New car, caviar, four star daydream

Once again, with the heroically remorseless inevitability of a Take That key change, November has crept up on me from behind like an inebriated but worryingly stealthy gibbon and I find myself staring with disturbingly erotic dread into the vast and empty chasm more commonly known as Christmas. The preparations at Castle Angstrom are underway and already I can feel the leaden corpulence of the festive season compressing what remains of my mutilated psyche to the size of a pickled walnut. Mrs Angstrom has issued firm instructions as to the nature (and indeed, the precise GPS coordinates) of her required gifts, the cost of which I can only describe as apocalyptic. All the tiny Angstroms have begun the astonishingly intricate task of piecing together their ransom notes to Santa; the constituent letters of which have been culled from my lovingly hoarded copies of Whizzer and Chips, which they "discovered" in one of the turrets after a particularly attritional chukka of Twister. And through it all, I; the great Angstrom, so admired by my innumerable and unswervingly loyal readers; put on my best shit-eating grin, gird my financial loins, and hope to God they can't smell the panic.

The Complete History of Popular Music (Abridged) Part 4

Sometime in the late fourteenth century (we can't be sure of the exact date, but it was almost certainly after the introduction of the Flying-V lute into Britain) a number of influential minstrels from across the British Isles gathered on a patch of land we now know as the Bull Ring shopping centre. They had become tired of the prevailing musical tastes and longed to be able to express themselves creatively without fear of summary execution by their feudal masters. A reasonable enough expectation by today's standards, although I still feel that execution may be the only deterrent left to us to prevent the reappearance of the dangerously subversive use of the 'rap' bridge section by inexplicably over-confident boy bands. The Council of Style, as this and subsequent gatherings became known, continued to thrive throughout the Middle Ages. After a brief hiatus during the Enlightenment, the Council emerged blinking into the sunlight of modern Europe and continued its work in a quiet and understated way, nonchalantly influencing musical tastes with a well-timed raise of its immaculately pruned eyebrow.

This happy band of musical pioneers skipped their way merrily through the years with nary a negative comment in whatever passed for the music press of the time. Until, that is, the tail-end of the twentieth century; when their ill-advised collaboration with NME (a move facilitated by the Council's needlessly altruistic recruitment of a large number of bored Canadian ex-servicemen marooned in Britain after a particularly gruelling Commonwealth Games) resulted in the inadvertent creation of grebo. I, for one, will never forgive them for insisting that I looked astonishingly cool in my army surplus/lumberjack shirt/hair shaved off at the back and sides combo. The fact that the feckless turds followed this up by giving us britpop has done nothing to improve their standing, and the contemporary incarnation of the Council of Style is virtually defunct, consisting entirely of a couple of hacks from Wired, Clint from Pop Will Eat Itself and Moira Stuart.

Readers interested in a more thorough analysis of the work of the Council will be delighted to hear that my latest publication; I Thought I'd Grow Up To Be Cool: in conversation with Mega City Four and Noam Chomsky (Whelk Press, £28.95); is available in several good bookshops now.

Ask the local gentry

A wedding anniversary is always a red letter day here at Castle Angstrom (if you know what’s good for you) and I feel it only proper to mark the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of my blissful matrimonial incarceration with the vigorously fabulous Mrs Angtrom by saying a few words to all of you, my tirelessly devoted readers.

But what can one say about the terrifyingly vivacious Mrs Angstrom that has not been said before by some of the finest clinical psychologists in the country? I recall an incident that took place many years ago during one of the countless legal proceedings in which she had become embroiled at the time, due to her rather avant-garde interpretation of business ethics. The trumped-up charges against Mrs Angstrom and her business associate, Knuckles “Nigel” McTavish-O’Pebblemill, were thrown out of court, as usual. But not before the ravishingly expensive Mrs Angstrom had delivered one of her trademark addresses to the jury. I cannot reprint here the details of her speech as they are the subject of continuing legal action, but I believe the weight of contemporary legal opinion is behind me when I say that her remarks necessitated the complete rewriting of almost all the relevant statute law. Those of you fortunate enough to have survived meeting her will know that Mrs Angstrom's genius for rhetoric is matched only by her gleeful exuberance with a switchblade.

Of course, Mrs Angstrom’s days of trampling with gay abandon over a bewildered legal establishment are behind her now, a relic of the simmering brutality of her youth. These days she devotes her time to her charitable foundation, Tower Of Strength (the world’s first Goth retirement community), and to nurturing all the irretrievably numerous tiny Angstroms.

So I ask you all to raise such glasses as you possess to the pathologically radiant Mrs Angstrom and to another twenty frivolously inescapable years with my nose to the spousal grindstone. So to speak.

That's how we roll

For those of us in the public eye, life is not always easy. It may seem to you, humble and modestly attired reader, that my life consists entirely of accompanying shallow heiresses to glamorous cocktail parties and attending lavish polo tournaments to exchange pithy remarks with minor members of obscure (and quite possibly defunct) royal families; but let me assure you, my life can be as cruel and cold as yours.

Only yesterday, for example, as I was giving a paper at the annual conference of the National Association of Writers of Letters to the Editor, I was made to suffer the most appalling and barbaric attack upon my person, my work, and the good name of the family Angstrom. The title of my paper; Non-Euclidean Geometry in the Works of Joe Strummer; seemed innocent enough, I'm sure you agree. However, it soon became apparent that there were a small, but suspiciously well-prepared, minority who did not agree. So overwhelming was their disapproval, moreover, that they saw fit to heckle my every word in the most sneeringly puerile fashion. They reserved the most obscene of their terrace chants for what I had hoped would be a light-hearted and entertaining interlude when I played Guns of Brixton on the harpsichord, accompanied on the giant screen behind me by a montage of video footage of elderly gentlemen falling off ladders. To say that this gross intrusion was disheartening is to quite understate the feelings engendered in myself and my technical assistant, Charles Fishpaste-Jenkins. Regular readers will be aware that Charles is not a man to be trifled with at the best of times. And when he's ripped to the tits on Harvey's Bristol Cream, I find it's best not to make eye contact with him unless absolutely necessary.

I shall spare you, gentle and intriguingly naive reader, the details of what followed, but I would like to put on record my particular thanks to the members of St John Ambulance who patched everyone up so nicely. Their dedication and professionalism in the face of extreme provocation should be a lesson to us all.

Back once again with the renegade master...

Greetings once more from Castle Angstrom! I trust you have all enjoyed the summer holidays in your own humble way. I can envisage you now; relaxing in your tediously predictable Tuscan villas, your aristocratically dilapidated chateaux, your eye-wateringly chic penthouse apartments, and your appalling caravan parks in the arse-end of nowhere. Mrs Angstrom and I have tolerated as best we can the bewildering demands of all the tiny Angstroms for the past two months and have now dispatched them to their various prep schools, borstals and psychiatric institutions. Needless to say, a top quality education does not come cheaply and so yet again I find I am forced to prostrate myself before Mammon.

"But how does an esteemed social commentator and noted para-musicologist such as yourself make big money, proper fast?", I hear you ask in a needlessly conspiratorial whisper. Allow me to enlighten you, my devoted readers. A brief telephone call to my good friend and personal physician, Dr Aristotle Walrus-Jones, has ensured that I am perched atop one of the very highest of the inexplicably multitudinous peaks of his latest unnervingly ingenious pyramid scheme. Strictly speaking it's more of a ziggurat scheme, but who's counting?

The Complete History of Popular Music (Abridged) Part 3

Everyone loves Crystal Castles, You Love Her Coz She’s Dead and their ilk (and why not?), but very few people are aware of the massive debt of gratitude they owe to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. Unless memory betrays me, it was Borges who first established a direct compositional link between Georg Philipp Telemann, nu-rave and worthless Atari-sampling nonsense in an article published some years ago in Whelks Monthly (incorporating Shellfish News). Borges was right in all particulars, of course; but he missed the crucial link to his own work. In fact, the role of magic realism cannot be underestimated when analyzing contemporary electronica. All of you will be familiar with Carlos Fuentes’ involvement with Massive Attack, but only the most perceptive among you will have noticed the subtle overtones of Italo Calvino in the work of Husky Rescue.

But what, I hear you ask, of Britain’s only successful exponent of magic realism? As luck would have it, my literary agent has just confirmed receipt of my latest manuscript; Funk-trocity: Salman Rushdie and the Rebirth of Disco. That man has a lot to answer for.

Honourable members

If, like me, you have had just about enough of the constant blathering of other social commentators about all our duly elected scoundrels plundering the public coffers, you will almost certainly have been praying for someone, anyone, to cry out in the wilderness with the clear and beautifully enunciated voice of sanity. Fear not, noble reader, for that time has come. As of now, the carping, hounding and badgering must cease. After today, no right-thinking person will be able to concur with the imbecilic ramblings of the half-arsed, quarter-witted news-wallahs. I shall turn the daunting light of reason on the darkly truculent legions of mudslingers, muckrakers and filth-herders who insist on sullying our national press with the unholy stench of their ill-informed opinions, and return our political life to its proper state of blissful turpitude.

Let me put it this way: if democracy was cheap, everyone would have one.

On the floating, shipless oceans

Relaxing at my club on Monday evening; regaling a gaggle of admirers with a selection of anecdotes from my repertoire, interspersed with a smattering of bon mots; I caught sight of my good friend Charles Fishpaste-Jenkins. Excusing myself from the attentions of my acolytes, I approached Charles with caution. Charles is a large man, and given to increasingly bizarre acts of casual violence when in his cups, so caution is the very least you must approach him with. “Wotcha!”, quoth I; but answer came there none. Hunched in his chair, gazing forlornly at bundle of back issues of NME on the table before him, he was clearly in sombre mood. However, with the judicious application of half a bottle of fino and three packs of pickled onion Monster Munch, I soon had him talking.

An hour later and I had managed to prize out of him three pieces of information:

1. His keynote speech to the annual conference of The Royal Society of Para-Musicologists had not been well-received.
2. His membership of said Society had been summarily revoked.
3. If he saw any of them again he’d pull their legs off and beat them to death with the bloody stumps.

It seems that his assertion in the opening stanza of his speech that Mark E. Smith was a “gobshite” had not endeared him to his audience. His further insistence that Rick Astley deserved a knighthood for single-handedly devising screamo from a council flat in Hackney had not improved matters, but the final straw came when he posited his frankly astonishing theory that the entire evolution of UK garage can be traced back to an unreleased demo by This Mortal Coil.

At this point I made my excuses and left. As an honorary member of the RSPM, I felt it unwise to engage Charles in further discussion. It would surely have been only a matter of time before he recalled my definitive biography of Thomas Paine, in which I established not only that he was a doyen of the early UK garage scene, but also an uncredited co-producer on ‘Song to the Siren'.