B-Side Sunday
October 5, 2008
Once more unto the breach, it’s Sunday! Settle down with a weather-beaten briar pipe and some comfy woollen slippers as another glorious lump of B-Side Sunday washes up on the digital tide. Cos at the end of the day, a cow’s gotta be milked.
Aristotle said that spectacle is the lowest form of art, but the hairy, warts’n’leather lairiness of Motorhead perfectly accompanies their balls-out rock noise. Still, being a great big rock brute doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings and sometimes it can get lonely out there in the great wide open, so Lemmy wrote ‘Too Late, Too Late’ to chronicle the cruel and fickle hearts of the fairer sex. Overlook the dreary wholemeal of their recent stuff, this is one of their most enduring and compelling B-Sides, as riotously visceral as a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs (as a great man was once moved to remark about something else entirely). Whilst the testosterone-fuelled machismo of Motorhead can sometimes grate, coming across as unpleasantly awkward as that time the vicar got caught in the boys toilets with a Kleenex covered in duck butter and an empty bottle of Scotch, it isn’t enough to detract from their grizzled charm, ‘Too Late, Too Late’ packing a sound that builds on their less measured earlier work, proving the old adage of greatness: Don’t be yourself, but be true to yourself.
Meanwhile, scenes in the B-Side Sunday church are fractious. Fresh from Goa, the vicar has offered up a 3 hour-long diatribe on one man’s view of the inside of his own head, eyes bulging wildly as he orates, thrusting his finger into the future in front of the bored masses (They’ll be ok, just a bit scarred for life). All this righteous excursion leaves the great man sweating like Gary Glitter in Mothercare, so he eventually tires of his reflection in the congregation’s dead-eyed stares, cutting off from his spiritual soliloquy to slip from the pulpit and sneak off to the hazy comfort of an eightball. Like John Lennon said, ‘You wanna save humanity/But it’s the people that you just can’t stand’. Aaaaaaaaaaaamen, brother.
