I've been rumbled, I've been sold

Oh, the joys of nostalgia - finding a ten year old album of wannabe-Smiths-foppish types is available - an album that used to curdle your soul and make you feel the passion, the pain, oh yes. It's hard to be Left-Handed, you know.

I've been listening to very little else other than Sleep Well Tonight, which is cheesy, yes, but my god I loved it. I also loved getting it mixed up, when trying to find it online, with a song of the same title by the guy from Busted's band. Oops.

Which reminds me of a great playlist I put together of songs I, inadvertently, happened to have two versions of on the old itunes - the cover and original (or older cover, in some cases). I know I said I would keep this rubbish for myspace, but, quite frankly, it seems ridiculous to compartmentalize (and using a "z" there because it's a ridiculously American word/theme/idea, my British friends) such important parts of my life i.e. talking about myself (this blog) and my musical passions. My particular favourites are:

1) Night And Day - Fred Astaire/Ella Fitzgerald/Sondre Lerche
2) Billie (or Billy) Jean - Michael Jackson and Shinehead
3) Black Steel [in the Hour of Chaos] - Public Enemy and Tricky
4) Across the Universe - the beatles and Rufus Wainwright
5) I Idolize You - Tina & Ike Turner and Purple Wizard - particularly love the latter as they remove all the very dodgy submissive misogynistic crap that Ike somehow persuaded Tina to sing...
6) Float On - Ben Lee (weedy, it's true, but sweet) and Modest Mouse
7) Bills Bills Bills - Destiny's Child AND the GENIUS Beelzebub
8) Can you count having the sample and the cover? If so, I'm going for Can It All Be So Simple? by the Wu-Tang Clan and Ex-Factor by Lauryn Hill (although of course the Wu-Tang, in turn, sampled Gladys Knight).
9) The Greatest (TM) Cover Version of All Time (1): Heard it Through the Grapevine - Gladys Knight & Marvin Gaye. Yes, indeedy, it wasn't his version first.
10) The Greatest (TM) Cover Version of All Time (2): All Along The Watchtower - Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. As said in the Guardian, genuinely good cover versions are "a form of theft - Jimi Hendrix stole All Along The Watchtower from Bob Dylan and never gave it back".

And the reason for the gloomy, rain-stricken scene of a boat crossing the Panamá Canal is because I am gloomy over my lack of control, still, over my life. Still, that will lift due to both the win of Spurs sinking in, and the start of the MLB post-season, and, of course, because I am going to see the third (formerly first) most-watched movie in the U.S. tonight - embracing the zeitgeist, it's Jackass: Number Two for me. To balance this out, I am reading Nabokov, and then shall read Sebald. Yes indeedy.