Due to a mixture of creativity, stubbornness and, frankly, distilled genius we won Best Performer (Will), Best Direction and Best Film.

Now this is where the bitch comes. A streaming deluge of vitriol and frustration, poured liberally over one particularly cogged and clogged machine. ITS. May they be disembowelled and hung on the ‘Welcome to Warwick’ poles. It has to be said, Res Net is vastly improved from my arrival in 2005. It took them a couple of years to wise up on the big download clients like SoulSeek, LimeWire and BitTorrent, but they got there eventually. Hey look – they even know what 4OD is! Now last time a fellow journalist bitched about one tentacle of the Warwick octopus, he was summoned to the department in question and got a smacked botty. It’s discourteous to complain through a student newspaper apparently. The correct approach is of course to complain to the department itself.

This poses a slight problem with ITS. While the residential network is buffing its nails and ignoring your frantic attempts to access JSTOR, you are of course incapable accessing customerservices@warwick.ac.uk. By the time service is restored (the February record is 48 hours, with a hitch in Monday’s service of…oh, 3 hours and counting), all that seething anger which you could channel into such beautifully vituperative eloquence has completely died. You’re just thankful to have Facebook again. With a righteous indignation only topped by Christian saints, I constructed an e-mail of (fairly) polite complaint. After a fortnight’s gap, I got a thinly veiled middle-finger from their ‘customer services’ desk. ‘Resolution,’ it said in tones of injured pride, ‘was not as expedient as we had wished’.

Well that’s one thing you got right.

I feel sorry for them sometimes. Their mission statement, to which I’m inclined to give about as much credence as Thomas’ lost Gospel, is simply to give us students the Internet. And the most efficient way to do this is to stop us downloading the next series of Lost. Fair play. What they’ve failed to take into consideration is Warwick’s inherent geekiness. If the odd theatre student can come equipped with a sound knowledge of html, then my God, what are the computer scientists capable of? So they ban one thing, and the Geek Army C++ their way out of it. And down comes Res Net. According to a polite lady in Reception, ITS don’t work on weekends. I thought it an embarrassing misconception on her part not to realise that they don’t work on weekdays either. Poor lady, what did she know.

I am an honest citizen. I have never downloaded at Warwick, though I did manage to stop Res Net for a day without even knowing about it. But that’s a story for another day. Like discovering a faithless lover, I don’t even know what to fume most about. Is it the wasted time and money on an unfulfilling service? Or is it the overwhelming sense of dishonesty, the lack of prior warning? I resort to the inferior services of the library or (grurgh) the student computer room. Such a grey, soulless experience. All I can do is write another twisted love letter, to vent my bitter feelings. ‘Dear ITS, I would like to lodge a complaint’. There. That told you.

No. Of course you didn’t. I know this, because the voting figures comprised under 15% of the university’s student body. And that minuscule percentage will consist of the candidates, their pets, and that bloke they met at the pub. A few members of the media societies perhaps who have yet to drown in their own hypocrisy.

Voter apathy is a bad habit at so young an age. This being an exceptionally middle-class university, disdain at proletarian ignorance during the general elections usually results in ‘Well…it’s probably a good thing half the population don’t vote. They wouldn’t even know what they’re voting for.’ The SU aren’t quite as cack-handed as the Blair government, but it might be if you don’t tell it what to do. You’re not ‘the population’; you’re in the top 5% of intelligent people in this country. Unless you go to Score.

I covered the elections night on Saturday for RaW. People who asked me about it were generally impressed at the fact that the winning candidate (Stuart ‘Tommo’ Thomas) obtained almost double the votes than rival Peter Ptashko. I told them to fuck off. 1712 votes made Tommo’s victory. That’s not an impressive feat. There are approximately 20,000 union members and about 12% of you voted. 1712 people do not represent the Warwick student body; therefore neither does Tommo. I’m not questioning the legitimacy of his win. He is indisputably the Union President, and if you don’t like it, then it’s your own fault. How can Stuart Thomas possibly claim to represent the student body when barely any of them bothered to check out and question his policies? What are his views on No Platform vs. free speech? What is he really going to do about the Union rebuild?

There were some interesting claims in the manifestos which needed serious grilling from the students to ascertain their veracity. How exactly did James Berragan intend to overrule the University and encourage such publications as the Sanctuary? How did Peter Ptashko finally pull off a lecture-free Freshers’ Week? Did Peter Thomas actually have any policies of his own or was he just a Tory Party bitch? Frankly I found all of the presidential candidates an unprepossessing bunch and voted for persistent underdog R.O.N. Although I voted for Woolley second, solely because it was nice to come across something resembling a sense of humour. ‘Nuts about Students’ didn’t quite cut it for me.

Elections intrigues are actually quite interesting, if you look into them. For example, a certain member of the democracy committee is allegedly under investigation for mouthing off about the rivals of a wannabe Sports Officer. Who is, incidentally, her boyfriend. Meanwhile, it’s likely that Tommo garnered a good proportion of his votes from Warwick Snow Society, of which he happens to be President. Warwick Snow isn’t the only society to attempt to monopolise the elections campaigns; there are also candidate clusters from RAG and of course the Tories. RAG, it appears, has won the day showing the Warwick students apparently prize altruism. Or they may just be familiar with new Societies Officer Lucy Reynolds as she chairs the RAG quiz every Sunday. Another wannabe Sports Officer claimed to have founded a club, but failed to mention that he was voted off the exec by his own team. And so on and so forth.

I have, at best, an ambiguous relationship with the SU. I don’t like how soft drinks cost as much as alcohol on a night out. I dislike its insistent monopolisation of student creativity (i.e. a vicious dislike of the Sanctuary). I think that flirt! was a really, REALLY bad idea. I don’t quite understand why it has a pro-life stance. But I do realise that anyone who dislikes any aspect of the SU should probably make things change by voting. This isn’t the general election, and actually, your vote does make a difference. Get involved. Come on….propose a motion to get rid of Score at the next Union Council meeting. You know you want to. No? Bugger…

As he was making me the new Tina Turner, he questioned my country of origin. Being a British subject, I replied I was English. This appeared to bemuse him and he said, ‘But…you are Indian originally aren’t you?’ I thought it would be unfair to pick out his vague use of ‘originally’ or indeed his assumption that I wasn’t perhaps Pakistani, Filipino, Iranian, Iraqi, Indonesian, Bangladeshi or North African. Strangely, I preferred his direct curiosity to the pained expressions of gap-year students who struggle to ask me the same basic question in politer terms. Ignorance is easier to deal with it when it’s obvious.

So I smiled back at him and replied that my parents were indeed Indian but had been in England for almost 30 years. Without any hesitation, he asked whether my upbringing had been strict. Again, I could have been pedantic about what strictness strictly means. Was he viewing strictness through eyes accustomed to media images of the hijab and honour killings? Because if that was the case, I clearly wouldn’t be sat in a hairdresser’s chair at Warwick uni. To be honest, I don’t think he thought the definition through that much. I looked at him quite carefully as I remarked that my parents were fairly Westernised.

I don’t remember what this man looked like, but I remember his exact tone as he grinned broadly and replied ‘Oh well, we like ‘em like that’.

I was unoffended. He was the man waving scissor blades in close proximity to my face, after all. But there was a genuine innocence in this whole dialogue where I almost felt it was a travesty to read too much into it. But I still don’t know whether I’m excusing ignorance for innocence. Is it right, is it hysterical to question what this man’s attitude would have been to the people who aren’t ‘like that’. And was it worrying that this man can only have been a year older than myself?

Strangely, it was a more subtle episode with a fellow student which troubled me more.

I rarely take offence to racial insults levelled at me, usually because they are in jest. It’s one very confusing symptom of a post-post-post modern culture of irony and self-effacement that allows one white man to call a coloured man ‘chocolate bear’ out of nothing but affection. Some months after my exchange with the hairdresser had taken place, I was assigned a presentation by a tutor. It involved meeting another student to discuss a novel set in Kerala, in South India. South India is as foreign a country to me as it is to most of the Caucasian population. Probably most gap year students know more about it than I do.

I barely knew this student except from a term of seminars together. Yet when it came to working together, he somehow felt it appropriate to comment a propos of nothing that my room decorations were my way of displaying my ethnicity. Everything in my room is from Paperchase, and not from cottage-industry workers as he seemed to presume. I was slightly non-plussed by his non-sequitur but put it down to social awkwardness. When it came to analysing the novel, he proved to be no better than my Kenilworth hairdresser, telling me that I might as well carry the seminar as I’d know more on the subject than anyone else. The beauty of these comments was that they were so indirect. I don’t know what it was about them which annoyed me – the fact that they weren’t funny, that they came from a stranger or whether I just felt they were offensive.

‘Political correctness gone haywire’ is a phrase I often seem to hear from the polite middle-class who constantly attempt to use ‘correct’ terms and phrases when referring to diverse cultures. But the effect of this correctness on the younger generation seems to have led to an almost ideological problem. How can I accuse anyone of prejudice when they make such veiled remarks? Would drawing attention to myself create some kind of negative boy-cried-wolf reputation for trouble? Racism, sexism and all the other isms aren’t as apparent as they were in the 1950’s. Scandals like football-pundit Ron Atkinson in 2004, or more recently Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds this year are actually quite rare in the media.

Middle-class racism is exceptionally difficult to perceive. Under a veil of politically correct language, it’s difficult to differentiate between personal opinion and prejudice. Take Ron Atkinson’s remark: ‘Chinese women are the unprettiest in the world’. Had Big Ron Manager chosen to, he could have quietly hidden the obvious idiocy in this remark behind a more careful phrase, like ‘I personally don’t find Chinese women attractive’. Simply by adding ‘personally’, the speaker implies that his view of Chinese women is not universal. This in itself is of course not racist – but can allow someone who is racist to mask prejudice or ignorance under this kind of veiled dialogue.

I return to the incident over my ethnic decorations and my apparently inherent knowledge of South India. Strip away the mask of vocabulary, and what this student implied was that there was a basic sameness about the myriad Indian cultures. He felt no need to ask my ethnic origin because he assumed a person who looked Indian must be Indian, despite my never making this apparent. He also assumed that however I decorated my room, it was consistently with this ethnicity in mind. But precisely because these two strange remarks were made in a casual, work-oriented context, I am still puzzling out my reactions. I haven’t ever even mentioned to this person that I was uncomfortable with his remarks.

Why should a generation used to that strange animal, ‘multiculturalism’ find it so difficult to communicate? Political correctness is only a virtue when it illumines rather than hides. To know that Kerala is very different from Bengal, to understand that the standards of beauty amongst the Chinese are no more nor less than amongst any other nation and the willingness to accept that Westernisation can be materially damaging – that is political correctness.

If you have lived in Leamington, you will have had a biblical experience to finally prove that this was in fact complete bollocks. June 2007 saw me fishing out my exam notes from my own personal Noah’s Flood. One minute I was swinging about on my chair reading a book, the next I was ankle-deep in water. This had an annoying cinematic quality to it, which meant when I ran screaming upstairs, no one was inclined to believe I was being serious.

My room was pond-like at the best of times. I lived in a basement, which offered me the dual pleasures of eternal darkness and the extensive scenery offered by…a brick wall. Interesting green spores seemed to grow and shrink on my walls, leaving the odd splotchy pattern here and there. Fun as these were, I developed a kind of death rattle whenever there was an impending rainstorm.

Being a strident atheist and therefore needing someone more earthly to take the blame, I felt that my landlord, in this case was God. God, in this case, is a multi-millionaire with a monopoly over the properties of Leamington. Not only was his beard inescapable evidence, but it was always his emissaries and never the man himself who checked out the damage. This is the man who is everywhere and yet nowhere in Leamington at once, particularly when the toilet had sprung a midnight leak. I’d always had aspirations as a child to live in a house with an indoor swimming pool, though said aspirations didn’t involve me actually living in the pool.

With my second year exams due to begin the next day, I began to panic. I stood ankle-deep in water and watched my notes drift by with much the same horror that you’d watch an incautious squirrel drown. It was one of the better dog-ate-my-homework stories I could present to my tutors. The next day, our local and entirely useless estate agent dropped by. I opened the door to a trim, portly gentleman wearing the kind of pratty suede shoes which would inspire a feeling of bilious hatred in any feeling human soul. He had a comb-over and carried a man-bag. Purposely, I allowed him to lead the way to my room and watched with spiteful amusement as he soaked a pristine shoe in four inches of stagnant water. He swore a lot.

God sent his ministering angels after I kipped on the sofa to aquavac the remnants of the flood. Quite pikey angels from Leicester, who stole my rug and didn’t appear to comprehend that painting over the mould wasn’t actually akin to getting rid of it. By midnight, I was wallowing in a quagmire of theological housing despair. Much as I’d like to pretend that Leamington is a pit of sin being purged by a hail of terrors, it isn’t. It’s just full of students, locals and a bearded lady with an obsession with 50ps.

Following the stars across south Leamington in search of a bed for the night and bent under the weight of my worldly possessions, I pondered. Maybe God was trying to tell me something about the wider world. Is Leamington just a microcosmic version of the property ladder? I find myself beleaguered by rivers of sewage, locust-like landlords, a hail of useless agents and naturally, a plague of mice. I can’t claim that God killed my first-born, but that’s probably only because I don’t have one. Now I know how Job felt.

Opening proceedings was solo guitarist and pianist Sarah Hacking-Brian. Impressively unfazed by first act nerves, Hacking-Brian played a 3 song-set moving from guitar to piano. She is talented vocally, combining a moodiness and quirkiness strongly reminiscent of Tori Amos. Perhaps her pensive singing was not fully complemented by full experimentation on either
instrument; repetitive chords formed the backdrop for the majority of her music and rendered doleful what ought to have been soulful.

Tuneful and moody follow-ups were pianist and vocalist combination George and Nikki. Opening with ‘Moonlight Song’, the pair gave a very strong performance although Nikki is clearly the more vocally talented of the two. The audience was particularly wowed by George’s innovative piano solos, and in spite of melancholy lyrics, this was a more upbeat set. Classic and confident, the music was very fitting for the Graduate Bar, but let down by a slight lyrical repetitiveness.

Where the first two acts relied on minimalism, The Frolics trundled onto the stage trailing clarinets, violas, double-stringed guitars and some kind of bongo thing in their wake. Sounding somewhere in between Broken Social Scene and the Rolling Stones in their Their Satanic Majesties Request days, The Frolics would not have been out of place in the ’69 Woodstock. Sterling performances from multi-talented clarinettist/violist Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy and drummer Cai Wingfield formed a chirpy, experimental backing to gravely, catchy vocals of Joseph Oldham. A trippy, mood-lifting performance with audience participation on a high. (Not literally, despite all appearances).

Toning the atmosphere down to minimalist again, one half of newcomers Dry Land performed a laid-back guitar set. This was the band’s first gig and is a promising indication of their electric performance in the fifth heat of Battle of the Bands. Unfortunately, the sound team were a little overenthusiastic after the loud psychedelics of The Frolics, and the careful intricacy of Rob Darnell’s guitarring were rather lost. Ian Thompson’s mellow, modulated vocals (well matched by layered chords and subtly stirring picking) rewarded careful listening, however. Further thought on the balance between vocals and guitarring, and more gig experience will give Dry Land the confidence they need for a fully rounded performance.

Penultimate act Jason Morgan bounced onto the stage with his guitar. Betraying an Irish lilt in his introduction, Morgan threatened to be another James Blunt wannabe. Certainly he blends a similar melodic melancholic sound, but his vocal confidence removes any dullness. His skill at guitarring and singing simultaneously, combined with a rhythmic interest quite difficult to achieve in an acoustic set made Morgan stand out. His guitarring is not to be faulted and is well-tailored for acoustic sessions.

If Morgan bounced onto the stage, the acoustic version of BOTB finalists Young and the Damned owned it. Like the Frolics, they provided an eclectic instrumental mix (was that a xylophone I saw in there?) although they provided a more frantic sound. Oozing stage charisma, the band radiated experience and enjoyment of their music. Citing The Killers, Depeche Mode and the Smiths as their influences, the acoustic trio consisted of talented pianist Jake Brookman, vocalist Patrick Carr and drummer Chaz Tomlinson. Fusing Futureheads-style vocal harmonics (that’s where any similarities end) with a sped-up take on the cheekiness of the Dirty Pretty Things, Young and the Damned were energetic and fully deserved their winning accolade.

Judges’ pick:

The Young and the Damned: http://www.myspace.com/youngandthedamned

Jason Morgan: http://www.jason-morgan.co.uk

In a peculiar hybrid of geek and cool, it seems like the techno-wizzes have had the last laugh in 2006. The intriguing Lily Allen (Alright, Still) and the slightly less intriguing Sandi Thom (Smile…It Confuses People) have jumped on the Internet bandwagon which boomed with the Arctic Monkeys. The phenomena of myspace/music combined with the possibility of broadcasting your own gigs on YouTube have sparked a boom in the Internet almost-industry.

Allen revels in the banality of everything; from her urban surroundings in ‘Ldn’ to the smiling cattiness of a former lover in ‘Not Big’. Allen infuses exceptionally bitchy London lyrics with soft vocals which, when live, are almost indistinguishable from her ska-influenced backing band. The nature of the music, comprising chiefly of skipping ska/reggae, allows the album to form a kind of ‘life soundtrack’ highly fitting with the current gritty perception of the real. (The Streets, The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living; Plan B, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words).

Certainly on mainstream radio, Allen will have made regular summer listening alongside The Kooks. Despite earlier releases and the appearance of Inside In/Inside Out in January, it was only at the beginning of the festival season that this band moved markedly beyond the pages of NME and onto mainstream radio. Even the majority of Warwick’s scenesters failed to attend their early gig in the Student Union while only 6 months later, they played to a packed NME tent at the Carling festivals. Lacking the live frenetic energy of other such Warwick-loved bands the Subways, the Kooks’ success has not gone unquestioned. An unambitious mix of irresistibly sing-along tunes (‘Naïve’) with pleasant foot-tapping acoustic guitar (‘Ooh La’) makes this band a winner. Whether the Kooks are capable, as a band, of developing musically and innovatively remains to be seen.

The Fratellis provided the soundtrack to the shift between summer and autumn with Costello Music. The anti-Kooks camp will shun yet another skinny-jeaned ,big-haired NME favourite, and no doubt the Fratellis are characterised by the same themes. Yet both differ from the sexdrugsrocknroll of their blueprint, the Libertines, downplaying the world weariness in favour of youthful playfulness. What makes Costello Music so appealing is the constant undercutting of this youth with elements of 70’s city rock.

While Rihanna provides a fresher sound and versatility on the R&B scene than Beyoncé with A Girl Like Me (featuring the brilliant mashup of Softcell’s ‘Tainted Love’ in ‘S.O.S’ – a club favourite), 2006 has undoubtedly been the year of Indie glam. The less said about Kasabian’s Empire, the better.

The Sellouts

2006 saw a strawberries-and-pepper collaboration halfway through the year with Nelly Furtado’s joint effort with Timbaland, resulting in Loose. Like said combination of foodstuffs, the two complement each other surprisingly well. (No, really). Despite being one of the few strong female figures in popular/folk music without resorting to the mainstream machine of self-promotion, Furtado’s Folklore flopped in 2003. The result has been a move away from the ‘ethnic’ roots of Whoa, Nelly! towards a total embrace of the MTV culture, even featuring Justin Timberlake in the sexualised ‘Promiscuous’ video. While the relaxed panpipes of ‘All Good Things’ (featuring Coldplay frontman Chris Martin) offer a brief respite from the almost satirically inappropriate club beats of ‘Maneater’, Furtado has lost the musical innocence which characterised her earlier releases.

Higher up on the mainstream machine is Beyoncé with the wonderfully entitled B’day (so called because the album was produced in a record three weeks, just before the singer’s birthday). With such a glaringly obvious publicity oversight, Beyoncé’s fans might wonder if she puts as little thought into her music. Well…yes and no. ‘Crazy In Love’ found Beyoncé the winning song formula of powerful diva vocals plus occasional guest rapper (Jay Z, who has returned from an official retirement lasting 2 years with Kingdom Come). Beyoncé has proved beyond all doubt that she has sterling abilities in both her vocal performance and showmanship, yet current mock-ballad release ‘Irreplaceable’ could easily have been a number from Survivor by Destiny’s Child. Coupled with the angry ‘Ring the Alarm’ (complete with fire alarm effects), this is nothing fans haven’t heard before. Previous album Dangerously In Love largely perfects Beyoncé’s established Independent Woman image, and fans who want more of the same will not be disappointed.

Rather darker in tone is Muse’s fifth album Black Holes And Revelations. Performing their most ambitious tour yet, Matt Bellamy and co. have perfected a seamless live act filled with musical fireworks to delight everyone from Indie ravers to metalheads. This all-inclusive sound is achieved by Bellamy experimenting with his earlier, endearingly geeky obsession with the electric and distortion sound effects first heard in Origin Of Symmetry. Black Holes is a more accessible album and Muse seem to have commendably retained their original fan base. However, a less chaotic sound is achieved at the expense of Bellamy’s blinding piano solos. Throughout the previous albums the classical and the electric intertwine to form the sound which is particularly unique to the band and perfected in Absolution. Black Holes may appeal to the thousands Muse will perform to in Wembley Arena, but it lacks the soul and depth the band is capable of achieving.

Improvers and Shakers

In the Spears/Aguilera teen pop playoff of 1999, it seemed like Britney had it all. Justin Timberlake, money, better hair and Justin Timberlake. With the dawn of 2007, it’s Aguilera who has established herself as the superior both in vocals and dignity. Moving from the awakening that is Christina Aguilera towards dodgy duets with Ricky Martin on Mi Refejo, Aguilera has stayed constant while the Latin American boom has faded like a badly-applied tan. Aguilera’s progress between the albums is so neatly divided it could be presented in boxes. From the gritty seduction of Stripped, Back to Basics is a vocally mature album, this time in the persona of a soul diva. Aguilera however, is not a soul diva and this starlet pose is not entirely convincing. It is nonetheless an impressive and jazzy effort from an artist finally established in herself. Moving entirely away from the jagged edges of 1998 debut Songs For Polar Bears is Snow Patrol’s Eyes Open. Maintaining the melodic melancholy of Final Straw, the band have constructed an exceptionally thoughtful and, on occasion, dark album. Their overt focus on sentimentality and a sound so subtle it is in danger of being bland weaken the album. Subtlety, however, is what characterises earlier, groundbreaking single ‘Run’ and the same compelling element in Eyes Open demands a second listen.

]]> http://shonaghosh.com/2007/12/21/music-review-2006/feed/ 0 shonaghosh http://shonaghosh.com/2007/12/21/warwick-sanctuary-heating-the-coconut/ http://shonaghosh.com/2007/12/21/warwick-sanctuary-heating-the-coconut/#comments Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:27:00 +0000 shonaghosh http://shonaghosh.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/warwick-sanctuary-heating-the-coconut/ ]]> The word “coconut” is used as a mild derogatory slang word referring to a person of Latino, Filipino, or Indian subcontinent descent who emulates a white person (brown on the outside, white on the inside).