£10.99

In stock

Catalogue number

RFVP009CD

Release date

21/05/2007

Format

CD

Label

Radiant Future

Martin Gordon

The World is My Lobster

So, it’s about that time again. As the world descends into fundamentalist chaos, feudal barbarism and futile reality-TV shows, along comes Martin Gordon with a new album. Perhaps timing was never his strong point. But on the other hand, perhaps it was.

This Nobel Prize-winning, former stand-in for Charles Atlas and personal friend of James Bond once again lays it fearlessly on the line. He wrestles with la condition humaine in his accustomed manner, but will never really come to terms with it. His existential angst, and I believe we can justifiably use the term, is disguised as mere joi de vivre.

Observe the cover, on which the Lobster of the title bravely struggles with the weight of the imploding and exploding world in the manner of the ancient mythological Greek lobster whose name currently escapes me. It is clear that this is no trite grappling with pop-cultural mores in the time-honoured manner of r’n’b divas and boy bands. This, frankly, is one Lobster that would rather chew its legs off than line-dance. It has, in a very real but figurative sense, come to redeem the world from its sins; it is the Lobster of God risen from the deep to absolve the non-crustacean of their earthly burden. It’s five minutes to midnight, says the Lobster, and you’d better listen up! Else you’ll turn into a pumpkin, innit. And explode. And that would be rather messy. So listen up! Oh, I said that already.

The songs:

Come on, are you serious? Pop music once had a voice, a role, a significance. Not all of it, not even most of it, but there was at least a critical mass. As ‘Pop Goes Bang’ says, ‘tell me will this awful racket never ever stop?’ Is the case for a Pol Pot of Pop being made? Yes, it is.

An American fundamentalist Christian group, trying to reconcile their lifestyles with the impending demise of the planet which supports them, came up with ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ as their campaign slogan. Apparently, He would drive an SUV, which is probably no surprise to anyone. And exclusive fixation upon one’s own issues is of course nothing new, as Roy Campbell in his ‘Home Thoughts From Bloomsbury’ scathingly noted in the 1930s. (He also described Hitler as a ‘teetotalitarian vegetarian’). Campbell’s scribblings triggered ‘Mirror Mirror’, an ode to narcissism.

George Best was known as ‘the fifth Bee Gee’, so prominent were his footballing skills and teeth. At his funeral service, his son delivered a literary tribute in the form of a poem apparently written by a dyslexic four-year-old Peruvian crack addict. Moved to tears, and beyond, ‘He Was The Best’ is Gordon’s own tribute to the most prominent sporting poet of our time.

William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan of course need no introduction, which is why I explain here who they were. 19th century librettist and composer respectively, their creations are the last word in articulate popular music, and two of their tunes turn up here. The relatively obscure ‘Am I Alone?’ (from their operetta ‘Patience’) contrasts with the legendary ‘A Policeman’s Lot’, from ‘The Pirates of Penzance’, to illustrate the proposition.

The impact of flat-pack furniture upon popular culture is all too often underestimated in the present day, and ‘No Offers At All’ serves to remind us of the intrinsically feral nature of the world of DIY. The particular instance referred to was reported in the Guardian newspaper as both a savage condemnation of the acquisitive nature of British furniture lovers and as an expose of the naivety of the Scandinavian store manager who unwittingly unleashed these forces in north London, on the occasion of the opening of a new store.

‘Don’t Do As I Do Do’ throws in a bit of didactic lifestyle advice but should not otherwise be taken too seriously. It does however use banjo, a rather forgotten, forlorn, and frankly unfashionable instrument by the standards of the hi-end world of today’s pop instrumentalists, who are about as likely to feature a banjo solo as they are a rapping odd-toed ungulate.

A Beatles song has always been de rigueur on the Mammal exploits, and Lobster is no exception. ‘Hey Bulldog’, whatever it means, is included, along with two drumkits and an extensive coda (‘My Dog’). So extensive is the coda, in fact, that it became an different song entirely, but the music-hall reference is not lost in that the entire lyric consists of ‘My dog’s got no nose. How does he smell? Terrible’. Perhaps this will be familiar to some of you.

A world dominated by celebrities… could it ever happen in reality? Here at Radiant Future we love them. We rely on them to tell us when to get up, in fact. They are the central point of our lives, and ‘Less and Less on Earth’ merely confirms that fact.

You could say that ‘Just Say Wee’ was an instant guide to the French language for Francophiles, but this would be inaccurate. It is in fact nothing more than an indictment of the American cosmetic company who named their product ‘Wah! Lah!’, firm in the belief that their customers were so monoglot that they would pronounce the first choice of name (‘Voila!’) as ‘Voiler!’ This again is a true story, from the pages of the Herald Tribune.

One of the first changes that Pope Benedict made when he assumed office was the abolition of Limbo. Joe the Rat was in the Hitler Youth as a youngster, palling up in the denazification camp with that other famous anti-Nazi, Nobel Prize-winner Günther Grass, who somehow forgot that he was once in the Waffen SS. Oh well, that’s what friends are for, I guess. Anyway, all those thousands of millions of innocent babes-in-arms and foreigners languishing in limbo suddenly woke up one day to find they existed in a figment of their own imagination. ‘No More Limbo’, to coin a phrase.

The age-old question about whether the chicken or the egg came first was recently solved. An empirical experiment determined that it was the chicken.  The experimenter mailed, in two separate boxes, a chicken and an egg, to his home address, bringing an end to the centuries-old philosophical debate that has plagued ..er… philosophers for centuries. In ‘Witch Came First’, a degree of complication is added by the British phonetic alphabet, whereby we see that various other elements are at work. The protagonist pleads for ‘the screens and a buxom nurse’ and I feel that we should, at least, grant him this small pleasure.

And finally, ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is both a hymn to chav, albeit chav writ large rather than local, and a morality play. The antithesis of Frank Capra’s George Bailey, Mr Wonderful knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and gets his comeuppance at the end, if you listen long enough.    James Julius Noseworthy / Radiant Future

Artist biog:

The world seems to have discovered Martin Gordon backwards. His first band Sparks have recently returned to international prominence thanks to their repetitive falsetto twittering and equally falsetto dancing; his second band Jet, despite accusations of not being Australian, are now acclaimed as the first supergroup of glam, and their recordings sell more today than they did when they were first released, although this is by definition not a significant achievement. His third band Radio Stars have been recently rediscovered by lovers of pop music with a veneer of humour disguised by electric guitars, and their catalogue has been made available once more to the masses.

In the intervening years between these bands and the present day, this intrepid musical warrior has travelled the globe, recording in India with Asha Bhosle and Boy George, in the UK with George Michael, Primal Scream and Kylie, in Germany with the Tiger Lillies, in Morocco, Ghana, the Gambia, Bali, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and, perhaps most notably, in France with the Rolling Stones. Spending a year working on Sezen Aksu’s album in Istanbul reminded him of the joys of hogwash, and he returned to his roots with a series of solo recordings that critics have, perhaps accurately, referred to as the Mammal Trilogy (the Baboon in the Basement, the Joy of More Hogwash and God’s on His Lunchbreak).

‘Baboon’ (2003) was based loosely on the work of Carl Jung. ‘Hogwash’ (2004) was even more loosely based on the work of Dr Alex Comfort, and ‘God’ (2005) was based tremendously loosely upon the work of God, who also contributed backing vocals. Following this burst of effort, 2006 saw the release of a book (the ‘Companion Volume to God’s on His Lunchbreak’), a box set (the ‘Mammal Trilogy’) and a best-of compilation (‘How Am I Doing So Far?’). And now, lawsuits, idiocy and dismal transactional scripting notwithstanding, 2007 sees the release of the long-awaited fourth part of the Mammal Trilogy.

THE OTHERS: crustacean contributors

There are other people who do this. Namely: drummer Chris Townson, the only man to replace Keith Moon on a Who tour while Moon was still alive. Chris’ band John’s Children had just supported the Who and Townsend nabbed him as a replacement for the temporarily-unavailable Moon. Vocalist Pelle Almgren is something of an enigma in his native Sweden, having deserted the world of rock’n’roll stardom in the 90s for the literally greener pastures of real estate in the 00s. He learned his skills heading a coconut against a wall and had never seen a football before scoring a hat-trick at the age of seventeen in the 1958 World Cup Final. Guitarist Enrico Antico, of Sicilian origin but German birth, overcomes these twin handicaps by studying guitar in Berlin and teaching stiletto etiquette at the weekend. Guitarist Ralf Leeman is another Berliner who has a particular love of the Who and British music-hall, and so fits in perfectly with the Mammal Construct.