Guardian 28,405 / Carpathian

76 comments on “Guardian 28,405 / Carpathian”

1. The theme came reasonably early so I really enjoyed this. There are a number of bands of different hues and at first I thought the rule was dropping the last letter of the solution. However there are also bands, either fully titled or missing various letters at the end of the clue or at the beginning.

   YES(SES) were my favourite band as a spotty oik and also spotted with a bit of Googleaid, were (The) CURE, CLASH, FALL, PAGEBOY(s), BOSOM(ED) Blues Band, POLICE, MUSE, CREAM, MOONSCAPE, LOUDMOUTH, BILLION, DOLLAR, BILLION DOLLAR, SUPER SECRET, PULP, BLUR, STAB, EASE, STRIDE, SARTORIAL, SEANCE and KISS. There are probably others.

   The clues were reasonably straightforward but I especially liked SECRETIVE and SARTORIAL. Good fun for a Monday puzzle.

   Ta Carpathian & Eileen

2. Entirely missed the theme.
   But an enjoyable puzzle for a Monday morning. First time through I had only got three or four solutions, but the rest came in steadily. Squarely in the “Goldilocks zone” – not too tough, but not trivial either.
   Thanks to Carpathian and Eileen.

3. Queen

4. Many thanks, AlanC – I’m glad I didn’t hold up the blog any longer, hoping to see it!

5. Ah, crap! Tina Turner’s the setter today! (10)

   (not really, I enjoyed it 🙂 )

   Bravo AlanC. There’s even 1/3 of TRANSvision Vamp and 5/12ths of Skunk AnANSIE all rolled into one.

   Also BILL HALEy, and what about LES Gray/Dawson?

   Thanks Eileen and Tina

6. Your welcome Eileen. I finished this last night, so had time to google the various obscure bands as well this morning. I forgot to add QUEEN so thanks PeeDiddy @3.

7. essexboy @5: lovely bit of irony there with your clue for the setter 🙂

8. God, what is it with me and themes? I actually thought of the relevant bands when entering CLASHES, PULPS and BLUR, but still didn’t get it. A bit embarrassing with a username like mine that the penny didn’t drop with FALLS either. Nice start to the week though.

9. Good Monday solve with usual precise cluing. I found this fairly straightforward as there were no cds or dd (I think).

   Missed the theme of course. I particularly liked SECRETIVE.

   Thanks Carpathian and Eileen.

10. Thanks Eileen. Chambers has Cream=”To thrash or defeat soundly (informal)”, usually seen in the context of sports, I think.

11. Theme blind, as usual.

    Perfectly sound crossword but I found it all a bit meh.

    Thanks, both.

12. Quite a quick solve today as befits a Monday but theme?! Errr, no…. missed that. Although I do remember that Van Day of Dollar lived in South Ockenden in Essex at one point not too far down the road from Southend. But the rest is out of my musical interest so well done AlanC for getting to the bottom of those!

    Off to a good start for the week!

    Thanks Carpathian and Eileen!

13. You could probably find most words could be manipulated to be part of a group. I thought the point of this one was singulars of plurals in the answers. [BLURS, FALLS, CURES etc]

    Otherwise, also had Supertramp.

14. After a tip-off from the Graun comments and with a complete grid, I was able to see the theme, although I missed a lot of the groups AlanC@1 mentions.
    I always enjoy Carpathian’s offerings.
    Thanks to C and E.

15. AlanC is doing a great job as Ents Sec. I spotted quite a few bands, but I’ve never heard of half the ones on his roster.

    As Alan said, there’s quite a range of musical styles. I’m more towards the Clash/Fall end of the spectrum than the pop of Thereza Bazar and David Van Day. Dollar were pretty dreadful (both pretty and dreadful), but they were still twice as good as 50 Cent.

    My favourite clue was probably KISSES for the reminder of ‘Kes’ and the wonderful Brian Glover insisting on playing as Bobby Charlton in the footie match.

    Thanks to Carpathian and Eileen

16. Cream were my prime era, plus know at least the names of Clash, Blur, Kiss, and of course Police and Queen, but nup, no chords rang… dim! Saw the G entry re esses but thought no, not it, but then they’re what you remove to get the bands. And as for secretive was vaguely thinking reverse of eviter, to avoid, after sec… dim again. Being bosomed sounds like fun. Didn’t see Kes, but yes it sounds cw-familiar. Clever puzzle Carpathian and thanks Eileen.

17. [Yes Penfold, I thought about that hilarious scene with Brian Glover, a bit like the competitive dad from the Fast Show. I like your 50 cent/Dollar quip as well].

18. Pedro/gif: hadn’t seen the de-pluralising thing. Of course it works for YESSES too.

19. eb, oh yes, Yes

20. Tough but enjoyable.

    Favourites: QUEENS
    Did not parse: TRANSIENT, SECRETIVE
    New: KES (film by Ken Loach)

    Thanks, both

21. [Penfold @15; T’Interweb is both a blessing and a curse.

    David Van Day appears to have setup a burger van in Brighton at some point…

    I’m so, so, so sorry about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBvarv7WirE ]

22. And cricketer (AL)EX HALES is know to enjoy a rock & roll lifestyle 🙂

23. A quick google reveals that there are also bands called The Stasi, Exhale and The Seance. The latter two are apparently Swedish Death Metal, which is somewhat outside my usual listening habits. There is also a band called The Strides apparently, though they don’t fit the plural/singular theme which Pedro@13 picked up on and they are an Essex covers band rather than one producing any original material, so maybe that one is unintended and just illustrates that most words in Chambers are in a band name somewhere.

24. [MB @21 that is just surreally excruciating and yet I feel strangely compelled to watch it]

25. I mentioned the other day that I like themed crosswords, but forgot to add that “ghost” themes often sail over my head unnoticed. So it was this morning.

    “Late meetings” for seances is very good.

    essexboy @5 – [applause]

    I also liked your comment, Eileen, about Kes being deposed as the setters’ default film.

26. [bodycheetah @24: When DVD was talking about his days at Italia Conte and said that “he used to travel up from Brighton 1h30 up, 1h30 down so 3h00 total” I nearly spat my Disgestive out – a real No S..t Sherlock moment; obviously one of life’s overlooked thinkers.

    Not being a Reality TV watcher (in fact, not being a TV watcher other than Only Connect – final tonight folks! – I wasn’t aware of just how ‘popular’ DVD was! Goodness me, this modern celebrity cult has really passed me by.

    Given that I’m only 30 minutes drive from Brighton (at least, the way I drive) I feel compelled to go and find a Van Day burger although one may say that the thought initially puts me off, you could say… ]

27. FJ @23: “most words in Chambers are in a band name somewhere”. Rather like any random pair of surreal words can probably be found in a Half Man Half Biscuit lyric.

    I went for the pluralised bands so missed many of the names in AlanC’s comprehensive list as I only looked at the solutions ending in ‘s’. I assumed Stasi was a band but didn’t go check. Subtly done Carpathian.

    Thanks to setter and Eileen (and none at all to MB for that disturbingly weird opening to a week!)

28. Just realised that I did not see the theme. And I actually know soem of those bands…

29. It would be nice if to treat someone was to cure them… Nor is to trip necessarily to fall. Policing does not always control, nor does being temperate entail abstaining. Late meetings was a very nice definition for SEANCES, though. Thanks, Carpathian and Eileen.

30. [MB @26 David Van Day popular? Depends who you ask. Cheryl Baker for instance.

    There is a precedent with celebs opening mobile fast food outlets. I believe that Kylie used to get her kebabs from Jason’s Doner Van.]

31. [Penfold @30: Talking of celebs, I hear that Greggs Wallace may have had a bit of a thing going with Keivn Bacon-roll as well.

    PostMark @27: You’re welcome.]

32. Not having heard of most of the themed entries in no way stopped me from solving so that sort of theme is fine. Couldn’t parse SECRETIVE so thanks Eileen and of course Carpathian

33. I don’t think I’ve ever written the word YESSES before, but it was last one in. As usual, I was completely oblivious to the theme. Though I did like YES a great deal in my student days. And MUSE more recently. Therefore a Yes Yes rather than a No No to this Monday puzzle once the ingenuity of the theme had been revealed to me..

34. I enjoyed solving this without spotting (or looking for) the theme – it’s always nice to come here and find there’s more to a puzzle than first meets the eye. I didn’t parse TRANSIENT and thought it was weak with TRANSPORT in the clue. Top favourite was KISSES for reasons mentioned by others, along with QUEENS and STABLE – the latter for the parts of speech misdirections where I first saw balanced as a past tense verb and then knife as a noun. Thanks to Carpathian and Eileen.

35. This was enjoyable. I vaguely noticed one or two band names but didn’t take it any further than that. AlanC’s list @1 is very impressive but I’m not sure that all those were actually intended by Carpathian, for the reason mentioned by Pedro @13 – probably thousands of words contain band names if you look hard enough. A while back I think we had a puzzle which some commenters suggested had a theme of fonts / typefaces, but rather like bands these have such a huge variety of strange names that it could just have been an accident. Sorry, I don’t remember who the setter was.

    Many thanks Carpathian and Eileen.

36. [Lord Jim @35: a Brummie from 2018, I think.]

37. Never a pause. That didn’t give me enough time to look for a theme, which I probably would have missed, even though many of the bands are my faves.

38. The bands were all a bit of a Blur to me. Has this been done the other way, with the crossword having the singular of the plural band? Plaudits to all the clever comments. I now have to expunge imags of Buck’s Fizz from my brain.

39. Now that I’ve got there, I think today’s puzzle took me longer than it should have.

    Didn’t parse TRANSIENT and got in a muddle over STRIDES because I took T instead of TR for middle of district – duh.

    Like Miche @25 and TassieTim @29 SEANCES for late meetings made me smile.
    Also liked SECRETIVE, QUEENS, DOLLARS

    Thanks to Carpathian and Eileen

40. Basically a write-in except for the two I missed — SECRETIVE and KISSES, the latter composed of segments all unknown to me. If I had looked for a theme I might have found it because I know most of the bands. Favourite clues was PULPS. Thanks to both.

41. [MB @26, just watched an ep of that quiz…brilliant (and totally over my head)]

42. Thanks for the lovely blog. Well done AlanC and you got to number one as well.
    Did spot the theme for once but only the ones ending in s .
    Never heard of BOSOMED but the clue was clear enough and it must be difficult to construct the grid with so many bands in there.

43. [MB, just checked out sister and b-i-l in Crouch End, yes they love it, but ditto re speed and erudition..he occasionally gets the odd one, she said]

44. Eileen — at 13A I see it as R (Republican) + S (originally supports). You don’t need the “originally” for R, which already stands for Republican. A tiny point. I think “cream” can also mean “defeat,” as in “They creamed us!”

    This singular/plural theme doesn’t work for LOUDMOUTH or SARTORIAL. I’m not convinced it’s a theme. The theme of bands totally escaped me, although I have heard of a few of them (and heard none of them).

    Did anybody else get stuck on DOSES for 2d?
    Is IS a standard abbreviation for Income Support in the UK?

    MB@21 your link tells me that the video is unavailable in my country. I’ll have to go burgerless. (But my neighbor gave me one last night from his barbecue, so that makes up for it.)

    Me too, Julie @32. All the solutions were real words, and that’s good enough for me.

45. [graninfreo @43: Only Connect as a programme is almost as good as the utterly bonkers Victoria Coren Mitchell. If you feel the need for more ‘Connecting Walls’ try this https://puzzgrid.com/

    Valentine @44: Be thankful that your country has seen sense to block it. It is seditious in the extreme – well, it made me want to do something unspeakable.]

    8d is very clever because SEISS is the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme rolled out by HMG to ‘cover’ income during the pandemic. So although Eileen has parsed it one way, you could take Income Support to be SEISS with the K from Ken. It’s a lovely, lovely clue.

46. Valentine @44. That’s exactly how Eileen has parsed it: “DO (party) + LL (lines) + A R (republican) + S[upports]”. She has used square brackets to show that S is the first letter of ‘supports’ and round ones to show that R is a standard abbreviation for ‘Republican’.

47. MB @45 Having spent my life thinking of sedition as something they were concerned about in the eighteenth century, with President Adams’s Alien and Sedition Act, I now find it’s being considered as a charge to the January insurrectionists at the Capitol.

48. MB @ 26 and @45 and GiF @ 41

    Love Only Connect and feel very proud when I get any answer in the first two rounds or a line in the wall. Both are rare occurrences. Have more luck filling in the gaps in the last round. Worth watching just for (as you said) the totally bonkers VCM.

49. MaidenBartok @45. That’s ingenious and quite possibly apposite, but it doesn’t work as a clue because ‘society’ is without a function if ‘income support’=SEISS; also there is nothing to indicate that the first letter of ‘Ken’ is required, ‘Loach film’ is just hanging, and there is no anagram indicator.

50. Saw what the theme was – and it’s one where almost any answer or partial answer will turn out to have been someone’s favourite in 1983 down the Dog and Duck. The clues themselves were straightforward enough: didn’t know BOSOMED meant that, and liked PAGEBOY.

51. As another huge fan of Only Connect and VCM, I’d recommend her book – For Richer, For Poorer – it’s about the time she first won a main event in the European Poker Tour. (She was the first person to win two.) She was great fun to watch playing poker – many of the other contestants were covered up with hoodies and shades trying to give away a little as possible, but she’d be sat there merrily chatting away with a nice cup of tea, and quite often taking them to the cleaners. She’s bonkers definitely, but also super-talented too.

52. sheffield hatter @49: Oh, I completely agree but it was just spotting SEISS in there that made me realise that IS was Income Support. I did parse it the same way as Eileen to solve it though.

    [MarkN @51: I’d love to be a fly-on-the-wall in the Coren Mitchell household because I bet the conversations are somewhat above “we’ve run out of milk” or “what’s on telly tonight…” And yes, hugely talented.]

53. [Thanks PostMark @36. As thezed said at comment 23 of that puzzle, “Is anything not a font?” Almost the same could be said about bands.]

54. Valentine @44 – I think that’s what I said in the blog. 😉

    MaidenBartok @45 – I love your idea but IS is in Chambers as income support.

55. Good point Lord Jim and Postmark, I wonder if the setter just meant the plural bands to be the theme ? Most of them appear to be more well known but I am no expert.

56. [You probably all know this already, but if you like Only Connect style clues, you might enjoy the weekly Guardian quiz on Saturdays. Eight general knowledge questions plus seven “what links…” questions. I reckon I’m doing very well if I can answer five.]

57. [ It can be very tricky gladys. Also Only Connect came from the Round Britain quiz show from Radio 4, I think it is still running time ti time. ]

58. [Eileen @54: I hang on to whatever I can to try to solve these things!

    Roz @57: RBQ is the the longest running quiz on British radio and most definitely still on-air although I have to say I prefered the two-location format rather than the current incarnation.

    For those who don’t know it, think of it as a cyptic, on the radio, solved by a team.

    I cannot recommend this book highly enough https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1118183/the-round-britain-quiz-book/9781785944642.html ]

59. I totally missed the theme but enjoyed this anyway; I particularly liked MOONSCAPE and SEANCES. Thanks, Carpathian and Eileen!

60. [Me @58: that would be a CRYPTIC…]

61. [ I left my typing error, people on here can work it ou ]

62. sheffield hatter @46 – my apologies: I was busy over lunchtime and by the time I got back to the site there were quite a few more comments and I overlooked your reply to Valentine. Thanks for that: I had to read the blog again a few times to make sure I wasn’t going more scatty than I thought I was!

63. Any Only Connect lovers who missed the Bluth puzzle on March 16th in the Independent should try and find it. It’s a wonder, even if this comment is a bit of a spoiler. I hope that’s OK for a two week old puzzle. If not, apologies.

64. Thanks Carpathian and Eileen
    Carpathian has been my favourite Quiptic setter for some time, and this Cryptic was a delight. Not difficult (though I didn’t see the theme, of course) but lots of fun clues. Favourites were the cleverly-constructed PAGEBOY, SIT INS, and the hilarious SEANCES.

65. [Anyone struggling through the GCHQ Turing challenge? ]

66. Well I’m late to the party today, so I’m going to comment on the comments. There seems to be a theme that almost any word can be the name of a band – something I would agree with – but the scientist in me says that every hypothesis needs to be tested.

    I randomly chose a recent puzzle and looked up all of the answers (or parts if they were compound) in Wikipedia. 10 were names of bands, and of the rest 6 were names of albums (a lot were both). Of the remaining, almost all were names of songs.

    What I should do now is write some code to automatically look up all the answers of all the puzzles in the archive to make the conclusion statistically sound, but I’m convinced already and I’m going to leave it there.

67. When, finally, I spotted the theme, I immediately thought “I’ve seen something like this before from our beloved setter”.
    As Vigo, she had a perfect companion to this crossword in the Independent (8 Feb 2021).
    In that puzzle most bands lacked the S at the end, while this time she added an S.
    Clever idea if that was indeed deliberate.
    Nice, friendly, very well-written Monday fare.
    Many thanks to Eileen & Carpathian.
    [ps, essexboy @5, quite liked that 🙂 ]

68. Sil@67 Well-remembered. I@38 thought I recalled it but couldn’t remember where.

69. Sorry, petert @68, I must have overlooked what you said @38.

70. [Julia @65 – I did the first two Turing puzzles and am now squinting at the third…]

71. [Thanks Sil @67. I was, of course, inspired by your and Eileen’s discussion on Saturday night, and I hoped that you both wouldn’t mind.]

72. Well done Sil@67. You are quite right – I inspired Carpathian to add some esses when I decided to drop them. The inspiration was a connecting wall on https://puzzgrid.com/ as referenced by MaidenBartok@45.

    Thank you to Eileen for the blog and to all who took the time to write.

73. A clever theme.
    Annoyingly I guessed 1d and 7d, but could not parse them. They were both unconvincing answers so I left them out and DNF’ed. I should have had more faith.
    Lots to like, Carpathian’s crosswords always make me smile.
    Thanks both…

74. [Julia @65 & katelinnea @70. I couldn’t make any headway with 2, 3 and 4 but I’ve done 5. Not sure I’m motivated to continue looking at the three I’ve skipped.]

75. omg wow

76. Is there also a contemporary mini-theme with POLICE, CLASHES, SIT-INS?

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