Wings Over Scotland

Something's puzzled me for more than 15 years, viewers, and an article I read today brought it back to mind, so I'm going to raise it very briefly in the hopes that someone might even now be able to answer the question for me.

There's something odd about the chart above, isn't there?

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In the light of the Electoral Commission setting higher limits for referendum campaign spending, Labour’s Richard Baker, Dr. Richard Simpson and Alistair Darling embark on an urgent fundraising drive outside The Rangers’ next away game in SFL 3.

(We might have gone with this, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to embed YouTube video at a specified starting point, at least in so far as we don’t know how to do it.)

"…don't you ever / Lower yourself, forgetting all your standards"

There are, we’re certain, some twists to come yet in the “Rangers” story. But while we’ve been able to pretty clearly identify and understand the motivations of all the concerned parties in events to date (and our assessments and predictions have accordingly almost always been bang on the money), we’ve finally run into a logical roadblock where we just can’t make sense of anything.

Because we can no longer for the life of us figure out what the SFA is playing at.

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…is seeing Scotland taking its place in peace alongside the other independent nations of the world (at 2m 42s), courtesy of the heartwarming and ever-splendid Dancing Matt:

(Where The Hell Is Matt? 2008 is still our favourite, though.)

It was very pleasant to see Lou Hickey and Dougie MacLean performing “Caledonia” at the Yes Scotland launch – it’s a nice enough tune, if a bit mopey, and “Flower Of Scotland” has been somewhat ruined for us as a national song by years of appallingly murdered, out-of-time renditions at Murrayfield and, especially, Hampden.

(We liked the brief period when The Three McTenors or something did a speeded-up rendition at the football, which was nicely modern and left less room for the crowd to balls it up in – for some reason football fans can’t grasp the concept of a pause – but the SFA with their trademark ineptitude soon abandoned it in favour of Ronnie Corrie barking it out in his Hielan’-wedding get-up again. We also approve of the SRU’s practice of making the band stop for verse two and leaving it to the crowd alone, but why not just count them in and then let them sing unaccompanied from the start?)

We can’t help feeling, though, that music is a bit of a weak spot generally for the Scottish nationalist movement – still basically mired in the misty-blue-hills-of-Tiree era, where Runrig are seen as modernist hep-cats and the SNP’s official song is a 1962 blues tune best known by the staggeringly inappropriate title of “Let’s Stick Together”.

Had it been up to us, the Yes launch would have seen Glasgow’s own Primal Scream stood in front of a giant backdrop of Gordon “British jobs for British workers“ Brown and pummelling out an apocalyptic rendition of “Swastika Eyes“, but we get that that might not have mainstream appeal. Anyway, the point is, it’s time to think positive.

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Long-time WoSblog viewers will already be aware that I’ve embraced my gay side when it comes to Eurovision now, thanks to the simple expedient of entering into the spirit and watching it with other people. (If everyone else is even briefly out of the room for some reason I get very twitchy.)

But for those of you still struggling, here are this year’s highlights, with the minimum of campness and the maximum of ROCK!

(NB “Maximum” does not necessarily mean “a lot”.)

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“…put out the streamers/It’s gonna be a good day for the dreamers.”

We all remember this, right?

(Click the pic to watch on YouTube. We can’t have it embedded here because the repellent corporate nightsoil at Sony Music Entertainment have laid a copyright block on it and there STILL isn’t a remotely decent video plugin for WordPress. This is the original TV version, incidentally.)

It’s fantastic, of course. But on this occasion it’s not the truly awesome thing.

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Because I never thought I’d ever see this again:

There are two reasons I’m incredibly happy about suddenly and unexpectedly rediscovering it – as I just have – of which the first is the less important.

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Malcolm McLaren RIP. This is a version of a piece I originally wrote for WoS a few years ago, reprinted in tribute to one of the world's great chancers.

The world would have been a much more interesting place if he'd managed to become the Mayor of London.

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or how one record changed my whole life.

(To enjoy this feature TO THE EXTREME!, install the excellent Spotify and click the song titles to hear the songs. Failing that, I’ll just have to try to paint you a picture of some sounds, but made with words instead of paint.)

In the heady atmosphere of 1985-1986, I never thought I’d live to see the day when The Jesus And Mary Chain – musical revolutionaries, performers of shambolic 20-minute sets of hellish white noise and inebriated chaos, banned from Student Unions across the country because of their concerts’ tendency to end in (sort-of) riots, scruffy council-estate urchins from the industrial wastelands of West Central Scotland – would be having their music celebrated and given away free with copies of The Times.

I guess if you’re right, and if you wait patiently enough, the world sometimes comes round to your way of thinking eventually.

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