Charlie Brooker is our leader elect

Today's post is about music and bear with me here because the chain of events will probably take a bit of explaining... to start with, i'm a subscriber to the B3ta mailing list on the grounds that it's always good for a laugh as long as you don't get offended easily. So i was reading this weeks installment over a cup of tea and one of the things that caught my attention was a YouTube video for a song called "Charlie Brooker Is Right About Everything". So i had a listen and was grinning like a wazzock by the end and something at the back of my mind said that the style was familiar...

The song itself is by The Attery Squash and there was a link on the YouTube page so i went to have a look around; it turned out to not be an actual site, instead it's a domain with framed forwarding that poijnts to the group's MySpace page and that in turn has a link to their store. And lo and behold, there were options to buy the original and the extended mix of "Charlie Brooker" for eighty pence a bloody pop! "That'll do me" thinks yours truly, and promptly loads the shopping trolley with both mixes and heads off to the checkout and, even better still, being able to pay with PayPal. After my purchase is made and the files downloaded to Ikaruga's hard drive i take a closer look at the shop page and there, squirrelled away in the "about" section, was the reason i was finding the style familiar; Ricardo Autobahn, one half of Attery Squash, was also involved with Cuban Boys, whose "Cognoscenti Vs Intelligentsia" (or the "Hamsterdance Song" as most people'll remember it) was probably one of the best things to be released in 1999. In fact, they made quite an impression on me at the time because they gave away some freebies and previews on the site and the Christmas of that year (or at least i think it was that year...!) was pretty dull and the only real memory i have is of spending a huge amount of time playing and eventually completing Carmageddon on the Playstation with assorted Cuban Boys tracks hammering out of the amp my PC was connected to as background music.

This was, at least in internet terms, quite a long time ago though and i remember visiting the Cuban Boys site four or so years back and being forwarded to a different project called The Beatbox Saboteurs (which i've just found out was a renaming of the Cubans and i downloaded all the freebies they had at the time as well) but, since these memories were bouncing around, i tried the old The Cuban Boys site address and... it was working again! Not only that, they've got a new track out for 2008, "The Penthouse Messiahs", and guess who just got all four mixes through their online shop? The lineup has been reduced to two of the original members but the sound is still very familiar and, as if to confuse matters further (something the Cubans seemed to enjoy immensely) the other two members who didn't return are now called Spray and one of these members is Ricardo and now i need some ibuprofen because this is getting hideously confusing but the cover on their site of the Cadbury's Flake theme called "Flakey" had me in bloody stiches!

So i've found some new music i like a lot from a couple of indie groups, rediscovered another group i have some incredibly fond memories of has returned, downloaded about forty tracks including six i was more than happy to pay for (and that's a first in itself, i've never paid to download music previously) and covered topics in this blog such as hamsters, kittens, Charlie Brooker, Flakes, messiahs and Terry and June and therefore have the most ridiculous list of labels i've ever added to a blog - and it's only one in the afternoon too!