My first car was a 20-year-old Renault 5. Bought new by my parents in 1976, it came with all the decade’s quirks – apple green body colour, faux leather (i.e. plastic) seats, thatched effect for the ceiling, a luxury spec featuring cigarette lighter and one of those analogue dial radios.
But even after two decades, it was easy to see the car’s original appeal: with VW’s Beetle its only real rival, the 5 was tailor-made for young families.
In 2009 so is Sandero.
There’s an odd hint of familiarity as two figures – cloaks flapping the wind – stand on a rocky outcrop, the camera swooping over the waves towards them. Moments later, inside a cave, the wizened old man bellows a spell, his flowing white hair and matching beard silhouetted against a sea of flames. And when a mass of pale, skeletal figures with big eyes creep up from the water (is that you Gollum?), it’s clear that ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ has ‘Lord Of The Rings’-scale ambitions.
“What was it that you slipped inside my drink?/ Maybe poison?” Jon Savage demands on the enigmatic fist-pumper ‘Who Do You Trust’.
No need to be so paranoid, man. His group’s second album – a quietly confident collection of steroid-enhanced stadium rockers, sleek pop anthems, and genuinely heartfelt ballads – is what few others achieve: intelligent, adventurous and damn near impossible to get out of your head.
Amid a blurred frenzy of helicopter gunships, airborne cars, cluster bombs, barked military orders, missiles, scattered brick and mortar, tanks, frantic shouting, the wanton destruction of ancient landmarks, that patriotic American music, and giant robots auditioning for the WWE, somewhere in the Egyptian desert, balding, overweight 50-something suburban dad Ron Witwicky runs for his life.
“I don’t know what’s going on!” he gasps.
Don’t worry, man, nor do we. And don’t even bother asking the director.
Hangovers suck. Your eyeballs raped by sunlight. The shagpile-carpet tongue. The squash court inside your skull. That urge to gulp all the water in the toilet bowl. The acid whirlpool spiralling in your belly. The urgent need to die.
Still, it’s nothing a greasy breakfast, another bottle of vodka, or Romanian tripe soup can’t fix.
Less easy to deal with: waking up in a trashed Las Vegas hotel room, a tiger in the loo, unknown baby in the closet, a friend disappeared, no recollection of the wild night before, and help from Gil Grisom’s CSI team strangely unforthcoming.
Depeche Mode, reasons driving force Martin Gore, are “a subversive pop band, able to get away with anything”. Theirs have always been twisted songs of faith and devotion, sex and death. Musically not much has changed either, the past decade spent trying to reach the heights of best work ‘Violator’ and ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’.
Yes, South Africa’s in its first recession in over a decade. The global economy looks about as healthy as Gary Busey. But, not unlike food and water, fast, expensive cars remain an absolute necessity. Here are SA’s most exclusive.
“You are not special,” Chuck Palahniuk once spat onto a page. “You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”
Brutal, perhaps, but what else would you expect from a book as ragged as ‘Fight Club’? And he does have a point. If we’re all as unique as Oprah and Dr Phil tell us, why are our choices always the same: life or death, chicken or beef, Yaris or Polo?
With Toyota and VW’s littlest cars more common than potholes on the N1, it’s easy to forget there are other options. Like the Suzuki Swift, a car that gets the priorities right.
They’ve split infinitives to boldly go where no man has gone before. They’ve battled aliens more plasticky than Michael Jackson. They’ve single-handedly kept the polyester industry in business. They’ve pranced about on worlds of paper mache and polystyrene. They’ve even saved the bloody whales.
But never before have the crew of USS Enterprise punched as hard, kicked as fast, warped as far, and blown up as much as they do now.
Larry Mullen pounds away like the Eveready Bunny on speed. Adam Clayton’s fingers stampede up and down his bass guitar’s fretboard. With his amp dialled up to 11, The Edge fires off savage riffs of mass destruction. U2’s misfiring ‘Get On Your Boots’ certainly relies on a shock and awe approach. And yet what hits hardest is an almost throwaway line from Bono: “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations.”
And, for most of the band’s 12th studio album, the man who never shuts up about poverty, Aids, third world debt and wars between nations actually keeps his word. The Big Themes are edged out by character studies of ordinary people, himself (“Napoleon in high heels”), and, clearly unable to ditch the political entirely, an Afghan man wounded in a bomb blast.
Nils van der Linden