Upon Brendan Benson and Strawberry Sherberts
Brendan Benson is a singer-songwriter from Michigan, USA. He is best known in the UK for his work with the famous singer-songwriter Jack White, as part of the adequate, so-called ‘supergroup’, The Raconteurs. I am familiar with his first three solo LPs and would aver that of these, his sophomore* album “Lapalco” is the finest.
I do not know what ‘Lapalco’ means and have not bothered to find out.
“Lapalco” contains three staggeringly good pop singles** written by Benson that make most other putative pop geniuses (e.g. the Beatles) seem like hapless plodders by comparison. However, I do not wish to discuss these.
As a child I used to walk to about a mile to primary school along a main road, in my provocatively gay uniform, unsupervised (it was the days before paedophiles) strengthening my constitution via carbon monoxide intake from the endless stream of passing 1970s tin.
En route I would pass a sprawl of shops and a petrol station. The latter was manned by a friendly, insalubrious ruffian and sold toy cars, aerosols, sweets and stick-on decals for 1970s cars (the like of which some older readers may recall); all of which, naturally, were attractive to me. Aside from the dizzying array of penny chews, black jacks, fizzy lizzies, cola bottles etc. that were commonplace in the 1970s and are doubtless fetishised elsewhere on the internet by professional nostalgists, the garage also stocked traditional bottles of sweets arranged on shelves behind the counter. Portions of these sweets could be purchased in imperial measures, notwithstanding decimalisation and accession to the EEC that had occurred some years previously. (I mention decimalisation not because I am confusing currency with weights and measures, but because one could use supposedly defunct British currency such as the sixpence, the florin and the shilling until at least the mid-1970s. Well, that is to say, at least one could in this garage).
As a child and teenager I never ate the free school dinners that were provided, distrusting them upon first sight for not looking exactly like the food my mother prepared. It was not until the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher considerately outsourced the provision of school dinners (and the associated friendly ladies) to heartless external companies that we, the skoolkids, finally got what we really wanted – chips and sausage sandwiches, at a price.
Ordinarily, therefore, I would not eat whilst at primary school. I cannot recall what I had for breakfast as a child, but I suspect it was eggs, black coffee and fluoride. Evening meals would consist of mince, beans, Mundies Fortified South African wine and an ersatz substitute for the (more expensive) Angel Delight, the name of which I cannot recall, but there were several crates of it in my wardrobe for months. I sustained myself during the school day with sweets purchased from the aforementioned garage – sometimes Midget Gems, sometimes Floral Gums, sometimes Cola Cubes, but most typically Strawberry Sherberts.
A Strawberry Sherbert comprises a gramme of sherbert encased in a hard-boiled vermillion strawberry-simulacrum-flavour casing. I would purchase a quarter (pound) of these on the way to school from the aforementioned garage, often using redundant sixpences. I would then hide the bag under the desk and methodically consume the entire contents during class.
The classic Strawberry Sherbert experience involves an initially vaguely pleasant, sickly, sweet, sucky strawberriness; closely followed by an insistent fizzing as the sherbert is gradually released; building to a shattering, explosive climax as the fragile shell of the boiled casing collapses into jagged shards, releasing the full payload of unhydrated sherbert onto the willing, supplicant tongue. Iterative consumption further results in the boiled shards lacerating the gums, mouth and tongue so that the sherbert is received intravenously; the sugar and saliva are meanwhile sharpened with a piquant tang of fresh blood that slithers pleasingly down the throat like a drugged blonde sliding off a waterbed. After a quarter pound of these the brains synapses fire irregularly and the user reaches a heightened state of euphoria, supreme confidence, loss of appetite, alertness and increased energy.
And so back to ‘Lapalco’. Track 6 is entitled ‘You’re Quiet’ and despite being an upbeat geetar and synth-driven euphoric rock contagion, was not released as single. Perhaps Brendan felt he had nothing left to prove after the aforementioned hat-trick. At 2 minutes and 8 seconds (according to my iTunes) the song breaks down and the rhythm track falters, becoming out of sync momentarily with the melody. As the synth and guitar struggle, and then succeed in realigning themselves with the drums, I am invariably transported back to the quarter-pound strawberry sherbert hit, rushing on my run and feeling like Jesus’s’s son.
And I guess, I just don’t know, but I guess, that is all that I wanted to say.
* Pretentious word for ‘second’
** ‘Folk Singer’, ‘Tiny Spark’ and ‘Good To Me’
by Mike McConnell