by Peter Moore

Number Eighteen – John Lennon: Stand By Me

God knows our generation has more than enough problems to trouble us. But, to brighten our minds for a moment, it’s well worth being thankful that we were born at the end of the twentieth century and not a hundred or so years beforehand. Not merely because we would all have been expected to pull our socks over our trousers and set off towards the mud and bullets of Flanders, but also because we would have had to stand for the abysmal state of popular music.

The worst horrors of the X-Factor included, there is little about today that couldn’t trump the songs of the early 1900s. Titles such as ‘Oh, stop your tickling Jock’, ‘Every nice girl loves a sailor’ and ‘Pop goes the weasel’ abounded. And, if I want to amuse myself for a moment, I imagine a heavily moustachioed Simon Cowell nodding his head along to a lively rendition of Tipperary from some rugged second lieutenant or other, hoping to jolly well sing his way out of the trenches.

Imagine the collective wave of relief then, which humankind must have felt all those years later when Rock n’ Roll came along. The image of thousands of teenagers on either side of the Atlantic fiddling delicately with their wirelesses, their ears pressed to the crackling speaker trying for all their life to catch the rhythms, the lyrics and the twanging guitars of Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and the Comets or Elvis has become an enduring one.

Amongst that generation of Baby Boomers who grew up to be the mods and rockers of the 1960s, was a shabbily dressed drop out from the Liverpool School of Art named John Lennon. As one of the centuries most important, more influential and most complex personalities, there are hundreds of different books waiting to be written about Lennon. But leaving to one side for the moment The Beatles, the protests, the drugs, the politics and the preaching, I want to use today’s Vibe Box to suggest that at the heart of Lennon’s formidable personality lay an enduring and profound love for the raw energy of early Rock and Roll.

You can accuse me of folly for taking a great songwriter such as Lennon, and then not choosing one of his original songs. But despite the fact that I am keeping The Beatles in reserve for another day, there is something about this song which supports the argument I’m making. Because if we all admit to being at our most emotionally vulnerable when our long-term relationships break up, then we have to admit that our behaviour at about that time is usually most revealing.

Some might want to contact certain reliable friends, others might want to head directly to the pub, some will scoot straight off to their parents’ house and some of my female friends seem content to collapse in front of a television and devour large quantities of ice cream. Well, it’s perhaps telling then that when John Lennon split with Yoko Ono during the early seventies, he headed straight off to Los Angeles, stocked a mansion to the rafters with gin, whiskey and vodka before setting about recording a Rock n’ Roll album. In it, he included this version of the 1961 soul hit, Stand By Me.

MOVIE REVIEW
Quarantine (Spain release 9 January 2009)

by Tim Anderson

For those who remember the creepy Spanish film from last year [REC], you may be surprised to see a remake out so quickly, but then it’s Hollywood, so making a quick buck is never a long conversation. So here it is, repackaged for the Americans as Quarantine, an atmospheric and sometimes gory horror flick, which relies on its hand-held camera direction to create the tension and shocks rather than any logical sense of story development.
Reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) takes on the story of her childhood dreams to follow around a fire crew on a typical night shift in downtown LA. Things go swimmingly until they receive a distress call from an apartment block where screams have been heard from one of the apartments. What follows is a discovery that takes the story into a question of survival and escape as Angela and her faithful cameraman record the all the action of the unfolding events.

Seen solely through the reporting cameraman’s lens, there are direct influences from The Blair Witch Project which so successfully captured the claustrophobic atmosphere and nervous hands of the recorder in setting the scene. The pacing is steady, and while the explanations merely confuse each other, thankfully more time is spent watching characters is panic freefall.

Quarantine is great undemanding horror entertainment. After leaving, I found myself quickly questioning why some characters and plot twists happened (surely it’s easier to run without trying to film the guy chasing you!) but instead of noticing the holes greater than a Wall Street balance sheet, I decided to revel in its generally well acted and moody flow. A few jumps and shocks is all you really ask for seeing this film, and it’s all you really get.

by Tim Anderson

In August, Zara, the fashion phenomenon from Galicia, overtook GAP to become the world’s leading fashion retailer.

In an extraordinary year of growth, the Spanish giant increased sales by 25% in 2007. Their recent growth was so strong that it allowed it to overtake long standing numero uno GAP at the top of the table. How much is that worth? 2.22 Billion Euros in jackets, coats, t-shirts, pants and accessories. And that was only in the first 3 months of 2008.

Started in the late 1970, Zara revolutionized the fashion industry by changing the distribution model. Where normally a fashion house would try to predict the coming season’s style 6 months in advance so that it could design, have made and then distribute their designs to their stores, Zara cut the cycle down to just 2 weeks so that it could instantly respond to changes in the market and get clothes out into the stores before the trend disappeared. It also meant that they were rarely left with excess stock because they could replace a failing line with something better in such a short time without having to make massive pre-orders.

Zara’s reclusive owner Amancio Ortega, who shuns the limelight and rarely interviews, still lives and breathes his fashion behemoth from his home outside La Coruña, in Galicia. His policy of investing in more stores rather than spend on advertising has made Zara a label of envy around the fashion world.

It’s just a shame that they don’t have more excess stock, the New Year sales won’t be so great for us!