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March 28, 2024, 05:41:13 PM

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Slow Club and Bros docs

Started by Icehaven, November 09, 2018, 12:54:12 PM

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hermitical

If only there was some sort of online network that people could join and be informed of such things. Imagine a fan club with a diligent administrator phoning each member up and letting them know of a special event....

Blue Jam

Quote from: AllisonSays on December 28, 2018, 04:25:45 PM
Must have been somewhat coordinated, those mobbings. I'd like to offer a slightly dissenting voice here and say that Hair Bros - while a patently ludicrous man - had some fair points about Bald Bros. Bald Bros was being a pain in the arse in the studio, he was being passive aggressive and hyper-sensitive throughout, and Hair Bros was especially tuned into his subtle but definitely present bullshit. I think, to use the classic scientific method, I'd rather have a pint with Hair than with Bald.

I'm not so sure about that. While I can see what you mean about Bald Bros, Hair Bros was going a bit UKIP about conkers back there. After a few pints he might turn into Nigel Farage, good thing he probably only drinks wheat grass. He might be like Richard Littlejohn, he loves Britain so much that he fucked off to live in the US. He's got an English bulldog and an Engerland flag tattoo as well, perhaps there's a Legend Gary inside him just dying to burst through that taut botoxed forehead of his.

I think I'd rather go for a pint with Ken Craig.

The Culture Bunker

I doubt I'll ever watch the Bros documentary, but would I be correct in guessing that the bassist fella was barely mentioned at all? Maybe they're still bitter that he ended up a industry bigwig and presumably pretty wealthy, plus married the not-dead-one from Mel and Kim.

Not totally surprised one went bald and one didn't. Same happened to Maurice and Robin Gibb*... though when the latter's barnet did eventually fall out in the 90s, he went all hair-transplant, rather than taking his twin's more dignified "hat, 24/7" approach.

*yes, I know they weren't identical twins, but still.

Blue Jam

I remember seeing the Bee Gees being interviewed circa 1997, and being asked "What would your Spice Girl-style nicknames be?". The behatted one (Maurice, I assume) answered: "Baldy Bee Gee". Fair play to the fella.

To be serious for a second: I can't imagine anyone wanting to be in a band with their sibling. Even if they do have an age gap of just 11 minutes. It's a bit weird, isn't it? I can understand why these bands usually head towards such messy breakups.

Squink

Quote from: hermitical on December 28, 2018, 04:41:06 PMIf only there was some sort of online network that people could join and be informed of such things.

Yeah, I'm sure that was how the word was spread. But presumably it was done with the documentary in mind, as opposed to something that always happens when Bald n' Hair arrive back in Blighty?

AllisonSays

Aye, Blue Jam, it's definitely true that between the 007 paraphanelia, the conker concerns and the supping bulldog there was a fair whiff of Daily Mail about Hair. I enjoyed Bald Bros baffled interjection into the conker rant!

holyzombiejesus

Has anyone seen the Slow Club one?

hermitical

I never realised the S stood for Slow, and what happened to the other 6?

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Just watched the Bros documentary. Very funny for all the reasons previously stated, but I actually found it surprisingly poignant. Hair and Bald are harmless idiots with no self-awareness whatsoever, they're hilarious. They're also a pair of highly sensitive souls.

Bald seemed alright though, relatively speaking. I did laugh at his deadpan interruption of Hair's mad Brexit conker rant: "Yeah, that doesn't really bother me."

Captain Crunch

Isn't it about time the BBC did the decent thing and let Matt Goss take over from Lord Bragg for In Our Time? 

magval

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on December 28, 2018, 06:05:11 PM
I doubt I'll ever watch the Bros documentary, but would I be correct in guessing that the bassist fella was barely mentioned at all? Maybe they're still bitter that he ended up a industry bigwig and presumably pretty wealthy, plus married the not-dead-one from Mel and Kim.

The DVD boasts an "exclusive interview with Craig Logan". Wonder why he wasn't featured in the main film.

hermitical

The gigs were announced a couple of years ago and he had no interest at all, maybe as a respected music industry person he didn't want to be a part of this circus documentary but agreed to an interview to be included as an extra - for the fans?

DrGreggles

Maybe it just wasn't as funny as the stuff that was included.

magval

Has anyone else gotten the occasional impression that this is a put-on? There's a couple of sequences in it that are too perfect as comedy sketches, little snippets of Tap, or just Partridge utterances.

The p..p..Pepsi is one.

The scene Conkers scene is the main one though. Matt skipping to the house, mentioning the house by name, skipping back over near Luke, changing gears to talk about Conkers, Luke saying he's not following, while stood in the background, Matt continuing, Luke topping it off by saying he's not bothered.

It's beautiful comedy. Maybe too good to be real. I don't doubt some of it is genuine, but maybe the whole thing is an ambitious fake-out to make Bros relevant again.

Quote from: magval on December 29, 2018, 12:16:16 PM

It's beautiful comedy. Maybe too good to be real. I don't doubt some of it is genuine, but maybe the whole thing is an ambitious fake-out to make Bros relevant again.

I have my suspicions too. The earlier Whams, Bay City Rollers etc are still held in affection by many (and Take That and the Spice Girls have efficient PR machines who've kept them in public consciousness since their heyday), but Bros barely even register in the nostalgia market. Their accountants have likely noticed this.

non capisco

It emerges a friend of mine worked as an assistant editor on the Bros doc and he says nothing was put on or staged. There's hours of unshown footage of that pair of prongs acting naturally like that.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Yeah, there's no way this is a wind-up, they're just a pair of unintentionally funny pillocks.

Epic Bisto

Quote from: non capisco on December 29, 2018, 01:08:38 PM
It emerges a friend of mine worked as an assistant editor on the Bros doc and he says nothing was put on or staged. There's hours of unshown footage of that pair of prongs acting naturally like that.
Tell him to smuggle out and upload all of the raw footage. All of it.

non capisco

I'll definitely be pressing him for more Goss Gold next time we meet up for a pint.

MiddleRabbit

There were plenty of funny parts but on the whole I found it quite saddening in a way.  The pair of them, but especially hair, just can't communicate anything that they feel - and obviously they're both quite sensitive.  Hair mentioned how he loves words and I'm sure he does but equally he also has no idea how to put them together in order to make people, specifically bald, understand how he feels.

The pair of them have the idea that if they churn out enough slogans and cliches that, in some way, they'll appear to have some sort of depth to their thinking when obviously there's none there.

So far, so Jeremy Kyle, but it was apparent that both of them have upset the other one and they have no idea at all about how to address any of the festering resentments that crop up on the - obviously - rare occasions that they get together.

So, yeah, I was looking forward to Spinal Pop but it wasn't that at all really.  It was quite sad in the genuine sense of the word.

Not that I give much of a shit but neither of them appear to appreciate their place in the annals of pop which is, basically, 1988's teeny bop sensations.  As if they'd never heard of T Rex, The Bay City Rollers and all the rest of the pretty boy bands who burned so brightly and so briefly.

Also, having had a mosey through Wikipedia, a lot of their claims were just lies: they were never big in America, their big album reached number 171 and they played three small gigs in LA.  That was it. They didn't write their own big hit songs and the writing credits were specifically chosen to suggest that they did - 'The Brothers' who were credited with them were their producer and Tom Watkins.  The later albums that nobody gave a shit about had joint credits with bald and hair getting a bit of credit, but it was all over by then anyway.

They didn't split up when Chcolate Box only reached number 9 as they claimed. 

Their claimed achievements were, in the main, a load of bollocks.

Finally, the concert at the O2 seemed really subdued.  Maybe it was the sound mix, I don't know, but it looked like a few thousand people had, by the end of it, just found themselves looking at his pair of halfwits and wondering what they were thinking, turning up to that.

Finally finally, having read a lot of Twitter comments lauding it as 'David Brent, 'Spinal Tap' and all that, I wondered if there wasn't a certain amount of people who actually aren't all that different to bald and hair in that they just churn out received wisdom in the hope that they're right about it without ever really spending any time thinking about what they were writing meant.

Far more thought provoking than it should have been.

Yeah.

Ps: at the time (1988), it was hair's grunting all the way through everything that struck me as being really odd and none of that seemed to have survived.  Maybe that was what left he audience feeling underwhelmed by it all.  I dunno.

Pps: my favourite lyric, which I had assumed was one of hair's, but wasn't, is 'I'll watch you crumble like a very old wall'.  Nice one.

Custard

Can't wait to see this

After rewatching the sublime Bucks Fizz - Trouble At The Top the other day, this will do well as the comedy dessert

Custard

Highlights for me were Hair saying he'd like to take a 50 metre run up and take Bald's head off with a golf club

The entire "PLAY THE FECKING NOTE" scene(s)

And the editing suggesting their entire O2 gig consisted of just When Will I Be Famous

Overall though, I found the whole thing quite depressing too. They clearly hate each other, and didn't even bother trying to hide it. Even when they first meet up! It just needed George Harrison to mumble "Just tell me what you'd like me to play, and I'll play it"

Bleak

FOUR STARS

the

Saw this the other day, most of my thoughts on this have been neatly covered by MiddleRabbit.

Quote from: MiddleRabbit on December 29, 2018, 08:39:43 PMFinally, the concert at the O2 seemed really subdued.  Maybe it was the sound mix, I don't know, but it looked like a few thousand people had, by the end of it, just found themselves looking at his pair of halfwits and wondering what they were thinking, turning up to that.

...

Ps: at the time (1988), it was hair's grunting all the way through everything that struck me as being really odd and none of that seemed to have survived.  Maybe that was what left he audience feeling underwhelmed by it all.  I dunno.

This was the most deflating thing about the programme - divorced from the snappy crispness and boisterousness of the 80s production (and without Hair's 'no-one beats The Anorak!' helium soul-grunt), their hit song(s)* are totally unremarkable. That performance of WWIBF had such a totally flat middle-aged band arrangement it rendered the song an utter waste of time.

* I'm making the assumption here that the performance of their other hits was similarly uninspired, as they failed to make the edit

daf

#53
Quote from: MiddleRabbit on December 29, 2018, 08:39:43 PM
It was hair's grunting all the way through everything that struck me as being really odd

ROOOO-AAAARGH!!!!!

First TOTP appearance on BBC4 should be early July next year (the 21 Jan 1988 edition) - if anyone wants to track "The Glory Months" in slightly concentrated almost real time *

Quote from: MiddleRabbit on December 29, 2018, 08:39:43 PM
They didn't split up when Chcolate Box only reached number 9 as they claimed. 

That was very misleading - and unjustly made Baldy Bros look like a right wally. 

They lasted another couple of years - their final Pops spin ("Try" . . .  no, me neither) being in September 1991 (thus both ends of their career being spit-roasted by "Ooh" Gary Davies - who also leaves the show at this point, along with "The Wizard" Theme tune - truly it was the end of an era!)


- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
* They're shovelling through them now at top speed by showing 2 years worth annually - so 1987 and 1988 is pencilled in for 2019.

kalowski

This is gold from the start: "I'm a London boy: Big Ben, the Embankment, cab drivers."

kalowski

"I made a conscious decision after listening to Stevie Wonder to not be superstitious."

kalowski

""Epi-Tome" which is the Latin for abstract."

kalowski

Matt is a lost, little, broken, Gervais creation, but Luke is a bit of a cunt, isn't he?

Sebastian Cobb

"I'm obsessed with the news, it ironically relaxes me, if I don't see the news I don't feel informed then I can't go about my day properly. CNN is the thinking man's reality show."


Custard

The first half is a goldmine of hilarity. Though it all goes a bit dark once they get together in the rehearsal space. And like others, I ended up feeling a bit sad for them

Dunno why really though, as they seem to have very nice lives. When they're apart