Licenced

What do you do when life makes you weary? How do you lift your spirits from a state of malaise? Well, I don’t know what you do, but I get myself down to the Lego Store with my VIP card on double points day.

On Monday I bought this.

I haven’t actually built it yet because I’m, you know, preparing to move house and everything, but it’s sitting there in its box just waiting for me. The anticipation alone is enjoyable. Anyway, this particular set is only available from the five Lego Stores in London at the moment – nowhere else and not online – and if you took the trouble to go down there and get one, and you flash them your VIP card like I did, you get handsomely rewarded with extra qualifications. My new set came with this.

Yes, you saw right. I am now the proud holder of documentation that proves I am qualified to build and drive this bus. (The cards are individually numbered so I think I’m only the 209th person to get it as well.)

So in future, if you want to build some Lego, that’s fine, but you won’t be getting anywhere near this one unless you’re the holder of a driving licence like I am.

Four Word Reviews: Bugs & Friends Sing the Beatles

1995 is a fertile year for the albums that randomly arrive in the post without any indication of their provenance. That year has already brought us The Lone Ranger and It’s Time. Now it brings us a third forgotten horror, Bugs & Friends Sing the Beatles, subtitled “The Furry Four Sing Their Fab Four Favourites!”.

I have to be honest, I don’t really know where to start. I loved Looney Tunes cartoons when I was a kid. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were my favourites, and Disney could absolutely do one. So I had a small glimmer of hope that there might be something entertaining about this. Then I put the CD in and – in a Four Word Reviews first – I genuinely had to pause it at the end of the first track to try and gather my thoughts and steel my nerves to get through the rest.

I don’t even know what’s worst. Is it that they’ve taken on brilliant, beautiful songs and wilfully converted them into vehicles for terrible puns on other Beatles song names and cartoon fights with lots of sound effects? Is it the fact that almost every song breaks down in the middle into a spoken-word sketch of some kind? Is it that even when they’re not talking, they mostly speak the lyrics in “funny” voices or respond to them in some way? Is it the patronising Indian accent in “Fool on the Hill” when Elmer Fudd is asking his swami for spiritual guidance?

Actually, no, I do know what’s the worst and it’s none of those. It’s that you’re not even listening to Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and Taz. You’re listening to four bad impressions of Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and Taz and they are slowly battering eleven Beatles songs into an early grave. Taz doesn’t really matter because he’s not in it much, but his character isn’t really meant to speak. Elmer’s voice is wobbly and cracked and sounds awful when singing. Daffy is vaguely convincing until he does his catchphrase “woohoo!” and then the actor loses the character a bit. And Bugs is… well, I don’t know who Bugs is, but he’s not Bugs Bunny. It’s not convincing at all. He doesn’t even speak in the right register. I have never missed Mel Blanc so badly.

Track	Title	Word 1	Word 2	Word 3	Word 4
1	She Loves You	She	wouldn’t	love	this
2	The Fool on the Hill	Elmer	Fudd’s	harrowing	vocal
3	Birthday	Includes	reference	to	Laserdiscs
4	Hello Goodbye	Joyless	Bugs/	Daffy	argument
5	With a Little Help From My Friends	Elmer	bludgeons	another	classic
6	It Won’t Be Long	It	was	too	long
7	Yesterday	Daffy	Duck	singing	“suddenly”
8	Penny Lane	Oh	god	I	can’t
9	Help!	Yosemite	Sam’s	unwelcome	debut
10	Can’t Buy Me Love	No	no	no	no
11	The Long and Winding Road	Featuring	Roadrunner	“meep	meeps”

The jokes are bad. The sketches are bad. The scripted-to-death ad libs are bad. The changes to the lyrics are bad. The way they shoehorn other Beatles song titles into their jokes is beyond bad. The instrumental version of “The Long and Winding Road” that featured only backing vocals and Roadrunner – “the long and winding road MEEP MEEP that leads to your door” – was painful. But I think worst of all is that I listened to the album and it made me realise what brilliantly written songs these are and how sad it was to hear them being taken for granted and pillaged for cheap laughs that mostly don’t land by people without even half the talent of the original songwriters. It’s a horrible parody of brilliant music by people doing a horrible pastiche of a brilliant voiceover artist. There’s no joke at the end of this paragraph. It’s just really sad.

In all, this was among the worst things I’ve ever listened to, though still not as bad as “To The Extreme” by Vanilla Ice which is the worst thing that has ever happened to me and will never be matched. My favourite thing about this album was Daffy Duck singing “suddenly!” in Yesterday. My least favourite thing was basically everything else.

Garforth takes its place in the history of rave

You might think that our humble home town of Garforth has a very low key history that starts with coal mining and ends with the time Tesco moved into the old Safeway’s. The people living there might have enjoyed listening to music but it has no famous musicians. Nearby Kippax can claim The Music as their own local band, but Garforth remains quiet. There is absolutely no way it could have played a role in the Eurodance scene of the mid-1990s.

Well, I am about to blow that idea right out of the water, because it turns out that Garforth played a very central role in mid-90s rave music. It happened right next to the Old George. Don’t believe me? I will explain. Let’s talk about N-Trance. (And if you don’t want to talk about N-Trance, that’s a shame, because we’re going to.)

This Way Up: Episode 6

Yes! You have been waiting, no doubt, a very long time for this and you have been waiting impatiently. Your foot has been tapping. You have looked at your watch so frequently that the numbers have been worn off its face. You have sighed pointledly to no avail. Well, wait no more, because it’s here: the season finale of This Way Up has just landed right in front of your ears. If you ask me it’s the best one of the whole series.

Six episodes of this magnificent folly are now at an end, but there will be outtakes to follow for the fans to collect and put in a sticker book.

Election results 2017

It’s been an exciting campaign, most of which has happened away from The Beans since the election was first announced back in April which is why we haven’t heard anything about it here since it was first called. But the day is finally here, and the results are in. Let’s go now live to the civic centre in South Beans for the results as the candidates take to the podium.

“I, Professor Louche, being the Returning Officer for South Beans constituency, hereby announce the results for the election of the Member of Parliament for South Beans.

King, Saint Jim Wilkins: eight thousand, four hundred and twenty nine.

McJEEFY, EEFORD RONALD ALOYSIUS WILKINS, commonly known as EEFY McJEEFY: four thousand, nine hundred and three.

Cockall, Nonnington Nen Nay Wilkins, commonly known as Nonny Cockall: four.

Lady, Sexatronic Wilkinia: six thousand, two hundred and eighty three.

Kitty, Flat: twelve thousand and thirty two.

Flat Kitty is therefore elected as the member of parliament for Beans South. Thank you.”

Well, there we have it! An astonishing result for Flat Kitty, bringing her agenda for high-speed pancake delivery to the front of mainstream politics. There will be a lot to discuss in the days to come but for now we will all begin by pledging allegiance to our new MP and overlord. Or possibly overkitty.

Frankenstein’s sideboard

If you read the papers you’ll already know that Kevindo Menendez – now properly styled Lord Chang of Micklefield – recently sold his former home, a palatial residence that he had spent most of his life enlarging and expanding to a size copiously documented here in the past.

A property of that magnitude, crossing numerous county and parish borders and easily visible from space, naturally fetches a handsome price, and so the estate he has now purchased with the proceeds is one of the largest in the world. I understand it has its own representation at the UN and is a member of NATO.

I was recently offered the privilege of visiting this magnificent residence where I helped Chang himself assemble new furniture.

Ikea do not sell furniture even nearly big enough for this new house, and their normal wares would look like miniature dolls house furniture in its cavernous rooms. That’s why we took several flat-pack kits and re-engineered them to build this behemoth.

The people from Guinness have not yet visited – or rather, to be strictly accurate, they came as soon as we called but they are still travelling up the driveway and are due to arrive a week on Thursday. But we fully expect this unprecedented masterpiece of joinery will be officially confirmed as the largest sideboard in the Western Hemisphere when they finally see it.

Eleven today

Let’s take a moment to remember that it was eleven years ago today that Kev made the first ever post to the Beans.

Much has happened since then. Because of his very busy lifestyle it was also, sadly, Kev’s last post to the site, but in the decade that’s passed since then I have posted quite a lot and Ian has reliably turned out his own personal brand of things without a break, so between us we’ve more or less kept the flag flying.

Four Word Reviews: Love Situation

I’m getting used to terrible albums mysteriously landing on my doormat now. I don’t know who sends them or why, but they keep on coming. Normally I’ve heard of the people involved – Vanilla Ice, Clock, that sort of thing, but I have to say I’ve never heard of Gary Wilmot before. I’ve searched the internet to no avail. He’s a complete unknown.

Still, here it is, a forgotten 80s classic: Love Situation by Gary Wilmot.

The feeling I normally get while listening to music for these Four Word Reviews is that I struggle to care about the music I’m hearing, but this album was an interesting first, because I got the distinct feeling that Gary Wilmot didn’t care either. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an entire album of music in which none of the participants show any sign of giving a damn about the music they’re mechanically churning out.

Of the 12 tracks here, four are cover versions. The eight original songs are without exception awful, with the sort of lyrics that slowly and deliberately tell you exactly what the song is about so there’s no space for imagination or subtlety, but it’s not clear whether Mr Wilmot thought that he could genuinely improve on the four songs he covers or whether he’s just using them as a way to avoid having to write any more drivel. In any case, all four are disasters.

In terms of the music, it sounds like someone listened to “A Winter’s Tale” by David Essex and decided to make a whole album like that. There’s almost no sound on the whole CD that is not made by one of the instrument settings on a Yamaha keyboard, though there is a bit of Carpenters-style subdued electric guitar once or twice that’s turned right down so it doesn’t get you too excited. Several of the songs fade out over the course of thirty seconds or more, sometimes from the middle of a chorus, which gives the impression that the producer has had enough and is trying to wrap it up early.

Track	Title	Word 1	Word 2	Word 3	Word 4
1	Love Situation	Dreading	eleven	more	tracks
2	On the Way to a Dream	Synth	clarinet	and	sadness
3	Unchained Melody	Uninteresting	rendition,	unmitigated	failure
4	And Now She’s Gone	Allegedly	emotional	breakup	ballad
5	Take My Breath Away	Masterclass	in	slaughtering	songs
6	Star Without a Soul	“Raggy	Dolls”	backing	vocal
7	Wind Beneath My Wings	Emotionlessly	plodding	through	dross
8	Expectation Road	Overwrought	ballad	about	loneliness
9	I Won’t Forget You	Not	even	Gary	cares
10	Against All Odds	Nobody	asked	for	this
11	Danny You’re a Loser	China	Crisis	with	crooning
12	There’s Only Room for the Good Girls	Unsuccessfully	channeling	Billy	Joel

Interestingly, after ten solid tracks of slow, quiet, bored-sounding crooning, the last two tracks suddenly pick up the pace, like a direct reversal of all those albums that have ten tracks of lively good stuff and then a couple of slow half-baked songs tacked on the end. Both of them are crap, but Danny You’re a Loser is almost the first appearance of any sort of beat, which is at least a welcome change if not actually pleasant listening, while There’s Only Room for the Good Girls might be a terrible song and a transparent pastiche of Billy Joel but is at least not more mushy, apathetic muttering over dreary keyboards. If they were the first two tracks you’d misguidedly think there was some hope for the album, so in that sense at least it is kinder to put them at the end.

In short, my favourite thing about this album is that it took four songs I already knew and didn’t like, and showed me how it would be possible to make them much worse, so that next time I hear any of them I can at least appreciate the fact that the originals are competently performed and that the singer seems to give a toss about them. My least favourite thing is that I still have no idea who Gary Wilmot is.

Pouring
Beans

Author: Chris5156