The great thing about Saturday nights during the summer is that there are no football highlights on TV (unless you count the dozens of live World Cup matches we’ve had but, come on, you know what I’m saying). It frees me up to watch other things instead.
Netflix tried to force me to watch Alley Cats, which looks like a terrible show designed specifically for Ricky Gervais to achieve his wet dream of saying the worst possible things in a vaguely legitimate way (an ambition that he’s already been able to fulfil many times over in his career, it’s worth pointing out). Actual alley cats would only amuse each other by using the likeness of Ricky Gervais to say the worst possible things to each other in the most legitimate way anyway, so all’s fair in war.
Instead I cracked on Legends, of which I knew very little. Set in 1990, I was one of the many inevitable bores who noticed that during an opening scene (in which a young lad dies from drug abuse at a house party) N-Trance’s Set You Free was filling my ears.
They blow a wad on production, and go to the trouble of making sure all the street scenes are incredible accurate, including the reg plates of all the innocuous vehicles in the background, and they make a boob like that. Tut, tut.
I think the series is great, but I’m easily influenced by the soundtrack which, being from 1990, is incredible. That N-Trance track is an absolute banger. From the gentle tickling of a piano set against the sound of thunder to the moment the rapid beat kicks in, it’s everything I imagine a pill head in Liverpool would’ve craved had it been released three years earlier. Out of every record I own, and of every song I have on my Spotify playlists, few deliver a better vocal performance than Set You Free.
Naturally you have the The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, and The Jesus and Mary Chain, plus Cocteau Twins (a personal favourite of mine). The series is gripping by itself, but the soundtrack just reeled me in further. Oh to have been old enough to have enjoyed the dance, trance, house and rave scenes at the time! The irony being, of course, that I’ve never touched any Clarky Cat, Triple Sod, Zoopy Sleepers, or Cake.
Just taking it one episode at a time, Gary. The series is a marathon, not a sprint. Resting up tonight, then we go again tomorrow, and all that malarkey.
I still had time to kill so I sat down to watch Lady Macbeth afterwards on BBC2. Having studied Macbeth at school, I thought I’d have some of that! Turns out it’s not about Lady Macbeth, but patriarchal oppression (that old chestnut). Don’t judge a production by its title, that’s what they say (unless it’s Ricky Gervais’s Alley Cats).