ALBUM REVIEWS...

Back in the early 2000's when the internet was starting to become more widely used, I was asked to write some "humorous content" for a webzine. I decided to do album reviews for them. They were, at the time, rather popular but prompted some genuine enquiries from people including one bloke in Argentina who wanted to know if the Jean Michel Jarre album I reviewed was a bootleg as he couldn't find it anywhere.

For a brief bit of context, I come from a generation that read Melody Maker, NME, Sounds etc and saw the emergence of several music journalists who thought they had some great literary prowess.

 My view when reading most of them was “shut up with the bollocks and tell me if the album is any good or not”. Don’t get me wrong – there are some great music writers whose reviews and features I will always read, regardless of whether I like the artist or not – but many writers see a review as an excuse to show off their prose 'style' without actually assisting the reader to know what the album is really like. 

The likes of Paul Morley, Tony Parsons (and in her day as an NME scribe Julie Burchill) wrote some very pretentious bullshit.

They would also do this really annoying thing of writing "it's as if they're trying to say...." and put their own interpretation on everything. They would suggest that some catchy pop song was about the struggle of the Suffragettes or neo-classical philosophy when it was actually about a man dancing on a fucking ceiling.

So I attempted to write the same sort of thing - as pretentious and surreal and utterly pointless as the real thing. I thought after the first few that I was getting carried away and being too silly but was sent a scanned copy of a CD inlay of a Brian Ferry album with liner notes by the one and only Paul Morley.

I was so jealous. It was more ridiculous, pretentious and mad than anything I have ever dreamed up.

Please note - this is EXACTLY word for word as it appears on the liner notes for the CD...

"Well aware of the lateness of the hour, the brightness of the day and the fullness of time, because ultimately there's no hurry - and a void to fill - the surefooted Ferry heads out into the black colossal brevity of the fourth track. With just the correct amount of transcendent grace he sings the song - which is just a song - and much more than a song, as if to say 'wherever I've been, whoever I've been, whoever I met - and it might have been me, it might have been you - whatever I've seen, whatever happens next - because it means a lot to me....It's been an absolute pleasure' "