Category: Ageing

Avatar The People vs the solo Spice Girls discography

Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, you have heard the evidence presented to you and yet I am duty-bound to go over it one more time so that you are aware of the heinous crimes that have been committed.

When the Spice Girls split, it created five solo careers. Five very different and yet equally awful solo careers. We have had to endure the outputs of these solo careers for over three decades now and it’s about time each and every one of them is brought to justice.

Let’s start with the best of the five, Emma Bunton. Apart from that weird one where she starts singing about sucking you off all night and that sub-par cover of Downtown, Bunton remains the least offensive. She has a warm voice and her discography is a lot better than it should be. ‘Maybe’ remains a genuinely decent song. There are a lot of singles from her past that aren’t anything to be embarrassed about.

The same, however, cannot be said for Mel B. The only reason she isn’t higher on this list is because of the frequency of her singles is significantly lower than some others. Absolute stinkers like ‘Want You Back’ and her stitched together with string and cellotape cover of ‘Word Up’ by Cameo stick long in the brain and not for good reasons. Perhaps she knew that singing wasn’t her strong point and thus gave up quick sharpish. The over polished American R & B smear that appears on most of her singles makes her sound like every other R & B singer during that era. Time has not been good to our Mel.

The same also cannot be said for Victoria Beckham. Less a singer and more a millionaire’s daughter who decided she wanted to be a singer one day, if you don’t count the autotuned-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life ‘Out of your Mind’ with True Steppers and Dane Bowers, she only has three singles to her name. Do you want some really sh*t rapping over a ballad? Becks has you covered with ‘A Mind of it’s Own’. Are you interested in someone singing a terrible Kylie b-side at you? Try ‘This Groove’. Every single feels as though they made the video first and cobbled a song together around it. You have to stick to what you know. It’s a good job she’s a fashion icon and also has a millionaire husband otherwise she’d be bored senseless.

We’re down to the dregs and you know where we’re going. She has eight (count em’) albums to her name although I doubt any of you would have heard anything past the second one. Mel C almost almost took the crown from you know who because her crimes are numerous. On her first album she covered as many genres as possible including rock (Going Down), pop (Northern Star), twinkle-shafting R & B (Never be the Same Again) and Ibiza club nonsense (I Turn to You) without mastering any of them. She then went a bit alternate with the second album, probably doing an Avril Lavigne thing, which was the style at the time. If we could give an award for trying then Mel would get it. I’m sure if we had enough time there’s probably a lot to like in her later stuff and she does seem like a lovely person. Still, strength of character is not on the stand today. Personality is not being judged here. What’s being judged is keeping Bryan Adams in the public consciousness and ‘When You’re Gone’ continues to dominate certain easy listening radio stations. That cannot be forgiven. Canada thinks we’ve forgotten, but we haven’t.

I’m going to come out and say it; Geri Halliwell’s career is the worst. Think I’m joking? She only has nine singles to her name. Nine singles! It feels like more because they’re that terrible, ladies and gentlemen. Once you get past the go get ’em sassiness of first release ‘Look at Me’ you’re left with disturbingly bad anglo-Spanish your mum’s holiday video ‘Mi Chico Latino’, so unmemorable and by the numbers you’d think it was written for an advert ‘Lift Me Up’, feminist anthem but nobody was listening ‘Bag it up’, I left my switchblade on the bus but I’ll happily cut off my ears with this oyster card before I ever touch this again cover of ‘It’s Raining Men’, my five year old wrote some words on a paper that rhyme so make it a song ‘Calling’, another Kylie b-side but worse than Victoria’s if you can believe it ‘Ride It’, Emma’s doing a 60’s thing so I’m going to copy her shamelessly ‘Desire’ and the puke-inducing generic song about driving and probably talking about sex too ‘Scream If You Wanna Go Faster’.

I need to sit down. It’s all too much for me. Remembering is fun but not today. I hereby condemn all five Spice Girls solo careers (okay, we’ll let Emma Bunton off).

Avatar ABOFB 39: An Oral History of Pouring Beans (ish)

In a slight change to the usual episodes, today we have a self aggrandising look back over our voluminous body of online work under the Pouring Beans name. Everyone does these thing on nice round numbers or important dates usually, but not us. No Sir. Basically we read our own stuff back to ourselves. We discuss:

  • Why is it called that?
  • How did it begin
  • Some McIver poetry
  • Remembering is fun

Avatar Logical Dreamscape: that Rachel Stevens dream

Right, it’s about time we find out what’s going on here.

For too long I have wept in the shadows from the trauma of that Rachel Stevens dream from some twenty-seven (possibly) years ago. I need to take the bull by the horns and try to interpret what my brain was trying to tell me at the time in my life. I was young, hormonal, somewhat deranged, floating in a puddle of filth.

When I need explanations I turn to the friend we all need; dreamdictionary.org. Let’s have a brief recap as to what happened:

“I’m somewhere on Garforth main street when I meet Rachel Stevens from up-and-coming pop group S Club 7. She’s a little bit alluring, somewhat flirty but mainly pushy. She’s very, very pushy.

She takes me up a flight of stairs to a fairly plain corridor with only one door and a wooden chair outside. She makes me sit on the chair and goes into the room behind the door. When she emerges, she has a plate of salad and a fork in her hands. She then proceeds to angrily eat the salad making constant eye contact with me throughout the whole experience.”

I hope I haven’t misremembered what could be a pivotal turning point in my life. Anyway, let’s turn to the dictionary for an insight into the troubled mind of a teenage youth.

First, let’s pick out the main points:

  • Street, celebrity / singer, woman, stairs, corridor, wooden chair, salad, anger

Now let’s see what the dream dictionary says:

  • Street – walking along on the street could imply our current life’s path. Take note of what is around you and write down all the symbols because it may have hidden gems that might help you out (I don’t remember anything).
  • Celebrity – this represents our own desires to be noticed or unacknowledged potential that needs to be explored.
  • Woman – According to Jung, a man dreams of his anima; the feminine within the masculine psyche that needs to be integrated. In dreams a women represents wisdom, love and protection.
  • Stairs – there is nothing for stairs.
  • Corridor – there is nothing for corridor.
  • Wooden chair – when we dream of a chair it symbolises our need to take it easy. You need to take a break from you busy schedule and rest. You are working yourself to the bone and this dream is your unconscious tell you to calm down.
  • Salad – there is nothing for salad, there is nothing for lettuce (I remember there was a lot of lettuce in that salad).
  • Anger – there is nothing for anger, I also tried looking for ‘rage’.

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

So, by meeting a celebrity woman on a street it meant that on my life path I wanted to be noticed. I don’t think Rachel Stevens represented wisdom, love or protection because she was so enraged with my very presence. If I was doing GCSEs or A levels around that time then the idea of taking it easy would make sense. Wanting to be noticed too does make sense because, shocked as it may be to hear this but, I wasn’t very popular during secondary school.

Huh. Maybe there is a little truth buried beneath the absurdity of it all.

Avatar Memory Flash: celebrities

When you were watching television as a kid did you ever notice a person or persons who seemed to be everywhere? I watched a lot of TV when I was young. I drank it all up at all times of the day. I would watch kid’s programmes very early on, mundane game shows and special interest programmes during the day and films that were definitely not for my age group late at night.

Those interest programs and gameshows though, they were something else. You’d be watching something like ‘Noel’s House Party’ and a particular someone would be there, and then they’d also be on ‘Blankety Blank’, and then you’d see them later on in the week on ‘Crosswits’. This person would always be there, no matter what you were watching on what channel. They still flash into my mind every now and then and the majority of them I have no idea why they’re famous. I thought it best to therefore look into the CVs of a select group so that we can all remember why

Lionel Blair

Lionel Blair was an actor, dance, choreographer, tap-dancer (I remember this about him the most, don’t ask me why) and television presenter. When he father died when he was thirteen, he became the breadwinner for the family and took to the stage to earn money. He briefly took on a career as an actor before deciding dancing was for him. His dance troupe appeared on a number of TV programmes in the 1960’s. He also appeared in the Beatles film ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and was one of the team captains on the game show ‘Give us a Clue’ from 1979 until the early 1990s. Later on in his years, he earned up to £100,000 for a six-week run doing pantomimes. This is but a brief insight into what must have been a very illustrious career.

The Krankies

This was a husband and wife duo, Ian and Jannette respectively, where the latter dressed as a schoolboy called Wee Jimmy and the former was their umm paternal figure. Unusual setup aside, they began their comedy career performing on the circuit during the 1970s and were given a big break with a spot on the Royal Variety Performance. They released a series of pop singles and an album, they had roles on several television shows including Crackerjack (?) and the Joke Machine (??). In 2003, Wee Jimmy Krankie was voted ‘the most Scottish person in the world’ by readers of the Glasgow Herald. The most interesting aspect of all of this me looking at Wikipedia is that in 2009 they were invited onto the Paul O’Grady show for the pantomime special of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in which Janette played a hooker and Ian played a rampant camel. Yes, you read that right. I’m sure that’s not the strangest part of their careers but hey ho.

Gary Wilmot (who?)

Wor Gazza needs no introduction. Already adept at singing and performing, his big break came in 1978 when he featured as part of a comedy double act with Judy McPhee (?) on ‘New Faces’. This then led to numerous appearances on ‘Copy Cats’, ‘Knees Ups, Cue Gary’ (??) and ‘The Keith Harris Show’ (???). In addition to co-presenting the kid’s quiz show ‘So You Want To Be Top’ (I’ve never heard of any of these things), he hosted something called ‘Showstoppers’ where wor Gaz would sing songs from musicals with special guests, although the main point of the show was for celebrities to learn and perform a song in ten days. Nobody cared about that mind. Gary was so popular that his original sixty dates taking the performance on tour had to be increased to one hundred and sixty due to phenomenal demand.

We all know his marvellous music career including such classic albums as Double Standards, The Album and, of course, Love Situation.

Gaz has dabbled in theatre too playing numerous roles in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘The Pirates of Penzance’, ‘Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’. I personally remember him being the guy man in ‘Chicago’ when it was showing in Leeds around maybe 2010. Not because I actually went to see it but because I saw the poster in Leeds train station and took a photo of it (and I still have it somewhere).

I also saw him recently on Richard Osman’s ‘House of Games’ which was only showing last week however I can’t remember if it was a repeat or not.

There you have it. A comprehensive insight into the world of people who were around when we were growing up. It’s not too much of a understatement to say that there’s a lot going on here (especially for Lionel Blair, who knew?) and I would thoroughly encourage everyone to go do their own research.

Also, what happened to Rowland Rivron?

Avatar Long-awaited outcome

I was recently reminded that this exchange had happened while Ian and I were talking about gingerbread.

1 May 2025 was three weeks ago and I can confirm with pleasure that it was a fairly normal day. I was at work, where among other things I dealt with some emails about election coverage and logged a call with our facilities helpdesk to have a carpet cleaned following a minor water leak.

As a result I am pleased to confirm that my ability to see precisely five years into the future is working nicely. Or at least it was five years ago. If you want to know whether it’s still working now you’ll have to wait another five years.

Avatar Newsboost – unused material (part one)

You may or may not remember the Newsboost Twitter account that I started back in 2014. It was a way of force-feeding mega news into the public subconscious via a steady stream. I ran it for roughly a year before abandoning it as one of those Beans side projects that didn’t quite work out as well as we’d hoped.

I still have the same notebook that I jotted ideas in. Most of them were used but there were some that didn’t make the cut, possibly because they were too “radical” for the time or, which is much more likely, because they were utter nonsense that popped into my head for a moment and there was nothing I could do with it.

Anyway, here’s a short list of what could’ve been:

  • A good chair shouldn’t be sat upon
  • Portable sarcasm
  • Pointy beard serving posts (?)
  • Credit card gifts to children for irresponsible parents
  • Broom jacket
  • Aliens have given up on earth
  • Drive by serenades
  • Recycling man caught littering
  • Skeleton career guidance
  • Polar bears stealing chips
  • Tub Barsley promises a marrow for every household
  • Backwards cutlery for dieters
  • THE NOSE IS THE FACE ON THE BODY OF THE FACE
  • Chicken on drums
  • Slowest tortoise keyboardist fired
  • Big ass television comeback
  • Growling slippers
  • New number set to debut this Autumn
  • Chronic pigs

I’ve listed this as ‘part one’ because after turning over the page there’s so much more and one month where I’m not particularly feeling it, I can whip this out again for a quick win.

Proof that not every idea is a good idea (but every invention is a good invention).

Avatar Last minute rush

“… so nobody eat the mushroom cake because you could come out in a rash.

Moving onto our last race of the month, we see the “young” McIver slapping together whatever nonsense that could constitute as a post in order to fill his quota of four. It’ll probably have numerous spelling errors, make very little sense and be as disposable as any film created and released by Netflix.

Chris “Consider Me” Marshall, once the dark horse of the beans collective, now demoted to digging holes in his back garden and filling them with water just to get some attention. It’s a shameful practice and hopefully one that will eventually peter out because what the crowds want is more bathroom art and weird things he sees on the train to work posts. They ALWAYS go down a storm.

We finish, if you can call it a finish due to the unpredictable nature of the man, with the scant offerings of Kevin “Podcast pirate” Hill. Will he slide in with another podcast shortly before the end whistle? Will he be too tired to edit and post one? Does he have enough thumbs for the process after whittling so many wooden spoons? Only time will tell.

It’s going to be a scrabble however you look at it. Still we should all be grateful that these titans of men, these pillars of hope keep generating enough content to fill a website. Where others have fallen, they continue to get back up. I know I never get sick of reading it.

Anyway, onto Purdy’s prediction corner!”