Shang-A-Lang

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.

It’s nice out and I’m in the garden listening to The Beatles and eating an apple. (It was meant to be a pear but the sole pear in the fridge, when proffered by Fints, was deemed by both of us far too small).

Old Brown Shoe

Hmmm. I’m wondering what happened to the people who used to live next door. They’ve obviously moved but God only knows when during the last two years that was. They weren’t friends at all, not even nodding-terms-neighbours, but I’m reminded of a sunny Bank Holiday day like today, a couple of years ago, when they had people round and sat in their garden playing a Robbie Williams live concert on the radio REALLY LOUD. It was so loud we had to shut our patio doors and turn the telly up which was annoying given the weather. It wasn’t really the volume of it per se - I just think we were really puzzled and even a bit offended that you’d invite people round and choose a Robbie Williams concert on Radio One as your background music. And then turn it up so loud it became frontground music - ”Hello Knebworth!” etc., and then ”I don’t wanna rock, DJ,” and all the rest of it. Just awful. They were Australians, these people. Dominic upstairs says the new people in there are gays who come to Duckie but I’ve never seen them.

The Ballad Of John & Yoko

Ah, Evie has come out to lie next to me. Poor little brown hen plain moth tabby. I love the way their pupils just go like slits in bright sun, like an alligator or something. Almost a bit alarming. And there’s a new white cat in the area whom Captain Hook has been pretending to fight, i.e chasing it up the path but only when Fints is around. Roy actually has been fighting it, though. He came home the other day with his ear sliced more or less in half, top to bottom. We looked it up on the internet and it said there’s not much a vet can do for ear tearing and those of you who know us will understand we’re pretty reluctant to pay out any more for Roy, what with the cage thing and the only half-living here anyway. If the other owners are so bothered they can take him. It’s healing anyway, although now you can see a line of daylight through his triangle ear.

Hey Jude

I can’t pretend that the last three months or so have been anything other than very, very uncomfortable. Disruptive and uncomfortable and at times plain bloody awful, like I’d never enjoy myself again. Getting used to going to the gym every day was just the start of it and then there was packing in the ciggies… Honestly, this time round I ran the gamut of every withdrawal symptom known to man. There were aching joints like a bout of the flu, followed by constipation and then nightmares and insomnia and then, for two weeks, this little black cloud of sadness. Oh boo hoo me but the fact I'm writing this means I'm mending. Now I’m not drinking as much either, although this is much much easier than not smoking. I've always been able to take or leave El Boozo, as The Faces used to call it. The new thing for me and Jels is to start on it much later at Duckie – as opposed to piling straight into the Bacardis in the dressing room before we even open. For the first few hours we altetnate Diet Coke with this weedy shandy-ish thing – fizzy water with a smidge of Magners in. It looks like carbonated pee and tastes of, well, water mainly. Rock ‘n’ roll! But it means we can 1. remember the last couple of hours the next day and 2. get stuff done on Sundays.

Rain

We still have a laugh, though. In fact, I woke up laughing this morning over something from last night. At about 1am Jelly turned to me in the booth and said:”Oh do you ever think you’d like to have a big pair of tits?” and I replied that, no, I wouldn’t I didn't think I would. Then somehow this led to us going: “I wouldn’t like to have a big pair of tits except if I was on a nudist beach in St Tropez with big brown bozoms” and “I wouldn’t like to have a pair of tits except imagine how amazing it would be if you had a spread in Nuts or Zoo” etc., Oh I can't remember the rest.

We Can Work It Out

I think I’m sort of ready to start blogging a bit again. I was moaning a bit up there about the fags thing and it has been hard but it hasn’t stopped me enjoying meself. My God, what have I done??? Saint Etienne at Bloomsbury Ballroom, Foxbase Alpha start to finish with Richard X DJ-ing and invoking the spirit of 1991. La Roux and Heartbreak in Camden. And we’ve had Dickie Beau on at Duckie these last three weeks doing three specially commissioned pieces. I can’t really explain them here but what I will say is he’s the best thing I’ve seen for at least five years. last night I felt real tears prick at my eyes during the piece's climax and I am now, officially, a fan bordering on stalker.

I’m Down

That’s enough typing I think. I want to finish my book about the studio system in the golden age of Hollywood. I love all that – RKO! Metro! Paramount! Universal! Columbia! Warner Bros! United Artists! Me and Jelly also joke about having separate bungalows for when we're shooting on the lot at... well I think he's more MGM while I fancy I'm a Warner Bros. Anyway, this book - I really enjoyed reading about Universal Studios’ amazing run of horror - The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man etc., so I’ve been collecting them. Me and my true love are going to watch some Frankenstein ones tonight with a Thai curry.

Oh look Roy’s here. That ear looks much better.

Still neither the inspiration nor the inclination to blog, I’m afraid. It just won’t come and I know why – it’s because I’m off the fags. It was sort of my favourite thing in the world, sitting here tapping away with a ciggy on the go. Now that the smoking is (hopefully) over I just can’t rouse myself to write anything at all. I sit down at the desk and bash out a couple of clunky, uninteresting sentences, before rapidly losing interest and drifting off to do something else instead. Shame, because there’s been loads going on. Maybe it’ll come back soon. Oh dear I sound like Molly Parkin - ”My muse has deserted me!”. Well, so be it: for now at least it has. Better to be off the fags. After all, "What are words worth?"

In the meantime, here’s a list of my top 10 pop singles so far this year. All worth a download – money back, as usual, if not 100% satisfied.

01. The Fear / Lily Allen
02. Shoes / Tiga
03. Poker Face / Lady Gaga
04. In For The Kill / La Roux
05. Walking On A Dream / Empire Of The Sun
06. Zero / Yeah Yeah Yeahs
07. Happy Up Here / Royksopp
08. Cable TV / Fol Chen
09. Love Etc., / Pet Shop Boys
010. Solo / Chew Lips

Bubbling under: The Horrors; Au Revoir Simone; Lady Sovereign; Jesse Rose; Calvin Harris

It’s been two weeks, I know I know I know. Mental mental life. Still, let’s do this, shall we… Agatha Christies. Two. ‘Death Comes As The End’ first. Dire. Already I harbour bad memories of reading it. Set in Ancient Egypt in 2000 BC (or something) and of course the characters spoke this hideous artificial dialogue throughout – “Oh my sister the grain shall fail for we have surely angered the gods” etc., I don’t know why I hated the main protagonist Renisenb as much as I did. Maybe it was her name itself – I spent the whole book never really knowing how I should be saying it in my head. ReniseB, ReniseN, ReniseNB… Gah! Decent count of novel, historically ancient murders though – poisoned unguent, forced drowning in the Nile, suffocation, pushed off the top of a temple - there might even have been a couple more I’ve forgotten. But just 3 out of 10 for this one. Back with the killer again for ‘Dead Man’s Folly’, though. Stupid teenage girl found strangled in a remote boat house at a summers country fair. She’s found surrounded by comics with clues, possibly, in the margins. It’s a Poirot and joined by the crime novelist Mrs Oliver again. Funny how this year I’ve read three Mrs Olivers and none with Hastings. Very edifying twist at the end. 7 out of 10.

I’ve been off work for a couple of days. Dastardly, deadly runs although the fact that I’m writing this you can take as a sign that I’m on the mend - I’ve been asleep for 36 hours, give or take. Anyway, these runs came upon me at 7.30 yesterday morning at the gym of all places. There I was, bright as a button and Leave-It-To-Beaver-early, totally unphased by losing the hour’s sleep, and first among all the other larks on the cross trainers, going fast and, after 25 minutes, going fast backwards which is my new favourite thing. Then, 2,000 metres rowing followed by the bastard arm bike which is a killer. I was still up and at ‘em and just finishing my circuit on the normal leg bike when the, um, stirrings began and I only just made the loo on time. Can you imagine? You’d never be able to show your face again if you shat yourself at the gym, although I’m told it’s quite common for body builders to evacuate involuntarily, what with all the straining and steroids. Anyway, I made it home again (just, again) and there ensued an extraordinary few hours running in and out the loo and then this strange, shivery sleep with a cat lying on me for most of it.

My birthday present to myself was to give up smoking again. This time it’s serious. Since Christmas I’d really started to hate the smell and the faff and the expense and, really, no-one smokes any more, do they? You’re always on your own these days if you’re a smoker, having a fag in the rain and wondering to yourself, why am I doing this? Then, when I read in The Sunday Times that Maggi Hambling of all people had quit something just seemed to snap. If Maggi Hambling and Bryan Ferry and Peter Popjustice don’t smoke any more then nobody smokes any more. Day 17 tomorrow and I’m off the patches already but still on the gum especially in the evenings. Duckie has been torture, as is writing this. They – the club and the laptop - were the times I really did still enjoy a grout or several. But a couple of rocky club nights and a few piss-poor blogs (such as this one) will be a small price to pay for not getting emphysema.

Got through quite a few big nights out without a ciggie. Not as hard as it used to be, seeing as you can’t actually smoke anywhere any more anyway. Really enjoyed Lily Allen at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire last Thursday night. All the young girls in the crowd screamed when they espied Kate Moss on the balcony above us, although I was more amused watching Keith Allen on the opposite balcony, conducting and roaring along to ‘Fuck You’ like Old King Cole. People hate him but I like him very much – I think he’s got that English wild man Oliver Reed, Keith Moon thing going on and of course Lou and me love love loved him in the Comic Strip’s ‘Geno’ about a hundred years ago. Beautiful Lily… she didn’t do ‘Nan You’re A Window Shopper’ or ‘Alfie’ but she did do some amazing covers of ‘Dance Wiv Me’, ‘Day N Nite’ and ‘Womanizer’. Most odd. Like the ‘60s, really – the thing about covering records still in the charts. I like it.

Agatha Christies. One. ‘After The Funeral’. Stately home. Tick. Massive family inheritance. Tick. Hatchet buried in head. Tick. Poisoned wedding cake. Tick. Sinister nun. Tick. Poirot. Tick. Amazing twist. Tick. Score: 8 out of 10 - this was almost as good as ‘Towards Zero’. Did I guess who did it? Did I fuck. I’m a stupid, credulous person.

I’m quite good at the gym, though, which has amazed me, I can tell ya. My trainer man, Harry, poked and measured and ran all the tests on my first day and said, “Well there’s a lot to do but to be honest you’re in no worse shape than most of the 25 year olds I see.” I could have kissed him. It’s possible he was only saying that in order to motivate me but it’s true I’ve always sort of walked everywhere, a couple of miles at least most days. I always choose the stairs over the lift at work, too. Probably the 25-year-olds he was referring to are the ones who play on the Playstation all day and only roll off the couch to roll into their car to go and buy pizza. Anyway, I told Harry I positively definitely did not want big bosom-y chest muscles or anything like that and explained I was only doing this gym lark because Dad was diagnosed with a bit of a dodgy ticker recently. That sort of thing really makes you think. Also, I just felt so old and knackered-out after hobbling about with the bloody foot for two months, what with the back going too. Limping and crooked, the very definition of a bent old man.

Twice a week Harry makes me do horrible things on machines that look like guillotines and the rack. I occasionally shout, “You BASTARD” at him and mean it. Afterwards I find it difficult to walk or get my hands above my head to shampoo my hair in the showers. These one-to-ones are the gym visits I look forward to least but are, I’m told, the ones that will do me most good. They release all the testosterone, apparently, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, and get everything else going. The rest of the time I just go for an hour to piss about on the bikes, cross trainers and rowing machines and have a swim in the pool. I do the cardio challenges on the machines – running or cycling uphill etc., - and it’s funny how in the zone one gets after ten or so minutes, like being at a really good club, really, with the old iPod banging out some cheesy old house tune or, funnily enough, The Fall. Encouraging, too, how I’ve improved after two weeks of going every day - except of course for Sundays which have always been and always will be reserved for sitting on my arse with cats, papers and hot cross buns. Incidentally, my rapidly hardening gluteals portend that soon I will soon be in possession of the hottest, crossest buns in town boom tish.

It’s my birthday on Thursday and I can’t be bothered with it, really. 43 - is that the boringest age imaginable? I think we’re just going for a curry with the bezzers. If I get any money I’ll buy some new Levi’s. I always need them.

Speaking of birthdays I got a great book in one of the second hand shops in Bexhill the other week. Confusingly titled the 1967 Year Book it’s actually all about 1966, the year I was born. Remember those yearbooks? They don’t do them any more I think. Anyway, it’s a corker with sections on politics and architecture and fashion and a quaint little article by somebody called Jane Reid entitled ‘Changes In the “Pop” Scene’. Not sure about the quotation marks around the word ‘Pop’ but there you go. Jelly and I were reading bits of it aloud to one another in the voice of Jane Reid who, we decided would be a posh, deby sort of girl ever so slightly out of her depth with all this music malarkey. She certainly had an interesting turn of phrase: “Unfortunately, Nancy was something of a nine days wonder. When she followed her “Boots” with another, almost identical in sound called “How Does That Grab You Darling?” the latter was one of the year’s worst failures.” Poor Nancy! And we loved “Even more way-out than the Beach Boys sounds were those of “psychedelic music” The craze swept America and the strange “happenings” with which the music was presented produced the slang term “freaking out”.” Wonder what happened to Jane Reid. I Googled the name but the only suitable candidate I found was a Jane Rankin-Reid who’s originally from Australia and writing now for an Indian newspaper. She looks the right age but of course our Jane could have got married and be called something entirely different now.

I still think Facebook is great. It sounds a bit silly but the odd message or poke really does make you feel a lot closer to people. People like my friend Neil in Paris, or Paul in Brooklyn, old work colleagues and mates. This week I was contacted by a friend from school called Vanessa who was always magic and so funny. She emigrated to Australia years ago and but for Facebook that might well have been that. Like I say she was ever so funny and naughty. Very pretty, and if she hadn’t done her homework for the strict male teachers she could make herself cry and they'd let her off. She and my still-good friend Sarah used to sing that “My friend Billy’s got a ten foot willy, he showed it to the girl next door” song in really high posh voices and it always made me laugh. Years later, Ness was studying in Manchester at the same time as me. She was at the Beauty College there. I remember going to her flat in Crumpsall there one night and she and her friend Tanya from Buxton did me dinner. We listened to ‘Combat Rock’ over and over and they put rust-coloured lowlights in my briefly died black hair. Anyway, it’s just nice to be in touch again. Tanya from Buxton was great, too, actually. Wonder what happened to her as well. Life oh life.

Agatha Christies. None. On holiday this past week so a break, too, from fastidious Belgians, nosy old ladies and so many suspicious foreigners, spite-filled spinsters, bachelor poisoners and scheming, gone-off-the-rails, dope-addicted heirs and heiresses of once-great English families now in decline. Fell into a pop-culture reading hole instead and spent my £25 Christmas leftover book token (quaint, huh?) on Luke Haines’s ‘Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall’ and ‘Superstar DJ’s: Here We Go!’ by Dom Phillips.

You could argue that between them these two books cover, just about, the entire musical terrain of my 1990s. A shimmering decade of so much musical promise and yet it still feels like it ended in failure - and a spectacularly British failure at that. For the best part of that decade it was mostly British music for me. Barring the odd ‘California Love’, ‘Intergalactic’ or ‘Beep Me 911’ I fell, permanently it seems, out of love with contemporary Hip-Hop (appropriately around the time of ‘De La Soul Is Dead’). After ‘Cannonball’ and Kurt, and with the glaring exceptions of ‘Crush With Eyeliner’ and Beck who was always, always SUPER, I couldn’t be arsed with American rock either, or not until an unexpected late-‘90s cavalry charge from the likes of Grandaddy, The Eels, Elliot Smith and The Dandy Warhols. Heck, even Hole pulled it out of the bag in ’98 with ‘Celebrity Skin’. I know they sold a lot of records but all those big ‘90s Yank bands like Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum and Soundgarden felt utterly beyond the pale, like cruddy ‘80s British Metal but worse. Mind you, I wasn’t really listening anyway - to this day I don’t think I’ve heard ‘Ten’ all the way through. And what's the one with the llama on the cover? I dismissed it out of hand simply because of its appearance. (I will get hate mail for typing that. Hate mail from Martin in particular).

'Superstar DJ’s’ was a great read because it clarified things for me, reminding me sharply of the strange love-hate relationship I had with Dance music in the ‘90s. Not the actual records, you understand - if there was a load of formulaic dross about, which there most certainly was, you had to be philosophical about it. Every month you had to plough through the three M's - Mixmag, Ministry and Muzik - and negotiate a path through through the wailing divas and half-arsed remixes to get to the pearls. But barring Glam and Northern you've needed to do be equally discerning with every Pop genre since the start of time, innit? No. there were many, many good Electronic / Dance records made between 1993 and 1999. Off the top of my head…

U Girls by Nush, Song Of Life by Leftfield, Dreamer by Livin’ Joy, Joanna by Mrs Wood, Groovy Feeling by Fluke, Flylife by Basement Jaxx, Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust, Poison by The Prodigy, At The River by Groove Armada, Bits + Pieces by Artemesia, Praise You by Fatboy Slim, Texas Cowboys by The Grid, White Love by One Dove, Son Of A Gun by JX, Girls & Boys by Hed Boys, On Ya Way by Helicopter, Rez by Underworld, 9PM (Till I Come) by ATB, Cassius 1999 by Cassius, Big Love by Pete Heller, Professional Widow by Tori / Armand, I’m Alive by Stretch ‘N’ Vern, Hideaway by De’Lacy, Disco’s Revenge by Gusto, The Private Psychedelic Reel by Chemical Brothers, Let Me Your Fantasy by Baby D, Sugar Is Sweeter by CJ Bolland, Klubbhopping by Klubbheads, It’s Not Over Yet by Grace, Love To Do It by The Ride Committee, Da Funk by Daft Punk, Battleflag by Lo Fidelity All-Stars, Renegade Master by Wildchild, Higher State Of Consciousness by Josh Wink, Get Your Hands Off My Man by…

Oh I could go on. All night. I even liked Alice Dee Jay and The friggin' Tamperer - and everyone hated those. Haha. “WHAT’S she gonna look like with a chimney ON HER” So not the records, then - they were fine. The “problem” I had at the time with that whole world was that everybody just seemed so up themselves. I always suspected it would turn out like the Emperor’s New Clothes and, happily for me, the book confirms it. The ‘Superstar DJs’ - Sasha, Paul Oakenfold, Jeremy Healey, Danny Rampling, Judge Jules etc., - they all come across as weird charm vacuums, ransacking all their early promise and talent and, increasingly, peddling money for old rope. Bombing about the country with their reptilian lackeys and hangers-on, charging a million pounds to, well, to mix one similar-sounding record into another similar-sounding record. I mean, it was hardly Hendrix, was it? Lovely Jon Pleased Wimmin, who got out while the going was still good, sums it up best in the book when he says, “It just wasn’t fun anymore. It all got a bit Woolworth’s.” You can always trust a tranny to nail it, ya?

I don’t think many people I know would disagree that Acid House was a terrific musical phenomenon, nor that the Superclubs reinvigorated many a grim provincial town and contributed to the gaiety of our '90s nation. Like I said up there, there’s also a sizeable stack of records I’d happily be cremated with when I go. But I also can’t imagine anybody with half a brain agreeing to part with £150 for a millennial night party. At the time when they were being advertised you just thought, “Well that’s just disgusting.” Even so that’s what they all tried to get away with – Cream, Gatecrasher, Ministry… all those big ‘90s brands – and that’s what nearly finished them all off. The nights were all a quarter full at best. Epic fail! From shivering for free in fields and warehouses in 1989 to the world-beating soundtrack of the KLF to shivering in the Dome in 1999 to sappy boring Trance and being charged £150 for the privilege. All this in the space of ten years. Oh, ain’t it a mighty long way down rock ‘n’ roll?

Dear, dear I’ve been ranting and have failed, as usual, to say what I came to say. My travails at the gym with the personal trainer, The Watchmen at the pictures and Fints and my escapades in my beloved Scotland will just have to wait for another day.

Not drinking all week is a waste of time really. You just get even more violently pissed on Saturdays because your defences are down. This weekend I was so soused when I got out of our regular apres club cab at 3am I tripped over a bit of kerb and my ankle sort of did that 90 degree thing. Swollen up like a football yesterday (or, if you like, the landlady’s vagina in ‘Prick Up Your Ears’) and still hobbling today. All a total arse, really, having only felt very recently that I can once again skip gaily and free after the toe operation. No two ways about it, I am having an unlucky feet year.

Still, we had a spectacular Saturday night, or so I gather. Extremely busy and Ryan Styles was on and he’s always really good. Credit Crunch Traditional Duckie Quiz with Amy – the Beat The Intro round was ‘Dirty Cash’, ‘The Wall Street Shuffle’, ‘Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent’, ‘Take That To The Bank’, and ‘Crash’.

But I am ahead of myself - the evening began properly in the late afternoon round at Jelly’s. Theoretically we met early to practise on those new decks I haven’t had time to get near yet. Ended up watching ‘The Love Boat’ on DVD (Jelly’s bought the box set) instead. It was a good episode, with one of the plots (I’d forgotten they always had three things going on at once) involving identical twins who were sharing a ticket to save money. They had this watch alarm thing and when it went off the one out on deck had to return to the room and let her sister out. Trouble was, one of the sisters fell in love with the ship’s Doctor… with the inevitable hilarious consequences. In the end up old Doc ended up bedding them both anyway. We agreed mainstream TV was much more slackly randy in the Seventies, even if everyone involved looked like they had a mild STD - herpes or crabs, something like that. Still, we decided, ‘The Love Boat’ was a veeeeery sexy programme. Jelly fancies the barman and I fancied the silver fox businessman who, espying an old flame in the elevator, said “Hello, Baby. I’d recognise that perfume anywhere’. Scream!

Jock came round and then Fints and we cabbed it up to Vauxhall for a Traditional Duckie Curry. Jez met us there – really good to see him again at last – and Fints’s mate Nick joined us with his wife Jackie, a real live wire from the same part of Glasgow as Jock (the English outnumbered by Scots again, also traditional). Nick told us he used to live with both Chemical Brothers in Manchester when they were starting out. Fints and I tried a new item on the menu - curry made with grainy mustard. Looked a bit bogey-ish but tasted fantastic. The food in there is always fantastic. Later at the club we had lots of faces in – Wayne came along and Doug put in an appearance for the last hour. Andrew from work brought 7 of his straight mates. They had a great time up the back doing Sambuca shots and getting their picture taken with Matt Lucas. Did I play much new stuff? Can’t remember. Scissors’ ‘Do The Strand’ definitely and La Roux’s ‘In For The Kill’. Oh, and the Royksopp single and PSB’s ‘Love Etc.,’ again. I think it’s a cracking comeback single that one.

Did we like them on the Brits? The people I’ve canvassed seem about 80:20 in favour. Possibly they tried to be a teensy bit too clever with their elaborately constructed medley of hits – I’d have been happier to hear more of ‘Left To My Own Devices’ and ‘Being Boring’. And, WHERE WAS ‘DJ CULTURE’? Also, for all the fuss beforehand about Gaga taking Dusty’s part in ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’ if you’d blinked you’d have missed her completely. But it was Pet Shop Boys dammit, never knowingly folderol and for me the best Pop thing to have happened in the past 25 years and that’s including The Smiths, Madonna, St Et, Prince, Pulp, everyone. I’ll never get over them. Actually I screamed when they came on. Properly screamed.

Slightly shorter missive from Baztowers this week. It’s because ‘America’s Next Top Model’ is on and we’ve also gotta get through the new feature-length ‘Futurama’ which came out today. And ‘Masterchef’ I suppose but I don’t know why we watch it. It’s so zzzzzzzzzzz and formulaic.

Agathas - two. First, 'They Do It With Mirrors'. Murder in a juvenile detention centre. Just OK. 'Cat Among The Pigeons'. Three murders in a girls school. Very good.

Agatha update. The last time I did this I was about a third of the way into ‘Postern Of Fate’, and I think I said I was sort of enjoying it. Well, I was wrong: it was really rubbish. It began fairly promisingly with Tommy and Tuppence finding an intriguing code in an old children’s storybook – ‘Mary Jordan did not die naturally’ – but failed entirely afterwards to go anywhere with it. Pages and pages of repetition – village gossip and inauthentic working class dialogue and all these weird, irrelevant précis of previous mysteries. It seemed to just ramble on forever. The denouement when it finally came (a man in drag, an excitable pet dog, a poisoned coffee in a china cup) was so unbelievable, sloppy and just plain weird I was compelled to do an internet search to see if I’d actually missed something. Thousands of results returned with the consensus among Christie weirdoes (people like me) being that she was actually properly senile when she wrote it in 1973, the common view being that it only got published because of the Christie name and because it was the last thing she wrote.

The next one I picked up was ‘The Mysterious Affair At Styles’ – by coincidence her first book from 1920 and (it felt like to me) the blueprint for all the ‘stately home’ murder mysteries that came after it. Happy to report that within an instant we were back in the game – it was crisp and quick and clear and I was through it in a single sitting. Since then I’ve done ‘Cards On The Table’ (Mephistophelian dilettante stabbed through the heart during a game of bridge), ‘Towards Zero’ (elderly heiress smashed through the skull with a golf club – really good) and ‘They Do It With Mirrors’ (rich philanthropist shot in the head, attempted poisoning of another elderly heiress). What I think, have always thought, is that the titles of so many of Christie’s stories could be pop albums – ‘Endless Night’, ‘Towards Zero’, ‘At Bertram’s Hotel’ etc., For the purposes of this exercise I’m only reading the books in the ‘70s Fontana paperback editions. They just have the best covers and, as we all know, I’ll never get over the ‘70s.



My God, what have I done? Been all over the place the last couple of weeks. Thursday evening Jells and I DJ’d for work, playing between the bands at our New Artist Night at Bush Hall – Noisettes, Gary Go, Melody Gardot, I Blame Coco and the wonderful La Roux. One of the decks broke which made for some interesting gaps between the songs, but what with the noise and the free bar nobody seemed to mind or, indeed, notice. Got a free day off on Friday for my troubles, which was fortunate because after Bush Hall, we rather naughtily decided to pop into The Eagle’s 5th birthday. The Horse Meat girls were all DJ-ing and, well, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so welcome anywhere in my life, and that's including my own birthday parties. We were whisked straight through by that handsome doorman from New Years Eve and showered with drinks tickets by Mr Oakley and co. Spoke to smiley Dan from Rebel Rebel for a bit, and dear vogueing Roy and of course we hung out with Seve. The rest is a bit of a blur. I remember it being late and talking to Wayne Shires and Jeffery Hinton about Taboo (imagine if you’d been the DJ at Taboo!) and later still dancing with Jelly and Wayne to The Faces’ ‘You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything’ courtesy of Jim. I was drunkenly trying to recall and tell somebody – Jelly? Wayne? - the full title of the Faces track, which I remembered still holds the record as the longest for a UK hit single. But by that point it was futile so I looked it up the next morning instead. It’s ‘You Can Make Me Dance Sing Or Anything (Even Take The Dog For A Walk, Mend A Fuse, Fold Away The Ironing Board, Or Any Other Domestic Shortcomings)’ – amend your records, pop pickers!

Finally met Prince Nelly on Tuesday evening. We decided to do it at The George in London Bridge because I had a meeting earlier up at Ministry Of Sound in the Elephant and because Jelly was meeting our old friend Anne Brassier there anyway. Nelly and I have been Facebook-ing back and forth for a while now and I’ve always admired, from a distance, what he’s done over the years with his various Now! and Weekly Chart nights at The George & Dragon. I also think he’s scarily like me, the way he thinks about his pop music and stuff. Pleased to report that it felt from the off like we’d known each other for years. After a few pints we hatched a plan for a radio station which, if it came off, would be very very exciting and a way of linking all of the overlapping and interconnected club nights we admire. We just need an army of technical wizards and about a million pounds. Great to see Anne again, too. She’s all married now to a really nice fella called Chris but she really doesn’t look any different to how she did 20 years ago when we all – Jelly and Corinne, Chris, John Green, Vicky, Steve Baker - had a million nightclubbing adventures at Heaven, Roma, Kinky Gerlinky, Pyramid, Daisy Chain and Troll. Poor as church mice we all most certainly were but oh, didn't London feel so fantastic and open back then?

A funny moment last weekend back at home with the folks when my wee niece Remi took me out in her car for the first time. She was very good. I certainly felt very safe, and it was snowing, too. The experience – picking up Danielle after work, stopping at the petrol station for ciggies - reminded me so much of that point in the ‘80s when a load of my friends all passed their tests at the same time and we were all suddenly mobile and free. Wonder if I’ll ever get round to learning.

Well, look at that. I haven’t even got round to writing about our big weekend away with the club down on the south coast. That’ll just have to wait for the next time because we’re having belated Valentine’s meatballs and, if I don’t fall asleep, a bottle of vin rouge and ‘Antiques Roadshow’ on the V+. It’s nice going away but coming home is even better, ya?

No buses running, no trains and no Tube so we couldn’t go to work yesterday. Indescribably happy all day. I mean, fancy the cosmos handing you a day off – a Monday, too - just like that. I was up at 5.30 as usual, first just looking out of the window at the strange grey-orange light and, later, watching the cats creeping tentatively through the white. Captain Hook obviously didn’t like it – but then he’s never experienced weather like it before. My lovely boss phoned and said “Put the fire on and put your feet up” but I felt I should at least make an effort to put this unexpected chunk of gratis time to some use so I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom floors listening to the weather chaos unravelling on Radio 4.

I’ve decided the news media are awful. Quite out of step with actual living people and, well, just awful. You should have heard them, ”Don’t go outside unless you really have to” and (over and over again) “It’s bad - and it’s going to get much worse.” They love to imply that the world is always at the point of ending. But when I ventured out at 9-ish for a pint of milk and some ciggies giddy high spirits were all around. Our street was full of children building snowmen and throwing snowballs, neighbours standing round chatting in little groups, holding frothy coffees and going in and out of one another’s’ houses. For a brief moment it was like being in some cold Northern state of America i.e. brilliant.

Some snow things:

I’m at London Zoo with my Dad and it’s snowing. In my hand I’m holding a brand new copy of ‘Mamma Mia’ by ABBA on the black and yellow Epic label. He’s nipped off to the loo and left me standing against a wall into which has been cut a huge glass window. I’m facing the other way looking at nothing much (I was a very spaced out child – I believed I could see air particles) but, getting bored, I eventually turn to look through the glass. As I do this the enormous head of a killer whale looms through the turquoise and appears to look right at me. I jump out of my skin and while I’m old enough to stop myself crying (just) with the fright, by the time he comes back I’ve moved a fair way along the wall to where there is no glass. When we pass the window again the whale has swum completely out of view.

It’s a Thursday night in December 1981 and I’ve missed Top Of The Pops. I don’t mind, though, because I’m seeing the Human League at Guildford Civic Hall. Two days before, on the Tuesday, they’d reached Number 1 with ‘Don’t You Want Me’. Before the band come on they play the 12” of ‘Bedsitter’ by Soft Cell over the P.A. and everybody goes mad. It’s a terrific, right-place-right-time, zeitgeisty show before I even know what a zeitgeist is. The girls are doing their funny walking up and down dance, Phil has his asymmetric haircut and Adrian’s doing the slides i.e. it is classic-period League. There are big screens behind them showing sheep and the Soviet Army and scenes from Star Trek. Some Punks are spitting (I know!) so the girls walk off but Phil warns the Punks and Jo and Suz come back on and finish the show. When we leave the Civic Hall it’s snowing really hard and we throw snowballs at each other in the High Street. The next day it’s still snowing and school is closed. (This might qualify as the best twenty fours of my life.)

It’s the same winter and the snow isn’t nearly so much fun once it’s frozen into mean ice and you have to negotiate a paper round. I’m walking up an icy, sloping driveway, holding a rolled-up newspaper and I’m vaguely aware of a woman standing at the kitchen sink watching me from her window. For the umpteenth time that morning I slip and fall flat on my face. Furious, I look up at the woman and she laughs and holds up for me to see not one but BOTH of her arms in plaster from wrist to elbow. I laugh and dust myself off. While the whole exchange was over in seconds and while I never saw that woman again I always had a nice, warm feeling when I delivered papers to that particular house.

1987. I’m 20 and I can’t get back to college in Manchester – trains cancelled due to snow. So instead, I’m round my friend Mark Wealthy’s house, in his bedroom, listening to Mantronix’s ‘Music Madness’ and New Order’s ‘Low Life’ over and over again. At about 2 in the afternoon after a rummage in his desk he says, “I can’t believe it. Look what I’ve just found.’ and it’s a small quantity of magic mushrooms. Naughtily, we decide to take them – all of them – which we wash down with milky coffee. Soon afterwards ‘Music Madness’ and ‘Low Life’ start to sound very very good indeed and we spend the whole of the rest of the day and night rolling around on his bed laughing and laughing. We try, hopelessly, to figure out how to play ‘Monopoly’ but in our state get absolutely nowhere. Nice colours, though.

It’s December 1990 and snowing heavily. The phone’s broken (again) in the freezing house I share in Tooting Broadway and I’ve got my school friend Taff staying with me. It’s so cold in the flat we decide to spend the night in the pub, putting records on the jukebox and eating McCoy’s. At some point I have an overwhelming urge to phone home because my sister is due to give birth any day. The phone in the pub is also broken (or only taking Mercury phone cards or something) so I trudge round to the public one and it’s slow progress because the snow is almost up to my knees. When I get through Mum tells me she’s given birth to a girl they've named Remi. When I get back to the pub and Taff I am officially an uncle.

Soho, hmmm. I’ve always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with that tiny warren of tight streets, believing it to be equal parts packed with pearls and full of shit. Like most Londoners I’ve spent incredible nights (and it usually is nights, late ones) secreted away somewhere within that dank square mile. On other occasions I’ve found myself stuck there and really not wanting to be, mired in the dirt, paying through the nose, surrounded by desperate alcoholics. It really is heaven and hell. It’s impossible, however, to imagine it not being there but when you look at The Astoria and Ghetto closing and consider the great chunk of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road that’s about to be razed to the ground to make way for some new transport hub (with inevitable shopping mall) you can’t help but wonder if it won’t change the entire area forever.

Hope not because I’ve had some good Soho nights this January – I just haven’t got round to blogging them on here yet. I seem to have been in the area an awful lot lately and I’ll tell ya one thing it’s more packed than ever. Drinkers spilling out onto Hanway Street outside Bradley’s, no room at The Toucan or The Boheme. Is this just the phoney war stage of the credit crunch? When the six of us bezzers tried to grab a quick Pizza Express the other night we waited a staggering 45 minutes for a table. The staff were literally run ragged trying to accommodate everyone and the queue was out the door and round the building. WTF!

Another thing about Soho - for a locale so teeny it always throws you something new. Do you know Molly Mogg’s, the tiny one-room pub on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Old Compton Street? I’d walked past it a thousand times and even stopped to watch the drag queen through the Victorian sweet shop-style windows. Never been in though, not until recently when my friend Peter suggested we all pop in for a quick one. There were six of us in as reasonable spirits as can be expected in January and, well, in we duly popped, having just run into Mez standing outside the new Colony Rooms surrounded by a load of fellas. (That’s another thing in Soho’s favour, you almost always run into somebody fabulous, like the Good Friday afternoon we were trying to persuade Greg not to pull his trousers down outside Ed’s Diner but he did anyway and Justin Bond just walked right into our little fray like Moses parting the waves – we didn’t even know he was in the country.)

Anyway, Moggs … I took it as a Very Good Omen that upon our entering Barry Blue’s ‘Dancing On A Saturday Night’ struck up over the P.A., followed in succession by ‘Bye Bye Baby’, ‘Sugar Baby Love’, ‘Gonna Make You A Star’, 'Angie Baby'... Matt announced just like *that* that it was to be his 27th birthday at midnight and after this things seemed to speed up rather with bottles and bottles of wine and pints and pints of beer and, courtesy of Grace, shots of tequila and God-knows-what-else. At some point the drag show started – Miss Christina (or was it Miss Christian? – it’s important) in a shiny gold number launched straight into ‘Womanizer’, instantaneously uniting a rather disparate crowd comprising media wankers (us), Eastern European gangster types (with wives in real fur), dazed shoppers, foreign students, leathery old Soho types, and businessmen.

One of this latter clan deigned to slip his hand down the front of my trousers whilst I was waiting at the bar, leering, “You like that don’t yer?” I cannot remember my reply, almost certainly it would have been something mumbled, polite and middle-class such as, “Certainly not!” - although said nowhere near forcefully enough evidently because he did it again when I went back to collect the rest of my round. Throughout the show another game old drag queen sat at the bar, gamely singing along all the wrong words and sipping something clear but, I’ll wager, definitely alcoholic because during one of Miss Christina’s numerous fag breaks she took to ‘the stage’ (in effect the tiny patch of free floor space in front of the fireplace) and performed a most curious knock-kneed, Walk Like An Egyptian-style dance not to The Bangles song but to the theme to the old ‘Robin Hood’ telly programme. “Robin Hood Robin Hood riding through the glen…” Most bizarre.

Then, last Friday we met at Black’s sort of to celebrate my friend Lesley’s launch of her new supplement in Saturday’s Times. Jelly and Norrie and Bryony who I hadn’t seen in ages and James and Andreas and –bingo! - Emily Dean who knows everyone and who can always be persuaded to talk about her auntie who happens to be LYNSEY DE PAUL. She told us the most fascinating stories about her privileged Bohemian North London Jewish childhood, waiting tables at Auntie Lyn’s dinner parties, opening the door for the Emmanuels and James Coburn and serving canapes to Barry Blue, Suzi Quatro, Ringo Starr, Cleo Rocos and Kenny Everett. During one such occasion dear Ken turned to Emily, aged 10, and said pointedly, “I’m sorry I really don’t like children.” You don’t seem to get queens like that any more - we're allfamily-friendly now.

…
Two more Agatha Christies. ‘N or M?’ (what a fantastic title, Fints said and he's right) which was a gripping Second World War Fifth Column thriller starring Tommy & Tuppence (8 out of 10) and ‘Murder In The Mews’, a collection of four short, very clever Poirots. One of these – ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’ – I think would make a fantastic sinister-sexy film. You know, convert a couple of the characters into queers and cast everyone in it drop dead gorgeous and always getting their clothes and jumping into bed with one another, like ‘White Mischief’ relocated to English suburbia. I'd make Poirot a bit of a sleazy curtain-twiching voyeur - Christie aficianados would hate it! Maybe Gareth could do it. Now I’m on another Tommy & Tuppence – ‘Postern Of Fate’. It’s 1973 and they’re old in it, which is a bit of a shame and the prose seems to ramble more than it does in the vintage Christies but all told still fairly gripping.

Here's one for ya. What are the three most precious words in the English Language? 'Big pay rise?' Nope. 'It’s Christmas Day'? Nope. 'I love you'? Nope. 'Jesus Loves You'. No and no again. As any fule kno, the three most precious words that anyone will ever hear are:

New.
Project.
Runway.

Poor Jock, when he told me it was starting this week I terminated our chat immediately, just as if he was that bloke who phoned up Matt Bianco on Swap Shop and started calling them wankers. Click… brrrrrrrr. Belted downstairs like a bat out of hell, screaming for Fints, and oh my the first episode of Season 5 did not for one second disappoint. It never does. They had to go to the supermarket, sorry, grocery store and make an outfit out of stuff you wouldn’t usually wear. One fella (Daniel?) fashioned a faaaabulous dress entirely from sections of disposable blue plastic cups which he cut into strips and ironed and then moulded into place. Several naughty competitors cheated by buying table cloths which did not go down at all well with Tim and Heidi who had in mind pins and tins and things like that, while right at the other end of the scale a crazy-haired rock chic from Queens cobbled together an abomination out of bin bags that is still making me laugh five days on. The snooty, imperious man who was (rightfully) eliminated let himself down with probably the worst garment you or I will ever see - a see-through shower curtain tramp’s coat dress thing that succeeded in being bizarre, scruffy and just a little bit frightening all at once. It’s a great show, better even than Master Chef which we also watch religiously even if I do wish the big-faced men would stop shouting ”BIG FLAVOURS” all the time.

Lesbo’s husband, the dashing Pete, had Feargal Sharkey come and do a little talk about the music industry on Tuesday night in some swanky private members club off The Strand. The wee Derry Undertoner's a music industry bigwig these days – who’d have known? I said I’d go along with James who now works for our biggest competitor Sony but who’s one of my oldest friends of some 20 years standing. Wonder who’d be my friends now if I’d never worked at Virgin two decades ago... Anyway, Feargal was introduced by a man with a dodgy radio mic as ”The person responsible for the greatest single of all time”- meaning Teenage Kicks, of course. ”That’s as maybe”, I felt like shouting out, But he’s also responsible for the worst - ‘A Good Heart.”. But I didn’t say that, obviously, just listened, and he was very passionate and interesting and positive and commanding and charming. I have to say, he’s one of those people who’s ‘grown into their face’ as they’ve got older, like Alison Moyet and Tyrone off Corrie. I remember how disturbed I was when I first saw that pinched wee fizog doing Jimmy Jimmy on Top Of The Pops 30 years ago. Now that was a good song.

How about this for a strange one. Wednesday afternoon there I was at the clinic having me toe scrapped aht and sprayed with iodine by the doc and, as one does in these situations, we were making small talk.

Doc: “You off work for this, then?:
Me: “Yup. I can’t really afford to be. We’re so busy.”
Doc: “Really? What do you do?”
Me: “I work for a record company in West London.”
Doc: “Which one?”
Me: “Universal”
Doc: “Oh I haven’t heard of them.”
Me: “We do U2 and Amy Winehouse and Eminem and people like that”
Doc: “Oh I’ve heard of them. You do this lot?” (The radio was playing Some Might Say by Oasis.
Me: “No. They’re on our biggest rival”.
Silence.
Me: “But my friend was in the video for one of their records playing a lady bus conductor!”

… and then I rambled on about our Amy being in the video for Go Let It Out and I do a club night with her every week in Vauxhall blah blah blah. And then blow me if the record didn’t finish and there was Amy herself, doing her bit with Danny Baker. And the first thing she said was, ”Did I ever tell you Danny, that I was in an Oasis video once…” Haha! I almost leapt off the chair jabbering ”OMG OMG that’s her! That’s actually my friend. And she just said what I just said. What a spooky coincidence! Full moon! Full moon!” etc., and I don’t think the poor man really knew what I was going on about as I suspect he'd only been half-listening and as a man of SCIENCE almost certainly doesn’t believe in things like spooky full moon coincidences. He just probably thought I was a mental and was considering phoning Security.

As you all know I am an expert! I am an expert and I know things and that’s why I was interviewed twice this week, first by Bob Stanley for a thing he’s doing for The Times about K.Tel compilations and later by Dorian Lynskey for The Guardian about why the singles chart has slowed down since the advent of legal downloading. My presence will be felt over the broadsheets more keenly this week than the Credit Crunch. The Dorian thing was interesting because he was especially probing about why, between ‘96 and 2006, the singles chart sped up so rapidly. In 2000 there were some 42 new Number 1 singles - all of them debuting straight at Number 1, many of 'em pretty much forgotten now. Of course I was Central Singles Buyer with Max for Our Price at the time (we were the biggest chain in the land – imagine) so it forced me to try and remember the convoluted and, looking back, nightmarish system of Week 1 discounting which meant all singles went out at a big discount and then got put up to £3.99 or even £4.49 in Week 2. Of course by then most people had bought them cheap and everybody else thought a £3.99 CD single was just extortionate so the records crashed out of the chart as quickly as they’d crashed in. It was a madness, really and so stressful to work with. You had to get things exactly right on your first order because you got bollocked if you were stuck with a load of stock in Week 2. I’m convinced this is why Max and I will always be close – it’s like we were in a plane crash together or something.

Now the charts behave like they always did before the mid-‘90s – records go up and then they go down again and they even climb to Number 1 and this is a good thing. The tunes people actually like hang about for ages - and you can say what you like about last year’s Kings Of Leon, Ting Tings, Girls Aloud, Leona Lewis, Dizzee Rascal, Katy Perry or what have you they at least feel like proper actual hits. And I love proper hits even more than kittens.

Speaking of proper hits I’m loving Lady GaGa, who right now appears to be dividing my friends more than any artist I can think of for light years. It’s true I’m not absolutely convinced about the flesh coloured knickers and tights on Letterman but as Joanie Dairy would say, ”It’s a look, babe”. What I am sure about is that there are at least six massive singles on The Fame - it’s like a veritable goldmine of hits - and I’ve had to play the album every day for a month now or else I shall just die. There’s something a bit spine-tingly about the intro to Just Dance - it feels kind of epic, like the start of a brilliant film… “Der der der der der… Oh, RED WINE!” Imagine starting your album with that – it’s fucking terrific. Don’t write in and tell me you hate her though. I’m not listening on this one.

Scream. I have to go and get ready for Duckie. Beforehand we're treating Dear Dicky to a curry for doing our tax for us and after the triumphant return last week oF Hayley, this week Jonny Slut and Marcus Bangs Your Face and Fints and Wavey are coming. Ra ra Rasputin lover of the Russian Queen!

Don’t know about you but I found the start of this week hard. A crashing, clunking, thumping landing after being off work forever, what with the foot and then the festivities. Got up on Monday morning after weeks of loafing, smoking and watching endless Gavin & Stacey's and experienced a shock of sorts – ”Oh gosh. I'm here again. Now, what is it I normally do?” This was followed by a sense, like a small black cloud until mid-week, that after months of looking forward to one fabulous thing after the other there was, well, nothing in particular coming up - just space and air. Irrational of course, but at least I wasn’t the only one. Here’s a Facebook message received from crazy Jelly on Wednesday lunchtime. It made me laugh for two days:


Ha Ha M8,
hope your lunch lunch is better than your breakfast, poor baby....
Hey what are you doing tonight?
If you want the week to drag i have found the cure is to not drink or anything and just watch the telly or do your TAX! I am bored out of my microscopic mind.
Are you busy at work work?
X X X
Jelly

Crazy Jelly was being really crazy last night. We’d just said goodbye to Mez at Finsbury Park tube at around midnight and got down to the Victoria Line platform and he started doing that robot thing Smithy does in Gavin & Stacey - ”Gav-LAR!” robot, robot - and it made me laugh and I started doing it too and bumped into a man looking at the map. We were laughing so much and having such a hoot on the Tube we decided to get off at Vauxhall and swing by the Tavern for Jez and Pan’s Kimono Krush night. Jells blagged us in while I hung back all silly and shy – I can’t do that thing where you get to the door and say we’re the Readers Wifes can we get in on the guestlist but he doesn’t care. Anyway, we were whisked straight through (in gratitude I gave the doorman a kiss scream!) and there were boys in glittery spandex bikinis on the stage go-go-ing to The Monkees’ ”(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”. This filled me with a sense of enormous wellbeing, obviously. Jez and Pan played some great tunes (it’s a long time since I’ve heard EMF’s Lies) and even though we’d missed their set we cozied up to the Unskinny Bop girls and, over the noise and beer and shouting, agreed, I think, to do a joint party in east London sometime over Easter. Good Friday would be ideal actually. Vauxhall and the West End have been really good to us Wifes but I have a real yearning to do something east-ish. Left, happy and a bit drunk, to the strains of Saint Eteinne’s Who Do You Think You Are…

… which was a funny coincidence because earlier in the evening we’d been up Caitlin and Pete’s for dinner with Mez and Bob Stanley was there again. Ostensibly we were there to draft a serious manifesto for the BBC about them bringing back a very important TV music show (Cait does telly for The Times) but, really, that took up only a small part of the time and the rest of it was the usual quacking and boozing. Mez is such a tonic always - one of my favourite people in the world. Jelly told us about him being hypnotized onstage into eating an onion like it was an apple, while Caitlin related a bizarre story about the optician giving her a discount because he thought she was married to Pete Doherty. Unfortunately we had to leave for the train just as things were starting to swing quite seriously to Tight Fit’s Fantasy Island with people dancing round the record player in the kitchen. It was all a faff and annoying because after trudging all the way to the WAGN in the freezing, freezing fog we discovered we’d missed the train anyway. Hijacked – literally hijacked – a poor cabbie dropping somebody off and shouted ”Get us to a Tube station! Any Tube station! Take me anywhere I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.”

Met a really nice bloke at Caitlin’s called Dorian. Funnily enough Jelly is reading The Picture Of Dorian Gray at the moment - or rather, he’s given it up because it’s “too slow”. Anyway, turns out this Dorian writes for The Word - my favourite magazine of all time – which means I must now have met everyone who there, barring the legendary “Reviews Kate”. I’m in it this month, too. Twice. My friend Rob asked me to be Subscriber Of The Month so I’m in that section quacking about records, films and books and also in the Reviews bit there’s a photograph of me on the dancefloor at The Hacienda in about 1987.

Now I know his happened once before with me recognising myself on some archive TV footage of the club and I appreciate I probably sound like some sad deludenoid always claiming it’s me but - once again - it really is me. Slim-hipped and rake-skinny and I can see I’m wearing my friend Helen Mucus’s lilac blouse from Top Shop and the Swatch watch Mum and Dad had just bought me for Christmas. Thing is, whilst it is a bit of a rum coincidence pictures of me from then and now have appeared in the same publication in the same issue it’s actually not all that spectacular I was twice captured on that legendary dancefloor. Not only were a group of us there every night for a couple of years, in spite of the myth that’s grown up around the place there often weren’t that many of us in there, especially in the early days. Sometimes it was just a couple of hundred max rattling around on the dancefloor in a desperate effort to keep warm - it was freezing in there at the start of the night. And anyway, you were always being filmed at The Hacienda – film crews for the The Tube or Look North or whatever it was called and photographers for i-D and Japanese magazines. So there could be thousands more of me from 86-87 yet to be unearthed - I'm sure you'll all be keeping your eyes peeled.

I chat from time to time on Facebook with a young chap called Prince Nelly who DJ's for Tranny Shack and at The George And Dragon over in east London. Mostly, we just bang on about records. He’s a proper 80s kid and he runs these nights where they play old Chart rundowns or a celebration of Now That’s What I Call Music LPs. He seems scarily like me really. Anyway, yesterday he gave me a great tip to play out – Madonna’s Till Death Do Us Part which is off Like A Prayer. It was always my favourite on that record but I’d never have thought of playing it but I will be now – tonite! It’s an amazing amazing amazing track. We’re playing lots and lots of ‘80s again. It just feels like the right time, because that’s how all new records sound anyway these days. Not Come On Eileen, you understand, or Tainted Love or anything too obvious but Strawberry Switchblade, A-ha, the Pet Shops Liza stuff all seem to fit in seamlessly with Ladyhawke, Pacific! La Roux and all. There was a near-riot when we played Take On Me at the end last week – we were laughing because you could hear the crowd over the record, every single word and especially funny when it goes all high at ”Ill – be - gooooooooooooone”. And there’s these two oldies-but-newies we’re playing early on in the night – Wham’s Nothing Looks The Same In The Light and OMD’s Souvenir which both sound all wintry and twinkly, just right for January.

Hmm January. It’s not that hard a month to love, I suppose. I like to feel in some kind of sync with the season so I looked up on the internet what farmers and gardeners get up to in January and have tried / am trying to apply them to my life. Seems farmers and gardeners don’t get up to anything much exciting at this time of the year – lots of cutting back and taking stock and repairing and clearing away so that’s what I’ve done. Bought a new drive and backed up computer files and chucked stuff and sent the confounded tax off. I like proper Winter weather (I wish it would snow properly) especially if I don't have to be out in it for long and there’s definitely something to be said for siting round in the warm with Fints wearing our new enormous towelling bath robes with hoods. We look like something from gay Star Wars. Two Agatha Christie’s this week - comfort reading. Both quite late books - Pale Horse which was very clever and Halloween Party which was less so but has lesbians in it. Cripes, Auntie Ag!

LES Artistes 2008: Clockwise from top left: Ladyhawke; MGMT; Santogold; Pacific!; Crystal Castles; Crookers

Phew! What a difference a year makes, eh? Crystal Castles, MGMT, Crookers, Ladyhawke, Fake Blood, Little Boots, Pacific!, Hercules & Love Affair… I’d barely heard of any of the blighters this time last year and yet there they are, down there, rampaging all over my end of 2008 list like a bout of the galloping nadgers (as Dad would say). Nice, I suppose, to see some longer-serving stalwarts in the 50 – CSS, Goldfrapp, Nick Cave, Annie, Hot Chip – and who’d have guessed I’d ever press a new record by Grace Jones, Estelle, Beck or Radiohead to my heart again? Not me but that's what 'appened and it just goes to show you can’t ever really write anyone off. Well, maybe in the case of Oasis.

No apologies that it’s overwhelmingly Electronic / Electropop-y. That’s just the way I liked it (uh-ha, uh-ha) in 2008. Synthesisers up and guitars going down on my giddy fairground of Pop. And while it’s the most un-mainstream list for as long as I can remember I’m pleased my tastes converged with the consensus on a couple of things. Ting Tings, MGMT, Elbow and The Last Shadow Puppets all shifted a fair few records and, hey, those Dizzee, Estelle and Kings songs were bona fide hit parade Number 1s. Hooray! Go on, Britain, show us yer hits...

Nevertheless I had the greatest sport away from the charts. In fact, I had more fun seeking out the new in 2008 than at any point since the mid 1990s. The 50 favourites were culled from an original shortlist of over 300 songs - it was a bugger separating the very best. In 2008 there was so much brilliant / amazing / vital / bouncy / bright-eyed and bushy-tailed stuff to hear I rarely mustered the inclination to listen to anything old. So until it all calms down out there again I imagine those Remastered, Expanded Trojan Tighten Up editions, Who Deluxes and Kinks and Northern Soul box sets dutifully lugged home from work in 2008 will remain unplayed. This year, even more than last, it’s all been about the I’ll-give-it-a-go download from i-Tunes, the Electro blogger’s recommendation of a super-rare remix, or that idiosyncratic little gem heard fleetingly on late night radio.

On that last point, it seems only fair to give credit where it's due. I have so much to thank Radio 1's Rob Da Bank for. My Toys Like Me, Fujiya & Miyagi, DJ Mujava, Karoshi Bros., Pacific!, Cheeky Cheeky, Little Boots, Santogold – I heard them all first on his show. After two years of rabid fandom I truly believe he’s the John Peel of now, just with more Disco so (heresy alert) he’s possibly even better. Go on, listen or (like I do) Listen Again on the iPlayer to his amazing Sunday night graveyard shift. It's a smashing belter every single week.

Here's my Top 20, then, and a click through to the rest of the 50 if you're interested.

I'm going downstairs to watch Iron Man and then, on Tuesday, we're off to Scotland scream! Happy Christmas John, Happy Christmas Yoko, Happy Christmas LJ friends. x

1. Time To Pretend / MGMT
2. Blind / Hercules & Love Affair feat. Antony Hegarty
3. Hot Lips! / Pacific!
4. American Boy / Estelle
5. Mars (Original Version / Player Player’s 95 Mix) / Fake Blood
6. Dance Wiv Me / Dizzee Rascal & Calvin Harris & Chrome
7. LES ARTistes (Original / Herve’s Edit) / Santogold
8. Day N Nite / Kid Cudi
9. Courtship Dating / Crystal Castles
10. Knickerbocker / Fujiya & Miyagi

11. Kids (Original Version / Soulwax Remix) / MGMT
12. Paris Is Burning (Original Version / Alex Gopher Remix) / Ladyhawke
13. Movie Star / Roisin Murphy
14. Guilt / The Long Blondes
15. Williams Blood (Aeroplane Remix) / Grace Jones
16. Wearing My Rolex / Wiley
17. Kim And Jessie / M83
18. Hardcore Girls / The Count & Sinden Feat Rye Rye
19. Barnaby / My Toys Like Me
20. A&E / Goldfrapp

( 30-50 )

Hello Live Journal - it’s been a while. I’m having that toenail off today (Catford again) so last week I squashed in as much Christmas gadding about as possible. Out on the town Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and even – meep! – Sunday. I can’t say exactly why but this December I’ve especially savoured the season. Possibly it’s the weather – it’s been properly cold the whole month long. Honest, pagan, frost fair cold - three fab weeks of white mornings and twinkly nights. And yes I know that makes me sound like Nigella Lawson or the Winter Elfin Of Twee. Chase me!

I’ve had the Winter-themed CD I made my friends on the iPod throughout and now I’m starting to get theirs back from them (so far, Moggy’s has been especially amazing). We did the same exercise in the Summer and I’m already considering Spring but why on earth did we miss out an Autumn playlist?

Here’s my final, final Winter tracklisting – while not aiming to be Christmassy as such, all the songs remind me of the season – and I’ve decided to keep a copy and dust it off every year along with the Puppy Christmas CD I made in 2005. (Puppy Christmas, so named after the puppy in a Santa hat on the cover, squashes all the Christmas songs I actually like – Mud, Wombles, Wizzard, Boney M, Saint Etienne, Wham! - onto one disc, thereby circumventing the need ever to hear The Darkness or Bing Crosby or effin’ Rocking Around The Christmas Tree ever again. I hate all that ‘50s American Cheesy Listening crap.) Anyway, Winter, Ultrabaz-style.

01. Gaudete / Steeleye Span
02. Moonlight And Muzak / M
03. Hot Room (Tiga's Remix) / Linda Lamb
04. Searching / Change
05. Your Funny Uncle / Pet Shop Boys
06. The Fox In The Snow / Belle & Sebastian
07. The Boxer / Simon & Garfunkel
08. It May Be Winter Outside (But In My Heart It's Spring) / Love Unlimited
09. Neon Lights / Kraftwerk
10. In The Morning / Junior Boys
11. Burning Disaster / Language Lab
12. Permafrost / Magazine
13. Hallelujah / John Cale
14. Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand (Radio Version) / The Who
15. December Will Be Magic Again / Kate Bush
16. Don't Make Me Wait Too Long / Roberta Flack
17. The Hairstyle Of The Devil / Momus
18. Copenhagen / Scott Walker
19. Gonna Make You A Star / David Essex

Sleeve notes: David Essex because it reminds me of the Christmas Top Of The Pops round my Nan's in 1974. Hallelujah - sod Tim Buckley, John Cale’s is the shizzle - it even ends, appropriately, with wintry, weather sound effects. Lost Electroclash classic Hot Room has the oddest lyrics - ”A plate of meatballs… caught on FIRE!”. Mary Ann With The Shaky Hand is there because as a young ‘un I assumed those hands were shaking through the cold (so innocent, so naïve) and because you can see the plumes of wintry breath rising during the harmonies. Lecherous wintry breath, as it turns out. And Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long might just be the best record ever made: along with Yarbrough & Peoples’ Don’t Stop The Music it reminds me of my friend Gita washing my hair in the afternoon of Christmas Eve 1980. Wonder what happened to Gita – she was fantastic.

Every year at about this time I'm pulled towards The George in London Bridge. For me, it is the Christmas place in London, due to its connection with Dickens and its historical link with four centuries of wild winter hedonism in the Sodom that was old Southwark. It just has the vibes. Last year Fints and I went on Christmas Eve to meet Babcock but when we arrived they were closing early so we had to settle for a Guinness in a boring hotel round the corner – very disappointing. In previous years we’ve exchanged presents and got sozzled with Jock, Ada, Jels and Norrie round their fireplaces. This year I met my old work colleague and friend Maxine there. Packed inside, so we sat out under those heater things (”Magic torches of fire!” - Catweazle would call them. More paganism) and drank mulled wine and gabbled away. As ever, time flew by: I do so miss working with her. And Dan. We were a true gang, the three of us. Dan’s gone now, though: he emigrated to New Zealand the week before last.

On Thursday I met Grace and Tom in Soho House. It was fun. Grace writes (amazingly) about telly for The Guardian and she’s always popping up on Woman’s Hour and Screen Wipe when I least expect it. I’m just finishing a series of books she’s written, officially for teenage girls but really they’re for all ages, like the Adrian Mole’s. The books are the fictional diaries of Shiraz Bailey-Wood from Essex, and all the mad stuff her and her mates get up to - fellas, crap jobs, going to Ibiza etc., I had to laugh when in one sequence of events Shiraz moves to London and is taken by a gay mate of hers to a club in Vauxhall called Quack Quack. Grace admitted that not only was the club based on Duckie she’d based the mate on me! Me! I was so chuffed. Tom’s read the books too (he got me into them, in fact) and the three of us were so deeply engrossed in conversation / gossiping / mucking about we failed to realise the napkin hanging over our ice bucket had actually landed on top of a candle flame and was now on fire. Very much on fire. TWO FOOT HIGH ON FIRE and even then we only noticed because a French woman from across the room screamed blue murder. I had to kind of poke it down into the ice bucket and mash it with our bottle of Prosecco, a right bloody mess, blackened bits floating in the air and smoke everywhere necessitating, to the consternation of the other members, the opening of all the windows on the coldest night of the year. Hideously embarrassing.

Due to the regular rigours of my Saturday nights, Sunday socialising is all but banned around these parts. They are precious Fints Time, fiercely protected. On very rare occasions, however, I will make an exception and such a case arose this Sunday when Mez announced she’d be spending her birthday at Horse Meat. Obviously, if Mez said she’d be celebrating her birthday on the moon I’d be there queuing up in my space suit and, really, HMD is far and away more fabulous than my imagination allows intergalactic travel could ever be. As ever Mez looked wonderful - golden Studio 54 with smoky eyes - easily the most glamorous person in there. Anyway, another freezing night, shivering and smoking in The Eagle’s garden round another impressive flame while Jim played a gob-smacking 3-hour set that took in Sylvester, Giorgio, War’s Galaxy and Young & Co’s I Like (What You’re Doing To Me) (another Gita one, that, a big shout out to the Wokin’ funkateers). Loads of us there and they let six in on the Wifes list and Jim and Mark were doling out drinks tickets like they were going out of fashion so I didn’t spend any money all night. I love those fellas and really wish I could go more often. Ooh and we bumped into our mate Guido, who’s a massively famous and well-regarded hair stylist – probably the most famous and well-regarded hair stylist in the world, although we just know him as a lovely drunk punter from down Duckie.

Back in 2002 we did his 40th, to this day both the most star-studded and the most hedonistic gig we’ve ever done –the one where everyone was dancing on the tables, where Pete Burns did a private lip-synch along to Wuthering Heights purely for the benefit of me and Jelly and the one where a very, very famous fashion designer started a full-on orgy in the basement. The sort of night you just don’t forget and I felt a small welling of pride when he said to Jelly and me on Sunday ”Everyone still talks about you two at my birthday”. Guido lives in New York now – he was just back for a shoot – but he said the city wasn’t a patch on London for fun, fun, fun. And Looky! I found a whole thing on the interweb about some of the heads he’s had the pleasure to know – you try doing that to Lady Bunny’s wig. There’s even a photo of G, himself. http://tinyurl.com/6dk7op

So, today I’ve got this operation thing. Because Fints works from home and I’d just be in the way lolling about and watching Loose Women I’m going to mum and dad’s to recuperate. The bummer about the whole thing was always I’d miss our work’s day ‘n’ night department bash in a swank place in Notting Hill this coming Thursday. Last night as I was shutting up and leaving, tidying up and closing down the year at work, our Director came past and said, ”Mark, it’s a shame you’ll miss Thursday so we’re sending a car to pick you up and take you back to your mum and dad’s”. Some Christmas Magic there, I feel, and I shall go to the ball after all, albeit with an unglamorous bandaged foot.

The next time I blog, I’ll do me records of the year thing.

Tony / Fletch who runs Rebel Rebel (sort of a Duckie for 21-year-olds in skinny jeans) had his 30th birthday party last Friday night. Theme: Mods Vs Rockers. Because the date coincided with a Mez / Jelly / Toby / me V reunion we all went along, meeting first in Glammasmith Tube before downing a swift one in one of those terrifying after-work pubs in King Street.

I hadn’t seen Mez or Toby properly for weeks, nor Jelly, in fact, who was back from Thailand, handsome and tanned and bearing gifts from Bangkok – wallets, T-shirts, that sort of thing. Mez has started wearing glasses which make her appear very media-sophisticated plus great shoes as always. Toby was all pressed and pastel-coloured - he never looks like he’s spent a day in the office. I, on the other hand, looked awful and very much like I had reached the end of the working week - a week spent down the mines or worse. A loop at the back of my Levi’s had bust meaning the belt kept riding halfway up my back like a proper old-fashioned loony. Thank God the leather jacket, kindly remarked upon by Tobes, hid a multitude of riding-up-belt sins. I kept it on all night, kidding everyone including myself it was part of a deliberate Rocker look strategy. Sigh. That’s the trouble with going straight out after work. I crumple easily and really do need to go home and refurbish myself from top to toe before hitting parties. I'm high maintenance, like Chrissie Shrimpton to Jelly’s Marianne F.

We weren’t the oldest there! Excellent stuff. Fletch’s entire family had chartered a bus down from Liverpool, so there were Nanas and Aunties and very young children skidding about the floor in fairy wings, all mixed in with trendy East London kids with Winehouse hair and Uniqlo cardies. The venue was somewhere near Latimer Road tube in an estate in one of those working men’s clubs architects used to build into the bottom of blocks of flats. What with the ‘60s music and crap flashing lights and miserable old regulars at the bar it was very much like stepping back in time to the family dos of my childhood at the old Penrose Social Club in Walworth.

Jelly and Mez started the dancing (who else?) and I had a bit of a twirl round to 25 Miles and Back In My Arms Again - it’s been a while since I’ve danced under strip lights – and we all went up twice to the amazing buffet for ham sandwiches on white bread, pork pies, fondant fancies and crisps. Bumped into our old friend Wookie who still does the door at Popstarz after 15 years. Actually, I’ve just remembered, he won the Bingo, called authentically over the mic by Anthony Crank off the telly - ”All the 7’s…77”, "On it's own...Number 4" etc., For the first couple of minutes I thought we were playing for the line as opposed to the whole page so it's possible I missed some numbers and forfeited the grand prize -a bottle of Babycham plus two of those special glasses with the prancing deer on. I coveted those glasses if not the bubbly itself. Bingo's fun.

Here we are outside on our way in. The bit of scorched wall behind Mez and the carrier bag are nice, gritty touches don't you think?



Christmas is done, finished, all wrapped up. I’d love to know why the simple, gentle act of covering oblong-shaped objects in shiny paper sends me into a foul mood every year but send me it most certainly does. Did the whole lot last night, scowling at Fints and barging cats off the table. I wanted to get them done so I can distribute ‘em among the folks this evening. Jelly and I are going to deepest Essex for my niece Remi’s 18th birthday party. 18! It’s just unbelievable. It seems like a couple of years ago tops that I trudged through the snow to a payphone in Tooting in December 1990 to find out if my sis had given birth yet. I was in the pub with Taff eating beef McCoys and their phone was only taking cards not coins. Remi’s mind probably wouldn’t be able to compute a time before mobiles, all those phonecards and fiddling for 10 pence pieces. She passed her driving test last week, too – I still haven’t got round to learning – and I’ve already made her promise to come and pick up her Funny Uncle and drive me places. Anyway, tonight’s combination of Essex college kids + my family + Jelly means carnage is assured. We’re looking forward to it, so if we make it home safely I’ll let you know.

Sky One and Virgin Media have been having a Bette / Joan-style feud for the best part of a year, meaning we’ve been deprived in this household of endless Malcolm In The Middle, Futurama and Simpsons repeats. Borderline-traumatised when the channels first went dark but it hasn’t been too bad - though that might have been a different story had we not already owned all the Futurama box sets. I could watch that show forever – I think it’s the colours.

One thing I did miss, though, was Project Catwalk, the US reality thingy where fashion designers are eliminated one by one a la ANTM, The Restaurant, Top Chef etc., It’s great and, like all these programmes, especially edifying when the contestants fashion something utterly ghastly, a gown so horrific nobody but the dog would be seen dead in. Anyway, the Sky channels are back now – world saved! – and we’ve been V+-ing it. With no little excitement I sat down with my breakfast on Saturday morning to view a bunch of ‘em, only to realise a short way in that I’d already seen it. Gah.

I stuck with it, though, chuckling away to myself as I recalled Fints and me actually spending one whole precious day of a week-long trip to New York lying on the bed in our apartment watching this self-same series in its entirety on crazy American TV. Meanwhile, across the hall, Jock and Ada were doing the exact same thing in their apartment. If you’d told the teenage me that the adult me would waste a chunk of time off work in America watching telly I would have thrown myself under a bus.

Winter’s properly here. How did that happen? It seems like only yesterday I was making the summer playlist for my gang of Internet friends. Now we’re doing winter-themed ones. Not Christmas, you understand, which would be far too boring and limiting. Mine’s got Steeleye Span (Gaudete), Love Unlimited (It May Be Winter Outside), Belle & Sebastian (Fox In The Snow), The Walker Brothers (Nite Flights), Kraftwerk (Neon Lights), Magazine (Permafrost), Junior Boys (In The Morning), a few others. And my most wintry song of all – Change’s Searching. ”Hit the town in the cold of the night / Looking round for the warmth of a light / There was fog on the road so I guess no-one saw me arriving.” ‘Mazin’.

Yup, Winter’s properly here, alright. We’ve got the tree up! I don’t hold with the 12-days rule middle-class and religious people always lecture you about. We’ve had cards through the post, the telly’s full of Christmas ads, all the big records are out, I am invited to two Christmas drinks this week, I’ve done all me shopping and written the cards – therefore in my book it’s Christmas and I’m gonna grab it while I can. On Sunday evening I did the tree and we had haggis and mulled wine and watched Down Argentine Way with Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda on DVD. I fell asleep before the end, though. That old mould wine sends me right off every time.

Shoot. Work beckons. I’m in tonight so I’ll finish this, then.

It’s been a good day for listening to the radio. This morning Janet Street-Porter was the guest on Desert Island Discs. God, I love the awkward old cow. She chose Philip Glass, George Formby and, naturally, some Pet Shop Boys’ - Always On My Mind. She didn’t, though, tell the story that’s in the PSB biography about rushing up to Neil and Chris backstage after a gig and saying, “Cor blimey that Elvis Presley cover’s brilliant. You should release it as a single.”, to which Neil had to reply, ”Er, Janet, we did. It was Number 1 last Christmas.” One of those horrible rightwing newspapers – the Mail I think – had her down as one of the 50 people who've "ruined Britain". Cheeky pot-kettle bastards! I was incensed when I read that.

But I do appreciate that Janet’s Marmite - loads of people I know think she’s an idiot. Personally I’d love to properly meet her - she’s probably the person alive today I’d most like to have dinner with, apart from Neil Tennant. I’ve been fortunate enough to sit in her actual chair behind her actual desk when she wasn’t there. I've also been fortunate to have danced with her, Sarah out of Bananarama and Neil to Alice Deejay's Better Off Alone at Chris Lowe's birthday party a few years ago. But that’s still not enough, dammit Janet!

Now I’m “listening again” to the Archive Hour from yesterday. My old mate Mark Paytress is doing Kenny Everett. It’s fantastic - very good on the pirates. Loads of Beatles - I’d forgotten how involved he was with them, how John Lennon called him “one of us”. It’s a very informative show. Two things so far I didn't know: 1. Kenny invented the term “Auntie Beeb”. 2. Before the government made pop music legit with the launch of Radio One in 1967 13 million British kids listened to the pirate stations like Radio London.

It’s our first Sunday at home for three weeks. Last weekend we were in Paris, officially a birthday present for Fints but also an excuse to finally meet the eskimolimon off of here and to piss about with wavelteats. I’ve decided that short breaks can be as exciting as long holidays, and there was something really thrilling about leaving work, meeting at St Pancras and zooming through countryside – tunnel – countryside on the Eurostar. I was fascinated by a middle aged couple right snogging in the buffet – popping olives in each others mouths, knocking back a slug of wine and then going at it again, tongues and everything. Quite revolting but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Having an affair, we decided. Fints got stuck next to a queeny German man with repulsive manicured nails and an equally repulsive decorative belt. “Prissy”, my mum would have called him. So we could sit together Fints asked nails German if he would swap seats but he replied, “No I am afraid I hef to sit by the aisle. It is my obsession”. Later, as he moved to put the arm rest down between him and Fints he said, “Excuse me, I hef to hev this down. It is my obsession.” That man had a lot of obsessions. Fortunately the fellow next to me moved so we got to sit together anyway.

In a good way, compared to London or New York, Paris seemed so very slow. And so uncrowded. Even the big department stores (we were looking for a French Christmas decoration for Fints’s mum not being naff shop shop shopping queens) felt calm and distinctly unhassley on a Saturday afternoon. The Metro was just busy enough and every restaurant, bar and café we visited had a seat and a table for us. So unlike it is over here at the weekend. Our hotel was proper central, in the Montmatre district, off the Rue Des Martyrs (this very much appealed to the drama queen in me) opposite a bar called Amour. It was a good omen that when we were checking in Shalamar’s A Night To Remember was playing on the radio. That’s mine and Fints’s song!



It looks like it a brothel but it wasn't. Really, it wasn't.

Sigh. I really liked the Rue Des Martyrs. I wish I was there now. It was like staying in textbook Paris, with people walking their little French dogs and queuing up to buy fresh bread, fish, meat, cheese, etc., in proper shops. Not like us, barging our way round dispiriting Tesco Metro’s in a bad mood. And I really don’t know where Parisans get their reputation for rudeness from. Everyone was totally smiley and helpful and accommodating and not because you have to tip them all the time like you do in New York. We walked everywhere, a good move because we ate loads. Like good gays we visited the Dalida memorial and noted how rubbed-shiny the tits were on her bust's bust. An incredible number of people must have fondled those bronze orbs over the years.

It was great spending both nights and Sunday lunchtime with eskimolimon. If you read his blog (and if you don’t you really should) you’ll be pleased to know he’s exactly like that - so clever and charming and interesting. He brought the wife and kids along to meet us on the Sunday before we went to get our train home and I’ll wager they’re the cutest family in Europe. His wee daughter gave me a leaf before we left! Haha. And Wavey. Had such a laugh with Wavey. I’d say I knew him pretty well before we went but what I didn’t know was that the man sings, literally all the time. He’s like a sort of walking ‘80s / ‘90s jukebox. In the cab home on the Saturday night Chaka Khan’s I Feel For You came on the radio so he even got to do his party piece, a word-perfect rendition of Melle Mel’s rap. After that, Fints took this photo of me. I don't know what he said to make me pull that face. I wasn't hammered if that's what you're thinking. I look so English. And I really look like my Grandfather. I like it though.



I've been writing all weekend. My friend Bryon's launching a new website thing. I reviewed a Patti Smith film and the new Killers album for him. They also asked me to write about a forgotten classic so I chose Malcolm McLaren's Waltz Darling. That album still sounds incredible. Deleted ffs!