Out On Blue Six: Eddie & the Hot Rods, RIP Barrie Masters

RIP Barrie Masters, frontman and founding member of Canvey Island pub rockers Eddie & the Hot Rods.

The band were lauded as one of the pioneers of the nascent punk scene, with no less a figure than The Clash's Joe Strummer citing them as the first punk band he ever saw and John Peel pointing to them as the first example of there being a 'change in the air'. But being grouped with DIY bands like The Sex Pistols didn't go down too well originally with Masters who believed the band was more to do with hard graft and accomplishments than fashion. Indeed, The Sex Pistols played their debut gig as support for Eddie & the Hot Rods in London in 1976 and incurred Masters' wrath by smashing up the band's equipment; "I gave John Lydon a little slap and told him, you don't do that to another band's gear" Masters later recalled. They were perhaps best known for the 1977 hit, Do Anything You Wanna Do, an anthem for disillusioned teenagers whose message did little to separate them from the punk milieu they found themselves unintentionally part of. But I'm with Masters; Many's the time down the years that I have bored friends and acquaintances with how much I love this song and how, to me at least, it represents the closest in spirit a British outfit ever got the similar dissatisfied blue collar desire for wanderlust that Bruce Springsteen employed across the pond. It's a beautiful track that immediately energises you, and I cannot think of a better tribute to Masters than playing it, so here goes... 

Masters eventually came to terms with the tag 'punk' after playing in the US where he found Blondie were also being heralded as a punk group. The band folded in 1981 but reformed three years later and last performed a live retirement gig together in April this year at the suitably titled 'Done Everything We Wanna Do' night in London. 

RIP

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Out On Blue Six: Stiff Little Fingers

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Out On Blue Six: Buzzcocks, RIP Pete Shelley

I can't believe I'm typing this, but it's been announced that Pete Shelley died yesterday of a suspected heart attack at the age of 63.

Shelley was really important to me as a young man and the music of Buzzcocks is still as fresh today as it always was. Here's just a few of my favourites...

"But after all life's only death's recompense" ~ Pete Shelley,Manchester, 1978.

RIP and thanks for the music

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How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017)

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is less ‘Croydon, 1977’ and more ‘Instagram, 1977’

Nicole Kidman is ACTING at every turn, Dick Van Dykeing it all over the shop with the most ridiculous Cockney accent. There’s a bit near the end where she leads her punk children in a charge against the aliens elders that is so daft and cheesy that it feels more like a sequence from a prospective Ben Elton-penned punk jukebox musical – something which I’m sure you’ll agree is about as far away from punk as you can actually get!

Remember Jonathan Glazer’s visceral, creepy and hallucinatory Under the Skin?  Well now go on and remove all of those qualities and remake it with Rentaghost‘s budget and overall panto aesthetic, with a cast of performing arts students.

That's How to Talk to Girls at Parties.

See my full review of this stinker at The Geek Show

Radio On (1979)

Wimpy bars  and the Westway. Nightshifts spinning discs for the disinterested workers at the Gilette factory and fresh wintry evenings with sopping wet hair. Getting your hair cut short, too short. The end of an affair and the open road. Inky black nights and doom laden news. The Troubles on the radio and flickering away on your three TV sets back home. A psychotic AWOL squaddie brings them to your passenger side. Rainswept roads and pylons. Snow on the hills and mist in the air. Fräulein drifters and an Eddie Cochran obsessed petrol pump attendant. Your car radio, on with Bowie and Kraftwerk. The Blockheads and Devo. Wreckless Eric and Ohm Sweet Ohm. Pornographic slides and your dead brother, and why, and why, and which side was he on? 'Happy Birthday, Brother'. Why?

'We are the children of Fritz Lang and Werner Von Braun. We are the link between the Twenties and the Eighties. All change in society passes through a sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesizers and telephones. Our reality is an electronic reality'

Back in 2013, Radio On got its network television premiere a full thirty four years after it was made. And I was wrong about about it.

Let me be clear, Christopher Petit's film is still far from great. It's ponderous and pretentious, but it is also enigmatic and interesting and proof that sometimes you really do need to watch something more than once to get a handle on it. It is a snapshot of the winter of discontent, embracing the ice that was setting in ahead of Thatcher's ascendancy and offering little comfort or solution in journey's end. It's the enigma of it all that possibly alienated me five years ago but, returning to it now, I'm tempted to read Radio On along supernatural and metaphorical lines, and understand it all the better for it.

We never learn what happened to Robert's brother and how he met his end, alone in the bathtub of his flat. We learn from his girlfriend that the police are involved but, beyond the pornography Robert finds in a Get Carter-esque moment, there is no other suggestion of illegality. The talk of sides is the closest inference we get that his brother was mixed up in something - could it possibly be the Troubles? 

As the camera weaves its way around the brother's flat from tub to living room and that handwritten message about Fritz Lang and Werner Von Braun  (the closest thing to a suicide note?) I'm left to wonder if this is, in fact, his spirit leaving the body. His subsequent gift  from beyond to Robert of Kraftwerk tapes, complete with the message 'Happy Birthday, Brother' (when there's nothing to suggest it is Robert's actual birthday) takes on a great resonance throughout the film as it is music and the eponymous radio that will serve as Robert's most faithful companion on his journey. Is his late brother living on through the music, trying to make a connection - the 'sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesizers and telephones; the note implies will bring about a societal change? And, if so, is his death the thing to release the previously detached Robert from his stultifying limbo of late night London life? Does the brother's death represent the end of the 1970s and a necessary closure before the 1980s - and Robert's life - can commence. The 1980s seem to be a future that Petit is trying to suggest will (or should) exist on cleaner lines, in the European vein of Kraftwerk and Bowie's Berlin period; a world away from the rock and roll and American bubblegum dream that Robert seems to return to, either by Ian Dury's rocking lament to 'Sweet' Gene Vincent or one of his most chatty and good humoured encounters at the middle-of-nowhere garage with a fellow lost soul, living alone in a caravan and plucking his guitar to the strains of Three Steps to Heaven, waiting for an A+R man to make his dreams come true. A call that will never occur or a letter that will never arrive.

Unfortunately that petrol pump dreamer is Sting, and I still can't tolerate that atrocious cameo from the Geordie poser who dares to call Dave Dee an 'arsehole'. For a film that places so much store in good music, the casting of this future lute bothering knob makes it something of a mockery. Did Robert's brother die for nothing? It would seem so.

Out On Blue Six: Buzzcocks

After yesterday's post it was only going to be one song wasn't it?

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Love You More (2008)

Over the weekend, I made the mistake of rewatching Sam Taylor-Johnson's young John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy. I'd seen it just once before, where I found it to be no masterpiece, but even then I enjoyed it more than I did this revisit. 

To counteract this, I decided to rewatch and share this other music based short from Taylor-Johnson (nee Wood), Love You More. Written by Patrick 'Cornish Curmudgeon' Marber, this is a beautifully bittersweet, tender and sexy look at two teenagers coming together over their mutual appreciation of the Manchester band Buzzcocks in the summer of 1978. 

The sense of excitement and anticipation, of euphoria and timid uncertainty and ultimately the enthusiastic naivety that comes with the stirrings of first love is gloriously captured by Taylor-Johnson, most notably in the scene in which the two teens played by Andrea Riseborough (looking not unlike one of my exes) and Harry Treadaway sit in the bedroom listing to the eponymous Buzzcocks track. The moment which really chimed with me was the close up of the hairs on Riseborough's standing to attention and Treadaway's subsequent panicked, dry mouthed beer swigging response. It's so real and yet at the same time feels so original for it to be captured in such an arresting, artistic manner.  As with a lot of artistic director's works, it's the little details that speak volumes - and Taylor-Johnson's film is full of beautiful little details.

A perfectly crafted short with excellent timing, strong direction and performances, I am willing to bet money that this is more sexier to me than the director's best known offering, Fifty Shades of Grey. It's certainly better musically than Nowhere Boy.

Warning; this is really quite steamy...

Girls With Guns

Michèle Winstanley as Louise, one of the McMahon gang molls in Alex Cox's 1986 fucked up punk Peckinpah pastiche, Straight to Hell - a story of blood, money, guns, coffee and sexual tension! Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it Tarantino! 

Jubilee (1978)

In 1976, Derek Jarman had this to say about the British punk scene, its prime movers and faithful followers; "petit bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-alikes – who’ve read a little art history and adopted some Dadaist typography and bad manners, and who are now in the business of reproducing a fake street credibility"

So why did he set about making Jubilee - a film whose aim was to capture the nihilist aesthetic of punk? 

Well, primarily because he had become fascinated with Jordan, whom he first spotted at Victoria Station and recorded in his diary thus; "White patent boots clattering down the platform, transparent plastic miniskirt revealing a hazy pudenda. Venus T-shirt. Smudged black eye-paint, covered with a flaming blonde beehive ... the face that launched a thousand tabloids. Art history as makeup." It was a match made in heaven; the posh thirtysomething gay filmmaker and set designer and the curvy, young provocative trendsetter who worked at the counter of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's Kings Rd boutique, Sex and managed a band led by one Adam Ant. Jarman made a super 8 short of Jordan (real name Pamela Rooke) performing ballet around a bonfire, which in turn gave him the ambition to make a full length feature around her and the punk movement. Jubilee became that movie.

Despite his fascination with Jordan and his admiration for punk's bold, anti-establishment stance, Jarman's initial suspicions regarding the scene still seep through the chaotic savagery and juvenile shock tactics of Jubilee, and never more so than in its depiction of how its sloganeering and fashion goes hand in hand with the capitalism it purports to be against. Almost every one of Jubilee's anarchists want a piece of the pie offered by creepy impresario Borgia Ginz (Jack Birkett, like an uber camp, terrifying Bond villain) who rightly proclaims "they all sign up in the end, one way or another". It's a statement all the more prescient than when you consider how, in just a few short years after the film's release, Adam Ant went mainstream and pledged an allegiance to Thatcher by appearing at the Falklands ball, whilst Vivienne Westwood, Jubilee's biggest most vociferous critic (she posted an open letter to Jarman on her next best-selling T-shirt, slamming the film as "the most boring and therefore disgusting film" she has witnessed, adding that Jarman was "a gay boy jerking off through the titillation of his masochistic tremblings") went on to accept both an OBE and a damehood from a Queen who Jubilee gleefully kills off in its initial stages. Then again, when you consider that Jarman based Jordan's character, the punk historian and (with her reggae infused, bum flashing and rather catchy version of Rule Britannia) UK entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest, Amyl Nitrate on Westwood it's perhaps unsurprising the fashion designer got the hump.

Ultimately, Jubilee is the best film about punk because it dared to call out the hypocrisy at the heart of punk. Its a damning indictment not just of the establishment they railed against, but of the movement itself. It wasn't the film the punks wanted, it wasn't their A Clockwork Orange, but the protagonists should know that they don't get to tell the story or write the history. In Jubilee, Jarman has managed to capture them, and their inevitable failings, warts and all. And Ian Charleson's Angel was right, Toyah Wilcox really does have a fat arse in this.

The Tempest (1979)

Derek Jarman's inventive interpretation of what is believed to be Shakespeare's final play wisely understands that the traditional narrative thrust - Prospero's expulsion to his isle of wonder - is over before the play even begins. As a result, Jarman's energies lie in the atmosphere of the piece and his fascination with magic, alchemy and the life and legend of the Elizabethan astrologist John Dee; the man widely believed to have been the inspiration behind Shakespeare's Prospero, who had died in ignominy as James I set about discrediting the Elizabethan preoccupation with magic, and who Jarman had previously included in his film Jubilee.

Jarman's The Tempest really is a film steeped in atmosphere and one in which the traditional theatrics inherent in the text are dispensed with in favour of an acceptance that magic is real. These atmospherics are also helped rather than hindered by the film's tiny budget, with the entire shoot taking place inside Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, doubling as Prospero's candlelit lair and Bamburgh Beach, Northumberland (shot with an ethereal blue tint to enhance the dream-like qualities of Jarman's telling) as the isle's coastline where the shipwreck washes up. 

Also dispensed with is the sense of imperialist postcolonialism that is often inherent in many adaptations of the text. Here, Jarman cast a white actor to play Prospero's 'savage and deformed slave' in the shape of the regular cohort Jack Birkett, whose Romani roots draw comparison to a possible influence on Shakespeare's character (kaliban or cauliban means black or blackness in Romani) as the first gypsies are said to have arrived in England a century before Shakespeare's era. He also went one further and created a flashback scene featuring Caliban's mother Sycorax played by Claire Davenport, an imposing Junoesque Aryan seen breastfeeding Birkett and pulling the tormented Ariel (Karl Johnson) on a chain in the hope he too will suckle at her large teats! 

Character-wise this is very strong stuff. Birkett's Caliban, using his broad native Leeds accent, is a beguiling mixture of the nauseatingly repellent and wretchedly pitiable. The latter is especially apparent as he naively falls under the spell of the shipwrecked drunkards Stephano and Trinculo (Christopher Biggins, arguably the only luvvie in the cast, and Peter Turner), whilst the former is queasily apparent when it is revealed that he has continually tried to sexually violate Prospero's daughter Miranda, since their arrival to the island and therefore, presumably, when she was just three years old. 

Starring as Miranda is Toyah Willcox, still a relative newcomer to acting and aged just twenty-one, takes to not only her first Shakespearean role but arguably her first proper acting role away from punk stereotypes with aplomb. Indeed, the distance travelled from her performance in Jarman's Jubilee just two years earlier to here is nothing short of incredible. Her Miranda is unmistakably a young woman with neither the understanding or appreciation of her gender or the desires she feels because of her time in exile. As Prospero, the gloomy, thoughtful banshee that is Heathcote Williams is an unforgiving master, reminiscent of an incarnation of Doctor Who deemed too disturbing for the family show. Physically, there's a touch of Tom Baker, but in character he's reminiscent not only of the paternal qualities the grandfatherly William Hartnell possessed, but also the dark, unknowable and quite terrifying qualities Hartnell also originally brought to the show. 

But the icing on the cake comes in the film's final scene. Embracing the themes of forgiveness he so appreciated from the text itself, Jarman reinterpretes the Elizabethan and Jacobean tradition of the masque, the courtly entertainment which bears witness to goddesses of classic mythology for the purposes of magic, to introduce the legendary American singer Elisabeth Welch who performs her rendition of Stormy Weather to the assembled cast and a whole fleet of sailors - a magical, touching, happy-ever-after and gloriously camp high note to close the proceedings.

Out On Blue Six : Siouxsie and the Banshees

Fabulous cover of a much covered Dylan classic

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Out On Blue Six: The Slits

Just a fab cover...

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Out On Blue Six : Diagram Brothers

Very pleasant objects...

They're not expensive at all.

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The Day New Romanticism Died

Much is written about the fact that, when The Sex Pistols became household names, punk had died. I'm not convinced by that argument, largely because I think punk had a greater and continued history and meaning beyond the King's Road and out into the urban areas especially up here in the north.

But not a lot is said regarding the demise of the next big music and fashion craze; New Romanticism. 

Well, I think I can put a date on that particular phase's death. It's sometime in September 1981. Adam Ant's Prince Charming may well have been Number 1 that month but, if you'd been a regular at the Blitz Club for a couple of years up until that point, you must have realised it was all over the day David Van Day and Thereza Bazaar rocked up on Top of the Pops to sing their track Handheld in Black and White dressed like buccaneers... 

Never ahead of the trend this cheesy pop duo had clearly seen what Adam Ant, Spandua Ballet and Duran Duran had started to wear and decided to get in on the act - and just what is the drummer wearing?! It's all so half-hearted as to be genuinely hilarious. It was screened again on BBC4 this week.

Still, the song is a dreadfully catchy earworm thanks to the Trevor Horn production and that bass line. Proof that you can indeed polish a turd!

But yes, definitely the day that New Romanticism died.

Out On Blue Six : Siouxsie and the Banshees

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Wordless Wednesday : Punk Petrol Pumps

Young Soul Rebels (1991)

Artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien's first commercial, narrative feature film Young Soul Rebels was borne from a desire to depict the various youth movements around the Queen's Silver Jubilee of 1977, a time of great jingoistic pride, belligerent chauvinism and the counter narrative regarding the confusion for many young people, specifically ethnic minorities, regarding national identity and where their place in this anniversary celebrating Britain actually was.

Received wisdom is of course that the only counter narrative that mattered at that time was punk but Julien, who was there, knows differently and manages to place the spotlight specifically on black popular culture of that time and the underground movement of soul and funk music, as well as the gay scene at that time and shatters the myth that disco or dance music was a redundant white capitalist invention that punk would have you believe. 

The film focuses on two soul boys and lifelong friends, straight mixed race Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and gay black Caz (Mo Sesay) who run a pirate radio station from a friend's garage and are keen to get ahead and introduce their mixture of soul and funk to more and more people in the London area - an area which is reaching boiling point thanks to the forthcoming Jubilee celebrations and the murder of a local gay black man (and mutual friend of Chris and Caz) out on the heath and its subsequent bullish police investigation. 

On its release Young Soul Rebels was compared favourably to Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, though in the long run one suspects this did more damage than good. It's certainly true that Julien shares some of Lee's traits and talents, but he also has a touch of Hanif Kureishi about him too, and he is - like Kureishi - specifically a vibrant and vital storyteller of a culturally and ethnically diverse London. It's a beautifully directed film too, capturing the period and the summery vibe well (though its just as nostalgic now for an audience for the 1991 it was filmed in) and recreating the varying youth movements (punk, racist skinheads, soul boys, the gay scene) all jostling for street space with a variety of astute costume choices and social sentiments within the script.

You could argue, with that latter statement, that Julien and his writing partners Paul Hallam and Derrick Saldaan McClintock are perhaps too guilty of using these characters to make political points but I think, on the whole, they do it authentically and naturalistically rather than place their creations upon soapboxes to instruct and inform its audience. For example, a scene where Chris' Radio PR girlfriend Tracy, played by Sophie Okonedo, chastises and challenges Caz's punk white boyfriend Billibud (Jason Durr) for his belief that the dance music of soul, funk and disco is a capitalist distraction by pointing out that paying twenty pounds for the infamous Westwood designed Cowboys T-Shirt he is wearing is making him more of a capitalist puppet than her is particularly amusing and astute. 

It is true to say though that the murder mystery subplot, based on an episode from Saldaan McClintock's life and included at the behest of by head of production Colin McCabe to give the film more story, isn't wholly successful and with its almost Blow-Out style investigation on Chris' part,  occasionally distracts from the rest of the narrative and what Julien really wants to say. You also don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out the mystery itself, as its evident pretty much immediately. Where it does impress is in highlighting the racist and homophobic tensions created by the subsequent police investigation and its impact on minority communities.

For me, it's a shame that the production didn't see the real story playing out before their eyes, namely that of Chris' love for Tracy coming between him and Caz. It's clear, specifically from Mo Sesay's beautifully layered performance, that Caz is trying to come to terms with that fact that his friend and soul partner is straight and therefore not the love he has perhaps harboured even since their childhood. There's a coming-of-age plot here begging to be fleshed out in the great traditions of those 'nothing could be the same again after this summer' dramas, and it would have been great to explore just why this apolitical gay soul boy falls for a white Socialist Worker selling punk in Billibud - is it a rebound thing or are his feelings much deeper? - but Julien all too often muffs it, leaving it tragically sidelined. 

Nevertheless this is a great little film somewhat overlooked now which adequately explores this time in British culture and, with a genuine thought provoking style, asks some important questions. It also has, naturally, a sublime soundtrack featuring the likes of the great Roy Ayers, Funkadelic, Sylvester, Junior Marvin and X-Ray Specs. 

Erotic, vibrant, political and great fun, it goes straight into my best first watched of 2015 - even though I vaguely and hazily recall snippets of it on TV some time in the 90s.

Recommended.

Good Vibrations (2012)

If you were ever looking for the middle ground between Michael Winterbottom's Factory Records biopic Twenty Four Hour Party People and Yann Demange's Troubles set thriller '71, you can now say you have finally found it with Good Vibrations - Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn's film about Belfast's godfather of punk, Terri Hooley. 

Terri Hooley is what you'd call a character. An idealist with the best of intentions and a firm conviction, at the height of The Troubles he decided to singlehandedly draw people back out from the cracks and unite the divisions by the power of music alone. He did this by opening up a record store on Great Victoria Street, a dilapidated war torn street that was known to all as 'Bomb Alley', which led in turn to a label putting out music from Rudi, The Outcasts and, most famously, bringing The Undertones' hit single Teenage Kicks to the masses. 

Or as Hooley puts it;

"Good Vibrations is not just a record shop. It's not just a label. It's a way of life" 

This film made its network premiere on BBC2 last weekend and it is a wonderfully cheerful, optimistic, warm and  immensely likeable movie whose title couldn't be any more apt - it really does have 'good vibrations'. There's something genuinely uplifting about Hooley's spirit - brought vividly and lovably to life by Richard Dormer - as he defiantly goes about bringing joy and shelter from the miseries of Sectarian life and boots on the ground British rule, even if his entrepreneurial skills and business sense could leave Factory's Tony Wilson shaking his head. Tellingly, 24HPP's producer Andrew Eaton also produced this biopic and this film shares both that one's wit and vitality as well as a similar (real life) story trajectory. It's also laugh out loud funny in places and boasts a great performance from the lovely Jodie Whittaker as Dormer's long suffering wife as well as a series of cameos from the likes of Dylan Moran, Adrian Dunbar and Liam Cunningham.

Really not at all convinced by the guy playing John Peel though!

Different For Girls (1996)

I hadn't seen Different For Girls since the late 90s and had fond memories of it. Rewatching it, I may have realised I remembered it a little more fondly than it perhaps deserves, but that isn't to say that Tony Marchant's sensitive and well-intentioned film isn't a good movie. 

Marchant's script  follows the time-honored conventions of the romantic comedy movie genre, introducing two characters for whom opposites clearly attract. Paul is a hotheaded dispatch driver who, at 34, still largely lives like the punk obsessed teenager he was back in 1976. Kim is conservative and demure to the point of being painfully introverted. 

So far, so so...except Kim is a post operative transsexual and Paul was once his protection from the bullies back at school. 

A chance meeting in London one morning places the pair in an unusual relationship that neither can immediately get their heads around and numerous obstacles are put before them along the way to their happy ending.

Much of the film's success depends upon Steven Mackintosh's portrayal of the transsexual, Kim. So it's a relief to find that he is brilliant, hitting all the right notes of quiet determination, hard fought for privacy and shyness. It's a mark of his performance here that I actually forgot I was watching Steven Mackintosh, an actor I am very familiar with from other productions. He was simply Kim. 

As Paul, Rupert Graves gives a wonderfully swashbuckling turn inhabiting both the character's loutish recklessness as well as his obviously good heart. Unfortunately, Marchant's script makes the cardinal error of not getting under his character's skin as well as it ought to have done, which means the dynamics of the attraction he feels for someone he once knew to be a boy are sadly ill-explained. There's a great opportunity here to explore how certain Kim is of herself now and how still in the dark about himself and barely mature Paul is, but Marchant muffs it. Instead he offers us an unnecessary subplot concerning Kim's sister (Saskia Reeves) and her squaddie husband (Neil Dudgeon) who, it is revealed, is infertile. It's clear the message here is that it takes more to be a man than the ability to reproduce, but this is an obvious point you would hope we all know by now and, in the end, it is a diversion from the real heart of the tale (which is Paul and Kim, and what Paul sees in Kim) that wastes Dudgeon and Reeves, two excellent actors who appear to have been pushed centre stage like last minute subs in a game of football.

One of the things I fondly remembered about Different For Girls is the beautiful soundtrack of the punk and post punk/new wave music that Paul so loves. The film is choc-full of greats from the likes of Wreckless Eric, The Buzzcocks (who appear as themselves on stage when Paul takes Kim along to a gig) The Only Ones and Joe Jackson, whose 1979 hit gives the film its title. Keeping this late 70s vibe, the film also includes appearances from several notable figures from punk including Ian Dury as a bailiff, Edward Tudor-Pole as a solicitor and Graham Fellows aka Jilted John as the dispatch manager alongside the more traditional supporting cast that includes familiar faces such as Miriam Margolyes, the late Charlotte Coleman, Phil Davis and Robert Pugh.

Flawed and uneven it may be, but Different For Girls needs to be applauded for taking the first bold step in representing transsexualism on screen. Almost twenty years on, it is still an area that remains overlooked and that's the biggest flaw of all here.