| Opinion > Sick notes |
| Written by Ed Whatley |
| Thursday, 26 August 2010 15:13 |
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 Ed Whatley is sick.We are blighted this week at Shabby. Sick. Sick in our creaking bones. Flu followed by a wretching, wrecking lung infection has laid waste to our plans - a couple of airdrops into Rwanda, 40,000 press-ups before bed, and then tomorrow popping over to help Sisyphus with some DIY he hasn't got finished. It's not 'man-flu', either, ladies. You can't fake phlegm this dense. There's only three things to get rid of a cold. Chicken Soup, sleep and lots of lovely somnambulant tunes. So here are Shabby's Musical Panaceas. (No Placebos, don't worry.) The Just the sort of platitude you want when you're under the weather. "You look after yourself." "Don't come back until you're ready." "We'll do it when you're better." "I'll clean up that sick, you rest." "Oooh, you look tired. Go back to bed." This is nostalgia music, deliberately meant to evoke a memory of kid's electronic TV music from a childhood a little bit before mine. Better an evocation of a science programme from 1976 than a split second of Jeremy Kyle baiting working class bears. If you listen to this at around 4pm, you will start to crave fish fingers and hoops. Neutral Milk Hotel/In The Aeroplane Over The Sea Why not let someone else have your fever dream for you? This record is viral in so many ways - you can't shake it off, you pass it on to your friends and they can't shake it off either - and it makes you feel odd and exhausted and wrapped up and you don't know why it's quite so strange. Like a sweaty, drugged-up dream, a sequence of strange people and shapes roll past you - The King Of Carrot Flowers, The Two Headed Boy - and you know it's happening, and you know you're younger than you are but you're not sure why or how. Bands from Peggy Lee/Melancholy Lullaby Past a certain age, you're not going to get a lullaby to get you by, even when it's all you're wanting. What you can do is have Peggy Lee sing you off to your fourth sleep of the day. You can also know that no matter how bad you're feeling, Peggy Lee has felt worse. Love of her life was an alcoholic. She was a diabetic. Her stepmother used to beat her with a frying pan. And you think YOU don't feel well! Pull yourself together. Spiritualized/Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space Whatever Bear Grylls or Andy McNab might tell you, toughing it out is for fools. Self-medicate. Pop anything that will make you feel even slightly better. Antipyretics, Analgesics, Antibiotics, Antiseptics. Pills, Powders, Potions and Prayers. And pop open the ultimate paean to letting the drugs work - Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. The pack even looks like it's from Boots. Jason was self-medicating to remove the pain of lost love, and he was doing so with heroin, but you don't need to do anything so radical. Hot Chip And Bonnie "Prince" Billy/I Feel Bonnie It might not feel like it, but you are going to get better. That flu will pass. That tear will heal. Your areas will improve BUT ONLY IF YOU STOP FIDDLING WITH THEM. Honestly, it's not a toy. The temptation will be to head right back into the behaviour that made you sick in the first place - the boozing, the late nights, working too hard and resting too little. But listen to the weary sadness in Will Oldham's voice as he and Hot Chip claim to "feel better". It's telling you one thing - you better look after yourself, or you'll be bent double retching a lung again before you can spell bronchial hyperresponsiveness. What do you like to listen to when you're under the weather or hungover to all heck, readers? Prescription
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