The best thing I heard in June was… (drum roll, please)

I heard many amazing things in June. Here is a list.

1. A magpie warbling like a crazy little thing inside a bush
   
   
2. Game Of Thrones – the soundtrack bit, not the head-chopping-off bits
   
   
3. A chap singing the Danger Mouse theme tune in the style of Pulp
   
   
4. The sound of my bedroom fan white-noising my overheated self to sleep
   
   
5. The 808 State listen-along for #TimsTwitterListeningParty
   
   
6. Actually, yes, the head-chopping-off bits in Game Of Thrones
   
   
7. A chap chopping the head off Danger Mouse in the style of Pulp
   
   
8. Magpies hitting my fan to the rhythm of 808 state.... inside a bush

All these sounds are undoubtedly exquisite audio sculptures that make your ears feel like a carpet of velvet unicorns. Why not recreate the above sounds using cardboard tubes, a staple gun and some glitter?

Despite all that noise nonsense, there is one sound that topped them all. There is one sound that was undoubtedly the best thing I heard in June...

In fact, a whole bunch of us picked our favourite music of the month on the Picky Bastards website. One writer picked the new Phoebe Bridgers (pictured) album that everyone's banging on about. Someone else picked Lady Gaga's Chromatica. My pick? I chose Special Request's lightning-sharp Spectral Frequency, a track released a short while ago but rereleased this month on vinyl. It put a rocket up June's bum like nothing else.

Read all about the track's resonating drums and sweaty rave flashbacks on the PBs website (my choice is at the end because I always submit last). Have a read there, and have a listen below.

It's just the sun rising (and being a bit too hot)

The recent heat has done something funny to me. It felt like a hot spoon scooping out my brain. It left me feeling like a cartoon character that's just been exploded by TNT, leaving only a pair of smoking boots.

The other day in Manchester, my home city, it was 900 degrees. Or something like that: I was too cooked to focus on the numbers. I went for a walk and the sun was so unbearable, I had to dive into the shade. Everyone looks suspicious diving suddenly behind a hedge. I got looks.

It was hotter than a quartermaster's whelk. It was hotter than a jelly salesman's foghorn. It was hotter than a rampant barrister's whittling knife. It was hotter than a dog-whisperer's door handle cabinet. It was hotter than a confectioner's wardrobe on a Hungarian spaceship. It was hotter than a cheese bridge for dogs over a trench full of grandfather clocks. It was hotter than the year 1437 mauled in a bear trap by Robot Phillip Schofield.

Those hotter-than comparisons were swiped from my previous tweets, by the way. I'd like to thank past-tweeting me for being an imaginative and nonsensical idiot.

I think the sun is great, and even though horoscopes are hogwash, I do feel a connection with my star sign Leo. It's a fire sign that's ruled by the sun, which sounds really summery even though I have no idea what that means.

I'm also quite fond of sun songs. For example, Orbital's The Girl With The Sun In Her Head, Caribou's Sun or The Beloved's The Sun Rising. They're so much better than, say, Engelbert Humperdinck's Winter World Of Love, the Glee Cast's version of Ice Ice Baby, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Snow (Hey Oh). Is that last one real? Yeesh.

The problem is that I'm not very good with heat. I'd like all the benefits of summer weather but without the high temperatures. It would be nice if the sun was cold and fire felt like ice pops. All the colour and brightness without the sweat. That's not too much to ask, is it?

I'm grateful rave culture based itself around Ibiza and not Nunavut, but there's a balance to be struck. Next time we have a heatwave, please let's have a cold one. Thanks.

Endless Ed Sheeran is the most played artist of 2019

It's official. Ed Sheeran is the most played music artist of 2019.

He beat Calvin Harris to top PPL's Most Played Artist Chart for the fourth time in five years. Coldplay broke that run as 2016's most-heard, although everyone now agrees we were all having a bad day and we listened to them by mistake.

Sheeran scored three UK number one singles last year, respectively with Justin Bieber, Khalid and Stormzy. The most-played tracks of the year are full of collaborations too: Calvin Harris with Rag ‘n’ Bone Man; Mark Ronson with Miley Cyrus; Sam Smith with Normani. It's like no-one can do anything on their own anymore. They're all trying to emulate successful double acts like Ant & Dec and those two girls out of The Shining.

It's interesting to see who Sheeran beat in the Most Played Artist Chart. In third place is Sam Smith playing the spoons while tightrope walking over a crocodile pit. In seventh palace is the sound of Rita Ora having a benny and throwing a television through a hotel window. And in tenth place is the whole of Maroon 5 screaming into a funnel.

I once claimed that Ed Sheeran was here to destroy us all, that every song had become Ed Sheeran. In my defence, it was the week he broke the charts by scoring 16 top 20 hits at once. But even a stopped idiot tells the right time twice a day. Maybe I was pointing towards a future so Sheeraned, we forget how to listen to anything else. We are living in that future.

Extensive surveys tell me that the average Fat Roland reader reads this blog by mumbling the words out loud. This blog is actually all cut-and-pasted from Ed Sheeran lyrics: has been since 2004, seven years before Sheeran had his first hit single. Sorry to break it to you, my muttering friend, but by reading this very page, you're already making the Suffolk superstar the most played artist of 2020.

In two of his singles, Shape Of You (not bad) and Galway Girl (terrible), he makes a reference to putting Van Morrison on a jukebox. People aren't paying attention. They're putting Ed on their jukeboxes, not Van. They're putting Ed on their record players. They're putting Ed on their Spotify. They're putting Ed in those annoying birthday cards that make a tinny noise when you open them. 

Ed everywhere. Ed will never end. He is Ed Sheer-on-and-on.

Further Fats: Rihanna has ruined everything (2012)

Further Fats: U Can't Touch The UK Charts: an MC Hammer infographic (2014)

Spotify's mystical rivers of bad recommendations

If you ordered a handbag full of wasps from my Wasp Handbag shop, and instead I sent you a bucket of hamsters, you'd rightly be annoyed.

"I demand a refund," you would shout through my shop's letterbox. "I'm not in," I would convincingly shout back while hiding in the stock cupboard. "Ouch, ow, stop stinging me," I would add because of what was in the stock cupboard.

The streaming service Spotify is fairly good at giving me what I want. Its curated playlists seem to recognise my musical moodswings from gloomy techno to big gay pop anthems. It's easy enough to avoid its more ridiculous categories such as "At Home", which is as nonsensical as defining your listening experience as "Standing On The Floor" and "Leaning On A Hedge".

However, it has recently been trying to flog me hamster buckets instead of my favourite wasp-based clothing accessories. Not literally: it's a metaphor. Keep up.

Here's an example. The Grid is a brilliant dance project by Richard Norris and Soft Cell's Dave Ball, but instead of popping classics such as Floatation and Crystal Clear into my recommendations, it's been trying to push some unrelated rock band of the same name.

I get all excited when I see a Grid track I don't recognise, and when I click on it, all I get is some unrelated guitar dirge that makes me want to drag my ears through broken glass. And because I've played it, Spotify recommends them some more, locking me into an impostor loop that can only end if I throw my computer into a fire.

This happened again the other day, this time with Orbital. According to Spotify, the latest release from Orbital is a track called Mystical River. This is not an Orbital track: it is a fake; it is Trojan horse; it is a cuckoo's egg in the nest of my musical egginess. It's Spotify getting it wrong again.

As you can see from the picture at the top of this blog post, Richard Hughes the alien is furious about the incorrect listing. Who is Richard Hughes the alien? I drew him because just posting a Spotify screenshot would have been as dull as heck. He now exists. Everyone say hello to Richard Hughes the alien.

This isn't Spotify's only failing, of course. There are other user annoyances, such as the lack of ability to browse by label, even though a browse of, say, DFA or Warp would be really useful. And Spotify earn musicians so little money, they appear to want every musician to wear rags, work up chimneys and snort gruel.

Computers are very clever, but they are also eye-wateringly dumb. I recently subscribed to Now TV, and now my internet is packed with adverts telling me to subscribe to Now TV. That's like going into a newsagent, popping a Twix on the payment counter, and the newsagent screaming at you "buy a Twix, buy a Twix". I'm buying one, for crap's sake, lay off me. Also could I get a packet of Rizla? Thanks.

This is a reminder that algorithms can only ever be algorithms. We need to rediscover personal recommendations: proper ones from humans. As shops reopen across the UK, there are insanely experienced booksellers and record shop assistants and handbag wasp experts just waiting to give you the benefit of their years of experience. Use them. Spotify has its plus sides, but it can't tell great music from a bucket of fluff.

Further Fats: Mr and Mrs Spotify plug my oozing holes (2011)

Further Fats: How does Spotify work? I'm glad you asked (2017)

Infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters: Electronic Sound issue 66 is out now

On the cover of the new Electronic Sound you'll find synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani, who is such an electronic music legend, when she once moved to New York, the only furniture she took was her Buchla modular kit.

Also inside this edition is my usual column. This month, my sluice of wet word waste recalls the time I had a jam session with some Christian friends. This really actually happened, although the details will be different* because I have the memory of a slightly neglected plank. Here are a few sentences:

"I Marshall Jeffersoned that synthesiser to pieces. As long as we weren’t in the key of C, my choppy rave chords soared above Anita’s meandering oboe and hairy William’s sixteen tambourines (he was surprisingly dextrous). Infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters: we were bound to be headlining the Hacienda within the week."

Once again, I illustrated my column, an excerpt of which you can see above. I've gone for a yellow and brown vibe this month. Last month it was purples and pinks. This all just doesn't happen by accident, you know. Apart from...

In this illustration for a previous @ElectronicMagUK, George the hippo is pressing G for George. Let's pretend this was intentional and I am, in fact, dead clever. pic.twitter.com/Ur2UvWOl40

— Fat Roland (@FatRoland) June 13, 2020

I also reviewed Shaw & Grossfeldt ("a mountainside of smoky chords"), Helena Hauff ("unrelenting"), Sonic Boom ("a disturbing flicker"), Koenig ("tin-can tomfoolery"), J Majik ("a warm hug") and Blibberty Jazzpump F'nang F'nang Splat ("this is Robson & Jerome, no I mean literally, this is Robson & Jerome"). I made that last one up, sorry.

If I tell you any more about issue 66 of Electronic Sound, I'm legally bound to charge you 50 pence, so get yourself a subscription, or pick up a copy in one of those new-fangled shops they're opening up these days.

* the true core of the story in my column: the church youth group. the Christian holiday, the jam session, me playing choppy chords, the talented pianist freezing up.

Further Fats: New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody talk about complicated electronica with difficult time signatures and a limited listening demographic (2009)

Further Fats: Refresh FM Manchester: how I was stopped from presenting because I was gay (2009)

The quarantine raves: Top one, nice one, get Covid?

A bunch of people in Greater Manchester went raving last night. 

This would not normally be news because, as we all know, 100% of people in Manchester are raving 100% of the time.

However, these raves happened in the middle of the pandemic, and it's kinda not okay. A tonne of party-goers descended on two sites in Trafford and Oldham for 'quarantine raves'. Several videos on Snapchat caught lots of revellers half-heartedly swaying to fairly commercial dance music. 

In the aftermath, Warehouse Project founder Sacha Lord slammed them as "morons" and "selfish idiots", while local volunteers collected over 200 bin bags of rubbish from the mess they had left behind. He's right. Top one, nice one, get Covid? If you went to one of the raves last night, you're a wrong 'un.

I understand the need to be at events like this. Hold on. Let me clarify. I wouldn't be caught dead at crappy park raves where WKD-glugging drones cheer as the DJ drops Get Lucky. But I do get the need to go to places with speaker stacks banging out tunes; to feel the heat of the bodies, the music and the lukewarm sweat dripping off the ceiling. I miss clubbing.

But surely us ravers can keep our glow-sticks in our pants for a bit longer? The more these Superdry-wearing sub-Parklife plonkers go to illegal raves like this, inevitably spreading the virus because that's how viruses work, the longer the rest of us wait until we don our party pants. And the longer the club industry will take to recover.

It has also occurred to me that if Covid hangs around for a long time, we may never go raving again. We'll have to go to clubs in human-size hamster balls, zorbing our orbs against each other like a kinky lottery machine. It sounds weirdly appealing, but raising our hands in the air like we just don't care is going to be a logistical nightmare.

I can cope with people protesting in large numbers for #BlackLivesMatter, because that is about a threat that is every bit as immediate as this pesky virus. If you disagree with that sentence and you're white, you've just proved the need for #BlackLivesMatter. But a bunch of rave babies dancing to low-rent wedding reception dance music because they feel stronger than the virus? No thanks. 

It's like they listened to the chorus of Rozalla's Everybody's Free without paying attention to the verse: "We are a family that should stand together as one / Helping each other instead of just wasting time." Together is a metaphor: that means staying home, you clubbing Covidiots. Also, I bet that was the only track the DJs had: just Rozalla over and over again.

If you want to support Greater Manchester clubbing instead of frightening a bunch of hedgehogs in a field in the middle of the night, then support United We Stream.

Edit: Since posting this, the news story has advanced. In addition to the idiocy of a quarantine rave, there have been some pretty serious crimes at these events. It's pretty depressing reading.

Further Fats: "Short of performing a skiffle set on the grass, we were going to have to pull the show." (2011)

Further Fats: Review – Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (2013)

Get ready for Fat Roland's top 20 magical dreams

Instead of raving all night, sometimes I like to go to bed. And when I go to bed, I like to fall asleep and dream.

Shakespeare said "to sleep, perchance to dream", and I think he was waffling about death, but whatever the ruffed berk was on about, he clearly found dreams fascinating. And so do I. Especially when the dream stays in my memory in the first moments of the day; a lingering afterglow of imagined nonsense.

If I find a dream particularly memorable, I tend to post about it on Twitter. So I did some homework. I trawled through my entire Twitter history to find all of my tweets about my dreams. 

So, a special treat for psychologists everywhere, and perhaps as a tribute to 808 State's excellent 1989 track Magical Dream, here is...

Fat Roland's top 20 magical dreams

A list of my dreams as posted on Twitter over the past 11 years, in no particular order. This is all genuine. Brace yourself. 

1. The record collection

Last night, I dreamt I was showing someone my record collection - but the only record I had was I'd Rather Jack by The Reynolds Girls (pictured above).

2. Fridge problems

Last night I dreamt Robert Plant sneaked into my fridge and did a poo in my Yopp.

3. On the bus

Dreamt I met Debbie McGee on the 142 bus. She was very nice despite being overburdened with shopping.

4. The classic album

Last night, I dreamt I had a listening party with all of my friends so we could reappraise the "game-changing Manic Street Preachers album with all the Red Hot Chili Peppers songs on".

5. The brush off

Last night, I dreamt that every time I used a broom, I chucked it away. I had a bin full of brooms.

6. Career choice

Last night, I dreamed I became a hairdresser by mistake.

7. At the club 

Last night I dreamt I was at a club night. Every so often, Grace Jones would patrol the room to check no-one was smoking. 

8. At the memorial

Last night's dream: I got asked by my local pub to say a few words at a George Formby memorial event. I said yeah fine, I know all about him, I'll not prepare, I'll just wing it. As I walk into the stage, I realise I know nothing about Formby: I was thinking of Bobby Ball.

9. Waking nightmare

Last night I had a nightmare in which I dreamt Mumford & Sons was a real thing and then I woke up and it was true.

10. The race

Dreamt I was racing spiders. (I won.)

11. Definitely my ego

Last night I dreamed I was giving motivational leadership speeches in a car wreckage yard whose electronics were powered by a Nook E-reader.

12. At the pub

Last night I dreamt I went to the pub for a meal. Covid made it way too stressful. Don't touch that, don't queue there, don't lick that, don't stick that in there. Also, @jpmdaly was having a pint with Lou Reed, which just made everything worse.

13. Phone levels

Last night I dreamed my phone battery was at 25% but when I woke up it was at 46% not 25%. 

14. In Edinburgh

Just awoken from a dream in which every Edinburgh pedestrian was dressed as an egg. Big oval costumes with leg holes, but no arm holes or eye holes. Chaos.

15. Someone else's record collection

Had a dream that I was DJing, but I forgot all my records. I had to use @fullofpenguins' vinyl instead but all he had was 30 copies of Female Of The Species by Space.

16. Possibly satire

All I dreamt about last night were zombie bankers molesting me with their elephant trunks.

17. On Christmas Eve

Was intending to be a good boy and go to midnight communion, but fell asleep and dreamt of breakcore instead.

18. A bit dark

Last night I dreamt horses were on fire. I asked an elderly couple if I could borrow their duvet cover to smother the flames. They refused.

19. The grime MC

Last night, I dreamt that Jme released a new single, but it was underneath a pavement and as a result a bunch of Dutch people lost an election inside an ice cream van.

20. All too real

Dreamt last night that my blog got deleted and that the entire world banking system collapsed causing poverty everywhere. My blog. My blog!

Further Fats: Every Guardian music 'crepuscular' reference since the start of 2010, probably (2013)

Further Fats: Ten slices of shallow-fried Twitter whimsy (2020)

Listen to these June 2020 electronic music albums if you want to save your knees

Here are some albums out this month, June 2020, and let me warn you: if you don't give these a listen, I'm coming round there and painting sad faces on your knees, so next time you're out skateboarding in your Bart Simpson shorts, everyone will see you and feel depressed.

Let's start with a man who loves acid so much, his name would be an anagram of "I love acid" if he had different letters. Luke Vibert (pictured) has announced a trilogy, like Lord Of The Rings, The Matrix and the Police Academy films when there were only three of them.

The albums are intended to be a PTSD-style flashback to the golden years of electronic music. Last month, Luke Vibert Presents Amen Andrews took us into the old-school jungle, and next month's Rave Hop will be packed to the brim with breakbeat. June's offering is Modern Rave, which is centred around... *checks notes* ...rave. Obviously.

I mentioned jungle just then. This reminded me of a crazy Twitter moment a few months ago when I referred to an Orbital track as "lightly junglist". "That’s not jungle though," tweeted a random stranger. No, it's not jungle mate. It's "lightly junglist", in the same way a "lightly drizzled" cake doesn't mean the cake is drizzle.

This stranger insisted that instead of posting tracks that are lightly sprinkled with a jungle vibe, I should post actual jungle tracks, or as he put it, the "choonage to represent the scene and industry, otherwise it’s an insult in certain circles". He then called me a moron who was single-handedly bringing the music industry to its needs. Reader, I blocked him.

Let's have some drum 'n' bass, which is a bit like jungle but isn't jungle. I loved Goldie collaborator J Majik's last album Full Circle. It was his first album for 20 years and it was a cracker. Look out for his new album Always Be, which should serve as a great companion to Full Circle, like double-yolked eggs or Jedward brothers.

And then there's Trickfinger's She Smiles Because She Presses The Button, which is a new album of solo electronics from John Frusciante. John who? He's the bloke from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, statistically the band most listened to by white boys with dreadlocks. The 'Peppers are as dull as spending an afternoon watching cricket with a Tory, but Frusciante has IDM credentials, so it's worth a listen. Remember when he worked with Venetian Snares?

There's also Shaw & Grosfeldt's Klavier, which is Simian Mobile Disco's Jas Shaw faffing around with a sensor-fitted Disklavier piano. And there's a new album of bassy electronics from Budapest sound artist Gábor Lázár: Source is a follow-up to 2018’s excellent Unfold.

Finally, there's some proper industrial helt going on with Helena Hauff's Kern Vol.5, a various artists mix for Tresor’s Kern series, including some exclusively unreleased tracks. The whole thing is lightly junglist. I mean, it's not: that's an inaccurate description, but I just want to annoy the choonage moron randomer.

Further Fats: Bleep Years day nineteen: LTJ Bukem's Horizons (1995) (posted in 2012)

Further Fats: A tribute to Andrew Weatherall: imagine a cake, a simple cake (2020)

On my mind: The Guardian's 100 greatest UK No 1s

The Guardian's 100 greatest UK No 1s had some pretty good selections. It's hard to go wrong when you're picking 100 highlights from fewer than 1,500 songs, most of which are hogwash. Take a random year as an example: 1999 number ones by Chef, The Offspring, Boyzone or the Mambo No 5 bloke were hardly going to trouble the list.

Pet Shop Boys' topped their poll, which is entirely the correct choice. Their take on Elvis's Always On My Mind has an incredible energy, like a firework exploding in the boot of a car – I've always considered this the best Christmas number one, so I'm happy to extend it to the best chart topper of all time. Sadly, the Guardian opted for West End Girls as the greatest number one; any fool knows that the other PSB number ones, Heart and It's A Sin, are better than 'Girls. Pfffrt. Just you wait till I get you home, The Guardian.

The Chemical Brothers were just inside their top 50, while the Prodigy soared into their top ten, troubling the likes of Michael Jackson and the Human League. Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body was also in the mix, with it being labelled as "the most minimal No 1 of all time". Black Box and Daft Punk were included, although the latter's only number one song is hardly their best.

Killer made it into their list, with the Guardian praising its perfect design, as did I just last week. Kraftwerk's The Model is also in there, with a welcome shout-out to its brilliant flip-side Computer Love. And while we're doing k-words, the KLF's 3am Eternal made it quite high up the list, proving the ancients of Mu-Mu still have some mojo. This made me sad that Last Train To Trancentral never got to number one. Still, all of these were great to see.

They chose Snap!'s Rhythm Is a Dancer, which I'm sure they were as serious as gout about, but I would have probably have gone for Snap!'s other number one, The Power. That track was so strange and discordant, confusing my head at the time before my heart fell in love with it. The Power knocked Beats International's Dub Be Good To Me off the top spot – another missed contender in this list.

They should have included Pump Up The Volume by MARRS, which incidentally stands for band members Martyn, Alex, Rudy, Russell and Steve. They're like ABBA but with less knitwear. The band didn't get on, and it was a miracle they ever released anything, never mind create a chart-topping acid house classic. And how on earth The Guardian missed The Shamen's Ebeneezer Goode, I have no idea.

There were some outsider choices I would have like to have seen, and would have no doubt made a top 200. For the 1990s, I love the indie spirit of White Town's pin-sharp Your Woman ("So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways, just use me up and then you walk away"), while I mourn the exclusion of Flat Beat by Mr Oizo, which was a blow to yellow puppets everywhere.

There are some 21st century outsiders I'd liked to have seen: Rihanna's Diamonds (they chose Umbrella); Duck Sauce's Barbra Streisand; David Guetta's epic Titanium; Tinie Tempah's Scunthorpe-namechecking Pass Out. Nothing much interesting to say about them – I just like the tunes, dammit.

Like I say, it's an easy list to generally get right, even for people like me who find it difficult to focus on anything before 1987. And not a single mention of Lou Bega's fifth Mambo, despite its remarkable lyric "It's all good, let me dump it, please set in the trumpet". Pardon?

Further Fats: Delirious' bid for number one: the rock delusion? (2010)

Whatever happened to the cheeky New Year number one? (2013)

Lapse dancing: the stories of Manchester clubbers

Maps are great. You can get big paper ones that are difficult to fold, and digital ones that ask you to rate places you've been nowhere near.

The Lapsed Clubber Audio Map is a crowd-sourced map that was launched a few years ago by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The great thing about this map is it talks to you.

The Map contains audio and text memories of Greater Manchester ravers of their clubbing experiences between 1985 and 1995, easily covering the peak years of rave culture.

I had a pleasant trawl through some of the stories uploaded to the site. Here are some highlights from various clubbers in various venues, appended with my comments because I'm a blabbermouth who wants to make everything about me.

808 State at G-Mex: "It was a hell of a gig for us coming from out of town, us small country people... we heard all the same music that we listened to in the clubs of the back and beyond, but on a massive sound system and with a massive crowd of people."

Growing up in Manchester, it's easy to forget that the city was a bit of a Mecca for people out in the sticks. I went to the Hacienda because it was just down the road – albeit quite a long road. My earliest gig memories were at G-Mex: Radiohead supporting James comes to mind, mainly because it makes me sound cool. I probably went to awful gigs there too.

Tangled at the Phoenix: "It was small and it was dingy and there was sweat dropping off the ceilings... Everyone would end up at the garage at East Lancs getting Ribena, the king of all drinks. That was pretty much my life for about five or six years."

The Phoenix was very sweaty. We're talking Piers Morgan's armpits when he has the guilty sweats, which is all the time. I did my first ever DJing gig in their bar – I was terrible – and I remember grubby acid techno bashes in the club. I worked near the Phoenix and watched its building get knocked down. It's shops now. On warm summer nights, you can still smell the perspiration.

Daft Punk’s first UK live gig: "Daft Punk played live for the first ever time in Britain and played that song [Da Funk]... Still to this day, the B-side Rollin’ & Scratchin’ is the only song I can never listen to without vomiting."

When I saw Daft Punk DJ at Sankeys Soap back in the 1990s, a French stranger tried to roll my torso like plasticine while saying "wide boy, wide boy". I have nothing more to say about Daft Punk.

Devils Dancing: "I had this strange-shaped pill I bought, which actually turned out to be ketamine... These lights were making red shadows and all I could see were these weird devils dancing, in this weird, satanic fire dance, and my friend took me home."

I've always stayed away from the more hallucinogenic end of the drugs spectrum. My imagination has always been vivid and strange: my silly creative activities are my way of pressure-cooking that intensity out of my brain. If I didn't have that kind of release, I really would be seeing red devils all over my walls. For now, I just have slightly muted woodchip.

Dancing at Sankeys Soap: "I felt this body come up behind me and start dancing in the same rhythm as me. It got a little bit too close and so I turned round, not forgetting that I’m off me chops, and it was Zammo from Grange Hill."

So many good nights at Sankeys. And a bad trip that nearly destroyed me. Easy come, easy go. When I took on the name 'Fat Roland', I didn't even think of the Grange Hill connection. I should have gone for something different. Wide Boy, maybe. The forward Frenchman was right. Dammit.

I've plenty of memories of clubbing back in the day, so I really should upload something to the Lapsed Clubber Audio Map. Have a browse, why dontcha.

Further Fats: Store Street blues: waddling with the scrotes, the clubbers and the tokers (2007)

Further Fats: There goes the hear: Manchester has enough gigs (2011)