Ban this evil fruit!

The BBC reports that the cultivation of cheap strawberries for the UK (and, implicitly, Irish) market is driving Spain's lynxes to extinction (by lowering the water table in the wetlands in which these fury predators live). Will we wake up to the fruit menace before the Spanish lynx is extinct?

Tom Murphy

I read yesterday that the actor Tom Murphy has just died. You might know him as one of the eponymous characters in Adam & Paul. I knew Tom slightly in college, even treading the boards with him in a production of John Antrobus's Why Bournemouth? I never saw that much of his acting stuff since then (I still have not got round to seeing Adam & Paul), but he had seemed to have made something of a name for himself, winning Tony awards and stuff. I never begrudged him his success; this is not something I could say regarding the other people I knew back then who have gone on to greater things.

v/a [Mercury Prize 2007 album of year competition compilation]

I bought this because I realised that I am very out of touch with the young people's music. On a first couple of listens, the young people's music turns out to be rubbish.

"Mean Team"

2000AD Xtreme features in its latest issue the complete Mean Team. This was one of those future sport stories they liked in 2000 AD. These future sports were always sub-Rollerball excuses for extreme violence, and this one was no exception. Or so it was initially - after a bit the titular Mean Team, who were all slaves or indentured servants of some sinister team boss, busted loose and escaped from the planet they lived on, making their way to the now abandoned planet Earth. At this point the story became incredibly strange, though not in a good way. My recollection is that Mean Team started promisingly enough, but then became one of the worst stories to ever appear in 2000 AD, rivalled only by the interminable Strontium Dog: Ragnarok or that forgettable suckass story about the taxi driver. Or anything featuring Durham Red. I'm almost tempted to buy the reprint, to see if Mean Team is as bad as I remember.

v/a "From the Closet to the Charts: Queer Noises 1961-1978"

This is a Jon Savage compiled record of music by homosexuals. It runs the gamut from tracks where the gayness involved is very oblique (or tongue in cheek) to in your face tracks like '53rd & 3rd', before finishing with some cheese-tastic disco nonsense as a way of celebrating the mainstreaming of gay culture, at least in music. A lot of these tracks are very novelty, and here as examples of a type of music rather than anything anyone would say is actually good music, but there are some great tunes here, notably Tornados b-side 'Do you come here often?' (Joe Meek releases an overtly gay record to a world that does not care).

I suppose the track I most like on this is the one by Jobriath... he was some guy in the 1970s who was one of the first overtly gay pop stars (or would-be pop stars; his career tanked). His track suggests that he was some kind of genius who invented a new musical genre that combined pop with the baroque.

The record has a nice sailor on the frontcover, so it might be useful to you for research purposes.

Two albums by Talking Heads

Two cheap ass Talking Heads purchases bring me ever closer to completion – or at least, completion of their good stuff. 77 is the debut, have not fully got to grips with it yet, but I do like the way some of the songs prefigure the African interest of peak era Talking Heads. 'Psycho Killer' is also excellent, one of the few Talking Heads songs that is not better on its Stop Making Sense. version. And as a civil servant, I appreciated the sentiments in 'Don't worry about the government'.

Fear of Music is a somewhat redundant purpose, but I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to this on my iPod. This is the second of the band's three albums with Brian Eno, and one I think that maybe gets overlooked in comparison to Remain In Light. It is a most enjoyable record, if a rather sparse one. Last time I bought it (on vinyl), one of my then flatmates begged me to never play it when he was in the house. I still find this attitude strange – while I can imagine people not liking Fear of Music, I find it hard to comprehend that kind of visceral loathing. Such was life.

None more Black (Slight Return)

Research reveals that MAYHEM's current line-up comprises NECROBUTCHER, BLASPHEMER, HELLHAMMER, ATTILA, and BRIAN.

It is suspected that these may not be the band members' real names.

None more Black

Once upon a time there were three guys in a band. Their names were Dead, EURONYMOUS, and COUNT GRISCHNACHK. Their band were called MAYHEM. After a while, Dead got a bit bored with being in a band, so he blew his head off with a shotgun. Then EURONYMOUS ate some of his brain. COUNT GRISCHNACHK also got bored with being in the band, so he left and formed his own called BURZUM. He also changed his name to VARG VIKERNES. EURONYMOUS would have been all sad being in the band on his own, so VARG stabbed him to death and was thrown in jail, where he lives happily after. So who is playing in the Button Factory (formerly the Temple Bar Music Centre) on the 29th November?

More on MAYHEM and BURZUM

Children of the Stones

The BBC reports that mysterious stone carvings have been appearing in a number of Yorkshire villages. Some nineteen of these sculptures have appeared in three locations separated by some 80 kilometres from each other. They all seem to feature a carving containing the word "paradox".

Grainy CCTV footage shows an unidentified man dropping some of the stones off from a car in the village of Braithwell, at 4.00 am on the 23 August

A publicity stunt is suspected.

Missy Elliott "Under Construction"

This came after the one that had 'Get UR Freak On' on it, and is famous as the record that spawned a thousand "what does Fremme Neppe Venete mean?" threads on ILX. Like the other one, it is co-produced with that Timbaland fellow, but it is basically not that good. There are two things wrong with this record. Firstly, Missy does too much shiting on about stuff between songs, to which I say "Shut up and play more music!". Secondly, there are too many feats on this record, with Beyoncé's feat being particularly rubbish… it's like Ms Knowles is auditioning for the job of being the new Whitney Houston, something I have no objection to her doing so long as I don't have to listen to it. As against that, the record does have 'Work it' on it, which 1. is heavily ripped off by at least one CSS track and 2. finally allows me to understand all this Fremme Neppe Venete stuff. The record is nevertheless overall one for the transfer list.