Well well, what a momentous week it’s been. Some brown fellow won an election in a trivial Chinese client state somewhere in the former British colonies, but far more importantly Glasgow Celtic managed a very creditable draw against Manchester United in the Champions’ League despite not actually passing the ball to one another more than half a dozen times during the entire ninety minutes. Momentous, I tell you. What a day for Scotland.

Snigger. Sorry, that was mean.

No, what I really meant was that it’s about time our side started winning elections again. There was a rash of lefty wins in the mid-nineties as Clinton and Blair won, accompanied by similar successes in France and Germany by Chirac and Schroeder. I know ‘lefty wins’ is not really the picture in retrospect, but at the time it seemed like social-democrats were winning all over the place. It’s odd, then, that as America finally shakes off the governance of fear and insularity, some of us in Europe seem rather worryingly to be embracing it: Sarkozy is a right-wing nutjob, and the Austrians have basically elected the Nazi Party. Cameron may be in a position of some strength in the UK, but he’s really far too wet and insubstantial to be considered much of anything, not that this can really be described as a good thing.

I know it’s going to take a different kind of politics to deal with the rise of the Indians and, particularly, the Chinese, who don’t seem to give a shit about anyone but themselves, but I am not sure nationalistic jingoism is quite the solution. We’ll see though.

And how about next week we try and make the prevailing topics of conversation a little lighter in tone, eh? We’ve had cultural witch hunts and dramatic elections these last two weeks, and it would be nice to get to the end of the week with nothing more grave than titties and beer on my mind, for a change.

So de-lurk, come out of the shadows, say hello and join in. And if you want to pick next Friday’s five, then email me with your picks – details on the Contact page.

1. Favourite U.S. state name.
2. First tipple of the evening.
3. Last tipple of the evening.
4. Blonde, brunette or redhead?
5. Nicest looking alphabet, with link if you can.
5 and a half. Can anyone identify that picture? Bonus points if you can.

Weddings, Parties, Anything – Father’s Day (Live)
Joe Cocker – Hitchcock Railway
Liz Green – Bad Medicine
The Fiery Furnaces – Single Again
Giant Sand – Red Right Hand

I’ve just recently heard a couple of versions of an old folk song called Barrett’s Privateers, and neither quite captured my imagination.  Two groups I know – The Men They Couldn’t Hang, whom I love, and the now defunct Australian band Weddings, Parties, Anything, whom I quite like – have covered the song, and presumably there are countless more.  Neither recording really captures the experience I once had hearing it live, and both are live recordings themselves.

The first time I actually heard the song was when The Men They Couldn’t Hang performed it at King Tut’s in Glasgow back in about 1995.  They, as is generally the way, sung it entirely unaccompanied (acapella just sounds a bit gay, I can’t call it that) and it was absolutely spine-tingling.

The song itself was written by Canadian Stan Rogers back in the 70s and tells a pretty convincing tale of a young man lured away to the sea and piracy, only to end up broken and crippled at the age of twenty-two after a brief and disastrous expedition to plunder American trading vessels in the Carribean.  The venom with which the Men They Couldn’t Hang snarled it out brought the bitterness of the song vivdily to life in a way, I suppose, that a studio recording would find it nigh on impossible to capture.

Their live recording isn’t bad, it must be said, but hearing it live was something else.  Have a listen and see if you can quite imagine what I mean:

The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Barrett’s Privateers
Weddings, Parties, Anything – Barrett’s Privateers