"Staaan' clear of the closin' baaars, pulleze... staaan' clear"
There is nothing that I enjoy more, on occasion, than a funky juxtaposition of leading-edge, space-age, white-hot British technology and strident Latino brass. The above clip is a marvellous example of such a happy coalition.
Luxuriate in awe and wonderment, as heroic, unsung session musicians on 39/6 an hour underpin the sterling work of London Underground technicians in pumping gleaming trains around the arterial network of our fine capital! Gaze in astonishment as magnetic tape whirls around at warp speed, switches trip and pretty lights flash in seemingly random patterns, all while the bass player extemporises with gay abandon around the massed trumpets in the middle eight! Suspend your disbelief as the train driver pushes just two buttons to depart from King's Cross St. Pancras on the Victoria Line, while the Farfisa organ glides over the bossanova beat, and arrives at Oxford Circus station... without having passed through Euston or Warren Street stations en route!
Truly, truly wonderful. I wish it was still 1970.
(Actually, it would be easy for those of a cynical bent to scoff at the touchingly passé content of the above clip; however, if one were to attempt to create a 2011 equivalent, the depictions of "technology" controlling the trains would merely be "jump cuts" between executives of Capita, or some other "consultancy", and Department of Transport mandarins slapping each other on the back; project "managers" delivering nothing but endless "management-speak" rubbish in endless meetings; Indian programmers in Chennai with no concept of the project requirements churning out masses of code which is completely unfit for purpose; and a server room full of racks of "blades" gathering dust as taxpayer's money is pissed down the sink at an alarming rate for a command and control system that simply does not work, and never will, whilst frustrated passengers crowd the platforms for trains that will never arrive. Oh, and the music would consist of some tinny, derivative rubbish concocted in half an hour on a Casio keyboard by an impoverished music student who had gained nothing for his efforts but "the exposure").
Do others recall when major infrastructure projects in the United Kingdom just... happened? And worked? And when a brass section consisted of several brass instruments, rather than a keyboard plugged into an iMac?
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