The massive disco ball which stands on the prom at Blackpool, just south of the Pleasure Beach. From last Autumn’s trip, but with the weather this week showing a few chinks in winter’s armour, it seems apt.

“Inspired by Mayor John Bickerstaffe’s visit to the Eiffel Tower in 1889, it survived a fire at the top eight years later and was largely rebuilt in 1921-4 because cheapskate owners had failed to use rust-proof paint. Mistaken for a lighthouse, it lured the Norwegian barque Abana ashore in 1894. With good binoculars, her fragmentary remains at low tide off Little Bispham form part of the middle-distance view.”

Previous posts on Blackpool on The Wired Jester.

Yes, what if? Well, wonder no more – this very odd picture (which may or may not be photoshopped) was used by the Guardian to illustrate a story about how there’s apparently an inverse correlation between the stability of the stock markets and the regularity of beats in pop songs:

“Beyoncé’s worldwide hit, Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), is not just catchy – it may spell doom for international finance.

According to findings by Phil Maymin, professor of finance and risk engineering at New York University, the more regular the beat on Billboard’s top singles, the more volatile the American markets. After studying decades of Billboard’s Hot 100 hits, Maymin found that songs with low “beat variance” had an inverse correlation with market turbulence. Which is to say, the more regular the song, the crazier the stock market.

And Single Ladies is very regular.”

Cue dramatic music. The meme of a link between turmoil and culture is old of course – why else would a researcher even be looking at this field – and is expressed in a well known speech by Harry Lime in The Third Man:

Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The Wikipedia entry reveals the line wasn’t in Graham Greene’s speech, but was added by Orson Welles:

Greene wrote in a letter (Oct. 13, 1977) “What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence.” Welles apparently said the lines came from “an old Hungarian play”; the painter Whistler, in a lecture on art from 1885… said, “The Swiss in their mountains … What more worthy people! … yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box!”

Part 2: New Bon Iver

Fine, his album, For Emma, Forever Ago wasn’t the album of the year (wrong OMM! PFork got it right – Fleet Foxes), but his new track, Blood Bank is great. You can stream it from Pitchfork; looks like he’s taken the Iron & Wine route and added cheerier instruments while heaping on the dread and spookiness.

Part 3: A pop star from Blackpool

Being as it’s where much of my immediate family come from, Blackpool is close to my heart,  it’s good to hear one of this year’s most tipped pop acts, Little Boots, is a native of that strange, cold and fascinating place. There’s an interview with her in the Guardian, and you can listen to a few tracks on her MySpace. For those interested in the economic ramifications of her music, it’s electronic and quite regular.

Flag and seagull, 2
Originally uploaded by Sifter.

Just got back from a trip up north. Blackpool at the end of January can be a staggeringly inhospitable place as when the weather is grim, it’s really, really grim. This time though, it was cold and clear, so I got some lovely photos – this one in Cleveleys, and some more on the beach at sunset.

Blackpool permanently enjoys a strange type of fame. There is the Blackpool that is made out of brick, concrete and rock that sits on the Lancashire coast. This Blackpool is run-down, often wet, cold, and full of desperate drunks and yet… is also surreal, beautiful and weirdly funny [10p Tea virtually demands to be heard in Peter Kay's voice].

Then there’s the Blackpool that is famous. It seems to have been created by replacing the ‘and yet’ of the previous sentence with an ‘addition’ sign, and turning all those words into a formula. The results of which are then put up in lights and announced by someone with a very forced smile and a dayglo pink
jumper. I’d say “if you can imagine that”, but then, if you’ve heard of Blackpool, you probably can…

So to the point. 1. BBC. New drama about Blackpool. It’s a musical, as if the formula didn’t see that coming… Although it’s supposed to be good. And 2. My photos, taken on Blackpool beach. Boththese photos were taken on the same afternoon, the same beach, and within five minutes of each other: Sometimes Blackpool can show its many sides very easily.

…Literally. Spent a long weekend in Blackpool, and on Friday, I went to the Pleasure Beachwhich is a massive theme park with a lot of rollercoasters crammed in to a small space. It’s not quite as high concept as a lot of other theme parks (like Alton Towers), but, like Blackpool itself, manages to
create a surreal-yet-shabby atmosphere that I’ve never found anywhere else. It’s like an alternate universe that’s only slightly changed – you know it’s different, but you’re not quite sure how…