SOUNDTRACK: ART D’ECCO-“That’s Entertainment” (2021).
I saw Art D’ecco open a show a few years ago and I’ve become mildly obsessed with hi. I’m delighted to see that he’s getting some promotion and success.
His new album In Standard Definition is a great synth pop retro dance infusion. But in addition to that he has released two standalone covers.
This one, a cover of The Jam’s “That’s Entertainment” was a little concerning for me. This song is one of my all time favorite songs and I’m always nervous when a song like this gets covered.
But Art D’ecco does a great job. There’s acoustic guitars, a grooving bass line, cool harmony vocals and, best of all, he keeps the way the chorus offers the short “That’s” and the stretched out “en ter tain ment.” He even does the falsetto note (of course).
But what’s most enlightening about is cover is D’ecco’s voice. He seems to be stretching out of his comfort zone a little and it really shows off how good a singer her really is.
[READ: April 21, 2021] Last Human
I’m not sure what got me on my recent Red Dwarf reading kick (finding out that they had just released a new series was certainly a spark). I was sure I had read all of these books before and yet none of them were familiar to me at all.
The Grant Naylor team wrote two books and the second one ended on a cliffhanger.
Then for reasons I’m not willing to dig into, both Rob Grant and Doug Naylor each wrote a sequel to that book. But neither book is like the other and they both go in very different directions. Naylor’s book was really dark and very violent. Grant’s was also dark and very violent, but in very different ways.
The previous book ended with an old Lister being sent to a planet where everything goes backwards so that he can de-age to about the same age he was when he was on the series. They plan to meet him 36 years later at Niagara Falls.
In this book Naylor has the crew place Kochanski’s ashes on the planet Kochanski so she came back to life and she and Lister were able to live their lives backwards together for some thirty years.
But this book opens much further back–to the birth of the first humanoid.
And then it moves onto a place called Cyberia, where Lister is being taken to be passed judgment upon by His Imperial Majesty F’hnhiujsfr Dernbvjukidhgd the Unpronounceable. Lister was to stand before the Gelf Regulator: an Alberog (albatross, bear and frog). He defended himself and was soon sent to Cyberia–a jail that essentially takes over your mind and puts you in the worst place your guilty mind can think of.
Part Two opens with Dave Lister waking from Deep Sleep with a scene from “Psirens” as Lister tries to remember himself. The difference is that in the book, Kochanski is madly in love with him, so when she walks in, she immediately has sex with him (not very graphic, but surprisingly much for Red Dwarf–and a really unsexy sex scene it is).
We also learn that Naylor is the one who likes to make the space corp directive number jokes “1742? No member of the Coprs should ever report for active duty in a ginger toupee?”
The crew have been brought out of deep sleep because they have just encountered another Starbug. No check that, the same Starbug. For they are in the Omni zone where all dimensions cross.
They board the new Starbug and find that everyone on the ship has been killed (gruesomely) but there is no sign of Lister. So Kochanski decides that they should go look for him–doesn’t lister feel some sense of moral duty to himself ? No he doesn’t. He feels no connection to this other Dave at all.
Over in Cyberhell, when Lister regained consciousness, his hell was quite heavenly–lapping waters, beautifully appointed furnishings, even great music on discs. Then he saw the letter and saw that he was not supposed to be in this cyberhell. This was designed for someone else. When Dave woke again, things were less wonderful. And he was sentenced to 18 years.
There’s an interesting twist about this. The prison was specifically designed to house innocent people–people tried and found guilty for crimes they were “going to” commit. And all because ethery wanted innocent people to terraform a new planet. It’s twisted and sick and just might work.
The Rimmer plot is also really fascinating. There’s always been jokes about Rimmer and his one off affair with Yvonne McGruder. Well in this story, he impregnated her. Their own neuroses prevented them from aver talkin to each other again (a funny but sad scene). Turns out that McGruder’s son is alive and, through the mechanisms of time travel and stasis, is actually able to meet his father. All this time his mom has been telling him that Rimmer was a hero, a man of honor and respect (its not like she thought he’d ever meet his dad, right). Oh what does Rimmer have to live up to?
Cutting back to our own Lister, we get a scene from one of the episodes where Dave is set to marry a Gelf bride from the Kinitowawi tribe. There’s a lot more detail than in the show. This episodes also includes the luck virus and the oblivion virus. As well as Kryten becoming human–and the jokes that stem from that particular episode, including the double Polaroid.
The two Listers encounter each other but the other Lister is a pretty evil dude. At first it’s funny how naughty he is. But it soon becomes apparent that he is actually psychopathic. He leaves our Dave for dead on a planet and prepares to be rescued by Starbug.
The last section of the book, The Rage is all about a planet where anger has fueled a kind of raging tornado of pain. Its a pretty scary thing and our heroes have a hard time with it.
A lot went on in this story and sometimes it was convoluted. Some parts dragged on (I didn’t really like the rage sequences), but there was enough funny for me to enjoy the book quite a lot. I wonder how it would work if you took out the bits from the show and just made it a standalone novel….
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