Shang-A-Lang

People, this is what December does to you. It starts sometime around the first week of the month with a solitary mince pie, perhaps a chocolate from the tree, and just carries on and on until, by New Years Day, one finds oneself actually proper debauched - the sort of debauched person who attacks a tube of Revels for breakfast. Because that’s what I’m doing right now - and I find I can’t actually stop.

Duckie’s on tonight so we stayed in for New Year for once, watching Coronation Street and drinking Tattinger (the champagne is another habit I’ll have to get out of when I get back to work). It was really smashing not having to queue for bars / taxis / toilets / A&E and anyway, nights in with Is Nibs and kitters are just about my favourite thing to do in the world. 'Downton Abbey', Corrie Tramcrash, 'The Apprentice', 'RuPaul's Drag Race' – we’ve had a riot on our settee in 2010, I can tell you. I do wish Is Nibs liked 'The Edwardian Farm' more but you can't have everything, can you?

Said Is Nibs made delicious partridge last night, served with a watercress salad and actual real chips which were, in the eating, precisely 1000 times nicer than the oven kind. The real chips necessitated the taking down of the deep fat fryer which hasn’t been used round these parts since The Darkness were fashionable and I still quite liked Sharon Osbourne. Inevitably it was covered in that distinctive kitchen-y, top-of-the-cupboard-y grime and for a moment we questioned whether real chips would be worth the elbow grease. That was until Is Nibs produced this obscure cleaner stuff he got from Lidl yonks ago, which cut right through the fatty dust with such poetic ease (like a glider in the sky) that I’d have to nominate that particular moment as one of 2010’s real highlights. Nothing makes me more satisfied than a clean something.

Speaking of which I spent yesterday tidying out the midden that is our office room. This job took thirteen hours and by mid afternoon I just felt like crying or running away. It was certainly a bloody good job we had nothing planned for New Years Eve. As I lugged bin bags and endlessly rearranged Cor! and Fab 208 annuals on shelves, I left the music randomly shuffling through everything, old and new, that I’d added to iTunes in the past 12 months. Inevitably I suppose, 2010 came back in snapshots, such as the one of my Mum and two aunties in Spain, huddled round an iPad and screeching out the words to Max Romeo’s “Wet Dream” - except the words they had learnt back in the day were far ruder than the official ones we found on Shazam. There were some smashing family dos in 2010, culminating in Alice and Phil’s 40th anniversary party back on Halloween. We took over an entire hotel, the (fake) Beatles played, we (well, me and my Sis) boo-hoo’d at the speeches and everyone got pissed and danced to ‘The Israelites’. The day after was 2010’s undisputed Hangover Of The Year.

I remembered the June night we brought Sylvie home on the train from Paul and Steve's in her cat box. She was so tiny and we assumed she’d be like all the other kittens we’ve had - that is, terrified at first and skittering away to hide behind furniture etc., Instead, we opened up that box and out she strolled, cool as a cucumber, before arching her back and spitting directly in Captain Hook’s face. Utterly unphased she then took a leisurely promenade up the stairs and round the house, before flaking out between us on the settee (although not before attacking my goolies through my pyjama bottoms, which remains a favourite pastime.) Since that evening she has proved herself the most fearless and, without question, the naughtiest pet either of us has ever known. She is totally ASBO.

Too many fun Saturday nights, too many acts and great punters at Duckie to mention, although I suppose the big one-offs stand out. Niece Remi's birthday with all the ladies, including Mum, Sis, cousins and Aunty Jan was very sweet, although I was glad that Mouse giving herself enemas onstage was the week after their visit. Our pre-Gay Lib gay club 'Gross Indecency' was a riot of soul stormers and dressing up in synthetic fabrics. The go-go girls in cages, fake police raid and subsequent strip and dance routine to ‘Downtown’ was unforgettable. It’s unlikely, however, I would put my hand up again to doing it with me and Jels in full ‘Up The Junction’ drag, with itchy beehives, tight mini skirts and the most excruciating shoes ever invented. After three hours I could barely stand, let alone run around Battersea chasing Dennis Waterman. The free Royal Festival Hall 15th birthday was good, too, as was pissing about in the sun at Latitude with Duckie and Cloths, Norrie, Tish, Jock, Ada, Scottee and Severino. I even met, ever so briefly, my old Manchester friend John’s wife Sian (a Facebook friend) and their kids for the first time.

Screamed myself hoarse back in March at Suede’s reunion for the Teenage Cancer Trust, with Jude, Martin, Andrew, Eamonn and Wadey. We must have tested the very structure of our box at the Albert Hall to the point of collapse we were leaping about so much, clambering lairily over red velvet and over one other. Clinking bottles – “BLOODY CHEERS TO SUEDE! HOORAY!” over and over again. It was like the boozy 90s had never ended. The standing ovation after ‘Metal Mickey’ went on for five full minutes which was just extraordinary and something I'd never seen before.

Work was good, although a few really lovely people left. ‘The Complete Introduction To Disco’ box set I compiled was a helluva lot of work for Hannah, Wayne and I but I think we ended up with something we were all really pleased with. It was certainly well received and currently stands as the most blagged item ever in the history of Universal’s catalogue. Would I be like a dog going back to its own sick if I said I really want to do a Volume 2?

Stood this close to Sarah Cracknell back in October before the Saint Eteinne Fan Club show and even sort of had a conversation with her (about 'The Hay Wain' of all things) before I ran off with me nerves for a smoke, dazzled and terrified by her amazingness. There was meeting my producer hero Tony Visconti, too, which we've done on here and, back in frozen January, yer actual afternoon tea round Holly Johnson's house, replete with art and anecdotes. A very entertaining man, just as you'd expect.

With Jock and Ada down in Cadgwith in May we spent a couple of hours in a fishing boat with Nigel the crab man, and saw an actual basking shark really close up. Supernature! In the daytime we walked through carpets of bluebells and picked wild garlic: in the evenings we flopped out with red wine and ‘Archer’, definitely the best thing I saw on TV all year and the funniest show since, well, ever. If you’re not into ‘Archer’ you are nobody in my eyes. And here’s a funny thing that came back to me yesterday afternoon, as I was shoving old shit into new bin bags. While we were in Cornwall we made friends with a really lovely woman whose cottage Is Nibs and I had stayed in over a decade ago. Back then it was frankly a bit of a dump with dead flies everywhere and, I recall, cold hard floors. Anyway, it’s a private house now. One afternoon, Jock, Ada and Is Nibs were all out in the car and I was sunbathing alone on our porch. Said nice lady came out of her cottage and asked if I’d like to go in and look at the improvements they’d made since they bought it. I said yes, of course I would, and we went in together and I admired the kitchen and cooed over the living room. Then she took me upstairs, to the bedroom, where – eek! –her very hot, silver fox of a husband proceeded to strip down to his underpants and change his clothes right before my eyes. I didn’t know where to look and cannot remember what, if anything, I was able to say…. and if that doesn’t sound like the start to a 'My First Time Swinging' story in Penthouse then my name's not Paul Raymond.

Barring none, the Robyn / Goldfrapp double header in the dance tent at V this August with Toby, Andrew, Charlotte and Jels was the musical highlight of 2010. In fact, Robyn won 2010 for me, with my favourite album, single and gig of the year and I don’t think that’s happened since the Human League annus mirabilis of 1981. Also, I just don’t have the superlatives to describe how much I enjoyed being a part of Readers Wifes Fan Club in November. Working with Daniel, Dicky, Martin, H and Simon and watching, night after night, the spectacularly talented Jess, Dickie and Ryan lip-synch for their lives through 40 years of pop culture was a pleasure and a privilege. I genuinely didn’t want it to end and it is now my proudest Wifes moment in the history of Wifes.

But one thing in 2010 eclipsed even all that good stuff, and that was meeting up with my friend Alison after losing touch for two decades. We studied together in Manchester back in the 80s, where we clubbed together and got drunk together and generally lived in each others pockets for a couple of years. We even lived next door to one another in Moss Side afor some time. But in 1988 I moved back to London and Alison stayed in Manchester and we both moved flats several times, like you do at that age. Filofaxes and scribbled down addresses were lost and of course nobody had mobile phones and, well, we eventually just lost touch sometime around 1990. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that this separation kind of broke my heart. It was something I would actually feel when I remembered her.

And then in the summer, by the miracle of Facebook (thanks, John Sturgis!) we hooked up again and then by the miracle of British Rail, Ali was in London, and we were sitting down having lunch together on the river at London Bridge with her bezzer Melanie and my bezzer Jelly (it was his birthday, too). Lunch turned into hours and hours, just boozing and laughing (and laughing and laughing) and it was just as if those two decades hadn’t happened at all. Which is the sign of a true friend, isn’t it?

The Revels are all gone now. Happy New Year!

It’s been a while. I’ve been so fucking angry and depressed and annoyed by this shitty government and the student thing I just haven’t felt like breathing let alone writing. I think it's made me ill! I’m angry, too, with people from my own generation - who I KNOW benefited themselves from an entirely free further education – who are indifferent to or actually opposed to the students’ cause, which is the same as siding with the bastard reactionary shits in this tawdry coalition. And let's remember, they have no mandate for their venal ideological attack on the meritocracy of education. Who voted for that? I should be writing about fun stuff, like snow and Christmas and Corrie, and about some very good news I received this week . Life should feel sweet and, hell, I would normally have done my favourite singles and albums of the year about now but I just can’t fucking well be bothered. I’d rather be anywhere other than the UK at the moment.

Spent the better part of last week gorging on this year’s ‘Now!’ compilations, namely, volumes 75, 76 and 77. It’s the time of year I always go back and check (neurotically, I admit it) that I haven’t failed to ferret out every last pop truffle in the musical undergrowth. I haven’t fallen in love with anything absolutely new to these ears, though some kind of succubus inside – not me! - keeps hitting repeat on Cheryl Cole’s ‘Parachute’ ahem ahem and, well, Doctor, I think I might actually really like ‘Just Be Good To Green’. I’m still waiting to get utterly sick of ‘Barbra Streisand’ and ‘Club Can’t Handle Me’ and ‘Pass Out’, too, but I suspect they’ve passed into canon and I’ll like them forever now. Anyway, it’s been nice hearing all the megahits not topped and tailed by the inane witterings of Fearne Cotton or Moyles. The charts– I just can’t leave ‘em alone. At my age I should probably be ashamed. If we were in an actual relationship, the Top 40 and me, Our Tune would definitely be ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’.

December’s music, though, isn’t all about hits. No-one will know this because I haven’t kept this journal up-to-date all year but my resolution for 2010 was to try and get more out of the music I listen to by listening to less of it. You remember that thing when you were younger and funds were limited so when you bought a record you listened to the arse out of it? And remember that sometimes it wouldn’t be until the 5th or 6th listen that everything clicked into place and you experienced a sort of eureka moment? You know - My God! This Can / Magazine / Brian Eno / Au Pairs record I thought was dead boring is actually the best record EVER! Well, I wanted to see if it was possible to recreate that. Increasingly, I was finding that what with Spotify and music on tap and getting so much free stuff from work, I was just whizzing through music at warp speed. I was hearing it but not really listening, and definitely not getting out what I used to.

So, every month, on the first of the month, since January this year I’ve been wiping my iPhone of all music and loading on twelve new LPs. These I’ve listened to, on rotation, exclusively, until the end of the month when I make a compilation CD of the best bits and start all over again. Another important rule – it is against the law to skip tracks. The month’s records need to be chosen carefully but are always a mixture of new releases and old records I always meant to listen to but never got round to listening to enough. Oh, and there’s always one disc from my Complete Motown Singles box sets which I spent a small fortune on and was determined not to treat like coffee table artifacts, even if they are indisputable works of art. Of course, it’s not the only music I’m exposed to in any given month – new singles are free plays (and I need ‘em for the club) and the radio’s there at work. I always do Rob Da Bank’s show on Listen Again. Weekend nights sitting up boozing with Fints are still free-for-alls, too.

But apart from those exceptions, it’s just the twelve - for the commute and the gym, for any time I’m listening on headphones. And you know what, I can’t describe how well it’s working. To paraphrase something Quentin Crisp once said, less choice can be so much more liberating than endless possibilities. It’s also still true that sometimes it really is the 6th, 7th, 8th, whatever play that things actually click. The System (for it shall henceforth be called that) has taken away that paralysing feeling of being utterly spoilt by choice: so paralysed, in fact, I would just sleepwalk towards a safe choice, like ‘Hunky Dory’ or ‘Introspective or something else I’d already heard a million times.

December, then: Arthur by The Kinks; Pinkerton by Weezer; Happiness by Hurts; Body Talk (the final, complete version) by Robyn; Saint Etienne’s Christmas LP; Ommadawn by Mike Oldfield; Nico’s The Marble Index; Motown’s Singles 1968 Disc 4; Current by Heatwave; A Wizard A True Star by Todd Rundgren; Joni’s Song To A Seagull; and Now That’s What I Call Music, Vols 75-77... which is where I came in.

What about that snow, eh? Fints rang me while I was still at work last night to say that, out of three possible routes on three different train operators, there was absolutely no service from London Bridge. Avoid like the plague, he said, though he said it with a lot more swearing. While my mouth was going Oh God in fuck how am I supposed to get home etc., inside I was secretly exulting, thinking, “Goody!” and even “Yeeeeessss!” Weather and transport bedlam – amazing! I like the chaos: I think every Briton does. Having something to moan about, some challenge to the routine order of things simultaneously quickens the blood and reawakens our latent Blitz genes. So I jolly well fought my way – bad back, gym kit, Amazon parcels and all - through sleet, sludge and freezing wind onto two Tubes and one especially packed 172 at The Elephant. It took twice as long as usual but as a consequence, when I at last reached this little Anderson Shelter we call home, my customary ciggie and cup of one-sugar tea were even more edifying than usual. (And of course I set straight to painting tights on my legs with gravy browning etc.,).

Bloody hell better leave for work. Bet it's more snow chaos (hooray!).

Tony Visconti came into work this week and a couple of us had a meeting with him in the Seventies Meeting Room. It’s not actually called the Seventies Meeting Room by anybody but me but, well, look at the facts: it has dark brown suede wallpaper, light brown suede armchairs, a huge smoked glass coffee table, and a smoked glass drinks cabinet. The carpet is brown and I think it also has a shaggy rug on top of that but that could just be my mind’s eye camping it up. It was, anyway, the best possible place to meet Tony Visconti to talk about… well, I can’t say just yet. Not being coy, just can't.

Beforehand I was actually quite cool about the fact that I was going to sit down in the same room with the person who made some of my all-time favourite records, by Bowie, Bolan and Morrissey. I love all the Bowie Berlin stuff, of course, and 'Electric Warrior' etc., but I've always thought that ‘The Slider’ is his masterpiece - the most beautifully produced album I’ve ever heard, no less - and so the night before I set out my old dog-eared vinyl copy for him to sign. I forgot it, of course, in a freezing black November morning mad dash for the gym before work but anyway… 9.45 came and there was Tony, bang on time, sitting in a brown suede armchair in the Seventies Meeting Room.

THE Tony Visconti. Looking amazing (hot, really, it has to be said) and smiley and friendly and chatting away (“I’m having dinner with David next week”, “Morrissey was just on the phone”) and I still kept my cool until the subject turned to talking about actually making the records with T.Rex. That would be the precise moment the reality of the situation finally hit me - that the person sitting directly opposite had built and scored and arranged, had done the alchemy on ‘Get It On’, ‘Metal Guru’, ‘Life’s A Gas’, ‘Cosmic Dancer’, 'Ballrooms Of Mars', ‘Telegram Sam’...

I had a flash of lying on the floor of my bedroom, back in the early-70s, listening to ‘20th Century Boy’, ear pressed against the speaker of my old mono record player. This was followed by a dread sense that this meeting might possibly be too BIG for me, actually, and I found myself fighting down a compulsion to flee, to run away down six flights of stairs and right out onto Kensington High Street. Instead I think I garbled “Oh God, RAW RAMP” or something pathetic like that and - haha! - it came out of my mouth all high and weird and loud, like I was being strangled. My colleague and friend Joe must have noticed because he said, “Gas and air for Mr Wood!” and everyone laughed and that sort of brought me back to earth. The rest of the meeting passed normally and without incident, though there was a tiny throb of hysteria when Tony said he was producing his new record (Kaiser Chiefs) in the same Soho studio room he mixed ‘Scary Monsters…And Super Creeps’ back in 1980.

I’m too old to be in awe of popstars and famouses. My attitude could be summed up as one of good luck to them and all that but, really, they don’t frighten me or make me go weak at the knees. You see them all the time, anyway, in our building, getting out of lifts, queuing up in the caff and bored-texting in reception. Some of them hold the door open for you and some of them don’t – just like everyone else. Record producers on the other hand must, I think, be my kink. I don't think they are like everyone else. I think, have always thought, that the good ones are actually wizards.

Earlier this year when Wayne got Patrick Adams to email me some notes about my final tracklisting for the Disco Box Set and it came through and it was, well, a eulogy to something I’d personally sweated buckets over, I welled up reading it. On that occasion, too, I was transported back to my bedroom listening to Musique’s ‘In The Bush’ (this would be the late-70s now and the record player a stereo one), never imagining that the person behind those amazing sounds, which I considered and still consider to be a form of magic, would ever, ever know my name, let alone endorse something I’d done.


Heading towards the last week of Readers Wifes Fan Club now - we had some great audiences this week. I just know I’m going to feel extremely flat when it’s all over. When I said earlier in the week that I just want to do it every night, Simon said, “I know it’s addictive, isn’t it?” and it is, much more so than the DJ-ing which I’ve always found enjoyable but very, very tiring. Doing the late shows on Friday nights has necessitated us taking off our usual Saturday spots to rest up and it was the strangest thing, last night, not faffing about with records in the early evening, not getting our usual lift to The Tavern. I spoke to Jelly on the phone at around 7pm and we just couldn’t remember what we used to do in London on a Saturday night (go to Brighton on the train, I said). So I stayed in and we had a nice pie and watched the uncut ‘New York New York’ and drank a vat of wine. It was lovely but weird and it feels like I've had too much rest. I've had an annoying surfeit of energy today (usually I am comatose until the afternoon) and the weekend has felt very, very long.

Well, that was the summer, was it? Tara, I suppose. Better batten down the hatches, ‘coz here comes the autumn. Ugh. Stupid nights drawing in like the abyss grabbing at you and everything dying off everywhere. Weak sun. Back-to-school memories of 1978, and the dreaded trip to WH Smith’s to get stuff with Mum. That was the year I went up to big school where they flushed your head down the toilet on the first day. Appropriately, the song on Radio Fun at the time was Justin Hayward droning on with his ponce's flicky hair: “My life will be Forever Autumn now you’re not heeeere”. And it really felt like that and still does every single year. “I watch the birds fly south across the autumn sky”... “Come back!” it makes me want to yell.


1978. Hulky blazer and nylon tie, new pencil case, felt tips, and that three-headed monster of torture - the protractor, ruler and compass. Said trip to WH Smith, Woking, leavened only by coming home with a sensually thick and chunky 7” of The Rezillos’ Top Of The Pops on Sire. US Sire with the paper label - not useless European pressing Ca Plane Pour Moi Sire with the stamped plastic label and all the sound quality of a wholemeal biscuit.


Did we go through this last year? Am I repeating myself? It’s unlikely I’ll ever get into September (actually as I was coming home from the gym this weak with the sun pathetically all but fizzled out at 8.30 I realized that this time of year actually makes me angry) but I’ve decided that this year I’ll try not to hate the season with my usual fervour. Somebody in The Times today was writing about the pleasures of walking across a frosty, ploughed field at dawn in November with a pale pink sky and the hard ridges of mud under Wellingtons and I thought, Hey, I could get into that. I’ve forgotten who it was who wrote it but I’m grateful to them because it was like they’d suddenly opened a window of possibility in my mind. One thought led to another and I thought of a rabbit or hare sitting up in the distance and then I thought of Roxy Music’s ‘For Your Pleasure’ which is their autumn record for me.

Roxy Music’s albums and the months they are:

Roxy Music - February
For Your Pleasure - October
Stranded - June
Country Life - December
Siren - August
Manifesto - March
Flesh And Blood - May
Avalon - August

The other reason not to be too miffed about the passing of the summer is that to a certain extent it’s still with me, for a bit at least. While I don’t yet know what we’ll do with ourselves without Big Brother every night (and this year it was an awfully good one) Bestival (and Kraftwerk!) is next weekend and simply everyone is going. Half of my lot at work plus Jock and Ada and Jelly and I in a camper van. Bet it’ll be just like ‘Scooby-Doo Where Are You? Perhaps we’ll end up solving the mystery of The Shanklin Phantom but I get dibs on being Fred. Not long after, Fints and I are off to the very tip of Spain where we will be able to see Africa from our bedroom window and where we'll take a trip to see Karen Tiger on Gibraltar. Karen’s a 6th form friend I’ve not set eyes on since my 21st birthday party. We called her Tiger because she was a tiger grrrrrrrrrrrr. Hopefully, it will still be boiling, San Miguel weather. Then, when we come back it’ll be practically Christmas.


Egad, that medley on Side 2 of Abbey Road’s good, isn’t it? Polythene Pam! Carry That Weight!


It’s not been a terrific week. Typical September for me, really, it also being the time when the sun in Virgo beats down in direct opposition to my delicate Piscean sun. My powers feel utterly diminished. When I die, it will surely be while the sun is in Virgo and this week was a case in point - a dry run if you like, because I certainly felt like I was dying at certain points. Wisdom tooth agony kept me awake all night for 2 nights and then a pretty violent reaction to the prescribed antibiotics deprived me of sleep for the remainder of the week. Exhausting - and I was on a course, too, trying to force myself to be all sparky and brilliant about forthcoming Rihanna and Eminem etc., campaigns whilst feeling like my stomach was being used as for the Devil’s Punch Bowl by Satan himself. Sleeping on the settee with the bucket by side and dragging myself up in the morning like an automaton... are there any antibiotics I can take? I tell ya, these babies this time were enormous, like they were designed for horses or elephants or bigger. Whale medicine. Anyway, after they ruined a big family party for me last night (a half a lager and some peanuts made me feel like hurling and I had to go home in cab after two boo-hoo hours) I decided that I was going to stop taking them and to hell with everything they say about completing the course. I’ll take my chances with the wisdom tooth and Neurofen and get my kicks while I’m still young enough to get ‘em! Pip pip!

Was playing with Captain Hook on the stairs there and he affectionately (one presumes, he was purring) bashed his whole face into my eye socket and now it keeps watering. As is customary he was exceptionally nice to me for five seconds precisely before remembering that I’m not Finton and running back up the stairs to lay guard at the foot of his bed like Old Shep. Gosh, I’m playing The Gospel According To TheMenInBlack - haven’t played it in years - and oh my Just Like Nothing On Earth sounds like Fluke! I know!

It hasn’t been the greatest of weeks, truth be told. A pall of sickness, resembling even Death at times, has been hanging over this house since Wednesday. If somebody had boarded up our door and painted a cross on it I couldn’t have blamed them. That fateful morning Fints awoke with the flu and after a feverish, Victorian heroine’s nights sleep of my own I discovered that the neat network of mosquito bites around both of my ankles had all joined up and swollen to the extent that I could barely walk. When I did attempt a sort of hobbling carriage about the flat you could actually see bits of skin pop open and emit a mixture of clear liquid, cloudy puss-y stuff and blood. The Doc mentioned some kind of syndrome I have, whereby the body reacts abnormally to common-or-garden gnats. This is called Skeeter’s Syndrome which sounds a bit like an American joke, no? MoSkeeter’s? But it can’t be that.

Oh this album isn’t much good after all. Let’s change it to Black And White. I like Tits and Tank off that, and Nice N Sleazy, natch. Anyway, bites wasn’t the half of it. The antibiotics the Doc prescribed upset my stomach precipitating vomiting and nausea for two full days. I think the week’s absolute low point must have been Wednesday evening when, in that foul damp humidity, an aching and sweating Fints struggled to the shops and made a chilli and I took one mouthful and threw everything straight back up again. Head down the toilet bowl, painful scabby Elephant Man legs folded under me, I had one of those defining “Hi-Mum-I’m-doing-really-well-in-London!” moments. And I know you’re not meant to but I’ve stopped taking them and, well, I don’t think I feel sick anymore and it’s wonderful. Don’t care so don’t write in.

How different from last week’s wholesome episode down on The Lizard with Jock and Ada. We had a few absolutely amazing holidays with dear Diane and Sean in the 90s and early-00s and it felt like the right time to go back. This time, I can’t believe we got away with the weather and because it was so in our favour we walked up hill and down dale and caught the sun just nicely. We ate crabs and cream teas and pasties and had a barbeque in our cottage garden and played cards and watched Sarah Beeny and BB and didn’t drink too much. Azi leant me the Lynn Barber autobiography “An Education’ which I read on the first morning. (Short on laughs Fints said but i didn’t mind: I appreciated her window onto working for Penthouse in the slack Seventies) .

At one point LB mentions walking heroically all the way from Coverack to Cadgwith on a family holiday. Because we were staying in Cadgwith I took this as a sign that Fints and me simply had to take the coastal path in the opposite direction. Almost bit off more than we could chew with that one, under the blazing sun with no water or anything, and admittedly at one point Fints told me “JUST SHUT UP!” when I pointed out how high the next climb was and on another snapped “Look I’m not a fucking MONKEY” when I led him downwards, on our arses, for the umpteenth time. We didn’t see another soul for hours. But when we’d finished the trek and met up with J and A at the pub for lunch in Coverack I had the best pint of bitter in my entire life and sort of knew it was one of the most fantastic things we’d ever done together.

Didn’t take any photos on holiday but a series of what we half-seriously termed ‘vignettes’ on my iPhone. You know, moving photos like in Harry Potter or something - i.e. the sea crashing against the rocks in Kynance Cove, Jock and Ada driving to Roxy Music and The Yardbirds, the surfers at St Ives, a naughty runaway Jack Russell we tended for a while outside the Post Office in Helford... My plan was to keep shooting the old vignettes when we got back but I managed just one, on Monday, a boring one of me on the rowing machine at my gym. As we know, shortly after that the week went pear-shaped and nobody wants a vignette of me being sick and having scabby legs, do they?

Oh my my my. Mike Oldfield's 'Five Miles Out' has just come on the iTunes! Now that's a song to pull a curtain back on a standout moment.

A few weeks ago we put out a new Mike Oldfield Best Of and I just never got round to playing it. I was loading it onto the computer there imagining that I might want to hear it some day and that track popped on and (it was instantaneous) I slipped right down the memory drain.

Haha. Let me have my 'Stand By Me' moment. *Morgan Freeman voice* It was 1982, and I'd left school that June. Maybe I'd started Sixth Form, but maybe not quite yet. Anyway, a few of us lads went to a party thrown by an older brother of Simon, a vague friend on the fringes of our gang. His dad was a millionaire - he dealt in posh cars like Jaguars and BMWs but the whole family were hippies basically. The sort of hippies with money and businesses of their own, like Branson or Chris Blackwell. There were a lot of them about in Surrey in the early 1980s. There was a definite type.

The Men: open-necked white shirts, copies of Playboy strewn over the place, Eric Clapton LP's. The Women: Bebe Buell suntans, sitting in kitchens flicking through interiors magazines, often hungover behind dark glasses. As a pair: well, they were nice mostly, although you found out that one or both always seemed to be having affairs. Or rowing, going hard at each other, even in front of you when you were round there. They often ended up divorced. I suppose I sort of admired them and judged them at the same time. They were certainly a different class. Mum and Dad and their friends Anne and Vic and Brian and Wendy and Wendy and Dave and Pat and Dave were certainly nothing like that. Titbits rather than Playboy, Vauxhall Vivas over BMWs.

Anyway, this particular family had bought a derelict mansion in the middle of some woods near... Guidlford was it? Deepdene it was called and I mean it really was derelict - there were plants growing in through the windows, great sagging vaulted ceilings, missing stairs on the staircase. I don't think it had any doors, even; it was just this big shell hidden in a dell. Looking back it closely resembled Big and Little Edie's gaff in 'Grey Gardens', although nobody was actually living there. Because I never visited again, I've often wondered if they finished doing it up and moved in proper.

We were the only really young people at the party - Simon, my best friend Michael and Elwyn Leak (I swear I'm not making that last name up). The rest were Simon's brother's friends and to a man also posh hippies but of the more dropout, Art School variety. Sheepskin coats, languid voices, the lot - to us they were just like Neil and his friends at that party in The Young Ones. Julie is the one actual name I remember because Michael and I did a mean impression of her for years afterwards. We used to shake pretend long blonde hair and go, "Make LOVE!" in a posh, slow voice, although it's really doubtful she ever said anything of the sort.

Parts of the house had electricity, run off a generator, so there were coloured lightbulbs strung about and Fleetwood Mac, Lindisfarne and, inevitably, Pink Floyd on the stereo. Very strong herbal smell in the air. Simon got a lump of hash off his brother and we all shared a joint - it was my first time - and it wasn't long before we were all in hysterics, probably making jokes about 'Make Love' Julie. I remember Michael asking if Simon's brother if he had any decent music i.e. the Birthday Party (the answer was no, obviously) and me requesting Shalamar's 'Friends' LP (even more obviously a no).

But something very strange started happening. The tuneless, dirge music (Gong?) actually started sounding quite good and then got even better when somebody put on 'Five Miles Out'. I swear at the time I'd never even heard 'Tubular Bells' by Mike Oldfield, just 'Portsmouth' and 'In Dulce Jubilo' which Legs & Co always danced to on Top Of The Pops because, it was widely known, Mike Oldfield was a recluse and lived like a wild man in the middle of nowhere. Soon I'd inched myself even closer to the speaker. I couldn't believe how all the component parts of the music - the vocoder vocal, the guitar, the woman - sounded so separate and distinct with all this air and space and echo round them. It was amazing, a real revelation. When the different voices all came in about half way through I thought I might actually have a nervo. It was all a bit too real, knowworrImean?

I don't think any of us made it to the end of Mike's album though. Zonked right out. I woke up, freezing, on the floor in the grey of dawn. One of the hippies had put a coat over me. The four of us went downstairs to the half-exposed kitchen where like savages we ate handfuls of dry cornflakes and cream from one of those aerosol things. I remember a cup of nasty black tea. Then we went noodled our way off to the station and that was that. Like I say, I never went to Deepdene again and can't have seen Simon since he dropped out of Sixth Form sometime during that first term. Funny how you grow apart.

I was actually going to write something about iMacs and iPhones but oh well.

Foulest mood. Utterly soaked on the way home and battered by hailstones en route from High Street Kensington office to Earl’s Court Tube. A Mad Mary ten minutes if ever there was one. At one point I was trying to talk to Jelly about iPhones whilst pulling my red waterproof out of my overstuffed bag (keys, CDs, insect spray all pinging out) whilst using a piece of paper to try and leverage a queen bee stuck on a lump of soft, melted chewing gum stuck on a paving stone. Futile. The little bee’s legs were firmly rooted in the gum and I didn’t want to go at it too hard because I was sure this would only wrench body from firmly stuck legs… so I stamped on it to kill it and that made me feel wretched, but what can you do? And after the bee drama was over (with people walking past looking at me funny and wondering what I was doing on the floor in the middle of Earl’s Court) I looked like a contestant in a wet T-shirt contest for the second day running and my stuff was still all over the pavement. By the time my waterproof was actually on me and zipped up against the elements the sun had come out! I am honestly the most untogether person you know.

Home and next up the worst thing of any week - Cleaning The Bathroom. I would rather do anything else I really would. On this occasion the Cilit Bang stuff we had in was rubbish and didn’t spray right and the cats kept getting in the way because they were starving and I should have fed them first. Worst of all, Radio 4 had one of their unfunny comedies on about sport so I had absolutely no frame of reference for the ‘jokes’ whatsoever. For some reason, too, the radio was up REALLY LOUD but, wet hands and all, I just let it play on, getting more and more wound up by the posh people laughing. In the end all of this – bee, downpour, bag stuff, Cilit Bang, cats, comedy – has left me with what they used to call a tense, nervous headache. I don’t think I am a good multi-tasker at all. Women of the world take over!

Thing is, I’m tired. I last had a week off in February and feel like I’m crawling towards the holiday which is still a way off in any case. Or maybe it’s the bloody weather coming back with a vengeance: enough to drive anybody round the bend. Certainly, I felt very differently on Sunday night, still basking in the afterglow of the best week / weekend for yonks. It was a foregone conclusion really that Blur in Hyde Park would leave me all moony and silly like a teenager and that’s precisely what happened. I mean they were my favourite band for almost an entire decade (my God, I’ve just realised I don’t really like any guitar bands from now). I also knew beforehand they were gonna do ‘Popscene’ and ‘Jubilee’ and ‘End Of A Century’ and ‘The Universal’ and ‘For Tomorrow’ and ‘Chemical World’ and ‘To The End’ and ‘Sunday Sunday’ and ‘Tender’ and ‘She’s So High’ etc., because the setlist was all over the internet. But what I wouldn’t have dared hope for was such perfect weather, boiling hot at first settling down to balmy, which leant proceedings the air of a really amazing festival. I swear the sun set and the full moon rise during ‘End Of A Century’, which can’t be possible but that’s what it felt like. Everybody in the Park was in such a great, up-for-it mood and word perfect throughout.

Everyone in a good mood except for the woman who got a plastic bottle in her eye and her eye filled up with blood. Me and Jock saw it happen. You know how it is at gigs with these bottles flying all over the place – annoying but not actually dangerous and everyone does it. In this case however a young bloke in front of us had made to throw one back but did a sort of spazz throw by mistake and rather than go up above the crowd it went straight into the eye of the woman directly behind him. She instantly started crying and her scary-looking boyfriend, who looked like he’d recently escaped from prison, made to go after this extremely mortified fellow who kept trying to apologise. In the end he sort of slipped away into the crowd because his apologies seemed to be enraging the pair even more and soon after that convict and blood-eye went off to the medical thingy. The crowd churned a bit more and before long there we were standing behind bottle-thrower boy again, only this time he was with my friend Hannah who I sit next to at work! We spent the rest of the gig with Hannah and her date, now a marked man (and a hot one at that, we agreed) but I’m really glad the bloke didn’t come back or if he did he didn’t find him. As a rule I don’t pick fights with the bullies or the cads and I’m not much cop at punching other people’s dads.

Saturday, our last ever Gay Shame. Brixton Academy. Theme this year was Femininity. I was nervous as hell beforehand because through work I’d booked Saint Etienne and felt sort of responsible for it being a good gig for them. Likewise our Unskinny Bop buddies who we’d got in to do the warm up. There was also the small matter of making 3,500 people dance till 4am – I was sure that by that time in the morning there’d be just the Wifes left and a caretaker, sweeping up. Determined to have as normal a day as possible and take my mind off worrying I went to the gym and did a triple workout. Later, Jelly and I even Tubed it down to Brixton from our usual pre-Duckie curry house in Vauxhall. It's true - a chicken naga and a chapati will always calm me down.

Had a ball of course. Hung out a bit with Jonny Woo (Wonderwoman on stage hilarious) and Scottee (backstreet abortion tapestry), and looked at some of the amazing installations. There were some great pieces from Ryan Styles, Howard, Wee Lee, Francesca... Oh I forget. We wore all white and I was pleased to see so many of our regulars had gone to town with their outfits (David and Stuart had replica Anna and Frida ABBA costumes – the white platform boots alone must have cost a fortune). Crowd fantastic (word perfect again) for Saint Etienne and from our wobbly scaffolding balcony my eyes were treated to the rather wonderful vision of Sarah Cracknell dancing backstage to ‘Get It On’ in her feather boa. They did 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart', 'Who Do You Think You Are' (with Debsey - yay!), 'Like A Motorway' and 'He's On The Phone' and were apparently totally unprepared for, and knocked out by, the reception. Unskinnies perfect, natch – a brilliant femme-themed set. Love those gals.

Beer, beer, cider, cider... after a couple of hours our swaying balcony didn't seem to pose such a threat any more and I'm pretty sure (it is a massive blur) Jels and I had a blast. We slunk off at dawn into our waiting cab leaving a still-full dancefloor. A great relief, it has to be said, that people danced all night. And while I’m a bit sad that that’s it for Shame a part of me is relieved, too. In terms of scale, ambition and numbers we couldn’t possibly top that evening and it’ll be good thing to move on to something new. What we’ve discussed for 2010 is much smaller (we will be able to see the whites of people's eyes again) but I'm already massively excited by it.

Tsk did this yesterday and left it in draft. Tsk, me.

Heatwave coming. Good. I can almost hear, from childhood, Mum singing one of her favourite songs (as she hoovers up the white shag) – “Temperature’s risin’, it’s hardly surprisin’, we’re havin’. A. Heat. Wave.” The other things she sang were ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ and ‘I’m a woman W.O.M.A.N.’.

I loved the hot weather when I was a young child and then, for many years, went right off it. That teenager in his bedroom playing Marc & The Mambas and Magazine records in July with the curtains drawn… that teenager was me. Not sure when precisely I reverted back and became the kind of person who actively looks forward to the heat – which in London inevitably means melting pavements, wilting Tube journeys, the stink of bins and petrol – but here I am. And I realise now I was wrong to regard summer as an inconvenience, a too-hot too-red season to be bravely borne between lemon spring and auburn autumn. Now I find I’m running toward it screaming “Bring it on!” every time there’s a peep of yellow overhead and I wave my angry fist at every grey cloud with the cheek to pass between June and September. In this latter endeavour I’ve been busy: I mean really, the last two summers in the UK have been pathetic.

Yesterday afternoon, after the gym and before the storms, I spent a good couple of hours on my back in the garden literally pinned down by the heat. I couldn’t do anything except lay there, ’76 playlist on shuffle – ‘Harvest For The World’, ‘Blinded By The Light’, ‘Heart On My Sleeve’, ‘Sixteen Bars’, ‘The Killing Of Georgie’ - getting raped by the sun. Oh it was fantastic.

Duckie was also fantastic. I’m seriously not overstating things when I say that I’m enjoying it now more than at any time since the first couple of years – you’d have to go back over a decade, to ’98 / ’99, to find me leaving at 2am on quite such a (natural) high. We’ve had some brilliant acts on lately (Dickie Beau for example, Ursula last week, Lorraine Bowen was great on Saturday) but the good feeling is really down to our crowd - so many fantastic new people have pitched up recently to complement the lovely loyal regulars. Last night, which would have to be easily the best Saturday of the year so far for me, there were many moments where I felt filled with “ a sense of enormous well-being”: those rat-a-tat-tat BIG drums at the start of Belinda Carlisle’s BigScaryAnimal, for example, or the sleazy tick-tock of Andrea True’s ‘More More More’ and (a new Saturday night staple) the whole of The Beloved’s ‘Sweet Harmony’. Ooh and we had 'red Sails', too. "The hinterland! The hinterland! We're gonna sail to the hinterland! It's fa fa fa fa fa etc." 'Lodger' is mental, right? Oh but anyway, everything sounds better on a hot summers night.

Really wasn’t sure beforehand what to do about Michael Jackson. I reasoned people would probably have heard enough of ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Thriller’ and ‘I Want You Back’ from the news round-ups and, anyway, they’ve never been Duckie tunes. We used to play ‘The Love You Save’ a lot in the early days and ‘Smooth Criminal’ got an airing recently for some reason but on the night we plumped for The Jackson Five’s ‘Lookin Through The Windows’, The Jacksons’ northern soul-y ‘Goin’ Places’ and the Philly genius of ‘Show You The Way To Go’ which we used to play at Duckie Up West. We put ‘PYT’ on at around midnight but the ‘tribute’ song we really reserved for a little after 1am when, after blacking out the venue completely and filling it with smoke, we started with the spoken intro from ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’ and just whacked on every light – strobes, wall scans, mirror balls, arch lights, pillars – at the ‘Whooh!” bit.

Pandemonium! I really wasn’t expecting it to get anything like the reception it did but Jelly and I exchanged the look signifying a genuine “My God!” moment. We have one of these once every couple of years - if we’re lucky. I would have been quite happy to end the night there.

But on reflection maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised. After all ‘Don’t Stop’ is (in my ‘umble opinion) one of the late-70s’ defining records. No matter how many times I hear it I can never really fathom how all the bits hold together. It feels kind of too loose AND too tight at the same time and there’s that strange bit where in the middle where the brass rises and goes crazy and all those creepy voices start burbling away in the background before, after one more ‘Whooh!’, it clicks back into its strange disjointed groove. It’s intergalactic pop made by disco magicians for the Star Wars generation and for me it has the power to erase at a single stroke all the sordid craziness, boring pointlessness and bad (and 'BAD') records after ‘Thriller’.

Blur Blur Blur on Friday. Saint Etienne at Gay Shame on Saturday with The Unskinny Bop girls. I’ve got the best boyfriend in the world who can, when you’re not even looking, make strawberry and meringue ice cream and serve it up with real strawberries. We’ve got Norrie's 40th and my sister’s, um, 41st and then a week in Cornwall with Jock and Ada all in July. Bestival and V follow in late summer and then it's Spain (or Scotland but I’m holding out for Spain) in October. I just want the sun to stay here and to keep getting hotter.

India Knight's rubbish.

I have to go and have spag bol now. We're going to watch 'Oh What A Lovely War' and then Blur on the telly.