Gary – an 8 foot tall ornament – dutifully welcomed visitors to a garden centre in Scotland for a decade before he was stolen last year. As you can see, he did his bit during the pandemic by wearing a face mask and has also been known to get into the Christmas spirit by donning a Santa hat.
Gary – well, most of him anyway, as the thieves had sawn a bit of him off – was reunited with his owner, a Mr Andrew Scott (not the guy who played Moriarty in Sherlock or the ‘hot priest’ in Fleabag), in March this year.
This truly bizarre crime feels uniquely British. As we know from Netflix, the US is full of incredible true crime stories that usually involve murder. Here, we get an 8ft Gorilla ornament nicked from the entrance to a garden centre.
It’s a story that has captured the imagination of one of my favourite bands, Blossoms. They have announced that their new album will be released in September and that it is named after our gorilla friend.
The band’s frontman, Tom Ogden, wrote the album’s title track about the story of Gary the Gorilla and used some of the lines from news reports about him in his lyrics. He mentions that ‘Mr. Scott hasn’t seen him since’ and the second verse goes like this:
I heard there’s been a breakthrough A registration plate His movements they were able to track But, you see, hе comes from a fairly extendеd family Don’t know how many brothers he has
This refers to an actual incident:
Blossoms also look like they had a lot of fun recording the two videos that we’ve seen so far from the album. The band have concoted a story where they are Gary’s captors – but they have been sent on a special mission by, er, Everton manager Sean Dyche. In the follow-up, Mr Scott appears to be played by Rick Astley!
All that’s left for you to do is watch the video and listen to the song. I think it’s great, I hope you do too.
Many would have been tempted to stick to the formula that had brought such huge success, releasing a rinse-and-repeat third album to please the masses. Not Arctic Monkeys.
After a whirlwind period in which the Sheffield band’s first two albums had been released within fifteen months of each other, there was more of a gap between 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare and its follow up. The front man, Alex Turner, recorded with his side project The Last Shadow Puppets – the resulting album, The Age of the Understatement, also went to number one.
The four members of Arctic Monkeys had first met Josh Homme while playing the support act for his band, American rock outfit Queens of the Stone Age, in Houston. The idea of working together was mooted and in late 2008 they began making music with Homme in his recording studio near Los Angeles. They then continued to work in another studio in the Mojave Desert – about as far away from suburban Sheffield as it is possible to imagine.
Ten tracks, all written by Turner as usual, but this time the lyrics were more abstract and instead of just guitars and drums those lyrics were accompanied by keyboards, xylophones, glockenspiels and shakers.
I won’t go into detail about each song, but here a couple of things I want to say: Fire and the Thud was written about Turner’s then-girlfriend Alexa Chung, and Cornerstone contains my favourite lyrics in the entire Monkeys canon.
Tell me, where’s your hiding place?
I’m worried I’ll forget your face
And I’ve asked everyone
I’m beginning to think I imagined you all along
Cornerstone by Arctic Monkeys
Humbug was released in the UK on 24th August 2009, which was not just the day before my 17th birthday but also five days before Arctic Monkeys headlined Reading Festival with a set that included seven of the new album’s ten tracks. They were almost unrecognisable from the band that had performed on the same stage just three years earlier – the hair was longer, the guitars louder, the mood darker.
Arctic Monkeys headlining Reading Festival in 2009
As such a major departure from their earlier work, it took some fans time to get their heads around Humbug but it was another number one album for the band and is now seen as something of a gateway for them – a record that allowed them to break out of the image of cheeky indie lads and into bona fide rock stars. It paved the way for AM, the album that broke America, and the other-worldly Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.
Yes, I’m well aware that I’m biased (I’ve listened to Arctic Monkeys nearly every day for years), but I urge you to give this album a listen.
As much as I love football, I am getting a bit tired of the daily dose of games beamed live from empty grounds. I’m really starting to miss crowds now. A living, breathing crowd adds so much to sport. Bordered by empty seats, even the biggest games feel like no big deal – Liverpool v Manchester United might as well have been Tranmere v Oldham.
Last night Arsenal played Newcastle, and, while I would usually have the game on in the background while doing other things, this time I decided to watch something more interesting. I watched Blossoms – Back To Stockport.
It’s a documentary film about the band Blossoms, exploring their origins and showing their preparations for a big homecoming gig in front of 15,000 people at Edgeley Park, home of Stockport County Football Club, which took place on 22nd June 2019.
Blossoms. Left to right: guitarist Josh Dewhurst, bass player Charlie Salt, lead singer Tom Ogden, drummer Joe Donovan and keyboard player Myles Kellock
In case you haven’t heard of them, Blossoms are a five-piece band from the aforementioned town of Stockport, near Manchester. The sort of music they make is probably best defined as psychadelic-indie-rock-pop. They came fourth on the BBC’s Sound of 2016 list, the broadcaster’s annual pick of musicians to listen out for in the year ahead. I first heard about them as I am a listener of Radio X, who included Blossoms on their similar Great X-Pectations list, and gave a lot of radio play to their single Charlemagne.
Charlemagne, the breakthrough single for Blossoms
I was immediately drawn to the band I think, in part, because there was a certain groove, a funk, to their songs – a sound that manages to simultaneously feel both modern and retro. I respect the fact that the frontman Tom Ogden writes all the songs and they all seem genuinely great guys who are living the dream. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I am a total devotee to Arctic Monkeys, so you can imagine how delighted I was to hear in the film that Blossoms started off doing Arctic Monkeys covers and described Alex Turner as an ‘idol’.
The film is made to a very high standard. It goes in-depth on the back stories of the five members of the band (discovering that all but one of them is younger than me made me feel old), who go against the grain of many rock bands of the past by showing themselves to be best mates in a way that they simply couldn’t put on for the cameras. Footage of the Edgeley Park gig runs as a thread throughout, and there are even little animated inserts to go along with whatever story one of them is telling at that moment.
In Ogden, the band have a figurehead who demonstrates great showmanship on stage – the long hair and the 70s suits – but away from it he’s a quiet guy who just likes walking his dog. The drummer, Joe Donovan, has been Ogden’s friend since they were at school together and is a ball of energy brilliantly described by the others as ‘like having a fan of the band who is in the band’. Bassist Charlie Salt is a sort of older brother figure (he was born in 1991 for Christ’s sake!) who has the air of someone who would be able to charm his way into anything. Myles Kellock plays the keyboards, but seemingly only half as much as he plays video games – there’s one shot in the film where he’s playing what looks like Mario Kart at the back of a recording studio while the others are working on a song. His keyboards certainly contribute greatly to that modern/retro sound I described earlier, though.
That leaves my favourite member of the band, lead guitarist Josh Dewhurst. He has a quality that I admire a lot, and that is being funny with a straight face. He doesn’t go out of his way to make people laugh, he just has a dry wit that makes him naturally funny. I’m someone who relies a lot on sarcasm so I can relate. In one scene, the band are being fitted out with the suits they will wear on stage at the big gig and Dewhurst tells a hilarious story about how he’s had to have pockets made on his trousers because, according to the tailor, ‘you don’t have an arse’. He tells it in such a way that makes Ogden in the background crack up, as did I. Dewhurst is also an incredibly talented musician. On the most recent Blossoms album, Foolish Loving Spaces, on the track Your Girlfriend the cowbell-type sound at the beginning was produced by Dewhurst hitting the wheel of a car.
Your Girlfriend, from the 2020 Blossoms album Foolish Loving Spaces
The shots of 15,000 people packed tightly onto the Edgeley Park pitch feel like a window into a different world, one in which no one knew what social distancing was. As hard as it is to believe at the moment, those days will return but for now this film is a wonderful tonic for these locked down times.
I urge you to both give Blossoms a listen and watch the film. Their music appeals to all ages – I gave my mum one of their albums as a present last year and she’s had it on almost constantly in her car ever since – and the film is inspiring, in that a group of lads who a few years ago were playing to fifty people in pubs are now headlining stadium gigs. Watch the trailer below and the film is on Amazon Prime.
LEE PAYNE 