Fredrick Forsyth ‘the 4th Protocol’
Not quite Le Carre amount of nuance but great
Charity shop hardback FF trilogy so it weighs a ton
This was a great read.
Top read! Morris is great fun!. Could chat for hours. Has the most psychedelic trousers in the business too
“I don’t know, but John Peel is his fucking roadie” lol
Music is not for me but good on her!
Just read ‘The Dogs of War’ - he writes in such a matter of fact way with so much detail - I reckon I could invade a small African republic now after reading it.
Yep, same, I started reading it ready to mock and seethe at the state of dance music these days 
but came away from it liking her, she’s making people happy and seems a decent sort.
Any excuse
The world is such a shitstorm, I really struggle to get annoyed about people enjoying any music these days
Yeah. I have my Dave Clarke old man shouts at cloud moments but I’m trying to be nice these days 
re: Guardian article. The UK market found most 80s European pop pretty comical but I often thought that did the music a disservice. Personally, I hated the ‘irony’ that followed in the 90s… Eurotrash, the new ‘knowing’ Eurovision, St Etienne ‘he’s on the phone’…
Your Littlejohns on Fleet Street went loco about Sabrina’s tits as though she was some one-off freak cabaret act that had landed off a porno. But if you watched Spanish or Italian tv at the time, there were hundreds of similar women making records or crooners with greased back hair, miming along to backing tracks on late night tv, whilst some cornball presenter with a parrot on his shoulder read out lottery numbers.
The point is this stuff was pretty banal and the music was ubiquitous, filling up counterfeit compilation tapes locked away in cabinets outside petrol stations. The Brits would only ever stumble across a small % of it by accident in the resort discos.
In UK media, there was never any serious analysis of the fact artists across Europe were:
A. singing in a foreign language (which only ABBA really managed to conceal)
B. exposed to a completely different media and musical history (only France had anything like a comparable black music tradition)
C. in some cases emerging out of dark age dictatorships and still finding their way culturally, often enthralled by UK/US music but without the social context
D. not as invested in the history or sanctity of pop culture in anything like the same way as a macho British music media still trading off the Beatles and every ‘iconic’ yoof scene thereafter.
which is why I get a bit annoyed by listicles smirking at comedy foreigner holiday records, because they’re often plucked out of the air without any context given to the time and place they were made
I do remember a lot of these fondly from the kids discos on package holidays as a kid
Desireles - Voyage Voyage is still a tune in my book
Oh yeah, there were some great 1HW’s!
Very well put!