I Miss the Nineties by The Winter Olympics

I watched Reality Bites three times last night
And it nearly made me cry.
Did we ever, honestly, actually act like that?
Wouldn’t we have just laughed at the grunge guy?

I miss the nineties
I miss the Megadrive
I miss Eric Cantona
I miss the X Files

It’s been too long since I last stared into your magic eyes
Although I never saw a thing.
Remember we stayed up all night when your Tamagotchi died?
I think a piece of me died with him.

I miss the nineties
I miss Nevermind
I miss Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
I miss Windows ‘95
I miss Bill and Ted
(They were excellent)
I miss cashing cheques in pubs
I miss singles on cassette
I miss the Millennium bug

I miss the nineties
I miss the dot com boom
I miss the Melody Maker
I miss Terminator 2
I miss the people that we were
I miss the ones we might have been
I miss the friends that we have lost
I miss the bands that we have seen.

Sing along with the video:

The Great Outdoors by The Winter Olympics

We will find a better life
Outside these city lights. Take our place with the bears and snakes
Leave our office cares behind

Let’s call a meeting with the chairman of the board
Let’s rearrange the seating for the great outdoors.
 
Let’s get pizza sent, directly to our tents.
Tell the guy to take his time.
We will return to London, Birmingham, England
When our mountains have been climbed. 

I’ll bring my harness if you bring your torch
You light my way, I’ll catch you if you fall. 

Oh! I’m all yours. 
In the great outdoors.

We’re going to make new friends
Where the motorway ends
And the mobile phones stop working.
Swap our old spreadsheets
For the fields and trees
We don’t need roads where we’re going.

Oh! I’m all yours. 
In the great outdoors.

Everyone laughed at the tortoise when he limped over the line.
Although he had been victorious, we all knew the hare hadn’t tried.
Because in his post-race interview, he seemed pleased with second place
He said, “When you reach my level, there’s no such thing as an easy race.”

Run, run, run, run. run.

Speed equals distance over time (run away, run away)
I’ll see you at the starting line.

The tortoise signed an autograph for a bored, bored looking child,
When the hare came careering past he found it hard not to smile.
Because he’d signed a deal that would keep him in the papers for weeks
And a hot shoe contract where all he had to do was sleep.

Run, run, run, run. run.

Speed equals distance over time (run away, run away)
I’ll see you at the starting line.
Speed equals distance over time (run away, run away)
I’ll see you at the starting line.

——————————————————————————

Nothing used to anger occasional Winter Olympics art director Tim West more than what he perceived to be the hip-hopification of association football. How, he wondered, would England ever win a World Cup if local councils kept selling off playing fields and the only sporting role models our children were given are lazy self-serving billionaires pretending to be Akon.

Speed Equals Distance Over Time is the story of the hare and the tortoise re-told in this modern sporting context, with the tortoise cast as heroic journeyman amateur and his floppy-eared nemesis as the diamond-earring wearing, say-nothing, money-mad modern day professional. Guess who really wins out?

Actually, that sounds shit. And it’s only partially true. Speed Equals Distance is really all about the triumph and tragedy of being in The Winter Olympics. Hell, it’s the national anthem of being in The Winter Olympics: The eight long years of back-breaking, heart-aching training and toil, the dogged persistence in the face of mass public indifference, the little victories snatched away by younger, skinnier, shittier rivals… It’s a marathon not a sprint, remember?

Getting healed in a field
With a hundred thousand people;
Phones in the air
And their backs to the speakers.
This generation
Loves its photo taken

And we’re standing at the back
Just like Stadtler and Waldorf
Secretly hoping
The whole thing is called off,
“This ain’t half bad,”
“No. It’s all awful.”

We must have prayed for rain
James says he’s never coming here again.

It’s just another Sunday
With Martin and James.

This is what we came here for.

Martin was the man of the match,
He covered every blade of the grass.
By the end of the weekend
He’d got pleurisy
And swapped his credit card
For a fiver and some e’s.

He must have played for rain.
James said he’s never coming here again.

It’s just another Sunday
With Martin and James
It’s just another Sunday
On an industrial estate

This is what we were training for.

It’s just another Sunday
With Martin and James.
It’s just another Sunday
With Thunder and Suede.

This is what we came here for
This is why we trained.

——————————————-

Sometimes flicking back through my photographs it looks like we’ve lived the last twenty years of our lives at a rock festival. And I guess to an extent we have. Every year I take the same pictures, in the same places of the same people having the same great times. The names might change now and then - new wives and girlfriends drop in and out of the frames, each festival’s best new mate gurns brightly for a bit then disappears and the bands in the background get worse and worse by the year - but the idea remains resolutely the same. There we all are, year-in-year-out, a little bit older, a little bit wider, sunburnt or soaking, having the time of our lives. Over and over and over again.

The first festival I went to with Nick Winter Olympics was in (whisper it) 1988. Monsters of Rock at Castle Donnington. Iron Maiden headlined above Kiss, David Lee Roth, Megadeth, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Helloween. We didn’t eat or drink anything all day, got pelted with bottles of piss and, tragically, two rock fans died. Without wishing to sound too flippant, It was still the greatest time we’d ever had.

Our second big outdoor show was The Stone Roses at Spike Island. There was an advert on TV recently for some dreadful Father’s day themed lad-rock cd that asked, “Does your Dad know about Spike Island?” (The same terrible advert promptly went on to ask, “Is your old man well into Weller? - Why not buy him Cigarettes and Alcohol this weekend.” (That would be a fairly reprehensible Father’s Day gift, no?)

My God, the advert made me feel a hundred years old. My Dad didn’t even know about Spike Island on the day it happened. After the whole deaths at Donnington thing it was decided that it might be a better idea for us to say that we were going to the park for a bit. Lie told and feeling pretty guilty, we drove up north and bought some Roses tickets off a football hooligan in a pub in Timperley. We didn’t eat or drink anything all day, the sound was shocking, we fell asleep in a service station on the way back and somebody rolled the car over in the car park. It was easily the best day that any of us had ever had. Again.

Additionally, it was something of a surprise (not least to old man Wagstaff) to find a centre page spread of us in the Sunday papers the next weekend, all tops off and weedy arms aloft beneath the headline ‘Summer of Love Acid Hell’ (or something).

Surprisingly, we were (just about) let out enough the next year to go to Reading 1990. It had the greatest bill I’ve ever seen: Pixies, Jane’s Addiction.. urm… The Cramps: Nick crashed his car into a field, James got arrested, we didn’t see a single band. It was (of course) easily the most amazing time we’d ever had…

You know, I hate to sound like James Murphy’s world-weary hipster from LCD’s ‘Losing my Edge’ (who am I kidding, I’d love to sound like that. Maybe then you’d buy our records). But the more I think about it, the more it seems that for most of the epoch-making rock performances in recent history, we were there.

Nirvana destroying their drum-kit and killing off heavy metal at half-past two in the afternoon at Reading 1991?  We were there. Pulp saving Glastonbury and drawing up plans for a bright new brilliant Britain in 1996? We were there. Radiohead making us forget about the floods and being better than all the other bands in 1997? We were there, we were there. (Actually if I’m being honest, I wasn’t exactly there. Instead, I was splonged off my gourd in the middle of the rave tent, desperately trying to stop telling my best straight edge friend that I was (a) utterly in love with her (b) ripped to the high tits on chemicals and Carling and (c) the gig pig, Giggle piggle, GIGGLE PIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE! Still, James saw Radiohead, though, and he said that they were good.

James said Jeff Buckley was good too. I’d not know, because he shamefully sent Nick and I out of his only UK festival appearance (Reading ninety four I think) for ‘not taking it seriously’. It’s a good thing he did too, because it was then that we met Martin - who was, at the time, colouring in a blank wristband that he’d got from somewhere in an attempt to trick security into letting him watch Cud (honestly, we weren’t only there for the good bits of rock history). Despite having a nervous look in his eye (and an arm covered in luminous pen) Marty waltzed straight into the arena. We were impressed (not by the band, they were terrible) and would soon learn that such festival heroics were commonplace when you roll with Bowman.

And that’s pretty much what Just Another Sunday is all about. We’ve had the best of times, we’ve heard of the worst of bands, and we should count ourselves very lucky to be friends with such spectacularly cool people.

Hey Houston, we’ve got a problem,
I have seen the ships and there’s hundreds of them.

An X marks the spot where we parked the car,
Where the engine stopped and we found out who we really are.

Somewhere in this universe there has to be a place for us,
I’m looking into space for us with telescopes and high hopes.
And if it gets too dangerous, we’ll have to change our names,
They’re looking in our special places, hiding in our secret bases.

They launched a probe, to tell us something we all know:
We’re not alone. And we’re never ever coming home.

Somewhere off the map I have seen your greys,
From our blanket by the lay-by plotting our escape.
Now the two of us, like scientists, experiment,
Before we disappear in history and common sense.

So make like a star and come out tonight.
She said, “They died a million years ago, and we’ve just now seen the light,
And the aliens abducting us know the Earth’s too small for both of us,
But they need to see that we’re just leaving ‘cause we’ve got nothing to believe in”.

They launched a probe, to tell us something we all know:
We’re not alone. And we’re never ever coming home.

Feeling European by The Winter Olympics

Girl you know I’d love you like a holiday.
I’m packing the essentials and I’ve got my money changed.
I’ve been thumbing through the guide books,
I’ve been studying the map
To find your points of local interest
And take you off the beaten track.

SHA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAA

Well it wasn’t quite the holiday that you had planned,
You said I couldn’t find the campsite and my sleeping bag was damp.
But I bought a brand new phrase book
And baby by tonight,
I’ll have learnt a million ways to say
That I can blow your mind.

SHA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAA

When we go to sleep this evening we’ll be feeling European,
We’ll be steeped in history and swimming in warm beer,
I’ll be staring at your architecture and staggered by your art,
But worried that the politics will tear us both apart.

I’ve got to get away, on holiday, on an aeroplane.

Kolle alaaf you. Kolle alaaf you.

Back in 2003   (you remember 2003, right? David Sneddon, t.A.T.u and Fatman Scoop were all massive) The Winter Olympics took refuge in Cologne in Germany. The band had such a good time (getting played in local clubs, losing at electronic darts to the local big gay truckers, predominantly drinking beer and eating a lot of meat) that they wrote a song about it.

The phrase “Kolle, alaaf you!” from the song’s chorus was the closing line from a speech given by the visiting John F Kennedy in June 1963. It wasn’t quite German, but the 350,000 strong Cologne crowd he drew took the compliment to their hearts. Too right, as well, it’s a great place.

When they returned to the UK the band decamped to a studio in the middle of Wales (where My Bloody Valentine recorded Isn’t Anything) and attempted to put the song down on tape with the bass player out of Hawkwind. A week later they returned with ten minutes of barely listenable man disco and this picture of Martin riding a pig. Thoroughly embarrassed, the band disowned the song for the next five years until their new producer Paul Hollingsworth talked them into jamming out a version beneath the Bedford Park pub in an attempt to, “get a level”. He got a little more than he bargained for as he and the band birthed a bold new blueprint for a brave new European…

The song featured on the ‘Now Hear This’ CD mounted on the November 2010 issue of Word Magazine. The one with Frank Zappa on the cover.

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I’ve been checking your records, I’ve been flicking through your DVDs,
I’ve been looking at your bookshelves, I’ve been thumbing through your magazines.
I’ve been staring at your ceiling every weekend for the last four weeks,
I’ve been trying to fight this feeling, I’ve been trying to get some sleep, because,

The first time you passed out
The second time you kicked me out
The third time we don’t talk about
This is the fourth time I’ve been in your house.

After I kissed you in the kitchen, you said that we could just be friends.
Is there a meeting I’ve been missing? I swore I wasn’t coming here again.
But now I’m standing in your wardrobe, and you’re coming through the door.
You’re not supposed to be back this early. I thought that Thursday was your course.

The first time you passed out
The second time you kicked me out
The third time we don’t talk about
This is the fourth time I’ve been in your house.

Attention All Departments by The Winter Olympics

Attention all departments. Attention all departments.
I’m going to a party and it’s going to be amazing.
There’ll be pretty girls in glasses, actresses and artists.
And if I’m in late tomorrow, I’ll blame it on the trains.

Attention all departments. Attention all departments.
We’re going to get retarded on this cheap champagne.
We’ll be making friends and and lovers in the stationery cupboard
Dancing to the covers that the band decide to maim.

There’s going to be a party band
And all the secretaries are going to understand
Tonight, we’re dancing with the management,
Dishing out the dance punishment.

Let’s talk about work, baby.
Instead of you and me.
Let’s talk about all your budgetary requirements
Your health and your safety.

There’s going to be a party band
And all the secretaries are going to understand
Tonight, we’re dancing with the management,
Dishing out the dance punishment.