Off Topic Compare the cheese to no 10 thread

How is that possible?

 

Dear RHC,

What is the view currently of the brexit warnings about regulatory approvals in the pharma and bio pharma sectors?

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...s-of-consequences-of-leaving-eu-customs-union

honda uk is a very different business but are sounding the warnings loudly.

The regulatory bodies for pharma etc are much more stringent. Will having a separate licensing in uk and EU hurt much? I know the uk has its own competant authority but the licensing of a drug in EU happens across all state when one does it.

any issues for research etc in UK?

 

Was my explanation not succinct enough for you?

 

Most definitely.

 

Eh?
It's not all about you, you know.

 

Yes it ****ing is You sound like the unit now

 

succicent as always.

are you seeing less hiring out there or are you seeing companies preparing for a split by hiring for roles around marketing approvals

 

First Christmas record this year put on 'by accident' in the Cheese last night. Banana Bob the culprit. Gregory Porter, the over-hyped balaclava-wearing, useless **** trying to be Nat King Cole He received some well-deserved and vociferous abuse

 

The current trend, which is reflected in the biotech sector, is that vacancies continue to rise and unemployment continues to fall. No real shortage in hiring, but quality people are harder to find. Should make it better for us, really. However, there will undoubtedly be a cliff-edge appearing at some stage unless commitments are made to protect the hi-tech industries with a free flow pf people across national boundaries. Lip-service still the order of the day at the moment

 

I saw some stats saying employment numbers fell this quarter generally but the unemployment stats fell even more. Less people working (15k less) but even less on dole. (50klss)

 

#allaboutzanjinho

 

Must get some Cornish blue ordered for Christmas

 

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How the **** did you do that? Sorry for using the 'c' word

 

Apology accepted

 

**** off, you EM twot

 

Actually on purpose. It's a word used in these parts, on occasion.

 

^^^^ #common

 

Donald Fagen: ‘With Steely Dan there was no career plan’
As the band come to the UK, Donald Fagen tells John Bungey about the loss of his musical partner of 50 years, Walter Becker

John Bungey
October 28 2017, 12:01am, The Times

• Music
• London

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Donald Fagen on stage with Steely Dan last yearLARRY MARANO/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
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“It’s been pretty rough. He was a brother, a brother for 50 years.” Donald Fagen is reflecting on the weeks since the death of Walter Becker, his partner in Steely Dan. The group’s mix of breezy tunes and sharp, subversive lyrics — from Do It Again to Deacon Blues — turned them into the most popular cult band in the world. “It wasn’t completely unexpected, but then we had thought he was getting better. So it was a shock.”

Becker, 67, died on September 3, and while no cause of death has been announced, it’s known he struggled with hepatitis C.

Fagen has declared that his mission now is to keep Steely Dan’s music alive. So, as we talk, he’s about to head off on a Steely Dan Orchestra tour that crosses America before coming to Dublin and London.

Fagen says he is not sure how he will pay tribute to his absent partner. “I don’t know. I have no stagecraft, but we’ll be playing one of his songs from a solo album.” He hasn’t decided which. “We don’t usually sort out the set list until the sound check.” Jon Herington, the 12-strong band’s long-time lead guitarist, will take on Becker’s guitar parts.

Becker and Fagen met as kindred spirits in Bard College, New York, in 1967. For two wisecracking outsiders whose lyrics traded in irony, perhaps the biggest irony is that the Steely Dan name can sell out arenas 50 years on. “Maybe,” says Fagen. “We didn’t think of it as a career. There was no plan. When we started we just wanted to entertain ourselves.”

Their songs, which have proved so durable, were hardly typical Top 40 fare. Bodhisattva parodied religion; they sang about a fascist rally (Chain Lightning) and a stock market crash (Black Friday); Time Out of Mind took a thinly disguised ode to heroin use into the American charts. Their more obtuse verses still spark online debate and they have gathered some non-typical pop fans. When Two Against Natureappeared in 2000, after a 20-year layoff, the album came with endorsements from William Gibson, Roddy Doyle and Elmore Leonard.

“The best times were in the studio working out ideas,” says Fagen, who disbanded the original touring line-up of Steely Dan after only two years in 1974. “It was a good band, but it was put together quickly and we needed other musicians to achieve what we wanted to do. On tour we were staying in bad hotels and supporting heavy metal bands. It wasn’t right.”

I still think about music; there are songs; there may be another album’
So the pair retreated to the studio to become obsessive perfectionists. Eight guitarists were auditioned to play the solo on Peg for the five-million-selling Ajaalbum. On Gaucho Mark Knopfler played guitar through the night for what turned out to be a barely audible few moments of Time Out of Mind. Mixing the 50-second fade-out to Babylon Sisters took 60 attempts before Fagen was happy.

Of course another band who tired of touring and made the studio home was the Beatles. “I wouldn’t make that comparison,” says Fagen. “Anyway, I think their best work was before Sgt Pepper, around Rubber Soul.”

Perhaps only the offbeat Steely Dan could have nurtured a talent such as Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, who has gone on to make his name in an entirely different field. The lead guitarist was fascinated by the digital software coming into the music industry. Prompted by an ex-forces neighbour, he began looking at potential military applications and is now a sought-after expert on missile defence. Fagen sounds unimpressed. “He was a very clever guy with all sorts of interests, but some of his recent statements suggest he has moved to the right.”

Fagen is happy to chat, but his sardonic worldview tends to be the opposite of sunny. He thinks that Americans who grew up in the 1960s were the last to receive a decent education. “My parents encouraged me to read deeply.” Like Becker, he loved Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs. In a dig at the smartphone generation, he adds: “And we listened to music on good loudspeakers.” His staple listening is still the jazz music he grew to love in his teens — Monk, Miles, Mingus, early Ellington. Their records possess a “humanity” that successors don’t match.

Educationally, the rot set in with Reagan. “He invented hip-hop — young kids protesting at the lack of opportunities.” Fagen believes young people today aren’t aware of the possibilities in life, don’t think hard enough — and then there is Trump. “Yeah, we’ve reached rock bottom.”

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Fagen with Walter Becker, left, in 1977, the years the five-million-selling Aja was releasedAP
I mention that the last time The Times spoke to him, in 2006, he observed: “When you’re young you want to live for ever. But the way the world is now, when you get to be my age it seems to me the human lifespan is just about right.” He was 58 then, he’s 69 now; has the onrush of twilight given him pause? “No, I’d stand by that.”

So what makes Fagen, who is married to the songwriter Libby Titus, get out of his New York bed each morning? “I still think about music; there are songs; there may be another album.” What’s the lyric he is most proud of? He thinks for a moment and quotes some lines from his 1993 futuristic song cycle Kamakiriad. They are in Snowbound: “For seven seconds it’s like Christmas Day. And then it’s dark again.”

After the death of someone else close to Fagen — his mother, who had suffered “horribly” from Alzheimer’s — he responded by writing a darkly funny song. Godwhacker, which appeared on Everything Must Go in 2003, describes an elite squad of assassins whose sole assignment is to find a way into heaven and take out God. (“What sane person wouldn’t consider this to be justifiable homicide?” he once said.) He’s happy to agree when I suggest it’s one of the band’s underrated gems.

What has surprised many long-time fans is the musician’s willingness to leave the studio in the past decade for the tour bus. In the 1970s Becker and Fagen dismissed presenting their intricate work on stage as “corny, boring and stupid”. In 2017 there have been two Steely Dan tours and Fagen has gigged with a young band, the Nightflyers, playing solo material, Dan songs and whatever else takes his fancy. On a good night, with good sound, there is nothing better than being in the middle of a great band, he says. “It doesn’t happen every night, but often enough.”

In Steely Dan we did most things backwards
In the past he has been disparaging of audiences. In his 2013 memoir, Eminent Hipsters, he wrote of a show with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald: “The crowd looked so geriatric I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers.” And of another gig: “They must have bussed in people from nursing homes. There were people on slabs, decomposing, people in mummy cases.”

Fagen assures me that Steely Dan attracts all ages “from young kids to 80-year-olds”. These days he gets a decent hotel bed, which helps to stave off what he calls Acute Tour Disorder, a build-up of maladies, psychological and physical, contracted from rock show touring.

However, for Fagen the audience is still a puzzling beast. “One night people can be drunk and noisy, another just quiet.” Perhaps a few people influence the mood? “Yeah, alpha opinion formers, maybe.” So how does he rouse them? “Like I say, I have no stagecraft; playing some Seventies radio hits works.” This enjoyment in his senior years of playing and singing live, of basking in the acclamation of strangers — it’s as if Fagen is living his music career backwards. The singer chuckles. “In Steely Dan we did most things backwards.”

Postscript: on the opening US dates of the new tour the Becker tune that Steely Dan have been playing is the tenderly bitter break-up song Book of Liars. “He used to be standing right here, and it’s weird for me,” Fagen told the audience in Buffalo, New York. Book of Liars contains the lines: “Electrons dancing in the frozen crystal dawn/ Here’s one left stranded at the zero crossing,/ with a hole in its half-life, to carry on.” Dan fans mull on that.
Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers’ show on October 29 as part of BluesFest at the O2 Arena, London SE10, is sold out. There are still tickets for Daryl Hall and John Oates with Chris Isaak on October 28 (bluesfest.co.uk)

• Music
• London

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OBITUARY

Walter Becker

Walter Becker realised that he was going to have to form a band when nobody else would record the songs that he was writing with his creative...

September 5 2017