Don't normally do obits, and this isn't going to be one. But Frank Sidebottom has passed. I repeat Frank Sidebottom has passed. (This is a personal reference - I was in a Times Square record-mega-store when Barry White's death was announced in this way on the store tannoy). Morbid humour envisions Frank Sidebottom playing at Barry White's funeral, and vice versa. Perhaps Mr. Sidebottom will get a full Jacko send-off, mourners donning the papier mache Sidebottom noggin, a mourning party of little Franks around a bulbously top-heavy coffin.
Rilke's strip of reality on hearing of a death: the burst of sunshine and real trees seen more clearly. What do you see when someone, anyone, dies? Celebrated talented people die, as do the uncelebrated talented, the celebrated untalented, and the uncelebrated untalented. Even cartoon characters unreal in a real world, die.
You know they do. They really do.
Mark E. Smith in a papier mache head. One of those bonkers one-offs. Absurdist comedy, chants, songs, visuals from the child's intersection between delight and nightmare, uncanny inhabiting of a persona wholly unaccountable but wholly grounded in a sense of place. I sound wanky now, but if you have love for the North West that produced The Fall and The Smiths, and Eric Morecambe and Half Man Half Biscuit, then Frank Sidebottom is up there too, nasally twanging on over his bontempi keyboard.
Even to a southern ponce kid, who had yet to live in the North West (I later did for a few years), seeing Frank Sidebottom invade kids' TV in the 1980s, there was a lunatic mixture of eccentricity and groundedness; this wasn't Timmy Mallet whackiness. This character was about something, represented something, a certain kind of entertainment, (his performance style stripping the cruelty from the patter of a working-mens-club M.C., mashing musical comedy of George Formby tradition through a post-punk meat grinder), but also the concerns of where he sprang from: the weather, the football, the music, the telly, class, family, the local shops: not the voice (no such thing), but definitely a voice of the region. Timperley has lost its bard.
Rilke's strip of reality on hearing of a death: the burst of sunshine and real trees seen more clearly. What do you see when someone, anyone, dies? Celebrated talented people die, as do the uncelebrated talented, the celebrated untalented, and the uncelebrated untalented. Even cartoon characters unreal in a real world, die.
You know they do. They really do.
Mark E. Smith in a papier mache head. One of those bonkers one-offs. Absurdist comedy, chants, songs, visuals from the child's intersection between delight and nightmare, uncanny inhabiting of a persona wholly unaccountable but wholly grounded in a sense of place. I sound wanky now, but if you have love for the North West that produced The Fall and The Smiths, and Eric Morecambe and Half Man Half Biscuit, then Frank Sidebottom is up there too, nasally twanging on over his bontempi keyboard.
Even to a southern ponce kid, who had yet to live in the North West (I later did for a few years), seeing Frank Sidebottom invade kids' TV in the 1980s, there was a lunatic mixture of eccentricity and groundedness; this wasn't Timmy Mallet whackiness. This character was about something, represented something, a certain kind of entertainment, (his performance style stripping the cruelty from the patter of a working-mens-club M.C., mashing musical comedy of George Formby tradition through a post-punk meat grinder), but also the concerns of where he sprang from: the weather, the football, the music, the telly, class, family, the local shops: not the voice (no such thing), but definitely a voice of the region. Timperley has lost its bard.
