However same stage, two nights before, while 808 State were playing their own records at themselves I stumbled across Swami. who used to be DJ Swami but is now a six piece bhangra rock rap act who for sheer energy wiped the floor with anything on the John Peel Stage (and could probably teach the Go! Team a little bit about being a live act). More information on Swami here. Don’t mind the moody photo, they were lovely boys on stage.

How to judge how much a band affects ones life? How about the medium of karaoke?

I like karaoke. I rather like flicking through the big book and picking whatever takes my fancy at that moment. I do not have standards that I always do, not any more. Where is the fun in that.

EVERY KARAOKE NIGHT I HAVE BEEN TO SINCE SUMMER 2002 I HAVE SUNG A BUSTED SONG*

What I Go To School For is tremendous fun to sing. It is tremendous fun just to read, but straining for the notes and the three-in-one harmonies can easily be sung by one person. Year 3000 is even sillier (and has my name in it). You Said No allows a decent shouty rant bit as well. And of course the most karaoke friendly dance move is the Busted jump, you are literally staying on the spot.

I have never sung Thunderbirds Are Go! I need a karaoke night now to commiserate.
Buh-bye Busted!

*Except for the one in New York, and now that there Americee will never have the chance to fall for the ‘Sted.

I BLAME BIFFY CLYRO!!

Ah Busted. I saw you at Wembley Stadium. By myself. I sat in a row of three seats on the balcony as close to the front as the balcony allowed. I appeared to be the only person drinking. How I smiled as I handed over my three pounds for a pint of Carling in a plastic glass. And then more. And then some more. I was the tallest person in the venue, at 5″2. And possibly the oldest person who wasn’t a parent. How I loved you Busted. How I mocked you, YOU, CHARLIE, when you did your solo emo song which was k-rub. How I thought, “that will never be a single”. And now, it’s over. It’s all over. I suppose I could transfer my allegiances to McFly, but since the Popjustice BUSTED WZ ROBBED TRAVESTY I’m afraid my principles won’t allow it.

Those were the days, my friends. We thought they’d never end. We’d sing and dance… forever, and a day. We’d live the life we choose, we’d fight… and NEVER LOSE! For we were Busted fans! And we were sure (SURE!) to have our way.

What, I’ve stopped my touching tribute just to recite song lyrics by Mary Hopkins/your common or garden local drag act?

It’s a fair cop.

PS it has occured to me that a tribute to Busted should be written, to the tune of A House’s Endless Art just so we can all shout “TORY BUSTED, ARRR OII PEE”. Good old “A House”. Any Music-Ian readers reading – get on it.

1. People Announcing Who The Song Is By

This started as a sarky comments box dig at 6music, who may well be playing rub new band The Bravery day and night but frankly I wouldn’t know, because it’s so rare for anything new on their playlist to get actually named as such by the DJ. And when they do bother to tell you they mumble it. XFM are bad on this too, and I grumpily assumed that this is an ‘indie thing’ but when I thought about it some more I realised that Radio 1 were if anything even worse. It’s as if the transmittion of basic information is some kind of naff hangover from the old school Smashie and Nicey days and now Simply Not Done unless people email in and ask. Some credence is lent to that theory by the fact that the most informative pop station is cheesy old Capital.

Hand in hand with this is the rise of commercial digital stations which simply dispense with DJs entirely. Smash Hits radio can probably assume that anyone listening knows its entire playlist, but Kiss FM can’t. Maybe not telling you what’s been playing is some kind of cunning scheme to thwart the downloaders. I grabbed recent hot dance smash Uniting Nations off the inter only to find that I’d heard it fifty times in the last week.

(The exception to this is Andrew Collins, who is a DJ of the Peelite old school and very diligent about letting you know what’s playing. Good for him – but since everything Collins, A. plays comes from when Collins, A. worked for the NME, i.e. when I read it, I know it all anyway.)

(NB popjustice’s slogan “We love the pop – so you don’t have to”, a) that sounds familiar, b) but we want to anyway, c) we love you too!)

Bonus science: Vacuum Energy Problems

What gets me is that no record company seems to have realised that there’s a marketing opportunity here. Not a big one, but a chance for a chart scrap, a bit of publicity in a weak month, maybe a few extra sales. But no – the release schedules are a graveyard and the fattest corpse around is having a clear run. Even the Official Charts Company aren’t making any fuss about the 1000th No.1. Maybe only I care (and I admit I lost perspective on this some while ago). Bring on the sodding download chart and end this sorry business now, I think.

Sounds good to me. Can’t be worse than Mike Read, anyway.

I was lying flat in a London Osteopathy clinic last night. The Doctor was manipulating a disc in my back, trying to stop the sciatic nerve shooting pain down my leg. He advised me to go home and take a bath. Instead I went to a Pogues concert.

I last saw the band about fifteen years ago. I remember reading an article suggesting now was the time to go as Shane was technically dead. Yet, here he is, 2004, dedicating songs to Joe Strummer and Kirsty MacColl.

OK, he’s forgotten most of the lyrics and his face is fat, but most of the audience looked worse. He covered his mistakes with some yee-has and a silly dance and this wasn’t an impress me crowd anyway.

There’s a kind of homoerotic air at Pogues concerts. Big beery guys with arms around each other. Occasionally they have human tower ideas that end in heaps and puddles. I’m sure some of them even enjoy rugby, but I forgave them last night and got caught up in it all.

Oddly, my back feels a little better this morning.

For many of you out there, there may be none more seismic a newsflash over the festive season. The prospect of a new Daft Punk album has excited me for some time, but hang on, it’s not been mentioned on The Raft, only NME from what I can tell. And, that title! Those track titles…it’s all rather fishy isn’t it? Risky to speculate either way if you want to avoid getting a plate, getting your words, putting those words on said plate, and eating your words…BUT if it IS true then it did bring to mind an interesting ‘tactic’ for bands as they bid to distinguish their new great work from the last. Supposedly, by denial or retraction they go forwards…almost too keen to convince everyone this one will be different from the previous effort, at least in concept and premise. Not that another Discovery or Homework would probably be a good idea, I think I just adhere to a rather ‘boyish’ (and both appealing yet disturbing) ideal about machines or indeed man-machines being superior to the human, an ethos that’s resulted in some of the most amazing, dynamic electronic pop music of the last 30 years or more. And I hope Thomas and Guy-Man still recognise that and don’t ’sell their turntables and buy guitars’ (to paraphrase ‘Losing My Edge’) as it were.

So I think I’d prefer ‘We Are Still Zer Robotz’ for the title…

OK, so this is a novelty single. While Russell Tyrone Jones languishes in chokey the smart-arse undie-ground are partying up a storm on the back of another tragi-comic hip-hop legend in process. Like the recent Fog material, this is post-Beck slacker-hop: sirens wail for backing vocals, an acoustic guitar and garbage-can drums clatter away on top, and dubious homage is paid to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s short-lived refuge from the lawmen. Like all good novelty singles, this is a curiously satisfying, and eminently catchy song.

But like all sugar-saturated confectionary it leaves you with a headache. As a career launch-pad record for Californian Geoff McIntire this seems like a cheap piggy-back ride on the notoriety of another. As a ‘tribute’, the record continues the pop-mythologisation of yet another anecdote for an NME fifty most bang-to-right musicmakers article or similar. Yet the ghastly self-parody that was ODB approaching police officers in a burger joint carpark to offer them an autograph haunts this single in its turn. As ODB consumed Russell Jones, so in turn Jones’ immolation consumes McIntire’s work. For just as we depend on myth to make sense of the world, so myth depends on our celebration and re-elaboration to survive. And as myth is inseparable from catastrophe, so a novelty single is the only way to stave off the acknowledgement of our complicity in what became of Jones.

What Isabel likes about Bush is her range — ‘lots of variety; most of your CDs get boring after a few tracks’ — and I kind of agree, though one Kate Bush song is more like another Kate Bush song than it is anything much else. What I like is her practicality. Which is to say, her best tracks are very compact and unfussy — she packs maximum drama (in the stage sense) into a short time. With ‘Wuthering Heights’ or ‘Breathing’ or ‘Babushka’ she pushes a story into a four-minute box and those tracks can seem a little flushed as a result. With ‘Cloudbusting’ or ‘The Hounds Of Love’ or this track she’s learnt the trick of implying a backstory and a resolution, so these songs feel like the moments of absolute importance within a wider, more mysterious narrative (a life, even).

But also practical in the sense that a Bush song can often be used flexibly — ‘Hounds Of Love’ you can drunkenly giggle about and leap around to and shiver at as the occasion suggests — or all at the same time if you like. Maybe that flexibility is missing from ‘This Woman’s Work’, which I think would hush a party or be defeated by one. The song and its singing is very beautiful — more so 13 years on as the backing synthesizers feel so awkward — and the opening sigh-swoon captures some of the delightful un-fixedness I want from a Bush record. But mostly this seems a different, more straightforward, kind of excellence.

Now as you may have noticed questions of authenticity and the circumstances surrounding the making of records don’t really bug me much. Head for ILM and nose around if you want the theoretical justifications for this, because the topic’s always bubbling away on some thread or other – but the upshot is that I didn’t care whether Milli Vanilli were miming, I don’t care whether the Neptunes use live instruments or dead ones, and if Donna Summer really was playing hide-the-studio-sausage on “Love To Love You Baby” it’s no business of mine.

However here I am struggling against willpower, stress and time to get my packing done, and all I’m thinking while this soothing, delicate (and in my current fraught state, essential) song is playing is – “Are those real hiccups?”

- Layo and Bushwacka’s Low Life reviewed by Tim Finney, a piece which was for a long-time the least read thing on the entire site. (I think it got about forty hits!) That’s no reflection on its merits.
- My car boot sale odyssey, one of the best things I wrote in the early days of FT.
- The Chemical Brothers’ Surrender reviewed by me.
- D’Angelo’s Voodoo reviewed by Fred Solinger as part of our long-ago Love Issue. I can’t remember whether Fred or I was responsible for the godawful Magma pun that serves as a headline.

Spurred on by similar reviews published in the so-called popular press, I listened to this on the listening post at a well-known Megastore near me (and probably near you too). I found it to be a load of retro toss. And given that what Mr NME calls ‘dad rock’ and ‘flu rock’, let alone Pop Idol, are regularly berated for being similarly mired in the past, how can this be an antidote? Trying to live in one past moment rather than another is still trying to live in the sodding past.

(I also listened to and then bought the Tweet single, in case you’re wondering. It’s nearly as good as what people are saying about it.)

Ah yes but anyway where was I? Oh yes, they will not be lonely because WORD CAME TO ME IN A DREAM!!! In this dream, I passed through a wonderful vista of the streets of North London on a double decker red bus and my destination was to a Dudley Corporation musical gathering. There would be the squiggly guitars and the wickedfast basslines and the BEST DRUMMING EVAH, what more do you need for a rock experience? Venue? An indoor tennis court! I see bassist Pip doctoring his low frequencies on the sidelines. I wave, go over and LIKE A MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PITCHER, he throws me a beer! Quality! I then rock over to see guitar hero Dudley and punk rock drummer Joss. Joss drums like a BANG CRASH MONKEY HERO! But in my dream he is a professional marathon runner and is wearing a SWEATBAND on his head!! Hee, he looked funny. We do a bit of idle chit chat and then the Arsemonkey tells me she is bored and wants to go home. So we rock back home and then switch the telly on and what do we see?? The Corpo! Playing the Royal Festival Hall! To A CAST OF THOUSANDS! All cheering like wot the great unwashed are liable to do. Hoorah!!! I put forward that this is not at all being lonely but instead it is being ROCKSTARS!!! Yay!

And then someone threw a cucumber on stage. It is obviously phallic.

I love the Dudleys. It’s rock but not rockist, it’s pop but they don’t wear spangly S Club FroXoR (although if they did they would be best band EVAH maybe even better than KATE BUSH). The noise from the GEETAR and the intricate COMPLEXITY makes everything they do a WINNAH – and even when they slow it down I have been known to break my ‘Oh No, Not The Ballad’ rule and let them rock the melancholy acoustical tree hugging HIPPY RUBBIDGE. Because they can actually do it quite well due to lashings of very dark humour which drop kick them out of the ditch of mediocrity like 3 meng on new fangled FLYING MACHINES.

(9/10, obv. Get Kate Bush on backing vocals, 10/10.)