Bed! Hnghh! Good God! What is it good for?
Well, absolutely everything in my opinion. Bed just happens to be my favourite place – no question about it. In fact I want to be there now - I may not even stay up for the X-Factor results - that's how sleepy I am. Although Match Of The Day's on at 11 and I want to watch that (oh dear - he's wittering again. Ed). So I'm not going to bore you all with lengthy justifications for each of these tracks. I think they're all wonderful and I hope you will too.
A question for you: what's the strangest place you've ever slept? And let's keep it clean shall we? We don't want it getting too French...
Here's the track list:
1. Live Bed Show - Pulp
2. Amazing In Bed - Ooberman
3. Tender Blue - Everything But The Girl
4. Bedshaped - Keane
5. Bedroom Scene - Delays
6. Brothers On A Hotel Bed - Death Cab For Cutie
Enjoy - I'm off up the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire...
32 comments:
How did your team win that?
oh well you CAN be great for four mins.
as loads of bands know.
(I'll send you some compilations if you want)
Ooberman/ Death Cab/ Pulp for me in this collection.
bed used to be my favourite place in all the world, then i made them mistake of having child, which ruined the whole thing....
strangest place i've ever slept....hmmmmm. probs through the great storm of '87 or
"Strangest place you've ever slept", huh? Two spring to mind, only one of which is shareable when I'm sober ...
On the concourse of Nottingham Bus Station, with a Security Guard's Alsatian trying to lick the very top of my head all night. It was all the more bloody annoying because I was the only one of a dozen-plus of us that was getting the canine attention. The penny only dropped on that one 18 months later when the glass that was embedded in my bleeding greasy mullet that night finally worked it's way back out through the skin!
Ouch DsD.
Oh and by the way Toffee, I've been so bombed out with things to do this is actually the first 'Spill playlist I've listened to for a week or more, and it's absolutely brilliant - perfect for the time of night and my current stress levels (though I'm slightly horrified that I loved Track 4 and THEN found out it was Keane!!
;o)
[Technically, can you actually be "slightly" horrified, DsD? - Ed.]
@ Ed: Probably not. That'll no doubt be why my closing bracket stormed off the page ... in protest at my crap syntax/vocab!
@ Shane - Thanks for the cyberwince. It's a long story that involves a railway viaduct which was two foot shorter than the top deck of the double decker bus I was sat on when the two met at 40mph!!
weirdest place for me sleeping....
.. how many times in 38 years?
I don't sleep very well , so when I drop off it could be any old place....
on the Berlin Wall... on top.. too much wine..bashed legs to follow.
at a Jesus and Mary Chain gig after not being able to sleep for five days (they played for about 40 mins, missed it all)
in a corn field in France, was then taken home by a family that looked after me for two days.
in a Car hitching to Berlin ended up in a water mill being hosted by a green German MP..
and all the friends I still sofa surf with.. why do they still put up with me?
Great list - and like DsD I was mildly devastated to find that I could listen to Keane without adverse side effects. Loved Ooberman and Delays, both of which are new to me.
Places to sleep... I'm very attached to proper beds, so tend not to sleep if I don't have one - but if I reinterpret the question as 'strangest places you've spent the night', then there seem to be two contenders:
(i) Mountain refuge half way up the Glacier Blanc in the Alps; actually a fairly standard mountain refuge, but enlivened by presence of a load of national service trainees, most of whom seemed to be from Marseille and love boats - so naturally the French army put them in the mountain corps. Conversely, the father of the French family we were climbing the mountain with was a trained Alpine guide - and so naturally when WWII broke out he was put into the cavalry... Anyway, lots of bridge and interesting French slang while the wind howled outside.
(ii) A train carriage (couldn't afford a sleeping compartment) crossing Yugoslavia. A fairly dramatic journey all in all, with a succession of swarthy peasants concealing several carrier bags of contraband cigarettes behind our rucksacks, earnest looking Muslim youths wanting to engage us in discussions about Kosovo, and assorted suspicious-looking men in trenchcoats doubtless listening out for people engaging in discussions about Kosovo... The night was punctuated with the girl I was travelling with dealing with the wandering hands of the local non-Muslim youth, and the seats were deeply uncomfortable.
I once "slept" under the desk in an office in Brighton Metropole after the staff party at the Great British Beer Festival...
As the ranking Frenchman in these here parts, the strangest place I've ever slept in sober, nightclubs and classrooms not withstanding, is during a Sonny Rollins concert, and during the musical Chicago, which is more understandable.
I've slept in many strange places but the most embarrassing was the front row of a theatre 'in the round' in York - watching Samuel Beckett's 'End Game' - I was about two feet away from the actors.
I have some travel stories, of course, but the strangest night I've spent has to be after the birth of my first son. 18 hours of labor, an emergency c-section, a massive dose of morphine, metal staples holding me together, and at 10 pm they send mr. Steenbeck home and leave me alone with this helpless little newborn. Strangely, one of the best nights of my life.
Ah, now if we're heading off on that tangent, one of my weirdest nights was being scared of being in our own home when we'd already lived here for seven years!!!
It was because it was the day we brought DarceysSis home from hospital, and we felt ridiculously insecure being left in a building with no nurses in it and no 'Call Midwife' button by the bed.
@ saneshane - I was at work on Saturday afternoon, following the game on the BBC website. I'd seen that we'd gone one down and then had to go off and do something for a while. I went back to the PC hoping against hope that we might have equalised and couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw it saying W Ham 1 Everton 3 - I assumed it was a mistake and still can't quite believe it now!
@ blimpy - once your little 'uns are big 'uns you get your bed back again. Have patience...
@ DsD & Abahachi - re: Keane - perhaps we've all learned a lesson here?
@ everyone - some excellent falling asleeps here - and, abahachi, your re-interpretation is absolutely fine by me. I'm afraid I have nothing to rival the above (I particularly like the embarrassing public ones). I nodded off in a meeting at work a few months back (it didn't go down too well) and I once fell asleep in the middle of a Scalextric race - it's a long story which isn't as interesting at it might be - but I guess I haven't led as bohemian a lifestyle as some of my fellow Spillers.
Keep 'em coming...
@ saneshane - if your seriously offering to send me some compilations I'd be massively grateful. I'll send you a message on last.fm with my address. Happy to reciprocate...
toffeeboy..got the message, shall sort you some stuff in the week..
think it was overall an odd football weekend.. but that was some come back.
(and my boss is a Hammer so I will not be hearing from him this week.. get in!)
@ shane - thanks, mate. Looking forward to it.
Very amused at all the peeps enjoying that Keane track and going "Aaaaaaaaarrgh!! It's not....?" Trust your ears and as George Michael so rightly said "Listen without prejudice'... :-)))
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No very exotic places to sleep. once slept all the way through Clint Eastwood's "Bird" and judging by the way people were looking at me on the way out, I snored. Hard. Zzzzzzzzzzz
Strange sleeping places? Let's roll out one of my favourite vignettes.
About 25 years ago when I was young and idealistic I went to stay on a 'collective farm' in a certain controversial country at the eastern end of the Med. One night a group of us travelled down the hill to visit a neighbouring 'farm' for a party. A few hours later, after a few too many beers I decided that I couldn't be bothered walking all the way back up the hill to my own bed but would crash down in the long grass on the other side of a wall. In the middle of the night, I woke up feeling pretty rough, sat up and let off a suitable groan, just as a group of people walked past me. They stared at me and said 'Sorry for disturbing your sleep'. I mumbled, 'thash alright' and collapsed into a drunken stupor again.
In the morning I looked around me to see that the long grass I was in was on the edge of a cemetery! Bear in mind that at this time I had ALOT of hair and it had been bleached white in the sun, so I realised that when I sat up moaning and groaning in the moonlight from the long grass on the edge of a cemetery the group of people who were taking a short cut through the cemetery at midnight didn't think that they'd disturded the sleep of a pissed teenager but that of a rather more profound kind......
I was up all night the night of the great storm of 87 and saw the early birds hand over from the late larks (in total blackout)from the top of a hill in New Cross which had been decimated by it. So no chance to sleep through.
Strangest place ive slept? Probably, on the bare floor during an inter-band Subuteo match, at 3.00 in the morning, between my band and The Sultans of Ping. Coming direct from work in Leicester, to Islington to play a gig and then on to an all night Subuteo match, I was just to knackered and keeled over half way through. The Sultans were pasting us anyway. I slept on the touchline throughout the second half. No one could move me.
Mrs. Shoe slept on an ice-rink while The Damned were playing.
Mrs Abahachi has an annoying habit of falling asleep in jazz concerts - Joshua Redman, McCoy Tyner and Brad Mehldau so far - and, aggravatingly, of then asking to be taken home immediately, rather than keeping the snoring to a minimum to allow me to stay to the end...
Excellent list Toffeeboy, exactly my shade of fey indie. Lovely to hear Ooberman, my Magic Treehouse is on vinyl, so I don't get to listen to it as often as I should. I love Roll Me In Cotton from the same album, it's about being in bed with someone and rolling around in the sheets, right?
I've always quite liked Keane, so I'm very pleased to hear that others are won over without the prejudice weighing them down. Somewhere Only We Know is a big favourite in our Singstar drunken moments! Delays also v good: yummy list all round!
Scrolling over your exquisite bedding there TB it occurs to me to mention something completely irrelevant: Spongebob is a lot better in German. I only say this because I just viewed that GU clip featuring David Bowie and was appalled at how dull the voices are in the original.
@ tracyk - glad you liked the list. I've no idea how I discovered Ooberman (I suspect it was a review in Q magazine) but the album's a big favourite in the Toffee household. Shorley Wall is almost unbelievably beautiful.
@ nilpferd - SpongeBob Schwammkopf ist echt toll. Aber fűr mich ist es auf Englisch genau so gut.
That's funny, Nilpferd, because Isaac was watching spongebob on the computer today (which we've never done before) and suddenly in episode in German came on. Isaac didn't even notice. I still don't know why it happened.
And in the park today I met a woman from Germany--from the Black Forest area. I said "Oh, I have a friend from there...well, I've never met him, but..." And she gave me a better-keep-my-child-away-from-this-one look. And then I said, yeah, he's a hippo, and I also have a friend who is a frogprincess, who lives nearby...
Actually I explained about the Guardian and she visibly relaxed.
Toffeeboy: the 12" clear-with-sparkly-bits original release of Shorley Wall is one of my favourite slabs of coloured vinyl. I met Danny and Sophia when they played Glastonbury in 1999, they were lovely people. Indirectly met hubby through them too.
I think if you "explained about the Guardian" to parents here in the UK they'd wrestle their kids away from the liberal tree-huggers, Steen!
Steenbeck- so if I see a woman trying to sell a gross of dondle mitts at next Saturday's flea market, I should introduce myself as "mr Hippo, you know, friend of Frogprincess and Steenbeck, named after her dog who's named after a camera", then?
TB, actually only kidding about Sponge, I normally refuse to watch dubbed series on principle, and most stuff is clearly inferior. Although I do think the german voices fit the characters better, especially the gravel voiced, geldgeile Eugene Krabs, the besserwisser Thaddeus and the high pitched über-happy eponymous character. Or it could just be that the characters fit German stereotypes better. I was just surprised how "normal" and similar to one another the voices sounded in the original. It could also be that I've just been brainwashed by overexposure..
Tricky business, voice overing and dubbing. I used to work in that industry and perceptions are different from country to country which makes life very difficult. I once directed a voice over for a beautiful documentary on Chopin where his voice in the original was portrayed as a swooning, breathy romantic. There's no way that was working in English without sounding awfully naff and so we brought out the dry ironic humour in his words instead. the directors were horrified and I had a hard job explaining to them that the same approach in English would have sounded laughable. Horses for courses.. And certain members of our francophone family, on hearing the real voice of Tom Cruise, were horrified too.
A Japanese friend told me that Shrek has an Osakan accent over there...
Steenbeck, I've been there too - had to literally roll out of bed (couldn't straighten up or walk properly) and try to change a nappy - which I'd never done in my life - at 4.oo in the morning. And sprog had a little label on saying "total dependent", which was scary but endearing. Life is truly miraculous, but I never realised that until he was born.
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