My naivete concerning DIY is matched only by my child-like ignorance of pop music. One of the four popular CDs I own is the album Flood by They Might Be Giants. (The others are Sounds of the Sixties, Status Quo’s Rockin all over the years and Carry on up the charts from The Beautiful South.) Someone at church introduced me to it at a bring-your-favourite-track evening for the 20s & 30s group four years ago. Thank you, Nat.
I love its wackiness, its ‘folly’ in the medieval sense, and the amusing electronic instrumentation. ‘Particle Man’ and ‘Whistling in the Dark’ are very fine indeed, but they stand on the shoulders of what might be giants. Even their cover of Kennedy and Simon’s ‘Istanbul’ (from 1953) is great fun.
However, rather than find out anything more about the band and their work, which might lead to disappointment, information overload, or becoming an earnest groupie, I shall continue to feed off this fun slice, unrepresentative or not. After all, everybody just wants a rock to wind a piece of string around, or, failing that, prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.
