talking straight bananas

[1]

Electric cars, phooey! Just not buying this shit. If a full sized car is going to be electric, let it have four wheels drive as standard. Four WHEELS drive, not wheel? Yes, no central motor, or even one unit per axel. Each wheel hub should constitute its own armature. A wheel doesn’t NEED a motor when it IS one. Any electric car that even looks like it’s pretending to be an internal combustion driven thing is not worth bothering with.

Having said TV at, smaller electric cars should be three-wheelers as standard, configured with two wheels at the front and one at the rear, giving greater stability than those in the current tricycle mode. OK, they might look a tad like the old Morgan Sports car (as my dad had in the Mid-Thirties), but style is no drawback. They won’t need a leather strap across the bonnet to keep the engine in! They won’t have an engine, just a low c-of-g battery.

Talking of where to sling your batteries, why don’t electric cars simply change their cells instead of wasting time having to top up with fuel? With a proper, standard modular system, a battery change shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. And they could have two, three, four or fourteen more cells…  depending on the load. Battery technology could then evolve without requiring major upgrades to the car.

Actually, it’s a petrol/diesel head mentality that’s driving this race to electrify the roads. No thought is being given to such pedestrian concerns as parking and manoeuvrability in restricted spaces. By including rear- as well as front-wheel steering control, true electric cars will save on parking space as well as carbon emissions. Instead of starting with a clean drawing board, designers are falling over each other in the race to combine classic car lines with plastic tech looks. A glance at the LRVs used to drive on the Moon during the Apollo missions would give them an idea of what to do. Functionality needs to be the well-spring of invention not an afterthought.

Finally, there is cost. A basic, electric powered buggy with two seats and a baggage rack, with a good enough range for commuting and shopping trips, can be imported from China for twenty-five hundred Zealots. So, why are all the entry level electric cars costing twenty times that? Phooey!

[2]

talking straight bananas

yeller as the day is long

air guitars no cool

stick it up your billabong

 

on the point of getting booed

do another song

cut the cookie change of mood

 

cross the Aussie Rubicon

call me Corporal Mudd

stage a flipping Carry-on

 

Glasgow Empire sniffing blood

belt & braces thin

line between us understood

 

sitting on a drawing pin

smile as all is good

give ‘em like another ring

[3]

Art Technology & Fame

 

In a slightly altered version of pop music history, McCartney & Lennon don’t meet up but still, Paul goes on to enjoy a successful career as a songwriter and performer. So, what then becomes of a particular song, one he started writing long before the McCartney-Lennon brand would appear… When I’m Sixty-four?

Though it’s probably not going to end up on the first globally successful, truly psychedelic pop album (Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), the tune of When I’m Sixty-four is so good and its lyrics are so amusing, the song is bound to make it somehow. Though not as Beat or Rock’n’roll music. It’s really a novelty piece, closer to The Teddy Bears’ Picnic or Nellie The Elephant than… say… She Was Just Seventeen (Y’know what I mean). So, I imagine some smart producer, maybe even yer man George Martin himself, picking it up and getting Clive Dunn to spiel-sing it (Dunn was the Senior Citizen Impersonator who created Jonsie The Butcher in Dad’s Army). When I’m 64 actually goes to Number One, say Christmas, 1967. Take McCartney out of the Beatles and you’ve still got a hugely popular tunesmith under the hood. It’s just that he can’t make it so big without the whole Beatlemachine’s Yeah-Yeahs behind him. As a singer, Paul might have filled a niche somewhere between Tommy Steele and Cliff, and he would have been known for some of his own songs, Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night, for inst. But numbers as diverse as Let It Be and Martha My Dear would have been sold to the highest bidder. The Show Band as an Art Form that the Beatles became was the sum of many elements, and McCartney himself has more than most other Pop Stars.

What brought the crucial elements of popular music culture together in the 1960s? Technology, for one thing, Fame for another. A huge feature of 60s numbers is how they were produced on the spur of the moment. Get Off My Cloud by the Rolling Stones, written by Richard & Jagger in a hotel room between gigs. Help written by Lennon when the Beatles were desperate for a hit to finish their latest film with. Audiences wanted songs that told the story of their group’s fame. The availability of portable tape machines and the sublimest form of demand – popular acclaim - drove those cats to creative extremes. Take fame and technology away from the artists in the Beatles’ & the Stones’ machines and suddenly a great slew of their songs is erased. There is no Midnight Rambler, no Hey Jude or Imagine. Tell me the last time you heard a street pianist at a railway station playing their unknown rock anthems and people are going like where do I know that tune from? Isn’t that Mick Jagger covering Sinatra numbers wearing a WH Auden mask? Imelda, get your diamond encrusted skates on, Yer Man is gonna do One Last Song! When does the Music become the Musical?

It’s this: you get yourself a Beatlemachine and you can write out your own winning lottery ticket. You are there with your Tardis-in-a-pen; scan here and paste it there, produced, edited and with extra scenes by customising AI bots. Sure. You’re the rich kid at school. Celebrity Chef? Take whatever you like from the shelves! In fact, nuts to the cops and the press, we’ll pay YOU to shoplift here in future. Turn just about anything into product: Ringo's nail clippings, anyone? Putting it coyly. 

Still Not Closed On Sundays!