This Is This

Not some mince pie-related indulgance, I write of course of the death of James Brown.

Callous headline, but at least I didn’t go with Get Up, Get On Up, Stay On The Scene - because, you know, that would be wrong.

Or Not Now James, We’re Busy - which would only be clever to a small handful of people, which in my book is not clever at all.

I saw James Brown live at the Nice Jazz Festival when I was about 15 and would have been blown away, had Miles Davis not already done the job earlier that evening.

It’s good that he gave us music, bad that he beat his wife. If anyone should have been a godfather, it (what’s the past tense of ain’t?) him.

But it’s cool that for once, something knocked the Queen off the headlines, because let’s face it, she’s there on Christmas Day because she’s the only story in town.

Channel 5 said she was “down with the kids” - they actually said that - because her speech was available on podcast. Podcast my arse, I bet she didn’t upload it herself or put it on You Tube. Or One’s Tube.

If she were cool she would have made some kind of cultural reference:

This year, we remember the sad demise of one James Bryne, who use to fill not only performance hyses but also his own trysers.

So it’s with slight regret and a great back catalogue that we dip our heads and go down on one knee while a member of our entourage places a cape over our shoulders and we acknowledge that the band in the sky just got a whole lot funkier.

Also on This Is This
Everytime the weather shifted between showers and sunlight, mist and wind, I realised an important lesson in impermanence, and seeing it change was like watching a lifetime.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 11:56 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.