Jon Hopkins/Daniel Avery

I don't like dancing. It's pointless, fake, obviously contrived and bears no relation to the music that allegedly inspires it. I'll do a longer post on why dancing is shit (probably entitled Why Dancing's Shit, obviously) at a later date - and I can hear you all holding your breath for that one already, but don't. No, dancing is not for me. Dance music, however, definitely is. What's more, I blame Noel Gallagher's dalliance with the Chemical Brothers for this.

Now then. I like to think of myself as a person who won't necessarily dismiss music on grounds of genre, but I also count myself as a person who can dismiss a great deal of Nineties chart music precisely in this way, because I was there, and let's face it, it was bollocks. Culturally, musically, in terms of its legacy, it was utter rubbish. Unlike some fads (flares, kipper ties etc) which are seen as dreadfully a la mode at the time, only to be sniffily derided with the benefit of hindsight, mid-to-late-Nineties chart music, with its wall-to-wall manufacture of bobbins boy bands and cheap 'untz-untz' house fit only for the bovine super-club arenas that blighted the cultural  landscape at the time, was shit then, and it's shit now.

Between 1992 and '95, something bloody horrible started happening on the radio - a music none of us in the provinces understood washed over us, like a deafening blanket of nothing in particular, its verses, modulation, form, interest all stripped away, leaving a beat and a bunch of synths that just went on and on and on, until someone reached, at last, for a song with words in it. It was horrible unless you were on strong drugs. We weren't on strong drugs.

It was a dark time to be a rocker, I can tell you. This obvious crock of shit - If There Ain't No Love (Then It Ain't No Use) by Sub Sub - later to bafflingly re-emerge as the bearded and bucolic Doves - was on the radio eighty times a day, it seemed.

Give me fucking strength.

Then along came Block Rockin' Beats, with its - gasp - melody and - crivens - bassline probably played on an actual bass! The indie nation looked up from its collective copy of Vox for a second, snorted derisively (which we did a lot at the time) and carried on waiting for Dog Man Star to come out. The Chemical Brothers, who had goosed the public in late '94 with Leave Home and Chemical Beats,were coming back. Their joker, of course, was only just around the corner. This, for those of you who don't have it permanently seared onto your eardrums, is the noisy bastard in all its screeching glory:

I know how that feather felt.

Lore has it that the vocal Noel laid down for Setting Sun, the single that propelled the Chemical Brothers to number one and started all of this in my house at least, was recorded while a cab waited outside with its meter running. This alone makes it unimpeachably great, and is another reason to love Noel and his erstwhile band. I like to file this one alongside 'Supersonic was written and recorded in six hours', and just down from 'Wonderwall's vocal is take one', and not at all far from the fact that Talk Tonight, Headshrinker and Acquiesce were all b-sides of the same single.

As it happens, Noel's contribution to Setting Sun is pretty perfunctory, as the above story might attest. What it did, though, was bring the Chemical Brothers' seismic 1997 career highlight Dig Your Own Hole into otherwise unsuspecting sixth-form common rooms nationwide, whereupon it preceded to gently propel otherwise died-in-the-wool guitar-fanciers towards beats, synths, amyl and acid. It did so with fucking deafening beats, screeching synth lines, clarinets, trumpets - you name it. It's a bonkers record, and Noel's specific involvement with it made a 'cleverer' more textural kind of instrumental house music, acceptable. As trojan horses go, it must be one of the loudest ever constructed.

That must have taken all of 20 minutes, then. 


Kasabian's very existence aside, there are no real downsides to this turn of events. Personally speaking, it led me directly or otherwise to seek out Neu!, Can, drum'n'bass, Aphrodite, Renegade Snares, Orbital, the Orb and many other acts in that space that I would normally have avoided while ripping the piss out of, as they didn't know what a Les Paul was for. This interest in dance music comes and goes to this day: while I'm ostensibly 'into' more rock'n'roll than anything else, I'm endlessly drawn back to dance music (and jazz, actually) like it's some vast, scarcely mapped continent that needs further examination. Recently a couple of artists - one new, and one, well, new to me - have emerged that have further piqued my interest. It strikes me that living in London I've been exposed to, and taken a greater interest in, places like the Boiler Room, home to some of the most innovative dance music producers and DJs around - or so I'm told. I'm no expert on this, so forgive, yo.

Cassie was no joke

Cassie was no joke. Flipping channels, hopping bus to bus, train to tube, pushed and pulled, spat up at TCR, queued down into Maccy D’s, between seats and standing, hovered at the entrance, neon pulsing, skullcandy rattles Drake. Cassie was no joke. Mal bounced up, kiss kiss, how are you? Yeah not bad, got the tickets? Scoh, fucko.

Is Formula 1 Buggered?

Bernie Ecclestone, as reported in today’s Grauniad, might have done some naughty things in relation to the sale of F1 to somebody or other a few years ago. Obviously he isn’t confirmed as such, so there’ll be no allegations of wrongdoing in these august pages. But to the untrained observer, the man’s business dealings do look a little opaque at times, don’t they? Not that I’m really interested in the byzantine machinations at the top of the F1 management structure. No, I’m altogether more bothered about the proposed changes to F1’s core ‘product’ – its racing.

In recent years, a short-arsed German bloke who I’ll admit to having quite a bit of time for, principally because he loves Oasis, has eviscerated the competition in a car whose reliability and tarmac-curdling power has at times beggared belief. Time after time, Sebastian Vettel has wrung the absolute nuts off the snorting thoroughbred that is the RB9. The drive to victory in the USA. The absurd, lap-after-lap-after-bloody-lap consistency at Silverstone. The comeback in Brazil. The pass from miles back, around the outside of a bemused, struggling Hamilton, under Singapore’s lights. It just went on and on. Both car and driver won races in the most challenging conditions, and looked almost chipper at the end. More than once, Vettel reminded me of an eight-year-old lad emerging, wild of hair and broad of grin, after his first go in a dodgem. Going that fast, that often wasn’t just easy – it was fun.

And so the poles, the points, the wins and the accolades piled up, and up, and up. As the season progressed, Vettel’s lead began to take on embarrassing proportions, while somehow avoiding to do the incredible talent and technology struggling in his wake a disservice. He was better. His car was better. His car didn’t break. Ergo, he won, and won handsomely. But the people, they wanted more. They wanted competition: wheel-to-wheel, Mansell-vs-Senna-down-to-Ascari madness... and they weren't getting it.

Speaking of Mansell, Our Nige dominated the 1992 season, winning the first six in a 16-race season by margins. In doing so, he made Senna and Prost look like chancers, and McLaren and Benetton appeared positively backward. The backlash experienced by Vettel as his dominance increased last year bred envy, which might have something to do with his single-minded, arguably slightly cold public persona. There are several drivers in the paddock I could happily go for a pint with (viz: Webber, Alonso, and if I had a week off to recover afterwards, Raikonnen) but Vettel? Maybe not. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, and clearly knows his Supersonic from his Shakermaker, if you know what I mean, but he might just  be a bit, well, German for some people.

I fully expect this situation to continue into 2014. Vettel’s dominance is in many ways more ominous than that of Schumacher – who crashed into those he couldn’t catch, and was really run ragged by Mika Hakkinen alone during his six years as the sport’s apex predator. Vettel is younger, and is consistently thrashing a stronger field than Schumacher did. Schumi reigned during a period when brute grunt – sheer horses in harness – won races; when the number of torques spat out on the grid often dictated the number of points awarded at the end. Nowadays, the crazy-haired geniuses in Oxfordshire wind-tunnels decide things – aero performance is key. KERS, DRS and all that are mere distractions, adding a faint sense of unreality and more than a whiff of videogame power-up logic to the racing. As a spectacle, it’s got brighter, but duller. 

F1’s sharks believe that the technology bleeping away under all that carbon fibre must move forward, or no-one will watch their global superbrand’s travelling circus. With Little Seb winning at a canter every weekend, F1’s very own PT Barnum, Bernie Ecclestone, clearly had to convene the Powers That Be and decide to do about all of this tiresome predictability. After what one assumes would be considerable deliberation, the latest in a sequence of technological restrictions and rule changes was announced. Fanfare if you please – it’s time for Uncle Bernie’s Big Shake-Up.

As Patrick Head would probably put it, things done changed all over this biatch, basically. The engines in 2013’s cars were 2.4l, 760bhp beasts. 2014’s are 1.6s – that’s a mid-range Polo to you and me. Disturbingly, they’ll still kick out 600bhp, but as they’re still naturally aspirated, they’re set to whine like the world’s largest motorcycle display team composed entirely of wasps. They will probably reach peak revs at 20-22,000, with most ‘perfect’ changes happening at 18,000. 2013’s peaked at 19,000. Roughly translated, that means ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooowwww!’ All the time.

There’s also a new Energy Return System to replace DRS, which produced an extra 60bhp for six seconds per lap in 2013, the new ERS will generate 180bhp for THIRTY THREE (possibly trouser-soiling) seconds per lap. 

All the cars must have a faintly ridiculous eight forward gears instead of seven, for every race. The teams must also decide what their gear ratios are before the start of the season and then stick to them. This is designed to even up the differences in acceleration and top speed between the fastest and slowest cars on the grid, and kind of makes sense.

The big one: in 2013, fuel use was unlimited, with cars typically glugging down 160kg per car per race. In 2014, the cars will be limited to just 100kg per race, a reduction of 40%-ish. Obviously the fuel is one of the heaviest parts of the car, and combined with the 20% reduction in weight by dint of the smaller engine, these things are going to start races light, and only get lighter. This might be why the larger drivers  have started complaining that they may soon be too heavy to drive the things.

Mark Webber (who is at my estimate 6’4, and built like a boxer) quit because of the fuel and weight restrictions. They will doubtless lead to teams telling drivers who could potentially challenge for a podium or the lead to back off, for fear of not finishing at all. As Webber said on Top Gear the other day: “What’s the point of driving a super-lightweight car with a massive turbo on it at 70% for the last 20 laps of the race? Not for me, mate.”

The FIA’s prediction is the cars will be 3 seconds a lap slower, but much closer together. Time will tell...