Music From The Weird Part Of Youtube; Double The Fun, Double The Odd

 It was about 11 o'clock at night and I was trawling through Youtube looking for music. What I particularly enjoy is stumbling across a new music channel and strip-mining it for anything that looks interesting.  

    Sometimes I find fogotten classics, sometimes I get cool stuff I'd never heard of and sometimes I get little moments of  oddness.  Well, on my safari into the wildlands of Youtube I found two minor gems.  

  This particular channel - or cluster of channels- was dedicated to music performances from German TV so i knew right away I was going to find things that never hit the radar over here. 

 

Let's start with this one. Pink Project - Another Brick In The Wall (1982)

  Pink Project were an italian disco outfit that had the genius idea of mashing up "Another Brick In The wall" with a couple of Alan Parsons Project tracks that happened to have similar tempo. It really does work awfully well although it took me a while to work out what was going on. 

 However, that's not why this is on the blog today. with the song a hit in Germany, studio execs wanted the band to come in and perform it and the result is... borderline disturbing.  

What you get is a face off between some sort of Space KKK and a group of children who, frankly, look like they are just about  to open their mouths wide and reveal flesh-ripping teeth. 

 Credit to: Fritz51330

 Apparently the Italian team re-recorded everything from scratch, including the iconic guitar solo. 

Song number two is another case of the song not being weird but the presentation sure is.

Copes - Hold On (1982)

  A quick look on the net didn't turn up much on this band beyond that they were Dutch and seem to have released this one single and nothing more.  Discogs.com  only lists two members so that might explain why the cameraman blatantly ignores the bassplayer and guitarist. 

  So the song is a perfectly ordinary piece of sorta-new-wave pop-rock. decent enough and with some  potential to sell records in the USA if they'd had a push.  The video/ tv performance was clearly filmed on a shoestring in a spare lockup but somebody did try and jazz it up a bit with some haphazardly-applied twinkling stars. Bless them for trying.

Oh yes, then there's the reasons I am posting the video.

  Firstly: the backing dancers - a quartet of young ladies wearing lingerie and bridal veils who don't seem to have got any choreography beyond "Wiggle a bit. Try and look sexy."  My theory is that a hen-party happened to wander past and got offered a ten-minute job.

 

Secondly: The flying banana. 

WHY IS THERE A FLYING BANANA?

I demand that somebody explain the FLYING BANANA right goddam now

 Credit to:Fritz51333

If you fancy delving deeper into the rabbit hole of 80s German pop charts then check out the channels I linked above and show the uploader some love. Ask him about the banana.

That's All folks.

Big D Builds A Fighter With A Big Nose Part IV

   Previously on "Big D Builds..."

I bought a model kit from a charity shop becaue it looked like a cool design. 

Since i'm not actually that good at building model kits this led to a lot of swearing and blobs of glue  everyfrigginwhere.

Now read on.  

 

 When we left off I'd managed to get the main body of the Lavochkin put together. Next step was to jam filler into all the gaps and bits where the parts hadn't quite aligned. 

 Once that dried I sanded it all down until I got bored and painted the result.

 

 

As an aside, the Celebrations sweet tin is a perfect size for keeping spare bits and pieces.  

Plus you get to eat the chocolate first. 

  I left off the canopy until I painted the fuselage.

 

Canopy is now on and I painted that distinctive nose.

 

I am disappointed that nobody in Cold War Russia took the opportunity to paint the nose bright red and maybe add some eyes on the side.
 

Here's a better angle on the (unpainted) nose.

Between the big schnozz and those three intakes the Lavochkin looks downright goofy from the front. 

 

  Now we come to the aprt I was really not looking forward to and in fact, this is why the update was delayed for so long.  

The Undercarriage.  

" Intimidated" is really not the wrong word.  As soon as I saw those miniscule parts on the sprue I knew this stage was going to give me nightmares and at least one psychotic episode.  FFS, why are the main undergarriage legs in THREE sodding pieces?  The Nosewheel strut is in two and the only reason I can see is that tehy wanted to fil some extra slots on the sprue.   

 The nosewheel assembly. Not counting the wheel there's three pieces making up this bad boy and all of them are tiny. Not a good fit with my well-documented lack of co-ordination and chunky fingers. 

 

 The mainwheel was even worse and turned out to be a bity of a trap. 

 

Here's the relevant part of the instructions. 

 That looks an awful lot like the mainwheel assembly  is essentially one straight line.Right?

 

So that's how I put them together.

 

Then I looked at the painting guide on the back of the instructions. 

 

 Lemme just highlight the problem.

That's definite right-angle going on there. Why is this not in the fucking instructions? 

Aarrgghhh!

 

Now I have to take these bits apart and glue them back together again. 

Did the guy who wrote the isntructions and the guy who designed the kit work in different sheds  or something?

I'm going to go have a a nice cup of tea and wait for the vein in my temple to stop throbbing. 

That's All Folks.