18 March 1982
"Much of the chart music of recent months has been exciting, good for dancing, well-produced but very little of it has been powerful. "Factory" is all four things at once".
— Tim De Lisle
Day 1
Feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the entry on "Party Fears Two", you decided not to bother linking it on Facebook. Did anyone even notice? You promised yourself that you wouldn't get obsessed with page views and the number of times friends clicked on the like button but it's virtually impossible to avoid. You were hoping that PFT would be something of a breakthrough for your blog, the one where you finally began to grasp the nuances of critiquing an eighties pop song but it didn't quite work out that way.
But "Factory" represents a fresh start. You find the link on YouTube, play it a couple times and jot down any thoughts that crop into your head. Your only real goal today is to come up with some sort of theme that can act as a basis for the upcoming entry. You eventually think up a half-baked thesis that might work and you begin to feel confident that you've got a bite on it. Maybe this will be the breakthrough.
Day 2
Set aside some time in the morning for further note taking but you fail to do so in any meaningful way. The thought begins to gnaw at you that there may not be much of any real substance to say. Bim hardly being a successful, well-remembered group of the time, you resort to relying on Wikipedia for the bulk of your research. There's not a whole lot even there so you scribble down some random stuff about how both singer Cameron McVey and bassist Stephen Street would later go on to careers as producers of Massive Attack and Blur respectively. You then decide to write about the role that studio boffins played in mythologising pop music in your mind. Their names — alongside those of Stephen Hague and John Leckie and Steve Lillywhite, among others — you would take note of while leafing through album liner notes and they became curious musical heroes despite the fact that (a) you knew nothing about them and (b) you still aren't exactly sure just what producers do. You like all this but question its relevance to the blog post and decided not to bother including it.
Day 3
Nothing gets done. You make yourself work on it but you keep procrastinating in favour of crap on YouTube. You hate yourself and begin to think that you'll never make it as a real writer.
Day 4
A change of atmosphere might do the trick so you decide to work on it in a cafe. YouTube still manages to mess with you but you do get a couple pages worth of notes written in spite of your best efforts to get as little done as possible. (Just how much of it you bother using is another matter) You find yourself in agreement with Tim de Lisle that "Factory" is indeed exciting, good for dancing, well-produced AND powerful but it still doesn't do that much for you. Too bad, then, that such a trite observation has already been done on this blog. Or has it?
Day 5
When you aren't either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done on it you can be quite productive. Too bad, then, that you spent the whole day either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done. On a positive note, you've really begun to enjoy the whistling solos that follow the first two choruses of "Factory". Right up there with other great whistling pop songs such as "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and "Cornflake Girl" — and way better than bloody "Joyride".
Day 7
Well, it's time to get this sucker posted. You're not especially well prepared but you've always managed to get something done on previous deadline Wednesdays so you aren't too worried about it. Desperate for information, you do a Google search for 'Bim Factory lyrics' but tracking down the words proves elusive. The best you're able to come up with is some stuff about how while, yes, this single has a lot going for it, it feels like a flop. Whereas The Passions' "Skin Deep" could have easily attained a middling Top 40 position but ended up falling short, this smacks of never having had a chance. It's getting late and you're worried about that writer's high keeping you up and so you give up on trying to explain why.
Resigned, you publish the post and are just glad to get it out of the way. You begin to think about "Anyone Who Had a Heart" by B.E.F. presents Sandie Shaw: maybe that'll be the breakthrough you've been hoping for.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Talking Heads: "Life During Wartime (live)"
Day 6
Realising all of a sudden that you've been neglecting the other song you're supposed to pick, you make the hasty decision to write about Talking Heads, a group you used to enjoy listening to — Remain in Light was your favourite album about sixteen years ago — but have since moved on from. Still, it's an easy choice. Taking the easy way out from covering something genuinely left field like Mathematiques Modernes' "Disco Rough" or maybe Bill Wyman's "A New Fashion" just for a laugh, you opt for a live rendition of "Life During Wartime" from The Name of the Band Is Talking Heads. De Lisle points out that it's not as good as the studio version from their seminal Fear of Music album but LDW sounds pretty much as it always did. You used to wonder why ver Heads stuck with being a quartet on their records when they had become a nine-piece while on tour but now you've realised that it makes little difference. It does remind you, however, of the first time you watched Stop Making Sense with a couple friends and you observed that it would make a fantastic aerobics workout video (only to discover later when you got round to watching it with the DVD commentary that one of them — was David "swotty swot-swot" Byrne or one of the others? — made a similar remark at about the same moment. "Life During Wartime" remains reliably the same in any setting and the rhetorical "why stay in college? / why go to night school" line still makes you chuckle just as it always did.
"Much of the chart music of recent months has been exciting, good for dancing, well-produced but very little of it has been powerful. "Factory" is all four things at once".
— Tim De Lisle
Feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the entry on "Party Fears Two", you decided not to bother linking it on Facebook. Did anyone even notice? You promised yourself that you wouldn't get obsessed with page views and the number of times friends clicked on the like button but it's virtually impossible to avoid. You were hoping that PFT would be something of a breakthrough for your blog, the one where you finally began to grasp the nuances of critiquing an eighties pop song but it didn't quite work out that way.
But "Factory" represents a fresh start. You find the link on YouTube, play it a couple times and jot down any thoughts that crop into your head. Your only real goal today is to come up with some sort of theme that can act as a basis for the upcoming entry. You eventually think up a half-baked thesis that might work and you begin to feel confident that you've got a bite on it. Maybe this will be the breakthrough.
Day 2
Set aside some time in the morning for further note taking but you fail to do so in any meaningful way. The thought begins to gnaw at you that there may not be much of any real substance to say. Bim hardly being a successful, well-remembered group of the time, you resort to relying on Wikipedia for the bulk of your research. There's not a whole lot even there so you scribble down some random stuff about how both singer Cameron McVey and bassist Stephen Street would later go on to careers as producers of Massive Attack and Blur respectively. You then decide to write about the role that studio boffins played in mythologising pop music in your mind. Their names — alongside those of Stephen Hague and John Leckie and Steve Lillywhite, among others — you would take note of while leafing through album liner notes and they became curious musical heroes despite the fact that (a) you knew nothing about them and (b) you still aren't exactly sure just what producers do. You like all this but question its relevance to the blog post and decided not to bother including it.
Day 3
Nothing gets done. You make yourself work on it but you keep procrastinating in favour of crap on YouTube. You hate yourself and begin to think that you'll never make it as a real writer.
Day 4
A change of atmosphere might do the trick so you decide to work on it in a cafe. YouTube still manages to mess with you but you do get a couple pages worth of notes written in spite of your best efforts to get as little done as possible. (Just how much of it you bother using is another matter) You find yourself in agreement with Tim de Lisle that "Factory" is indeed exciting, good for dancing, well-produced AND powerful but it still doesn't do that much for you. Too bad, then, that such a trite observation has already been done on this blog. Or has it?
Day 5
When you aren't either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done on it you can be quite productive. Too bad, then, that you spent the whole day either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done. On a positive note, you've really begun to enjoy the whistling solos that follow the first two choruses of "Factory". Right up there with other great whistling pop songs such as "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and "Cornflake Girl" — and way better than bloody "Joyride".
Day 7
Well, it's time to get this sucker posted. You're not especially well prepared but you've always managed to get something done on previous deadline Wednesdays so you aren't too worried about it. Desperate for information, you do a Google search for 'Bim Factory lyrics' but tracking down the words proves elusive. The best you're able to come up with is some stuff about how while, yes, this single has a lot going for it, it feels like a flop. Whereas The Passions' "Skin Deep" could have easily attained a middling Top 40 position but ended up falling short, this smacks of never having had a chance. It's getting late and you're worried about that writer's high keeping you up and so you give up on trying to explain why.
Resigned, you publish the post and are just glad to get it out of the way. You begin to think about "Anyone Who Had a Heart" by B.E.F. presents Sandie Shaw: maybe that'll be the breakthrough you've been hoping for.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Talking Heads: "Life During Wartime (live)"
Day 6
Realising all of a sudden that you've been neglecting the other song you're supposed to pick, you make the hasty decision to write about Talking Heads, a group you used to enjoy listening to — Remain in Light was your favourite album about sixteen years ago — but have since moved on from. Still, it's an easy choice. Taking the easy way out from covering something genuinely left field like Mathematiques Modernes' "Disco Rough" or maybe Bill Wyman's "A New Fashion" just for a laugh, you opt for a live rendition of "Life During Wartime" from The Name of the Band Is Talking Heads. De Lisle points out that it's not as good as the studio version from their seminal Fear of Music album but LDW sounds pretty much as it always did. You used to wonder why ver Heads stuck with being a quartet on their records when they had become a nine-piece while on tour but now you've realised that it makes little difference. It does remind you, however, of the first time you watched Stop Making Sense with a couple friends and you observed that it would make a fantastic aerobics workout video (only to discover later when you got round to watching it with the DVD commentary that one of them — was David "swotty swot-swot" Byrne or one of the others? — made a similar remark at about the same moment. "Life During Wartime" remains reliably the same in any setting and the rhetorical "why stay in college? / why go to night school" line still makes you chuckle just as it always did.
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