Gadjo's Christmas Jukebox

Mrs Dilo and I are off tomorrow morning to my muvver country and will not have access to the Internet thang. I was commenting recently on Can Bass's blog how I liked the I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue lads' interpretation of Silent Night, to the tune of Tequila. I realised then that this festive season* tends to divide people into two camps. So, first up The Dickies with their endearingly faithful version of the carol. And then, for those of you not gathering around the manger, the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra with their alternative Christmas message - "We Need 5 Days Of Tequila" - which may be exactly what others of you are thinking. As Dave Allen used to say, may your God go with you!





* That's Hannakah and Winter Solstice too!

Gadjo’s Video Jukebox #5

Yes, we’re back in the USSR (that’s the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic)! After the last post’s rather rough offerings, I'm trying here to repair the damage done to both this country's and my own reputations. First up, highly accomplished headline act Vopli Vidoplasova with a video that seems to be an affectionate tribute to Bollywood cinema:



Now music by the superfast folk-ska act Haydamaky - featuring Jim Carrey on drums, it would seem! - and Ukrainians enjoying themselves at a festival:

Gadjo’s Video Jukebox #4

Gadjo’s Pickin’ Kiev Tonight*!! Yes, as promised. When I danced with the Balalaika Dance Group in London I found that Ukrainians have the butchest Soviet-bloc dances, and music to match. Then I happened upon The Ukrainians, a band from Leeds with some Uke ancestry and the willingness to have a laugh. They’ve done great versions of songs by The Smiths and The Sex Pistols - here, especially for Barry Teeth, is their version of Anarchy In The UK(raine) - and here's something more with the spirit of the Cossacks:



Then I discovered other great genuine Ukrainian bands. Bands fast and unintelligible enough to form the background music to many years studying at my computer terminal. First up it’s Perkalaba. On the map it looks like I could easily visit them from here in their Hutsul hideaway, but flying around the world would actually take less time. They named themselves after their local psychiatric hospital and act as dodgy as possible, as you would too if people had called your homeland "Little Russia" for 654 years!

* There’s a pun there somewhere; find it and you could win a weekend for one in Dnipropetrovsk.

Dark Night of the Soul #2: My Birthday

I just had a birthday. Some people want a bike for their birthday, others a party dress or a My Little Pony. But my one wish, pure and simple, was to get through one day without being engaged in conversation about Romanian food. More a mission, really. And if you think this should be easy then you’ve never lived where I live. These are the diversionary tactics I tried:

(1) Talking about everybody’s 2nd favourite topic of conversation: members of their family.

(2) Wearing my full highland dress: a kind of “shock and awe” tactic.

(3) Pretending I was French, so I'd be expected to neither understand nor care - or, alternatively, so they’d talk about another nation’s cuisine... or food in general... or food as a metaphor for something else... anything, really.

(4) Getting drunk. (This, as usual, happened later after everybody else had left).

We'd invited many people to our house, good people, honest people, people I care about. But despite this I knew from the moment I woke up that I would fail. But this put no halter on my blind ambition, and I hereby bask in the glory of Heroic British Failuredom:

(1) “Hands off cocks on socks we’re charging the Russian guns! Yes, lovely boy, it’s called “The Valley Of Death”, you want me to draw you a map does you? Oh, I see you is crying: is it because I am standing on your hair?!” (etc)

(2) “Hey you, Oatsie Boy, pop outside there’s a good chap I think one of the sledge-marmosets has run orf. Don’t bother looking for your boots, I ate them last night with a rather nice Chianti that I bought with me.”

(3) “I, George Mallory, am going up Everest, but I'm not taking any oxygen with me ‘cos that’s for poofs, innit. Oh, and if see me fall over come up and turn me round so it looks like was coming down.”

(4) Across the Andes by Frog.

Heck, I was so bomb-happy at the end of the day that I took everybody out for dinner at a Romanian restaurant.

Gadjo’s Video Jukebox #3

It’s Moscow Night here at Gadjo’s Jukebox! There seem to be quite a few bands from Russia with interesting style and fine musicianship who one can only hope are getting more international exposure now. Markscheider Kunst are actually from St. Petersburg, but you wouldn’t guess it what with their German name and their repertoire of afro/Brazilian/ska. It’s a mystery to me but I love it. And this track’s even got a funky animation to go with it:



And here's music by art-rockers Auktyon. I don’t understand the words but I reckon it’s a version of the play that William Shakespeare and Daniil Kharms would have written together:

G-G-G-G-G-Granville! (#4) The World's Top Stammerers

Disclaimer: Gadjo Dilo in no way supports bullying, which is shite, and anyway he now has several years of martial arts training under his belt so come over here - yeah you, <name deleted> - and try your luck if you disagree :-)

As promised, and with great pride, I hereby present the cream of the world’s stammerers. Rather than categorise them by profession I’ve used a simple tripartite taxonomy based on psychological profiling which I call “Playground Kicking Classification”. This simple metric also has everyday application: when you come across a stammerer, enact this scenario in your imagination and you’ll quickly understand what sort of stammerer it is and how it should be treated. (I myself largely managed to avoid this nonsense in the school playground by floating around like some ethereal golden-haired sprite too beautiful to be touched by human hand – I still don’t understand how I got away with it.) Some of the following may actually be ex-stammerers, but this only goes to show how effective a good kicking can be.

FREAKS
Kickable, regardless of what they might have “achieved”:

Rowan Atkinson: If kicked will do the funny face. Now probably a multi-millionaire though.
Yukio Mishima: Gay Japanese poet and fascistic ritual suicidalist - asking for it.
Marc Almond: We suspect he made his stammer up to justify his vaunted victimhood status.
Lewis Carroll: Simply a freak. Avoid.
Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad (Indian communist leader): Looks more like a Swot (see below) but you’d always make him say his name in full and then throw his duffel bag over the fence.

COOL PEOPLE
Can stammerers be cool?? Surprisingly, yes, though it may not be obvious at first. By constantly compensating for their deficiency they can become extraordinary gifted at something else. If you’re smart you’ll think before you kick:

Winston Churchill: The ultimate over-compensating stammerer. Respect.
Tiger Woods: All black sportsmen are cool, even if they play golf (though this pushes it a bit, admittedly).
Marilyn Monroe: Sex kitten. Enough said.
James Earl Jones: Super-cool - turned his stammer into the world’s most mellifluous voice.
Joe Biden: An asthmatic, a dunce and a stammerer when young, but you'll soon be mighty glad that you didn’t nick his dinner money.

SWOTS
The “halfway-house” where kicking’s concerned. Many stammerers spend a lot of time in libraries and other places where they try to avoid embarrassing themselves. Surprisingly, it can be worth giving these types the time of day: by pretending to be their friends you can get to copy their homework. Kick, but only as an incentive:

Bruce Willis: “Cool Person”, surely? No. Swot. Becoming a famous actor with a stammer and no talent, he must be a grafter.
Ed Balls: Maths homework... possibly. But which came first, the stammer or the cruel nicknames?
Isaac Newton: He also wore a girl’s wig so even looks like a freak, but his homework’s still worth borrowing.
Charles Darwin: A useful science bod on your homework team, though you'd have to do the monkey dance every time you met him.
Aristotle: Unusual double Cockney rhyming slang for “arse” (via “bottle and glass”), but he’s one of the swots that other swots most often copy from, so knowing him can save you a trip or two to the library.

This list of high-achieving stammerers seems endless, though actually it ends here. T-t-ta-ta for now!

Gadjo’s Video Jukebox #2

The Romanians got their chance in the previous video jukebox, so now it’s time give the Hungarians a go. (The Hungarians already had a go, they’ll tell me, and Fărâmiţă Lambru was %100 gyppo and nothing to do with us; why don’t you put on something by that nice Julio Iglesias, now he’s a Romanian) The Hungarians of course used to run this town, and although Ceauşescu ensured that their community is now reduced to an embittered rump their well-dressed presence here still leavens the dough a little. They may seem cold and to have one pint of blood less in ‘em than the rest of humanity (other than of course their distant cousins the Finns... and I mean distant - have you ever tried having a conversation with one of those people??), and a silly language, but they are at least modern people. They understand irony, and for that and for their comparatively spicy cuisine I thank them. Here’s the fine Hungarian/gypsy ensemble Besh O Drom with both a tribute to and pastiche of communist-era Top Of The Pops.