Well now, here’s something new from the Stalemates crew – LIVE SUFFERING. In late November 2021, Joe and John elected to take a hop on, hop off Belfast bus tour. It was a bright, sunny day and even the bus was shivering. Joe wore a bobble hat and multiple scarves; John was in his new woolly coat. They thought nothing could touch them. What fools they were. Within half an hour the microphone was frozen in John’s bone white hand, and Joe was lost in a reverie of past loves and fading memories. When the batteries ran out on the Tascam it may have saved their lives. 

What follows is often a load of windy bollocks – that’s not John and Joe’s fault, for once – it was just whipping a gale on the top deck, and the mic was buffeted to buggery. That, and the constant catty drawl of the bus’s inbuilt tour guide, throwing monotonic shade over the entire city, renders quite a lot of the following podcast inaudible. 

Parts of it sound like the breakdown in “You Made Me Realise” with John hoarsely slagging off the Titanic building over the top of it. 
There is a special prize for anyone who makes it to the end. We’ll come round your house and re-enact it. In the warm. With hot chocolate. Please respect our social distancing. X

Stalemates do Belfast

Everyone loves pop music, yeah? Just agree. 
Everyone likes movies, yeah? Of course, you do. 

So, what could be better than a magical twist of the two? Literally nothing at all. Cocaine donut sex? Get out of town. We’ll take pop stars acting ANY DAY. After the fun we had laughing along with The Mighty Quo’s antics in “Bula Quo”, this time we’ve enjoyed the cinematic sortie of that other pair of denim clad, down and dirty rockers, The Pet Shop Boys. 

Yes, The Pet Shop Boys made a film. 

Record companies still had money in the eighties, so when Neil and Chris couldn’t be arsed touring, they made a feature film instead. What do the teenage pop kids want from The Pet Shop Boys film? We’re not sure, but we’re pretty certain it isn’t dogfights over Beachy Head, Musical Hall comedy, the theory of the structure of time, leering men in postcard kiosks, a bloody big suitcase, Joss Ackland as a blind priest serial killer in high heels, or Chris Lowe throwing a plate of sausage and egg over Babs Windsor’s head (she didn’t make another film for thirteen years, you know...).

Join Joe and John Stalemates on another cough-a-minute excavation of the pop mine, where we’ll be hacking up great lumps of laughter. Joe was not keen on the film. John was perhaps slightly more so, but only because one of us had to be, in the interest of BBC style balance.
What HAVE you done to deserve this?

Stalemates watch It Couldn't Happen Here

The thing about Stalemates is our humility. No, it is. We NEVER big ourselves up. We’re shy, bashful, circumspect and coy, and probably other synonyms for shy. No, we are. That’s the way we were raised. We can’t help it. Compliment us and we blush, we “Aw Shucks!”, we wave you away with a big flapping hand. We imagine. No one has ever complimented us. We’d quite like to test the theory.

But no more. In these days of influencers, self-actualised media nodes, braggarts and bores, we have been unable to ignore market forces. We haven’t beaten them – how dearly we’d like to – so we must join them. This is the Stalemates telling you what they’ve been up to – their projects, their schemes, their successes and their soon to be successes.

We’ve been so busy that we actually recorded this podcast ages ago and have already done half the things we’re talking about. But we’re still very amusing about it, so it’s well worth a listen. And given the nature of the work we have decided to fill our lives with, most on the things mentioned are ongoing and hang in the balance like the sword of flipping Damocles.

It’s the uncertainty that gives us our edge. And the panic. The endless panic...

Stalemates are Delighted

Stalemates is a spiffing theme-time cultural podcast presented by Joseph Nawaz and John Patrick Higgins. Each episode a title is chosen and our heroes twist and spindle all possible meanings out of that word, often dropping in a few musical distractions. All this in an attempt to find a way to crowbar in a Roxy Music reference that’s tenuously appropriate.

Joseph Nawaz

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