BUT IT'S OK

 You know I’ve always felt ambivalent about Sergeant Pepper.  For every cracking song like 

‘A Day in the Life’ there’s some horror like ‘Lovely Rita.’

 

But without wanting to appear perverse, the song I really used to like and still do is ‘Good Morning,’ which apparently John Lennon hated, saying ‘It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought.’  I can see his point, the words are  all over the place, but throwaway isn’t always bad, the song does rock, and there’s some tasty lead guitar by Paul.

 

The song was on my mind when I was in Sheffield recently, especially the lyrics.

 

After a while you start to smile now you feel cool
Then you decide to take a walk by the old school
Nothing is changed it's still the same
I've got nothing to say but it's OK

Good morning, good morning
Good morning ah

 

They had some resonance because I did indeed take a walk by, and to a limited extent inside the grounds of, the old school: King Edward VII, Glossop Road, Sheffield.  And an awful lot had changed.

 

For one thing, they’ve built a stonking great extension, and there were some forbidding security gates, though not all THAT forbidding because you could easily walk through whenever they opened to let a car in and out, which happened all the time.  I assume I was being filmed.

 

Other changes: some art in the car park:

 

And they even have a school mini bus:

 

Many changes, though the main school building still looks like the same forbidding satanic mill that it always did.

 

It was early evening when I took most of these pictures so I had no reason to sing, or say,  ‘Good morning.’  But it was OK.

The Beatles version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3O23zqqaE

And, hold on to your hat, the Micky Dolenz version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyA_xBYUPw

WALKING WRONG

 

There was a brief news item in the Metro newspaper a couple of weeks back that read, ‘A 

lifetime of brisk walking can make your “biological age” 16 years younger by mid life.  

Health data from 405,000 Brits showed those who walked quickly had more of the DNA 

that reduces ageing, a Leicester University study found.’

 

         I didn’t know there was a kind of DNA that reduced ageing, but I’m no scientist.

       In any case, it seems I’m doomed.  I’ve never been a brisk walker.  I just haven’t. I mean sometimes I walk faster than others, if I’m in a hurry or especially eager to get somewhere, but generally I’m a bit of an ambler if not a dawdler.  It seems I’m walking all wrong.

 

It’s not the first time I’ve been told this. My dad was a great one for telling me that I was doing things wrong.  Walking was just one of them.

 

He insisted that a boy should walk with arms swinging like pendulums: right foot and left arm forward, then left foot and right arm forward,  I had difficulty with this, and I still do, but I see the point. The swinging arms surely help carry you forward.

 

Some guys at the University of Michigan would agree. They measured the energy used by people who walked in different ways—swinging their arms, holding them to their sides, and so on, and they found that the swinging actually reduces the overall amount of energy it takes to walk.  According to the study, people who hold their arms still while walking use 12 per cent more metabolic energy than people who swing their arms.

 

Of course some people walk in order to ‘keep fit,’ which may be akin to lowering their biological age, so I suppose in fact they’d welcome the chance to use extra energy.  More research required, lads.

 

I found this information while doing an online search for ‘walking wrong,’ and it appears the Internet is awash with articles telling me, and you, that we’re walking wrong, articles with titles like, ‘Common walking mistakes,’ ‘The 97 walking errors you didn’t know you were making,’ ‘101 walking blunders to avoid,’ and so on. These guys were a bit hit and miss:

         Who knew?  But my response to all this is pretty much the same as I said to my dad back in the day, ‘Leave me alone. I’ll walk to hell in my own way. And at my own pace.'

 

This is Raquel Welch in the Seinfeld episode where she doesn’t swing her arms:

 

And here she is in life – swinging with the best of them.

RECORD WALKS

 

Once upon a time it was apparently quite easy to design album covers.  You got a photograph of the artist – portrait studio, recording studio, maybe playing live - you did some more or less fancy lettering and there was your album cover.

And then someone came up with the idea – how about we show the artist WALKING?

There are a couple of advantages here obviously, it gives the subjects something to do, and perhaps even more important, it’s a way of asserting they’re men (and in a few cases women) of the people who haven’t lost touch with the street.

When it comes to “most famous walking album cover” it’s probably a toss up between Abbey Road and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.  I think Dylan just about edges it because even though we know it’s a setup, he actually does look like he’s walking somewhere, whereas the Beatles look like they’re only walking across the street for the sake of the photoshoot.

The Beatles actually looked a bit more natural on this one:

Of course when it comes to Oasis, it’s hard to know whether we’re dealing with homage or barefaced borrowing.  This picture is taken in Berwick Street, one of my “beating the bounds” streets when I go back to London.  Since there’s some motion blur on the cover you might be tempted to think the two men are the Gallagher brothers, but no, don’t be naïve.  The two men are Sean Rowley, who’s a DJ walking towards the camera, and the album sleeve designer Brian Cannon who’s walking away.  Apparently Owen Morris, the album producer, is lurking in the background.

I also suspect that photograph, borrows from this Duane Michael series, titled "Chance Meeting," but you know, in for a penny in for a pound, it’s all appropriation, innit?

No borrowings or homage here on this Dr Alimantado album cover, largely I think because walking down the middle of the street, wearing shorts with the fly open isn’t a look that really existed before or after, but in this case I’m glad it does.

Walking in the street too tame for you?  Then try the railroad tracks:

Earth too tame for you?  Try outer space.

And you can just about imagine what went on in the mind of Randy Jack Wiggins and his photographer when they made this cover.

“Sure,” said Jack, “I know I’m a boring old coot with a salt and pepper beard and dubious taste in shirts, but if we have a couple of good looking girls, and you know, they needn’t be professional models or anything, well if they walked with me holding hands, then that’d be a bitching album cover, wouldn’t it?  Wouldn’t it?”

 Maybe sometimes it’s better just to walk away from the camera.  If it’s good enough for Johnny Cash and Eminem, it’s probably good enough for you.