Exact dates TBC but you know, probably some time next week the first show will be hitting the airwaves and its pod will be cast here, on Freaky Trigger.

Its theme is DANGER.

So help us, O reader, to determine which of these attention-seeking, faux-admonitory albums is the best. But to sound a warning note of our own, we will play some of it on the show.

LITTLE GREG: [pokes at a finger of squared off chocolate that looks like it's been squished by a Big Hand] We found this at the grime scene. It appears to be a new type of Twix product. But not a limited edition flavour that hangs around the big players and disappears after several months! It looks like a whole new product from the Twix brand. Could it cause (arf), a ‘ripple‘?

NICK STOKES: Are you sure about this, Little Greg? Twix Limited Editions have a noble tradition – orange, dark-chocolate flavour (when done for Mars, the ‘midnight’ edition?), er, maybe some others? Are you sure the Twix Gang would bother?

LG: Look at the packaging we found under this ‘ere microscope. It is silver – this means “diet” in UK branding, viz “Diet Coke”. Another well-known gang-runner in the brand game. And observe the lettering, “fino”. How continental!

NS: Chocolate is always Different On The Continent isn’t it. A Mars Bar is a Twix in France, isn’t it? And I am sure I ran the Twix Fino through AFIS (Ed: google obv) which said this has been on the continental market already under the name ‘Tropix’.

LG: You are well travelled for someone who lives in Las Vegas and never appears to go on vay-cay. And are you making all of that up?

NS: I’m not even sure myself anymore. But tropix makes mre sense than ‘fino’. Tropical, and Twix! But then again that might make one think it is an Um Bungo flavoured Twix. Only Grissom could get down with that bad boy. Anyway, so you say this is essentially a “Diet Twix”, with a wafer instead of a biscuit. What’s the chemical analysis?

LG: Traces of Kinder Bueno, covered in a bit too much caramel for the quantity of wafer. Tried to take epithelials, but it crumbles to pieces in a very unsatisfactory manner. PH level resting at “I’ll give it a few months”. As depressing ‘diet options’ go, it’s a snooze.

[Shouting is heard from outside the lab]

SOMEONE UPDATING A BLOG: “Bring back the orange flavour!”

NS: [wry look] Can’t get the staff these days.

This is a little leaf-shaped nugget of cheese, covered in a pretty wrinkled geotrichium rind. It’s been dusted with ash, top and bottom, and is a lovely charcoal-grey colour under its wrinkles. The sides are paler and less ashy, but still have that brain-wrinkled rind, pale creamy yellow with a white bloom.

When I hack a wedge from this cheese, underneath the rind is predictabley, and delightfully, stickily liquid. The centre of the cheese is a bright white, with a crumbling open texture. The ashy patches of this cheese have a slightly bitter taste, offset by the sweet, milky almond liquid layer. Where there’s less ash, the  rind is sweeter, and mellow, with a fragrant herbal undertone.

There’s an incredibly flaky and light texture to the centre of this cheese; it makes me think of lovely, buttery puff pastry. It melts away to nothing, and tastes typically goaty – creamy and sweet, with a light acidic lemon tang.

Andeerer Bergkäse
A hard cow’s cheese, bought from Käseswiss

We have a slice from a large wheel of this cheese. It’s got a pale biscuit-coloured rind, criss-crossed with tiny basket-weave indentations. Under the rind, the pale yellow paste is smooth and silky.

The rind tastes sweet and nutty, and very mellow. The silky, supple texture of the cheese dissolves away very quickly, in my mouth . It tastes of hazelnuts and cream, rich, sweet and smooth, and with a slight back-of-throat tang. It’s a pleasant cheese, but not very exciting or interesting, and it’s a little too mild, and too mild-mannered, for me.

Edgar Wright partially has a Watchman problem, that the original material probably does not need a film version. The original Scott Pilgrim books are, for their manga styled archness, pretty dense with character and incident. And it works in a comic, where relationship drama can coexist with non-diagetic metaphorical action sequences. The film works really well up to its first action sequence, at which point it steps up a gear becoming an elongated Spaced style diversion. Its only when you realise its a diversion you won’t get out of that the trouble kicks in. The last two thirds of the film lie in some sort of limbo between fantasy, extreme fantasy and oddly surreal comedy which makes the stakes f the action in the film difficult to assess.

If Wright had made one decision about this material to go off canon and piss off all the fans, the most obvious one would have been to shorten the number of fight sequences. Seven (six really) is too many, and the metaphorical load held by each is not always well explicated. Pilgrim goes from being a dick to being a different kind of dick to being the hero in ways which are not always clear to the audience. Indeed what Wright has done is cleverly make a film where the two romantic leads are not only somewhat dislikable, but we are ambivalent about their eventual fate. He also manages to people the film with supporting characters who we care about because we know they don’t need the life lessons Pilgrim and Flowers need (via hugely entertaining onscreen battles). Indeed the metaphorical load of these arcade style bouts is partly where the film really is a musical. Instead of song and dance sequences however we get punch and kick sequences – which to all but the ardent gamer may be less entertaining (especially when the song sequences leave something to be desired). So it lives in that strange limbo of films which are wonderfully entertaining whilst you watch them, and well made, whilst you know they could have been better.

So what next now Scott Pilgrim has been a flop? Well Wright comes out of this one smelling of roses, and one hopes that he still manages to plow his considerable talents into character driven special effect comedies. No-one can effotlessly deal with sight gags, verbal gags and play with the language of film with light comic effect like he can. But back to something original from his own head I think. Or, even better, a proper musical. That he would do with apl-omb.

A wonderfully simple, wonderfully dense record. “When you call my name / It’s like a little prayer / I’m down on my knees / I want to take you there”. That’s just the chorus: 21 words, and what’s happening in them? A pun on Madonna’s name, setting up her dual role as divinity and supplicant, receiving a prayer while on her knees, drawing a parallel between the (apparently) fixed relationship of worship and the mutual shifts of self and role in sex. Which is all “Like A Prayer” is, even before you look at the video: sex and religion, entwined like lovers all through the song, their identities melting.

The choice of “little” in that chorus isn’t accidental – it’s an Aretha call-back, Madonna putting herself in a tradition of women who steer a way in pop between the devout and the earthy (before exploding the idea of that ‘between’). She’s also inviting direct comparison between her stuff and the soul and pop canon 80s tastemakers have spent the entire decade working to sanctify. It’s easy enough to sit down and try and make a ‘classic pop single’, though – we’ll see plenty of examples of that, mostly hamstrung by caution. “Like A Prayer” bears some of the trappings of the intended masterpiece – hark! a choir! – and occasionally I play it and it feels too detached, missing the snap and bite of even a weaker early single. But those times are outweighed by the times I come back to it and end up transported. (My instinctive reaction as “Like A Prayer” starts to peak is to raise my eyes to heaven.)

Her voice has lost some of its rough, snarky hunger, but that was on the way out in any case: the roleplay of “Papa Don’t Preach” aside, none of her True Blue hits had much venom. One of the things “Like A Prayer” is doing is inventing a new voice for Madonna – contemplative, compassionate, but distant too. It’s the voice she’ll use on her ballads for the next decade at least. Here, working with the wash of organ and choir, she uses it to sound iconic in a literal sense – like a colour-saturated picture of her namesake on a mantelpiece, lips suddenly moving in miraculous benediction: “Life is a mystery…”

From that beginning “Like A Prayer” builds then falls back, establishes space then fills it – it’s perhaps the only pop song which actually deserves the term “sonic cathedral” – then breaks out halfway through to reveal an even larger scale. In the Immaculate Collection mix most of this build and release is ruined by a galumphing house beat: I love house music and all its works but on this occasion the hi-hat is the devil’s trick and the righteous should avoid it. (And let’s not even consider the “whoa – yeah!” guy.)

The danger of making something ‘epic’ is that the details get lost, but “Like A Prayer” avoids this. Take, as one touch of many, the way the beat comes in for the first time under that long “home” in the intro: faintly latin, all disco, discreetly dispelling the aura of kitsch the intro has teased us with. It’s also a hint that ‘home’ might mean the club, the party, the world that the song finishes so triumphantly in, with the gospel soloists and Prince’s guitar and a horde of imaginary dancers all joining in together. Or the way the rhythm guitars switch between low-end grind to high-end skip and jangle during that climax. By then the song is romping home, triumphant, and the switch is a memory of its undertow, a reminder that this release was earned.

Very few of Madonna’s other hits are quite so obvious in their ambition, very few as clearly personal. But if “Like A Prayer” was only interesting in the arc of her own life and career it wouldn’t be so good. It feels immense not just because it’s long, or addressing big themes, but because it manages to pull together the strands of a pop decade as rich and confusing as itself. New pop’s sense of the pop single as event; the rediscovery of soul and gospel roots; the power of celebrity; the continued evolution and relevance of club music; even and especially the skyscraping portent of stadium rock. Pop stars are always having to prove themselves – they rarely earn the right to coast, and while this is the most renowned of Madonna’s event singles it’s not the first or last. But it’s the best, even though I’m usually suspicious of great singles which seem designed intentionally to be that: “Like A Prayer” pulls off everything it’s trying to achieve, and it’s trying a lot.

A soft-ish blue cheese from Nottinghamshire, bought from Neals Yard Dairy

Coming south from hence we pass’d Stilton, a town famous for cheese, whch is call’d our English Parmesan, and is brought to table with the mites, or maggots round it, so thick, that they bring a spoon with them for you to eat the mites with, as you do the cheese.

So wrote Daniel Defoe in 1727.¹ Maggots and mites! Our wedge of cheese – bought to savour with a piggerish civilised after-dinner port – harbours no visible wildlife, unless you’re counting the mould. The rind’s a crusty pale biscuit, with a soft white bloom. Inside, the pale yellow paste’s scored and splattered liberally with green-grey Penicillium roqueforti. (P. roqueforti is guaranteed a place in my Top Ten Fungi List, if I ever make a Top Ten Fungi List.)

The stilton is is soft and buttery, melting in my mouth. Where clusters of mould have gathered, there’s a crumbliness like that of clumps of damp toast crumbs; granular, and slightly ticklish. It tastes very blue², quite salty, slightly sour and tangy, and with a peppery hit to the back of my throat, numbing and prickling it slightly. It’s gloriously rich and creamy – every mouthful seems liken a pleasingly greedy excess. There are subtle fruity notes; a sharp lemon, and something sweeter and darker – ripe plum? Underneath the rind there’s less mould, and and subsequntly a sweeter milky, nutty flavour, and an even richer and creamier texture. The rind itself is crumbly, with a gentle pleasant mustiness and the aroma of hazelnuts.

Cheese-eating chum P suggests that it would be improved by the addition of vanilla, white chocolate, peach and orange rind, and by the removal of the pretty green mould.

I normally prefer Stichelton, and I was really delighted with how delicious this was. It tasted much richer and softer and deeper than I remembered it being; my wedge must have come from a well-loved, well-aged truckle.

1. I hunted this up for the mention of Stilton, but it’s all-round, all-over FASCINATING! Everyone should go and read it right now.

2. What does blue cheese taste like? It’s the cheesy element that I have most trouble describing – resorting to vague words like peppery, spicy, piquant, when they tell only half the story. Saying ‘tastes blue’ feels cheating. Focusing too much on the tang and the fruit and the salt feels deviously avoidant.

This is what happens when you dip a cheeseburger in hydrochloric acid. I want to try this at home!

I like to browse charity shops in search of amazing books. As I’m a bookseller if not by trade anymore then by something possibly stronger than genetics or space-time, this is not necessarily just a case of being pleased to find an unproofed review copy of the new China Mieville six weeks before it’s meant to come out, since the YMCA clearly don’t check that sort of thing. No, it is not just good books that I am interested in. In fact, I think I’ve possibly passed some sort of event horizon where I no longer care about “good” books because all books are part of the whole sort of general bookish thing and so it’s beyond an investment in my own literary pleasure into an investment in this whole sort of general bookish thing. All books, especially the waifs and strays, are relevant to my interests. Especially, sometimes, the really, really bad ones.*

Which is how I found myself in the aforementioned YMCA shop, West Ealing, idly browsing the racks and happened across a spine that immediately set my ‘this is unlikely to have been nominated for the Booker prize’ senses tingling. ‘TYRANNOSAUR CANYON,’ t’was. I know, with the ambiguous quote at the top of this entry, you’re probably thinking that this book doesn’t sound very amazing at all. After all, if John Grisham wrote Jurassic Park there’d probably be a lot of courtroom drama regarding the massive number of personal injury claims possible if you’ve had your legs ripped off by a velociraptor and it wasn’t your fault and then some coffee-drinking. That, though, is because I’ve deprived you of the rest of the blurb, as in actual fact the book contains-

“A moon rock missing for thirty years…

A scientist with ambition enough to kill…”

BUT WAIT, THAT’S NOT ALL.

“A monk who will redeem the world…”

THE WHOLE WORLD.

“A dark agency with a deadly mission…”

YES. AND-

“The greatest scientific discovery of all time”

THAT’S RIGHT, THE ACTUAL GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF ALL TIME.

I won’t spoiler anyone who for whatever reason hasn’t read this astonishingly brilliant work by the author who brought you ‘The Codex’ but I’ll just link you to this Wikipedia page and casually mention the phrase “Venus particles.”

*I actually find it difficult to think of a book as ‘bad,’ unless it has been written by James Patterson. Then it is bad. Most books are simply ‘esoteric.’

Terschelling Schapenkaas

A hard, pasturised sheep’s cheese from Terschelling, in the Netherlands, bought from Boerenkaas.

We have a wedge of this hard sheep’s cheese. Its interior is an opaque pale creamy white, smooth-looking, and dotted with uneven little holes. Towards the rind it becomes translucent and a little darker.

It’s slightly softer than I’d imagined, looking at the solid wedge, and silky smooth. It tastes bright and tangy, and wonderfully creamy, rich and luscious; lots of yoghurty and buttery flavours and textures. There’s tinge of gentle hazelnut to it, and also an unusual blueberry aroma. The rind’s harder, quite chewy, and reminiscent of pineapple. This is a good, gentle, balanced cheese; the yoghurty bite cuts through the sweet richness of the sheep’s milk and the fruity and nutty tones are restrained and very civilised.

Oude Remeker

A raw-milk cow’s cheese from Lunteren, also in the Netherlands, and also bought from Boerenkaas.

This is a different animal, entirely. We’ve bought a similar sized and shaped wedge to the soft sheepy cheese above, but this beast of a cheese is a dark yellow-orange colour, wrapped in a deep red wax rind. It’s liberally speckled with caesin crystals almost the size of my head – huge, they are! It tastes rich and dark and dense; of coffee, and beef gravy and yeasty beer, and of the sticky sweetness of raisins, prunes and dried dates. The texture’s meltingly buttery, and slightly crumbly, and the crystals explode like popping candy under my teeth.  This cheese means business, and although I like it very much, its relentless crunch and intense taste are almost overwhelming. Too much of this and you’d need to have a quiet lie-down.

MGMT: The answer is “Kids”. 9 out of 13 people got this, the rest said “Time To Pretend” (#2). Not a bad start!

Lady Gaga: The answer is “Poker Face”. 6 people got this. Other choices were “Bad Romance” (which HAS now topped it but at the time of the update was #2), “Alejandro” (#4), “Just Dance” (#6) and “Telephone” (down at #20, an obvious victim of the ‘featuring’ curse)

Vampire Weekend: The answer here is “A-Punk” – 3 people got it, but the most popular answer was “no idea”. Or “Cousins” (#3), “Oxford Comma” (#5), “White Sky” (#6) or “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (#9).

The Smiths: Right answer – fan favourite “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”. Again, 3 people got it. Most popular alternatives were “This Charming Man” (#2) and “How Soon Is Now” down in 6th.

Lily Allen: Our first one that NOBODY got – it’s impotence-diss-track “Not Fair”. Responses pretty evenly distributed between “The Fear” (which is a close 2nd) and “Smile” in 5th. (Someone said “Fuck You” – it was #3).

Blur: Despite a rich and varied catalogue it’s “Song 2″ that’s their primary legacy, as 9 people twigged. “Parklife” was a very poor 2nd.

Kanye West: Another one nobody got – “Heartless”. “Love Lockdown” was 3rd, “Stronger” 2nd, and people who picked “Gold Digger” were subject to the ‘featured’ curse but it would still barely have come in his top 10.

The Prodigy: It’s all about the current stuff with their fanbase – “Omen” was the winner here. 3 people got it right, most of the others said “Firestarter”, their 11th most popular track.

Beyonce: Surely it’s “Single Ladies”? Nope, that’s in 2nd. “Crazy In Love”? Don’t make me laugh – 10th. “Irreplacable”? “If I Were A Boy”? No – Beyonce’s most played track on LFM is “Halo“. No takers.

Radiohead: Ver ‘Head represented by “Karma Police”. Only Mike TD got it! Well done Mike! Huge spread of other answers: “Creep” is 3rd, “Paranoid Android” 2nd. Well done Steve M for “How To Disappear Completely”, there were a mere 36 better answers.

Rihanna: It’s not “Umbrella”! (Which is 10th). Lots of people realised that was too obvious, though nobody mentioned the #1 at the time, “Disturbia”. “Rude Boy” has taken over since, so I’ll use that as a tiebreaker.

Michael Jackson: It’s not “Billie Jean”! Oh, OK, it is. Only 4 people got it though. “Beat It” in 2nd, the other popular choice “Man In The Mirror” has faded post-death and lands in 6th.

Johnny Cash: “Hurt” by a fair distance. 8 people got it right, “Ring Of Fire” (3rd) its only real challenger.

Metallica: Well done KAT for getting “Nothing Else Matters” right, which noses it over “Enter Sandman” in 2nd and “One” in 3rd.

Britney Spears: Britney’s newest material is still what’s attracting fans – “Womanizer” was the right answer, and 4 people gave it. (Though nobody guessed the #2 track, “3″). “Toxic” is 4th, “Baby One More Time” is down in 15th.

The Kinks: It’s their debut, “You Really Got Me” – 3 people got it right. Most obvious other choice, “Waterloo Sunset”, is down in 6th.
12
The Beatles: Well done Birdseed who said “Come Together” – nobody else got this, most people plumping for “Hey Jude” (11th on the chart). The Beatles are weird.

Donna Summer: A few people thought “I Feel Love” was too obvious and they were right (WHY they were right I have no idea). It’s 2nd, well ahead of everything else but well BEHIND “Hot Stuff”. Pink Champale said “Hot Love” and I’ll give him a point for that.

Jay-Z: The ways of pop are strange. Well done Lex for saying “Big Pimpin‘”, nobody else did. “99 Problems” was a very close 2nd. “Empire State Of Mind” 3rd, but Lex is the only winner here.

Outkast: Now was not the time to avoid the obvious – yes, it’s “Hey Ya!“. “Ms Jackson” in 2nd is closer than you’d think. 11 easyish points picked up by people here.

And after all that – who won? Scores are as follows:

Pink Champale: 8
Birdseed, Steve M, Mike: 7
Roodle: 6
MV, Katstevens: 5
Lex, Crag: 4
Winner, Jeff W, Flahr, thefatgit: 3

So well done Mr Champale!

And while I was there, I noticed that Asda also sold something billed as the Ultimate Chocolate Cheese – Wensleydale with Belgian milk chocolate liberally scattered through it. So I sorta, umm, ended up buying that too.

The stilton looks pale, and is liberally scattered with chunks of dark orange fruit. It’s got a very soft, quite crumbly texture, reminding me slightly of putty. I taste some, and it’s incredibly, tooth-curlingly sweet. Despite the moussy insubstantial texture, it’s got a damp cloying mouthfeel that I find quite unpleasant. The lumps of orange rind are like a tiny Christmas pudding invasion – unseasonal and unwelcome – in my mouth. The pieces of peach are flabby, fibrous, and (again) sickly sweet. The white chocolate chunks are indistinguishable from the surrounding over-sweet mess. The obvious comparison to this is cheesecake, but it would be a disjointed, unpleasant, and over-busy concoction, and actually, I like my cheesecakes less sugary than this.

The Ultimate Chocolate Cheese was very similar in texture, crumbly and sticky and damp, and just as horribly sweet; I was getting accustomed to the sickly sugariness at this point. It was a disconcerting shade of pale brown, scattered with darker chocolate chunks. It tasted nothing like a Wensleydale, but rather a lot like the unpleasant chocolate yoghurt that used to appear in my school lunch box.

I’m an insufferable food snob who dislikes dried fruit, doesn’t approve of cheese-with-bits-in, and can’t abide over-sweet things. (Also, I consider white stilton a rubbish non-cheese – a sop to people too afeared of the tasty Penicillium roqueforti to sample the real thing.) I might not be best placed to appreciate the great things that these cheeses have to offer. But it wasn’t just me that recoiled in horror – FT’s own Pete tried the summer stilton, and shortly afterwards scoured the skin from his mouth and tongue with a particularly harsh century egg.

As a pop star, Jason Donovan had two big problems. The first was his singing, which we’ll get to, but the second was that Stock Aitken And Waterman didn’t seem to have much idea what to do with him. Kylie couldn’t sing terribly well either, but she immediately turned out to be a missing piece in the PWL puzzle: a girl who could be ordinary without being boring. It helped that she’d had a few years experience as an actress doing exactly that, too.

Couldn’t Jason do the same? Maybe: PWL had gone down that route a little with Rick Astley, but his appeal was more the Clark Kent demeanour and Superman voice, and Jason had, so to speak, no vocal spandex in his closet. That comically awkward bit of guitar at the start of “Too Many Broken Hearts” sounds like a gesture to the idea that Jason, being a boy, might have some connection to Boy Music, but it’s a complete bluff: this is business very much as usual. “Too Many Broken Hearts” seems like SAW taking the path of least resistance, giving Jason some solid material and hoping he doesn’t make too much of a bish of it.

As an insurance policy he’s mixed down in the big earworm chorus and the “backing” vocalists track his vocal line to the note. He gets the verses to himself though, giving us plenty of opportunity to appreciate his trundling delivery, tiny range and the strain every time he has to do anything dynamic. The overall vibe is one of karaoke – not in the usual critical sense of someone doing a crap cover, but the unpleasant sensation you get when you’re singing karaoke and realise you’re only actually comfortable on the choruses: the verses become tightropes of potential embarrassment. In this context the pre-chorus climax – “I’ll be HURT I’ll be HURT” – is a triumph, not just because Jason actually nails it but because there’s a huge sense of relief every time he gets there.

And that’s when I realise SAW’s diabolical cleverness. Because by that point in the song I’m on Jason’s side – I want him to get through this, which is exactly where the record needs to be emotionally: “Too Many Broken Hearts” has to seem like a struggle or else the guy singing it will just come over as an overconfident dick. And so we have a record which ought to be awful but somehow isn’t really. Phew! Now, if only they don’t do something really idiotic and give him a ballad to carry…

The facts: “Belfast Child” is a song written by Jim Kerr in grief and anger after the atrocity of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, built on a traditional Irish folk tune. “I’m not saying I have any pearls of wisdom,” he’s quoted on Wikipedia as saying, “But I have a few questions to ask.”

Noble intentions rarely translate into effective outcomes. There are an awful lot of cynical and rude things one could say about “Belfast Child”. They might involve words like “stupefying”, “leaden”, and “is that the time”. Or indeed, “desperate”, “wannabe” and “Bono”. But that would be too glib, and would also underestimate the extent to which this kind of statement-making seemed at the end of the 80s like something rock music could and must do. Rock was now happening at a scale where its practitioners felt they should use it to raise awareness of certain issues and causes. The B-Side of “Belfast Child” was “Mandela Day”, premiered at the 1988 Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, the climax of this entire tendency – the line-up now reads like a nightmare of worthiness but there was no doubting the performers’ sincerity, or the cause’s importance, or the way that this idea of rock as a moral force had become naturalised since Band Aid.

But that very scale was also a trap. Kerr’s “few questions to ask” catches the problem – stadium rock amplifies and simplifies a musician’s feelings, and you need a remarkable level of skill to keep nuance alive in those circumstances (just ask “Born In The USA”). So when a musician “raised awareness”, it wasn’t simply in the form of a PSA, it was awareness filtered through their own understanding and response. “Belfast Child” rests on two assumptions which can’t easily be separated: that the situation in Northern Ireland is worth making this kind of record about, and that Jim Kerr’s take on that situation is a valuable lens for it. And if Kerr doesn’t really have a take – if all he’s got is “a few questions”, the same baffled anger and horror with which most of the mainstream mainland reacted to Northern Ireland, when they thought about it at all – then the danger is that the music he’s playing will shape itself into a take by its simple force.

Which is exactly what does happen. “She Moved Through The Fair” is actually quite a good song for the purpose – it’s about disappearance and death, the random and mystifying cruelty of sudden loss – and it’s got a lovely melody, the kind which would force the word “haunting” even if one wasn’t in the song. A straight cover might have been effective – OK, not a straight cover played by Simple Minds, but by someone. But “Belfast Child” takes the song’s weight and associations and won’t leave them alone: it piles on more and more over six long minutes, switching from cod-folksiness (“gallows tree” and that bloody tin whistle) to full-bore Rock Unleashed Mode.

The first sign of this shift is when Kerr sings “some say Troubles” with clomping emphasis and then turns the next word into a big arena rock growl just like the one he used on “Don’t You Forget About Me”. And now he’s getting to the real meat of the song he can properly let rip, so in come the drums and he’s off, yelling “Come on Billy!” and “War is ragin’! Cross the Emerald Isle!”. When surely the whole point of the record should be that getting quite so excitable about that stuff is a bad thing. But he can’t help it, this is arena rock and this is what arena rock does: the song is structured so that invocation of war is its natural climax. If you wrote a hands-in-the-air trance anthem about Gaza you’d end up with the same problem.

Scale and abstraction were once what made Simple Minds worthwhile – on New Gold Dream (“worldwide on a wider screen”) they were making big music too, as enormous, beautiful and unreal as the grid-plans for some great future city. Then during their chest-thumping years there was an exhuberant innocence to their huge singles, empty and absurd though they were. But this awfully misconceived thing is where it all comes crashing down. “Belfast Child” takes the grubby, botched, intractable brutality of the Troubles and makes them sound grand and mythic, which would be embarrassing enough even if it weren’t exactly what the fighters on both sides liked to play it as too.

versus

You’ve got to fight for what you want
For all that you believe
It’s right to fight for what we want
To live the way we please

As long as we have done our best
Then no one can do more
And life and love and happiness
Are well worth fighting for
(themetune to The Flashing Blade)

(I googled about a bit, without success, to see if this was a well-known spot: in the movie, the fellow playing chaz jankel says “you stole that from somewhere!” to the fellow playing gollum dury, with a big grin… )

Lightning review of film: the visual direction is so sophisticatedly smart and witty — full of jokes about the relationship of punk design to pop art, barney bubbles to peter blake, the videos jankel’s sister annabel would shortly direct — that it’s a bit of a let-down the script is so VERY much a classic and conventional biopic, in which BIG TRAUMATIC EVENTS from childhood SHAPE EVERYTHING, from songs on out…

The remit of the column is that I’m meant to be jumping off from something that’s happening now – sometimes this is more central to the piece than others.

1. Cheap music and the ‘event single’ (Singles overtake album sales)
2. Indie rock and indirectness. (Spoon’s Transference)
3. The randomness of virality (OK Go griping at their label).
4. What critics get wrong and why (Fall Out Boy split)
5. What does ‘new music’ mean anyway? (6 Music brouhaha)
6. Three types of revivalism (Alphabeat and Goldfrapp LPs)
7. Fans as industry stakeholders (UK Music report on UK industry)
8. Why we want politicians to suck at pop (UK election campaign)
9. Global pop v world music (The Ayobaness! compilation)
10. Pop as a coalition (UK election aftermath)
11. The car-crash that is the UK’s Eurovision strategy (er, Eurovision)
12. Different kinds of populism. (Dizzee’s football single.)
13. Summer jams and the longing for ubiquity. (Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”)
14. Lo-fi as a post-industry survival strategy. (Wavves, Sleigh Bells)
15. The aesthetics of glut (Wiley’s 200 track giveaway)
16. Grown-up-ness in pop (Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs)

Reaction amongst friends at the time was a sort of bemused approval: it was a Good Thing for this kind of record to get to number one, but nobody really seemed to love it, and the Pitney/Almond team up was faintly baffling. Of course, that was the odd-couple appeal of it: a gentleman from some ancient past allied to a leathered perv from a more recent one. And even though I remembered “Tainted Love”, in the bright world of Kylie and Jason both pasts seemed equally lost, both sides of this revenant alliance surprising.

Twenty years later, “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart” has aged well, and seems to look forward rather than back – the cross-generational duet became a 90s fad, then a commonplace, and by the end of that decade we had Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews crooning at each other, and Jarvis Cocker writing for Tony Christie. Placed in that micro-continuum “Something” has aged rather well, mostly because neither singer acknowledges the curiosity value or leans too hard on their particular schtick. Almond, with a chance to be the old-style showman he’s always wanted to be, puts his back into it. Pitney glides witchily over the top with rather less audible effort but still steals the show.

So why Pitney anyway, and why this? Almond may have felt some sympathy for a man who’d began his prime decade as a new star only to not quite fit in. The Gene Pitney past feels exotic partly because it never really happened: he’s a wanderer from a parallel 60s, where rock’n'roll gave the pop establishment a shot in the arm then slipped into history. Or he might just have been attracted to Pitney’s voice, which could give corny material a sense of urgent dread – “24 Hours From Tulsa” being the obvious example, where the compulsion and mystery in the song is all down to Pitney’s delivery. As for the choice of song, Nick Cave had covered it before Almond took it on, identifying the Gothic streak in it which this version acknowledges and ripens. The strings do the heavy lifting, the intro cutting through whatever else was on 1989 playlists and the arrangement helping the two singers locate the exact point where kitsch bleeds into mystery.

Radio 4’s Today programme was recently discussing how Kate Barker, the single female on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) had stepped down, and had been replaced by a man, Dr Martin Weale. A quick catch-up for those of you not fluent in finance: the MPC makes decisions on interest rate levels and tries to control inflation. The results affect pretty much everyone and so ideally the committee’s decisions would reflect the interests of the country as a whole, especially as the credit crunch has made the financial sector appear alarmingly out of touch with ordinary people.

Getting annoyed at the MPC’s gender imbalance may seem like an argument for positive discrimination, or even worse, imply that women are needed for their ‘social outreach’ abilities (displaying a warm, friendly face that the public will trust). The women that appeared on Today dismissed both these trains of thought, and agreed there are plenty of top-class female economists — Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize for Economics last year. But only 4 of the 38 candidates for the empty committee seat were women. Why are female economists shunning the MPC?

The evidence shows that most female economists at this level tend to come from an industry background, with practical experience in the markets. MPC members on the other hand almost entirely have their background in academia. The MPC favours the application of macro economics, which (roughly) involves attempting to find umbrella trends throughout the entire economy. Unfortunately, the business-orientated female economists generally agree that macro economics doesn’t actually work in real life. Former Independent economics editor Diane Coyle (one of the Today guests) didn’t actually say “women think macro economics is a load of old bollocks” on the radio but she came fairly close.

So how is this a tenuous metaphor for music criticism? Well, despite the appearance of a male-dominated culture, there is no shortage of female music critics either. However many of them tend to avoid traditional review-based music journalism that marks songs out of 10 and constructs all-time top-100 lists, preferring conversations and long-form pieces that leave numbers out of the equation. List-making is the macro economics here: satisfying in theory, but many female writers think it’s just not worthwhile bothering with in real life.

Does gender really matter when talking about music? Could women necessarily contribute something that men couldn’t, just because of their ovaries? Our passive music consumption is certainly over-gendered: not the CDs we buy or the websites we visit, but the songs heard while clothes-shopping, or on adverts for computer games (products aimed at both sexes, but compare Girls Aloud cooing at their Nintendogs to Eminem’s bilious ranting over footage of Call of Duty 2). Alexandra Burke is currently flaunting her perfect armpits for Sure and you can set your watch by how often Muse turn up during Formula 1 racing coverage. Music remains firmly targeted at demographics whether those demographics like it or not, and so men and women who are equally passionate about the same music will probably bring different experiences of it to the table.

These days we don’t need critics to tell us what a song sounds like — if we bother to read a music blog then it’s likely that we are interested in the writer’s opinion, formed by how they relate to the artist or the music. This obviously affects the kind of music that gets covered in the first place: to construct a rather stereotypical example, who would be best qualified (and willing) to write competently about a member of S Club Juniors who had chosen to release a song about the devastating social impact of My Little Pony? Someone who has experienced the horror first hand, of course — be they male or female. Without that background Calvin’s magnum opus likely wouldn’t be written about at all.

The experts interviewed on Today agreed that although gender was largely irrelevant to economics, there should be a mixture of both business and academic backgrounds on the MPC, not least to avoid the reinforcement of bad habits and general risk-taking idiocy. Similarly, to avoid becoming obsolete, the world of music criticism needs a balance between in-depth debate, top 100 lists, and developing mad macro-critical theories to prove how Lady Gaga’s lobster outfit is somehow linked to the new Belle & Sebastian album. Exploring our different musical experiences may not be as vital to the world as economic stability, but if we’re going to bother at all then we must make it as rich and varied as possible.

In this part we dig a little bit deeper into an artist’s catalogue, with two more metrics based on their list of top tracks (which, remember, are the tracks with most listeners over the last six months, not over the whole of LFM’s history). I’m calling these metrics – rather unimaginatively – head and body. “Head” is the number of listeners to the tenth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the first. “Body” is the number of listeners to the fiftieth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the tenth.

Both of these are based on the same principle – ratios of popular and less popular songs in an artist’s catalogue – but they turn out to measure quite different things. Head measures the extent to which an act is a several-hit wonder. A high head means that your top track isn’t that much more popular than your tenth, which usually means you’ve racked up either a bunch of successful singles or have at least one album that people are keen to listen to in toto. A low head means that you have a few, or maybe just one track which people are particularly keen on but that interest doesn’t extend very far – it suggests a big chunk of casual listeners in your audience.

A high body, meanwhile, means that people are keen to dig deeper into your back catalogue (50 songs is 4+ albums worth for most bands) and a low body either means they’re not, or that you haven’t GOT that kind of back catalogue. It’s usually pretty obvious if this is the case, as the body will be microscopic, since by the time Sleigh Bells or Wavves hit track 50 we’re in the realm of misfiled tags and typos. It certainly isn’t the case that artists who have that kind of back catalogue automatically get a fat body score though.

Head scores of over 50% seem to be pretty good, below 30% suggest the presence of at least one catalogue-outshining hit. In the top bracket you find “album acts” old and new – Pink Floyd are up there, for instance, but so are Vampire Weekend with an enormous 77% head, i.e. their tenth-most-popular track gets more than three-quarters the plays of their most popular one. In other words when someone puts on a VWE record they probably stick it out.

Just below the album acts you find a smattering of pre-Beatles icons – Sinatra, Elvis, Duke Ellington – men with broad enough catalogues to withstand even standout songs: Sinatra’s 10th most popular track gets over half the listeners of “My Way”. Modern pop icons – even those like Madonna with a basket of hits – dip under 50% head scores: there’s always a few songs that are much more popular than their others.

Down at the bottom you’ve got the occasional newbie like Ke$ha (14%) or Drake (9%), but you’ve also got a lot of 80s acts remembered for one or two songs – Dexys, Soft Cell, Bananarama.

Here’s where the relationship between head and body gets interesting though – or rather, the lack of it. The thing about these scores is that they don’t really correlate that much – you can quite credibly have a fat head and a thin body or vice versa. The averages are distorted by acts with small discographies but broadly speaking above 35% seems like quite a big body and below 20% is a thin one (if you’ve got a back catalogue that would merit more, that is.)

So this makes them diagnostically a bit richer, i.e. you can draw up a QUADRANT.

(Positionings in this quadrant are relative rather than reflecting absolute numbers, i.e. I hand-drew it, it’s not an actual chart.)

So let’s have a look at this. In the top-right you have acts with a big head and a big body – lots of popular tracks AND a deep back catalogue. Oh look, it’s the Beatles! But also Yo La Tengo, Radiohead, Kraftwerk, NIN: acts who have devoted fans who see their work as a body rather than a catalogue to be picked from.

Some of the interest lies in who doesn’t make it in: in the top left quadrant you get older acts like Elvis, Queen, and the Doors – people with extensive catalogues but who don’t have the big “body” scores which might be expected. This is the “good for one album” quadrant – whether that’s a debut album or a greatest hits isn’t reflected in the raw stats.

Below that is the “good for one song” quadrant at bottom-left – this section includes a lot of the acts I particularly like, perhaps because I believe people who’ve made one great pop song will often have made more and am happy to delve in on that basis. But the Last.FM public don’t agree with me so here are the Human League, Britney (though she does much better than most pop acts), ABBA on the borderline – lots of hits but no body to speak of – and, interestingly, the Beach Boys.

And on the bottom right is the most intriguing bunch of all – the rarest quadrant, made up of bands with one or a few big hit songs and a bunch of devoted followers who really get stuck in. If you’re happy to listen as far as your tenth Kate Bush or Johnny Cash track, you’re likely to stick around for a lot more. Most extraordinary is Lil Wayne: very very few of the many “Lollipop” listeners dig into Weezy’s labyrinthine back catalogue but a lot of those who do really get stuck in.

In part III I’ll link the data set as a download, point out important caveats, note some quirky results and also draw some conclusions from all this.

No surprise, really. This is the economy of fiction, and what exists must work in service to the plot or it’s out on its ear. But, still, all these characters on all these screens who seem to spend every night staring at a slideshow of memory – after a while you start to wonder if the screenwriters have actual dreams at all.

So what’s great about Inception is that there aren’t any real dreams in it. No-one falls asleep naturally and drifts through the various stages until they cruise into the REM state and find themselves driving a car downhill in their boxers despite never having learnt how, then curled up in a treehouse library whose rabbit-warren corridors curve overhead and underfoot with 360-degree shelving, reading a red book that turns out to be the morning sun. In Inception, all sleep is drugged; all dreams are built by conscious minds. If the scenes seem suspiciously coherent, if the buildings (bar a Penrose staircase or two) are all too structurally sound, if for some reason the subconscious is supposed to be on alert against logical inconsistencies rather than gleefully piling them on top of one another – that’s okay. These are less dreams and more fictions, stories thought into the minds of their target audience by a team of great imaginations, built worlds that can’t recreate the maker’s own familiar places for fear of giving too much away.

The comparison makes itself, really.

Inception is carefully, intelligently put together, the seed of a final twist (or is it??) planted half-way through, the various layers of the story worked together with delicate art. It knows about dreams what filmmakers tend to ignore, that they are strange sideways things that we can only interpret through metaphor, even if sometimes the metaphors are so crude and obvious we feel disappointed in our own subconscious minds. It knows about creation that it’s dangerous psychic territory, that when we think we are in control of the narrative the details may be letting our secrets slip. It’s a slick piece of work, the beautiful sharp suited young fraudsters of an Ocean’s Eleven exploding through the transnational spaces of a Bond or Bourne film, street markets in Mombasa and energy markets in Japan and the US, plastic chairs and first-class plane travel (and a French extradition reference!). Fractions of the familiar world, giving nothing away.

Yet — there’s another way we give ourselves away, not by what we put in but by what we leave out. A man must go home; a father-son conflict must be resolved (not an Oedipal one – there isn’t a mother in it. Which by the way is weird); economic competition must flourish, no time to wait on antitrust laws. None of these motivations seem any more important than the next gorgeously detailed set-piece. There’s a lot of charisma but not a lot of human sympathy. Ellen Page’s Ariadne is perfect, here, her curiosity intellectual and practical and unromantic, taking her place in the group for the thrill of immaterial creation. She’s an architecture student, her professor’s favoured pupil, enchanted with the idea that any environment she imagines can take shape without the tedious business of getting it built. She thinks up a world so another mind can realise it, so yet other minds can interact with it and finally, somewhere down the chain, it will make one mind feel something and so betray itself. It’s all craft, all contrivances, the final purpose lost in a huge Heath Robinson machine.

It’s not that emotion is lacking – it’s that emotion would sap the delight from this film, would upset the delicate balance of image upon image, fantasy upon folly. Like all heist films, the joy is in watching sharp minds think their way out of the inevitable unforeseens, use every tool they know to keep their plot in motion. We’re supposed to find it sad that Inception‘s team of creators can no longer dream spontaneously, but that’s hard to do. The only real threat in the film is the loss of lucidity, the thing that cannot be explained, the dreams one cannot control.

Stock Aitken and Waterman’s skills were based on simplicity: get a feeling, nail it. Their songs are unapologetically direct, with very little ‘side’ or ambiguity. The acts they worked with were similarly well-defined – the square but adorable one (Rick), the sassy ones (Mel & Kim), the confident everygirls (Sonia, Reynolds Girls), and then of course there was Kylie, sunny and optimistic whatever disappointment love threw at her. So “Especially For You” is Kylie’s happy ending, based very much on her Neighbours’ character’s happy ending.

But the question is, is pop a good vehicle for happy endings? Musicals are, and as a moment in a narrative “Especially For You” does its job. But can a happy ending work as a standalone single? Not in the hands of SAW, whose instinct to directness makes “Especially For You” mercilessly straightforward. No doubts now: all the tension, all the drama here happens offstage and in the past. What has not killed them has made them stronger – hurrah! But non-soap-watchers haven’t seen it try and kill them, so their victory here is unearned, presented as inert fact.

Even then the single would work if there was some sense of relief, or chemistry, or much of anything between the leads. Kylie brings it – she’s not a great singer but she’s likeable and honest and that’s all the record needs. There was a Twitter discussion recently about whether Kylie had “charisma” or “charm” or something else entirely. Certainly at this stage she wasn’t charismatic, but a charismatic singer would have made “Especially For You” unbearable by exposing how flat it is. With Kylie it has a shot at sounding innocent and wholehearted: she isn’t always the best thing about her records, but she almost redeems this one.

Unfortunately she’s paired with one of pop’s all-time plodders, the ever-hapless Jason, whose performance here is so wet that it makes his devoted Kylie seem like a simpleton (he’s comfortably outsung by Kermit The Frog, here). Of course they were an item in real life, so the single was even more of a banker: perhaps too much of one. All the songwriters and performers have to do is steer this record safely home, and so that’s all they do. Nothing on “Especially For You” – except maybe the odd Beach Boys keening right at the start – draws attention to itself, no risks are taken. “Boring” is the most useless of critical adjectives but there’s no getting past it: this record is boring, and to some degree that’s deliberate.

why YES, that’s right, I AM IN THIS YEAR’S SHOW! so if you would like to see it, the dates are:

5-14 August, GRV, 37 Guthrie Street, Edinburgh, MIDDAY
and
21 and 22 August, Camden Head, 100 Camden High Street, Camden, 8.45pm

Here are a couple of clips from our recent preview show in Lewisham:

And use the comments to discuss the year in general – which, as has often been mentioned in the regular comments boxes, was actually pretty damn good.

1. Royal Lochnagar 12 yo + Gorwydd’s Caerphilly (Cheesy Lover #88)

“Oh Crumbs!” says Sarah about the Caerphilly. “It absorbs all taste of whisky that’s just gone in my mouth. Once it’s finished face-punching the whisky, it tastes nice.” Juliet agrees: “the cheese smacks whisky out of the park”. Ewan is unsure of the rind.

Kerry says the whisky is very smooth and creamy, almost vanilla and cinammon-y. Katie thinks it tastes like artificial sweeteners rather than sugar, Pete G says there’s a bit of a herbal note, to which random shouting breaks out: “Pear!” “Shrub!” “WHEN CHEESE GOES WILD!”

Kat doesn’t like the Lochnagar but thinks the cheese is good – fatty and crumbly. Rick says the whisky is quite drinkable but not very exciting, Katie thinks it tastes sweet after the cheese. Marna doesn’t like it very much at all, but Mark thinks everyone is being a bit mean about it (“it would go down easily for quite a long time”). Ewan has read a children’s book called the Old Man Of Lochnagar [see left]. Mark suspects the Old Man of Lochnagar drinks whisky all day long.

Marna responds to queries concerning the whereabouts of the remaining Kraft Cheese Slices left over from April with narrowed eyes and scowled mutterings about ‘the bin’.

2. Glenrothes 13yo + 2 goat cheeses: Stawley (geo rind, CL #27) + Sleightly (ash rind, yet to be reviewed)

The Glenrothes has a rather strong whiff. “This one comes to meet you!” exclaims Mark. “Sticky toffee pudding”, says Kerry. Rick says it’s like banana toffee, but not in an aggressive banana cake way (Rick does not like banana cake as he is a FULE).

Most agree that the Stawley makes the whisky taste bitterer, and not in a good way. Pete G: “the geo and whisky combination tastes like vom – surprisingly unpleasant.” Sarah says it tastes congealed, “like that cocktail with baileys in that curdles”. However Roswell the cat likes the Stawley – she is licking it and her tail is swishing. This may be because Roswell has not drunk any of the whisky with it.

The Slately fares much better: “sharper”, “makes your tongue fizz”, “lots of gentle flowers that you cannot taste because you’ve just drunk some whisky”. Sarah and Katie say the Slately is delicious: “it tastes like A FOREST by the Cure!”

Katie does a burp and announces that it tastes of goats cheese, to general approval of the room.

3. Bowmore Dusk + Cardo (washed rind toffee, CL #26)

This whisky is an old favourite of many present, and we are very sad that they have stopped making it. There’s not much left as a lot of it was drunk last New Year’s Eve. Kat didn’t like whisky at all before she tried this last year. Katie says it’s “like a finger of fudge that has been smoked like a kipper”. Mark says it is “clinical and lovely, like a hospital”. Rick agrees that it smells more hospital-y than when he first opened it. “It tastes sharp but there’s a real thickness to this whisky.”

Katie doesn’t like the cheese, but “the whisky is very good at taking away the taste of it”. Sarah pronounces the rind on the Cardo “amazing, quite different from the rest of the cheese”. She doesn’t want to describe it as sparkly as that would be confirmation that she is in hock to a certain vampire franchise, however there are definitely seaside sandy bits. “It’s texturally like the powder that’s left in the bottom of the pork scratching bag.”

Ewan is getting flashbacks from New Year’s Eve, when he helped deplete the contents of the bottle with some rather unsavoury after-effects.

The Cardo is proving rather ‘potent’, however Rick says the Bowmore “stomps all over the cheese, which is a good thing”. Pete G makes the first mention of the word ‘mouthfeel’ and wins 10 ponce points: “The cheese is a creamy coating for the mouth, and the whisky cuts through it – a pleasant sensation”.

Robin makes bad pun about ‘peat’ and ‘Pete’.

4. Ledaig 10 yo + Isle of Mull Cheddar (CL #77)

There’s a general consternation in the room – this whisky smells of cheese already! Smoked Austrian cheese, to be specific. Could this be the mythical Sausage Cheese? No, it’s a cheddar!

“Bloody hell!”, Rick says about the Ledaig. “It goes FLUMP in the back of the mouth after a bit; it tastes sharp after the Bowmore Dusk.” Katie disagrees and thinks it tastes ‘phat’. “The whisky doesn’t taste anything like it smells – it’s delicious and mellow when you drink it.” Mark says “there’s something spectral about this – it’s insubstantial but not in a bad way. There’s a bit of a burnt taste, like ashes.” Sarah says this is the first whisky she can swill round her mouth without it burning. She tries to anthropomorphise the whisky: “if it was a pop star it would be The Nolans”.

Juliet thinks the whisky and cheese go well together, doop thinks that the cheese sets off something different about the whisky that isn’t there separately. Katie finds Rick amusing after he says his tongue has been Activated. Pete B asks if everyone’s getting a lot of saliva.

The room takes a roast potato break and there is talk about ocelots.

5. Springbank Claret Wood 12 yo + L’Etivaz (CL #90)

This whisky overwhelms everyone at first as it’s a bit strong. “Woooph!”, “orange blossom, very fruity”. doop can’t help but think of his chemistry teacher when he smells this. “It clears your head in an anti-chlorophorm way.”

Mark declares that it tastes of biscuits. Any specific biscuit? “ALL biscuits!” Katie wonders whether the claret business is making it go well with cheese. Rick replies that it’s a bit woody and oaky, but mainly in the aroma rather than the taste. Pete G adds that there’s a bit of spicy vanilla that you might associate with wine. All agree that adding a bit of water changes it dramatically.

The L’Etivaz is pronounced “bloody lovely, om nom nom!” It is indeed a lovely cheese. Is the rind edible? Marna doesn’t think it’s worth eating but everyone does anyway. Rick says it’s like oatcakes.

Popstar comparison: Marillion (with Fish) – bombast, trying very hard, lot of stuff going on, high peaks and low troughs. Sarah however doesn’t think the cheese is as good as “Kayleigh”.

The general cheese/whisky combination is thought to be tick vg thumbs up (“good cheese, good whisky, good cheese and whisky”). The dryness of the whisky is complemented well by the cheese.

6. Caol Ila 18yo + 2-beast barrel aged Feta (yet to be reviewed)

Mark says the Caol Ila smells of paper: “Lovely, lovely cardboard.” Kat can’t smell anything until she puts her nose right in it and goes “URGH”. doop also says paper, Marna says “parchmenty mouthfeel” for even more ponce points. “It’s slightly greasy.”

Rick sniggers: “I’ll tell you what, that’s bloody lovely in the mouth.” Sarah feels like she’s had 50 cigarettes but hasn’t watered it down yet. Katie has watered hers down too much, her mathematical skill is called into question by Mark and Rick.

All agree that the feta might be a bit strong for the whisky, Kat likes it a lot though. Popstar comparison: Sly and the Family Stone – “a lot of the time they are quite boring.”

Pete says something that provokes all to put him in the bin (not sure which Pete this refers to or what the bin-worthy utterance was).

7. Laphroaig 10 yo + Persillé de Malzieu (CL #13)

Some tasters are doing Crazy Frog impressions. This is the classic ‘smells like TCP’ whisky.

“This cheese is a really salty sea-cheese.” doop says it tastes more like the sea than the sea does, and not just any sea: “the Mediterranean!” Katie says the cheese makes the whisky tastes like Ribena (or possibly Robinsons fruit juice), and that it is the cheese that’s burning on the way down, not the whisky. “It’s not a cheese, it’s a health hazard!” She wouldn’t eat it for pleasure. Mark asks if she would eat it for a bet?

The cheese has made Robin’s tongue go numb, Ewan says it’s the only cheese that could make Laphroaig taste bland. Pete B says that the cheese has the saliva producing effect of szechuan pepper. Sarah says it’s all happening around the epiglottis, or possibly the glockenspiel, and that there’s an incredibly bitter aftertaste.

Herb watch: Rick says the cheese makes the whisky tastes like rosemary, Pete G thinks lavender, Marna thinks thyme. We all nod sagely.

Marna is having trouble cutting the cheese in to proper pieces; everyone else is having trouble forming proper sentences.

The formal whisky and cheese pairing ends and havoc ensues, namely dipping cheesy wotsits into glasses of Japanese whisky (“it tastes like raspberries”), waving bits of M&S cranberry stilton and Babybel around and listening to The Best Prog Rock Album In The World… Ever!, which is found to be mostly about bvmming.

CONCLUSION: Pairing cheeses and whiskies is quite difficult unless the cheese is hard and cheddar-like and the whisky isn’t utterly insane.

Squeaking into the Christmas canon just as the gates were closing, “Mistletoe And Wine” is a hard song to listen to charitably in late July. Mind you, it was a hard song to listen to charitably in late December 1988. Good Christmas songs since Slade’s 1973 breakthrough have been an extension of pop – aimed at the same buyers, performed in the same style, with only the seasonal trimmings and sleigh bell presets to mark them out from what else was going on. “Mistletoe And Wine”, on the other hand, is in the tradition of “When A Child Is Born” – it has nothing to do with any of the currents of pop in 1988. It’s the first Christmas hit since “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” to be aimed squarely at people who only buy singles at this time of year.

Unlike “Grandma” at least it isn’t setting itself up as a present for an old lady who deserves better. But I still don’t like it: the twinkly arrangements and choirs are dressing for a sanctimonious centre, like a lecture on the “true meaning of Christmas” in school Assembly. The religious bits felt shoehorned in to me at the time – as indeed they were: the song was originally a satirical one from a musical based on The Little Match Girl, and was meant to prod at the self-satisfaction of the middle classes who feasted and made merry while the poor starved. Cliff thoroughly repurposed the tune: self-satisfaction is now A-OK as long as you remember the Baby Jesus.

If the 15 year old me, secure in my teenage atheism, had known about that I’d have taken great delight in pointing it out before going home to my own very securely off Christmas feastings. As it was I just grumbled about what an incredibly clumsy line “children singing Christian rhymes” is (and I was right). But really what hobbles “Mistletoe And Wine” isn’t even the sanctimony, it’s that there’s no sense of wonder backing it up. The best secular Christmas songs get at something true and thrilling about Christmas, even if it’s the bug-eyed greediness of a happy child. But the best Christmas carols have some kind of awe at their centre – they’re songs about an event so impossible and vital it split time in two, and even if I still don’t believe in that event I can be moved by others’ belief in it as filtered through art. We’ll have a couple more chances to see if Cliff Richard could rise to that challenge – “Mistletoe” is memorable but too pat, and the overall impression is of a sugared pill.

And remember…

IT’S GOT TO RHYME!