Charlie Chaplin: Champion of the Film List

French Magazine Cahiers Du Cinemas have just published their list of the 100 greatest films ever (read the full list here). Most of the initial talk has been about the lack of British films on the list or Citizen Kane topping the poll, but something else stood out for me as soon as I saw the results.

Given that the list is French, I expected certain French ideals to shine through. Their fascination with Alfred Hitchcock is also well documented, as is their love of Film Noir and I also expected European film-makers such as Godard, Renoir or Fellini to feature heavily.

All of the film-makers mentioned in the previous paragraph were featured in the list with 3 movies, and the only man to garner more nominations is Charlie Chaplin. Five of his masterpieces (City Lights, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, Modern Times and The Gold Rush) were crammed into the list, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that three of these films were from the silent movie era.

There are a number of anomalies in the list which can probably be put down to the French and their foibles. Take the lack of British films in the list (famous quote from Francois Truffaut: "A film is a born loser just because it is English") or the way that certain directors have been underexposed. Some Hitchcock classics, like Rear Window, Rebecca or Psycho, for example are not included and other directors like Bergman (only Fanny and Alexander and not The Seventh Seal or Persona) are likewise criminally underplayed.

In fact, other than Chaplin only the following directors are featured more than twice: Renoir, Ophuls, Murnau, Hitchcock, Godard and Fellini. Why have the French magazine managed to squeeze all of Chaplin's classic films into the list and not some of these directors? Is this a reflection of the French love of his particular brand of film or is Chaplin being recognised as the most important film maker ever?

While it is true that Chaplin is credited solely with the emergence of cinema as an artistic medium, he was left behind a little when talking pictures came to the fore at the beginning of the 1930s. It is perhaps incorrect to suggest that the two talkies on the list (Monsieur Verdoux and The Great Dictator) are better than some of the missing films but as a celebration of the vision of one man, I can think of no better candidate than Charles Chaplin.

Even if you take out the sheer virtuosity of his work (he wrote, directed, starred and composed music for all of his movies), it is humanity of his film-making and not just his humour that stands out when you watch his films in the 21st century. I honestly believe that City Lights is perhaps the perfect example of this; not only is it incredibly funny throughout but it also draws on moral themes of poverty, alcoholism and love. What's more, the ending to City Lights remains perhaps the pinnacle of artistic film-making, even more than 75 years on. Perhaps even more so than any of the 16 films above it, City Lights is the pinnacle of cinematic creation.

This highlights what Chaplin was best at: fusing the popular with the artistic. His films were undoubtedly art-house in their style but people all over the world would queue around the block to see his films at their local theatres because he would make them laugh hysterically at the same time.

To watch all of his films in a modern environment - as I have over the past 12 months - provokes the same kind of reaction even now. Even the most ardent Hollywoodised young film consumer (you know the kind - won't watch films with subtitles etc) would be captivated by Chaplin by the end of one his films. There is even an argument that the films are even better now - helped largely by the fact that with the advent of sound, Chaplin composed musical scores to go over all of his films in the 1940s and 50s.

Lists such as the Cahiers Du Cinemas are not designed to be a definitive idea of what is best. They are to encourage debate and to get people revisiting and redefining classic films. Chaplin's Tramp remains one of the most striking and recognisable figures of the 20th century and it is critical that he remains as such for future generations.

He was more than just a funny man; he was the arguably the most important film-maker the world has ever seen.

The £100 Million Question

The recent news that the National Gallery has to come up with £50million to keep the Titian masterpiece Diana and Actaeon in this country has caused widespread debate (read about it here).

The basic deal is this: £50m will buy you the first Titian painting and a second (Diana and Callisto) will be offered for the same price in four years time. Once both of these paintings are secure, the rest of the Bridgewater collection will be secured on a long-term loan to the galleries also, which is a significant extra to the deal.

When you consider some of the substantial sums that are traded in the art world, £50m for each of the paintings isn’t actually too bad. I have no issue with paying that much money; in market terms it is a bargain. Furthermore, £10m has been pledged by National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), which is a wonderful donation.

However, there is bound to be a shortfall and eventually help will likely be asked for from the government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Given the current economic constraints on the country as a whole, should we be more cautious in spending such an amount of money on a painting?

The only problem that I have is not with paying the money, but from where the money is coming from – if it comes from the Government, it has to be as part of its budget and not a special magic fund. We have borrowed enough money as a country to suggest that we shouldn’t be pulling £50m out of a magic hat.

Another factor that irks me somewhat is the continual argument in favour of the painting: that it is part of our heritage. Various artists assisting in the campaign have described how inspired they were as children or students by being able to see the painting at its long term home in Edinburgh.

To me, this painting is not our heritage. It is a masterpiece from a great Italian renaissance painter which we have been lucky to have been able to display in galleries in Britain. To claim it as part of our heritage just because a wealthy British aristocrat bought it so many years ago seems a little misguided to me. Think of all the artists in different countries of the world who might have been inspired by it but haven’t had the opportunity.

People can buy great works of art, but they never own them. These Titian paintings belong to the people who spend hours looking at them. In recent times, this has been a British audience but if Lord Sutherland were to sell the paintings privately, it is likely they would go abroad and a whole new set of people would be able to spend time staring at them.

Despite this, from a selfish point of view, I hope that Britain keeps these masterpieces on our shores, providing the money is generated sensibly. But it is important to remember that we have no divine right to them.

The Truly Great Gatsby

The boom of the 1920s has long interested me, since I first learned of the period in my early teens. Perhaps more than any other time in the 21st Century, the 1920s helped to shape the world we live in today.

I recently finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 masterpiece "The Great Gatsby" which is an interesting portrayal of this period which he coined as The Jazz Age. It was a period of decadence, of popular entertainment through the first wave of cinema and of economic prosperity, particularly in America. It was the land of opportunity.

The 1920s is almost a historical allegory for the current economic downturn that we are facing. Everyday families played the stock market as if it was a game (and one that for the majority of the century, was easy to win) before it all ended dreadfully with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Consider the parallels with the housing market of the early 2000s and its sharp recent collapse and you can make an easy case for the parallel.

"The Great Gatsby" is more than merely a reflection of the boom of the 1920s however. I'm not going to go into the story in any great deal (you can read about it here) but I am going to describe the things that I think make it so special and far before its time.

The story of Gatsby is told through the eyes of a young man, Nick Carraway, and what I like about this is that the story is told almost completely without judgement on the central characters. This is quite unusual for a first person narrative in itself and made more so by the moral decisions that pins the plot together. The characters are so self-absorbed that they don't realise the importance of their wrong choices but at no point are we made to choose sides. By the end, Nick has made his own mind up and his allegiance is to Gatsby but the crucial thing is that the reader is afforded the option to make their own decision.

The ending is also stunning and yet at the same time, probably the reason why the book was unpopular on its release. Given the boom that the audience of 1924 were experiencing, it is perhaps only natural that they would reject the bleak and unhappy ending. At the same time, this is probably the part that helped an audience rediscover it as Fitzgerald's masterpiece after his death. Not only did it brilliantly surmise his riffs on the sanctity of marriage, of the falseness and loneliness of society and the way that things are not always as they seem but it has also inspired influential artists since. The mental image of Gatsby being shot dead in his swimming pool was almost certainly the inspiration for the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard - an iconic image that helped to redefine Hollywood in the fifties.

And finally, what drew me into the story was the entertainment of Fitzgerald's writing. It had pace, elegance and wit, yet at the same time was garnished with beautiful descriptions that in most other circumstances would slow down the novel. It was almost like it had been glossed with the modern sheen; that it was not of its time. If the same novel came out today, people would not question its writing style as being old-fashioned.

What's more at under 200 pages, it delivers an astonishing number of themes and motifs, proving that brevity is not something to be scorned. In today's publishing market, research suggests that people don't like to buy short books and more than likely, The Great Gatsby would be treated as a novella if it was written today. Not only would render it unlikely to ever receive the audience it deserves, it would also be a massive disservice to the work as a Novel in its own right.

This would be a sad indictment on modern culture. Given the parallels with the twenties, the world needs works of art like The Great Gatsby to remember that with every boom there must come a bust.

Fun and Games

I recently watched Funny Games US, the shot-for-shot remake of the original Michael Haneke film from 1997. What makes this unique is that it was the same director who made this virtual replica, albeit in English language with Hollywood actors like Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.

Haneke has suggested that the reason for making this film is that he saw the target audience as the American society that has notably been consuming "torture-porn" style movies like Hostel and Saw. With his earlier version being in foreign language, he argued that in order to get the film out to this audience, he had to remake it in English.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a success. Mainly due to its limited distribution across America, the wider audience that the remake was aiming at was simply not penetrated. If anything, the film was watched mainly by people who had already seen the original version or who had enjoyed Haneke's recent successes with Hidden (Cache) or the Piano Teacher.

The teen audience that attends multiplex showings of Hostel-like films were not there and the stats back this up - Funny Games US opened to 274 screens in the USA and took a total of $1.2million dollars in the month it played. To put this into context, Hostel Part II took seven times that amount on its opening weekend in 2007 ($8.2million) and grossed fourteen times the amount ($17.5million) in total.

The figure that most stands out is that it cost $15million to make and as such, even taking into account DVD sales, makes for a low level of profit overall. All things considered, surely it would have made more sense to just re-release the original film in the USA and spend a bit of money on marketing it?

While it is an interesting concept to remake his own film for such a reason, Haneke fundamentally failed. What's more, the actual films themselves are so identical that they is nothing to differentiate them. It is neither better nor worse than the original; they are identical in shots and dialogue and the performance from the cast is just as strong, especially from Naomi Watts. What's more - and this is perhaps testament to Haneke's skills as a director - the same repulsion and horror are impinged upon you and it maintains the same psychological bite as the original.

Based upon this, the conundrum that I keep contemplating is this: Which version would I recommend to a friend to watch over the other?

My gut reaction is that if I watched the two of them side by side, and independent of thought, that I would prefer the remake. Most of this is probably due to the familiarity of it - not in just the language but also the fact that the cast is known and with it comes a certain extra intimacy and connection. For example, I have watched a large number of Naomi Watts films purely on the basis of her participation and it is this warmth and familiarity that draws me to the remake.

There is an obvious cultural distaste for remakes, especially those of foreign language films into English language. This is invariably due to the inferior quality but there is often a more snobbish element at play. Why watch the remake when you can watch the original? Ultimately, I think Haneke's response would be that it doesn't matter which version you watch, as long as you watch it.

With Funny Games US, I think I can comfortably say that it is a great film, like the original. The logic behind making it however does not quite befit the same genius.

Long Gone

It is now nearly three weeks since the break up of Sheffield indie band The Long Blondes after their guitarist suffered a stroke in the summer. It was sad news at the time and their absence on the modern music scene will continue to leave a gap in the market.

They were always a slightly off-kilter band, full of seemingly different personalities. To watch them live was a strange experience as the charismatic singer Kate Jackson captured the attention of the audience, whilst the rest of the band - in particular Emma and Reenie - looked deeply uncomfortable.

What I loved about the band was the way their lyrics was full of pop-culture references, drenched in glamorous asides from years gone by. They name-checked, amongst others, Edie Sedgwick, Scott Walker, Billy Wilder films and Erin O'Connor whilst at the same time reflecting the difficulties of youth. They were exciting and, perhaps most importantly - and this is often overlooked or scoffed at in modern music - a lot of fun.

Their first album was critically well received on the most part but didn't sell particularly brilliantly. Someone To Drive You Home was full of well-paced, youthful sounding indie pop songs: it smashed you over the head before putting its arms round you and inviting you to the local disco.

Their second album Couples was a different affair, almost a specific attempt to sound grown-up in response to their earlier releases. It fused lyrics of mid-20s displacement with a more openly pop sound that made use of electronica as well as their normal guitar sound. There was a critical backlash as well as a confused reaction from fans expecting the second installment of Someone To Drive You Home and it reached only number 48 in the album charts.

It may not have sold many CDs but there was undoubtedly a massive record company push behind them; faith they never repaid in monetary terms. They had an unbelievable opportunity but somehow the mainstream couldn't seem to take to them, no matter how much hype surrounded them.

Because of this, it was perhaps an inevitable split - even if Dorian Cox's stroke was a quite shocking final chapter of the story. It is a sad reflection of the UK music industry that if you don't shift units, you will probably end up losing your record deal and it is unlikely that the band would have been given the opportunity to release another record.

Part of me is sad that the Long Blondes are no more. In time, I can't help but feel that their second album - for all the bad words said about it - will stand up as a much greater work than their first. Whether the band will end up as a cult forgotten act like many that have gone before is debatable, that they'll always be hovering around my CD player is not.

Marina Lewycka: A Modern Great

Marina Lewycka's comic tales of the troubles of immigrants moving to the UK are the most accurate depiction of our country in the 21st Century.

That's quite an outlandish statement, considering some of the fantastic writing that has been published in the early part of the new millenium but one I feel justified in suggesting.

Across the ages, the best writing reflects the generation that it came from. Think of a Dickens novel and you think of Victorian Britain and a very particular British environment. The same goes for Oscar Wilde or F. Scott Fitzgerald who pin-point a particular time in UK and US society before and after the turn of the 20th century. You can argue this continues right the way through to modern authors like Nick Hornby or Zadie Smith - they all sum up a particular micro-period of British history and a particular place (in both Smith and Hornby's case this is London).

I can't help but feel that Lewycka is currently doing that now. Both of her two novels Two Caravans and A Short History Of Tractors In Ukranian are superbly written and exquisitely funny depictions of the effect of immigration on the person themselves as well as the society around them. The proliferation of migrant workers have become one of the key changes to multi-cultural Britain in recent times.

This topic is difficult to write about (it is all to easy to offend) but it is something that has affected British society in both positive and negative ways. What I particularly like about her books are that they tackle both sides of the coin - in Tractors, the main plot is about a Ukrainian woman coming over to this country for its riches (and marrying an elderly man to achieve this) whereas in Two Caravans, the characters come over for the same riches but end up being mistreated and taken advantage of.

What links both books together is the way that the characters (despite their numerous collective flaws) are so loveable and how entertaining a read it is as a result.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what a book represents when it is so damn fun to read. There is a quote from Nick Hornby that says "If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits". What I think he is basically saying is, why force your way through Russian literature or literary novelists like Ian McEwan when you can breeze through the entertaining ride that writers like Lewycka can provide.

On the other side of this coin, it is often suggested that books that are easy to read are somehow lightweight; easy entertainment for the throw-away culture that we live in. In reality, the skill of writing in such a page-turning style is something that is incredibly difficult to achieve; just as difficult as creating the literary masterpieces described in the previous paragraph. There are merits for both.

Only time can ever tell how a work of art will age, but it wouldn't surprise me if people are still reading Lewycka's comic masterpieces throughout the 21st century.

The Orchestra As Pop Decor

On Sunday night I ventured out to see the Last Shadow Puppets in concert at the Manchester Apollo. The band is the side project of Arctic Monkeys front-man Alex Turner and Rascals singer Miles Kane which resulted in their Mercury Music Prize nominated album The Age Of The Understatement.

The band is also notable because it contains the 22-piece London Metropolitan Orchestra.

On the record, the orchestra adds an extra, lush dimension to the songs, helping to bring out the 60s-fused melodies into the forefront. I was hoping that the live experience would be a similar affair but it was ultimately a disappointing exercise.

In their defence, the biggest problem was probably that of the venue; I'm sure that the cramped housing at the back of the stage and the acoustics that were more geared towards your traditional guitar/bass/drum did not help to bring out the best of the orchestral sound. At a more appropriate place, like the Royal Albert Hall or in Manchester, the Opera House or Bridgewater Hall it might have been pushed to the forefront a bit more.

In reality however, all that the orchestra did was provide an expensive and visually arresting piece of decor. It was a bonus rather than an integral part of the music, which is the usual way that pop music seems to treat its more sophisticated cousin. Even songs with beautiful orchestral refrains, like Standing Next To Me, seemed to be washed away by the energy of the guitars and the crowd, rendering it largely devoid. If they weren't so obviously stacked up at the back of the stage, you would not notice they were there at all. Perhaps more damagingly, they wouldn't be missed either.

In recent years, this fusion between the classical and the pop nearly always ends with the same result of a superfluous and largely without merit gimmick. The arrangements are usually dull and devoid of inspiration while in live performance, such greater prominence is given in the mix to the other core pop instruments that it hardly seems worth the bother.

The question of the performance, or the energy of the performance is perhaps just as important. It remains easy to whip up an atmosphere whilst playing a guitar that you can jump around with rather than the rather static positions that the violinists have to adopt, for example. The sit-down and observe nature of classical concerts is simply over-powered when put on the same stage as the pop performer.

The only example of the two styles merging successfully that I can think of recently was that of Elbow on their Mercury winning album The Seldom Seen Kid, where the orchestra had become the driving force of a number of tracks. The other instruments had become the secondary part of the makeup of tracks like One Day Like This or Friend Of Ours and this is what makes it work.

Perhaps it all boils down to the simple equation that there isn't enough room (both physically and aurally) for the orchestra on a pop stage.

Unpleasant Weddings

I watched Noam Baumbach's second film, "Margot At The Wedding" last night, the critically panned follow up to his critically loved debut "The Squid and the Whale".

The main bone of contention in all of the reviews in the British press was that none of the characters - specifically the adult ones - are in any way likable. In actual fact, they are all distastefully selfish and egocentric characterisations of middle class bourgeois.
Despite that and unlike many others who have seen it, I still believe that it is a good film. It's just not particularly pleasant to watch.

With regards to Noam Baumbach's two films; they are telling similar stories but the key difference is the perspective. "The Squid and the Whale" is the story of two kids going through the divorce of their neurotic, unpleasant parents from their point of view. "Margot at the Wedding" is telling a similar story - albeit with a sideline of sibling squabbling - but is told from the perspective of the neurotic, unpleasant parents.

To me, this raises two interesting points. Firstly, why as human beings do we need to feel empathy with film characters to enjoy a movie? We need someone to root for; to be able to decide who's side we're on. We also need to feel that there has been some change in the characters by the end; that they have learnt from the mistakes made and have grown.

A great example of this, albeit in a different medium, is the third album by The Streets, "The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living". The main character of the record was a self-obsessed celebrity who was out of touch with reality and, consequently his fans. The success of the two earlier Streets records had been the way that everyman listeners could relate to the lyrics, describing stories of life in working, binge-drinking Britain. These same fans couldn't relate to the third album, once Mike Skinner had disappeared into a world of celebrity culture - but does it make it any less of a work of art?

It has been said that cinema is the truest of all art forms; but if that was the case then we would be able to objectively look at it without the gratification of having to like the characters. When you go to an art gallery and look at a work by another modern narcissist painter, you do so because you can take something away from it, even if you don't like the ideas behind it.

This links into my second point which relates to the way that we consume films. There is a much bigger focus on entertainment than there is in books or music or art. We go to the cinema expecting to be entertained, even when watching an art-house picture or bleak documentary. Faced with unpleasant characters telling unpleasant stories and we tend to come away thinking that we have seen a bad film.

There are occasional exceptions - the films of Michael Haneke for example are afforded a certain critical and cult success despite being bleak and immeasurably unpleasant, but invariably this is because the audience goes into the cinema knowing roughly what to expect and also because the craft of the film is so good. In any case, Haneke remains a love/hate figure for many cinema-goers.

So to take this back to "Margot at the Wedding"; I came away with a particular dislike for all of the main characters (and quite especially Nicole Kidmans) but equally, that the general critical response to the film was undoubtedly harsh. It is unfortunately quite true to life that a lot of people are unpleasant and sometimes their stories still need to be told.

The balance isn't always in offsetting the bad guy with the good but in remaining true to the characters themselves. Too often we are left with the clear conclusion that Character A was an unpleasant dickhead but - Praise Allah! - he/she has become a better person by the end of the film. All they needed was to fall in love, etc etc.

In reality, people don't change overnight. More often than not, when bad, life-changing things happen, we respond in the same screwed up way that we have always done. Perhaps this is why our natural reaction is to respond badly when art mirrors life in this way; we need change, growth, fulfillment and people we can root for.

Ultimately, the cinema is our escape; whether the film we're watching is a work of art or not.

Edie: The Birth Of Celebrity Culture

I'm becoming somewhat of an Edie Sedgwick expert in recent times. She truly fascinates me as both the beautiful icon of a decadent era and as the birth of celebrity culture.

Edie was Andy Warhol's muse in the 1960s, appearing in his films and photographs as well as gaining notoriety on the New York fashion and social scene. She also was allegedly involved with Bob Dylan during this period and ended up dying of a drug-overdose in the early part of the following decade.

I finished reading a rather substantial biography of her a couple of weeks ago, entitled "Edie: An American Biography" and sealed the deal with a second viewing of the biopic "Factory Girl". I've also been listening to Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" of whom (allegedly) a number of songs were penned about.

There seems little point of referring to the film in this piece, because despite Sienna Miller capturing the spirit of Edie brilliantly, it isn't a very good film. It is also somewhat misguided
factually on several occasions.

The book is a different matter however, as rather unlike most modern day biographies it focuses a significant amount of time to her childhood and family setup which nicely sets up the tales of excess later on. It is well over 70 pages before Edie actually enters the story; her family, a rich and aristocratic family steeped in the history of America (a Sedgwick was present at the declaration of independence, for example) that was so spectacularly screwed up that it resulted in nearly all of the Sedgwick children being housed in mental hospitals at some point, two suicides and a drug overdose. It was little wonder that the rest of the book is detailing a sad and
inevitable demise.

What interests me about Edie is how she really seems to signal the beginning of celebrity culture as we know it today. Despite the fact that in the decade before we had stars like Marilyn Monroe and Katherine Hepburn who were famous because of their talent and acting skills (Monroe especially is a criminally under-rated actress), Sedgwick was a different kind of celebrity.

Edie came to prominence because she was Edie Sedgwick. She drew people into her personality with her natural charm and charisma. She was capable of innocence, charm, confidence and doubt all in one single look, which consequently led to the camera loving her like few before. When you parallel the journey of Edie with the emergence of tabloid celebrity culture, you can see a clear line. Our Heat magazine need and Big Brother obsessions were started in the 1960s and Edie was the first major breakthrough. She was a model and an actress, true, but this work was very Warholian underground. The reason she became well-known was through her association with Warhol and her activities in New York society. How different is she really to a Jade Goody figure?

What I like about Edie is that she links three of my favourite 60s icons together; Bob Dylan who she famously fell in love and was left heartbroken by, Andy Warhol who created her superstar image and marketed her so successfully and the Velvet Underground (although this is perhaps more of a shaky link) who she was known to have performed with during the Factory years and to whom the parallels of rock and roll excess are perhaps most relevant. She is the all-encompassing 60s icon, summing up both the heady times and the decline into the 70s.

It is rather fitting that we feel the urge to repackage Edie into films and books in the great Rock and Roll image of decadence; of crashing and burning like the rest of the 60s. She is the poor little rich girl, the lost soul and the glamorous socialite all in the rather handy package of beautiful, trend-setting and unique looking woman.

Neither the books nor the film does her any kind of justice; a more fitting tribute would be the two songs Bob Dylan allegedly penned about her: Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat and Just Like A Woman. Two contrasting and haunting songs that summed up the inconsistencies of her personality that in no small way helped make her a superstar.

Salvador Dali exhibition, Barcelona

On a recently holiday to Spain, I spent an afternoon in Barcelona where I chanced upon a career retrospective of the great Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali at the Real Circulo Atistico Museum of Barcelona in the Gothic Quarter of the city.

I knew a little of Dali's surrealist films, having seen his work with Luis Bunuel on Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or from the 1930s but I wasn't particularly au fait with his paintings. Being a keen advocate of surrealism in all forms though, I paid my 8€ and entered.

I'm glad I did, mainly because I saw what has become one of my favourite pieces of surrealist art. It seemed to sum up everything that I liked about the genre, even by just looking at the title. It was called "Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone" (pictured below). Even for someone like myself who doesn't always understand the meaning of artworks, the recurring themes were easy to pick out. The biggest singular theme was the image of a naked woman; of which nearly every picture seemed to have one buried under the absurd imagery on the surface. There were also recurring works of Don Quixote and a number of animal sculptures and paintings.

This all made me think about the way that my thought process works. Is there a naked breast hidden amongst the majority of my thoughts and ideas if I search hard enough? There has been scientific research that suggests that men think about sex every 52 seconds (or 7 seconds depending on what research you read) and Dali was obviously a repeat offender in this. It was most notable in a small series of what appear on the surface to be scribbles on pieces of paper, which almost like a Magic Eye poster from the 1990s revealed a subtle breast or genitalia if you stared closely enough.

Perhaps Dali was highlighting the fact that however we present ourselves as humans, the only thing that remains true of everyone on earth is our collected animal instinct.

Mercury Music Prize 2008

So Elbow have won the Mercury Music Prize; a feat that has been met with almost universal applause. The Seldom Seen Kid - a slow-burner like all of their albums - was pronounced the best album of the last year.

I like Elbow. I have all their records, have seen them live and consider myself a fan. Their records seem instrically Northern; which is something that always appeal to my regional sense of satisfaction. They are also quite obviously nice, down-to-earth blokes and you tend to see Guy Garvey knocking about Manchester regularly too. Which is cool.

So - A Mercury Prize winner? I'll go with that. Album of the year? I don't think so.

To first of all specifically look at the Elbow record. It's certainly their best offering of the last few years and is perhaps on a par with the 2001 Mercury nominated album Asleep in the Back. My main gripe is that it has four or five stand-out tracks and the rest of the album just blends into that. There is no real "wow" factor that makes this stand out more over the others. I would argue that it is inferior to several other albums on the shortlist but the reason that they have been given the award is because Elbow are the band who would make the biggest gain from receiving the prize.

I have been a long term supporter of the Mercurys as a useful tool for bringing great bands and artists into the mainstream. I would argue quite ferociously in favour of this style of decision making for the Mercurys. What annoys me is that it is then presented as the "Album of the Year" and the likes of Lauren Laverne and the judges go on about how it is only judged on the album itself. Looking at practically every winner that has ever gone before, I find this incredibly hard to believe.

Lets just examine the favourites for this years title:

Radiohead - (in my opinion) they have released the best album for the third time in their Mercury life but haven't won. Reason: They are the most important band in the world already. And they won't turn up.

Burial - I'm quite curious about Burial's record, mainly because its completely not my cup of tea. I listened to it a few times from start to finish in the hope that it would turn me on to dub; it didn't. However, from the looks of it the main reason why Burial didn't win is that he didn't turn up and he was a massive favourite. By merely becoming the bookies sure-fire winner, Burial has already gained the same kind of exposure, record sales and hype that he would have got if he had won.

Last Shadow Puppets - I think this is a better record than the Elbow one. There is an argument that it is looking backwards in style rather than looking forward but it doesn't detract from the quality of tunes. Reason it didn't win: Alex Turner won two years ago. Nobody has ever won the order twice.

I can't for the life of me ever imagine Portico Quartet, Estelle, Adele, British Sea Power or Rachel Unthank win; regardless of how fond I am (particularly of the latter). So when you take out three of the big-hitters and the ones highly unlikely to win you are left with a sublist of the following people: Laura Marling, Elbow and Neon Neon.

So, now we're down to the shortlist of three; i guess it's Elbow isn't it?

I actually had a crafty £5 bet on Laura Marling at 10-1 when the shortlist came out, mainly because of the reasons that I had detailed above and because I think she is the most extraordinary of talents. I was hoping that she'd pay back the silly sums of money that I spent trying to gather her early EPs on eBay, as much as anything else.

The popular consensus is that it might do Laura more harm than good to win. Arguments that she's too fragile, too young, too nervous around the press and too frightened of publicity to be able to handle it. I'm not sure whether I agree with this or not and I guess we'll never know. I'd much rather trust in her talent and obvious wisdom.

So that all boils down to Elbow again. They are great Mercury winners; a worthy band making a worthy album that finally is granted some mainstream success and the audience that goes with it. I have no bones about that; this is what makes the Mercurys so fantastic.

Well done Elbow. But next time you hear Lauren Laverne or one of the judges comment that it is judged purely on the individual albums, don't believe it. Nothing is ever that black and white.