meme tune

It's a bustling Manhattan street, seen from above. There's a chill in the air, people scurry, yellow cabs honk and lurch as our view slowly pans down the sidewalk. We see steps coming up from a subway station. Ts-t-t-t-ts-t-t-t say the insistent hi-hats, then in with the wah-wah guitar and up he comes, long leather trenchcoat, cool and sassy, black and hip, sharp and purposeful. It's Shaft. John Shaft.

Never was a person so well matched to their theme tune as in the opening scene of Shaft's eponymous classic blaxploitation movie.



When I was with Radio Savage Houndy Beasty we did a reworking of Theme From Shaft, giving it Yorkshire lyrics over a colliery band's rendition of the tune [MP3 here].

Gareth S Brown once said he'd like his theme tune to be one sustained organ dischord. He imagines himself walking down the street with a soundtrack like a church organist has keeled over and died on to the keys.

And so we come to the point. There's a blog meme of theme tunes for your blog. Five Chinese Crackers wants it to be Rock You Like A Hurricane by the Scorpions, but admits it has to be Billy Bragg's It Says Here. Chicken Yoghurt's hysterical Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows had me literally slappng my desk.

Reluctantly conceding that I'm not really sassy enough to have Theme From Shaft, I'd like mine to be the entirety of Bill Hicks' Rant In E Minor, but I guess spoken word is out of bounds for theme tunes. I'd like it to be Anarchy In The UK, but I know I'm not snarly enough really. Seize The Day's I Swear kicks the requisite ass.

But really I know it's got to be something a bit less righteous, a bit more musical and peculiar amidst all the countercultural politics, like the vibe you get bimbling around festivals in an English summer. It can only be The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain doing Theme From Shaft.



Over to you:

A Daisy Through Concrete
Alice In Blogland
Dreamflesh
Enemies of Reason
One Way Ticket to Cubesville

Is there any need to ask Jim at The Quiet Road? We all know it'll be the 12 inch version of Chris De Burgh's Don't Pay The Ferryman.

number ones

Danny Chivers' recent post on A Daisy Through Concrete says

It's getting so you can't type "ranting performance poetry video climate change bespectacled freak" into a search engine without my leering face popping up in front of your startled eyes.

The delicious irony is that, like a serpent eating its own tail or the first chicken coming from its own egg, he's self-fulfilled. If you type "ranting performance poetry video climate change bespectacled freak" into Google it comes up with one result - Danny's post.

A while ago commenters on a post over at Five Chinese Crackers mentioned being number one in Google for "pubs in leeds belgian beer", "Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks grapple fake hookers" and 5CC's own "Paul Dacre's robot arm".

It's something I've brought up in conversation with a couple of bloggers since, and I think it's time to start a meme.

Give me five great things that your blog or websites rank number one in Google searches, then tag five other blogs. Bonus points if you manage to have any sexual content in the phrase, as it's fairly easy to be top of the heap for 'post-marxist dialectics in contemporary radical discourse' than it is for summat like 'fisting shaven catholic teens'.

Bristling Badger's number one for:

"An old man wanking into a sock"
"Caviar enemas"
"Fuck you liberal democrats"
"Baboon in a bucket"

and - a matter of considerable personal pride - I also get number one for Strawberry Switchblade.

What about you;

A Daisy Through Concrete
Chicken Yoghurt
The Quiet Road
Dreamflesh
Alice In Blogland

not my favourite albums

There's a game that's good for passing long journeys called oojah-ratha. You name two people and say which one you'd rather have sex with.

It works best at extremes, which of the sexiest you'd turn down or which of the most repulsive you'd least like to shag. You can retain the discounted option for the next round, and you eventually end up with someone's least fanciable person on earth. For nearly everyone, it's Margaret Thatcher.

I mean, Paul Daniels or Margaret Thatcher? See?

Anyway, the real enjoyment of the game isn't to see the choices but to hear the explanations and argue the toss about it (so to speak).

So it was really really boring to find myself on a coach journey sat in front of some lads playing oojah-ratha just naming girls they knew and only choosing a name. No explanation, no inquiries, nothing.

It seems to me that blog memes operate on the same sort of principle as oojah-ratha. When you're asked to name seven tunes that are really doing it for you right now, you want to be told a little bit about what and why.

There was one going round recently where you name a favourite album for every year of your life (here's one or two people who did it).

Thing is, nobody's going to write 20 or 40 or whatever little explanations, so it comes out as little more than a list, and as such is kind of like those lads on the coach.

Like every other blogger, I love chestbeating about my opinions and have the requisite quasi-autism that makes me order it into words and write it down even though nobody might read it.

That's what's great about blogging, the pinballing around someone else's mind. A straight list of album titles doesn't really let you in very far. So I'm not going to do that meme.

Also, I'm not sure I'm that qualified anyway. I’ve bought less and less new music in the last ten years so my choices after about 2000 would be somewhat forced and ill-informed.

Not that I’m being one of those nostalgia tossers who thinks all modern music is crap compared to when they were young. If anything, I’d guess the opposite is true; it’s got easier and cheaper to make music, so in all likelihood there’s more great music being made now than ever before. But I no longer find myself frequently spending hours on end sitting listening to music as a sole activity in itself.

More of an issue is the fact that most of what I do get is old stuff. Way the majority of music I’ve discovered in the last couple of years is older than I am. I strongly suspect we could go the rest of our lives discovering great black American music of the 60s and 70s and still not properly scratch the surface.

And it's not just the lack of explanation in the meme either, it's the way it only picks a top album for each year. Oh look, everyone loves OK Computer. Again.

I think it'd be more interesting to, say, pick your favourite four-star albums. Something flawed but that's nonetheless really got something to it. You'd get told about something that's gone under your radar, you'd learn something new.

For instance, for 1992 I, like most people with ears, would go for Automatic For The People as my top album. But ask me for a four-star and we'd be on to Leonard Cohen's The Future, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury, Julian Cope's occult epic Jehovahkill or All About Eve's Ultraviolet.

That last one scares people cos they think it'll be whimsical goth folk like the other All About Eve stuff, but it's not. It's a huge textural brooding eerie beast, great washes of guitars, sometimes bright sometimes glowering, always ethereal.

They toured it with 60s style blobby oil projections and encored with a cover of See Emily Play! It sold fuck all (too different for the fans, nobody else taking any notice cos it was All About Eve) so their record label dropped them immediately and it hasn't been reissued to this day.

My big album for 1985 would be Psychocandy, but the four star would probably be Strawberry Switchblade's eponymous album. Often dismissed as frothy one-hit wonders, there's a strong darkness in their mix, a delicate angelic richly morbid undertow that counterpoints the harmonies and shiny pop perfectly. The luscious melancholy sweep of Being Cold is just gorgeous.

Or maybe I'd go for The Style Council's Our Favourite Shop. They get written off as faux-jazz, but there was actually a lot of guts and diversity in the early Style Council stuff. But more importantly, on this album Paul Weller hit a lyrical clarity that he never matched before or since. It's powerfully and unashamedly political (it was, after all, written during the miners strike). Try the chilling A Stones Throw Away and tell me it's all jazzy affectation.

See, I'm already off. The 'one per year for your whole life' thing is too much to ask to someone to write or read, but still, I think there's the germ of a good idea there. Perhaps it's to pick a year and reel off, say, five albums for it. Hmmm.

Thinking about it, loads of these memes come as lists of five or seven, and I think there's wisdom in that. It's enough to really get stuck into a topic without over-running, and with that many there's bound to be summat that you weren't expecting and/or haven't heard of before.

I note that the year I picked at random is the year I left school. I suppose it's not surprising that, in a teenage intensity of focus, I've got some albums that the sharper, more knowledgable and more dismissive music lovers of the time would've passed on.

Yes, after all that meander, I think that's it. Give us five albums from the year you left school. Not necessarily the five 'greatest', but five that really do it for you.

I've already done Our Favourite Shop and Strawberry Switchblade.

Psychocandy - The Jesus & Mary Chain
Out of nowhere, this canyon of noise, big pop chords and oceans of feedback, like playing a Ronettes single on 33rpm over a PA turned up to 11 in a church hall with you listening to it from three streets away. Amid the upsurge of 80s big hair, teeth whitener and attendant superficiality, having the Mary Chain's slouchy miserable ragged noise, clearly coming from a deep passion for music not stardom, was the antidote. The one proper go I had at being in a band began with me playing You Trip Me Up to the man who'd become our singer and saying 'there needs to be more records like this'.

Heyday - The Church
As long as I can hear music I will listen to the Church. The gift of finely crafted intelligent guitar tunes is a great thing to exercise, but they're so much more. On this album a deep lusciousness comes into their sound, Steve Kilbey's voice matures into the aching opiate marvel it has continued to be. Such pace, grace, and mystery, yet so clear and accessible.

Prince - Around The World In A Day
Less than a year after the release of Purple Rain, as that album was still calving hit singles, this album came out. No singles in advance, no adverts of any kind, it was just there. Recorded as recreation from the rehearsals for the Purple Rain tour it's playful, experimental, wide-eyed and yet also very intimate and confessional, being simultaneously the poppiest stuff he'd ever done up to that point yet also the weirdest. The Purple Rain stuff was catchy and rolled over musical boundaries like so much thin air. This album, though, was not only unlike what you expected to come next but unlike anything you'd ever heard. It is a great tingly pretty swirl, and a real declaration of genius.

I've surprised myself by picking quite a mainstream and poppy list there. that's another problem with doing favourites lists, you can't help but disagree with yourself pretty much immediately. I certainly wouldn't want to assert that all five of those 1985ers are objectively better than First And Last And Always or Head On The Door.

Tag time:
Five blogs I'm asking: five albums you love dearly from the year you left school, please.
Dreamflesh
Alice In Blogland
Panadola Diction
The Quiet Road
and one who's usually just politics but is clearly too interesting not to branch out into other areas, A Daisy Through Concrete.

seven songs

It's blog meme time again. Jim Bliss has tagged me.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your [summer]. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

I like Jim and Justin's thing of, where possible, giving you a link so you can hear the track.

That said, sometimes Youtube lets you down. There are all these recent performances of people doing their classics from decades ago, lacking the power of the original. Yet to the uninitiated, and to the future, these pedestrian geriatric videos will become what we were excited about.

Fortunately, some people are just sticking tunes up there. Try putting '45rpm' in a Youtube search and see what comes up.

Anyway, on with the show.

1. Brenton Wood - Baby, You Got It

I'd never heard of this guy until a couple of months ago. Someone listing soul 45s on Ebay was selling Wood's Catch You On the Rebound and it instantly grabbed me, a piece of gorgeous gossamer late 60s pop-soul.

When the record arrived, it turns out it had been mis-listed and the A-side was in fact Baby, You Got It. It was even better. Such warmth, such ease and tingle and lightness of touch with such groove. If sunshine could be captured and made into music, it would be this.

There's a double CD of all his 60s stuff, and most of it is in this vein and just as good. And if you buy it from his company, it comes autographed!

2. Nina Simone - Angel of The Morning

There are loads of versions of this song, most of them mediocre and forgettable. But that's all in the performance; there's a great song here. PP Arnold's version utterly soars and swoons. Joya Landis' Trojan reggae version sways and enfolds you. But even then, you find only some of the lyrics have stuck. Then come to Nina Simone's version and she takes it down and really pulls the spirit of the lyric out. As the brilliant analysis on Wikipedia says, it echoes Ruby Tuesday in being somehow slightly baroque and being the sentiment of an effortlessly liberated woman.

The venerable Richard Cubesville once said that every sentence of George Orwell's journalism seems to have a silent prefix of 'oh for fuck's sake, any idiot can see that...'. By the same token, everything you ever see and hear of Nina Simone seems shrouded in 'I am a fucking artist. Got that?'. Such incredible presence and gravity, total and constant, even on a tune played so delicately as this.

3. Hush The Many - Revolve

Fucking hell, this band are the real deal.

As so often with early records of a band's career, the recorded stuff doesn't properly capture their live prowess. They are one of the great live bands to see, absolutely mesmerising. Sensitive yet epic, brooding, tender, mysterious, searing, captivating. Imagine if Tim Buckley was writing and playing in Placebo and you're more or less there. Now add a cello.

This new single keeps me coming back over and over, while it's on it makes the world just stop.

You can buy it as an MP3 or a 7inch vinyl here.

4. Manu Dibango - Soul Makossa

From 1am to 5am Radio 4 fucks off and you get the BBC World Service. It's what I listen to before going to sleep. There's always tons of interesting stuff, and even if something's boring, programmes are short and it's only quarter of an hour at most before something else is on.

So I sometimes hear Charlie Gillett's - please someone invent a better term - world music show. He did one a couple of months back playing key old tracks that brought world music to western ears. When he played this I had to sit up, turn the light on and write the details down. Next day I bought a copy.

It's early 70s funk with this insistent looping rhythm, a rasping catchy sax hook and nebulous ethereal floaty backing vocals, so you're pulled in several directions at once. Punchy, spooky, and a hell of a groove.

Looking into it, like numerous great tracks (Rock Around The Clock, I Will Survive), it was recorded as an afterthought for a B-side but the public knew better.

Michael Jackson pinched the 'mama-say, mama-sa, mama-ma-kossa' chant for Wanna Be Starting Somethin and Dibango sued and got a chunk of the money. As that's the biggest selling album of all time, if you see Dibango in the pub then it's definitely his round.

5. Dinah Washington - Big Long Slidin' Thing

Man, I love Bear Family, the label that put out my compilation with this on. They've done a Johnny Cash box set so comprehensive it's got him singing Ring of Fire in Spanish and I Walk The Line in German.

There are a few I could pick from this recent play-lots album, Eat to The Beat: The Dirtiest of Them Dirty Blues. It takes records from a time when you couldn't sing I Wanna Sex You Up. Instead, you can say that you've got the best piano in town and I'd like to play it so 'baby, let me bang your box'.

It may be full of innuendo, but it's not all about the lyrics. It wouldn't work if it was just some pile of nudge-nudge. Musically, most tracks are superb. If you're going to write a song that pushes the limits, you're probably at the rougher edge of music, and the CD really captures the upsurge of jazz that fed into rock n roll.

And for those of us who only know My Ding A Ling from Chuck Berry's excruciating live single, Dave Bartholomew's original is very refreshing; explicitly saucy and a fabulous ska rhythm.

The womens songs have an edge, coming from a time when sex was unmentionable, let alone women having sexual desire. It's this one I'll plump for - from 1954 Dinah Washington's Big Long Slidin' Thing.

Incidentally, don't be alarmed at the references to her 'daddy'; it's not an incest thing, nor an infantilising of women thing. It was a common slang term for 'fella' at the time. 'Mama' was commonly used for girlfriend, and that survived intact well into the 70s and still at a diminished level to this day, yet 'daddy' fell by the wayside for some reason.

I’d been in every bar
Been in every honky-tonk
Been tryin’ to find my daddy
With that broke down piece of junk
Asked everyone to help me
Cried help me if you can
You know my daddy
He’s that trombone-playin’ man
Where is my daddy?
Tell me, where is my daddy?
With that big long slidin’ thing

I even asked a man
That played a steel guitar
He said that you don’t need him
To be moved eight to the bar
He brought his amplifier
And he hitched it in my plug
He planked it, and he plonked it
But it just wasn’t good enough
Cos I need my daddy
Need my daddy
With that big long slidin’ thing

Well then a knock came at my door
I said, 'Mmm, my daddy’s back'
I opened up the door
And there stood Piano Jack
He said, 'I came to do some tinklin’ on your piano keys'
I said, 'Don’t make me nervous; this ain’t no time to tease'
Just send me my daddy
Send me my daddy
With that big long slidin’ thing

Well the first time he played
I asked him how it was done
He said I blow through here
Then I work my fingers and my thumb
I slide it right out
Then I slide it back again
And I get a lot of wind
And then I slide it back again

Where is my daddy
With that big long slidin’ thing?
Oh yeah!

6. Jimmy Ruffin - I'll Say Forever My Love

I first heard of this through the reference in Reminisce Part Two on Dexys Midnight Runners' criminally underrated masterpiece Don't Stand Me Down. It was ages before I heard the actual Ruffin song.

It's the same team that wrote and produced his classic What Becomes of The Broken Hearted. This has something of the same pace and atmosphere, but where that record has an ominous anguish, this has a hands-to-the-sky euphoria. You can tell a songwriter's hit gold when they know they can start a track with the chorus.

Although it's from 1967, it was a top ten hit in the UK in 1970, as the emerging Northern Soul scene trawled for lost old belters.

7. The Church - Summer

Most people who love music have a couple of bands they really champion, people who haven't had the acclaim they really deserve, bands who become personal, part of who we are. For me, that's Cowboy Junkies and, most of all, The Church.

Starting out in 1980 with a brand of post-Television pre-REM intelligent Rickenbacker tunes, they rapidly progressed. Absurdly prolific (even the most devoted Church fans can't keep up with all the solo and spin-off projects), always luscious and mysterious, they imbue their work with a very strong yet very vague sense of longing. In the last decade or so they've mutated away from the three minute song into something more sensual and textural, something a bit more Spiritualized.

It's such an odd thing when a band you've loved for years brings out an album that becomes your favourite. At first it's just new music whereas the old stuff is branded into your soul. Then, as you absorb, you feel your spiritual innards shifting. So it was with the Church's beautiful languid 2001 album After Everything, Now This.

The follow-up, Forget Yourself, was more spiky and angular, yet still found space for several mellifluous opiate beauties, and they close the album with this one. Last week I was listening to a compilation I made for someone ages ago and it came up, and it wrapped around me like a warm slo-mo whirlpool. It makes me close my eyes and feel my arms lift as my lungs slowly fully fill. So human, so eternal, so rich, so gentle, so huge and so alive.

= = = = = = =

As for tagging others, I've recently found Panadola Diction, who listens with intelligence and a complete lack of pretention to a wide variety of music.

I thought of Jon over at Uncarved and then found that he's already done it.

Alice, we know of her activism and her allotment, but what does she listen to? It's time to find out.

Then, as with my last meme, there's a few great wits who really should return to blogging. Comfortably fronting the pack is Rhythmic Ginger, the man who recently put me on to Chuck Carbo's Can I Be your Squeeze, the funkiest thing I've heard in a long, long time. That would be reason enough even if he didn't have the best taste in music on earth.

Zoe at Goldfish Nation, again never playing music that's anything other than superb, and she put me on to The National, for which I'm forever grateful.

Then there's Justin at Kerosene Oyster Hell, a man who loves the most twisted fucked up darkest music ever made and Strawberry Switchblade. I still have a picture of him miming guitar with a cricket bat. Doesn't all that make you want to hear what he's listening to right now?

se7en

Jim Bliss tagged me with a blog meme. Start the year with a list of seven things you approve of. And no tricksy inverting of negatives, just straightforward 'I'm all for this' stuff.

I love Jim's mention of dolphins. Who doesn't love dolphins? I suspect they have the best life of anyone, so much space and freedom and arsing about.

Gyrus' mention of the telephone is great too - we don't even think about it, yet imagine if it had only just been invented how much you'd totally love it.

But I don't need to be copying anyone else's answers, for there are plenty of good things around.

1 - Growing your own food. Before I started doing this I thought it might be very hard work, and I was more certain it would be difficult. More specifically, it would be easy to get wrong. But no - they are plants, they are trying very hard to be alive and grow. It is so simple and so satisfying.

There are deeper resonations, something primal about being out interacting physically with the land and the way it makes you spend more time outdoors. Plus there's the reduction of your food miles and not giving your cash to supermarkets, but those are not only the negative-inversion reasons we're not going to mention, they're not necessary to justify it. The joy of eating the stuff is more than enough reward.

I suspect the thing that makes organic food taste better is that the varieties are slower growing and that you tend to be eating it fresher. Freshness is so important for flavour. Years ago I worked on a farm, just a normal, chemical, supermarket-supplying vegetable farm, and I'd often take a few things home to eat and it always tasted amazing. Fast growing agrichemicalled stuff, but only harvested that day. Everything you grow yourself has that going for it.

Even if you haven't got a garden you can use a friend's or get an allotment. Everyone can do this and they should.

2 - The Music Grin. I recently described it as 'that instant liftoff sensation hearing something so irresistably exuberant and uplifting, the feeling I got the first time I heard Do I Love You by Frank Wilson or The Tams' Be Young Be Foolish Be Happy'.

It's a thing I get most commonly listening to such Northern Soul tracks, but it needn't be summat so bouncy. Nick Drake's Northern Sky's a dead cert.

3 - Single malt Scotch whisky. As Angus from Ardbeg distillery says, there are only three qualities of whisky; great, good and really bad. There isn't 'mediocre' or 'alright'.

With bourbon, it can be fine stuff but really it just tastes of wood and corn. Scotch whiskies - especially the darker, smokier island ones - have such a complexity, the flavours overlapping and swirling around one another, rolling out and changing. It just doesn't compare to two-dimensional spirits like, say, rum.

With single malts, there is just no such thing as a bad one. Thousands of different ones to try, so there's endless discovery, all of it guaranteed wonderful.

Lots of people start off telling me they don't like whisky, which invariably turns out to mean they got pissed and threw up on Bells when they were 17. Whisky is not about getting pissed. It's about flavours and warmth, savouring the sensation and letting the layers and levels of flavour unfold. The squiffiness should be regarded as a happy accident.

Nothing on earth captivates, consumes and soothes like a good dram of a great one; Laphroaig Quarter Cask, Caol Ila 12 year old or Lagavulin 16 year old topping my list.

4 - The sound of cows grazing. That mix of low-pitch high-pressure outbreaths with the rip of the grass is just hypnotic, so mellow and so summery. And it also means you're very close to some lovely, gentle, intelligent animals.

5 - Bicycles. The quickest means of transport around the city. The best means of rural exploration (anything faster has an engine and glass to separate you from the environment, anything slower doesn't let you cover distance). Like I said here a while ago

Public transport has some benefits, but it is inconvenient. The car offers freedom from timetables, freedom from timetables being ignored, an opportunity to go directly from A to B when you want without wasting time looping off to stop places you're not going to.

But the car too has its drawbacks. Imagine if it were somehow made so nimble that it could magically jump to the front of the queue at traffic lights and junctions. Imagine if there were free parking outside - or even inside - any building you went to. Imagine if it needed no tax, insurance or MOT. Imagine if it let you do a daily fitness workout whilst driving. Imagine if fuel were free and it never needed refilling. If it had zero emissions. If, whenever anything went wrong, instead of being at the mercy of pricey mechanics you could quickly, easily and cheaply do most repairs yourself. Imagine how much more precious it would be than the cars of today.

That vehicle is here. Prices start at about twenty quid, second hand.

Bikes feel like freedom and independence, they make you feel athletic and healthy, they're straightforward, practical and easy. Nineteenth century technology refined and improved to near-perfection.

6 - Side 2 of Abbey Road. As Cat Vincent said, it'd be too easy just to list movies and whatnot, but still. This huge sweep of music opens with Here Comes The Sun, one of the few songs of George's that genuinely stands alongside Lennon and McCartney's. Then it moves through delicate arrangements of cosmic musings, and then careers through all kinds of peculiar, witty, playful songs, little snippets so it moves very fast, yet segued masterfully into one symphonic whole. I'm always broadened, boosted, amused and amazed by this music.

And every time I hear it, I realise how words like that become just words with the retelling, I find I've forgotten the depth and totality of impact it has. More than this, every time I hear it it feels fresh, new, I hear it prickling with possibilities that hadn't stood out last time. It has grown with me and beckons me onward.

And there's a photo from the sessions that I utterly adore. People want to simplify and polarise the Beatles story. They tell you that they were writing separately after 1964, that they hated each other for the last couple of years. Yet here's John and Paul, clearly relaxed, happy, creative and at ease with each other and with the work they're doing together, finalising the lyrics for Mean Mr Mustard.



7 - Bed. Really, it's just the best thing ever. So many of the best things in your life happen in bed, so many of the worst things happen outside of it. Whoever had a car crash in bed? After working hard or getting cold or anything else difficult, getting into bed feels like such a treat and an indulgence. Where else can you stay for twelve hours and still not want to leave? It's warm, comfortable, comforting, an environment specifically designed to make you rest. What a great idea!

= = = = = = = = = = = =

Pass it on: I'd like to see several quality inventive intelligent bloggers come out of their hibernation and do this meme. Be Like Water, Goldfish Nation, Wanna hangout?, Rhythmic Ginger, Kerosene Oyster Hell.

graduation singles

It's nearly a year now since I found an old photo of me and my friend Adam, down the front at Glastonbury for Simple Fucking Minds with a banner saying 'WHY DON'T YOU JUST FUCK OFF?'.

It tickled me so I blogged it. A couple of weeks ago that post started getting anonymous comments from an irate Simple Fucking Minds fan. I deleted the ones that were just insults and responded to the ones that weren't. My favourite bit was where they suggested I hate Simple Fucking Minds because I don't like the 80s.

Because what else could explain a dislike of Simple Fucking Minds, clearly the acme of human activity in that decade?

Saying 'you don't like the 80s' to the webmaster of strawberryswitchblade.net! Is there a more 80s band?

A quick shufty at my MP3 blog Dust On The Stylus shows that a clear majority of tracks featured are from the 80s (though admittedly the Paul Sodding Young and Deacon Fucking Blue ones were just for curiosity value).

Anyway, the good and bad of 80s pop has surfaced over at The Quiet Road, where Jim has given laudable and detailed reasons for his refusal to participate in the Graduation Singles blog meme.

I however, shall dive in with aplomb.

You get the top 50 for the year you graduated from high school. This website can help you with that. Highlight the list as follows: Italicise those you like, bold those you own, strike out those you hate, mark in red those you liked then but cringe at now.

I left the education system as soon as criminal law would allow me to, summer 1985. The UK Top 50 of that year was:


THE POWER OF LOVE JENNIFER RUSH
I KNOW HIM SO WELL Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson
INTO THE GROOVE Madonna
19 Paul Hardcastle
FRANKIE Sister Sledge
DANCING IN THE STREET David Bowie & Mick Jagger
MOVE CLOSER Phyllis Nelson
A GOOD HEART Feargal Sharkey
TAKE ON ME a-ha
LOVE & PRIDE King
I WANT TO KNOW WHAT LOVE IS Foreigner
EASY LOVER Philip Bailey & Phil Collins
AXEL F Harold Faltermeyer
DO THEY KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS? Band Aid
I GOT YOU BABE UB40 with Chrissie Hynde
CRAZY FOR YOU Madonna
SAVING ALL MY LOVE FOR YOU Whitney Houston
SOLID Ashford & Simpson
YOU SPIN ME ROUND (LIKE A RECORD) Dead Or Alive
THERE MUST BE AN ANGEL (PLAYING WITH MY HEART) The Eurythmics
I'M YOUR MAN Wham!
TRAPPED Colonel Abrams
CHERISH Kool & the Gang
EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD Tears For Fears
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE Shakin' Stevens
YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE The Crowd
IF I WAS Midge Ure
NIKITA Elton John
DANCING IN THE DARK Bruce Springsteen
1999 c/w LITTLE RED CORVETTE Prince
HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO Bonnie Tyler
KAYLEIGH Marillion
LAST CHRISTMAS Wham!
A VIEW TO A KILL Duran Duran
WE ARE THE WORLD U.S.A. For Africa
LEAN ON ME (AH-LI-AYO) Red Box
PART-TIME LOVER Stevie Wonder
MONEY FOR NOTHING Dire Straits
DON'T BREAK MY HEART UB40
WE CLOSE OUR EYES Go West
NIGHTSHIFT The Commodores
THAT OLE DEVIL CALLED LOVE Alison Moyet
WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER HERO (THUNDERDOME) Tina Turner
TARZAN BOY Baltimora
SEE THE DAY Dee C. Lee
KISS ME Stephen 'Tintin' Duffy
I FEEL LOVE (MEDLEY) Bronski Beat & Marc Almond
WELCOME TO THE PLEASUREDOME Frankie Goes To Hollywood
SUDDENLY Billy Ocean
SHOUT Tears For Fears

Kinnell, how many bits of forgettable mediocrity by people who've made great records - Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, The Commodores. Even Billy Ocean made a couple of corkers in his day (Love Really Hurts Without You and Red Light Spells Danger, two worthy late 70s throwbacks to Northern Soul)

I fuckin hated Wham at the time. Me and Melanie Griffiths used to have these furtive meetings at the back of the art classrooms, like some spy-swap at a remote bridge on the border between East and West Germany or summat. She'd give me Paul Weller clippings from the girls mags she got, I'd slip her the Wham ones from the proper music mags I was reading.

But anyway, as I got out of teenage angst and into unabashed pop fervour, I really got to like a lot of Wham stuff. That Fantastic era, Bad Boys, Young Guns and especially the hilarious pro-dole Wham Rap are great, young exuberant records taking the Chic blueprint and giving it a vibrant tight white English approach. What a shame George Michael started taking himself so fucking seriously. Who'd have said, 'yeah, Wham are alright now but it'll all go wrong when Andrew Ridgeley leaves'?

There's a clause in the constitution of bands that says once you have over a certain level of pop in you, you have to do a Motown pastiche. Be it Billy Joel's Tell Her About It, The Jam's Town Called Malice or Spice Girls' Stop, they all have to do it. And they're almost always a load of cobblers. Wham's Freedom is one of those rare beasts that genuinely stands alongside the Motown catalogue with its head held high. But the two Wham singles listed here, I'm Your Man and Last Christmas, really aren't up to much, so a misleading lack of Wham-positive from me in the list.

Conversely, the UB40 ownership thing does not denote any leanings to a general liking of their saccharine glossy shite. Their first album, Signing Off, is proper late 70s British reggae but then it all went Pete Tong, especially after Labour of Love showed a huge market for lightweight offensively inoffensive syrupy cover versions. Don't Break My Heart though, along with Please Don't Make Me Cry, have some real haunting, humid understatement.

Shakin Stevens. Utterly inexplicable to anyone who wasn't there. And even to those who were.

Elton John, still in his getting married and not gay honest guv period. Nikita is a love song across the Iron Curtain, with a video showing a striking Soviet female as the object of the song. Except that Nikita is a bloke's name.

In other gay observations, on paper I Feel Love by Bronski Beat & Marc Almond has got to be the gayest record ever made. In actuality, it doesn't come anywhere near Male Stripper by Man2Man Meets Man Parrish.

A line in Cherish perplexes me to this day: 'I often pray before I lay down by your side, if you receive your calling before I awake could I make it through the night?'

Is that a fear of waking up next to a corpse? And he often prays about it? Kind of morbid don't you think? Would you want to get into bed with someone who was consciously contemplating your imminent death right there beside them?

Maybe it's not death, maybe it's 'calling' in the sense of a religious or other vocation. Or maybe it's a need to use the toilet. But whatever, by the time he awakes, surely he has made it through the night.

If I Was also has a confusing line. The lyric is a hoary old trick of saying 'if I was in some way different then I'd do be able to do some impressive demonstration of affection for the person I love', in the style of I Can't Give You Anything But My Love by the Stylistics or Elton John's Your Song, the latter of which has the most ridiculous line in any song I've ever heard; 'if I were a sculptor, heh, but then again, no'.

Anyway, the opening line of Midge's chorus declares 'if I was a soldier, captured arms I'd lay before her'. Am I alone in feeling that a bloke dumping half a dozen scuffed Kalashnikovs at my feet wouldn't make me want to shag him? Then again, maybe that's why Midge has never tried it on with me. We're just incompatible.

The Crowd's You'll Never Walk Alone was yet another fucking charity record. In the wake of the seismic impact of Band Aid, every time any disaster happened there was an atrocious charity record, like Let It Be for the Zeebrugge ferry. You'll Never Walk Alone was for the Bradford football fire. If memory serves, it featured Rolf Harris, some Nolans and Lemmy. Really.

Whilst these days we talk of the obscene waste of oil in driving 4x4s or flying apples in from New Zealand, we somehow ignore the huge quantities of oil wasted in making vinyl upon which was pressed millions of copies of Tarzan Boy.

Future generations will have pictures of Baltimora in his loin cloth painted up the sides of high buildings in public places. He will be the emblem of all that was wrong with our culture and why - let alone as part of a wider wastage, arguably on his own - it justified their bloody cultural revolution that massacred us all.

9x9

Over on his blog, the redoubtable Jim Bliss has done a blog meme that's going round called 7x7. Seven questions to the blogger that want seven things listed in response.

The last one is who you want to do it next, and he's tagged me. So here it is.

There's two questions that I thought would make it more interesting - 'things I've done only once' and a music one (books and movies but no music?) - so I added them. Then realised that'd make it 9x7. In order to preserve the neatness of the title I gave nine things for each answer, and so it's 9x9 that I expect my list of tagees to answer.

Nine Things To Do Before I Die

Hmm, if I have plans then I tend to be setting them in motion, so it doesn't leave a lot of room for long-term aching desires. Still, let's have a go.

I do agree with Jim Bliss' 'meet David Bowie', but it seems too easy to copy his, even if they're mine too.

1. Dance on Margaret Thatcher's grave.
2. Write more political work - more important, more compelling, more convincing, and more by sheer volume.
3. Be in a band that really means something but is still loads of fun. Yeah, I know.
4. Play a major role in the eradication of all extant copies of the recorded works of Chris De Burgh.
5. Dance again out of pleasure rather than to prove a point to myself or because I've overdone my intake. Having my thighbone held together by an assortment of metalwork is an impediment on that front, but Thatcher karking it might be just the incentive I need.
6. Go and make it happen.
7. Take the world in a love embrace.
8. Fire all of my guns at once.
9. Explode into space.


Nine Things I Cannot Do

1. Get by in any language other than English. Oh the joys of an imperialist education system.
2. Abide David Sylvian. I once had a terribly convincing article published entitled 'Why Japan Are The Worst Band Ever'.
3. Put both my legs behind my head at the same time. Any more.
4. Drive a motor vehicle. Well, I drove a Citroen BX estate home one time, but it was an automatic at 4am with no other cars around, so it doesn't really count does it.
5. Roll the letter R. This has been an admittedly small factor in my Welsh vocabulary remaining static at about 50 words.
6. Remember all the words to All You Need Is Love. It was written to be broadcast on the world's first satellite TV link-up, so in order to be understood around the globe it was deliberately made memorable and simple. Yet I bet you can't remember them all either. And how many times have we heard it? Weird.
7. Draw.
8. Keep up with Jim Bliss' bong intake. We tried once. My daily maximum was about a tenth of his.
9. Be concise much. As if 7x7 didn't offer enough answers already.


Nine Things That Attract Me To A Person I Find Attractive

1. Sparkle.
2. Warmth.
3. Compassion.
4. Drive.
5. Playfulness.
6. Up for it ness.
7. Ability to sense significance in small things, and to make big significant things seem straighforward, simple and easy. Feels like there should be a one-word way to say it. 'Thoughtfulness' comes close.
8. The sense that I'm going to learn a lot from them.
9. A love of gratuitous weirdnesses.


Nine Things I Say

1. Fuck (and assorted cognates thereof, including a particular favourite in 'fucksight', meaning 'large quantity')
2. That's the badger
3. Your first allegiance must be to truth
4. It's like at Newbury when...
5. Yer ma's arse
6. Everyone have what they want and I'll have all the rest
7. Mornings are wonderful, just not at the start of your day
8. You can't beat a good otter
9. Put these on and call me your bitch


Nine Things I've Only Done Once And Don't Expect To Do Again

1. Snorted chilli sauce
2. Bought methadone
3. Had a notably muscular man try his best to shove a pineapple up my arse. There is photographic evidence of the event. Which has been made into a jigsaw.
4. Been shut in a room with just me and a millionaire
5. Been to Norway
6. A bloke tied out to a 6 foot pentagram
7. Stayed awake for four days
8. Not shat for a week
9. Met Patti Smith

You have to guess which, if any, of the above events were interrelated. Anyone who comes up with a one-week scenario involving all nine wins a prize.


Nine Songs I Don't Think I Could Live Without

1. High Hills Lament - Seize The Day. Although the recorded version is awful (cheesy keyboard and off-key harmonies), but the song itself is the most powerful I know. More likely to make me cry than any other.
2. Ace of Spades - Motorhead
3. Natural High - Bloodstone. The loveliest thing ever recorded, like a warm bath of chocolate duvets.
4. Northern Sky - Nick Drake
5. Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) - Frank Wilson. The ultimate soaring Motown stomper.
6. Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks. It's all about the backing vocals with the Kinks, you know.
7. The Way You Look Tonight - Peggy Lee
8. Headstart For Happiness - The Style Council (the free-flying early B-side version, not the clumsy album version with Dee's awful vocal)
9. Electric - The Church. They've done loads better and loads I prefer but, unique among their repertoire, there are times when only this song will do.


Nine Good Books

1. The Modern Antiquarian - Julian Cope
2. Collected Essays, Letters & Journalism - George Orwell
3. Suzy, Led Zeppelin & Me - Martin Millar
4. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor
5. What A Carve Up! - Jonathon Coe
6. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
7. So Shall We Reap - Colin Tudge
8. Complicity - Iain Banks
9. Love - Mahalia


Nine Good Movies

1. Cinema Paradiso (Director's Cut)
2. Casablanca
3. Withnail & I
4. Once Were Warriors
5. Amelie
6. Stardust Memories
7. The Last Temptation of Christ
8. Apocalypse Now
9. Head


Nine Blogs To Tag

1. Goldfish Nation
2. Kerosene Oyster Hell
3. Pandemian (formerly Green Fairy)
4. Uncarved
5. Dreamflesh (that one so interesting and intelligent blogs so rarely is truly a loss to us all)
6. James Davies
7. Rhythmicginger!
8. Cookie Loves Cake (she'll be embarrassed that her travel journal gets shoved above the parapet like this, but I'm too intrigued not to nominate her)
9. Boris Johnson. Nine things to do before he dies? Have just enough time to count quickly to nine right now, hopefully. Twat.

i've read it in books

*sigh* I wasn't going to do this.

There's this 'my favourite books' meme going around blogs at the moment, and the final question is 'who do you nominate to do this next?'.

I got nominated by Jim Bliss. Whilst I'm flattered by what he said, I thought I'd leave it. Jim seems one of the best-read people I've ever met. His number one book is Ulysses for fuck's sake. He's one of the two people I know who've ever managed to finish it. Me, I've never dared try to start.

I'm probably the worst-read literate person alive. There was a point a year or two ago where I think I was writing more than I was reading. Reading books, like having a job, is one of those activities that everyone seems to do and I just don't know where they find the time.

I manage to finish about one book out of six that I start. I hardly ever read fiction, so my knowledge of literature is sporadic, haphazard and frankly not worth a great deal. I'm way more likely to have my nose in a Marvin Gaye biography than A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man.

As my dad says, the saying 'everyone's entitled to their opinion' is simply not true. An uninformed opinion is invalid. If you don't agree, next time someone dear to you needs surgery, whose opinion on the procedure would you be inclined to follow, mine or the trained surgeon's?

Whilst there may be, say, some sculptures I like and I'm entitled to my feelings about them, I'm not equipped to talk about sculpture in general. I'm in the same position with books relative to pretty much everyone else I know.

But then I just got nominated again. And it's in one of those things that makes a blogger's heart melt; someone I've never met or communicated with who already links to my blog, and their explanation of why they like my writing is a description of everything I'd hoped I could achieve with it.

because the books he talks about on his blog all strike me as being of vital importance, and because he seems to be doing all he can to free himself and others from injustice, absurdity, violence and ugliness in this troubled world, and he opposes these things using positive actions.

So, Helen from Take Every Day As It Comes, Brothers And Sisters, this is your fault. Bless you.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

It's an enticing angle to ask from. A simple 'favourite book' would be stale and, crucially, not quite the same question. The last book question I liked so much was being asked 'what book would you recommend for everyone to read'; great angle isn't it? Not 'favourite' or 'best', but something that has a universality and accessibility for all kinds of people, but still something real to impart that everyone could benefit from.

For that one, I answered Is That It? by Bob Geldof. So much about commitment, passion and the unending process of learning from your life and the lives of those around you.

But on the Farenheit 451 thing, I have two lines of thought. My first impulse is to take something nobody else is likely to have memorised so that it will be preserved. I mean, there'll be hundreds of Nineteen Eighty-Fours out there, won't there? Ditto Vonnegut's novels.

Whereas I'm not sure anyone else would go for Martin Millar's stuff. He writes wonderfully dry, funny, melancholy witty novels of the giro generation. It's tough to choose, he's pretty darn consistent. Milk Sulphate and Alby Starvation? Dreams of Sex And Stage Diving? The subtler cleverer Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me?

Nope, at the end of the day despite one or two of the others probably being objectively better, I'd go for Ruby And The Stone Age Diet.

A friend gave me Ruby in 1990. She'd been lent it and said I'd love it. I started it before going to bed one night and just couldn't stop. Despite having to get up for work at 5.30 the next morning, I read it straight through. Then the ending so goosed me that I sat there for as couple of hours unable to sleep. It was so downbeat, so uneventful, so realistic, similar to the end of Nikita or the way Woody Allen ends Manhattan and Celebrity. It's way more shocking than neat resolution with all the ends tied in.

It's that realism in describing what are actually extraordinary lifestyles - sprinkled with twists of magic - that makes Millar's work so great.

Thinking about it, there's a lot of parallels between Allen and Millar. If Allen was a Glaswegian living in Brixton in the 80s and 90s into squats and drugs and punk, that is. The wit, the whirly melancholy/romantic mix.

I lent that copy of Ruby to a friend. He lent it on, and it never came back. So I had to buy a new one to give back to the person who'd lent it to me, to give back to the original owner. The fact that all copies I know of were read and lent on and on and on speaks for itself.

But anyway, here's what I mean about my randomness in literature - like Iain Banks, Millar also writes fantasy novels (as Martin Scott). Have I read any? Have I read his adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma? Like fuck have I.

When I was recently dumped a beloved friend advised me to turn to Ruby And The Stone Age Diet.

No need to be telling you to get hopelessly drunk and listen to music for days on end.You've probably already been there. 'Ruby And The Stone Age Diet' helps.Page 64 if I remember correctly.

How splendid that she's so very literary and so very goth that off the top of her head she would remember the page number of the most miserable part.

[The narrator and friend have been dumped.]

Cis shouts my name through the letterbox and I run down the hallway to open the door.

There is no-one there. I have imagined it all.

'Why are you wandering naked in the hall?' asks Ruby, her lilac dress crumpled from sleeping in it.

'No reason'

'Make me some tea'

I put on a pot of water. We have an electric kettle but we are having trouble paying our last electricity bill.

The God Of Foolish People Who Walk Around Naked In The Hallway Thinking Their Lover Is Shouting Through The Letterbox is called Alexander and really there is nothing good to say about him at all. He is more of a demon than a god.

His brother is called Philip The Terrible and he is responsible for delaying people's giro cheques in the post and sending out electricity bills that no-one can afford.

Yesterday Ruby and I spent four hours wandering Brixton trying to accidentally bump into our lovers but my plan was a failure. We met neither Cis nor Domino, despite calling into every place where they might be.

'Sometimes it's difficult to manufacture coincidences,' says Ruby, sharing a drink with me before closing time. 'A pity. I would have liked to fuck Domino right this minute.'

'We could try again tomorrow.'

'It won't do any good,' says Ruby, morosely. 'Nothing does any good. You fall in love with someone and they leave you and you feel like dying. You meet their friends in the street and you tell them how unhappy you are and you hope this news will get back to your ex-lover and they'll take pity on you. Or else you meet their friends in the street and you tell them you're having a great time and you hope this news will get back to your ex-lover and make them jealous. You think about things you could have done and what you would do differently if you had the chance, you wait for the phone or doorbell to ring, you hang around the fringe of conversations hoping to hear some snippet of information about how they are.

'You can write poems and send them or not send them, you can turn up drunk at their house and plead with them to come back or turn up drunk and pretend you don't give a damn, you can send flowers or love-notes or a few intellectual books, you can discuss it endlessly with your friends till they're sick of the sight of you, you can think about it all day and all night, imagining that somehow your mental power will win them back, you can sit on your own and cry or go out and make yourself frantically busy. You can think about killing yourself and warmly imagine how sorry they'll be after you do it, you can think about going on a trip round the world and probably when you got back you'd still hope to run into them on the street. You can do anything at all and none of it is any good. It is completely pointless. Lovers never come back. You can't influence them to do it and you would realise this if only you weren't so dementedly unhappy all the time.'

The pub is noisy with little room to move, and we have to guard our drink against a marauding barman who keeps trying to snatch it off the table even though there is a good half-inch left at the bottom.

'So we won't try again tomorrow?'

'We might as well. What else is there to do?'

Anyway, despite all that, I don't think I could go for Ruby. I acquiesce to my second line of thought on contemplating the question. I think I'd want to pass on something equally humane but a damn sight more useful. George Orwell's four volume compilation Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism

Orwell is my main man. I love the clarity, the way he doesn't let the literal inaccuracy of a generalisation stand in the way of making a good point, the way he was unafraid to change his mind and explain why, his commitment, his scathing wit, his will to really roll up his sleeves and get into the cogs and gears of social mechanisms and see how to engineer change.

His Collected Essays Letters and Journalism is especially enlightening because unlike the proper books it wasn't written with an eye on posterity. Much of it was written either as private letters or as quickly turned out pieces for magazines. Book reviews paid the bills in the Orwell house, and he often used them as a platform for a superbly insightful rant some distance from the subject of the book he was ostensibly reviewing.

Reading about the 1930s in words written at the time is very different to the modern stuff; in the differences we see how we've been emasculated by a sense of inevitability and fatedness. But in Orwell's contemporary writings, the Spanish Civil War is still fresh, the communists in the UK are siding against the non-Stalinist troops, the Second World War isn't inevitable, sympathy and indifference to the rise of fascism are widespread. There's everything to play for, and in this there are parallels with politics today and clues for wise action.

Is it cheating to pick a four volume set as my book? Hey, at least I wasn't smartarse enough to be the staggering 20-volume £750 Complete Works of George Orwell, a collection so mighty it leaves out only one known piece of writing he ever did (KGB archives won't let it go apparently), and putting it together left the compiler needing heart bypass surgery.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Nope, although I have been powerfully persuaded to share certain viewpoints. I love how Cis in Ruby and The Stone Age Diet has her hair in a bleached crop, but is described as one of those people who'd look great whatever she did with her hair. Better, 'one of those people you see once in the street, then think about once a week for the rest of your life'. That one was so good I nicked it to describe Cas in my book.

(That was an entirely gratuitous mention of my book just to make Jim Bliss feel better - see his nomination of me for more info)

The last book you bought is:

Bought, you say? I buy a tiny minority of books I get. I tend to avail myself of the poor security arrangements at corporate bookshop chains. I recently got three copies of Colin Tudge's So Shall We Reap so I can give them away to friends. It's the most important book I've ever read.

Oh, actually since then I've got Mark Lynas' High Tide: News from a Warming World. It doesn't argue that climate change is inevitable. It demonstrates that it's already here. Only read the intro and am already astonished and horrified. And yet still they launch the largest passenger aircraft in history.

The last book I actually bought was The Lorax and Oh, The Places You'll Go! from a charity shop in Bradford about a month ago. I got copies for my nephews last christmas, and I'm sure I'll find happy homes for these copies. They're as good a welcome and motivation for newcomers to earth as I can think of.

The other main method of acquisition is loans and gifts. I just got given The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe's sequel to The Rotter's Club. Enjoyed the latter immensely, although for me What A Carve Up! shines above the others of his I've read. It's combines great tenderness with a detective story and an intelligent fury against Thatcherism. But it might be cos it was the first one of his I read.

When you get your first book by a great writer or your first album by a great band it often stays your favourite. Subsequent stuff is sort of more of the same, whereas that first one opened out that whole world to you.

Iain Banks said that if Complicity - an superb novel, btw - had been his first book it'd have cause much more fuss than The Wasp Factory. Similarly, Ruby's the Martin Millar I plumped for, and asking other people they always love their first Millar the most, but if it were given a single transferable vote system Dreams of Sex And Stage Diving would win, it's everyone's second or third favourite. It's got a clearer moral than the others, and could even bee seen as heavy-handedly doing so, but it's a book with lofty aims and hilarious sleaziness.

Criminally, the miserable fuckheads at Fourth Estate have let Millar's stuff go out of print. He's talking with his new publisher, the excellent Codex Books - who also do the essential A259 Multiplex Bomb "Outrage" by Simon Strong - about reprints. I will try to stop talking about him now. I think you've got the point.

The last book you read:

The Boy Who Kicked Pigs by Tom Baker. A dark twisted macabre short story, very vivid, great savouring use of florid language. And all helped by hearing it in your head in Baker's voice as you read. Him and Stephen Fry, the best speakers of English I can think of.

Oh, Fry was simply born to be the voice of the book in Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The movie's pretty good. Like Shaun of The Dead, it manages to be intelligent yet lightweight, a perfect day-after movie; playful with ideas, but no matter how munted you are you won't be bewildered.

What are you currently reading?

I start many more books than I finish. I don't know if I'm going to get any further for a long time. There's usually several such books on the go at any one time. By my bed at the mo (apart from the concise Oxford dictionary which lives there permanently) are:

Julian Cope's The Megalithic European, a stunning continent-wide companion to The Modern Antiquarian.

How To DJ Properly excellent, very witty and in a field that invokes pretention, egotism and wilful mystification of technique more than most it's very clear, down to earth, accessible and encouraging.

Norman Davies' The Isles: A History, a big fat history of these islands that is, for once, from something like a balanced perspective. Simon Schama's 'A History of Britain' was largely actually just a history of the English monarchy. The BBC website for his TV series had a link to English Heritage but not to Historic Scotland or Cadw.

The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Protest. It's a compilation of writings from throughout the century written at the time, mostly by the actual people involved in assorted struggles. Though the title aims a tad higher than it delivers, being very much from a British political perspective.

As with Orwell's thing, writing from the time is very instructive for its freshness and its urge to make changes that aren't yet inevitable/lost. Keir Hardy, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Trotsky, Thatcher, Tony Benn, Malcolm X, Hitler, Germaine Greer, Haile Selassie, Che Guevara, Churchill, Arthur Scargill, Gloria Steinham, George Monbiot. Hell of a book. I love the format; it's dip-in-able without being superficial.

That's a quality we consciously aimed for when we set up the Godhaven Ink writing/publishing coolective; a way of writing that was intelligent, inspiring, informative, substantial in content yet concise.

Maybe it's the punk ethic of DIY and brevity. Growing up on punk, glam rock and 60s pop I got steeped in a value system that said 'make your point well, memorably, then shut up'. Anyone can find a good idea somewhere in a 17 minute guitar solo, but to set up, declare yourself, put a twist on it and leave all in two and a half minutes - and all in a way that sticks in your head even if you only catch it once in passing on the radio - now that's talent.

As Woodrow Wilson said, 'If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.'

And on a related tip, as Orwell himself said, 'never use a long word where a short one will do'.

Five books you would take to a desert island.

I strongly dislike the use of 'desert island' as an image in this type of question. Most of the books, records and other cultural items I love resonate deeply because they help me make sense of this life. They equip me for a future in this culture, they embolden my heart to stay robust for the challenges this society gives me.

There'd be little point in having lots of songs that help you cope with the complexity of human relations if there were no more humans with which relations were being had.

I think a more accurate phrasing - but more unwieldy so I don't expect it to catch on - would be 'if you were only allowed to have access to five books for the rest of your life what would they be?'

That list would look like this:

1. The Modern Antiquarian by Julian Cope.
A huge book in size, scope and effect. Over 300 British Neolithic monument sites documented, and so much more. But for all the good the gazetteer has done to get me properly out of doors, the real power is the hefty wodge of visionary writings that aim to understand why . Why these places were built, why it's still relevant and how we got from then to now.

These monuments aren't from a Golden Age, they're the beginning of humans insisting on leaving their mark, on reshaping the world to suit them, the beginning of alienation and neurosis; the farthest back where we can understand the psyche of who we're dealing with and the start of modern humanity.

Stunningly set out in thought and visually, this inspired work isn't like anything else you've read. A book that, in every sense, makes you see the world a different way.

2. Ruby And The Stone Age Diet by Martin Millar.
The best book for someone like me, a relentless soppy realist dreamer from the Thatcher era.

3. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.
Could have been a number of his. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater is often overlooked, Timequake grossly underrated, Slaughterhouse Five and Slapstick are bona fide masterpieces too, but in the end it's this one that contains all of the greatness of those and more.

Playful with ideas in a way that only a writer who came of age in America's mid 20th century sci-fi years can be, Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut firing on all cylinders. Warm and deeply compassionate, it encourages a tenderness in the reader, you can feel your hard scales of cynicism dissolving.

4. Love by Mahalia.
Is it bad form to pick a book I had a hand in publishing? Well why the hell would I be publishing something that's not astonishing, that's like books already out there?

Love is an unusual format - mixing short stories with poetry (but don't let the p-word scare you) - and mixes scouring emotional honesty with subtlety, an uncommon intellectual perspective and laugh-out-loud wit, always seeing deeper meanings and resonances in human interaction. The workings of the heart told in scenes lit with a light as stark and precise as a laboratory, yet as mysterious and enchanting as a full moon.

5. Egads! It's got to be one of my beloved dip-inable compilations, but which? That Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Protest is the likeliest candidate, but really, to the exclusion of John Pilger's Distant Voices ? Vonnegut's Palm Sunday and Fates Worse Than Death? Or, if this is a Desert Island Discs style thing and money's no option, that complete Orwell thing that chucks in all the novels too? Can I?

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Step on up,

Green Fairy - The first blog I ever got into, and still a big favourite. She combines political intelligence and eloquence with caustic humour, and you know she couldn't give a monkey's what anyone thinks of her writing.

Miss Badger - Discovering each other through a mutual love of Green Fairy and badgers, she's a clever unashamed feminist and we so need a lot more of those around the place.

Uncarved - Culturally, John's a tireless observer, commentator, catalyst and instigator, and brings so many diverse strands to his mix that he's bound to put you on to good things you've never come across any other way.

twelve things about me

That last post about dithering over the disclosure of bruised heart ponderings made me realise that I haven't actually written that much about me in the form of personal details.

So, as any good writer should do, I'm going to copy Jim Bliss.

Having read his 'eleven things about me' blog post, I realised that I too tend to talk about music and politics and leave you, my dear devoted reader, a little in the dark about myself.

So let's go one better than Jim. Here are twelve things about me. I'm not necessarily proud of all these, but they are all true. Except one.

• One:
  The first record I bought isn't entirely known. My brother says it was Remember You're a Womble. I have no memory of this and contend it was a record token spent on Little Does She Know by the Kursaal Flyers.
  
  My brother thinks I say that out of embarrassment at the Wombles, whereas I actually think the Wombles would be perfectly acceptable for a five year old. Little Does She Know, on the other hand, is inexcusable shite.
  
  The BBC once ran a late night series called Rock Docs where they repeated a wide range of vintage documentaries about rock bands. I caught one about the Kursaal Flyers. You know the bit in Bad News where the van picks them up to set off on tour and they all live with their mums? Yep. So similar I genuinely believe Bad News just lifted it direct.
  
  It also featured their seasoned pro sessionist banjo player (banjo player!) downing a pint of beer in one go which the proper members of the band cheered on as a marvel of rock n roll excess to which they could only aspire.



• Two:
  The only pilgrimages I've made to graves are, in order; Wilfred Owen, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Marc Bolan and George Orwell.



• Three:
  I was once in a band called Clitoris Allsorts. Although we were a trio our publicity photos had four of us in. The extra person was Bastard Barry Beetroot who wanted to be in the pictures, and on no account did you argue with Bastard Barry.



• Four:
  I am the executor of my brother's will. It is my legal duty to carry out the instructions therein, indeed it will be illegal for me not to ensure the James Bond theme is played as his coffin is carried into the crematorium, placed on a surfboard, draped in a hawaiian shirt, then when the curtains part and the coffin goes into the flames the Beach Boys Surfin' Surfari kicks in .
  
  'Let's go surfin' now, everybody's learning how, come on a surfari with me...'
  
  Reciprocally, my family have instructions to play The Laughing Gnome at my funeral. The Laughing Gnome is a joke record, and life itself is ultimately a joke. We're all gonna die, all things pass, there is no final ultimate meaning.
  
  Also, it's Bowie, my big musical hero. He made it in 1967, freshly signed to Decca's new hip offshoot Deram. Everything on Deram was being a big hit - Cat Stevens, Procol Harum, even idiotic nonsense like I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman by Whistling Jack Smith (you probably don't recognise the name but trust me, you'll know the track if you hear it).
  
  Bowie, having flopped on several labels already, was another bright hope for Deram. However The Laughing Gnome made no impact at all. And rightly so, it's rubbish.
  
  Six years later when Bowie had bloomed into Ziggy Stardust and was one of the great rock artists of all time at the peak of his powers, his old label Deram reissued The Laughing Gnome. It went top ten and sold over quarter of a million copies.
  
  The moral, as Kurt Vonnegut took a whole novel to make loud and clear to us, is that it's so very easy in this life to do things in all innocence that turn out to be a very bad idea and come back and haunt you forever.
  
  But beyond the profound element, I just like the idea of a record that stupid being played at a funeral.
  
  My family are also instructed to ensure everyone present joins hand Auld Lang Syne style and sing Ace of Spades.



• Five:
  The computer I'm writing this on was paid for by the police. I was arrested because a policeman said I bored him. As being boring is not a criminal offence (and even if it were I can nominate a hefty list of more serious offenders), I got compensation off the cop and not only bought the computer but two weeks in the Caribbean as well.



• Six:
  I've made a real point of personally meeting artists whose work I really like. If you pick your heroes well they're never a disappointment in the flesh.
  
  One time I met Marty Willson-Piper out of The Church, my all time guitar hero. Unfortunately I'd been awake for a day and a half and gone into an Amsterdam coffee shop, bought the strongest weed in the house had two hefty bongs and gotten so high that even though I was sitting down I had to hold on to the table. Two minutes later this, in turn, became too hectic and I had to put my face on the table.
  
  At this point Marty came in, had a half hour conversation with the man beside me, then left. I couldn't move or speak the entire time. I was shunted to the gig round the corner half an hour later which in that state was quasi-religious experience. (The gig, not the shunting).
  
  Although I've met several dozen of the people whose creative output means the most to me, I've only been tongue-tied and starstruck in front of three of them. They are Patti Smith, Mick Jones out of The Clash, and Jill Bryson out of Strawberry Switchblade. Make of that what you will.



• Seven:
  Although I'm an eco-orientated anarchist, my close family includes an international arms dealer, a racist copper, a genetic engineer, a marine, a road haulage firm director, a racist immigration officer and a prison adminstrator. All things considered we get on pretty well.



• Eight:
  At a Mudhoney gig in Bristol I was asked for my autograph by a girl who thought I was Sebastian Bach, the singer out of sub-Bon Jovi wet metal band Skid Row. Being taken by surprise I was, in retrospect, dismissive of her to the point of unkindness. Which as it will have sullied Bach's reputation rather than mine is not necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps I should have been downright cruel.



• Nine:
  I met my first proper girlfriend at a Pogues gig. My friend Trixie had misjudged his intake of my homebrew and stumbled into a random stranger, whereupon he proceeded to give her abuse for it. I calmed him down and apologised on his behalf. She turned out to be great. She wrote her phone number on the back of my gig ticket, which I have to this day. When she got home she discovered Trixie had vomited all down her back. Despite that we saw each other for several months.
  
  I recently googled her. She's working for a council making sure kids who leave care get as much help as possible setting themselves up in life. She's written a couple of really good militantly compassionate articles on the subject. I knew I was right to feel like I did about her.



• Ten:
  Me and some friends once broadcast a radio sketch about a facial dickslapping contest between Ian Brady and the reanimated corpse of Sid James. It got no complaints from listeners at all.



• Eleven:
  I've been on Top of The Pops. It got more complaints from viewers than any other edition.



• Twelve:
  I used to work on a farm in Lancashire with people who played a game of cash-based theoretical dare; 'how much money would you need to...?'.
  
  One day someone said he'd fuck a cold headless corpse on a mortuary slab for three and a half thousand pounds, rebuffing disbelief with 'I could pay off my car with that'.
  
  This, as it turns out, was a good thing for me; Obviously, I quit soon after, finally completely and permanently free of the work ethic.