Bonkers Food of the Week

Another delicious Chinese snack. You will love this. We have cheese and onion crisps, they have... Chilli flavoured chicken's feet! Mmmm. You can enter a corner shop anywhere in China and buy this lovely poultry  based snack. Me being me, I simply couldn't resist. They are pretty crunchy but also a little slimy at the same time, I don't think they are as bad as most westerners make out, but I also don't really understand the culinary gusto with which Chinese people enjoy them. Amusingly enough, I read a little while ago that the enormous population of China is so keen on this snack that countries in Europe are currently looking at exporting this particular poultry off cut toward the middle kingdom. Could this be a reverse in the usual flow of primary goods signalling the changing nature of the globalised economy starting in the poultry feet industry? One can only hope.  

Bonkers Music of the Week

A quick one this week, I've been a bit busy with various things. I just want to tell you about a band from Oxford in the UK. I had this slightly barmy friend (in the best possible way, in case you're reading this!) at school whose eccentricity was matched only by his intense interest in all things musical, but particularly the esoteric side of things. I guess he had a big effect on my approach to things concerning music and food. In any case this particular band are of interest because they were not just bonkers but very technically skilled too. They were called Nought and had (as far as I remember) a bassist, guitarist, drummer and cellist. I heard that one of their major influences was Igor Stravinsky, the early to mid twentieth century composer who was famous for The Rite of Spring and The Fire Bird amongst many others. Stravinksy is known for his innovative and intense style of music that used new rhythmical and tonal forms that really pushed the boundaries of contemporary composing. I think it's fair to say that Nought did this with their guitar driven music, it was very noisy indeed but also imaginatively arranged and made with passion. It's loud guitar music but with a cello involved and clearly defined mood changes, almost like movements in a symphony. It isn't for the faint of heart or those overly keen on preserving their aural health, but it certainly is on the bonkers side of things. It shares that intensity one feels when listening to The Rite of Spring, the kind of attack that make spasms go through your body from the shock of that electricity conveyed by the music, which feels you with musical vigor. The most bonkers part of their performance that I remember is James, their guitarist, using a drill with his guitar to make cacophonous accompaniments to Nought's often frenetic sound. I found a rather amusing clip of the late John Peel talking to James about this on his show Sound of the Suburbs, for which I'll post a link below. They are well worth a listen if you can find anything by them but, as I'm sure you can imagine, they missed the number one spot by a shade of a whisker so they're a bit difficult to find, like all the best music.

  

Here it is, the hilariously twee John Peel interviewing James.

And it turns out they're not that hard to find on Youtube after all...