These old farts usually turn up on television shows to unashamedly plug their books or CDs. Today it was the turn of Leo Sayer - more rotund but still with the big hair of yesteryear. At least Sayer has a new album coming out and wasn't just trying to re-hash his greatest hits. I have no great problem with Sayer as such and his first album is one of my favourites. That came out in the days when he used to dress up as a clown and tell us that "the show must go on."
It's just that they try to re-invent themselves or tell us that they have something important to impart. I haven't heard the new album and it's probably decent, but it did make me smile when on Breakfast Television he made it sound like a ground-breaking item. We were told that his concert tour would mix new material in with all the old hits and favourites as if this is unusual. Isn't that exactly what the majority of artists do?
It's rather like the author who was interviewed a few days ago, having written a new Sherlock Holmes novel - another ground-breaking move (not). There have been countless new novels/stories written about the world's best known sleuth in the last few years, so it's scarcely a notable literary happening.
Back on the old farts stage. I see that former Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour has a new album coming out with the loose theme of a set of songs/pieces surrounding the thoughts that go through his head on a single day. This includes a song about fellow Floyd man Richard Wright who is sadly no longer with us. I am looking forward to this release and would hazard a guess that it will be slightly better than Sayer's. I will have a bit of fun by listening to both and letting you know which I feel is the better effort.
Talking about old farts. I see David Bowie is going to contribute songs to a musical production of SpongeBob SquarePants. Apparently he was a big fan of the show when his daughter was young. Not sure what his son Duncan Jones, the film director, will make of it all. But I suppose that, having survived being given the birth name of Zowie Bowie, he's probably open to most things. It would be wonderful if Bowie returned to the quality of his early 1970s songwriting, although I'm not sure that SpongeBob was ever an alien.
Interesting fact of the day culled from reading a biography of Jack Kerouac in Norwich Library. The iconic American author was not a natural English speaker. He came from French descent and for many years spoke in a language called Québecois French. So now you know.