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Sheesh!  Quiet round here, no?

We’ve spent the last (check time since last post) up to all sorts… Oh, the stories we could tell, if only we had a suitable outlet for those stories, which I’m pretty sure we don’t.

Anyway, here’s a quick message to highlight the following items of mild Steve Show Posse-related interest…

Rufus is currently appearing in the wildly triumphant run of The 39 Steps at London’s fashionable Criterion Theatre. 

A night of big laughs and reasonably priced interval ice-creams is guaranteed – tickets available here, get them before they’re gone…

The microscopic Venn diagram intersection that comprises Steve Show fans and football supporters will be elated to learn that Dan will be taking a sideways glance at tomorrow’s transfer deadline activity on LiveWire Sports’ all-new Deadline Day website.  He will also be offering full frontal views and sneaky rear-shots. 

Sammy has been at Leeds festival… while we await reports, why not try to create your own Sammy festival story using the following words…

Wellie-Slash-Fishtank; Jarvis’s Glasses; Glitter Stew; Banjo Unorthodoxy; Tentally Ill; Man With Small Ears; Loose-Fitting Goggles; Noodle Smoothie; I Befriended An Owl; etc

Harry, freed from the requirement to occasionally admit to liking things on the radio, has now settled back into hating everything, and is much happier as a result.

Steve, as you’re no doubt aware, has a massive stand-up tour starting in September and running until early December.  Incredibly not sponsored by Lemsip or the concept of having a little lie down in the afternoon, Steve’s tour will be coming to a town near you soon.  Why not buy some tickets?  If you already have some, why not buy some more?

Of course, Steve has an official website where you can find all the very latest Steve news – please don’t sit here, wildly mashing the F5 button in the forlorn hope of being the first to discover some red hot Steve titbits. 

So that’s the latest.  Thanks for coming by. 

H.

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Steve and I have a relationship that, as far as music is concerned, works something like this… I plough through obscure periodicals, far-flung corners of the internet and dusty record shops hunting for exciting, sexy new music.  When I’ve found some, depending on the decade I’ll either record a compilation tape, burn a CD or download a playlist onto a USB memory stick shaped like a pineapple and hand it to Steve to enjoy and impress girls with.

Steve, in fairness, does likewise and has often brought little-known artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and The Beatles to my attention, for which I am eternally grateful.

Anyway, by virtue of being a 6 Music ‘jock’ and being sent all kinds of free stuff, Steve was able to up his game and introduce me to the joys of Built To Spill, a band that I’d shamefully managed to overlook.

For the uninitiated, Built to Spill’s sound revolves around three guitars and veers from laid back & dreamy to insistent & snarly.  It’s never less than fascinating, often thrilling, and Doug Martsch’s high-pitched vocal recalls Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard (who apparently cites BtS as an influence).

Doug Martsch, Built To Spill.......Ron Burgundy, Ready To Hurl

The last time I saw Dinosaur Jr was during their first reunion tour in 2005.  It was unbelievably loud, like being beaten around the head with a mid-sized bungalow, and I walked away with little recollection of the evening, save for a ringing in the ears that will no doubt return to haunt me in later life.

As the roadies wheel on more and more amps for tonight’s set, I’m patting myself on the back, carrying myself head high through the crowd and drenching myself with a massive celebratory bucket of Gatorade, safe in the knowledge that this time I’ve come prepared.

The young, devil-may-care Harry would be appalled, but old, let’s-just-sit-down-and-have-a-biscuit Harry couldn’t give a shit about that snivelling little idiot, which is why he’s proudly wearing earplugs to a gig.

I’ll concede it’s not fashionable or sexy, and listening through earplugs is like watching through a net curtain, but if it means that 83-year old Harry is at least able to hear the bus coming before it runs him over, I’ll be happy.        

The set has moved on since those reunion shows – rather than being tied to the early albums we also get picks from the two (excellent) new albums, a blistering Feel The Pain and a triumphant Freak Scene, amongst other treats.

J Mascis, looking for all the world like Iggy Pop’s glamourous younger sister, peels off 747-sized riffs and glorious, squally solos, while Lou Barlow looks like he’s having the time of his life on bass, a world apart from the nervous figure he cuts at solo shows.

The ludicrous 10.30 curfew (in order to make way for the indie disco) means we only get a one-song encore, but I’m probably the only one left disappointed.  The rest of the audience stumble out into the night, wondering what just happened, and why Oxford’s buses have fallen silent.

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Like a highly intelligent and sexy hedgehog, the Steve Show Posse website has been in a kind of hibernation during the barren, permafrost musical months of January to April. 

Sure, we’ve occasionally popped our pretty little heads out from our Sonic Youth slankets for long enough to toss out the odd wordy nugget, but we’ve mostly kept ourselves to ourselves while waiting for sunshine and the tunes that will form the soundtrack to a summer of frisbee championships, barbecue riots and outdoors baby-making.

The first such tune to come our way is the all-new single from The Bitter Springs – My Life As A Dog In A Pigsty.

If you didn’t pay attention last time, then listen up now and listen up good – no-one else is making records like this at the moment, and you need to be involved for your own good.

Propelled by guest Terry Edwards’ (Tindersticks, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, etc) majestic trumpet, My Life… combines warmth, wisdom and high comedy in the tale of a young man’s turbulent life, all set to a majestic tune.  To hell and Bacharach*, you might say. 

Of course, it’s yet another song about breaking up with the missus after she discovers your inter-species affair with the family’s pet dog Beyonce, of empathising with terrorists after getting off at the wrong stop in Canary Wharf, and of rhyming slang carveries (Jean Claude? Penelope?**), so if you’ve heard enough of those sort of songs, don’t bother.  The kids on Glee probably did one like it last week.

And if you’ve ever been given better advice than ”Pray to whoe’er you choose, keep one good pair of shoes, some you’ll win, some you’ll lose“, then you can pass too.

But for everyone else (ie everyone), this is a wonderful record, blighted only by the fact it’s not getting a physical release.  You can buy it online from Monday at Amazon, Play and iTunes, and by doing so improve the quality of your life by several notches.

And if you’re going to be in London this weekend, The Bitter Springs are playing a frustratingly rare gig at the Wilmington Arms on Saturday night (the 24th) – buy your ticket in advance here or hope that there are some left on the night.

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So, it’s true.

Erstwhile home of The Steve Show and favourite radio station of everyone who likes music, 6 Music is to be shut down by the BBC.

In a strategy report released today, the BBC announced that 6 Music and the Asian Network are to close, along with cutbacks to their website and various other tinkerings.

I fell in love with 6 Music the first time I turned on my brand new DAB radio and heard them playing Husker Du.  No-one plays Husker Du.  I woke up to the grumpy mumblings of Phill Jupitus, I nodded off to Marc Riley in the evenings, and often considered throwing a sickie just to tune in to the brilliant Gideon Coe.

And then, incredibly, we got the gig!  Where else would a bunch of utterly unqualified hangers-on like us be allowed to broadcast for two hours a week on national radio?  Apart from talkSPORT, maybe?

Now don’t get me wrong – 6 Music isn’t perfect.  I’ve never understood the point of 6 Music News Music News, the playlist can be a bit annoying during the week, and then there’s George Lamb.  Also, it took them ages to sort out our passes for the building, the security guards on reception were useless, and finding a pair of headphones that worked was always the toughest assignment of the afternoon.

6 also had a big part to play in the rise and rise of ‘landfill indie’, the dreary corporate alterno-fodder used in the trails for every E4 show.

But by playing interesting, often challenging stuff that you really don’t hear anywhere else, by giving a platform to hundreds of lesser-known artists to play live sessions, and by having some of the most musically articulate and passionate DJs around, 6 Music really is unique.  Maconie’s FreakZone?  The Craig Charles Funk & Soul Show?  The aforementioned Coe and Riley? Garvey, Cocker, Robinson?

And yet it has to go.  The BBC is shutting down a station that could not exist in the commercial world.  We sometimes received bleating emails from unhinged listeners carping on about how playing something that they didn’t like was somehow against the remit of the station, which was obviously bollocks, but at least proved the passion of the station’s supporters.  Today’s decision, to me, flies in the face of the remit of the BBC.  

If they’re going to shut anything down (in what is, let’s face it, a pre-emptive strike against a BBC-hostile Tory government which may not even be voted in), it should really be Radio1 – there are countless commercial stations that replicate the output of Radio1, and the cost saving would be off the scale of anything announced today.

Of course, everyone should join the Facebook group, but frankly, once businesses make decisions like this, they tend not to change them.  You might as well join a group appealing for the return of New Coke, or the abolition of Tuesdays. 

If I’ve learnt anything over the last 12 months, it’s that no matter how inept a business decision, the individuals responsible will fall behind it and defend it to the death, and hope that people eventually just give up the fight.

But wait – what’s this?  The chairman of the BBC Trust has said that the decision could be overturned if there is ‘massive public concern’.  And absurd shadow culture spokesman Ed Vaizey is now apparently a huge 6Music fan.

So take to the streets.  Daub pro-Nemone slogans on your duvet covers and hang them from motorway bridges.  Don Shaun Keaveney facemasks and storm the town halls of this fair land.  Raze the studios of XFM to the ground and dissect the corpses with sharpened Fall CDs. 

Let’s save 6Music.

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It’s been a busy January for me, what with a skiing holiday and relentless (and – finally – successful) job searching.  The result of which has been a backlog of hot new tunes, in what seems like a stellar musical start to the year.

There’s a pile of vinyl next to the record player that I haven’t even dared to attack yet, so let’s start off with some comfy old favourites, bands you can return to album after album in the knowledge that you’ll get some tasty treats…

I shouldn’t really like The Magnetic Fields of course.  The synths and a frustrating propensity towards novelty have tended to irk, but the tunes, the wonderfully arch lyrics and Stephin Merritt’s world-weary baritone always draw me back.  This time, the credits proudly state ‘no synths’ (just like Queen did back in 1973), and Merritt takes his fare share of vocal duties. 

The bar is set pretty high on opening track You Must Be Out Of Your Mind, a trademark shuffling melody accompanied by a creamy croon and, in the first verse, the wonderful ‘I want you crawling back to me, Down on your knees, yeah; Like an appendectomy, Sans anasthesia’.  Ace.

We Are Having A Hootenanny might be poking fun at Scientology but definitely sounds like something from The Muppet Show.  So it’s good, obviously.  But is it as good as The Swedish Chef doing Yes, We Have No Bananas?  You decide…

Click here for We Are Having A Hootenanny Now by The Magnetic Fields (opens in a new window for your reading pleasure)

So, we have another reassuringly lovely Magnetic Fields album – better than previous effort Distortion, not as good as 1995′s synth-tastic Get Lost, if you want to slip it into some theoretical MF league table in your brain.  If you haven’t got any Magnetic Fields, don’t be tempted to begin with 69 Love Songs – it’s their most well-known record but there’s just too much to get through, and some of the filler will have you punching yourself in the face with frustration.  Realism is a good a place as any to start.

Gloom-core, mope-rock, jazz-sob, you can try to pin down Tindersticks but you’ll never quite nail it. 

After a triumphant first three albums (First, Second and Curtains), a shift to a more soulful sound, a messy break-up in 2006, singer Stuart Staples (who almost out-baritones Stephin Merritt) releasing a couple of solo albums and an eventual rebirth with three of the original six members, Tindersticks have, against the odds, made their best record in years.

I could get all CSI on your ass and give you some rigourous analysis of the record but this ain’t Vibraphone Sniffer’s Monthly, so let’s just say it’s a great Tindersticks album.  It has to be, as all of their classic constituent parts are there…

Woozy instrumental – check (Hubbards Hills), Morricone-esque rattler – check (She Rode Me Down), delicate piano ballad – check (Factory Girls), duet with a nice lady – check (the endearingly goofy Peanuts, with Mary Margaret O’Hara). 

It’s top-notch stuff, with the added bonus of a song that sounds just like Kim Wilde’s Kids In America.  Harmony Around My Table is its name, and it even has the temerity to break down halfway through and restart with handclaps.  Tindersticks gigs aren’t renowned for their audience participation (apart from the weeping), but this song could be the one to change all that.

Find out for yourself as they play Europe in February and March.  There are three UK shows  – Edinburgh 22/3, Manchester 23/3, and London, almost certainly with Tiny Dan and I in attendance, on 24/3…

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Belittling charity isn’t a cast-iron guarantee of popularity. 

In fact, I’d go as far to say that there’s not much to be gained in making fun of charity. 

There’s no money in it, it won’t increase your standing in the community (no-one ever got an MBE for making fun of Cancer Research), and should you become the victim of something terrible, those who would usually be the first to help – whether by donating money, a vital organ, or by badgering their colleagues to support them in their latest self-aggrandising Herculean feat of running/cycling/skydiving/farting the alphabet – would be well within their rights to thumb their noses, turn on their heels and leave you to wallow in your misery.

That said, this charity record that Simon Cowell’s organising – doesn’t it sound like a bag of toss?

Like JR, Stalin and Jeffrey Dahmer, Cowell is the man you love to hate.  He’s a mischievous chappy with a glint in his eye and a frighteningly small vocabulary, whose hatred of music knows no bounds.

To this end, he’s ruining the great efforts of the British people in helping the Haitian earthquake victims (£38m raised so far in a recession), by guilting them into buying what sounds like the worst record ever.

He’s organising a star-stunted cover of REM’s weepalong classic Everybody Hurts.  Not a bad song, by any means.  But let’s see who he’s managed to rope in so far…

Well, there’s Rod Stewart.  He’s a big name.  And Michael Buble.  Then there’s JLS and Leona Lewis (how on earth did he manage to get them?)  And, ummm, that’s it. 

Apparently Coldplay, Robbie Williams and Paul McCartney have been approached.  More likely to appear are those who have expressed an interest – uber-chinned nice guy Will Young, victorious X-Factor automo-gonk Joe McElderry and single-mother-text-threatening gormoloids NDubz.

Anyone who’s anyone has already donated to Emily Eavis’s rock memorabilia auction (Coldplay, Damon Albarn, Arctic Monkeys, Chemical Brothers, Pearl Jam, etc) or signed up to George Clooney’s massive US telethon (Bono and The Edge, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen, Mary J Blige, etc).

So Simon is left with nothing more than pop detritus with which to produce a charity smash.

It looks horribly like going the same way as 1987′s Ferry Aid single, hastily arranged to raise cash for the victims of the Zeebrugge tragedy.

Ferry Aid was organised by the Cowells of the day, the shadowy shit-pop collective Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and featured a motley crew (ferry pun not intended) of attention-seeking no-marks.

Paul McCartney gave permission for Let It Be to be used, but wisely only contributed vocals from the original 1970 recording sessions.  The rest was left to the likes of Paul King, Pepsi and Shirlie, Mel and Kim, Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot, Jaki Graham and the justifiably-forgotten Taffy.  If you are under the age of 30, you really shouldn’t know who any of these people are.

The highlight of Ferry Aid was undoubtedly the final chorus, honked by a haphazardly-assembled choir including Alvin Stardust, Doctor and the Medics, Go West, Bucks Fizz, The Nolan Sisters, Mandy Smith and Su Pollard (I’m genuinely not making this up).

Against all odds, and showing that the British public will support almost anything in the name of charity, it stayed at number one for 3 weeks and shifted just under half a million copies.

Will Cowell’s attempt do the same?  Probably.  People are generally quite nice and willing to put their hands in their pockets for a good cause.  But wouldn’t we all be better off if Cowell (estimated worth £112m) just handed over £3m of his own money and pissed off for a bit?

For anyone who’s bothered to read this far, I can provide an exclusive peek at the wish list for the song’s running order, showing who will be taking each line…

(Leona Lewis)                      When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
(Michael Buble)                    When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on
(Rod Stewart)                      Don’t let yourself go, ’cause everybody cries

(Sisqo)                                  And everybody hurts sometimes

(Scouting For Girls)              Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it’s time to sing along
(JLS)                                     When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)
(Eamonn Holmes)                 If you feel like letting go, (hold on)
(Sir Trevor McDonald)          When you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on

(Simon Weston)                   ’Cause everybody hurts. Take comfort in your friends
(The Go Compare Ad Man)   Everybody hurts.

(Abu Hamza)                         Don’t throw your hand. Oh, no. Don’t throw your hand
(Loose Women)                    If you feel like you’re alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

(Sir Fred Goodwin)                If you’re on your own in this life, the days and nights are long,
(Jackiey Budden)                  When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on

(Amanda Holden)                  Well, everybody hurts sometimes,
(Louis Walsh)                        Everybody cries. And everybody hurts sometimes
(Simon Cowell & Sinitta)      And everybody hurts sometimes.

(Chorus comprised of the above plus Neil Tennant, David Tennant, Princess Superstar, Davina McCall, Nicholas Van Hoogstraaten, Lemar, Ricky Hatton, Elin Nordegen, Flat Eric, Eric Bristow, Bernie Eccleston and Bernie Madoff)

So, hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Everybody hurts. You are not alone

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A decade, eh?  It’s too long to even think about.  A review of the year is hard enough, a whole decade is ludicrous.  Summing up 29% of my life in a series of snappy soundbites, with mildly amusing links, comments and the odd youtube video is a massive piece of work.  I know Jordan releases a new autobiography every 8 months, but she’s a massive pro, and I’m not.

However, that’s not to say that I haven’t noticed certain things (at a rate of 1 every 2.5 years), which I could write in list form below, complete with supporting arguments and questionable grammar…

1. Things keep getting smaller.

Oh, we used to have lovely big records, which became nasty little CDs, which briefly threatened to become even tinier and less loveable minidiscs, and now we have mp3s which are so small that YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.

My first iPod was the size of a shirehorse, and if I wanted to take it out with me I would have to strap it to my back and attach counterbalancing weights to my chest to stop me from falling backwards.  But then came the itty-bitty Nano and the even smaller Shuffle.  And all the time the standard iPod kept shrinking.  Now they can put them in phones, which means that they are so small that YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.

TV’s used to be massive.  Do you remember massive TVs?  Do you?  You do? Weren’t they huge?  Not the screens obviously – they were little bulbous affairs that made your eyes septic – but all of the gubbins round the back.  TVs were so mind-thumpingly futuristic that they had to carry a big, hot, glowing box of science behind them to power their magic.  If you wanted one with teletext, you had to buy one that was so enormous due to the many wires, valves and pulleys that powered it, that the screen ended up looking like the sticker off an apple, stuck onto a car-park.

But now the clever bits have been crushed down to the size of nothing, and even though the screens are massive, if you stand to the side and look at them from the wrong angle, YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.

And this unarguable point can be observed throughout our daily lives.  In the 90’s we all used to live in castles and eat whole pigs for breakfast, whereas now we live in individual life-pods and subsist for a month on a spoonful of macrobiotic yoghurt. 

In the 90’s we all had hair that was massive and we drove lorries, now we’re all slapheads in Nissan Micras.

If the march of technology continues unabated, soon we’ll all be commuting in tiny, one-man trains to an office which is too small for us to get into, where we think up marketing campaigns for billboards that are invisible to the naked eye, for products that we keep losing because YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.  

In my view, that would be a bad thing.

2. The Demise Of The Record Shop.

In the 90’s, independent record shops were living the dream – Nirvana and Pearl Jam created a new generation of rock fans, Oasis v Blur made the evening news, Echobelly v Shed Seven made page 12 of the Stockport Gazette, and people couldn’t stop going out and buying their records.

And there were a bunch of big record stores too – Our Price, HMV, Virgin, MVC – a savvy record buyer could shop around, maybe getting 30p off the recommended retail price of a single, a free Roxette keyring, or an exclusive papier-mache replica of Morrissey’s chin with their copy of Bona Drag.

Nowadays, we all steal music online and the record shops are dying.  93% of the independent stores have been closed down and turned into Pound Shops.  Our Price, MVC and Virgin are long gone, and asking for something non-chart from the music section in HMV (usually hidden away at the back of the store behind a wall of Michael McIntyre DVDs) is like going into Anne Summers and asking for a lifesize blow-up Alsatian, such is the look of disdain you’re likely to get from the shop assistant.

So support your independent stores while you can, for they may not be around for much longer. 

Remember, without record stores there would be no High Fidelity.  Instead we’d have a film solely about a guy downloading Annie Lennox b-sides from a file-sharing service, for 93 minutes.  Booooring.

3. Excessive and Unfair Guilt by Association.

A handful of bankers make a few piffling blunders and wreck the world economy, and we all get the blame for it. 

It’s just not fair.

Telling people that you work in a bank these days is like telling people that you’re the guy who tests perfume by dripping it into the eyeballs of live toddlers.  It’s dinner party hell, and you can’t even get a decent bonus anymore to pay for protection.

Luckily, as I’m now unemployed, I no longer get invited to dinner parties, as potential hosts fear that I’ll eat them out of house and home, nick their cutlery and start living rough in their front garden.

So why did everyone in the banking industry get tarred with the same brush?  I mean, just because Gary Glitter was found guilty of all that stuff, it doesn’t mean you’d instantly point the finger at other figures from pop in the 70’s like Jonathan King and that bloke out of the Bay City Rollers, does it?

OK, bad example, but you get my drift.

4. Aren’t gigs expensive these days?

As ways of acquiring music got cheaper, so gigs became ever more expensive. 

Once a cheap way to see a band to find out whether or not you liked them, gigs are fast becoming for the devout fan only, with casual punters unlikely to shell out £23 plus booking fee, plus delivery fee, plus paper & ink fee to see a bunch of chippy blokes with 3 good songs who got a mention in the NME six months ago.

And because gigs are packed with happy-clapping fans, there’s no-one available to pipe up and heckle if the band is rubbish.  Have we really moved forward as a species if no-one is prepared to throw a Doc Marten full of warm piss at a moody bass player anymore?

I saw some great shows in the noughties though.  Radiohead in South Park, Oxford in 2001.  The Night Marchers at San Diego’s Casbah in 2008.  The Strokes at the Hard Rock Café in Las Vegas in 2006.  The Bellrays, The Dirtbombs and Rocket From the Crypt on the same bill at Bristol’s short-lived Essential Festival in 2002.

The best one was probably Foo Fighters in the tiny 400-capacity Dingwalls in Camden in 2007.  Having found out from someone at work that there was a fans-only gig going down that night, I decided to mobilise the full force of The Steve Show, with notoriously crazy producer Jude putting in some calls and getting Steve and I on the guestlist. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgkYhQqpyfc

I should point out that this was pretty much the only time that working on the show got us a juicy bonus like this.

Even so, I know what you’re thinking – it’s a sad indictment of the record industry when a fan-only gig is gatecrashed by a pair of corporate shills like us (especially as the fans didn’t get to go to the pre-show reception where Dave talked about the new album while we munched on canapés and necked free beer).

But in fairness, I had always been a massive fan of the Food Fighters, ever since lead singer David Gray left his old band New Order following the death of their drummer, Bernard Bresslaw.

So, erm, in summary, aren’t gigs expensive these days?  Ahem.

Conclusion.

In the 2010’s, the Teenies, the Tweenies, the Tenties, whatever you want to call them, I think we can all now agree that we’d like to see

• things get bigger, or at least maintain their current size;
• an environment where record shops prosper and flourish again;
• people, like, you know, calming down a bit;
• gigs becoming more affordable for bladder-challenged boot-hurlers.

This is my manifesto, and I look forward to receiving your vote in May.

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Merry Christmas to everyone who managed to find us tucked away in this little corner of the internet over the last few months.  The New Year should hopefully bring solid-gold content aplenty, or, more likely, the usual stuff.

We hope that Santa brings you New Music by the sackload, but let’s face it, we’re all likely to receive the odd iffy present from a distant relative.

‘Ooooh, he’s always listening to music, why don’t we get him that music-related thing that we’ve got no idea whether or not he’ll actually like?’

So, sympathies to everyone who receives something horribly inappropriate, whether it’s the Scouting For Girls 2010 Calendar, a hot air balloon ride with Duran Duran, or the life-size Lady Gaga doll with self-moistening crevices.

If you get something truly awful, please let us know below…

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Hidden away on Sunday afternoon when nothing really happens, The Steve Show was a fearless crusader in taking a sideways look at the big news stories that had already been done to death elsewhere, and that everyone, us included, was already bored with.

In that spirit of hard-hitting, zeitgeist-straddling, opinio-tainment, let’s have a look at the big ruckus over the UK Christmas No1… should you be happy that Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name beat Joe from the X Factor in the race to No.1 in the hit parade?  What does this mean for the future of the country? Will we all die horribly before our time, or can we now look forward to everlasting life and free sweets? 

This handy cut out and keep guide will allow you to hold a forthright view in any discussion on the matter over the festive period. 

Argument 1 – It’s A Good Thing

Of course it’s great that Rage won the battle.  Simon Cowell does not understand or even like music.  His shows plough a dreary furrow to the lowest common denominator, proving that you can sell any old crap if you attach a dubious backstory to it – a dead parent, an unfortunate stammer, a birthmark shaped like a massive cock and balls on your forehead – and flog it to death on 18 consecutive Saturday nights.

But it’s not just that, it’s the manner in which he was defeated… take a look at the magical machine you’re reading this on – it has the power to bring hundreds of thousands of people together for an authority-bashing campaign. 

It’s a common complaint from ex-kids that the kids of today are too apathetic, that they’re too sodding lazy to care about anything, let alone do anything about it.  That theory has been smashed by the youth uniting with their right hands, not for an enormous attempt at the biscuit game, but to download the sound of disobedience and to thumb their noses at authority.

On top of all this, it’s raised stacks of money for Shelter and brought a classic track to the attention of a new generation of rock enthusiasts.

I remember seeing Rage at Reading in 1993, it changed my life forever, and they’re still as important and relevant today.

Argument 2 – It’s A Bad Thing

Of course it’s terrible that Joe lost the battle.  The X Factor is the Christmas story updated for the modern age - Joe is the infant child in a manger; Cowell, Cole and Minogue are the three wise men; Louis is Mary, it all stacks up.  In celebrating the birth of Joe by giving him the Xmas No.1, we are painfully aware that we will be mourning his passing by Easter as his second single (an unwise cover of Richard Blackwood’s Mama Who Da Man) bombs and he’s reduced to opening new branches of Millets for £50 a pop.  Denying us this timeless narrative is an affront to the magic of the season.

And what’s even worse is the manner in which he was defeated… hundreds of thousands of sniggering ninnies, hidden behind their keyboards thinking they’re so bloody clever and ironic, uniting for an aim with no tangible purpose. 

It’s typical of the youth of today, getting excited about something so utterly pointless while ignoring the big issues of the day.  And you know it will lead to even more of those ludicrous Facebook campaigns - Get 1,000,000 People To Make Brown Shoes Illegal; 800,000 People Say ‘I Like Crisps’; 375,000 People Support Exhuming The Corpse Of Jade Goody And Giving Her A Traditional Viking Funeral On The Thames.  

On top of all this, it’s raised stacks of money for Sony and brought a ludicrous, whiny track to the attention of a new generation of hairy outcasts, all of whom express their individuality by looking gloomy, having dubious personal hygiene and wearing the same Nirvana ‘smiley’ tshirt.     

I remember seeing Rage at Reading in 1993 – I got bored after 20 minutes and went to watch Chumbawamba in the NME tent.   I wonder what they’re up to now?

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There’s no point whatsoever in living through an entire year, a whole 365 days if you will, if you’re not prepared to sit down sometime near the end and draw up some fatuous lists celebrating things that might have happened during said year.   I’m not the sort of person to shirk my responsibilties (unless I’m at work, or there’s football on the telly, or, you know, I can’t really be bothered), so here – in what was a strange and unsettling year on Planet Harry – are my top 5 top 10s of 2009…

5. Top 10 Albums of 2009

10. The King Khan & BBQ Show – Invisible Girl (garage rock duo present more hi-jinks)

9. Jacuzzi Boys – No Seasons (tuneful Floridian oddness)

8. Peter Doherty – Grace/Wastelands (sounds like The Clash at times, but not all the time)

7. Obits – I Blame You (shiny rock and roll)

6. Graham Coxon – The Spinning Top (better than the Blur reunion)

5. Magnolia Electric Company – Josephine (country gloom with occasional eau de Boss)

4. Built To Spill – There Is No Enemy (world-weary brilliance)

3. Maplewood – Yeti Boombox (they sound a bit like Canyon, but with shorter songs and better tunes)

2. Great Lake Swimmers – Lost Channels (acoustic loveliness)

1. Reigning Sound – Love And Curses (I like this more than the other 9)

I started the year with two jobs – one as a banker, one as a giggling buffoon on the Steve Show.  Now I have no jobs, so I have a lot of time to kill.  For the unemployed, Sudoku is a great thing.  If you find a newspaper that offers an Easy, Intermediate and Hard Sudoku each day, you can a) kill an hour and a half, b) exercise your brain, and c) burn the newspaper for heat after completing them.  The Easy ones are easy, I can polish off an Intermediate with little trouble, but sometimes the Hard ones are very hard and you have to just take a guess on a number…

4. Top 10 Numbers To Guess In Sudoku When You Don’t Know What Number To Put In A Particular Space 

10. 7

9. 3

8. 6

7. 2

6. 1

5. 5

4. 9

3. 4

2. 8

1. err, 6 again

But let’s not forget, it’s not all peaches and pixie - if you don’t have work then you get a pitiful £63 a week from the state to keep you in razorblades and sleeping pills.  But surely there’s hope?  What else can you buy with your £63? 

3. Top 10 Things You Could Buy With Your £63 Weekly Jobseeker’s Allowance 

10. Staywell Infra Red Cat Flap

9. Rolsa Mountain Luna Shopping Trolley

8. H Fereday & Sons Queen Traditional Kitchen Scales

7. 4 Pack of Ultrasun Sport Factor 20 Suncream

6. Black & Decker Electric Leaf Blower

5. Ready Made Melamine Vivarium (With 2 Toughened Glass Sliding Doors)

4. New Fox Warrior Recliner Chair

3. Printmate Q6000A HP 1600/2600 Series Black Toner Cartridge

2. ‘Alina’ Doll Kit Sculpted by Adrie Stoet-Schuiteman

1. DrySenz UltraDry Commercial Hand Dryer Unit

Blimey, that’s enough hard-hitting social commentary for now.  What about the music, eh?  That’s what we’re all here for, hmmm? 

2. Top 10 Tunes of 2009 (That Weren’t On Any Of Those Albums I Listed Earlier…)

10. Hex Dispensers – Doomsday Romantic

9. The Marked Men – Fortune

8. Holy State – Solid State Messiah

7. The Bitter Springs – And Even Now

6. The Cribs – Cheat On Me

5. Lou Barlow – I’m Thinking…

4. The Broken Family Band – St Albans

3. The Bird & The Bee – Love Letter To Japan

2. Art Brut – Alcoholics Unanimous

1. BC Camplight – Your Daddy Is A Little Girl

Now, come on, let’s be fair, I may have painted a bleak picture of unemployment during this piece.  I’m sorry, don’t be upset.  It’s not all that bad.  I’m fine, really.  To prove it, why not suck up my final top 10 of 2009…

1. Top 10 Best Things About Being Unemployed

10. Health and well-being.  Avoiding packed trains on the daily commute into London means you don’t pick up several billion germs/bugs a day.  These are some of the illnesses I haven’t had this year – cold, flu, earache, scrofula, tendonitis, mad cow disease, nursemaid’s elbow, the heebie-jeebies, Norfolk Nose, Ruislip Wrist, and Staines Massive Syndrome (which I believe to be a form of elephantiasis).  

9. Finding yourself.  Working for the last 13 years, you become accustomed, oblivious even,  to the bizarre phoney rituals you have to go through to satisfy the endless cycle of work, praise, reward, only occasionally interspersed with the odd promotion or bollocking along the way.  Without that cruelly manufactured system of institutionalised weirdness to adhere to, freed from the deafening background noise that blights your daily toil, and with the time to ponder, ruminate and contemplate your very being, you can find yourself again.  Turns out I’m amazing.

8. Tip avoidance.  My barber always asks if I have the day off work, so I look all sad and say that I’m between jobs, providing unarguable justification for not giving him a tip.

7. Duck feeding.  More therapeutic than either standing on the bank of a river doing nothing or randomly throwing small chunks of bread when not near a river, duck feeding is the best therapy for the blues, even better than those desk-clacker-things from the 80’s. The borough of Richmond upon Thames now has some of the fattest ducks in the country.  You have to be sneaky to make sure that the seagulls don’t see you though.  They’ll peck your eyes out given half a chance.

6. Dealing with cold callers.  You’ve got no idea just how many times you get phone calls during the day.  It’s amazing.  Most of them are selling insurance.  What they fail to realise is that, unless they’re offering specialist insurance for the treatment of bed sores or seagull attacks, I have no need for their services.

5. Playing loud music during the day without complaints.  The neighbours, suckers that they are, work.  I play Hot Snakes records at amp-destroying volume and provide additional rhythmic support by smashing the radiator with a floor-standing lamp.

4. Availability for workmen.  If you need a plumber to come out to make some emergency repairs, maybe if a radiator is gushing boiling water all over the lounge carpet while a floor-standing lamp lies nearby in pieces, at least you’re always in, paying daytime rates rather than rip-off-Britain evening/weekend charges.

3. Times, days and dates lose all meaning and relevance, especially if you watch all eighteen episodes a day of Friends on E4, More 4, Channel 4 and their respective +1’s, HD’s and OD’s.  You jump forward and back in time at such a rate – Chandler’s fat/Chandler’s in the depths of painkiller addiction; it’s the awful one where Ross plays rugby/it’s one of the awful ones with Bruce Willis; it’s the era where they look a little too old for the ages of their characters/it’s the era where they look way too old for the ages of the characters, etc.  What?  It’s December now?  You shitting me?

2. Daytime TV.  ITV’s Taste The Nation was an uninspired combo of Masterchef, every bad reality show imaginable and a nightmare where Nick Hancock is responsible for your miserable death from muscular atrophy.  It was a cooking competition pitting region against region, with the climax of each show unsurprisingly being Hancock’s announcement of the winner.  However, he would do this by saying ‘The winner of today’s Taste The Nation is…….’.  And then he would say nothing.  For 45 seconds.  I know, I timed it.  With a stopwatch.  45 seconds.  Does that sound like a long time?  Try talking to someone, and before you get to the end of your point/joke/argument, pause for 45 seconds.  They will either walk away, slap your face to ensure that you haven’t fallen into a coma, or, unable to withstand the pressure of the situation, start confessing to appalling crimes that a) they didn’t commit, and b) possibly never even occurred.  I say bring back the test card, or pages from Ceefax, before more innocent people get sent to prison.

1. DVD boxsets.  When daytime telly gets me down and the ducks are refusing my bread, I hit the boxsets.  I never got into any of the big US series when they aired, purely because it was too much of a commitment.  If 24 had been called 7, then I would almost certainly have watched it.  But 24?  I have to watch 24 of the things?  And that’s just one series?  No way, not happening.  However, given the gift of time by misguided managers I devoured The Wire in double quick time, and I’ve just got to the end of season 3 of the Sopranos.  24 still seems too numerically intimidating, and Lost sounds rubbish, so hopefully I’ll have a job of some sort by the end of the Sopranos…