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I have no idea.

Novelty, cross-genre cover versions have two separate, parallel lives. The first is as “You gotta check this out, this fucken grindcore band are doing ‘Synth and Strings’”. And the second is actually as something you can sit down and enjoy.

Let’s run this down quickly. Nancy Wallace is a folk (as in the British “a flagon of ale oh stout yeoman of the bar” genre, not the American vaguely cool one) musician of indeterminate age who dropped an album this year that got reviewed by what I can only assume was one of Pitchfork’s youth teamers, but three years back released an album of disco covers. Disco music hadn’t yet ruined rap music for Sasha FJ, so it was still cool to like it back then.

Now, really, this should be a full-on exercise in “hahaha, people wore flares back in those days, but now I’m gonna to play this song whilst wearing wellington boots and smirking”. Which, in fairness, there’s nothing wrong with per se: ILB will represent for The Dan Band until someone points out to us the misogyny rampant in their act, and then we’ll just mumble and hope the conversation switches to something else. But Wallace goes somewhere else with it. She’s actually… sincere?

Don’t be for a second fooled into thinking sincerity makes for good cover versions. Arguably one of the lowest periods of music was in late 1999 when every single band were doing long-ass dragged out acoustic cover versions of “Baby One More Time” to prove that it was a Real Pop Song. I mean, basically, the point I’m making here is that Wallace’s take on “Young Hearts Run Free” has so much going against it, and yet it’s a legitimately affecting piece of work, and it kinda makes up for the fact that there’s this chick I went to uni with who syncs her blog to her Facebook notes updates and it’s about her adventures in breaking into folk music and how she wore a fucking shoal in a rainstorm celebrating Oestre or some shit the other week. Good times.

SPOTIFY DONE HAS THIS SONG

Despite them not really sounding anything like each other, it’s not just me that’s merged these two songs into one in my mind is it? Tunes, both of them….

They’re both Classic Gold mainstays though, so we can probably spare a few hundred words to sing their praises. The Foundations, or at least a band of people claiming to be The Foundations and probably featuring just a bassist who played with them briefly in 1975, currently make a living touring UK campuses singing “Build Me Up Buttercup” to pissed-up freshers. I wonder what the life expectancy on this is: kids who start university next year will only have been six when “There’s Something About Mary” came out, and I doubt that’s a movie that’s gonna make it to two generations of viewers. Apparently Alfonso Ribiero is also appearing at student events these days, judging Carlton dance-a-like contests. It’s a pitiful fall from the top.

The Foundations are British. I never knew this until one of them (one of the white ones, take that society) was arrested for raping a kid. Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that the reason this song got to #1 was because it was so bland and generic for the time it wasn’t played by pirate radio stations, so Radio 1 playlisted it as a deliberate attempt to show how “different” they were. A victory for the normal, paedophile, man.

The Hollies, on the other hand, released an album called “Abbey Road”. It’s better than The Beatles’ one, even if I do always think that “A Simple Game” is by them. It’s actually by The Moody Blues.

First world problems: remember classic failed ILB series Trance Anthems, in which we dicked about with a bunch of perverts in exchange for (mild) lols? Well… one of them hasn’t been googling his username recently and emailed “Claire” out of the blue because he wants to send us, via the post, a load of pornography and, I kid you now, “a free pizza”.

Now, being SW London-based we’re in the vicinity of Firezza, so we’re feeling that offer. But, if we give him our home address, there is a 50% chance he will come round to rape us or, considering what his plans are, the Brazilian chick who lives downstairs. Morally, can we accept this pizza? ILB readership, please answer.

Released: June 1989

UK chart position: #16

From the album: cloudcuckooland

Between 2001, Ian Broudie’s mother, father, sister and brother all died, his brother choosing to react to the terminal illnesses of the other three by throwing himself off of Liverpool Anglican Cathderal’s roof. I’m not saying that Ian Broudie’s loss is equal to the wiping of my hard drive (his mother was probably incapable of playing the Hefner Peel Session circa the release of “We Love The City”, for instance), but there’s a feeling of kinship there.

Look, it’s the end of October, ain’t nobody in a good place right now. What, you’re looking forward to Guy Fawkes Night? You think that bringing back double-baked jacket potatoes is gonna save your year? You think your job isn’t going to freeze bonuses in 2009? Fuck you. Life’s a struggle man.

I knew that Broudie was a man who’d coped with loss in his time, even at the start of his career in the early 80s he looked like a man coming to the end of a three-month lounge about the house in his pants eating Dominos after a turbulent divorce. But I had his death spurt as occuring a longer time before. He wrote songs like a man who needed some brief merriment in his life to detract from the misery. This is why he was always Mondeo Pop’s lost warrior, a man who was never going to be a Finn or a Heaton, but deserved better than being dragged out onto the playlists every time England have a crunch last-game-of-the-group-must-win fixture against Hungary.

Think about the lyrics to “Three Lions”. “So many hopes, so many sneers/ But all those oh-so-nears/When you’re down through the years”. You really think he’s talking about Terry Butcher’s poor tracking back in 1986? No, he’s on it for the working man, the little guy who gets beaten and bashed around day in day out and all that can keep his mind off the agony and monotony of work is a little tune on the radio. Something like “Pure”, something about how he wishes you’d “never learned to weep”, I mean this doesn’t actually mean anything, it’s just words he’s singing aloud, Broudie isn’t a “lyricist”, but he knows that if you can get across some sort of vague definition of “cheer up, might never happen” across.

The idea comes that Mondeo Pop is just “Cheer up, it might never happen”, but as a musical genre. Does that cheapen it? I don’t think so. Ill-placed optimism is what this nation needs more of, and what you can expect from a man who wrote the anthem of the England national team.

Notice a lack of updates over the past week? Let me tell you a story.

Around midnight Tuesday. I’d just locked down, via email, a date with a librarian. I know, right? About ten minutes later, while I was contemplating whether I had enough caffeine through my veins to catch up with the last two episodes of Curb, blue screen of death. No real problem, I’d had some virus grief off typing empornium.com rather than empornium.us into my browser a few weeks back, no biggie. Anyway, it was late, I was kinda tired, and I’d found a couple of back issues of Retro Gamer I’d completely forgotten I’d ever had, so I decided to turn the PC off and just do some nice educatory late-night reading.

Wednesday morning. Turn the PC on. Nothing. Zero. Turn it off and on again. Nothing. To cut a long-winded and boring story short, I spent Wednesday and Thursday running back and forth into internet cafes (one of which featured was located next to a stall playing a CD of Hammond organ covers of “Through The Wire” and “Ordinary People. Jamaicans are fucking weird people) to try and find what was wrong with my computer. The answer was: it was fucked. £60 to get it anywhere close to functioning, repaired by a Nigerian guy who was seemingly named by Roy Chubby Brown’s gagwriter (he was called, I shit you not, Winston Obongo. I felt racist just writing his name on the cheque).

So, sitting on top of my chest of drawers right now, is a fucked hard drive. It’s deader than Morrissey (subs, please check he has actually died since yesterday). Maybe some of the information on it is repairable, I don’t know, I don’t have the heart or currency to find out just yet. 60 gigabytes of music: gone. Pictures of my ex-girlfriends that I used to post to BBWChan when I was feeling particularly vindictive. Gone. A Football Manager 2009 saved game with 450 game hours on it: gone. It almost makes spending 20 whole days of your life in three months managing fictitious footballers seem wasted, huh?

I appreciate this is a first world problem, but now I have to actively sit down and think about rebuilding my Digitial Music Collection, especially after I sold most of my CDs in 2007 to pay off PokerRooom.com debts. Are all those live bootlegs lost? Will I never again here that rubbish mash-up of “Careless Whisper” and “Stay Fly” that somehow found its way onto every iPod shuffle run I ever did? Here’s hoping.

I haven’t actually downloaded any music yet, and we’re talking four days since I got my PC back. I’ve been making do with Spotify, which is kind of numbing me away from the fact that I need to make a decision: what should the first album dl’d onto this PC be?

I remember when we first got a PC in our household back in 1997, around the time I started buying a shit tonne of singles, the amount of fun that could be had just editing the information on Windows’ basic CD player so it came up with the name of whatever track you put in. “Hey, mum, look: the PC recognises that I’m playing “Film Star” by Suede!”. Exciting times for all involved. I have the horrid feeling that the first MP3 I ever downloaded was “Backdraft” by the Arsonists. The first album I ever downloaded illegally was whatever the Alkaline Trio one that has “Private Eye” on was, and in 2005 I interviewed the bassist from Alkaline Trio and he was a fucking cock, so history has absolved me of my sins.

I’m thinking Zevon, to be honest, but then I always do. If this was some shitty comment-hungry CIF piece, I’d now ask “So guys, what would YOU download if your hard drive was frazzled”, but I don’t really care. If you can tell me how my Guiseley team in the 2031/32 season would have gotten on, though, please do. I honestly think we were close to finally winning the Champions League. You know who the real victim in all of this is? Danny Dawes, our 19-year-old right-back. Within one year he went from the Huddersfield youth team to the England squad, and he’d already racked up four caps by the time the game was wiped from history. He could have grown up to be one of the greats. Like Wilfred Owen, cut down in his prime by unnecessary strife. Pour one out for Danny tonight ;_;

One thing the kids of the post-print media generation are going to miss out on is the visceral thrill of having your name published in the letters pages of a magazine. Those of you with a British Newspaper Library membership and literally nothing better to do with your time could find the opinions4u of a 13-year-old me clogging up NME, Melody Maker and SFX magazine back in the day. Being a three-time When Saturday Comes subscribers email “Wikipedia Vandal of the Week”, while undoubtedly an honour, doesn’t really register in the same way.

I mention this not just to fill up word count but to explain why I dragged my ass across to London’s trendy Shepherds’ Bush, accompanied by someone from fucking Rugby of all places, to watch Levi “off the telly” Roots do some songs. The high point of my publishing career to date isn’t managing to get a joke about Mobb Deep in a Bizarre Magazine article, or managing to be the darling of Powerslam magazine’s editor for two months, or even that time that Guardian music and film editor Michael Hann exchanged emails with my ex-girlfriend after we’d split looking for dirt. No, it’s the fact that I have two entries in the Viz Profanisaurus. I know, right? “Ummfriend”, being a fuckbuddy (as in “this is my, ummm, friend”), and paedophile’s door, one who is used to being constantly broke. I am a paedophile’s door right now, due to circumstances too tedious to explain, and am spending the next ten days living solely off of mortadella sandwiches and Diet Coke. My skin will look like a Manuel Noriega’s aged 14 by the end of this.

So when you’re broke, you’re always looking for free food. I feel a little bit sympathetic when PR agencies hit up Ich Luge Bullets with the details of their latest launch. I mean, if your product is really so desperate for publicity that you’re hitting up a 700 hits-a-day blog, it may be time to go and do something else with your life. But but but: we got an email saying that Levi Roots, Mr Reggae Reggae Sauce himself, had a new album out, and would we like to come and see him perform? There’d be free cans of Red Stripe and hella chicken, with Reggae Reggae Sauce to dip it in, plus there may even be the opportunity to meet Peter Jones! Wow. Free chicken and everyone’s fourth favourite Dragon in one evening?

You just feel so… Godless when you are that cynically claiming free shit with no real intention of doing anything to advance the cause of Levi Roots. And, really, what could I do? Levi Roots is the breakout star of one of the hit British TV shows of the past decade. Levi Roots is in every branch of every major supermarket. Levi Roots has his products in Subway sandwiches and on Wetherspoons’ nachos. Levi Roots even has his own TV cookery show nowadays. I run a blog, on the other hand, where all the American readers I’ve picked up in the past few days after being linked off Smoking Section, Cocaine Blunts, and Okayplayer have gone “What the fuck limey bullshit is he dribbling about? I’m done”. How exactly can I help Levi Roots? My grandfathers both spent World War II trying to blow the shit out of the leader of his faith, for one thing. I mean, yeah, this is an improvement on that, but an improvement worth six cans of Red Stripe and a whole chicken?

We were taken to the event in a “Reggae Reggae Sauce” Routemaster bus which was playing a CD containing, clearly, the only reggae tunes that the PR agency arranging the thing had ever heard of. In fairness, one of these tunes was “Ring the Alarm” by Tenor Saw, which made me reminisce of the entertainment to be had when Audley Harrison used to enter the ring to the Buju Banton redub of it, so it wasn’t a wasted evening. But seriously? A Routemaster bus? thelondonpaper is dead and buried, nobody else actively enjoys these twee marketing gimmicks any more. The only white people at the gig where the ones who were being plied with free alcohol and food to turn up, by the way. And I mean that completely, because for all of the advertised swagger, Peter Jones was nowhere to be found. Vanessa Feltz was apparently around as well, but she must have been held up in the VIP’s VIP.

The punchline to all of this? Turns out the reason I was invited wasn’t because of the triumphant IchLugeBullets fanbase. It was because they thought I was still writing for DrownedInSound. Sean Adams, unknowingly, put food on my plate yesterday. And all I had to do to earn it was bullshit my way through a ten-minute interview with Levi himself, who was dressed in a billowing white robe with silver trim that made him look like a colour negative of a member of Aphrodite’s Child. I have no intention of ever transcribing those notes, but he came across as a sound bro.

The gig itself? Dunno, didn’t stick around for it. Reggae music is shit.

Special bonus material:

Levi Roots – Cool Me Off from the album “Red Hot”, available sometime soon I think, MP3

Weighing in early on what academics call “periodization” is a dicey proposition. If you try to locate the moment of a major paradigm shift, in the moment, perhaps by calling your album “Hip Hop Is Dead,” as Nas did in 2006, you’re slipping into weatherman territory

Released: March 1985

UK chart position: #15

From the album: The Dream Academy

The first time Mondeo Pop became a standard? My last.fm account keeps telling me that Frank Sidebottom is playing this year’s Bizarre Magazine ball, alongside our old muckers Lucha Britannia and some other faggots. He has covered “Life In A Northern Town“. It’s pretty funny, in an 80s student irony way. American country superstars Sugarland, who nobody in the UK has never heard of because we don’t have TOTP2 anymore complete with Steve Wright going “Just before we go, here’s The Be Good Tanyas or someone like them” at the end of every episode, have covered “Life In A Northern Town“. Their version is basically proof that white people don’t have anything positive left to contribute to society in 2009 (also lol blonde perm, don’t they have stylists in Buttfuck, Tennessee?). Crewe’s finest, Dario G, sampled it for “Sunchyme“, and as Youtube commenter “OCPrunsthecops” rightly says, “I heard this in Toys R Us years ago”.

The point I’m trying to get across here is that “Life In A Northern Town” had a greater life outside of local radio playlists. It made it to America. It got covered by bands in school halls hoping for greater things. It got sampled and remixed and soundtracked and licensed. And then, like the prodigal son, when it realised that it was all said and done, it came right back home, plonked its arse down, and got on with the job of entertaining the daytime radio masses again. I think that’s kind of admirable, like the footballer whose career is over and goes back to working on the docks or factory floors he would have done anyway if he hadn’t made it. Mondeo Pop is working man’s music. How many times do we have to hammer this point home?

“Life In A Northern Town” still makes me feel weird, anyway, to the point where I have to wonder if I was molested as a child when it was playing in the background. It’s just so weirdly other-worldly for what is, effectively, just an “I’ll Be Missing You” with Nick Drake substituted for the Black Frank White, and somehow even worse lyrics. I’m expecting the comments box here to tell me which shitty album filler rap tracks sample this… I’m thinking there was probably a K-Os track? “Life In A Town Where Racism Is A Serious Thing We Can All Overcome If We Play The Acoustic Guitar”, or something.