Second weekend excuse…this highly entertaining blog post from Eurotrash. It comprehensively works over a young music reviewer from a local London paper, and also journalists generally:
Step forward Dean…From your picture, you appear sneering, which is an excellent attribute for any journalist. This week Dean is ‘presenting’ to us, Ginger Bread Men, who come complete with a myspace page here. I haven’t clicked on it, as I feel I am far too old for myspace and that it is best left to the kind of people that annoy me anyway.
Dean starts off quite puzzlingly, in my opinion.
“What do you get if you cross a festive cookie snack with a 70’s rock sound and some punk-punk-punk vocals (it has to be stressed)?”
Due to my inability to picture a ‘festive cookie snack’, I’m kind of stumped, but I suppose my answer would be: Dazzlingly bad writing, Dean.
In journalism school, they tell you not to insert your personality into your writing, which is a good thing considering that most journalists are narcississtic psychopaths. But Dean is either undeterred or he hasn’t been to journalism school. Hmmm. Tough one, that. He begins his third sentence with the words:
“When I started writing for the Barnet Press, I wondered…..”
Yes Dean? What did you wonder? Did you wonder why your latest novel, a seminal 21st century riposte to the Jacobean splendour of the Kings James Bible remained steadfastly unpublished, forcing you to turn your hand to Grub Street and the daily tawdriness of hackery for a minimum wage. Or did you perhaps wonder if you had any journalistic talent? I think probably you could have pondered that one a wee bit further.
But no. You wondered how you could POSSIBLY cover the entire local music scene, and bring GREAT LOCAL TALENT to your dedicated music readers.
Well Dean, the wondering’s over. You can’t. Primarily because the entire local music scene of Barnet and Hendon comprises of a few nearly dead jazz hippies and some tiresomely red-headed morons without the wit to think of a better name than the Ginger Bread Men. Ginger! Red-headed! Geddit????!!!! Also because you are an idiot, but hey ho.
The Ginger Bread Men (Jamesdust, brothers Matt and Ollie Sexx – crayyyyyyyyyyzeee names, crayyyyzeeeee guys! – and the disappointly named Danny Grey) come from Finchley, which is about as far from Detroit or Seattle as you could get, spiritually speaking, while still remaining in this galaxy. They look ‘fabulous’ according to Dean, so I fear a secondary career in fashion writing will be forever closed to him. They also have a ‘brilliant logo’, so let’s add graphic design to the scrapheap too.
But it’s in chronicling the boys’ rocket-fuelled rise to “fame”, that Dean excels himself, casting pearls before those swinely eight dedicated music readers hanging on his every word.
“The guys are certainly no stranger to the performance side of the industry and brag an impressive CV. Among their accomplishments are a gig at the famous Caernarvon Castle in Camden; raising money for a Tsunami fundraiser at the Rose pub in Highgate; and rocking the Watling Burnt Oak Festival.”
Gosh. Watling Burnt Oak Festival. Tough crowd. I once ‘rawked’ the equally daunting Finchley Carnival, performing the Breton Dance in a rain-lashed tent in front of an audience of AT LEAST thirteen old people and five adults with learning difficulties and also my mother and my dance teacher, so I am well aquainted with the pressures of fame in the intense environment of North London community festivals. I salute you, boys.
As for you Dean, you are clearly over-excited by your brush with fame. Take a month off. We have a monkey with a typewriter standing by.
A few lemons have been sucked, but funny…