Thursday, April 19, 2007

Three Magic Minutes

Ian Brown has written a song for Dynamo.

No, we didn't either, but Victoria Newton explains that he's some sort of Paul Daniels in a back-to-front baseball cap:

Dynamo, real name Steven Frayne, grew up on a tough Bradford council estate. He learnt to deal with the local bullies by performing tricks his great grandad had taught him.

Now Dynamo flies the world to perform in front of the great and the good of music, sport and politics. He has left PRINCE CHARLES, DAMON ALBARN, CHRIS MARTIN, GWYNETH PALTROW and SIR PAUL McCARTNEY speechless by his card shark magic.

While it's great that Dynamo beat the bullies by using prestidigitation, it suggests he went to a bit of a weak school - the big boys at my secondary school wouldn't have been distracted by having sixpences removed from their ears, although they could perhaps have been brought onboard by sawing a second year in half.

So, how does Ian Brown's song go?
“Magical offerings — the suspension of time
Some like bending spoons
Dynamo’ll bend ya mind [...]
At the greatest show on earth
Folks are slack-jawed by The Magic Man.”

As far as we can gather, making people's jaws slack isn't part of his act.

It's interesting that as soon as someone tries to write a song about magic, they just fall apart ("you can do magic/magic/magic/ you can do magic, baby"). Rather than write a whole new song, we'd have much rather Brown recorded the all-time great conjurer anthem:
You're gonna see a whole lot of magic
look at this trick and that trick...


5 comments:

James said...

Ooh, I think I saw this Dynamo chap on TV the other day. He was a guest on something. Not sure if he was any good, I switched over before he started pulling unconvincing fluffy bouquets out of his sleeves.

Bloody hell, what did I see him on? That's going to drive me nuts now.

Whoever he is, I hope he's a bit more fun than most of these 'street magicians' you see these days. Apparently the Magic Circle has brought in a rule stating that if you perform card tricks to passers-by on a pavement, you must do it in the style of a man who's suffered a bereavement in the last five minutes. I've never seen someone so depressed at correctly predicting a card.

Nope, still can't think where I saw him. Bugger.

Anonymous said...

Don't worry, James.

Unlike a Mercury Prize to Ian Brown for those lyrics, I'm sure it'll come to you.

Anonymous said...

I may be setting myself up for a whoosh here James, but I think he was a guest on Jonathan Ross' show last week.

James said...

JONATHAN ROSS! Thank you! That's where I saw him. I remember now, he was tossing cards at the camera when I saw him. Not sure how that counts as 'magic' - It's that sort of behaviour that earns my five year-old a telling off and no more High School Musical Uno until she's cleared up the mess.

No woosh required, thank you for settling that for me. It was my birthday on Sunday, so clearly getting another year older is playing havoc with my...

My...

Ummm...

Memory. That's it. My memory.

Anonymous said...

"He has left PRINCE CHARLES, DAMON ALBARN, CHRIS MARTIN, GWYNETH PALTROW and SIR PAUL McCARTNEY speechless by his card shark magic."

IT'S A CARD SHARP!! for goodness sake, i couldn't count how often people get this wrong... a card "shark" is a person who is good at cards and takes on people who're not very good at cards... a "sharp" on the other hand is a person who deceives i.e. cheats or performs card tricks...

(sorry for that completely unnecessary outburst but like they say any chance to point out a mistake in The Sun)

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