CocoRosie: Live

Originally published in The Independent on 18 May 2006

If a live musical experience can ever evoke the spirit of a particular joke, then a CocoRosie gig is that experience and "The Aristocrats"is the joke.

Points of comparison: the joke is based around a "family act" going to see a talent agent.

CocoRosie are two sisters, Sierra and Bianca Casady, who garnered their name from the nicknames "Coco" and "Rosie", given to them by their mother.

The content of the joke is a description of the family's, shall we say, unconventional sexual activities, which struts way beyond the boundaries of accepted taste and joke-telling. CocoRosie push the electro and folk envelopes so far that they end up with an amalgam of sounds that seems to uncontrollably veer between the rehearsed and the off-the-cuff, the beautiful and the chaotic, carving its own niche in the musical map.

The joke involves a cast of extended family coming on and off the stage. CocoRosie's on-stage coterie varies in number between two and eight, utilising a vast number of instruments, as well as children's toys and a videowall showing images of the CocoRosie girls in geisha masks.

As is evident from the above, both "The Aristocrats" and CocoRosie are an acquired taste, and while CocoRosie are unlikely to cause as much offence as the extremely filthy joke, if you like your pop music regular you'll probably want to steer yourself away from them.

Put simply, this is Beth Orton fed through a blender, the instruments and vocals slipping out of sync, topped with slices of beat-boxing, rapping and opera (Sierra studied opera at the Paris Conservatoire), and eaten cold.

Surprisingly for a group whose recordings reek of melancholy and sedation, the cast of eight (one of whom looked like a grown-up Oliver Twist still wearing his childhood clothes and who towards the end of the show began hammering the back of his violin with his bow) perform like a manic Gypsy band: dancing with one another, swapping instruments, lying on the floor and jumping into one another's arms triumphantly at the end.

Re-workings, rather than renditions, of various songs from the La Maison de Mon Reve and Noah's Ark albums, as well as a few slightly more upbeat new tracks and four lines of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", are rolled out. Most notably the elegiac "Good Friday" is transformed into a 10- minute hip-hop jam, while "Beautiful Boyz" (which features Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons on the album version) is developed through a series of rolling arias into a truly dramatic crescendo.

What CocoRosie are, I don't really know, but they have a visceral attraction that is quite irresistible. As the talent agent says at the end of "The Aristocrats", they're "one hell of an act".

How will the African Nations Cup influence the title race?

Originally published on Sport.co.uk in November 2009

The African Nations Cup comes around every two years, but why?

Is it just to annoy the all-powerful Lord of football that is the FA Premier League, or is it because, like every other continent, Africa deserves its own championships?

Well, yes, it’s the latter, but in between BBC football folk's parroted clichés about the ANC providing a shop window for raw emerging talent, we can also hear the whines and moans of Premiership managers who don’t want their prized possessions taken away for three weeks to compete for the continent’s greatest honour.

Where’s it at this year?

This year’s ANC will take place in Angola from the 10th to 31st of January, with the group stages ending on the 21st.

All the usual big guns are involved – Egypt, Tunisia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Mali – while a few names are yet to be confirmed as the final qualifying games take place on the 14th of November.

The draw for the ANC will happen in the Angolan capital, Luanda, on the 20th of November. It’s a day that matters a lot for some Premiership managers. They already know that some of their star players will miss two games, but if their players end up in an easy group,they could well be away for four.

Who’ll be going?

Manchester United have precisely no players who will be off to Angola, so Sir Alex will instead by able to concentrate on blaming referees for any misfortunes his team might stumble upon.

Chelsea will be hardest hit, with Michael Essien (Ghana), Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast), Salomon Kalou (Ivory Coast) and John Obi Mikel (Nigeria) all packing their bags.

Arsenal and Manchester City will take the next heaviest blows. The Gunners will be without Emmanuel Eboué (Ivory Coast) and Alexandre Song (Cameroon), while City could lose a couple of former-Gunners.

Kolo Touré (Ivory Coast) is definitely going to Angola, but Emmanuel Adebayor (Togo) might not be. Togo play Gabon on the 14th of November in a game they need to win in order to guarantee qualification, although they could lose and still qualify if Cameroon beat Morocco.

If however Morocco qualify by beating Cameroon and hoping Togo lose, Liverpool’s Nabil El Zhar will be booking his ticket to Angola. If they don’t qualify, Liverpool won’t have any players in Africa come January.

Though they won’t be winning the league come May, Tottenham still have their eyes on the top four. Their intentions may be somewhat affected though by Sébastien Bassong and Benoît Assou-Ekotto jetting out of town to hook up with their pals from Cameroon.

What are they going to miss in the Premier League?

Arguably the biggest Premier League fixture during the ANC is Arsenal vs Manchester United on the 30th of January, although Liverpool vs Tottenham on the 9th is also of some significance.

If Cameroon or Ivory Coast make it to the final Arsenal will be marginally weakened by the absence of Song or Eboué. Arsène Wenger would rather have them both available, and would certainly like to have Song available, but his squad is good enough to live without them both.

Being without Essien would decimate a lot of team’s midfields, but Chelsea have the depth to cope, with Lampard, Ballack, Joe Cole, Deco, Malouda and Zhirkov all able to come in.

Where they’ll be most hurt is up front, with only two recognised strikers - Nicolas Anelka and Daniel Sturridge - available during the ANC.

In 2006 they lost 2-0 to Liverpool while Drogba was away and went on to miss out on the title by six points. No one can say the ANC cost them the league, but it might have played a small part in it.

Drogba’s importance to Chelsea was highlighted on his recent return to the Champions League with two goals against Atletico Madrid. With Chelsea’s transfer ban now suspended by the Court of Arbitration for Sport and this year’s title race looking like a tight one, Ancelloti may therefore want to think about picking up a striker in the January transfer window.

However, he has said he’s happy with his squad: “It's not necessary at the moment to take new players. I know we will lose four in January but if we maintain the players' fitness we can do a good period also without the African players.”

He might be right as they don’t have any massive fixtures to play during the ANC. First up is Hull away, then Sunderland away, before Birmingham at home and a trip to Burnley, who will themselves be weakened by the loss of André Bikey to the Cameroon squad.

Mark Hughes will certainly be hoping Togo blow it against Gabon so that his side don’t have to face Everton away without Adebayor. They also have the hardly tasty prospect of an away day in Stoke to cope with without Touré, which, considering their hardly exemplary away record against mid-table opposition, could easily make the Britannia Stadium the site of something of a upset.

So how will the African Nations Cup affect the title race?

Probably not that much. The only team really hit by it, Chelsea, have a more than adequate squad to manage without the four players they will lose. The absence of Mikel and Kalou is not going to upset anyone, and the only problem could arise with Drogba being away.

City could come a cropper depending on what happens to Togo, while Liverpool and Manchester United are barely affected.

Arsenal might stumble on trips to Aston Villa and Bolton or when Everton visit, but are no more likely to do so than they apparently would be anyway, considering their recent capitulation away at West Ham.

So when you hear the whines and moans of certain Premiership managers, you need not pity them. Instead you should drown them out by tuning into the inevitable sound of kettle drums and Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the BBC’s no doubt trite and parochial ANC coverage.

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The English

Originally published on 1001 Words and Counting in February 2009

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem.
You live a new life for every new language you speak.
If you know only one language, you live only once.
(Czech proverb)

For many people around the world, their quest to learn English is one of the main things that spurs them on in life. Be it to get a better job, to be able to communicate when abroad, to be able to read more sites on the internet or just to pass the time, English is without doubt a worldwide phenomenon.

Yet foreigners’ passion for English is far from reflected in the fat, lazy, drunken mouths of the English themselves. Not only are English people who can speak a foreign language in the minority, but the number of English people who can speak their own language properly is also declining.

First and foremost is definitely spelling, or as most English people would write “definately” spelling. In reality, the situation is much worse than the odd mistake with a vowel here and there. Just take a look at this 11-year old’s exam answer, published in The Times newspaper:
“If he wasent doing enthing els heel help his uncle Herry at the funfair during the day. And had stoody at nigh on other thing he did was invent new rides.”

Furthermore this problem is not just confined to youngsters. Ken Smith, senior lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University, is confronted by so many spelling mistakes that he thinks we should “simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings”.

Yet it’s this kind of defeatist attitude that leaves England (and Britain as a whole) lagging behind the rest of Europe in terms of uptake of foreign languages. As George Orwell wrote in his landmark essay “Politics and the English Language”:

“An effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”

Shockingly, Britain is the only place in Europe where it is not compulsory to study a foreign language in school. And while in most countries students learn foreign languages from the age of seven to 18, in Britain they only study from 11 to 16, if at all.

The European Commission sees foreign language skills as being “among the key competences for lifelong learning”, and its Barcelona objective has set out the aim of enabling European citizens to communicate in two languages in addition to their mother tongue.

While the Czech Republic and Italy have introduced reforms and now comply with this goal, Britain shows no sign of following suit. Recent figures from Eurydice, the information network on education in Europe, show that British students spend by far the least amount of time spent on learning foreign languages in Europe. The network’s “Key Data on Teaching Languages at school in Europe” shows that Britain is also one of the few places where figures haven’t increased on 1994 levels.

In Portugal, where compulsory language learning begins in the first or second year of primary education, British music and subtitled British TV abound. This kind of exposure breeds an enthusiasm for English that the English themselves are incapable of developing, at least en masse, for another language or culture.

Foreign language films and music are virtual non-entities on British TV and radio, where the only dishes on the menu are British or American. The BBC do still air some foreign films and music, but these are on non-mainstream TV channels and radio stations at times when most people are in bed.

This lack of access to foreign languages only augments the problem the British have with learning foreign tongues. As a recent EU report on multilingualism stated: “The media can…be a great source of informal language learning through ‘edutainment’ and subtitled films.”

But why should the English care about learning foreign languages? 90% of all European pupils study English at some point, so if everyone else can speak English, why not let them?

To be brazenly practical, according to a report published by the Commission of the European Communities earlier this year a shortage of foreign language skills can drastically affect a country’s economy:
“11% of exporting EU SMEs [small and medium enterprises] may be losing business because of language barriers. Although English has a leading role as the business language of the world, it is other languages that will provide EU companies with a competitive edge and allow them to conquer new markets.”

So England is digging itself further into the economic hole that it current finds itself in, with the Euro and the Pound rapidly approaching an equal value.

To be less practical, I have only to refer to the proverb at the start of this article.

“If you know only one language, you live only once.”

Until three years ago I spoke only English and a smattering of French. Since then I have lived in Poland, Russia and now Portugal and learnt to speak the languages of these countries to varying degrees.

As a result I have discovered that the ability to speak another language, even if cack-handedly, can open doors both literal and mental. Languages have made me new friends, taken me to places I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get to (most memorably the site of a former Gulag) and allowed me to read things in other languages and, to some extent, experience that culture’s way of thinking.

Yet this is not just a personal experience, as there exists a phenomenon known as “frame shifting”, according to which people are said to switch between different ways of interpreting events and feelings according to the language it is spoken in. New Scientist magazine recently reported on a US study of bilingual Hispanic women which found that women who were actively involved in both English and Spanish speaking cultures interpreted the same TV advertisements differently, depending on whether they were shown in English or Spanish.

Joanna Moszczynska, a University of Warsaw student currently studying in Lisbon as part of the ERASMUS programme, speaks five languages and agrees with the theory of frame shifting: “Some languages are richer in expressing certain feelings, others have more words to describe certain objects or phenomena. Thus we can develop to a certain point a different personality. Languages like Portuguese, Spanish or Italian are very melodic and vivid, and foreigners who learn those languages often copy the native speakers in their behaviour and modes of expression.”

Nelson Mandela expressed another aspect of frame-shifting when he said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

But translator and English teacher Annabel Browne says that knowing another language isn’t enough. According to her it’s essential to have an insight into a country’s culture in order to fully understand its language: “Lots of things are lost in translation. It isn't just what they say it is how they say it and why. Lots of things are cultural and not just words.

“When you speak a foreign language, rather than everything being translated back into your own language, which means making things English or viewing things from an English point of view, you can see directly into their way of thinking through their words and expressions and cultural references.”

A concrete example she gives is that while for English people “jealousy” is a negative word and concept, Italians view it otherwise. For them, being jealous of friends or family is a way of expressing how proud they are of them.

So is the Czech proverb true? If you know only one language do you really only live once?

According to Browne the answer is yes: “When I speak Italian I am much more assertive and aggressive, much more outspoken and blunt. I feel when I speak Italian I don't have to be polite and British.”

So why don’t the English grab this chance of a second life? Well, the good news is that maybe they are slowly realising that they should…with the help of Polish women.

Moszczynka, herself a Pole, says: “Knowledge of foreign languages has exposed me to experiences I may never otherwise have had and has helped me to explore things unavailable in my native language.” It seems that many British men, as is their wont, are taking this to a very literal level, using the Polish language to expose themselves to and explore Polish women!

At least this is something that the organisers of a new Polish language course in Cardiff, Wales found out when they experienced a huge demand for their course from men who wanted to learn the language of their new Polish girlfriends.

Around a million Polish citizens have arrived in the UK since 2004 and maybe they have shed light on something that the British Government should consider before the European Commission carries out its review of multilingualism in member states in 2012. The only way to a fat, lazy, drunken English man’s head is through his pants.