Culture Show

On Saturday night I’m watching the Culture Show, and the Next Big Thing are discussing their experiments with different rhythms and so forth, and I'm thinking: why are you talking about all this as if no-one had ever done it before? Because on Friday night I just happened to be listening to 'Damaged Goods'. The next moment, Lauren Laverne and Mark Kermode are name-checking Gang of Four and I realise I have just happened to become fashionable, by accident. But I still don’t want to listen to Foals, any more than I needed to listen to Franz Ferdinand when it was their turn. And I’m about to start intellectualising about the contradictions inherent in doing an experiment more than once when Mark Kermode says: they’ve got really bad haircuts. Which is, of course, the real reason I can’t take them seriously. A question. Why is it cool when Mark Kermode plays music that could have been made 50 years ago, but not cool when Foals play music that could have been made nearly 30 years ago? a) He has a better haircut. b) I’m just a hypocrite, basically.