May your days be merry and bright.
With copious drifts of seasonal Blog Love,
Mike and K. xxx

(Think I'll just switch this thing on and see what comes out...)

K has been sick this week. Horribly, incapacitatingly sick. So sick that he had to go to bed for two days... and K never spends the day in bed; he's one of life's Brave Strugglers On.

(How very different from my own attitude to viral infections, which I view as a God-given chance to do f*** all and not get stressed about it. This makes me a thoroughly good-natured invalid - indeed, I've been complimented in the past about my Positive Mental Attitude - when all I'm really doing is gratefully yielding to my default factory settings of extreme indolence. K, on the other hand, tends towards vocally expressive martydom, with regular five-minute bulletins on the precise state of his health, linked together with a non-stop mantra of groans, wheezes and theatrical exhalations. But that's because he's fighting against his condition, instead of graciously accepting it and working with it.)

Returning home from work yesterday, and fully expecting to find him draped over the sofa in his jim-jams, hand poised over brow, in an artfully assembled tableau of suffering, I discover him cheerfully bounding round the kitchen, voice restored, eyes aglow, busily preparing anchovy and pancetta palmiers for Boxing Day. In other words, he has been miraculously reborn as Martha Stewart. Hosanna in the highest!

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Ah bless, the things they say, etc.

Me: So, have you seen Shrek 2?

L, aged 8, curled up contentedly in her father's lap: Yes, Daddy got it on DVD.

L's father: You enjoyed it, didn't you?

L, beaming: Yes... but now I'd like to have the non-illegal version.

L's father: Shhhh. You're not supposed to say things like that...

God, we're good at buying presents. That's going to be one happy little girl tomorrow morning. Gloria in excelsis deo!

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Boxing Day aside, we're having a quiet one. No tree, no turkey, no house guests tomorrow at all; instead, we're going out for a walk with friends in the village, followed by a beef supper round at their place. We've took our holiday three weeks ago, so the pressure is off Christmas to deliver what it singularly fails to do each year. (You know: peace, quiet, tranquility, healthy pursuits, a chance to catch up on some reading, that sort of thing. Whereas the reality is days on end of waking up late, blobbing around in a bloated haze, and never actually getting anything done with the day.) In fact, we've de-prioritised the festive season to such an extent that, for the first time ever in my (hem hem) "professional career", I'll be going back to work for a couple of days between Christmas and New Year. Because I'll be saving two perfectly good days which could be spent going somewhere nice, later in the year. Yes, the penny has dropped at last. Four days off; two days on; four days off again. Good enough for me. Right, I'm off down the pub with my co-workers. Christmas Eve's a doss day at work, innit? Deo gracias!

Cristina - Disco Clone (Disco Mix) (1978)

Whip crack-away! Now that you've had time to get used to the "proper" song-based version, I think perhaps you might be ready for the full-on perv-fest of the Disco Mix, in which Cristina (and Kevin Kline) get low down and dirrrtay (and in the process, showing up latter day pop strumpets like Ms. Aguilera for the lightweights that they are). Warning: do NOT listen to this on headphones in crowded lifts. Yes, I speak from experience.

Katina - Don't Stick Stickers On My Paper Knickers (1973)

Ooooh, cheeky! There were at least two, if not three, versions of this whimsically jaunty little pop-reggae confection knocking around in 1973 - none of which charted, probably having been deemed far too risqué for radio play (if not quite risqué enough to build up a Judge Dread-style cult following).

A period piece, this one; a social historian could have a field day with it. I particularly like the way the second verse fails to scan properly, and the Carry On-style banter towards the end.

(Now updated with a fourth MP3.)



The Enemy Within - Strike (1984)

Lest anyone should think otherwise, Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas wasn't the only topical, "issue-based" single of December 1984. With the UK miners' strike moving into its tenth month, three singles appeared at much the same time, each offering its own commentary on the longest - and (give or take the odd scuffle down Wapping way) the last - of this country's major industrial disputes.

Listening to them again twenty years later, Strike by The Enemy Within - the least commercially successful of the three - emerges as the strongest piece of music by some distance. Put together by the same team (Adrian Sherwood/Keith LeBlanc/Tackhead) that had been responsible for No Sell Out, 1983's pioneering Malcolm X cut-up, Strike does the same job for Arthur Scargill ("The most gorgeous redhead since Rita Hayworth" - Julie Burchill, The Face), setting excerpts from his speeches against stark, stuttering electro. Surprisingly for such a time-specific piece, it retains a good deal of its resonance to this day.



Keep On Keepin' On! - The Redskins (1984)

But can we say the same for The Redskins? Led by a former NME journalist, this deeply politicised punk-soul trio were effectively the house band for the Socialist Workers Party, with singles such as Kick Over The Statues, Bring It Down! (This Insane Thing), The Power Is Yours and It Can Be Done! Impeccable left-wing credentials aside, there's something tinny and strained about the would-be clarion call of Keep On Keepin' On!, with its Motown-pastiche bassline sounding as if it had been lifted from A Town Called Malice rather than Holland/Dozier/Holland. It's also now impossible to listen to its earnest exhortions ("If it takes a year, we've gotta take it...") in isolation from the knowledge that the strike collapsed just three months later, the miners' defeat also signalling the inexorable decline of both the trade union movement and the British coal industry.

A heroically principled and uncompromising stance - or naive, shallow, manipulative posturing which barely disguised its hidden agenda? Oh, but you had to decide. For this was an age of binary choices and clear-cut ideological certainties, where fence-sitting was derided from both sides.



The Council Collective - Soul Deep (12 inch version) (1984)

However, listening to Paul Weller & the Style Council, Jimmy Ruffin, Junior Giscombe and a cast of thousands trying to imbue clunkingly prosaic lines ("Just where is the backing from the TUC?") with some approximation of gritty "authenticity", on this borderline-embarrassing stab at re-creating the "hard times" funk of US outfits such as Brother D & Collective Effort, Defunkt and the Valentine Brothers, you might find it increasingly hard to suppress a smirk. To say nothing of the cringingly misplaced "solidarity" of a bunch of pop stars deploying the first person plural so readily - because, like, this is our struggle too, yeah? You know those two adjectives that the right have always delighted in bashing the left with: "sanctimonious" and "self-righteous"? Well, it is difficult to argue convincingly against their presence on this effort (which nevertheless crawled as high as #24 on the UK singles chart, giving Paul Weller his smallest hit in over six years).

On the other hand, it does put Weller's curmudgeonly scowling on the first Band Aid single into context. Don't they know there's a war on?

Coming up later (after a six-hour round trip to an industrial estate outside Rickmansworth chiz chiz) ... one more MP3, which might put a somewhat different complexion on things.

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However... flipping over to the B-side of the Soul Deep 12-inch, for its first playing in 20 years, I find this...

The Council Collective - A Miner's Point (1984)

...which is a lengthy interview with a couple of striking Nottinghamshire miners called Bob and Chris (complete with a baffling writing credit for "Weller/Talbot", but I'm sure there's a VERY SOUND EXPLANATION for that). Instantly, the cynical smirk that had been spreading during the previous two tracks was wiped straight off my face.

In December 1984, in the rather less than glamorous surroundings of the John Carroll Leisure Centre in Radford, Dymbel and I DJ-ed a benefit night in aid of the miners' strike, as organised by the local branch of the Labour Party. (My first DJ gig ever, in fact.) This turned out to be a decidedly disillusioning experience.

For - as PJ O'Rourke infers in this month's Word magazine - in those almost unimaginably far off days, one of the great things about lining yourself up with the left was that you were simultaneously lining yourself up with all the cool kids. All the sharp, aware, sexy people, with the just-so flat-tops and the button-fly shrink-to-fit 501s, were sporting "Coal Not Dole" stickers on their donkey jackets and rattling collecting tins outside the refectory in the Portland building on campus. And, wa-hey, I was going to be DJ-ing for them!

Except, well, perhaps there were better things to do that night than shuffle on down to the John Carroll Leisure Centre. Which just left a couple of dozen morose old hippies - lank, centre-parted hair and shit-brown sweaters - skinning up in the corner and displaying absolutely no interest whatsoever in the contents of the singles boxes which Dymbel and I had spent all afternoon putting together. (Except for one solitary over-enthusiastic punkette from Tyneside who kept fruitlessly pestering us for "Nellie The Elephant" by the Toy Dolls - but to be frank, she was neither here nor there.)

With less than an hour left to go, Dymbel and I decided that it was only right and proper to play something that was directly related to the strike. Out came the just-released Soul Deep... and over to the decks wandered a solidly built man in his twenties, incongruous in sober suit and tie, who politely asked if he could take a look at the record sleeve.

"I'm on the B-side of this, you know. Have you listened to it?"

It was Chris, the younger of the two men interviewed. Decent, dignified chap - as you'll hear if you play the MP3 (encoded at 96 kbps, to save space). I'd forgotten this until now, but I think we stopped the music and let him make a brief speech. Actually, we must have done - because then Dymbel introduced the Redskins record as being about the strike, in the hope that this would finally get the hippies off their arses.

It didn't. At which point we just went "oh sod it", and - all lingering aspirations of credibility finally cast aside - slapped on Jumpin' Jack Flash. It filled the floor. As did Free's All Right Now, and all the other dinosaur rock classics we followed it with. (I can still remember shaking my head in scornful disbelief: imagine only being able to dance to records which were at least 12 years old! I had a lot to learn.)

I wonder what happened to Chris and Bob - whose voices on this interview (and is that Gary Crowley talking to them?) sound like echoes from a world that has all but vanished. Impossible - utterly impossible - to imagine these sentiments, or anything like them, being expressed in the Britain of 2004. For of the wide range of emotions I experienced in the course of listening to this, the one that ultimately lingered was one of a great, ineffable sadness: at all which has been lost, and replaced with... what, precisely?

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Coming soon: that filthy version of Cristina's Disco Clone. Best stock up on the Kleenex, lads!

Isn't it weird how, despite all your best intentions, Christmas just leaps up and mugs you at the last minute? With a sea of bossy Post-Its screaming at me from all sides, and an imminent lunch hour that will need choreographing to the nearest second, there's just enough time to fob you off with a bunch of semi-digested links. Think of them as my store-bought mince pies, to be whipped out and plonked on a plate in emergencies. (Because semi-digested links deserve half-baked metaphors.)

À propos my recent mild flirtation with tech-geekery, Gordon was moved to comment:Funny you should say that, Gordon...

Since the early months of this year, Eric Bogs' evijhserf (pronounced eve-sherf) has stealthily risen through the ranks to become an absolute must-read, hang-on-every-word, delight of a blog. A twentysomething American ex-pat in London, Eric inhabits a world with which I used to have a certain passing familiarity: a endlessly self-renewing demi-monde of giddy thrills, reckless spills and cheeky pills, in which there will always be hunky new Brazilian bartenders in the VIP room at Heaven, hot new trade to laugh and flirt with, whole new clusters of eager aspirant shags, unattainable fantasy shags and wounded, bitter ex-shags, new scandals and dramas to witness, new door-whores to schmooze, new openings to crash... and documents it with wit, verve and panache, combining an agreeably unabashed self-aggrandisment with a redeeming sense of wry perspective, coolly dissecting all that he celebrates.

Towards the end of August, Eric put a shout-out for a guest-blogger, to take over evijhserf for a couple of weeks:Mired as I was in post-Peruvian wobbles, and laid up with a severe case of Diva's Block, I sensed an opportunity... applied... and was accepted, under terms of strict confidentiality.

Thus it was that Guest Blogger Neil was born. A brusque, terse, somewhat jaded and embittered individual, who had seen it all before, done it first, and - naturally - done it better, Neil relished the chance to parade his exploits and misdeeds before the fluttering jeunesse dorée that (in his eyes at least) comprised the bulk of Eric's readerdhip. Tawdry? Sordid? Oh, he could do that all right. Just watch him.

Unfortunately, browser compatibility problems meant that Neil's debut on evijhserf was delayed for a week or so, thus cutting short his intended aim to write one post for every year between 1993 and 2003. Given the contents of the three main posts which did make it to press, perhaps that was just as well.

Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth. (Oscar Wilde)

Neil isn't Mike, and Mike was never Neil. (At least that's my story, and I intend to stick to it.) But then, lest you think otherwise, Mike's life hasn't always been about boutique spa resorts, second homes in the country, Princess Diana memorial gardens, gracious living and nice shirts. So, in honour of those increasingly distant days of experimentation and excess, here's a glimpse into Neil's Wild Years.

• you ain't seen me, right?
• 1993: doya do do do doya
• 1994: away with the fairies
• 1995: things they'll never see
• i've started, so i'll finish

Note 1: Except, well, I didn't finish. Exported everything I'd written to a new blog; looked at it again; and decided that, out of the context of Eric's site, it all looked a bit underwritten, and thus unsustainable in the long term. To say nothing of the undocumented - and maybe undocumentable - tawdriness and sordidity that lay ahead. No; best leave it at that, all things considered.

Note 2: The photos are all cropped scans of larger pieces by the great Richard Avedon, who died just over two weeks later.

Note 3: If the typeface on Eric's site looks a bit on the tiny side, then click on text size: normal at the top right of his sidebar.