The Zero Room

I swore I'd never go back to web development. I can pinpoint the precise moment.

I was fat, prematurely old, bald, grey bearded, and dancing up and down the hall in my underpants with the phone pressed to my ear, explaining to a "mate's rates" client why the impossible things he was asking for were impossible. It was made all the more infuriating by the fact that this client fancied himself a guru, boasted of his mastery of the dark arts of awk, sed, and groff, and insisted that he sought my assistance only because his time was so in demand elsewhere.

So while he was insisting that he didn't understand why I was being so difficult, and that it should be trivial to create a totally secure system that didn't require his users to supply an email address or remember a password, I lost my rag.

I can't even remember how I resolved that situation. I think I might have given him his deposit back. But I did resolve to call it a day, prise my web developers' shingle from the wall, and dither about for a while.

Dithering about was no less lucrative, and much better for my health, but there's no fighting age, and lately my body has started falling to bits, so suddenly minimum wage physical labour seems less viable. I find myself thinking where's the harm in looking at what's been going on since I've been away?

It's true I spent a miserable decade trying to be a tech entrepreneur in a small town where the prospective client base had a serious problem with literacy. Not technical literacy; I mean just reading and writing.

The only people who around here who can spell are the very many extremely busy tattoo artists, and even that proficiency is limited to names like "Sienna" or "Kaiden".

It's all very endearing to declare a devotion to one's offspring so indelibly, but surely there are times — during moments of consensual physical intimacy, for example — where one doesn't want to be taken out of the moment by a list of offspring running across a pair of shoulder blades or down a hairy forearm. Or maybe the thought of one's rampant fecundity contributes to the mood. Eww. Suburbia is sick. I digress.

I did enjoy becoming quite proficient at my trade, despite the lack of good it did me, and also the camaraderie of the Drupal community. Perhaps if I were to broaden my sights beyond Mount-Druitt-by-the-Sea, I might find this a trade I could ply from the comfort of my cat-drawn bath chair well into my dotage.

So I've decided to dip my arthritic old toes back into the water by migrating my old Drupal 7 personal website to Drupal 9. The plan is to migrate rather than upgrade in place. I would be creating a new, functionally equivalent and/or superior, site and copying the content (such as it is) over. Upgrading, at a distance of this many years is out of the question.

Preparing Your Work Surface

I'm going to start with a development site on my local computer and than try to use modern best practice to deploy on my Linode server.

Well, this is embarrassing. Surprisingly, my days as an IT professional comfortably predate the purchase of my now-rusting hulk of a desktop PC. It doesn't even have Apache on it. And all my work documentation, including my LAMP install checklist was on a long-gone Drupal site. I'm a hoarder, and don't often burn my bridges, but when I do I always regret it.

So, I'm going to have to remember/relearn all this:

# apt-get install apache
# apt-get install php
# apt-get install mariadb-server mariadb-client


And I at least get the Debian Apache placeholder page:

Look how lovely and calming it is. It should never change. I think I want it on my grave stone. It says, in essense, "Don't feel sad or anxious. Everything is alright."

Surprisingly, Moore's Law has caught up with Drupal, and so Debian 10's default PHP memory allotment is fine. Nevertheless I know I'm going to have to tweak limits when I get to coping with image files, so to pre-empt the urge to hack php.ini:

# cd /etc/php
# touch local.ini
# ln -s /etc/php/local.ini /etc/php/7.3/apache2/conf.d/10-local.ini

So any custom settings go in /etc/php/local.ini, and when PHP is upgraded, I just have to remember to create another symlink of my custom settings for the new version, rather than be prompted to investigate changes to php.ini on every `apt-get dist-upgrade`. (Who doesn't just cross their fingers and opt to keep the current version whenever that happens?)

Composer

I'm a Debian person. I like installing software from Debian via apt. I don't like installing binaries from tarballs, much less compiling from source. Really uncomfortable about the idea of layering another package management system on top of apt.

That said, Composer now does the package management for Drupal modules that was hitherto done by our own command line Swiss Army knife, drush. Why reinvent the wheel when you can hand that job over to something that the wider PHP developer community is already using? I'm okay with that.

Also, why not use Composer to install Drupal itself? Yeah… okay.

Debian 10 ships with Composer v1. When you try to use that to install anything, the package repository fires off a warning message, and because I'm skittish, I comply, and manually install Composer v2 according to instructions. With one wrinkle: anything I install that hasn't come from an apt package repository, I put in /opt and symlink the executable to /usr/bin. That way, I always know that anything I use which came from a from a source not in /etc/apt/sources.list can be found there. I love a bit of en passant documentation.

Drupal 9

As I said, I no longer have my old notes, and the official Drupal documentation (which is a mess; some things never change - at least not for the better) mostly refers to Drupal 8 rather than Drupal 9. This isn't quite the offense it seems to be at first glance, as due to Drupal's new continuous upgrades policy, Drupal 9 is just Drupal 8 minus deprecated code. New features get added incrementally with each minor version release, so there is no vast chasm of incompatibility between Drupal 8 and 9 (or later) as there was between Drupal 7 and 8 (and earlier).

So I decide to sally forth in total ignorance with the intention of remedying deficiencies in system requirements as and when they arise, thus:

$ cd /var/www
$ composer create-project drupal/recommended-project local.mjd.id.au
[…]
drupal/core 9.1.7 requires ext-dom * -> it is missing from your system. Install or enable PHP's dom extension.

Okay, so:

# apt-get install php-xml
$ composer create-project drupal/recommended-project local.mjd.id.au
[…]
drupal/core 9.1.7 requires ext-gd * -> it is missing from your system. Install or enable PHP's gd extension.

 Right, I'm fed up with this already. I go back to the documentation to find the PHP modules I need for a basic install and:

# apt install php-gd
# apt install php-curl
# apt install php-mbstring


Now:

$ composer create-project drupal/recommended-project local.mjd.id.au
[…]
Congratulations, you’ve installed the Drupal codebase 
from the drupal/recommended-project template!

And sure enough, there's a whole mess o' Drupal in /var/www now. Awesome. Just need an empty database and some Apache configuration.

PHPMyAdmin didn't make it into Debian 10, for some reason, though it is in testing/unstable.

I can't be doing with composing my own SQL queries. My brain is stubbornly multi-dimensional, and refuses to serialise. I love that SQL exists in ubiquity, and admire people who live and prosper in a world of LEFT INNER JOINs and so on, but it's not for me. Not to worry, Debian Backports to the rescue, so I can now create an empty database without breaking my brain.

I'm almost certain that the documentation on drupal.org used to have a sample Apache virtual host configuration template, but I'm blowed if I can find it, so I cheat and copy from my current site. What I put in /etc/apache2/sites-available/local.mjd.id.au.conf looks something like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin me@my.domain
        ServerName local.mjd.id.au
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteCond  %{HTTP_HOST}  !^local.mjd.id.au          [NC]
        RewriteCond  %{HTTP_HOST}  !^$
        RewriteRule  ^/(.*)        http://local.mjd.id.au/$1  [L,R]
        DocumentRoot /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/web
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/web>
                RewriteEngine on
                RewriteBase /
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
        LogLevel warn
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
        ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

Then it's:

# a2enmod rewrite
# a2ensite local.mjd.id.au
# systemctl restart apache2

And I can finally fire up a web browser and go through the familiar Drupal web install process. I opt for the "minimal" install, which is no exaggeration:

That is well minimal. This is the new "Stark" theme, which does not fail to live up to its name.

Switching to the new "Olivero" theme feels a bit more comfortable:

Still, I can't get around without the trusty old Admin Toolbar module so let's have Composer download that for us:

$ composer require drupal/admin_toolbar
Using version ^3.0 for drupal/admin_toolbar
./composer.json has been updated
Running composer update drupal/admin_toolbar
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies
Lock file operations: 1 install, 0 updates, 0 removals
  - Locking drupal/admin_toolbar (3.0.0)
Writing lock file
Installing dependencies from lock file (including require-dev)
Package operations: 1 install, 0 updates, 0 removals
  - Downloading drupal/admin_toolbar (3.0.0)
  - Installing drupal/admin_toolbar (3.0.0): Extracting archive
Package doctrine/reflection is abandoned, you should avoid using it. Use roave/better-reflection instead.
Generating autoload files

Using the web UI, I enable that module and also the Claro administrative theme and holy cow, this is starting to look like Drupal:

Drush

While I can now install bits of Drupal with Composer, I'm still missing the ability to actually enable/disable/configure those bits from the command line. For that I need Drush, which sounds like a yeast infection, but I think originally implied "Drupal shell":

$ composer require drush/drush

Drush now lives as a per-site instance under the Drupal root as vendor/bin/drush, which is a pain to type, so there's a wrapper script which will find the the instance appropriate to your current working directory:

# cd /opt
# wget https://github.com/drush-ops/drush-launcher/releases/latest/download/drush.phar
# chmod 755 drush.phar
# ln -s /opt/drush.phar /usr/bin/drush

So now I can go:

$ drush status
 Drupal version   : 9.1.7                                                
 Site URI         : http://default                                       
 DB driver        : mysql                                                
 DB hostname      : localhost                                            
 DB port          : 3306                                                 
 DB username      : mjdidau                                              
 DB name          : mjdidau                                              
 Database         : Connected                                            
 Drupal bootstrap : Successful                                           
 Default theme    : olivero                                              
 Admin theme      : claro                                                
 PHP binary       : /usr/bin/php7.3                                      
 PHP config       : /etc/php/7.3/cli/php.ini                             
 PHP OS           : Linux                                                
 Drush script     : /opt/drush.phar                                      
 Drush version    : 10.4.3                                               
 Drush temp       : /tmp                                                 
 Drush configs    : /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/vendor/drush/drush/drush.yml
 Install profile  : minimal                                              
 Drupal root      : /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/web                         
 Site path        : sites/default                                        
 Files, Public    : sites/default/files                                  
 Files, Temp      : /tmp

The full list of drush commands used to be had via `drush help`. I always derived some degree of confessional satisfaction from regularly typing `drush help|less`. `drush help` is now reserved for getting help on a particular command; to see all currently-available commands, one must use `drush list`, which when paginated is also quite appropriate.

There are approximately two people on the planet who will be astonished to find from the above that I'm installing a site in sites/default. I was always an advocate for Drupal's multisite capacity; the ability to run multiple websites from a single Drupal install, all sharing the same codebase, core and "contributed" modules and themes. You'd have each site's files, custom modules or themes sitting under sites/sitename.com.

In principle it sounds wonderful. In practice, it never quite worked. Imagine upgrading two sites at once. Then imagine upgrading a dozen sites at once. I never had, for instance, one single Drupal 6 instance. I had a Drupal 6.0 instance and a Drupal 6.1, and a Drupal 6.2, and so on, and I would shift sites one by one up the ladder as necessity dictated.

Ironically, the new Drupal versioning/upgrading regime makes that dream more realistic, but Moore's law has caught up. Server space is so much cheaper than the cost of even my labour that the most trivial website can afford the overhead of all those files it could easily be sharing with others.

That overhead is not trivial. In terms of disk usage, this new, entirely content-free website, currently looks like this:

$ du -chs *
4.0K    composer.json
224K    composer.lock
38M    vendor
128M    web
166M    total

A hundred and sixty-six meg of nothing is pretty extreme. Better start adding some content, I suppose…

Lately, I have been mostly reading:

• The Past and Future of Political Economy — Jamie Galbraith reviews The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky for American Affairs: The gold standard and the quantity theory of money have been succeeded in our day by rational expectations theory and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling (don’t ask), and by their policy stepchild, inflation targeting. These are the doctrines of repute and respectability, the touchstones of academic and professional advancement in our time. They share an almost eschatological preoccupation with the condition of things in the long run—the economists’ version of the prophets’ paradise to come—and a willingness to absorb (or more accurately to inflict) pain and punishment in the present. Economists in this respect are unlike modern doctors. The arsenals of pain relief and fever reduction play little role in their toolkit—and where they do (“stimulus programs”) they are often treated as having long-term costs that offset the benefits in the short term. Our social doctors generally prefer to let events take their course, on the assumption that the patient always recovers. If intervention is indispensable, they say, then let it be surgery without anesthesia, so that the patient will remember next time that it is better not to get sick.
• Life Before the Pandemic — xkcd by Randall Muroe:
  
• Global Vaccine Equity Is Much More Important Than ‘Vaccine Passports’ — Steven W. Thrasher in Scientific American: I am a much bigger fan of creating global vaccine equity—by breaking intellectual property patents if necessary—to suppress the level of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in as many humans as possible as quickly as possible across borders than I am a fan of creating vaccine passports that only allow those with the privilege of getting a vaccine to cross borders. Borders in some countries are currently being used to determine who does and doesn’t get a vaccine. It would be even more unethical to use those borders to bar the movement of people who have been denied vaccination. As Stefan David Baral, Jean Olivier Twahirwa Rwema and Nancy Phaswana-Mafuya recently wrote in the BMJ, “being a citizen of certain countries grants people access to nearly the entire globe, whereas others face challenges just to legally leave the borders of the country they live in, even during times of conflict.” Not coincidentally, people in high-earning-income countries also have much greater access to vaccines than those in poorer countries with less mobility. But the idea that one “needs” to go on vacation or attend an academic conference abroad at this point in the pandemic is morally unjustifiable. This is especially true if you are traveling to or from a place where you know others do not have access to vaccines—and you want a special piece of paper proving that you do, which would allow you to cross the border.
• Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
  
• How Workers Really Get Canceled on the Job — Nathan Newman in the American Prospect: In her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about being given a personality test when interviewing for a housecleaning job, which asked such questions as whether “management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals.” She also described alarming the tester for Walmart, by asserting some measure of independence on a couple of questions. Ehrenreich’s working-class job seeker was among the real victims of cancel culture in the U.S., not A-list writers and actors. For decades, millions of workers have been rejected for employment based solely on their answers to pre-employment personality tests administered by corporate America. Instead of social media mobs, inscrutable algorithms silently delete people from interview callbacks, without their résumé even being seen by a human being. And make no mistake, rooting out dissent is the primary goal of these hiring algorithms.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Pirarro:
  
• North Carolina Republicans Want to Punish Gender Thoughtcrime — Sarah Jones in New York Magazine: In the race to stigmatize trans children, North Carolina Republicans have pulled ahead. If passed, Senate Bill 514 wouldn’t just ban people under the age of 21 from getting the transition health care they need, it would also require state employees to out trans and queer children to their parents. If a child displays “symptoms of gender dysphoria, gender nonconformity, or otherwise demonstrates a desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex,” they must notify the child’s parents or guardians, the legislation mandates. Legislators in other states have proposed bills that would, similarly, prevent trans children from getting medically necessary care. North Carolina, however, is innovative. Co-sponsoring legislators have in essence devised a way to punish gender thoughtcrime. The bill is broad, and could affect tomboys and trans kids alike. A person’s definition of “gender nonconformity” depends first on their conception of gender — of what’s normal, and what isn’t.
• Who The #Resistance Was Actually #Resisting These Last Four Years — Caitlin Johnstone in/on Medium: The Resistance™️ was aggressively marketed by cynical liberal spinmeisters like Neera Tanden (who in a brazen middle finger to US progressives is also set to play a role in the Biden administration) with the goal of harnessing and maintaining the enthusiastic grassroots anti-establishment energy of the Bernie Sanders campaign and directing it against Trump. But what did it actually accomplish? In the end, all the so-called Resisters ended up doing was promoting a bunch of Russia conspiracy theories and an impeachment which failed to remove Trump, all while providing no actual resistance to Trump’s most pernicious policies. […] This is because the #Resistance was never actually intended to resist the evil agendas of the powerful, nor even to resist Trump. The #Resistance was not created to resist the powerful, it was created to resist you. The grassroots anti-establishment populism of the Bernie Sanders movement was cynically imitated by the Democratic establishment to ensure that the establishment is never inconvenienced in any way, and that progressives never take power in America.

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  
• People with ‘gay-sounding’ voices face discrimination and anticipate rejection — Carrie Woods in the Academic Times reviews a recent paper in the field of stupid men studies: The research highlighted that essentialist beliefs about homosexuality can result in “auditory gaydar,” or the use of vocal cues to infer someone else’s sexual orientation. Whether or not an individual “sounded gay” resulted in different levels of prejudice and avoidant discrimination. […] The findings show that “sounding gay” is something that still carries a significant stigma, especially for men. The men who believed that they “sounded gay” reported higher levels of vigilance regarding their voice, which is something that can create stress in their lives, Fasoli said.
• The Nightmare Is Finally Over, and We Can Say with Absolute Certainty That There Will Never Be Another Death Star Ever Again — Madeleine Trebenski and the pop culture metaphor that never gets old at McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Our reports state that, at the time of the attack, the Emperor was playing golf at his resort in Canto Bight, but has since retreated to the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim. He continues to send out communications claiming that he won The Battle of the Death Star, even though flaming chunks of debris from the former moon-sized battle station are currently raining down on nearby planets. Try not to take his refusal to acknowledge defeat and his vow to never relinquish supreme power too seriously. In the wake of our victory, his regime and all of the anti-republic support he has stirred up over the last few years will surely fade back into the dark corners of space from whence they came. There’s no reason to believe that his followers will quietly nurse their hatred in the shadows and commence rebuilding a second Death Star the minute we become complacent and return to the status quo.
• Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace — Matt Stoller explains why the new Australian law isn't a "link tax": The law says that if you are a dominant digital platform, then you have an obligation to engage in good faith bargaining with news outlets whose content you distribute over the terms of that distribution. The law only applies if there is a bargaining imbalance with media outlets. So this isn’t a tax, it is an anti-monopoly law. […] The idea behind the law is to mimic a healthy market, where there is transparency of data and a robust set of buyers and sellers instead of a few dominant platforms. […] In other words, despite what Facebook’s PR armies are saying, it isn’t a link tax, it is an anti-monopoly law that Facebook is opposing because the law will undermine the firm’s ability to monopolize the ad market and force transparency in how the firm gathers and manages its vast data horde. […] Facebook’s response to this law was to flex some serious muscles, and block the sharing of news in Australia on its platform. Doing so was a disaster, at least PR-wise, because it revealed how much power Facebook really has. The social media monopolist lost credibility globally, with Canadian and UK politicians attacking the firm as a bad faith actor. Facebook even lost American support; as late as last month, the United States Trade Representative was supporting the company against Australia’s law, but the American government seems to have switched course, and is now neutral. It’s now only a matter of time before Facebook is broken up and regulated.
• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  
• “I Don’t Trust the People Above Me”: Riot Squad Cops Open Up About Disastrous Response to Capitol Insurrection — Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan in ProPublica: Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters. “We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’” By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day. “We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”
• Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market — Jamie Galbraith for INET: In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity system. […] The market system could, and did, work out most of the time. Prices rose and fell, and customers who didn’t sign long-term contracts faced some risk. […] The problem with “most of the time” is that people need electric power all of the time. And Texas’s leaders knew as of 2011, at least, when the state went through a short, severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather. But they did nothing. To do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed – most of the time. In 2020, even voluntary inspections were suspended, due to Covid-19.
• It’s Always The Same Lie — Kelsey McKinney in Defector (some kind of sports blog, apparently): Americans are being failed in every state. They are dying and suffering while our representatives are arguing over whether to give us 1,400 more dollars in the 11th month of a pandemic. Every level of the United States government is lying to you right now. They are looking you dead in the eye as your family members freeze and cough and drown in debt and telling you that, actually, you’re fine. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” former Texas Governor Rick Perry said in a blog posted on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s website. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.” Current Texas Governor Greg Abbott went on Fox News to place the blame for Texas’s blackouts on green energy sources, and to wield the grid’s failure as a dire warning against the Green New Deal. He was lying, the same way Andrew Cuomo lied when he wrote an entire book about his masterful leadership through the coronavirus pandemic while 15,000 New Yorkers died in nursing homes as a direct result of his policies. He was lying the same way Barack Obama lied when he went to Flint in 2018 and pretended to take a sip of water in front of an outraged community.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  

Probably about [squints a bit, rubs chin] four years ago a friend of my [then-]wife invited us to a nineteen-eighties-themed birthday party. For the previous few years I'd been assembling playlists of music videos, mostly from YouTube, to play during the traditionally festive bit at the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Together with getting out the turntable and dusting off the vinyl, jigsaw puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Uno, and insane amounts of food and booze, a splendid time was generally had, under the circumstances.

So as we were too skint to shell out for an appropriately lavish gift for a round-numbered birthday, my wife suggested I put together an eighties-themed video playlist on a USB drive. It was tremendous fun finding and downloading the videos (for any young people who may be reading, "downloading" is just like streaming, only deleting the data you've just downloaded isn't mandatory). Where previously I'd just played the videos through my RaspberryPi plugged into the telly, this time after downloading with youtube-dl, I edited (most topping and tailing) the clips when necessary in OpenShot, checked the audio in Audacity to see how much it should be amplified to keep each track at more or less the same level (no, I've not found any satisfactory way of automating this), then applying the amplification and transcoding to H264 MPEG with HandBrake, so that you could stick a USB stick into any telly made in the last ten years and it would play.

It was so much fun that I extended my remit beyound the eighties and started doing the same thing every year. I'm less fussy about the format/codec now, as I don't have a telly (these days nobody does; they're just computers you don't really control, with a huge monitor and a very bad UI), so I just leave it in the format/codec I found it wherever possible.

This year — no relatives, not much food, still plenty of booze — I set about doing the same. Having exhausted the obvious back-catalogue stuff it's a smaller show than in the past, and I'm a month behind schedule. It's mostly little novelties that I've stumbled across in the last twelve months, plus nostalgic things that they brought to mind. You can download the whole thing here, for as long as I have the server space, or follow the YouTube links below until the sources are taken down.

Here's the list:

The Pogues: Dirty Old Town (A Snippet Thereof)

Can't start without the Pogues. Found a few old clips while down some rabbit hole or other last year. Would love to know the source of this one, beyond "somebody's VHS collection". Really encapsulates MacGowan's punk attitude to music at a point in the Pogues trajectory where the success they'd had didn't interfere with his preferred lifestyle; no barriers between performer and audience, and a sheepish indifference to his own talent.

The Trashcan Sinatras: Obscurity Knocks

In the late eighties and early nineties, my old school chum Paul used to drive up from his family's semi-rural property to my family's utterly-suburban home once a week. We'd order pizza and consume vast quantities of cola to the point where I swear I could feel the sugar slurry moving through my veins. Until the not-so-wee hours of the morning we'd talk nonsense and watch Rage, where this video was one of several on high rotatation at the time. A gorgeous song and a video that perfectly suits it, but doesn't define it.

Courtney Barnett: Pedestrian at Best

Stumbled across the official video for this single on a forum somewhere and immediately thought "This is great! Simple, relentless, like the Fall!" As it happens, this song is a bit of an outlier, and most of her stuff is more in the standard Oz Alternative vein. Still, I like that as well, so no harm done. This live rendition is a bit nearer Nirvana than the Fall. Which — also — is nice.

I'm fascinated by the way she plays guitar, since the way I play (well, used to play) is to treat the whole enterprise as mainly an aerobic workout, and if all the frantic thrashing about sounds okay, that's a bonus. Seeing her get that big sound out of lightly brushing the strings, and realising "Oh, yeah. Electric amplification…"

The Stranglers - Golden Brown

Some transitions between songs are because one naturally follows from another. Others are because it's a jarringly discordant wake-up. Still others are just your brain telling you "I want to listen to this one next".

This song was on the EMI (Australia) various artists compilation album 1982 with a Bullet, which we had in our house as kids. In the nineties, when I was living in Oscar's Palace, I was messing about on my guitar with chord progressions and suddenly thought "Oh! That sounds like…", and did the same few chords in waltz time. And yes, my entire life is basically nostalgia for times that don't really warrant it.

Putting together the original 80s playlist, I couldn't find a source for the official video, so I used a far less satisfying Top of the Pops mime performance. This will be not the last callback to earlier playlists (which I may also put online if I'm ever less work-shy).

Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over

Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of beloved songs: didn't you love these in 2020?

Maybe not entirely, but still it's Crowded House. Well, it's Neil and Nick. Plus fun fact: the "catch a deluge in a paper cup" line was a conscious nod to Lennon's "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup" from Across the Universe. Bet you didn't know that. Read it in the early nineties in an interview with Neil in one of those music papers that used to give you black fingertips.

Steve Martin (with The Philadelphia Orchestra): Office Supplies

Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of things you've never heard before…

I think The Jerk is one of the greatest films of all time, and I'm delighted by Steve Martin's quite substantive musical career in recent years.

I bought a banjo about twenty years ago, hoping to emulate Jem Finer from the Pogues. Turns out it's a very loud instrument, with no volume control. Not quite as bad as bagpipes or the saxophone, but not recommended for anybody who likes to reach a certain level of proficiency in complete privacy.

Still have it. Barely played. Make an offer.

The Dick Cavett Show: Little Richard On Discovering The Beatles

Good golly, Miss Molly. RIP, the king and queen of rock and roll.

The Beatles (Live At The Festival Hall in Melbourne): Long Tall Sally

Ringo had just recovered from a serious bout of tonsilitis. Thought you might want to know that.

Using FFmpeg, you can fix the aspect ratio without re-encoding and losing quality. Which is nice.

David Byrne (Live on Saturday Night Live): Once in a Lifetime

This has already been yanked from YouTube. It's a performance from the American Utopia stage show which Spike Lee filmed and you can probably get from various informal distribution channels. How on earth taking this off YouTube might be to the benefit of Byrne, the producers of SNL, the stage production, or anybody even remotely associated with all the above, is a mystery to me. Monopolists got to monop, I suppose.

Happy Mondays: Sunshine and Love

The Mondays' last proper album is an unappreciated gem. The conventional wisdom about it is total bollocks.

They didn't bankrupt Factory, Factory bankrupted itself and was waiting, unreasonably, for the Mondays to come to the rescue.

The Mondays were always a producer's band, and after a cracking couple of albums with first John Cale and then Martin Hannett producing, they had their mainstream hit with Paul Oakenfold, which to me landed like a wet sock. It was so of its time that it was dated by the day of its release, and so polished that you can listen to it over and over and not feel a thing.

Yes Please! was a return to form, with Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth (from Talking Heads) putting the welly back into the mix.

Unfortunately the NME and Melody Maker, having decided how music was going to go in the nineties and finding that the Mondays no longer fit, elected to put the boot in. Because obviously Northside was the horse to bet on.

Divinyls: Hey Little Boy

Did Chrissy Amphlett make sexy scary, or make scary sexy? Anyway, an Australian band that broke into the mainstream without losing brains or edge.

My friend Paul and I saw the Divinyls at the State Theatre in Sydney about thirty years ago. Brilliant.

I love the State theatre, but it was the wrong venue for that band. The seats were totally redundant from five minutes in.

R.E.M.: Nightswimming

Fediverse chum @andyc brought this clip to my attention last year. It's a beautiful thing.

This song is occasionally on the musak playlist at work. I don't care. It won't spoil it. I could listen to it every day, and it would never fail to fascinate me.

The Sundays: Here's Where The Story Ends

There are no words.

Modern English: I Melt With You

Another lockdown video which is also a callback to my eighties mixtape. The song hit that sweet spot of one you'd remember but not too familiar, so that you'd get that Proustian remembrance effect.

Also, the original version makes one think "Christ! What a bunch of wankers!" I can't say that the update entirely rids one of that sensation, but as a general rule, getting old is a blessing.

Dicey Reilly: The Dubliners

Now, to be honest, I don't know why I included this. I was probably drunk. It's off the first Dubliners album I ever bought, which was kind of a reunion album (with an accompanying TV special I've still not seen), made in the banner year of 1988.

Siouxsie and The Banshees: Killing Jar, Burn Up

1988 was my last year in school. Beginning with pocket money record purchases, and accelerating when I got my first job the following year I mined that year for everything it had. And what riches it had! The children of punk came of age in that year. The Pogues and Billy Bragg released albums of staggering brilliance and beauty, and the Banshees gave us Peepshow.

I'm a sucker for a cello. Love this video for the eighties music show presenter awkwardness and the VHS artifacts.

Also, as far as I'm concerned, Siouxie still looks and dresses like this. I will not accept any evidence to the contrary.

Electric Light Orchestra: Can't Get It Out Of My Head

Okay. The cello thing can be taken too far.

I was really thrilled when George Harrison had his late eighties renaissance, and the Wilbury thing, with ELO's Jeff Lynne. So as a gormless schoolkid, I started shoplifting ELO records and cassettes (shoplifting pro tip: the cassettes are easier). I tried to like them, but my god, they were awful.

For decades afterward, I tried telling myself that actually, the first — budget-constrained — album was pretty good, what with the overdubbed raw scraping of bows on strings. A few Christmases ago I put that record on the turntable, and no, it's just bloody awful.

So this video is just self-flagellation, and a reminder of what punk fixed, however temporarily. Enjoy.

Madness presents - Two Mad Men and a String Quartet: Night Boat to Cairo

More lockdown. The only song I included in the mix was the first, as it later becomes apparent that Suggs is just phoning it in. Jesus. You had one job to do! Be a nutty boy. That's not an unreasonable request for a sixty year old man, surely? Look at Siouxie: she's still stunning!

The Smiths: Accept Yourself

Oh, Morrissey. Look at yourself. You poisoned it all.

Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock N Roll Fun

Another one I got from some bonkers forum site. I knew guitarist Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia, one of those Lorne Michaels catchphrase-driven sketch comedy shows that are never quite as funny as you want them to be. I'd heard that she was in some band called Sleater-Kinney, but I never felt sufficiently motivated to investigate.

This song is good, inoffensive guitar pop. What's not to love?

I'm working my way through the back catalogue, The first couple of albums are a bit raw, but the ones after that are in the grey area between offensive and inoffensive, otherwise known as my comfort zone.

Son House: Death Letter Blues

I never heard of Son House, can't remember how I got to this video, by my god this is the real stuff.

Hat Fitz and Itchy: Miss Mabel

Back in about 2002 my wife and I were in Annandale on a very important mission to get a pot of some specific colour of paint, and after securing said item and dinner at McDonalds, we wandered across Parramatta Road to the Empire Hotel for a beer. This was the inner west's premier blues venue, and as we sat down, a young blond-haired, blue-eyed boy started setting up on stage and I, in a terribly racist way, thought "Hello, get ready for some Eric Clapton."

Turned out he was actually quite good, and we stayed to the end of his set. By then we were a bit tipsy, and game for the next act on the bill: Hat Fitz and Itchy.

Good golly, Miss Molly. Never knew that it was possible to make that much sound out of a single guitar. Literally pinned back to the wall by the force of it. Never mind the malevolent glare Fitzy gave the audience as he sent them into paroxysms of pleasure. He was playing the audience as much as playing the guitar.

He announced that he accepted tips in the form of Jameson, and by the time they were done, the front of the stage was covered in little glasses. He's settled down now, and his current musical/life partner told me on a recent visit to Coffs that he doesn't drink at all any more. Which is nice.

I'm a couple of albums behind at the moment, but he's the kind of artist where it doesn't feel right to buy a CD anywhere but out of his suitcase at a live gig.

Neil Finn - Don't Dream It's Over

Yes, I know. All I want from life now is a cure for baldness and a string section that will follow me about on a cart.

Trashcan Sinatras: Best Days on Earth

Not the most prolific band on earth, but thirty years on still the most adept at tugging on heartstrings. I've a personal vignette I can't help but associate with this song, but it's a matter for another occasion.

The Pogues: Greenland Whale Fisheries

Okay, the whole concert video is mesmerising. I just included the whale one because it's such an oddity of a song, and so weird that Shane included it on the Pogues' first album. He has a logic that defies logic.

Shane here is just magic. He's a very capable guitar player, and possibly rivals Lydon as the best punk vocalist. That original simple lineup, the selection of traditional songs, and of course the glorious original compositions are pure genius. He engineered it all, but a few years later it crushed him.

Obscurity is underrated.

That 1 Guy - Whale Race

Not long after we moved to Sawtell, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend came down from Queensland and lived with us for a while before heading off again to Goondiwindi (sounds exotic, but don't go there unless you have a thing for red dirt). They'd seen That 1 Guy in Queensland, and insisted we all had to go see him at the Planto in Coffs.

(There's a doctoral dissertation to be had on the syntactical rules around Australian colloquial abbreviations. The Plantation Hotel is the Planto, while the Toormina Hotel is the Toormi and the Sawtell Hotel is the Sawty. The Park Beach Hotel/Motel is the Hoey Moey. Nobody feels the need to ask why.)

I was so impressed that when I bought a CD from him after the gig I positively gushed. In those days he and the magic pipe mostly stuck to a pithy three minute pop format, and I said he reminded me of the raw, percussive thing that Tom Waits does (I don't think I was any more eloquent than that, sadly). He seemed genuinely flattered and said he knew some people who had worked with Waits, and would really love to do so. I was chuffed to learn a few years ago that he eventually did.

He's become a bit more symphonic in recent years. It should offend my punk sensibilities, but this holds one's attention for nearly ten minutes. Plus it's about whales.

The Undertones, True Confessions

You have to. You just do. Two minutes, in and out. Thrashing guitars, no whales, no violins, just pure mischieveous joy on BBC2.

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