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Garrie Fletcher

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Garrie Fletcher

Category Archives: Review

Pond Weed

30 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by fletcherski in books, fiction, Reading, Review

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Book, fiction, Lisa Blower

I don’t tend to post a lot of reviews here, but I’ve made an exception for Lisa Blower’s Pond Weed and here’s why….

I read this very quickly much quicker than Selwyn and Ginny’s journey from Stoke to Wales. This is the third book of Lisa’s that I’ve read, and they continue to grow in richness and depth, much like the contents of one of Selwyn’s pond experiments. If you haven’t read Sitting Ducks or It’s All Gone Dark Over Bill’s Mother’s House, you really should.

Pondweed concerns itself with Ginny and Selwyn an unusual couple who were neighbours in their teens and have met again in their late 60’s and early 70’s with Selwyn being the slightly older and supposedly wiser of the two. Ginny is our unreliable narrator who steers us through the present via the past and who has a larder full of secrets that are gradually revealed along their journey.

Pondweed starts when Selwyn arrives home early from work and instructs Ginny to pack her bags as they’re going on holiday to Wales. Try as she might she cannot get the reason for this impromptu break or their final destination. This book is all about language, the words the characters use and the economy and finesse with which Blower uses them to convey a situation or a character. At one-point Selwyn and Ginny stay in a grim room at a pub called The Swan with Two Necks,

“The room is dissatisfying and small. The door opens onto the double bed with its feeble white duvet, and there’s a window above the bed, with curtains that don’t meet in the middle.”

Brief, concise and crisp – much crisper than the sheets on the bed.

Throughout the book, we are treated to quotes from Selwyn Robby’s The Great Necessity of Ponds. I found these quotes interesting for several reasons. Firstly, I’d just dug, lined and filled a pond in my garden so any tips are greatly received but more importantly it was a glimpse at Selwyn’s inner life and his lifelong passion, and they often reflected what was going on in the book. This quote from the beginning of The Tenth Day chapter could equally relate to Ginny and Selwyn’s journey and relationship,

“Water beetles can fly, and they readily leave the pond, usually at night, to indulge in long flights in search of possibility. During the course, they occasionally mistake the wet road for a stretch of water and come to grief.”

At the beginning, I found myself siding with Ginny dragged away from home with no real explanation, chance encounter after chance encounter leading her to correctly assume there’s a method in Selwyn’s madness, but as their journey progressed it was Selwyn I started to side with as Ginny projected her distrust upon Selwyn’s actions.

There’s lots to love in this book. The two main characters are expertly realised with depth and humour as is Ginny’s mother, Meg and the mysterious Bluebird as well as the caravan with its optics and fish in the glass pedestal of a washbasin which, with its shedding of letters and weird plumping is almost another character in its own right. The convoluted car journey mirrors Ginny and Selwyn’s romance, of sorts, and is realised with craft and precision. I loved losing myself in this book with its attention to character and place, real characters and real places, and I’m sure you will do too.

Star Trek: Beyond

24 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by fletcherski in Film, Review, writing

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Chris Pine, Film Review, Idris Alba, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Star Trek, Star Trek: Beyond, The Beastie Boys, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana

We’ve just watched this in a chilly, Birmingham cinema, and even an over-eager air conditioner couldn’t put the freeze on this hot picture. The boy and I loved this phaser fest despite there being a couple of plot holes you could drive the Enterprise through at Warp 9. The 2 hours flew by in a blur of hand to hand combat, dizzying space battles, and pithy one-liners. There’s enough here for even the harshest Trek critics.

Star Trek poster

Spoiler alert.

Chris Pine continues to shine in the role of Kirk, a man with a natural ability to lead and a distinct inability to follow protocol, and the opening scene shows him completely out of his depth. Kirk tries to negotiate a peace treaty between two aggressive races and offers one a gift from the other. His inability to play the role of ambassador leads to him being attacked by hundreds of imp-like aliens and he has to rely on his crew, and in particular, Scotty, to get him out of the mess he’s created. Afterwards, we find him reflecting upon the Enterprises five year mission into the unknown and coming to the conclusion that he’s bored – well not for long.

The York Town Star Base is pretty damn impressive. It’s a huge sealed globe of twisted gravity, conflicting angles, and skyscrapers, on the edge of Federation space. It’s here that Spock learns of Spock’s death (that’s Spock from the original timeline as played by Leonard Nimoy) that leads him to question his role on board the Enterprise. Both characters are now left with internal conflicts to resolve, and both consider leaving the Enterprise; Spock considers taking up the other Spock’s role upon New Vulcan and Kirk applies to become an assistant admiral? (God only knows how he thinks that’ll work out.) These decisions are put on hold when a distressed alien arrives, in dramatic fashion, to ask for their help. My immersion into the Trek universe was slightly rattled here when they buy her story wholesale without even a cursory check of the facts. Even more worrying was their failure to act (clap her in irons, interrogate her, etc.) when upon arrival at the planet where she claims her crew is trapped, the Enterprise is torn apart in a matter of minutes. At no point does anyone turn upon her and exclaim, ‘Trap!’ This, I must admit was pretty hard to swallow. A rather vertiginous space battle ensues and the Enterprise is well and truly whooped with chunks of it flying off left, right and center.

 

Phew! Only a few minutes in and everything is trashed. The main trunk of the film is then a case of Kirk and co regrouping, liberating and escaping in the rather impressive, and obsolete, U.S.S. Franklin. The Franklin is a retro joy to behold and even in its shabby, unkempt old age you can see nods towards the original TV show. However, here lies another hole in the plot. The rather wonderful, Jaylah, lives in the deserted craft – Jaylah is an escapee from the clutches of Krull, (played by Idris Alba.) She has hidden out here for years and has taught herself English and developed a fondness for really loud 90’s hip-hop. To keep her from getting caught she has set up an optical shield for the craft and rendered it invisible. However, as we later discover, Krull, is the presumed dead captain of the Franklin and surely he’d have known exactly where the ship was!

I digress.

The action tumbles along at a satisfying pace and leads us to a nausea-inducing fight between Kirk and Krull in the center of York Town where gravity is more of an option rather than an absolute. Krull needs to get his ancient, ultimate weapon into the air recycling system for Yorktown station to kill everyone there. There are fisticuffs galore and an inability to say which way is up. Kirk has to eject Krull and the weapon into space without getting himself sucked out with them. It’s a shame that there isn’t a way of doing that. You know some way of moving matter instantaneously. You know, like a TRANSPORTER BEAM! But of course, if they did that there’s be no need for a fight above the skyscrapers.

These gripes aside, Star Trek: Beyond is a very enjoyable romp that pushes all the right buttons and left me feeling entertained rather than cheated. Chris Pike continues to fill Shatner’s boots with a confident swagger and Zachary Quinto is suitably Vulcan – there is the ubiquitous nod back to the past when Spock looks through some of the Nimoy Spock’s possessions and finds a picture of the original Star Trek crew in their Wrath of Khan outfits. Zoe Saldana puts in a fine performance as Uhura, but doesn’t get enough screen time for my liking; she’s merely Spock’s kick ass girlfriend. Anton Yelchin will be hugely missed from any following films; they’ll find it hard to find another actor with such a fun Russian accent and youthful charm. Simon Pegg’s Scotty continues to amuse, but why have Idris Alba in and then obscure his features? A lot of Alba’s emotion was lost underneath the makeup and his voice distorted by his comical dentures. For me, the standout performance comes from Karl Urban. He continues to delight as the permanently dour Dr. McCoy and steals scene after scene. If you love Trek, you’ll love this and if you just want to switch off for two hours and watch the galaxy teeter on the brink of destruction you leave feeling hard done by.

Now treat yourself to the Beastie Boys at their finest. Watch the film and you’ll know why.

 

 

Pedestrian At Best.

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by fletcherski in Live Music, Review

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2015, Courtney Barnett, Pedestrian At Best, Wulfrun Hall

I loved Courtney Barnett. I think I need to state that before I go anywhere else. She’s bright, clever and, to use her Aussie vernacular, ‘spunky.’ She writes intelligent, insightful pop songs that often read more like short, character-driven stories than traditional pop pap. She gave us a taste of what she was capable of with the excellent, The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas, (which has the sublime ‘Avant Gardner’ on it) and quickly followed that up with the wonderful, ‘Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit,’ LP. The album proper has some bloody good songs, finely crafted tunes with economical guitar riffs and hypnotic keyboard hooks as well as a mighty fine rhythm section. ‘Dead Fox,’ in particular has an exquisite backwards guitar riff that lifts the song out of the humdrum and into a whole different world of wonderfulness. I was keen to see how they’d pull this off live.

Wulfrun Hall is a decent sized venue and a step up from the stages they’d have played before the success of, ‘Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit.’ It wasn’t full but there was a decent sized crowd, I’d say six to seven hundred people. The band came on and opened with, ‘Avant Gardner,’ which was ok. It lacked the rolling subtly of the recorded version, and the guitar was fighting against everything else, but I thought, ‘Hey, it’s the first song.’ They then launched straight into, ‘Dead Fox,’ and my heart sank. My thoughts on how they’d pull off that gorgeous backwards guitar riff were quickly answered: they wouldn’t bother. In this age of technology, it wouldn’t have been difficult to pull off live, but they thought, ‘Fuck it, we don’t need it.’ They were wrong. Without the riff the song fell into a glam rock driven dirge, (we’d had to listen to Sweet before they came on) and left me feeling cheated. I don’t go to see bands expecting them to sound exactly like the record, that would be naive, but I do expect them to try. I felt like walking out, but I stuck with it. 40 minutes later I’d had enough and as I was leaving a steward asked me if I was coming back in, ‘No bloody chance.’

Courtney doesn’t have a great voice, but she doesn’t need one. Her songs are written around her strengths, clever lyrics and simple, compelling melodies, all of which were lost under a mush of drums, bass and guitar. In fact, the bass was so loud it hit you like a kick in the throat every time the drummer stomped along. A friend who’d heard her performance at The Green Man Festival summed it up perfectly, ‘…the subtleties of the recorded songs drowned in a sea of grunge.’ There was no subtlety last night just an almost wanton destruction of something quite beautiful. It was like Van Gogh smearing shit over one of his sunflower paintings and then standing there with a big grin on his face. I realised that the songs were only working when I played the guitar and keyboard parts in my head and by the time she got to, ‘Elevator Operator,’ I’d had enough.

Sometimes I sitIt all got very, ‘Emporer’s New Clothes,’ for me. I kept asking my wife, ‘Why are they cheering? It’s bloody awful.’ (There was a hardcore of a hundred or so fans down the front who cheered anything – ‘Oh my God, she just flicked her hair!’) You may think my standards are too high, but they’re not. I’ve seen a lot of bands over the years, and live performances are usually a treat, not torture.

So thank you, Courtney Barnett, but no thanks. I work hard for my money, and I won’t be wasting it again on someone who doesn’t give a shit about their work let alone the people who come to hear it. It’s not as if it can’t be done. There are lots of three piece bands over the years that have created great music, both in the studio and on stage, but you’re not one of them. With that in mind, how hard would it have been to bring in a second guitarist/keyboard player? I’ve never left a gig feeling angry before and even now, the morning after, I’m still fuming. That’s £30, 40 minutes and 30 miles of road I’ll never get back. Your performance was: Pedestrian At Best.

Suits You Sir.

12 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by fletcherski in Comics, Film, Review, Uncategorized

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Colin Firth, Great movie, Kingsman, Mark Hamill, Mark Millar, Mark Strong, Matthew Vaughn, Michael Caine, Must see film, Samuel L. Jackson, Secret Service, Sophia Boutella

Kingsman

Do you pine for the days of the classic spy movie, for the suave Bond who dispatched enemies with grace and a witty aside? Or the megalomaniac villains with their jaw dropping bases carved out of the hearts of mountains and their singular vision of world dominance and destruction? Do you miss the sophisticated gadgets, the bullet proof umbrellas or the poisonous ink and yearn for the femme fatale with their killer smiles and razor blade feet? Then Kingsman is the film for you.

Rollicking fun.

Rollicking fun.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn and starring Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson, Kingsman is adapted from Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbons’ comic book of the same name and whilst I enjoyed the book the film is far superior.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot as I think this is a film that you all should see. It’s visceral, sharp, clever and just the right side of bloody: exploding heads anyone? Elements of the book have been tinkered with slightly, but these only add to the drama and a female Gazelle -played by the stunning Sofia Boutella- is far more graceful than the original black man in the comic book. Samuel L. Jackson is sublime as the lisping genius Valentine, a man who’s mission is to save the planet by killing most of its inhabitants. Firth is gloriously assured as the arse kicking Galahad -a member of the secret Kingsman organisation that spies on the spies bringing impartial justice to the world- and I can only imagine the Bond producers punching themselves repeatedly in the nuts having overlooked him for that role.

Valentine, Gazelle, Galahad, 'Eggsy' and Arthur.

Valentine, Gazelle, Galahad, ‘Eggsy’ and Arthur.

I wanted to take my son to see this, but he was less than enthusiastic at the time and I missed it at the cinema. I wont be making that mistake again, it really shouldn’t take sitting through Jurassic World to realise that a twelve-year-old is not the best judge when it comes to film, this is the lad who raved about After Earth and that was less interesting than watching flies crawl over dog shit.

There’s a lot of humour and warmth in this film and fun, tons of fun. It’s not a high-brow soul beater, far from it, but it’s everything a movie should be -I love films that make me think, but this is not a film, it’s a movie, there is a difference. I’d be interested to know how it did in the States as it’s a very British film with run down boozers and Millwall scarves. Matthew Vaughn has said that it’s his hymnal to the stuff he watched growing up: Bond, The Avengers, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. etc. and the inclusion of the umbrella had me pining for the days of Steed and Emma Peel.

Bespoke tailors or spy HQ?

Bespoke tailors or spy HQ?

The original idea was that this first film would be the start of a trilogy and I can only hope that that happens and that the writing and directing stays as razor-sharp as this. Mark Strong, who plays Merlin -Kingsman’s answer to Bond’s Q- has said that, “This [movie] will be to Bond what Kick-Ass (2010) is to superhero movies” and I can’t help but agree with him.

Check it out and let me know what you think and see if you can spot Mark Hamill.

12/07/2015: Simon & Garfunkel “Sounds of Silence”

12 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by fletcherski in Music, Review, Vinyl

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coffee, records, Simon & Garfunkel, uk, Vinyl

The first of many posts from the sometimes inflammatory and often funny, Benjamin John Jones. Here he reflects upon Simon & Garfunkel in philosophical style. Enjoy.

The Saturday Ritual

I didn’t realise that I had a Saturday morning ritual until I moved in with my partner.  Before then I’d just managed to get on with it without reflection, missing it whenever I was over at hers or she was at mine.  When we moved in together and our lives blurred, she noticed that I did the same thing every Saturday.  I’d wake up and make a pot of coffee and pick a record, doing little more than listening to it in silence with a cat on my lap or standing in front of the record player.  It was a way to just let everything soak in, settle down and gear up.  It was the strange moment of stasis I had before the day began and I gradually moved towards Monday.  My partner will be upstairs sleeping or getting ready for the day.  I get a brief moment of my…

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Gig Lag

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by fletcherski in Event, Music, Review

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Tags

Alex James, Blur, Damon Albarn, Dave Rowntree, Graham Coxon, Live, Llandudno, The Magic Whip, The Venue, uk, Wales

Or: Why does a 46 year old man drive 274 miles in one night to see a band?

Today I find myself groggy and out of sync. Everything seems muffled and a little duller, the colours are muted and there’s an underlying hum, like a guitar amp left on low, an almost imperceptible electric hiss underlying everything. The weather, even now building into the muggy onset of a storm, is not to blame. No, last night I saw Blur.

Yesterday I left work sat in traffic for nearly two hours trying to get out of Birmingham and then shot up the A41 (to name but one road) to Llandudno. I don’t know a lot about Llandudno, I’ve only been there a few times, but it’s never struck me as a rock and roll town. With its Victorian promenade and four-story guest houses it looks more like the kind of place you’d take your aged aunt for a pot of tea and an iced bun, not somewhere you’d jump around for two hours whilst choking back the stench of other people’s sweat and the richly spiced gas that their pre gig snacks and drinks have evolved into.

IMG_7153 IMG_7154 IMG_7155

Llandudno looked pretty good in the early evening sun, a vanilla glow covered the bay as middle-aged couples took in the sea air. I parked right outside The Venue (no, really, it’s called The Venue,) decided it was madness to join the queue that snaked away from the entrance for some ridiculous length down the road and walked into town. Llandudno continued to appear sedate and at peace with itself. I ordered a heroic portion of fish, chips and mushy peas, sat down and took in the world. 

Blur took to the stage with a confidence and aggressive swagger that stripped the years away. Damon was a man possessed, his eyes feral, unblinking, taunting the crowd, pumping them up to breaking point. Graham was gripped with a boyish intensity, attacking his guitar in staggered blasts as his face lit up with delight. Alex strutted around the stage in a shirt and tie, his face a mask of cool aloofness that soon dissolved into beaming joy, whilst Dave pounded at the drums his face gurning out every beat, his tongue in danger of dragging his forehead over his eyes.

dailypostblur06 dailypostblur03

Photos from The Daily Post http://bit.ly/1B7CKpS

Photos from The Daily Post http://bit.ly/1B7CKpS

Don’t ask me what the first song was, I can’t remember. I didn’t go there to write a review. I didn’t go there to spend two hours stretching with my phone to get the perfect shot and obscure the view of everyone behind, (so ta for these pics Wales’ Daily Post,) or to start a fight with someone who was more beard than man (although that was tempting.) I went to see Blur and by God they were bloody good.

Go Out kicked things off (thanks again Daily Post, at least someone was taking notes) and was magnificent, firing the crowd up into a near hysterical fever of chanting and beer throwing. This was followed by a break neck speed There’s No Other Way. Two songs in and I was lost in a sea of joyous madness. The new songs were incredible, full of verve and confidence, such a pleasure to hear them with 2500 strangers.

The performance was electric. Blur stormed through songs from all their albums including seven from The Magic Whip,the highlight of which was Terracotta Heart the song that details Damon and Graham’s friendship, a friendship that is the heart of Blur. Coffee and TV was fun, Parklife expected as was Girls & Boys, I Broadcast almost took the roof off and The Universal had me close to tears at the end. The surprise of the evening was He Thought Of Cars, an album track from The Great Escape. In its recorded version its a pleasant enough experience a gentle enough refrain on globalisation -possibly? and yet, last night it was transformed into a snarling demonic beast that had the hairs on my hairs standing on end.

Tender and Song 2 had everyone by the throat and groin, a hall full of people swept away by the sheer, primitive magnificence of it all.

I left the gig buzzing. Stared at the sea for a bit and decided to drive home: there was no way I was sleeping after that.

Post gig Blurness...

Post gig Blurness…

And this is where I came in, I think: Why does a 46 year old man drive 274 miles in one night to see a band? Because they’re not just any old band, they’re Blur.

They’re the band I grew up with. They were there when I was an arsehole, when I was young and stupid, when my heart was broken, when my teeth were broken. They were there with me and my mates and they were there when my mates were gone, they were there when my mates came back. And that’s the key to this. They’re not a manufactured money machine or an ‘arty’ sneering experiment. They’re four friends who’ve grown up, grown apart, fallen out and then fallen back in again. They’re my band and I love them and fuck it, it’s only 274 miles.

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