FINKPOINT | MUSIC | VIRUS CLIFF

Finkpoint’s music taste. Well so far this week, we’ve had the Lawnmower Man, the Matrix, Space Odyssey and so on, so I suppose you’ll all be like, what’s it going to be now Finkpoint, a discussion of Kraftwerk’s We Are The Robots segueing into a discussion of the glassier proponents of electronic Krautrock – To Rococo Rot, perhaps, laden with minimalist grooves as palindromic as their bandname? Or maybe you’ll make a grab for the zeitgeist a bit more, like you did yesterday re. the angry smashy youngster riots, and talk about autotune or the sound of Justin Bieber slowed down 300% or something. Well let me tell you something dear readers: you think you know Finkpoint? You know shit.

This evening, I shall rather be discussing the most sophisticated self-redefining virus ever to enter the arteries of culture (before Finkpoint came along) – to the extent that he (it) has succeeded in overriding several usually reliable arts-defining databases, not to mention electromagnetically manipulating the spending and behavioural habits of thousands of menopausal women, in five sequential decades. And that's just the start of it. A virus not stupid/German enough to advertise its robotic nature in song, rather choosing to cleverly disguise itself under the gauze of something that behaves a lot like a virus whilst remaining remarkably acceptable in rational society – born again Christianity. A virus that we all presumed originated in the Soviet Union, insofar as it first appeared early on in Khrushchev’s premiership – a man responsible, of course, for many of the Cold War’s more technological innovations i.e. space travel etc. Only for it to spring up throughout the nineties, resulting in a massive crash in 1999. Truly, the Millennium Prayer was the millennium bug.

A virus so riddled with glitches – having stated he/it once considered marrying Sue Barker, he/it moved in with a former Catholic priest who he/it describes as his ‘property manager’ and told the Sun he/it ‘loves’ being a ‘sexual enigma’; he/it has no lips; he/it spent much of the nineties turning Wuthering Heights into a musical which advertised itself via bad reviews – that only in the UK, a country which loves to celebrate ‘eccentricity,’ could he/it have been pervasive for so long without the cops being called. It took until the mid-seventies for he/it to appear in the US, and only did so briefly. He/it knew, in short what was good for he/it.

(I'll drop the he/it now.)

Indeed, said cops continue to flounder. What did I see on Archbishop Cranmer’s usually good if rather Tory blog last month? 'Cliff Richard’s Little Town for Christmas No1!' Cranmer continues: ‘And the Machiavelli of music monopoly has schemed and manipulated this year to ensure that his Anointed One is crowned No1 at Christmas by making every X-Factor week an iTunes download week.’ HE THINKS COWELL IS THE VIRUS! IDIOT! COWELL IS JUST A SMOKESCREEN! IDIOT!

For I talk, of course, of Harry Rodger Webb, a virus so powerful and strange he sometimes makes me wish that I hadn’t been born into his species (via a magic spell not unlike the one that equips the cleaning robot with AI in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, in case you were wondering). Hell, you think his only tangible effect upon society has been to sell terrible records, terribler wine and the Albert Hall out for five or six nights every three years? I’m afraid you display a similar technaivety to the Silkworms fags – who thought I’d stop at forcing my screenplay, ‘Trojan: First Sequence. An Erotic Thriller’ onto their bleurg. You know the whole, Cliff got a number one single in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s thing? That, friends, is basically binary code for the virus Cliff was in control of everything for half a century. EVERYTHING. A WHOLE LOADA BAD STUFF HAPPENED BECAUSE OF HIM. HE DID IT THROUGH THE SONGS. DON’T ASK ME HOW BUT HE DID. And Archbishop Cranmer wants him back? For shame!

Your evidence, sirs:

The 1950s – No. 1 single, Living Doll

Like many repressed homosexual viruses, Cliff Richard despises women. You know the way the women’s movement regressed throughout the 1950s into a valium-tranquilised, imprisoned in the suburbs shadow of what had been achieved during the Second World War? That was Virus Cliff’s fault. As proved by the frankly astonishing lyrics to his innocently jazzy number, Living Doll, a track that encourages the objectification of women, ridicules the notion of feminine autonomy, condones the aggressively masculine ‘roving eye’ and concludes on a note of sociopathic jealousy…

Got myself a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, living doll
Got to do my best to please her, just ’cause she’s a living doll
Got a roving eye and that is why she satisfies my soul
Got the one and only walking talking, living doll

Take a look at her hair, it’s real
And if you don’t believe what I say, just feel I’m gonna lock her up in a trunk
So no big hunk can steal her away from me

The 1960s – No. 1 single, The Next Time

The forgotten other half of the double A side that gave the world Bachelor Boy, read The Next Time as the note Virus Cliff intended to pin to the first nuke fired as the Cuban Missile Crisis ( of 1962 – the year The Next Time was released) became all-out nuclear war. Virus Cliff had fallen for a lady virus (this was back when Cliff still thought he liked girls) who rebuffed his advances – upon realising he wasn’t going to find romantic happiness, he decided to make everybody else in the world’s opportunities to do the same ANCIENT HISTORY. To this day, nobody knows how disaster was averted…

They say I’ll love again someday
A true love will come my way the next time
But after you there’ll be never be a next time for me
They say that I’ll find happiness in someone else

warm caress the next time
I'll soon forget your kiss and heartaches such as this will
Just be ancient history

The 1970s – No. 1 single, We Don’t Talk Anymore

The Winter of Discontent eh? Unprecedentedly widespread strikes – even the gravediggers got in on the action – as a result of failure after failure of negotiation between business leaders and unions. All exacerbated by James Callaghan’s government’s refusal to communicate properly with anyone: ‘Crisis? he asked. ‘What crisis?’ Bet you thought all that was down to evil bosses and obstinate TUC ‘barons’ (the most inexplicable of all the ol’ Daily Mail’s coinages) eh? Think again. Virus Cliff didn’t want everybody to talk. Being an aggressively sexist fruitcake, Virus Cliff wanted to create an opening for Thatcher’s big, veiny member to thrash its way into. So Virus Cliff stopped everybody talking, and he didn’t lose a wink of sleep about it. Oh no – readers, Virus Cliff laughed...

Used to think that life was sweet.
Used to think we were so complete.
I can’t believe you’d throw it away.

Used to feel we had it made.
Used to feel we could sail away.
Can you imagine how I feel today.
Well it seems a long time ago you were the lonely one.
Now it comes to letting go you are the only one.
Do you know what you’ve done.
It’s so funny how we don’t talk anymore.
It’s so funny why we don’t talk anymore.
But I ain’t losing sleep and I ain’t counting sheep.
its so funny how we dont talk anymore.

The 1980s – No. 1 single, Mistletoe and Wine

Early December 1988, and Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine starts getting a bit of radioplay. On December 21^st 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie, killing 270 people. 


The child is a King, the Carollers sing,

The old has passed, there’s a new beginning.
Dreams of Santa, dreams of snow,
Fingers numb, faces aglow.


The 1990s – No. 1 single, The Millennium Prayer

By the 90s, Virus Cliff was having to face down a hugely increased techo-literacy amongst everybody from the security services to music-makers – the result being that the latter became more adept than he at synthesising hits what made idiots rich. Virus Cliff was entering a world full of antivirus software. And so he had to make the people terrified – and therefore ignorant – of all the technology, if he was to continue to rule. And thus, the Millennium Bug was born. And thus, the apocalyptic vision of the turning of a technocratic century that is the Millennium Prayer was recorded to buttress it. A sign of Virus Cliff’s decline, however: he didn’t realise that when his ‘theory’ was proved wrong, the people would fall back in love with all things digital all over again. If Virus Cliff was still firing on all cylinders, autotune wouldn’t exist...

Let all the people say Amen,
In every tribe and tongue.
Let every heart’s desire be joined,
To see the Kingdom come.

(To access a Spotify Essay-Soundtrack-Playlist to accompany the above, open your exercise books here)

FINKPOINT

THE ANTICLIFF