Napoleon would be spinning in his grave...

April 6th – When foodstuff on the shelf reaches its sell-by date then it usually gets chucked. There’s a debate about whether or not food that’s a couple of days over date is still OK to be consumed; personally, as long as it's unable to move of its own volition, I'll eat most things.

I think it’s a ruse by the producers and sellers to get us to discard more to buy more, a ruse perpetrated particularly by the supermarket-end of food dealing… and while I’m on it, why have we let those bastards bugger up the milk producing chain in this country? Why? We've watched like sheep as the milk production of the UK went under (remember quotas and the buying and selling of surplus milk from herds that no longer existed? WTF was that all about if not turning a profit for turning a profit’s sake…like they’re doing with carbon now…carbon’s not a threat to world survival now, it's a freakin’ commodity. Buying and selling carbon-output-points from countries that only produce less carbon because they’re so fuckin’ poor they have no infrastructure to start with that enables them to choke the skies with it. You know them by their worth, these conglomerate-fucks because, although they weren't prepared to do it just for the planet and the good of humanity, when they realised they could turn a coin on it they were ‘in like Flint’…bastards… OK, sorry, right; shelf-life of food products. 

I really do believe the Eurovision Song Contest has reached its shelf-life (come on, keep up). I really do believe the Eurovision Song Contest has reached its shelf-life…no, bugger it, not reached it but reached it, overtaken it, dug a grave for it, buried it and put a huge headstone over it saying;

‘Here lies the body of popular music; Butchered in the name of TV ratings and turned into a sack of shit’.

Apart from the obvious cheating that goes on in the voting system, the levels of favouritism shown and the;

“Now I can get my own back on you for denying us the opportunity to buy those missiles by giving you ‘nil point’ for that tune you just did…even if it was the best on the night”

childishness that’s indulged in by the judges (HA! There’s a bastardisation of a term if ever there was one) on top of all that it has to be said its given us one of the worst of the worst excesses in the pop world: I refer to ABBA.

I qualify this by saying, firstly, that I think ABBA wrote some very tricksy pop songs and their production values were and still are superb, but that’s as far as it goes. No, my argument isn't necessarily with ABBA (although they were the cause of it so…) but with the endless stream of ABBA tribute bands that do the rounds nowadays.

Why?

I mean, IMHO it isn't as if the original was that good when everybody thought it was that good, so what makes their music so…so indestructible? When they folded many, myself included, breathed a sigh of relief. Not that I’d want anyone to go through what the various group members had to go through to get to that point but it was a blessed relief…until some bright spark thought of doing a copy-cat version...and it went on from there, spawning hundreds...hundreds of offspring, like a fly on a carcass that lays millions of eggs, the larvae of which (maggots) gorge off the boated corpse of what was once considered, by some, to be a beautiful being. 

I've had the pleasure (?) of working on several of the seemingly hundreds of ABBA tributes and I can honestly say, honestly, they’re all second-rate carbon copies (some even third and fourth rate) and yet folk still flock out to see them. I mean, how many times can you watch a poor copy of something that at one time meant such a lot to you (see yesterday’s blurb) and say, “Yeah, luvvinit; gimmie more…!”?

On this day in 1974 ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with their single ‘Waterloo’ and, in the corrupted words of Oscar Wilde, we were gifted ‘the unkillable in full control of the unrepresentational…