Albums

1. Hot Chip – One Life Stand

2.Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers

3. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

4. Brian Eno – Small Craft on a Milk Sea

5. Four Tet – There is Love in You

The Hot Chip album is easily their most cohesive effort to date and takes the winner’s medal for being chock full of stuff that is catchy, clever and, occasionally, wildly romantic. In case you hadn’t realised, these things, in the right combination, almost always make for great pop music and Hot Chip have lined everything up quite majestically. The Mount Kimbie record got me really quite excited for its dislocated bumpy beats (I’ll avoid the word dubstep) – Fat Roland does a better job than I ever could of explaining why it’s great here. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs is a similarly coherent album that contains, as usual, a couple of outstanding songs (Sprawl II is vigorously excellent) as well as a lot of very good ones. Eno not only because it’s Eno but also because it’s good and Four Tet for being nicely, and surprisingly, housey.

Books

1. Jonathan Franzen – Freedom

2. Dave Eggers – Zeitoun

I didn’t read that many books that were released this year, hence only a top two. Freedom is outstanding and you can see how it took Franzen about 400 years to write it. I can’t remember reading a novel where each sentence is so carefully thought out and each page is so densely packed with brilliant prose. Zeitoun is incredibly moving and is easily as engrossing a work of narrative non-fiction as Capote’s In Cold Blood. I’m just starting Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, which might get better but at the moment I can’t imagine it will top these two.

Films

1. Inception

2. Monsters

3. The Social Network

4. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

5. Rec 2

I know it’s a bit low-brow and predictable to select a massive blockbuster as my favourite film of the year but Inception is an exquisite movie, executed brilliantly, that manages to retain a completely satisfying narrative logic and is hugely entertaining for the entirety of its 142 minutes. The conclusion, in particular, is beautifully economical while managing to be emotionally and intellectually rich. Monsters, an ultra-low budget (£500k) semi-improvised road movie – with aliens – really surprised me and is a genuinely remarkable filmmaking achievement. The Social Network is Aaron Sorkin at the absolute peak of his powers, managing to create an engrossing drama from what, on the surface, looks like the most meagre of real-life material. Bad Lieutenant, narratively a fairly bog standard, hard-boiled police caper, benefits hugely from rampant Herzogian hysterics, while Rec 2 was inventively shot and constructed, elegantly concise… and full of demonic zombies.

Television

1. Mad Men (Season Four)

2. Wounded

3. The Trip

4. Welcome to Lagos

Mad Men continues to be extremely enthralling for all the reasons it always has been. The writing is as sharp as ever, the characters continue to evolve in interesting ways and there’s still that ever-present, darkly tense undercurrent, which makes the outcome of each episode pretty much impossible to predict. Wounded was a stunning one-off documentary about the rehabilitation of soldiers who had lost limbs in combat and is as moving a TV programme as I can ever remember. The Trip started a bit shakily but evolved into something rather deep, poetic and manly, as well as looking stunning. The three-part Welcome To Lagos was a true feat of documentary access that opened your eyes to a hidden world.

I’ve probably missed something obvious. Feel free to comment below.

But aside from Michael’s apparently fantastical erectile potency, and his belated apology over its effects, what I found most intriguing about the paper’s accompanying interview was the assertion, midway through the second paragraph, that Huckers was present at the Sex Pistols’ gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976. One must always take any printed reference to this semi-mythological incident with at least a quarter-ton of salt. Indeed, since Jean Baudrillard hypothesised that the Gulf War did not take place, I can’t personally see why we must accept the testimonies of the ageing punks and Madchester blabbergobs that the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976 happened at all.

But let’s, for the purposes of this blog post, assume it did happen. Journalist David Nolan, who has written a book about it, reckons there were “35-40″ attendees on the night but the only real suggestion that El Huckerino was one of them comes from this obviously satirical website, which claims he was accompanied by Bruno Brookes and Thora Hird, plus this Facebook page.

The evidence, then, is a little thin. And not being one of these people who believes the Wikipedia, or the newspapers, or, y’know, the books, I decided to settle the matter by tweeting Mick Hucknall thus:

Hey @mjhucknall Guardian says you were at the Sex Pistols’ Free Trade Hall gig in 76. Can you confirm if it’s true? Loving your work BTW

So what’s the truth? Was Hucko really a part of this mythical event? Did Johnny Rotten play some strange, indirect part in the creation of Simply Red’s 1980-something masterpiece Stars? Excitingly, Le Huck responded just a couple of hours later:

@davidquinn yes I can.

So there you have it. A sort of definitive yes, direct from the iPad of Sir Mick. Now, does anyone have Bruno Brookes’ mobile number? There’s something I need to ask him.

And so it’s happened again. This time, the Guardian has suggested that Morrissey has reignited a “racism row” by calling the Chinese a “subspecies”. My immediate response to the paper’s interview, imaginatively entitled “Bigmouth strikes again” (exactly the same as the cover-line for the NME piece back in 2007) is not, strangely, that Morrissey is a racist. Worryingly, in light of my otherwise unimpeachable liberal tendencies, it is that the Guardian is talking crap.

Aside from the interview’s rather tired set-up, in which the poet Simon Armitage explores the experience of being a Smiths/Morrissey fan, (“When Morrissey sported Jack Duckworth-style prescription glasses mended with Elastoplast I went looking for a pair in the market,” etc) and thus ends up using the words “I” and “I’m” an excruciating 35 times in the fucking preamble, the description “subspecies” has to be deliberately taken out of context in order to be interpreted as racist. In fact, as Armitage actually states in a follow-up Guardian news story, the word “subspecies” was deliberately chosen by Morrissey because, in a discussion about animal rights, it vividly suggests that the perpetrators of violence against animals are actually below the level of the animals whose rights are being violated. Or, as Armitage more succinctly puts it:

In his view, if you treat an animal badly, you are less than human. I think that was his point.

Now, fair enough, branding 1.3bn people with a culture stretching back thousands of years as a “subspecies” is crude, nonsensical and misjudged. But I guess the point boils down to this: If someone starts talking about various nations and cultures they dislike, and the Chinese crop up in that discussion and are described as a “subspecies”, then yes, fair enough, they are racist. But if someone starts talking about cruelty to animals, and they say they have a particular problem with China’s record in this area, then surely, despite the possibly ill-advised language, this is not really a race issue at all. And the fact that Armitage was there, and he doesn’t think Morrissey made a racist statement in the first place, makes you wonder about the Guardian’s agenda.

So anyway, now I’ve said all that, I feel a bit scared. Am I merely pointing out the weaknesses in a newspaper article, or am I, y’know [whispers] a Morrissey apologist? I fear I must be. Why else would I conclude this post with a link to a horrifying YouTube video depicting animal cruelty in China?

Yes, Tony Wilson was great, Blue Monday is an incredible pop song and that anecdote about the Happy Mondays’ crack-based vacation in Barbados is truly one that unites us as a nation. We get it. We got it some time ago, in fact. But someone really needed to point out that the Peter Hook-backed FAC251 club sounds like a criminally boring money-making, credibility-losing enterprise, while Delphic are an average band whose claim to the title of “the new New Order” smacks of a desperate record company marketing person’s unconvincing hard sell. (Edit: Having listened to the album I’ve actually decided I really like Delphic. The New Order link is possibly more a result of lazy journalism than deliberate marketing.)

As FUC51 puts it:

While slating Liverpool for being a Beatle-museum, Mancs are still pretending it’s 1988. Look around the city and you’re given constant reminders of Factory Records, The Hacienda, The Stone Roses, The Smiths, Acid House, NewOrderJoyDivision and… you get the idea.

Our aim is to act as snipers to this relentless wave of borrowed nostalgia that continues to make stars of Madchester hangers-on and people steeped in yesteryear.

Something went a bit weird when these hangers-on became part of the Manchester establishment. Despite coining the slogan Original Modern, the council and its public sector marketing quangos are obsessed with the myth-making. They recruited Hacienda designer Ben Kelly to design the corporate stand at the MIPIM property fair in the south of France a couple of years ago, at which copies of CDs containing various baggy-era classics were handed out to the greying property developers in beige suits and Ray-Bans who gravitate there each March. The council’s recruitment of Peter Saville as creative consultant at a salary of a hundred and twenty grand a year is also, if we’re being completely honest, a little bit silly.

So down with this sort of thing. Let’s all listen to Autechre.

Hat tip (at risk of turning this blog into a Stockport-based blog love-in) to Marple Leaf for pointing me in its general direction.

However, I became conscious that my regular reader would be missing me, so I invited, via the medium of Twitter, people to suggest things for me to write about to get me back in the swing of shit. Out of the literally hundreds of replies (or “at (@) replies”, to use the parlance of our times), I selected the suggestion of Fat Roland, whose words were exactly these:

“If you post a top ten(ish) favourite electronic music tracks / albums, I’ll link it from my blog.”

He didn’t put a smiley face on the end, thank God, or I would have immediately unfollowed him. Having accepted the challenge, I immediately realised that I have no real idea how to write about electronic music, tending, as I do, to write about other things almost all the time. And I also felt intimidated by Fat’s words, namely, to quote him:

“I’ll link it from my blog.”

Fat, in case you don’t know, is the über-lord of electronic music blogging. As such, I have spent the last 24 hours in a frenzy (often tearful), writing pages of drivel about each of the ten (ish) tracks I selected, before having to tear it up and start again, such was the inadequacy of my prose. In the end, I couldn’t go on, so I felt I had to enlist the help of legendary music journalist Gary Frotter (46), who worked on Muzik back in the “day”. He assisted me in coming up with some superb one-line descriptions for each track, which I reproduce below:

1. Baby Ford and the I-Fach Machine – Bad Friday

“Minimal echoey trance that sounds like someone throwing a set of magnetised woks at a giant radiator. In York Minster.”

2. Polygon Window – unnamed

“Squelchier than a combine harvester driving over a bouncy castle filled with worms.”

3. Speedy J – Kreck

“Rib-fracturingly hard techno.”

4. Moderat – Seamonkey

“Ultra modern like dubstep or some shit, kind of thing.”

5. Leftfield – Space Shanty

“Bubbly, yet banging. Like a partly-melted Aero, inside a kick drum, floating in a bowl of hydrochloric acid.”

6. Mike Flowers Pops – Debase (Soft Palate)

“More sym(cym)bols(bals) than a Dan Brown novel(12″).” [Not sure I quite understand that one - DQ]

7. Daniel Savio – Monkey P M P (video below)

“Literally indescribable. Like a condom half-filled with lumpy custard being flung at a Siamese cat as Alan Titchmarsh looks on.”

8. Lee van Dowski and Quennum – Lust Part 2

“Theme choon from a Venusian version of High Noon.”

9. Gui Boratto  - Arquipélago

“If this is Brazilian (which it is) then I want a Brazilian (wax)!”

10. Gow – Nipperkin Noodle

“Proto-industrial acid house with a moderate air of brotherly indecision.”

11. The Field – A Paw in My Face

“Lionel Richie trapped inside a photocopier with only a vial of liquid ecstasy and a mild brain tumour for company. And that’s my kind of party.”

That’s it, Fat. I hereby claim my link.

(Damn. Forgot about Flat Beat by Mr Oizo.)

What’s apparently happened, in case you don’t read the FT, is that the three original members of the band – Barbarella, Chelseigh and Kia-Ora – quit at various times during the last few years. As this gradual “staff turnover” became troublesome to their record label, each of the three was replaced with an alternative croaky-voiced harridan. First came Chantelle, then Shiraz was drafted in, and finally we ended up with… another one.

In other words, none of the original trio remains. Instead, all three have been replaced by a slightly better-looking new model at regular intervals. A bit like you get with Mazdas.

The intriguing possibility here is that the Sugababes, assuming they do still “exist”, could literally never end. Girls Aloud and the like will eventually be ravaged by age but the Sugafranchise will continue. The endgame will be the first mimetic polyalloy member of the group, Candida, who will be parachuted in to replace a defrosted Geri Halliwell in approximately 2180.*

*Yes, this observation is recycled from Twitter. Well spotted.

Damian McBride, a “special adviser” to the Prime Minister has been caught sending e-mails to Derek Draper (of Labour List fame) apparently suggesting some things that could be used to slur David Cameron and George Osborne. Somehow or other these got into the hands of Tory blogger Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes). They have also been touted around the Sunday tabloids.

McBride has said nothing publicly but this morning someone unnamed at Number 10 claimed he had apologised:

Neither the Prime Minister nor anybody else in Downing Street, except the author, knew anything about any of these private emails. The author of these emails has apologised for their juvenile and inappropriate nature and for the embarrassment caused. All staff will be reminded of the appropriate use of Number 10 resources.

It’s a slightly silly story with nothing much to commend it except for the similarity to a storyline in The Thick of It (see below), which in turn was based on the Jo Moore incident of 2001. (If you recall, she was the remarkably talented government “adviser” who issued an e-mail on the day 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks suggesting it was

a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.)

The bloggers’ spat between rugby shirt-wearing “mystery man” Staines (check out his appearance on Newsnight if you are unfamilar with the man) and the unfortunate Twitter-spammer Draper (“a former regular on ITV1′s Kyle’s Academy”, according to his biog) is also tedious in the extreme.

But the question remains: How is it that people like McBride and Moore are employed to give out advice about political matters, and yet can’t figure out that by putting stuff in e-mails they might as well fax it directly to the offices of the News of the World?

UPDATE 10.35pm, Saturday: The Sunday Times has revealed the contents of McBride’s idiotic e-mail, which includes a plan to force David Cameron to reveal his medical records on account of an alleged sexually transmitted disease (?). What’s startling is the way Draper commends McBride’s suggestions as

Absolutely totally brilliant Damian.

McBride has resigned. If these two pillocks are the best of the attack dogs then Gordon Brown surely has much more to worry about than the minor problem of a massive recession come the next General Election campaign.

It was consequently quite weird to wake up a few hours later and see on the news that Hart has died at the age of 83. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that you realise how great his various TV series were. The clip below shows the title sequence – a typography enthusiast’s dream – and music in all its glory, as well as the first half-minute or so of a random Hart Beat episode with a slightly peculiar and spatula-heavy scripted intro.

RIP.

Film

I thought Wall-E was surprisingly deep for a kids film and was also technically flawless. But There Will Be Blood blew me away.

1. There Will Be Blood

2. Wall-E

3. Jar City

3. The Dark Knight

5. No Country For Old Men

TV

Absolutely no contest for the top slot, while Top Gear remains the most entertaining programme on television even when watching a repeat for the seventh time on Dave.

1. The Wire*

2. Top Gear

3. Wallander

4. The Apprentice

5. House of Saddam

*NB I’ve only watched a couple of episodes from Season 5 so far so if you’re leaving a comment, please NO SPOILERS!

Music

I don’t think it was a vintage year but perhaps I’m just turning into an old fart. Hercules and Love Affair was the only album that genuinely excited me but the rest of these are all pretty good.

1. Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair

2. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

3. Duffy – Rockferry

4. Beck – Modern Guilt

5. Fujiya & Miyagi – Lightbulbs

Miscellaneous

1. The discovery of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and their Martin Beck books

2. The use of the word “ASBO” as a noun. eg “Dave, you asbo!”

3. Pro-Evolution Soccer on Wii

4. Peanut Butter & Co’s “Crunch Time” peanut butter

5. The Barclaycard advert where the guy slides down a massive water chute

The resignation of Brand and Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas, and the suspension of Ross on zero pay until January, shows the debate has moved beyond the issue about who said what to whom and how offensive it might have been. It’s morphed into a Daily Mail-led hate explosion in which the Alan Titchmarsh-loving moral majority lament the bloke-ish, foul-mouthed comedy of a few highly-paid BBC “faces” who represent the antithesis of everything they hold dear. (And yet the Mail’s decision to publish numerous photos of Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter Georgina Baillie in various states of undress entirely thwarts the paper’s position as a moral guardian.)

Whatever the problems with the unfunny, puerile, bullying phone “prank” might have been – and how it came to be aired – the Beeb’s capitulation to this mass of 30,000 brainwashed idiots – none of whom, let’s remember, actually heard the original broadcast – is depressing in the extreme.

The dead hand of Max Clifford in the affairs of Baillie (aka Voluptua from the Satanic Sluts – link almost certainly NSFW) adds another sordid angle. I notice she was complaining in a Sun interview yesterday about how Brand

embarrassed me by making a private relationship very public in the cruellest way imaginable.

And yet today, the same fuckwit’s comic publishes a kiss-and-tell in which Baillie reveals Brand is

a disappointment in the bedroom considering he has had so much practice.

Thanks for clearing that up, Voluptua. I hope your appearance on next year’s Celebrity Big Brother goes well.

Photo: BBC