Extended Trumpet Solo

Writing about totally failing to get much painting done recently made me realise I've been very remiss in keeping my legion of loyal readers updated on what I have been doing: writing about TV! Over the last three years I've been in three more Outside In books. I wrote short essays on the Millennium episode "Wide Open" and the Twin Peaks episode "Slaves And Masters", and went off-piste with a fictional academic article written by a smug fascist to cover "The Sontaran Experiment".

Next year, I'll be in the Deep Space Nine book with a piece on "Business As Usual", assuming Stacey likes the smell of whatever I cook up!

Friday 40K: The Best I Can Do

The second half of this year has been absolutely miserable for painting, lads. I've averaged one miniature a month, all of them from my oldest two armies, meaning the colour schemes on them are extremely limited. Here, for the sake of contractual obligation, are two Dark Angels Tactical Marines.

Technically painted, I'm sure we can all agree. Fun fact, I only had these on my paint station because I needed them to make my army codex compliant for 9th Edition. By the time I'd finished them, we were on to 10th Ed, and a whole new set of ways in which what I have isn't fully usable. I've dutifully started a Dark Angels Ancient (current name: Old Steven), but I can't imagine being very far along with him at all before the new codex means another set of bullshit changes.

Also complete is the only unit I both started and finished this year: four bases of 'Nid Rippers.

So tiny! So bitey! They'll nom your world because there's, like, LOADS of them.

Two marines; twenty rippers. But which is best? There's only one way to tell! FIGHT!

(Ah, actually I'm being told you can also tell who's best through a series of "point scores" through which all models in Warhammer 40,000 can be compared. Ludicrous.)

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.18 - "F.O.D. " (Green Day)

Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard me talk about hearing that before?

I can’t claim I planned it, but the one-two quiet-loud pinch-punch of these last two songs makes for a nice sign off to a playlist defined by the border between misery and anger. It’s a long border, of course, covering a wide range of terrain. “The Quiet Things…” is a multilayered mapping of cross-currents and riptides, swirling just between the surface. “F.O.D” is a man telling his about-to-be-ex to fuck off and die.

There’s a power in simplicity – “F.O.D.” doesn’t even bother to go quiet again. The sheer broadness makes the song feel like it belongs to you alone, and does the same for everyone. The steps may have been different for all of us, but we’ve almost all seen a long, juddering dance lead us here. The last thread snaps, and you're left with only the layers of Sellotape and rows of safety pins you'd put in place to hold everything together. Just the outline of what used to be there.

When that happens, there’s nothing to do but take that last snapped strand, that final frayed straw, and burn it to ash in front of your new/old enemy’s face. You can’t even explain why this time was different; it just completely, obviously, is. You want a justification? Justifications are for the people I can still respect. Just fuck off and die. 

One thing that I love about this song is how the chord progression actually gets more complicated as the narrator lets his fury slip its mooring. The obvious thing to do would be to go the other way; to lose complexity along with composure. Inverting this makes it clear how much this guy has been holding back. How careful he’s been to present only a part of himself. It's not so much a switch as an expansion, hence the repetition of the need to destroy the bridge between them past hope of repair. Besides, we often repeat ourselves, when we're that angry. When someone has made us that angry. Just fuck off and die. 

I listened to "F.O.D." while driving across an actual bridge once, belting out the words to myself, the river, and the night. I remember that every time I hear this song, even though I don’t remember which bridge it was, or which river. I can't even remember the car. The association remains, but not what lay on the other side of it. Just the outline of what used to be there. 

I can’t remember whose face was in my mind I as I sang along, either. Who was it I had so completely had enough of their daring to be in my life? Who was I so desperate to have gone, hat the memory of my exhausted, burning rage has so outlasted the name of whomever I'd directed it towards?

Just the outline of what used to be there. Just fuck off and DIE.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2: Louder Now

B-Side:

I don't like to go negative with my music posts, but you just gotta stand back and marvel at how completely this cover misses the point of the original song, on every conceivable level.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.17 - "The Quiet Things That No-one Ever Knows " (Brand New)

Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard that before?

Brand New were an interesting band more than they were an enjoyable one. Or at least, they were after their delightfully unselfconscious debut Your Favorite Weapon. Twelve tracks of charismatic emo so strong, it felt like a capstone for the whole damn musical movement. Or maybe a gravestone is the better metaphor. Brand New had dealt a slow-bleeding but ultimately mortal wound, inflicted ironically yet surgically by a band being feted as the big (brand) new thing. So this is how emo dies; to thunderous applause. 

But when you've mounted the summit of the terrain you're exploring, there's nowhere (brand) new to go, except down. Not in terms of quality; in terms of geography. Deja Entendu goes subterranean, almost daring the listener to enjoy its dark, stagnant pools and echoing darkness. "Charismatic" was now entirely off the table.

The band's masterstroke was to pair this quest for the deepest recesses of their genre and their psyches with an attempt to find a (brand) new spin on the first post-fame album. If standard emo can be summed up as "You WILL recognise my pain!", Deja Entendu explores the pain of being recognised. The fear of it is a central theme, too, whether it be at the hands of a para-social fanbase ("I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light"), a burned lover ("The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot"), or your own horrified conscience (the previously-covered "Me Vs Maradona Vs Elvis").

"The Quiet Things That No-One Ever Knows" is the central chamber in the cave system Brand New carved out here, with their teeth and nails and bile. The croon/yell formula is repurposed to brilliant effect, pressed into a parallel of the calm exterior of a man desperate to tell the truth to his partner, but knowing doing so will torpedo the relationship beyond hope of it staying afloat. "I lie for you, and I lie well". He knows they're doomed - indeed, he knows sooner or later she'll figure out he's been cheating on her - but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. Their love is dying, but he doesn't want it to die just yet. He looks out at the glory of the Pacific, and all he can think about is the hospitals. The places we delay the inevitable.

Mixed in with all this is the stress of touring - so much sacrificed for the sake of empty hotels. "If today's the day it get's tired/today's the day we drop out". Sure, mate. His partner isn't the only one he's lying to. Which of course means he's even lying about who he's lying to. Meta-mendacity.

When this song dropped as the first single from the album, there were people who complained its traditional structure - quiet/loud/quiet/loud, where have we heard that before? - was a poor advertisement for the desperate sandpaper leers and expansive hollow dankness of the parent album. That after trying so hard to be brand new, Brand New had let themselves down here.

This was and is bullshit. "The Quiet Things..." was the final cut, the coup de grace for an entire genre they'd left bleeding on the floor. Having slammed the door, they came back to burn the building. You can't head somewhere (brand) new until you've left some other place behind, and the whole fucking point of the elevator into Hell is that it starts at the top (listen to that guitar shifting downward as we head into each verse; these lads knew what they were doing).

Where the elevator ended up is a tale for another time. All that matters here is the soundtrack on the way down. 

You'd struggle to do any better than this.

B-side

Bonus B-side (ignore the shaky first couple lines)

Five Things I Learned In British Columbia

1. Both Victoria and (especially) Vancouver feel very European as cities, compared to Anchorage, Winnipeg, and Churchill, which are more what forty-three years of consuming US/Canadian film and television suggested I should expect. If it weren't for the accents and the signs warning me not to feed coyotes, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell I wasn't in an English-speaking city east of the Atlantic.

I felt right at home, is what I'm saying, at least until I tried to scratch an itch for a decent cider, something Canada does not appear to possess.

2. Humpback whales! They're HUGE! They're elusive! They get under your boat and you think "OH SHIT I don't think we'll win if this turns into a wrestling match"! Seeing them out in the Pacific, I had no trouble at all understanding why Star Trek felt comfortable basing an entire film on the conceit that an alien species would travel dozens of light-years just to check in on these fifty-ton krillbois.

(All my pictures are rubbish, sorry. Have some of a buncha extremely stinky sea-lions in consolation.)

3. The Museum of Vancouver is well worth a trip. I'd wanted to visit the Anthropology Museum, actually, but it was shut for earthquake-proofing (another of those rare reminders of just how far from home I was). The colonial era of Vancouver is well-represented, nicely honest about the city's racist past, and clear-eyed about how its labour history is marred by rabid anti-Communism. In order to get to that section, though, you have to go through three large rooms dedicated to the First Nations peoples who own the land Vancouver stands on (having never ceded it). The result, delightfully, is to turn the entire history of the city of Vancouver into an afterthought, a bitter coda to the true story of the land. 

There's a lot here; artefacts, testimonials from today's First Nations communities. The highlight of an extremely strong experience though is the film Mia, which you can see here, and I cannot recommend enough. Just the soundtrack alone gives me the shivers - it feels like the music Angelo Badalamenti was reaching for his entire life.

4. Totem poles are not the cross-continental Native American practice I'd naively believed (I blame Asterix And The Great Crossing). They're a tradition among the peoples of the Pacific northwest, used to tell stories and mark historic events. Victoria is home to the tallest totem pole in the world; presented here with an F for scale.

5. Best food in Vancouver: Sablefish. Also called black cod and butterfish, the former because it tastes like cod (despite hailing from a different order), and the latter because it's so high in fat content, it tastes like its been fried in butter even when it hasn't. You can get it in the UK, for about three times the price of true cod. I haven't yet felt that I can justify the expense, but a couple of times I've come close.

Worst food in Vancouver: Dutch salted liquorice. If the Flying Dutchman were real, this "sweet" would perfectly replicate the taste and texture of the undead captain's curs'd ring-piece. 

Honorable mention: poutine, which, like pizza, varies tremendously in quality but is almost impossible to get completely wrong.

Five Things I Learned In Manitoba

In descending order of YAY.

1. Beluga whales are awesome, and they are everywhere in the south Hudson Bay. After spending almost two hours at sea off Vancouver Island before we had even our first possibility of seeing a whale (see my next post, because why would I do anything in chronological order), the belugas of Churchill were immediate and unmissable. The sea seethed with them; it boiled.

Terrible quality, I know. Still though: WHALES.

2. The mega-fauna of Churchill is surely its biggest draw (it's definitely why we were there), but if you find yourself there and at a loose end, the local Insanitaq Museum* is well worth a look. It's an extremely impressive collection of First Nations artefacts and stories, along with a few specimens of taxidermy which, while I've always found animal-stuffing a queasy proposition, give a sense of scale to the local wildlife that's hard to discern when jouncing in a dingy or being chased off a beach by a bear.

(Look at that lynx! It's like a rejected CGI model for a grimdark Tom and Jerry reboot.)

Of what I saw there, probably my favourite two things were a carved figurine of a Viking, strongly suggesting the First Nations had traded with them at some point, and the story about the giantess who tried to swallow a river. She'd been tricked into it by a man she was chasing, who claimed he crossed the river by drinking it dry and walking across the bed. Trying in vain to replicate the feat, the giantess drank so much she exploded in a cloud of blood and river-water. This, the legend tells us, is how fog came into the world.

Faultless. Superb. 11/10 would relate again. Just the most perfect theory about anything, ever.

* I kept having to bite my tongue to stop singing the name to the tune of Cypress Hill's "Insane In The Brain". I thought it might be insensitive.

3. The majestic polar bear, lads! Huge things. Mighty. Extremely lazy at this type of year, as they go into a kind of walking reverse-hibernation, but that just meant we got to check them out for longer. I saw so many of the white-furred carnage units that I lost count. Lost count! Of motherfucking polar bears! Ludicrous.

Obviously, they're lovely to look at from a distance, but they can cause problems when up close. Churchill has a polar bear jail, where the delightfully named "problem bears" are kept for a fortnight in the dark until they stop associating civilisation with an easy meal (usually they eat the contents of people's bins, rather than the contents of people's clothing). They're starved throughout their time in the hoosegow, which might seem cruel, but is born of necessity - the first year they ran the jail they kept the bears well-fed, with the consequence that, once released, the bears would immediately attempt to break back in for their regular round of seal-steaks.

Despite the apparent logic of keeping the bears hungry, environmental groups have in the past attempted the prisoners in order to offer a decent meal. This is considered a bad idea by the authorities, if for no other reason than the would-be liberators are liable to feed the bears much more directly than they had in mind. In our case, this led to the wonderful spectacle of our guide explaining that he wasn't allowed to tell us how many bears are in the prison at any time, but that he was sure it was currently empty any way, all to the soundtrack of the furious bellowing of famished bears from just inside the facility.

All of which is so delightful, I'd probably have put bears at the top of this post, had one of them not been so rude as to chase me off a beach when I was trying to take a dip. Dick move, ursus maritimus! 

4. Let's talk about the Prince Of Wales Fort on the Churchill River. Ordinarily, something like that wouldn't make it onto the blog. A symbol of British imperialism on First Nation land? Not the sort of thing that interests me at all.

I'm making an exception here, though, because it's a symbol of imperialist total fuck-ups, which are always worth sniggering about. The fort was supposed to take about thirty years to build, but it went operational early, with the people in charge thinking they'd found a way to cut a few unnecessary corners in the name of expedience. Specifically, the walls weren't as thick as whatever STC system the Royal Navy was making use of in the 18th century. Who cares, though? Who's going to be sending the really heavy ordnance so far north. Thinner walls were all that was needed to keep the fort safe from bears, locals, and bit of light cannon-fire; surely that would do the trick?

The first time they attempted to fire their own cannons, the recoil pushed them clear off the walls.

Presumably due to this false start, the fort ended up taking more time to build than had originally been planned. Not that it particularly seemed to matter. It didn't seem like anyone was in a hurry to challenge British interests in the Hudson. It was a long way north, and no-one else seemed quite so obsessed with the idea of finding the possibly-mythic North West Passage.

So the fort got finished, pointed its forty cannons in every direction, and everyone figured they were sitting pretty. The only small problem was that there weren't any troops. It took ten men to fire a cannon at maximum efficiency, so they needed four hundred trained men. They had one. Not one hundred; one, alongside three dozen civilian workers of various trades.

So everyone was super excited when, in 1782, three British ships sailed into view. It had been a while since the last re-supply, so the small fleet was a welcome sight in any case, but there was hope that the vessels might be carrying the military men needed to actually make the fort capable of combat.

This hope was rather dashed when the fort's governor took a close look at the ships with his telescope, and realised that under the billowing Union Jacks stood dozens of heavily-armed and angry Frenchmen.

Whilst the governor had discovered the ruse early enough to give battle, though, he still had the problem of lacking 99.75% of the men he needed to actually fight. Given this, he surrendered immediately - though not unconditionally - and the British left the fort. The French stuck around just long enough to eat all the food and sabotage all the cannons, then likewise fucked off.

So ends the pathetic story of the Prince Of Wales Fort. A monument twice over to almost getting something right, and then ruining it all in the very last step.

5. Clamato juice! It will not do! Have you ever cooked a tasty paella and realised to your horror you've over-salted it? What do you do? Bin it and start again? Bin it and order takeaway? Force yourself to eat it regardless?

No wrong answer there, surely. The only wrong answer - and PAY HEED, North America - would be to put the paella in the fridge, and drink the juice from the bottom of the bowl the following morning. 

No

Yeeuch.

Bonus anti-YAY:

Air Canada are goddamn evil. They were perfectly lovely when we travelled with them, I freely admit. But F and I were in a Winnipeg bar when the news came on that the entire city of Yellowknife was being evacuated due to encroaching wildfires. Air Canada's response to this was to take their ticket prices on the day of evacuation, and ratchet them up by a factor of ten.

Fuck Air Canada.

Five Things I Learned In Alaska

Five things! In just 96 hours! US speed run!

1. Alaskan schoolkids are extremely smart. Or at least, they are in Anchorage, or at least, they are in one school in Anchorage. Or at least, they are in one school in Anchorage, and in the past. The '71 graduating class of West Anchorage High School's - home of the fightin' Eagles - pooled their dollars for a huge mural on the side of the school. The principal at the time said "Fine, you can have an eagle, but NO REFERENCE to the year you're graduating!". They said "OK, sure!". Then the little dickheads commissioned this.

I love it. Legend has it that at their 10 year school reunion, they all got given detention.

2. The forests of Alaska are fucked. And it's not just the wildfires that are already consuming human civilisation. Someone let some European bark beetles loose, and they've been munching their way through the pine forests like they're Pac-Man, and ghosts have just been ruled unconstitutional. In a lot of places there are more dead trees than living ones. As a metaphor for how European immigrants showed up and ruined everything with their rampant consumption, it's... well, it's supremely depressing and fucked-up. Which at least tracks.

3. Grizzly bear cubs are absurdly cute, and surprisingly good climbers.  They also like to use road signs to scratch their backs. We'd all do it, if it were socially acceptable.

Sorry about the window-frame getting in on the action.

4.  There are five types of salmon in Alaska. We got taught a trick for remembering them, using the fingers on your hand. "Thumb" rhymes with "chum". Your pinkie is for pink salmon. You wear silver on your ring finger, so that's silver salmon sorted. Your middle finger is the largest one on your hand, reminding you of a "king", who traditionally were taller than most people due to having access to actual nutrition. All makes sense, right?

One more digit, one more fish: the sockeye. I know what you're thinking: 'Oh, OK. Index starts with "I", as in "sockeye", it must be that!'. That is because you are a REGULAR HUMAN PERSON. No such logic for the mushroom-added chancers who've inveigled their way onto the Alaskan Piscine Pneumonic Panel, though. No, for them, the link is "You wouldn't want to accidentally have your index finger sock someone in the eye". Rubbish. You sicken me. Zero starfish.

5. Moose are BIG. They're also more dangerous than bears. That makes sense, though. They're on a hair trigger, because they have to worry about bears. Bears only have to worry about picnic baskets, and where their next back-scratch is coming from. 

SO ENDS ALASKA.

Tales Of The Far West

It's hard to maneouvre in Vancouver

When jetlag's bagged your hide 

And like barracuda in Vancouver 

We're sunk in synching tides 

Yes, we're intruders in Vancouver 

Big cats come from the wild 

And like a cougar in Vancouver 

To get here cost our pride

Friday 40K: Strikes And Strike Forces

Good morning, humans. It's a strike day today, so what better time to show you what's passed across my paint desk recently. Somehow I've found time amid all the exam board/student support jobs in the last three weeks (done at half pay, no less) to finish the last ten Orks from the Assault On Black Reach Boyz Mob. Very proud of these; if they're not the best squad I've ever painted, they're surely in the top five.

Here's all eighteen of the emerald hooligans, all of them desperate to kick yer zoggin' teef in.

Also, we once again Compare and Contrast, with my latest 'Nid Warrior painted like it's 1996. He's simple, he's bold, he's got a ludicrous gun in ludicrous colours. Ah, nostalgia.

One last picture I wanted to show you: I've finally gotten every one of my painted miniatures into glass display cases at the new(ish) house. The wider cases are for 40K, with the smaller cases being taken up by Warhammer, Dreadfleet, Battlefleet Gothic, Space Hulk, and Talisman figures (along with some spare 40K scenery).

Pretty proud of this set-up, even if a miscalculation regarding plastic pegs caused one of the shelves to fall, taking out three Blood Angels Strike cruisers and nine assorted System Defence installations on the way down. That was a sombre day at Casa del Calamari, I must tell you.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.16 - "Leif Erikson " (Interpol)

The thing about Interpol’s debut is that it sounded so much like Joy Division. The thing about Joy Division is that I only really liked them when they weren’t sounding like Joy Division.

You can see the problem.

Sure, points for honesty. The brief, tyrannical reign of New Wave 2.0 was always about extrapolating what could have come after the 1989, had the music industry not chosen instead to wholesale recycle the Seventies with far worse fashion. If we hadn’t had the gall to mock trousers that were needlessly wide at the ankles while wearing T-shirts that changed fucking colour. If you goal was a do-over, who better to base that on than one of the greatest what-ifs of the eighties or any other decade? Let other bands hide their guiding lights under a bushel. As their first album declared, Interpol was letting you know exactly where the flame spilled out from.

Not that light is in evidence here. Even the night is blind here, finding what might be pinpricks of illumination through heat alone. The one mode that Prelimterpol tended to get right for me, as we’ve discussed, was the cavernous soundscape. The alien world described over a distorted connection by a feverish, dying astronaut. “Leif Erikson” nails that mode perfectly, from the title outwards; an insomniac always on the verge of falling asleep, experiencing the flow of time as a moonless sail across an infinite, glass-flat sea. Trapped in the liminal prison where everything thought circles, ripping your skin with each rotation. What was it she said about me? What if she shows up early? What if I’m as dead as she thinks I am? Everything repeats, everything hurts, nothing resolves, nothing heals.

There are songs you should only listen to at night, and songs you mustn't listen to at night. This is both. A hymn for the gloaming. A warning of what’s coming, on those nights where sleep is an ocean away.

B-side:

New Load Of Balls, Please

Predicting a close one for the snooker this year, lads, though I'm even less certain I'm getting this right than I usually am - yesterday just felt too crazy to properly parse. Ah well.

Selby 18 - Brecel 16.

Good Friday 40K

Jesus! He'd probably be into 40K, innit. Likely play as Chaos, too, really wind up the SO-CALLED religous authorities. Just how he rolled.

I've been busily chipping away at the same Assault On Black Reach mob of Orks that I've had on the go for well over a year now. Another five of them have fallen off the end of the conveyer belt.

Along with the three I'd already done, that puts me almost halfway through the squad.

I also finished my last Advaned Space Crusade Tyranid Warrior too, still clinging doggedly to my bare minimum/ham fisted incompetence colour scheme that has graced my 'Nids for almost three decades now.

The other big development in my hobbying is that I've finally got enough glass display cabinets to house every miniature/scenery peie I've painted since I was sixteen. I had planned on photographing them to include in this post, but one of the shelves collapsed on Monday, dropping three metal Strike Cruisers on my collection of resin Imperial Defence Platforms, causing some pretty aggravating  

I've managed to salvage two of the crusiers and all the platforms (though one of the latter looks like its had a brush with the Warp that it won't be coming back from). The last ship should also be fixable, but it's going to need pinning, and for that I need to find a drill-bit that I haven't spent a decade using to re-open superglue nozzles that have gummed themselves shut. Until I've managed that, I don't have the heart to show you the 99.5% of my collection which isn't smashed to bits.

Anyway. Happy Easter.

A Tale Of Cocktails #61

South Side

Ingredients:

50ml gin
25ml lemon juice

25ml simple syrup
5 mint leaves

Taste: 8
Look: 7
Cost: 8
Name: 6
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 5
Overall: 7.2

Preparation: Gently muddle mint leaves and lemon juice. Add other ingredients and shake with ice. Garish with a mint sprig.

SURPRISE! We are EXTREMLY BRIEFLY back!

A south side is a mojito without the faff or the dead wood. Half the time, twice the strength. MATHS.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.15 - "Love Will Tear Us Apart " (Joy Division)

Roddy Woomble once said “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was Joy Division’s best single, if only because it’s the only one that captures the band’s live energy. I was four months when Ian Curtis killed himself, so I had to take Woomble’s word for it, but it certainly feels unusual – almost unique - within the band’s songs. This is one of those contrary takes wearying dickheads pretend are “unpopular”, or – heaven forfend! – “cancellable”, but I’ve never been able to get next to Joy Division. I don’t quibble with Peter Hook’s contention their music seemed to come from some other place. It just wasn’t a very enticing place, cold and distant and half-illuminated with polarised light. Extraordinary doesn’t have to mean engaging.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart”, together with equally late cuts “Atmosphere” and (so late Curtis was dead before it was recorded, and it came out as a New Order joint) “Ceremony”, represented the band moving into more interesting territory. Or, given the previous metaphor, perhaps I should say they represented a shift in how the band processed the territory they were already exploring. Songs about how it felt to traverse this strange, alien world, rather than terse reports about what it contained.

It’s not that this isn’t still minimalist (part of why it’s almost impossible to cover), though it wasn’t common to hear Curtis on guitar to free Sumner up for keys – the song is built around a D chord both because of its versatility and the ease with which Curtis could play it. But there’s an energy here that’s purposefully held back in the band’s two studio albums. A sense of release, as Curtis channels his disintegrating marriage, the stress of juggling new success and old commitments, and a recent epilepsy diagnosis into a piano-wire tight growl of exhausted desperation. The cliché contrast of how good/poor luck in life matters nothing compared to poor/good luck in love is rewritten to something much more interesting: “Everything is awful, but all that really matters is my marriage – which just so happens to 

also be fucked”.

There are all sorts of offensively self-centred ways to link Curtis’ last months with the quality of the song. All of them we shall ignore. No song is so good it is worth a human life, and no band is so good them losing one among their number is primarily sad because the music stops. Instead of inferences, then, let’s stick to the one certainty we have in this: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. That should be - HAS to be - enough.

B-side: