Announcement

**Ray de Galles** · 21-04-2008, 14:43

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Is this just a deliberate assist for someone to do the "adjustable wenches" tribute thread?

**noj** · 21-04-2008, 14:43

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

There's bound to be one in that Beni Benassi Satisfaction video.

**Mumpo** · 21-04-2008, 14:52

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Yeah... I probably won't watch that one here at work, though.

Is this just a deliberate assist for someone to do the "adjustable wenches" tribute thread?

No, I was just surprised that such an obscure tool should crop up is pop videos so often.

Now there is a tap-in.

**Wyatt Earp** · 21-04-2008, 15:03

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Is an adjustable wrench an adjustable spanner or are they different?

**WOM** · 21-04-2008, 15:05

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Same.

So anything by Steeleye Spanner would qualify, no?

**noj** · 21-04-2008, 15:18

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Is an adjustable wrench an adjustable spanner or are they different?

And is an adjustable wrench the same as a monkey wrench?

**Purves Grundy** · 21-04-2008, 15:23

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Unlike a spanner, a wrench has serrations on the bit that holds the object to be turned. Also the "mouth" of a wrench is usually parallel to the handle, whereas on an adjustable spanner it's more to the perpendicular.

I think there may be spanners in the video to Bananarama's Cruel Summer (isn't that the one where they start out as mechanics?), but they're more likely to be socket spanners, which are nothing like wrenches.

**Alderman Barnes** · 21-04-2008, 18:59

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Fucking hell. I just ploughed all the way through Another Brick In The Wall on YouTube because I thought there were marching adjustable spanners in it. But there weren't - they were hammers.

By Christ, what a wretched song that is.

**Spearmint Rhino** · 21-04-2008, 19:03

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

In a similar vein, I watched an SPK performance on The Tube on Youtube. No spanners or wrenches, but they did have a feller bashing a hammer and a sickle about.

And I learned that one of them later became Hoodlum Priest, which was news to me.

**Guest** · 21-04-2008, 19:29

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

I gave Steamhammer Sam by Intaferon a whirl, but although the video is unavoidably literal, it omits Sam's silver spanner. ("Uh-OH! Your big spanner!") Which may not have been adjustable in any case - we'll never, ever know.

**Spearmint Rhino** · 21-04-2008, 20:28

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Great song, mind.

**Stumpy Pepys** · 21-04-2008, 20:34

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

What does Billy Joel use as a microphone in the video to Uptown Girl?

Can't bring myself to watch the thing, but G-Man/Pau Tau will probably know.

**Stumpy Pepys** · 21-04-2008, 20:37

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

My curiosity got the better of me. It was a spanner.

**WOM** · 21-04-2008, 20:43

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

I confess that I watched the opening bit to I'm On Fire, where Sprinsteen's working on the car. Nothing but open-end wrenches laying about. I posted nothing, for fear of looking the loser. But since we're coming clean...

**Heliotrope** · 21-04-2008, 21:28

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Aw, man, you beat me to it. I looked up "You're on Fire" on YouTube to check for wrenches. Or were they spanners? I don't know what they'd be called in the UK. There seems to be a lot of difference in building-type terms, I've learned from watching How Not to Decorate, such as coving and skirting. (As well as differences in styles, e.g., the copious use of wallpaper in the UK.)

**Purves Grundy** · 21-04-2008, 21:41

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

the copious use of wallpaper in the UK.

It got to the point that we were all ordered to cover our schoolbooks in the stuff.

Or was thast just An East Anglian Thing?

**Lucia Lanigan** · 21-04-2008, 21:51

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Yeah, we had to do that as well.

**Purves Grundy** · 21-04-2008, 21:56

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Oh, I just checked out the Cruel Summer and it's a real tease. There are plenty of shots of a greased-up Keren manipulating some sort of tool, just out of frame but you can't quite make out what it is.

And what with the dykey dungarees, gay coppers and relentless phallic imagery that really is some video.

And yet brilliantly naive. Maybe that's not the word. Independent, perhaps. No. Spunky. Have you ever seen such joie-de-vivre in any pop video made in the last 25 years? God, Bananarama were great. Perfect role models. When my girls grow up I want them to be in Bananarama.

**E10 Rifle** · 21-04-2008, 23:18

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

It got to the point that we were all ordered to cover our schoolbooks in the stuff.

Or was thast just An East Anglian Thing?

Nope, it was an east London thing too.

Anyway, agree with every word of what PG just said about Bananarama and Cruel Summer - it's a great song. At the risk of sounding all curmudgeonly, and a bit squirmingly right-on too (pretty much my two default modes on OTF anyhow), early 80s Bananarama had a joie de vivre, a free-spiritedness that their mainstream girl-group descendants now almost wholly lack. Another vintage girl group vid from this era is that to the Go-Gos' Our Lips Are Sealed - which just exudes that sense of them all having a great biglaugh. They'd all be done up to look like lapdancers in the current pop-cultural climate.

**Purves Grundy** · 21-04-2008, 23:51

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Word. Compare and contrast with Girls Aloud's video for Can't Speak French. Who'd be most fun to hang out with for an evening? No contest.

**Spearmint Rhino** · 22-04-2008, 05:53

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Purves Grundy wrote:

God, Bananarama were great. Perfect role models. When my girls grow up I want them to be in Bananarama.

They stand a decent chance of being in The Pipettes, if the current rotating-door policy continues.

**evilC** · 22-04-2008, 08:36

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Spearmint Rhino wrote:

In a similar vein, I watched an SPK performance on The Tube on Youtube. No spanners or wrenches, but they did have a feller bashing a hammer and a sickle about.

And I learned that one of them later became Hoodlum Priest, which was news to me.

Would that be Derek Thompson, SR? If so, I think he's now based just down the road from you, in Brighton. At least, he's part of the same 'collective', Spirit Of Gravity, as my friend Howard, who lives in Hove.

Derek, Howard - it's all terribly rock'n'roll.

Mark E is yer man for all things Hoodlum Priest related, btw.

**Heliotrope** · 22-04-2008, 20:36

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

E10 Rifle wrote:

They'd all be done up to look like lapdancers in the current pop-cultural climate.

And it'd all be choreographed to the nines instead of spontaneous (or at least spontaneous looking).

**adams house cat** · 22-04-2008, 22:15

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

I don't suppose Mike and the Mechanics have any wrenches/spanners in their videos?

Announcement

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Videos featuring adjustable wrenches

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment