Lamb and the Lion

I had a good time today listening to the George Lamb show. It's not often you'll hear me say that - like 99% of the rest of listeners to 6 Music, I find listening to his wide-boy thicko approach to radio presenting frankly unlistenable, and for a radio show dependent on it's listeners knowing their onions, and having a two-way correspondence of music adoration and the spirit of sharing, having an offensively ignorant buffoon running one of the flagship lunchtime shoes, his hiring at the end of last year is a weird and unpleasant experience. I didn't hear the whole show, simply because I just can't do it, but I found out when I got home from Maplins and Wilkinson, that Lamb had Stephin Merritt in the studio playing a couple of songs, and an interview. The results were incredible.


All Lamb's interviews are conducted in exactly the same way: The musician or band in question sit in a room adjacent, one presumes, to his normal studio. A one-on-one interaction occurs and is recorded for our amusement. Due to his general lack of knowledge of who he's talking to or what day it is, Lamb obviously reads questions off a hastily cobbled-together set of crib sheets, that aren't so much a biography as a set of pathetic DIY did-you-know? trivia, which Lamb basically reads from, instead of engaging the performer in question. Today's was undoubtedly one of the best. Stephin Merritt, who is pretty renowned for his wit as dry as a desert and bleakly romantic and deadpan nature was the perfect nemesis for this inane banter. The best thing about the interview was just how quickly Merritt twigged that Lamb was a blathering idiot, and almost by the second question, he was down to single word responses, by question five he was shooting quick-fire smart-alec responses. "You released 69 Love songs, it was a triple CD" - "it still is" and then a preposterous talk about going to hang out in a record store in London "what now?" - Merritt. It was excruciating, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out during the course of the 5 minute epic of awkwardness, where my sympathy should lean. On the one hand, I've been an admirer of Stephin Merritt, and 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields is pretty much unsurpassed as a classic album, so it was unpleasant hearing him trying to turn up, talk about music, and then perform two of his songs, only to be subjected to 'yoof' radio. But on the other hand, it was unbearable, buttock-clenching listening to a interview car crash in full top-spin, with pretty much every word coming out of Lamb's mouth being a through-the-fingers moment. It was like an indie rock edition of Knowing Me, Knowing You. I had pangs of sympathy for George Lamb, again not something I'll say often, but he was no match for the snarling, wild fire wit of Merritt, he couldn't have been more out of his depth if he was a baby in a sack of snakes
At one point they were discussing one of the instruments that Merritt plays, the bouzouki, which of course was met with a predictable gag from Lamb about bazookas, and then after he drooled "what's that then" Merritt told him it was an 8 string instrument with a gourd", Lamb uttered the immortal "how do you play it, do you blow on it?". This was followed by a glorious miscommunication in which Lamb mistook Merritt's answer of "carry-on" (regarding an instrument size) for a irritated utterance "oh, carry on!" and then
hen came a hopeless non-conversation in which Lamb jabbered on about people on housing estates, and how Merritt should show a little love for his music mentor, in which the two parties involved couldn't have understood each other less. "What, like Throbbing Gristle?' was the point at which both parties gave up. But any confusion over where my sympathy was lying was washed away with the rain after the interview finished, where Lamb and his gathering of yes-men, slobbering dogs who sit around him in the studio like a professional WKD advert, all decided Merritt was a wanker, and admitted they were trying really hard not to laugh in his face, which is, I think, about as offensive, rude and pathetic as humanity gets. But the joke was obviously on Lamb, because this ten minute snapshot of the decline of media presenting in Britain, did nothing except highlight his own ineptitude, slack approach to interviewing, and God Bless Stephin Merritt, who not only endured, and outwitted on an enormous magnitude, he also performed two songs solo, with just a ukulele, as he does on stage, beautifully and impeccably, even though his voice is so deep now you can probably hear it through the ground in the next city. He did The Nun's Litany, off Distortion, which was great because he doesn't sing that on the album, and The Book of Love, which I think is the closest The Magnetic Field have had to popular recognition, and that's only because Peter Gabriel covered it on the soundtrack to Shall We Dance. Someone should make a film of this meeting of minds, though. It worked for Frost/Nixon, this is just a slightly more quirky encounter.


It's still raining. If only weather weren't such a lazy metaphor for mood, otherwise I'd write a paragraph here about the different in the weather between Winchester and Cardiff. I'm going camping on the Gower tomorrow until Sunday. Lucky I'm not scared of drowning.