The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/29505.
I thought that the parsing in the top half seemed mostly standard issue, but the lower part needed more thought, and also included, at 16A BUCKLAND and 21A BERRYMAN, two names, clearly clued, with which I was not familiar.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | CHAMPIONS |
Promotes good new cut mushrooms (9)
|
| A subtraction: CHAMPI[gn]ONS (‘mushrooms’, from the French, but borrowed into English) minus G N (‘good new cut’). | ||
| 6 | COLD |
Actor lady occasionally aloof (4)
|
| Alternate letters (‘occasionally’) of’aCtOr LaDy’. | ||
| 8 | DAYLIGHT |
Diary regularly written to illuminate − it’s as clear as this, so they say (8)
|
| A charade of DAY (‘DiArY regularly’) plus LIGHT (‘illuminate’). | ||
| 9 | ISOPOD |
Crustacean is given old shell (6)
|
| A charade of ‘is’ plus O (‘old’) plus POD (‘shell’). | ||
| 10 | MARTIN |
Maria’s half-cousin at last receives note identifying bird (6)
|
| An envelope (‘receives’) of TI (‘note’ of the sol-fa) in MAR (‘MARia’s half’-) plus N (-‘cousiN at last’). ‘Identifying’ is connective tissue. | ||
| 11 | NONSKIER |
One avoiding a slide – none risk slipping (8)
|
| A anagram (‘slipping’) of ‘none risk’. | ||
| 12 | FABRIC |
Great price essentially for duck? (6)
|
| A charade of FAB (‘great’) plus RIC (‘pRICe essentially’). Duck is a kind of canvas. | ||
| 15 | SWINDLER |
Point at which layabout without name becomes rogue (8)
|
| An envelope (‘without’) of N (‘name’) in SW (‘point’ of the compass) plus IDLER (‘layabout’). | ||
| 16 | BUCKLAND |
Where deer might have roamed according to an old English geologist (8)
|
| I take it that this is a sort of double (‘triple?) definition: there are various places called Buckland in the UK and elsewhere, where bucks (and does) might have roamed; the geologist is William Buckland, who was a theologian, but also an important figure in the early 19th century transition from a Biblical to evidential view of the earth’s history and geology. | ||
| 19 | TOWING |
Drawing to side (6)
|
| A charade of ‘to’ plus WING (‘side’ – in football or a building). Clues don’t come much simpler than that. | ||
| 21 | BERRYMAN |
British channel rower ignored fellow US poet (8)
|
| A charade of B (‘British’) plus [f]ERRYMAN (‘channel rower’) minus the F (‘ignored fellow’), for ’20th century US poet’ John Berryman. | ||
| 22 | GRIPPE |
Hold exercises, resulting in old complaint (6)
|
| A charade of GRIP (‘hold’) plus PE (‘exercises’). An old word for the flu. | ||
| 24 | REGION |
Part of backward African country receiving nothing (6)
|
| An envelope (‘receiving’) of O (‘nothing’) in REGIN, a reversal (‘backward’) of NIGER (‘African country’). | ||
| 25 | EUROPEAN |
Perhaps Swiss roll, a pure one (8)
|
| An anagram (‘roll’) of ‘a pure one’. | ||
| 26 | ETCH |
Impress leaders of health club’s training ensemble after retirement (4)
|
| A reversal (‘after retirement’) of the first letters (‘leaders’) of ‘Health Club’s Training Ensemble’. | ||
| 27 | RANCHEROS |
Cowboys managed goodbyes ignoring expletives and insults at first (9)
|
| A charade of RAN (‘managed’) plus CHE[e]R[i]OS (‘goodbyes’) minus an E and I (‘ignoring Expletives and Insults at first’). | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | CLARA |
Schumann originally composed like a romantic artist (5)
|
| First letters (‘originally’) of ‘Composed Like A Romantic Art]ist’. The wife of Robert Schumann, and a distinguished pianist and compser in her own right. | ||
| 2 | ALL-STAR |
Football’s tarzans include outstanding players like this (3-4)
|
| A hidden answer (‘include’) in ‘footbALL‘S TARzan’. The answer is adjectival. | ||
| 3 | PAGAN |
God introducing short break for heathen (5)
|
| An envelope (‘introducing’) of GA[p] (‘break’) minus its last letter (‘short’) in PAN (‘god’). | ||
| 4 | OUTINGS |
Picnics maybe forbidden in empty gardens (7)
|
| A charade of OUT (‘forbidden’) plus ‘in’ plus GS (’empty GardenS‘). | ||
| 5 | SCIENTIST |
Insects, it could be who studies them (9)
|
| An anagram (‘could be’) of ‘insects it’. | ||
| 6 | CLOCKED |
Noticed but left bent cans (7)
|
| An envelope (‘cans’) of L (‘left’) in COCKED (‘bent’). | ||
| 7 | LOOSE REIN |
Lack of control, run into toilet and appear briefly cool (5,4)
|
| An envelope (‘into’) of R (‘run’) in LOO (‘toilet’) plus SEE[m] (‘appear’) minus its last letter (‘briefly’); plus IN (‘cool’). | ||
| 13 | AMUSEMENT |
A goddess above people with time for laughter (9)
|
| A charade of ‘a’ plus MUSE (‘goddess’) plus (‘above’ in a down light) MEN (‘people’) plus (‘with’ in any light) T (‘time’). | ||
| 14 | COAL MINER |
Relaxed nice moral person working in gallery (4,5)
|
| An anagram (‘relaxed’) of ‘nice moral’, with a cryptic definition. | ||
| 17 | KURDISH |
Old city enthralled by king’s meal: tongue (7)
|
| An envelope (‘enthralled by’) of UR (‘old city’) in K (‘king’) plus DISH (‘meal’). | ||
| 18 | DUNGEON |
Horse, for example, going around working prison (7)
|
| A charade of DUN (grey-brown ‘horse’) plus GE, a reversal (‘going around’) of E.G. (‘for example’) plus ON (‘working’). | ||
| 20 | WHISPER |
Show how his performance gets a sigh (7)
|
| A hidden answer (‘show’?) in ‘hoW HIS PERformance’. | ||
| 22 | GIRTH |
Stomach upset, right? (5)
|
| An anagram (‘upset’) of ‘right’. | ||
| 23 | PLAYS |
Place votes for shows (5)
|
| A charade of PL (‘place’) plus AYS (‘votes’ in favour). |
Thank you PeterO. Needed your help for LOOSE REIN
Didn’t know BUCKLAND but got it from wordplay and google confirmed.
Ditto ISOPODS. Very detailed info from Wiki, but the one identifying characteristic that I am aware of is: Isopods belong to the larger group Peracarida, which are united by the presence of a special chamber under the thorax for brooding eggs. .
I liked the Swiss roll in EUROPEAN, and the upset stomach, in GIRTH. Entomologists wouldn’t fit for the studiers of insects. Liked SCIENTISTS though. KURDISH was helped by the chestnutty ”old city”
Fav was COAL MINER. Ok, it was an anagram but nicely disguised definition.
Great that CLARA Schumann got a gong,. I have to confess I misread the wordplay and was looking for S (initially) C (probably some notation somewhere that meant composed) and A LA (like a). Went looking for a Romantic artist called Scala.
Thanks Kite. Despite failing with FABRIC and LOOSE REIN I enjoyed this quite a bit with GRIPPE, CLARA, PAGAN, KURDISH, and GIRTH being my top picks. Thanks PeterO for the blog.
Liked MARTIN (tho someone may not put a stamp of approval on Maria’s half), BERRYMAN, PAGAN, LOOSE REIN and COAL MINER (for the same reason as pdm@1).
ALL-STAR
Someone may be able to explain that there is no part of speech mismatch between the def and the solution.
WHISPER
Can’t see how ‘show’ works as a hidden answer indicator (the blogger seems to have the same question). Someone may have an explanation.
Thanks Kite and PeterO!
KVA@3. I read ALL-STAR as an adjective, outstanding players ‘like this’. Both ”outstanding” and ”all-star” could be used to describe those players. Singular ok, adjective. Not the players but the description.
Pdm@4
Thanks
WHISPER also made me pause. Took a while to see the hidden, but I don’t have a problem with it. Show as in Wiktionary’s definitions: verb: (transitive) To display, to have somebody see (something). verb: (intransitive) To be visible; to be seen; to appear.
6a COLD PLAYS 23d
COLDPLAY is obviously the theme with Chris MARTIN, and band mates BUCKLAND, BERRYMAN and CHAMPION, tracks The SCIENTIST, CLOCKs, WHISPER and DAYLIGHT (from A Rush of Blood to the Head). I’m not looking further.
The theme obviously dictated the word choice.
Thank you PeterO and Kite
New album out today from Coldplay
Wasn’t looking out for a theme from Kite. So, as it’s Friday, is this a Hymn for the Weekend. ?
Crowbar used to bring in obscurities to fit a theme. Why not just bin the theme?
Hate a crossword with loads of googles.
I gotta ask, what’s the Editor doing? Ludwig recently, BBC One, and now a Coldplay release tomorrow/today, whatever time zone you’re in. This is weird.
Didn’t like the clue for ALL-STAR. What on earth are “Football’s Tarzans”? Let’s just stick two random words together. And surely King’s dish is KS DISH? And don’t get me started on Buckland and Berryman.
And what is Kite’s connection to Coldplay that has inspired him to compile a crossword for their new release, and the connection with the crossowrds editor who has slotted that in for today? If this were the BBC, heads would roll, but nobody knows about our crossword clique and sleuthing abilities. Thanks Frankie G and Shanne.
Cue a favourite of mine. Saw him, musicians, and singers live in Oz. Humbling.
The answers for BUCKLAND and BERRYMAN were fairly obscure GK but I don’t really mind that when the wordplay is clear, as it is here. NON-SKIER is also pretty clearly clued, but is it really a word?
I rather like Coldplay (and think Viva la Vida is one of the best songs ever written), but I confess I’m with paddymelon @14 about the new Coldplay album being shoehorned into the Grauniad crossword slot. Very minor grouse, though – a perfectly serviceable crossword with some enjoyable wordplay.
Thanks, both.
NeilH @15. As you say, NON-SKIER is clearly clued, but surely it’s (3,5), not (8)?
Me@16. Or even (3-5)?
Crispy @16,17, in a barred crossword it would be (8).
Is cold play one of those pop group thingies? 😉
Deduced Buckland but not Berryman. I’m afraid that the theme is not familiar to me.
Crispy @16 & 17; Yes, of course; but this is the Grauniad, for goodness’ sake. When Paul has a six-word phrase as the centrepiece of a puzzle, the proofreaders may actually check the enumeration, but (3-5) or (8), hey, what the heck?
I missed the theme completely… Liked CHAMPION, RANCHEROS and COAL MINER. I smiled at the comment from pm@14 (as well as the earworm).
I agree with Crispy @16/17 that NONSKIER was crying out for a hyphen, unless it is a non-UK usage?
Many thanks to PeterO for much needed help with some of the parsing. Thanks also to Kite.
Have a great weekend everyone 😎
TGIF.. Thanks Kite and PeterO. Wasn’t convinced by 23d as a sound-alike despite the cluing. Liked LOOSE-REIN and BUCKLAND. Thanks for the links. Always good to find out more. Have a good weekend.
Pretty much what PeterO has said. The two B-men unknowns, and FABRIC was a clever misdirection, I thought. A couple of nicely hidden ones, too. And I always thought GRIPPE only had one P in it. Oblivious to the obvious(?) Cold Play theme…
Thanks Kite and PeterO
I did know BUCKLAND, but not BERRYMAN. I didn’t parse CLOCKED (cocked = bent?) or LOOSE REIN apart from the loos.
Is ETCH the same as “impress”. I would have said that the process of producing the depression was entirely different – IMPRESS by stamping or pressing down, etch by dissolving surface material.
NONSKIER is a pretty feeble clue by more than one measure!
No theme, of course. I had heard of Chris Martin, but not the others. Maria and ?A?T?N also suggested Maria Marten, victim of “The murder in the red barn”.
I liked CHAMPIONS and REGION.
With two crossers, I had BETJEMAN penciled in for the poet, with only two misgivings: I could only partially parse it, and where would I find a word to fit that crazy J crosser? So I had to look closer. BUCKLAND was fine (but I do have a Geology degree!). Not bothered one way or the other about the theme. I know little about the band (never took to them) and didn’t even look for a theme, yet it was all solvable. Thanks, Kite and PeterO.
Despite paddymelon’s defence @6, I still fail to see how shoving ‘Show’ at the front of the fodder turns 20d into a grammatically correct hidden word clue.
Bah, humbug
Shown in [fodder] – yes
[fodder] shows – yes
Show [fodder] – hmm, don’t think so
[chargehand@22, on reading your comment it struck me that TGIF could also stand for Thank God
I Finished…]
Hey maybe Kite could have written this as an Inqy and the endgame was that solvers had to colour the grid all yello…[shot rings out]
Despite some great clues (EUROPEAN, COAL MINER, RANCHEROS, OUTINGS, CLOCKED, KURDISH) overall I can’t quite give this top marks I’m afraid, as a few clues made me wrinkle my nose (WHISPER and NONSKIER have already been covered).
I concede that some of these quibbles may be personal preference but hey, we’ve all got ’em…
– To me MAR isn’t “Maria’s half” as the possessive ‘s is required for the syntax (if the S is acceptable as part of the fodder to be halved then you’d have to accept e.g. “Sharon half” to indicate SHA) … ironically I think “Marian’s half” would have worked perfectly fine 🙂
– FABRIC: “essentially” in crosswords usually means the middle (one or two letters) not the whole inner contents
– GIRTH doesn’t mean stomach; it means circumference
Despite those little wrinkles it was still mostly enjoyable so thanks both 🙂
This one started off quite well for me with a few nice entries. However the curse of the theme forced the shoehorning in of some dubious wordsmithing. I think I have only seen a couple of cryptics where the theme did not distract from the enjoyment of the solve.
At least I didn’t have to be fluent in French or Latin or farcical religious ceremonies or know old slang and sayings from the setters youth 50 odd years ago.
WHISPER was my favourite for reminding me of the story about counterfeit chocolate. It turned out to be a case of Chinese Wispas 🙂
Didn’t clock the theme but it explains some of the unfamiliar names
Ticks for CHAMPIONS, CLOCKED and COAL MINER
Cheers P&K
muffin @ 24
An etching (print) is made by the etcher cutting / impressing into a (copper) plate to produce a negative of the required image.
As for others, BUCKLAND and BERRYMAN were unknown to me (and I completely missed the theme, as per.).
That said, one of the more pleasant non-Monday solves for me (my first attempt at a Kite) – only 2 frustrations with the bandmates, and one unparseable without 225 (LOOSE REIN – I was trying go get SERENE = COOL to work there…). Googling required for ISOPOD and duck = canvas.
Ticks for CHAMPIONS (I love mushrooms!), CLOCKED and TOWING. Nice surface for CLARA too.
Thanks Kite and PeterO – happy weekend all!
Kite’s constructions can seem a little odd. I solved 1a but does ‘good new cut mushrooms’ really mean “take G and N away from CHAMPIGNONS? At a pinch it could be a reverse clue, where CHAMPIONS is “cut into” by G and N to give the mushrooms. Is this what Kite means? (I think this setter has previous for this sort of thing. Not sure I approve.)
On the other hand I thought that the clue for SWINDLER was meticulously put together, as was RANCHEROS.
Thanks to Kite and PeterO.
[Is the release of a new Coldplay record something to celebrate? I can understand celebrating an anniversary of a significant record like Revolver, Never Mind the B*ll*cks or OK Computer, but something new? Is the Guardian Crossword available as advertising space?]
Simon S @34, that hardly answers muffin’s point – you are just repeating what he says is wrong. Etching in printmaking is erosion by acid where an acid-resistant ground has been scraped or scratched away. Certainly no impressing there.
I missed the theme completely, didn’t recognise BUCKLAND or BERRYMAN in either of their incarnations, and they weren’t clearly enough clued for me to get them. Can’t say I enjoyed this. But we’ve had puzzles themed around groups and their works before, sometimes much more obscure than this, so I don’t understand all the outrage at a Coldplay-themed crossword coinciding with an album release, whether or not it was specially written for the occasion.
@gladys – well said. I really think some people love to be outraged regardless. If Coldplay are relying on a themed cryptic in the Guardian about their second album released 20 odd years ago I think they need to sack their marketing people.
Many thanks to PeterO for a super blog and to the commenters here.
NONSKIER is not in Chambers or the ODE, but it is in Collins (and Wiktionary) as one word. I submitted this before I realised that the new Coldplay album was coming out but today seemed a good date to publish it – I have no connection to the band, just liked the previous album (see Shanne @8). As for themes; most of my crosswords do have a theme because there has to be some inspiration to fill a grid.
Thanks to Kite for dropping in. I understand about the need for some inspiration to get started on the grid fill.
It’s a bit of a shame when some of the themed answers then have to be defined with reference to what many people find to be obscurities. I’m thinking of BUCKLAND and BERRYMAN, though I have to say the wordplay was clear enough that I could solve those clues, while (of course) still not recognising the theme. 😁
Didn’t get the theme at all, as my knowledge of Coldplay is somewhat limited, but managed, unusually for a Friday, to finish this, but with four Googles: BUCKLAND, BERRYMAN, ISOPOD and Duck as FABRIC. No problem with the clueing of any of them, though.
An enjoyable crossword with which I have few quibbles; only the lack of a hyphen in NONSKIER and GIRTH for ‘stomach’ grated, but only slightly. No problem about its having a theme, however obscure to us oldies; that’s all part of the fun in crosswordland.
Thanks to Kite and PeterO.
New for me: ISOPOD; geologist Buckland, William (1784–1856); poet John Berryman.
Thanks, both.
Don’t forget the first four letters of 21 when looking for the theme words 😉
Put in gripes for 22a. Otherwise finished. I’m of an age where Coldplay are outside my interest. Perhaps sometime we can celebrate Frankie Laine or Guy Mitchell and maybe Rosemary Clooney,,!
Thanks to Kite (both for setting the crossword and for dropping in), and to PeterO for the blog – I needed it for the parsing of CLOCKED.
I’m another who had never heard of BERRYMAN or BUCKLAND, but the wordplay and a few crossers meant they were gettable, which I think is fair. I completely didn’t spot the theme but I also didn’t think it got in the way of the crossword which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Ticks for LOOSE REIN, COAL MINER and RANCHEROS.
I had a chuckle at PeterO’s comment on TOWING: “Clues don’t come much simpler than that.” – it was my LOI and took an age before it dawned.
(Edited for typos.)
Just a thought – re: 20d. Surely ‘gets a’ is the inclusion indicator, not ‘show’’?
@29 Pauline in Brum – Nice one :-))
Frustrated by not getting beyond Frost, Whitman, Pound and a few other US poets at 21, and just a likely BE*R*MAN left, I resorted to a couple of guesses. Lo and behold, the app told me the very unlikely BECROMAN was correct! How does this happen?
23D bothers me. I have seen AYES and YAYS for Yes votes, but not AYS (and a check with a search engine also suggests it is at best rare.) Just me?
In general though I’m with the grousers*, frustrated by some obscure “famous names” and some loose cluing in order to fit a theme that few here would know or care about and that is in hindsight an event of very minor significance. It’s not even well done, in that the “keystone” is Coldplay, but in the answers we have “coldplays”.
I continue to hope that these are “teething problems” for the new(ish) editor, but I reiterate my complaint that if we must have a theme, it should contribute to the solving process, not detract from it. Perhaps the editor should remind himself that his customers are the solvers, not the setters?
—-
*No, I’m not “outraged” as some have suggested; it is perfectly possibly to be somewhat annoyed without going to such extremes.
I was ETCHed by COAL MINER, no so much by NONSKIER.
Weird one. Raced through most of it then the last 4 in the SW held up for ages. I did get The Scientist running through my head after entering that one, but since I neither like nor know anything else about Coldplay I completely missed the theme. Great fun though, and as others mentioned above, I really quite like obscure GK which is perfectly feasible to get from the wordplay.
Togo@47: good point – and it would then make ‘shows’ redundant in what would become a tidier clue.
A straightforward puzzle I thought. Some neat hiddens and anagrams. NONSKIER is a clunky word, though; the bane of themed crosswords, perhaps?
Thanks Kite and PeterO
Not a Coldplay fan (they fail the ‘old grey whistle test’ for me) but found entertainment in the puzzle so thanks both.
Did anyone else try to shoehorn ‘mona licer’ in as the gallery worker? Just me I suspect…
oed.com has NON-SKIER with a hyphen, but the middle one of its three citations (1937, 1969, and 2000 – all American) is:
‘1969 It was argued that skimobiling..provided an outlet for out-of-doors enjoyment by nonskiers. New York Times 9 November x. 14′. …
… Hyphens disappear over time. In 2007, the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries,
such as fig-leaf (now fig leaf), pot-belly (now pot belly), and pigeon-hole (now pigeonhole). The BBC article is from that year, when people were still putting a hyphen in “e-mail”.
I’ve never heard of Coldplay, much less its four members, but that didn’t stop the puzzle from being enjoyable. The theme didn’t get in the way.
I’d heard of John BERRYMAN. Not heard of the creationist/geographer BUCKLAND, but there’s a Buckland Mall near here, so I figured the word had to be somebody’s name.
Thanks, Kite and PeterO.
@50 Jacob “if we must have a theme…” I’m always surprised people object to themes, I’ve said before that they make a crossword into a true composition as far as I’m concerned. To put it in musical terms it becomes a symphony of clues rather than a medley. Kite says “there has to be inspiration to fill a grid” and for me that inspiration transmits to solvers, consciously or not.
Robert Schumann’s compositions are full of crossword-type ciphers and themes, not least on Clara, as in this piece. And here’s one of Clara Schumann’s finest works Thank you Kite for a great composition, and PeterO for the blog!
My knowledge of Coldplay is limited to the one song (Viva la Vida), so the theme sailed right over my head. I have a BA in geology and an MA in English (also a JD–I’m a week shy of 50 and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up), but I’d heard of Berryman but not Buckland. (I don’t think the history of geology, which is frankly kind of embarrassing for the science, figured prominently in my coursework, and the only old geologist I can name off the top of my head is Hutton.)
The oddities here have all been mentioned. As a firm non-skier, I would certainly use a hyphen to say so.
Damn. If I’d realised it had anything at all to do with Coldplay, I’d have given it a wide berth. What on Earth is the attraction? Anyone?
[Mr.P @58
I would strongly recommend this book on the Devonian controversy. Fascinating, except for the last section where he tries to re-explain it in diagram!]
I bet I’m not the only one who nearly put in TURKISH at 17d. But I caught myself in time.
BERRYMAN and BUCKLAND were new to me, as to Peter – but they went in from the wordplay OK. And there I go claiming to have bagged a Geology A-level (mind you, that was years ago)!
The rest was fine and not overly taxing. Ticks for CHAMPIONS, ISOPOD (yes I had heard of them), FABRIC, EUROPEAN, RANCHEROS, CLARA (S), PAGAN (I think I’d have clued it “God has little time for heathen” (PAN containing AG[e]), COAL MINER (alas! few of those left now – in UK); DUNGEON.
Need I confess that the theme passed me by? No I needn’t. So many themes are simply out of my orbit. Something I just have to accept. 🙁
Thanks to Kite and Peter.
@50 Jacob – I respectfully disagree with your distaste for themes. As I’ve argued here before an un-themed crossword is a medley of clues, a themed crossword is a symphony, a true composition. Like Kite, Robert Schumann constantly composed with hidden themes, most famously on his wife’s name CLARA (1d). Here – at last! – is some Clara Schumann, her Trio in G minor. Thank you Kite and PeterO!
Fastest finish in a long time. BUCKLAND was FOI. That gave KURDISH and the rest seemed to follow.
Nice to see Frau Schumann making an appearance.
Vannucci @59: the theme is what’s called a ‘ghost theme’ – which means that, like me, you don’t need to know anything about it to solve the puzzle. So why would you want to give the puzzle ‘a wide berth’?
Unless you have a morbid distaste for any word connected with said group, that is.
Reminds me of one of the puzzles I sent to the late (and sadly missed) Alberich. One of the clues made a vague (but erroneous) allusion to Paul McCartney, and Alberich, bless him!, told me he utterly abhorred the Beatles. But he let me keep the clue!
Like some others I found the top half almost a write-in, whilst the bottom half was quite tough in places. I’d also never heard of BERRYMAN (I exhausted my limited knowledge of US poets), though managed to work it out. I just read his Wiki entry: a very sad life…With thanks to both.
Muffin @60[Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll look out for it.]
@59 – Asking people what the attraction is of music that they don’t like is one of the most pointless comments I have ever seen – what are you hoping to do, dismantle their argument?
[the (later?) numbers seem to have gone out of sequence by +1 if folks are wondering why the current 59 is causing consternation]
(Excuse my doubled comment @58 &63, after an hour I assumed the first was lost in moderation)
Thanks for the blog , so glad I missed the theme. My students call Coldplay bed-wetting music which I think is being too kind.
Very good set of clues , BUCKLAND and BERRYMAN very neat and very fair. CHAMPIONS was clever , it contains PIONS , the smaller cousins of the kaons from Wednesday.
I only took 10 minutes to do this one. But that was when I ruled the world.
Thanks both.
Coldplay have the unique ability of making every song sound the same.
Pretty straightforward end-of-weeker. I liked the Swiss roll and the bent cans.
The new editor is making great efforts to appeal to newer/younger solvers, so a fairly accessible puzzle with a more modern band as theme seems a pretty good idea to me, even though it (the theme) went over my head. I reckon the criticisms are a little overdone too.
Thanks, K&P. Have a nutty weekend, all.
Shane @9: didn’t even notice. Not a fan. However, the new Public Service Broadcasting album “The Last Flight” arrived in the post today. Recommended. As is clue 14D, great mis direction with “gallery”.
Apologies, my phone autocorrected Shanne to Shane and I posted before I noticed.
Another one only finished on second go around. Had to google Buckland and Berryman and didn’t parse clocked. I think the synonym is too obscure. Missed the theme. Thanks anyway Kite and Peter.
[Muffin @61: thanks–I’ll look out for it.]
[Nuntius @66: As a former English teacher–fully aware that British courses deliberately have only limited American content–I’d point you to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, E.E. Cummings, and Langston Hughes to start with. Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and William Carlos Williams (the Imagists) and Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac (the Beat Generation) are also seminal but never really did anything for me. Read that list and you’ll find others like the ones you like. There of course is American poetry that’s older than Whitman, but these days it’s considered Not Very Good. (Except of course Phyllis Wheatley–who’s been restored to the canon because of her unique position as an enslaved poet, but we can secretly whisper that she’s not very good either.)]
[Oh, and I guess Poe is also pre-Whitman.]
[No Longfellow, Mr.P? My single visit to the US was to Minneapolis (a friend was there for a year and we stayed with her), and we visited the Minnehaha Falls.
I must say that we liked the city, the State building in St. Paul, the river, and the surrounding countryside (though not all the biting insects it contained!).
Hiawatha was the making of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a black composer who achieved considerable success in early 20th century Britain.]
mrpenney@78: I have heard of all the US poets you mention (and even read some of their work) except Brooks, Bishop, and Stevens. I will look them up. Muffin@79: one of the first LPs I bought in the 1970s was Malcolm Sargent conducting various pieces and which included an extract from Hiawatha. It has just come back to me.
Late in the day now, but reading through some of these quite unpleasant negative comments about Coldplay makes me think there won’t be many complementary tickets dished out for their next gig to any of those making their – in one or two cases – uncomplimentary, downright rude remarks on here. Saw them once a while ago at the Arsenal Emirates Stadium. A wonderful night…every to their own opinion as ever, of course…
[ This one, by Bishop, is, as the title says, a sestina–and probably the best example of that form that I know of.]
[mpenny@78: I’ve never heard of E. E. Cummings. Though I do know e. e. cummings… 😉 ]
Thanks PeterO and Kite. As for people’s curiosity about the appeal or otherwise of Coldplay, they seem to be one of those bands (see also Simply Red and U2) which attract undeserved hatred from music snobs just because they are extremely popular, mainly among people who maybe don’t read music publications (or websites these days) or buy vast numbers of albums. I’m a big music fan, and though I have never been moved to buy any of their output, I can’t really dislike them either.
[ TassieTim @83 — having recently had the need to do some research on E E Cummings and the use of capitalisation I discovered that it was never his intention to decapitalise his name and was merely a publisher’s affectation that somehow stuck. His widow corrected subsequent biographers but the correction never really took hold, much to her annoyance.
A detailed explanation is here ]
[ in case anyone is tackling this week’s (today’s) Boatman Prize puzzle 29506 on the Guardian App, the instructions “Special instructions: A dozen of a kind are missing from their clues’ wordplay.” are missing! ]
[or at least if you dive straight in to the grid like I did]
Hmm, learned of the theme once here, after something of a tussle with this. Got Berryman fairly easily, because of his connection to the nearby University of Minnesota. The bridge from which he jumped to his death is part of the campus.