Musical taste is a contentious topic. Perhaps not as contentious as running a major international sporting event amidst large scale (and at times violent) popular protest, but hey, I’m not here to talk about that. I don’t even know what that is, and if I did (which I don’t) I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
Music is personal and subjective; people are liable to get pretty irked if you start talking about how what they like isn’t very good and why your taste is better.
So, because I enjoy it people calling me an idiot in the comments section of this article, I’m going to talk about music, applying my (totally subjective) taste in it throughout and passing lots of judgements.
I’ve already made clear my feelings on Sky’s theme song – a soulless piece of ‘music for people who don’t like music’ called Drive. Drive, you know, like you do in a car? Geddit? It’s actually very clever.
The song isn’t clever though. It’s more middle of the road than Nico Rosberg defending from Lewis Hamilton. Or Nico Rosberg defending from Fernando Alonso. Or Nico Rosberg defending from his own shadow.
But it’s not just Drive – the new F1 broadcaster has been laying the tunes in thick throughout their coverage. Every feature in the pre-race has a song to accompany it, most of which make me feel old, out of touch and quite glad of it.
But Bahrain also saw them pick their first ‘good’ piece of music, with a Talking Heads’ track making an appearance as the intro to a piece on Rosberg. However their choice of Once in a Lifetime to soundtrack Nico’s maiden win doesn’t imply great faith in the German repeating his Chinese triumph.
That was followed by some dance music (the type listened to exclusively by Italians wearing gilets), more dance music (the kind girls from Rotherham dance around their handbags to in nighclubs while their boyfriends fight on the high street) and a bit more dance music (the kind that has made David Guetta inexplicably wealthy). Am I asking too much to hope for a fifteen minute shoegaze piece detailing every occasion on which Narain Karthikeyan was lapped during the race?
The musical subplots were everywhere. During his track guide (which co-starred Michael Schumacher, who has rubbish taste in music) Brundle delivered his classic ‘hug the apex like your favourite granny’ line.
Brundle dropping that much-loved vox pop again is like the Rolling Stones bashing out Satisfaction for the thousandth time. He can barely mean it any more, having said it so many times, just as Mick Jagger no longer has any thought of ‘satisfaction’ when he sings that song. All he really wants is a cup of cocoa and his leg blanket.
The last of the coverage I managed was Brundle, Simon Lazenby and Damon Hill entering the noisy celebrations of the Red Bull garage. Hill of course used to play in a band, and obviously that beard of his is inhabited by the spirit of late Beatle George Harisson. He didn’t say anything interesting about music though.
The Red Bull lads were playing their usual post-victory celebration tunes, the genre of which seemed to confuse Lazenby. As he entered he described it as ‘trance music’ in a way that made him sound like a middle-aged businessman who’d somehow found himself inside a dark room in a Brixton warehouse with music blaring at 4am.
Fortunately he wasn’t. He was in a desert in Bahrain, which for one week was thrust centre stage but will subsequently fade from everyone’s memory like a one hit wonder. You might hear it in the background now and again but it’s unlikely to register.
NOTES
* This week’s GP Hangover was brought to you – or more specifically me – by a delicious Kenyan beer that I can’t recall the name of.
* I wish I didn’t have to be so harsh on Alistair Griffin and his ‘song’ but it’s just so bland. Sorry Al.
* A bit of shoegaze (which is perhaps best exemplified by My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, one of the best albums ever written ever) would be a great soundtrack to Narain’s F1 career: slow, expensive and ultimately a bit baffling.
* Mick Jagger is of course still as driven by his own desire to be satisfied as ever – perhaps even more. He does love cocoa though.
*I’ve never been to Rotherham and have nothing against it, though like any British settlement with a nightclub it’s bound to have dancing girls and fighting men. And the Chuckle Brothers.
* The spirit of former Beatle George Harisson has better things to do than haunt Damon Hill’s beard. It is more likely that he floats around Ringo Starr’s house tilting all of the pictures to a slight angle.
* As this article’s deadline came (and went) I noticed that blandness personified Maroon 5, Katy Perry (who I wouldn’t recognise if she slapped me and screamed “I’m Katy Perry”) and irrelevant eighties relics Bananarama, the Proclaimers and the Pretenders will play at this year’s Singapore GP concert. I despair.
