Quite a challenge from Knut today, which took a long time and even then I was defeated by 4dn. My guess is that there were a number of details that passed me by.
Down the leading diagonal is ‘Smoke on the Water’, which I’m afraid to say I’d never heard of (but then someone in Carphone Warehouse yesterday had never heard of Bach). Evidently it is a song by Deep Purple, and at least one of the words in the lyrics is used in the grid.
I’m sure that people who know about all this will be able to find other references.
| Across | ||
| 9 | EMOTIVE | Reviewed eastern sex book, totally getting the juices flowing! (7) |
| (E VI [= six in Latin, and six in Latin is sex] tome)rev. — ‘totally’ applying to this, telling us that it’s the whole thing that’s reversed — although such kindness to the solver is not really necessary, Knut presumably feeling that the surface is better with the word included | ||
| 10 | SCAFELL | Mountain seen from Sid’s Cafe, Llandudno (7) |
| Hidden in Sid’S CAFE Llandudno | ||
| 11 | FUNKY | Unsophisticated, earthy pleasures with lubricant (5) |
| fun KY — KY jelly is a sexual lubricant | ||
| 12 | ON THE MENU | Where to find today’s special: fried luncheon meat (zero cal. amazingly!) (2,3,4) |
| (luncheon meat)* – (cal)* — ‘zero’ is the subtraction indicator | ||
| 13 | OVERDO | Spoil Rover (dog) endlessly (6) |
| {R}over (do{g)} | ||
| 14 | BRISBANE | Following Blackmore’s intro, Serbian rocked the city (8) |
| B{lackmore} (Serbian)* | ||
| 17 | DIM | Given dunce’s cap, Knut’s stupid (3) |
| d{unce} I’m | ||
| 18 | TWATTLE | The old building material leaked helium gas (7) |
| T{he} wattle — gas in the sense chatter away: I didn’t know this word, which is apparently a rare variant of ‘twaddle’ | ||
| 19 | ARC | Middlemarch – a racy classic popular in France (3) |
| The middle of march is {m}arc{h} — Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe — sticklers would be unhappy with the equating of ‘middlemarch’ with ‘the middle of march’ | ||
| 21 | MONTREUX | Jazzy City second; “new dinosaur” United getting stuffed (8) |
| mo n T.re(U)x — Montreux in Switzerland has an annual jazz festival — and the word features in the lyrics of the thematic song | ||
| 23 | EMERGE | Come out from crisis cutting off northern Cyprus (6) |
| emerge{n Cy} | ||
| 25 | SHORELINE | Herons flying over French island’s receding littoral (9) |
| (Herons)* round (ile)rev. — it’s probably just me, but using ‘over’ as a containment indicator always grates; it doesn’t seem to be used this way in the highest places | ||
| 27 | HAIRS | Natural fibres trim front of seats (5) |
| {c}hairs | ||
| 28 | RELIANT | Dependent upon housing payment to cover lithium addiction’s onset (7) |
| re(Li a{ddiction})nt | ||
| 29 | GALILEE | Joy introducing the greatest Israeli region (7) |
| g(Ali)lee — “I am the greatest”, pronounced by Muhammad Ali | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | SERFHOOD | The state of those peasants! Revolting 13, oh fresh trousers! (8) |
| Since 13 is OVERDO, this is a reverse hidden [Revolting, trousers] in overDO OH FRESh | ||
| 2 | MOONBEAM | It’s broadcast from Sky satellite live before lunch (8) |
| moon be a.m. | ||
| 3 | CITY EDITOR | Financial journalist abandoned icy Detroit (4,6) |
| (icy Detroit)* | ||
| 4 | LEMON | An unattractive character, like Sue on her tod when upset? (5) |
| (no Mel)rev. — I couldn’t do this, partly because ‘Bake Off’ isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I see ‘Sue’ (nor is it the second, or third, or …) and partly because lemon = an unattractive character is not obvious, although yes Collins does say ‘A person or thing considered to be useless or defective’, so fair cop. | ||
| 5 | ASHTAROTH | Pure evil character of ciggy residues, hot top to bottom (9) |
| ash, tar [= ciggy residues] oth, the oth being hot with the h moved to the end — this name was new to me | ||
| 6 | LAKE | Mere hint of snow; 0 Fahrenheit (4) |
| {F}lake — another subtraction indicator that is a bit unusual: ‘0’, and in 12ac it’s ‘zero’ | ||
| 7 | GENEVA | Vincent Vega on vacation in the city (6) |
| Gene [Vincent] V{eg}a — Gene Vincent may be connected with the theme, not sure, wouldn’t have thought so but there seem to be quite a few entries when I Google Smoke on the Water Gene Vincent | ||
| 8 | CLAUDE | Rains disrupted penultimate take of Hotel du Lac (6) |
| ({Hot}e{l} du Lac)* — ref the magnificent Claude Rains | ||
| 15 | SPERM WHALE | Male seed with healthy body, able to swim huge distance (5,5) |
| sperm w hale | ||
| 16 | NATURISTS | North American travellers leaving nothing out?; hang on, they leave everything out! (9) |
| NA t{o}urists — I’m not sure if there is any significance in ‘hang on’ or whether it is just there to make for a nice surface | ||
| 19 | ADROITLY | A medic, quite oleaginous, bandaging patient’s foot with skill (8) |
| a Dr oi({patien}t)ly | ||
| 20 | CHEESIER | Upset, I notice raunchy diva going out looking increasingly naff (8) |
| Ch(eesi)er, the eesi being (I see)rev. — I didn’t know that Cher was a particularly raunchy diva, but that probably says something about my knowledge of this sort of thing — I’ve only glanced at the Wikipedia entry for her but it doesn’t apparently suggest raunchiness | ||
| 21 | MISERY | Skinflint Yankee in the Great Depression (6) |
| miser Y | ||
| 22 | NOODLE | Penned by Blackmore, L. Doone – revolting, silly person (6) |
| Hidden reversed in BlackmorE, L. DOONe | ||
| 24 | PEGGY | Lady Penelope’s introduction is a bit rich (5) |
| P{enelope} eggy — are rich and eggy the same? It seems that food can be rich without being eggy and eggy without being rich. | ||
| 26 | EXAM | Turn up guitar on Machine Head as a test (4) |
| (axe)rev. M{achine} | ||
*anagram
Great puzzle.I was looking for SOTW but its diagonal presence eluded me.I didnt stand a chance on LEMON for reasons outlined above.Wasnt MACHINE HEAD recorded in Montreux and is that on Lake Geneva(I liked that clue ).I beleve that SOTW is banned in some music stores for obvious reasons.Thanks all.
Thanks, John, for a great blog and Knut for another great puzzle. [John, I’m impressed that you spotted the diagonal when you’d never heard of it – I hadn’t either, and didn’t.]
Having the M?N?R of 21ac, I got fixated on MONTREAL as the Jazzy City – Wiki tells me it holds the 2004 Guinness record as the World’s largest jazz festival – but, eventually, 16dn helped the dinosaur to emerge and put me right.
I didn’t get 4dn: I think I’ve seen the ‘NO MEL’ trick before, now that it’s pointed out but I wouldn’t have thought of LEMON as an ‘unattractive’ character.
I liked the construction of 1dn but my top favourite today was the classy 8dn.
Many thanks to Knut for an enjoyable challenge.
Defeated by this one. Didn’t get 18a, 4d or 5d and missed the Nina. Nonetheless I did like what I could work out, with CLAUDE probably my favourite. Sorry, can’t help with any further Deep Purple refs.
Thanks to Knut and John.
A tough Knut to crack. Made slow progress but finished, which is how I like it. Fantastic crossword with lots of favourites: 9a, 12a, 4d, 6d and 16d to name a few. Didn’t like 24d but the answer was clear. TWATTLE was a new word for me but I guessed this from the clue quite early on. I knew 5d although I’m more familiar with spelling without the first H. I like Deep Purple and SOTW is, arguably, their most well-known track. I would definitely describe Cher as raunchy. Never watched bake-off but Mel and Sue are were well-known a long time before this latest venture.
Thanks to Knut and John.
PS – re 24dn: ‘to over-egg the cake’ is to make it too rich?
Thanks Knut, John
I didn’t get more than that there was some sort of lakey thing (Scafell, Galilee, Geneva) going on until John pointed out the song. According to wiki, funky Claude was the director of the Montreux Jazz Festival at the time of the fire that inspired the song. Ritchie Blackmore wrote it. Impressive stuff. The puzzle, that is; never heard of the song till today.
Thanks Knut and John.
I failed to see the diagonal nina, but as far as I can tell the further references are MONTREUX, LAKE GENEVA SHORELINE and FUNKY CLAUDE (Nobs, who ran the Montruex Festival), which are all in the words to the song. Add the references to Richie Blackmore in the clues. Some might claim that he was also prone to OVERDO it in his guitar solos.
No knowledge of song or band, but found this easy (for a Knut) as Mel and Sue have been favourites long before Bake-Off (never watched), and MONTREUX, CLAUDE Rains,etc are familiar from crosswords. BIFFED in ASHTAROTH purely from the wordplay. Liked the clue linkage between SERFHOOD and OVERDO……….this is a new device for me.
Thanks to John and Knut…….immer noch Klasse!
Not my cup of tea today. Very clever to have got all the references in and all that, but not being into the group it was never going to engage me and apart from seeing Blackmore in a couple of clues I wouldn’t have known there was a theme (except of course it’s Tuesday and it’s the Indy).
CLAUDE and LEMON defeated me. CLAUDE RAINS? Who he? ?E?O? with ‘Sue’ as an indication of MEL? That going to turn this solver into a cruciverbal Elise Christie, I’m afraid. DNF.
Interesting bit of punctuation in 16dn: standard practice would tell you that you can’t follow an exclamation mark with a semi-colon, so perhaps it’s just a typo.
Thanks to S&B.
Not LEMON squeezy, that’s for sure. I cheated liberally and never saw the nina (tbh, my hunting didn’t extend much further than a scan of the perimeter) but still found much to enjoy. Thanks to Knut and John.
[I didn’t have much time to spend on this, so only solved a few – and, on reading the blog, suspect that I wouldn’t have finished.
CLAUDE did remind of a (possibly apocryphal) quote from Sir John Gielgud. Asked about influences on him as a young actor, he said (something like)
“I had a very good teacher at RADA, a lovely man called Claude Rains. He taught me a tremendous amount. I often wonder what became of him – I believe that he failed and went to America.”]
We struggled with this but eventually got everything except 4dn, where our best guess was ‘felon’ (an anagram of ‘lone’ and ‘f’ for ‘female’ – but it’s an indirect anagram so very dodgy anyway). And in any case it’s less than 50% checking and both the checking letters are vowels so in our opinion it makes for an unfair clue.
We also took a long time to get 9ac, having once again been fooled by the sex = (Latin for) six = VI (Roman numeral) trick. Plus, we got fixated on the S in 27ac being the ‘front of seats’ and couldn’t see how ‘trim’ could mean ‘hair’ – doh!
But there were quite a few we liked – once we got them; SCAFELL, MONTREUX, GALILEE and ASHTAROTH among them.
Thanks, though, to Knut – and, of corse, John.
‘course’, not ‘corse’
Thanks for the blog John, and to those who have commented. I’ve never filled a grid with a 15 letter diagonal Nina before and I suspect this might be the last; I owe Eimi a thank you for his patience with this one and I’m sorry that a late edit used “revolting” as an inversion indicator for the second time. Sloppy.
Smoke on the Water must be in the top three rock riffs; certainly less obscure than Nantucket Sleighride.
warmest regards to all,
Rob/Knut
An enjoyable challenge even though the theme and Nina completely passed me by, very clever. I completely failed on 4 but got the rest. Thank you, Knut and John.
[I’m reading a book at the moment in which the author uses “likely” every time she means “probably”. I was somewhat disconcerted that your Wiki link for ASHTAROTH does exactly the same!]
Yes, Knut @14, that was one of my gripes today, ‘revolting’ twice (as well as ‘upset’ twice). Glad you noticed it yourself.
Of course, it’s not wrong as isn’t the second anagram indicator in 12ac (which is strictly speaking not needed as the anagram comes before the subtraction).
And what about ‘dunce’s cap’ = ‘d’ in an Across clue?
It took me two sittings to finish the crossword. It’s Tuesday, so there had be a theme. Two Blackmores and one Machine Head pointed in the right direction but, unfortunately, I didn’t spot SOTW. I do know the story behind it though, I think Sky Arts once had a documentary about it. Clever grid fill. I didn’t get ASHTAROTH (5d) right and wondered about ‘pure evil character’ as it is also a name for the Phoenician goddess of love!
I am another one who didn’t get LEMON and I also found NOODLE (22d) a bit unfortunate as it’s also an anagram of L.DOONE.
Some solvers apparently liked MONTREUX (I went for ‘Montreal’ for some unclear reason but ‘Montreux’ is definitely the place to be) but what does the surface mean? It also contains a semicolon, a punctuation mark that Knut uses more frequently than other setters. Therefore I think that Kathryn’s Dad complaint about 16d is not not just a typo, I’m afraid.
Am I negative now? No, I liked the puzzle!
And Knut, you’re right about Smoke On The Water perhaps having one of the most famous intros of pop classics. However, you never know with Deep Purple. Listen to Bombay Calling by It’s A Beautiful Day from their 1969 debut. Or listen to Meadows from Joe Walsh’s 1973 classic album The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get.
Themes are value added? Yep.