Pete's Pad: September

I’m going to start this with something I had prepared and then completely forgot to include last month - which is probably for the best anyway, as August was pretty hectic.

Resident Advisor reached 1,000 podcasts and stuck them all up on a dedicated website. To run a weekly mix series long enough to reach that many episodes is a seriously impressive achievement, so despite recent indiscretions, I say fair play to RA. And a second doff of the cap in terms of how they've celebrated the milestone, first splitting he 999th into several superb sets - I particularly enjoyed Prosumer & Peach's one - before celebrating with 10 truly standout mixes - I genuinely like them all, but particular credit must go to sourcing the Frankie Knuckles archive tape and marathon old set from Andrew Weatherall and DJ Harvey.

Looking back through the ridiculously-prolific archive, I've picked a few more RA mixes I've particularly enjoyed over the last 20 years.

The series started strong, with the first 50 including some of my favourite DJs around that 2005-2007 period: Digitalism, Dominik Eulberg, Ewan Pearson, Will Saul, Ryan Elliott, M.A.N.D.Y and Dixon.

The quality didn't really drop off for the next few hundred, with some of my favourites including Optimo's JD Twitch (RIP), Underworld, Todd Terje, Laurent Garnier, Derrick Carter, Johnno Burgess, Danny Howells, DJ Koze and Bill Brewster.

Scrolling through this enormous list really is a who's who of dance music and the consistently decent taste of whoever's commissioning things at RA. Fundamentally it's a great resource for anyone looking to adequately soundtrack an afterparty, commute, long train journey, study session, or as I have been the last few weeks, making the day job sound great.

Anyway, I'll plough on with some gems from the next few hundred entries: Erol Alkan does Disco 3000, Ivan Smagghe, Caribou, peak Daniel Avery, Trentemoller, James Holden, Joy Orbison, a young Midland, Kerri Chandler and maybe my favourite ever Andy Weatherall mix - and we're not even half-way through yet.

Things peter off a bit in the 500s, as it seems all the big hitters have had their turn, but that precipitates a shift towards more gender diversity, with great mixes by the likes of the then Black Madonna, Peggy Gou, Nightwave, Jamz Supernova, Jayda G, Eris Drew and Octo Octa. Also worth mentioning the nine-hour funk marathon B2B between Motor City Drum Ensemble and Jeremy Underground, this set by Kornel Kovacs and a tidy three-hours from Craig Richards.

Post-pandemic we get into pretty consistently obscure and odd territory (or maybe I'm just getting old and out of touch), with a few diamonds in the rough in the form of Fort Romeau, Sofia Kourtesis, Man Power, Lukas Wigflex, Barker and Binh.

Do tell me if I've missed a superlative set somewhere in there - I’ve been nowhere near comprehensive.

So that’s you sorted for sets, back to the usual stuff I’ve watched on telly.

Sky Cinema served up a few arty blockbusters this month, which I duly gave my attention to.

I really like Adrien Brody, I’m a big fan of Guy Pearce, and I also love Bauhaus school of design, so The Brutalist should be a slam dunk, but man is it slow moving. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, but when and why did directors and editors become so self indulgent? The myth of the American dream for post-war immigrants and the difficulties of Jewish integration could have been told perfectly well in about half the time.

Similarly, I quite like the Eggers oeuvre, and Nosferatu has all his hallmark directorial flair, but without the originality of things like The Witch and The Northman. It’s lovely to look at, with clever use of light and dark, but using such hackneyed source material disengaged me from the story somewhat. In keeping with previous work, the film is enjoyably grisly, but this time there’s a definite strain of camp silliness. Nicholas Hoult, something of an old hand at Dracula dramas now, certainly does a good line in looking scared and the Depp child has a decent exorcist impression in her.

Over on Film 4, you can currently watch River, an odd wee film where time begins looping in two minute increments at an old inn near Kyoto, with the staff and a few guests responding to the anomaly in charmingly Japanese ways. So it’s all very polite (the reaction to a guy wearing a towel seems quite extreme) to begin with, before they all start losing it and a forbidden love story blossoms. It’s clearly made on a budget, but the movie progresses at pace and is quite inventive with an increasingly tired trope. 

A significantly tougher watch - but nonetheless fascinating is watching and hearing (the sound design is brilliantly immersive) someone go deaf, in The Sound of Metal. I’ll give anything Riz Ahmed is in a go, and he’s excellent as ever in this. I went in assuming it was going to be about him getting back into drumming via vibrations or something, but it’s a far more complex and ambiguous tale than that - and probably the better for it.

Not a new film, but one I came across while idly scrolling the TV guide, I happily fell under the spell of Life is Beautiful again. Roberto Begnini is simply superb as Guido, bantering his way through Mussolini’s Italy and then doing his best to shield his son from a concentration camp. Much like Chaplin’s the Great Dictator, it reveals the fallibility of fascism via humour - there’s so many delightful slapstick scenes, comedic callbacks and witticisms. The conclusion is devastating in its brevity, but ultimately - in line with the title - it’s just a beautiful piece of work. It also inspired me to go back and finish off that Joe Wright series about Il Duce, which, for all its unpleasantness, is a really impressive piece of work.

Now time for a few documentaries, starting off with aka Charlie Sheen, a long overdue sit-down with the remarkably long-sober and apparently cogent actor. Given most of the latter controversy was live-streamed or covered intensively, some of the most interesting stuff came early on when recounting his interesting childhood. There’s a fair bit of foreshadowing, but in the first of several deviations from the usual ‘star goes off the rails’ theme, his upbringing - while unconventional - seems full of love and happiness. Unsurprisingly, given his nepo-credentials, his career really took off quickly and the classic combo of inflated ego, plenty of money and the ability to largely get away with things, had predictable outcomes. The way he channeled his fathers Apocalypse Now performance in Platoon was impressive so early on, and he was also perfectly cast in Wall Street, but apart from Hot Shots capturing his comedy talents, his career feels pretty barren. Which makes how famous he continues to be all the more bizarre. The testosterone and TMZ period is particularly difficult to watch, much like the train-wreck spectator sport of someone like Britney’s breakdown, although the way his dealer weaned him off crack is absurdly amusing. I still don’t understand how he’s alive, sober and looking so good, but fair play for charming his way back into the zeitgeist once again. That does come with its annoyances though, as while the whole thing is portrayed as no-holes-barred truth telling - with the big reveal being he’s had sex with some men - it neatly glosses over the many accusations of domestic violence, restraining orders and lack of proper parenting.

Back to Britain for some proper doc-making, in the form of Covid Contracts: Follow the Money. Many journalists, lawyers, campaigners and whistle-blowing civil servants have done fine work in the last five years to expose the monumental mismanagement of the UK Government’s pandemic PPE and lateral flow test procurement programme. This ITV programme does a good job of rounding all that up and straightforwardly presenting the infuriating corruption of the VIP lane, which let already rich Conservative Party pals get even richer, making huge profit margins on often unusable equipment - especially when genuine UK- based PPE specialists were trying to supply, but via the normal channels. The amount of over-buying and therefore unused stock having to be literally burned is also particularly galling. While the Coronavirus crisis was genuinely unprecedented and some margin for error could be forgiven, the sheer cost to the taxpayer is just staggering - especially given how much better the money could have been spent across the NHS.

On a lighter note, Michael Palin’s continued thirst for adventure is admirable, and if the Beeb isn’t going to fund this explorations then fair play to Channel 5 for stepping up and sending him to the ‘most dangerous country in South America’. As is so often the case, he sees much of the best of Venezuela, contrary to the reporting that filters through to us. But you do start to question the wisdom of sending a man in his eighties into notorious barrios, gang-controlled rural regions and shake-downs with government security services. Much like his trip around Iran, it’s fascinating to see the country and hear from its people, and I’m not going to begrudge the best Python a few more trips before he finally retires.

Another month, another apocalyptic drama to push, this time its The Eternaut, a belated recommendation from Gwilym Mumford who puts together what’s left of the Guardian Guide each week. He was pointing out a trend for localised dystopia, with this Argentinian series playing out through the lens of the country’s political climate, as collectivism in the face of disaster is seen by some as a shot against at the new, hyper-individualist rightwing government. As the review explains, the show is based on a 1950s comic strip of the same name, which proved eerily predictive of the civil unrest and lurch into authoritarianism that would beset the country in the following decades. In the show the unrest stems from a mysterious deadly snow, while in real life it was in response to a military dictatorship, but the effects are similar: paranoia and vigilantism.

No smooth way to segue from that to David Tennant as Nick Davies and Toby Jones as Alan Rusbridger trying to give the phone hacking scandal the ITV drama treatment. The Hack told with a sense of humour and some choice forth wall breaking, but I wonder whether the general public are going to be as bothered about this saga, given it’s lacking any destitute posties or salt of the earth struggle. I can certainly empathise with a stressed journalist trying to pull a story together with nobody willing to go on the record, but it all feels a bit ‘inside Fleet St’.

And finally, one of the nation’s finest broadcasters, Melvyn Bragg, is leaving one of the finest radio shows/podcasts, In Our Time. Such a simple format: pick a thing, get some experts in, ask them questions. But it takes Bragg’s inquisitive nature and skill as an interviewer to get the best out of it. So many episodes to recommend, but have yourself a browse of this archive someone’s assembled and pick something that interests you.