Music Video: Ratcat - "That Ain't Bad" (1991)

"That Ain't Bad" by Sydney band Ratcat was on an EP called Tingles which was released in 1990.

Back then there were two types of album/singles charts; one that counted EPs as singles and one that counted them as albums. Rage's music chart counted them as singles and that's the only one worth bothering about.

The song had a very simple video, and its EP flew up the charts and hit number 1 in no time. Unfortunately, Ratcat's record label (rooArt) decided to stop pressing Tingles while it was still at number 1 (couldn't they have waited a few weeks?) so promo etc could be centred on the forthcoming album. It worked, and both the album and follow-up single were both number 1s and Tingles dropped like a stone from the charts, only having had two weeks at number one.

However, Tingles got to have its moment of glory in the year-end charts for 1991, where it ranked number 2. Number 1 was that godawful Bryan Adams song from that Robin Hood movie which stayed at number 1 for 11 weeks, but I think it could have easily been overtaken by Ratcat had rooArt not ceased making the EP.

I couldn't believe it when a few months ago a shitty cover version of "That Ain't Bad" was used in a tacky Bonds TV ad. Simon Day, Ratcat's singer, was even in it. Nothing pisses you off more than an awesome song from your teenage years being bastardised for the sake of some lame commercial two decades down the track.

I remember watching the year-end countdown on Rage in 1991 with some others and we were all blown away when we saw Ratcat at number 2. The sliding volume knob on the clapped-out Mitsubishi TV was pushed all the way up and yanked off.

Enough talk. Watch the video, turn the sound up, and jump around like a rhesus monkey on crystal meth. Just like we did in '91.

AA:SE Cover

The whole Airbury Special Edition has been finished, and is now a 643MB PDF file on my desktop. It even has a clickable contents page (which thanks to the madness of InDesign, manages to work and not work at the same time).

What's 'Special' about it? The artwork for the 2007 material has been dusted off. All the speech balloons now have the same font. Snippets of dialogue have been re-jigged. Pages appear in a different order and the story still makes sense. That line about Facebook causing erectile dysfunction has been taken out.

And it's one hundred and thirty-flippin'-one pages long!

And it has a better front cover, which you can see below. It now has a picture of page 1606, which I thought is a better drawing of the four main characters. If you don't disagree, don't not tell me about it.

STENDEC.

UPDATE 9/9/10: Okay, no clickable contents page now. You'd think setting up nine hyperlinks in an InDesign file would be easy. Far from it. You fart around setting up the links. Wait 5 minutes for it to make the PDF. One link doesn't work. Open up ID again and fix it. 5 more minutes. Check PDF. This time the first 4 links don't work but the other 5 do. Open up ID again. Correct all links. Another five minutes. Check PDF. This time 6 of them work and 3 don't. Make one last PDF leaving the bloody hyperlinks out. Somehow this increases the file size by ten meg.

How Adobe can call their software 'world class' with a straight face is beyond me!

Airbury Academy: Special Edition

Good news for those of you who may, at some point, begin to consider possibly being interested in reading some comics I made. There will be a special edition of Airbury, taking stories from 2007, 2009 and the newest ones from this year – compiled into a huge 130-page epic! And I don't mean 'epic' in that overused internet sense either.

There will be 8 stories, but actually 11 because three of them have had additional pages stuffed into them like a comic sandwich, while somehow keeping continuity. How does he do it, folks? He has no life, that's how.

The stories will be – The Silence Ends Now (the very first story, with Dropping Out inserted just before the end), Teacher's Pet (with A Woman Scorned tacked on to the start), The Search For Room 200, Roses & Thorns (uncut and with Blue inserted near the start), Psycheswap, Chalkface, Mutiny and Evenfall. (I'm just writing this for my own memory's sake.)

It might make an appearance on a certain website as well – once I figure out if you can have webpages with 250MB PDFs embedded into them.

Indiagraphics

Today I'll be looking at other countries, in a non-World Cup-related way. First up, India, a country where things like movie billboards (although not much anymore), trucks, and even political graffiti is elaborately and garishly hand-painted.

My cousin Basil is a graphic designer in Bombay. Here's what he told me recently when I asked him about the influences on design:

"India is almost entirely influenced by Western graphic design and graphic art form. Floral motifs and vine vector patterns seem to have given way to grungy urban textures of dereliction. Rusty metal and concrete are doing really good right now. It's a strange phenomenon 'cause the entire world seems to be hung up on Indian culture. Go figure..."

In 2004 there was a graphic novel called The Moon Of Baroda being serialized in a daily Bombay newspaper called Mid Day. My attempts to find it published in book form was met with blank looks from book store owners. Later on I emailed Rohit Gupta, the author, to ask him about it. He didn't reply.

The Moon Of Baroda, along with two other stories Knife In The Water and Towers Of Silence were collected in Gupta's book Special Officer Savant, which he described as "mainly about a police inspector and Bollywood-style crime-fighting, robbery etc." Incidentally, he described his 2007 comic The Curse Of Pippilika as "a typical science-fiction, mytho-epical tantric sex fantasy" (!).

Anyway, here's a sample strip – the first one I saw. I like how they censored the word 'ass' but left 'bloody', 'shit' and 'bastards' as is. Enjoy!

(©2004 Rohit Gupta/Harsho Mohan Chattoraj)

Site Relaunch

The nonesuchdesign.com website has been redone in a new slimline version. It's basically just an online portfolio now, with a few galleries of images. Most of those images have already been uploaded to my deviantART page.

All the other stuff that was on the old site has been deleted, including the comic stuff. I was going to put some of those in, but Dreamweaver is being an arse as usual so for the time being it's just the galleries.

I'd appreciate anyone letting me know if something on the site doesn't function, is missing, or doesn't display properly.