The world of the instructional record is really quite fascinating. From sincere DIY teachings to crass bandwagoning & fad jumping, the instructional record was a force unto itself in the 60's & 70's. The endless barrage of salesman related "you can do it" LPs from that era rival the male enhancement ad fads of today and reveal a similar, sinister undercurrent of predatory schemes that feed on the insecurity of many a male ego. It's entertainment all the way around! You'd be hard pressed to find more timely LPs than Strategy At the Bridge Table or either of the dance related records below.



I always find it funny that the three most important classes I took in High School were one semester electives-- guitar, speech and typing. Guitar was the beginning of the dymistification process between music and I. It also gave me much needed entertainment as I watched the jock meatheads fumble through "Lovesong" by the Cure in preparation for a lame attempt at buttering up some ditz over at the girls school. Speech was SO important, as it gave me an opportunity to get over performance anxiety by forcing me to give contrarian speeches to the same hamfisted types I mentioned in the guitar bit, within the safety net of the classroom. The teacher always wore suits and had a small mustache, traits that may have settled into my subconcious. He was asked to leave by the end of the semester because his affair with a jr. over at the girls school had been discovered, a trait I don't think I've picked up. The third class prepared me for the internet age. Not that I 'm a great typist, but whenever I watch a two fingered wonder pecking away, I'm always glad I took the class. Anyhow, this rant was brought on by the plethora of typing related LPs that I've seen over the years, a few of which are featured below.  

We've all had that moment...the moment when you are in the grocery store or the bank or the donut shop, somewhere completely banal, where you are hidiously bored and spacing out...when, suddenly, something glorious happens...

Due out next month, the new British movie Awaydays based on the Kevin Sampson book of the same name, looks like it might be a pretty good flick. Definitely good, really good, is the soccer hooligan film's accompanying soundtrack, which is predominantly UK post-punk, circa late seventies -- the period in which the film's story line unfolds.

Awaydays, as its name implies, is about the football (soccer) game days when a team plays away from home in their opponents' towns; when their diehard thuggish fans follow them, they cause mayhem along the way. The fans in this case are The Pack in the far from glamorous Birkenhead corner of Britain. It is 1979 -- the same time that the unpopular conservative Margaret Thatcher had just begun her reign as prime minister -- so there is a lot of angst and aggro in the grim Northern English wasteland air.

If the above trailer, in which Awaydays is described as a "Control meets This Is England," is even halfway right then it should be a damn good film since each of those were very good films: both the Joy Division biopic and the early 80's skinhead and National front era films, that were each also set in that same rough time period -- and set against a sparse, overcast grey English backdrop where music (as well as booze, drugs, and sex of course) offered escapism from life's bleak reality.