It’s been a little while but I feel the time has come to usher myself out of an ideas cul-de-sac of my own making and give something a go. I did something about Blue Monday the other day (Monday, actually) but I’m afraid it didn’t pass quality control, so here I go again. Like all those who suffer from lack of motivation in January I’ve really been struggling. The 50+ pages of legal bumf (that’s Dad and big Sisters department) I had to read for my journalism course has put me right off and as that little distraction has ground to a halt it seems to have taken all possible wind from the sails of onstupidity.com as well. Which isn’t really fair.
Anyway, for rousing me from my torpor, my thanks go to Nick Knowles, a man seemingly so barren of talent that one wonders what skills his four children from various failed relationships could possibly have inherited from him. Is there any point to Nick Knowles unless you’re unemployed? In which case he may well fill up several hours during your daily routine of doing nothing.
His Wikipedia page (a spectacular waste of internet space) proudly boasts a varied array of unfeasibly useless and worthless programmes including DIY SOS, 5 Star Family Reunion, Real Rescues and Who Dares Wins, the last of which sadly does not involve Mr Knowles dying of dehydration in a failed desert storm operation or being brutally tortured in a Baghdad jail for information he couldn’t possibly know or articulate. The sum virtues of all the aforementioned programmes combined tally up to a grand total of zero and if you have ever found yourself even slightly distracted by a show presented by Nick Knowles then you should be asking some serious questions about the direction your life is taking.
But beyond all that barrel scraping Nick Knowles has seen fit to plunge several levels deeper and decided to indulge us with an album. That’s right, an album. Of music. And singing. Him singing. And playing. Some music. Christ alive, isn’t the world in bad enough shape already? According to Nick music has been a big part of his life ever since he can remember (what are the chances) only he’s chosen to keep this hidden. Presumably on humanitarian grounds. So to make up for lost time he released an album called ‘Every Kind of People’ last November, doubtless timed to cash in on the lucrative ‘it’s Christmas so people will buy all kinds of crap’ market. And sure enough the album is out there and the damage is done. Predictably it has all the artistic value and integrity of a battery powered singing trout slapped on a kitchen wall in the house of someone you no longer see on the grounds of taste.
Now I appreciate that this makes it sound like I’ve listened to it, which isn’t quite true. I’ve heard about one minute of him demolishing the title track, an astonishing affront to good music, and that was enough for me to make an informed assessment that no life is worth living with any more than that to endure. The reviews on Amazon can sometimes be misleading because generally it’s fans who write most of them and they tend to be swayed a little towards the positive but even this effort cannot turn back the tsunami of insults.
Some are initially misleading such as this from one R. Binout who described it as ‘a masterpiece created from an unworldly palette of musical colour’. But don’t worry, Mr Binout is not profoundly deaf or inbred, a quick read unveils a nicely written, fully rounded fisting of a review so don’t let the 5 stars fool you.
The undisguised insults are, generally speaking, brilliant and this is only a small sample:
Mr L J Martin – ‘I don’t hate anyone enough to buy this for them’ (oh go on, think really hard L J).
Harry Hipple – ‘Bought it for my dog…he has now left me. Made his ears bleed.’
Anon – ‘I was going to buy it for my Nan but decided to go round and take a sh*t in her ear’ (superb, but why has your Nan only got one ear?).
Mr JFT – ‘….an appalling exercise in the highest forms of self-delusion and self-congratulatory egocentricity from a ridiculous z-list tv turd with all the musical talent of a heavily soiled mattress.’ (I salute you Mr JFT).
Alan Frehley – ‘……I’d cross continents to avoid this……..it’s annoying, like a nagging wife……still, Nick loves himself so much, if he were made of chocolate, he’d lick himself to death.’ (happily married I presume).
Linda Elliot – ‘I think this CD has broken my cat?’.
And the list goes on and on and they’re all absolutely spot on. One can only hope that a deluded narcissist like Nick Knowles would have read all these and then spent a substantial part of his Christmas weeping softly as he masturbated over the front cover of his own album.
The point of this exercise has been rather simple. I had to write about something just to get going again (sorry if it’s rubbish) and I had to make you aware of yet another crime against recorded music. We can’t all be what we want to be. It’s unlikely I’ll ever become a marine biologist (or indeed a writer) and so Nick Knowles should terminate his desire to share his less than scant musical ability with the rest of the world. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be the saddest thing ever if he just vanished altogether. Up his own arse would be a good place to start.
G.B.Hewitt. 19.01.2018
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 