Full-mast hysteria: waving the flag for electronic music

 

Everyone's getting their cummerbunds in a twist over flags. Racists brandish St George crosses, idiots vandalise mini-roundabouts, and union jack underpant sales have gone through the roof. Probably.

In an effort to reclaim the national debate, I have designed six flags dedicated to electronic music. Shall we plaster pubs in these emblems instead? Replace the UK national anthem with Ageispolis by Aphex Twin? Yes. Let's do that. If you're reading this, please make that happen, the King. 

The first flag I designed is a red-white-blue rendering of the Aphex Twin logo (see above). This feels very flaggy indeed, and could be a distant cousin of the flag of Laos or maybe North Korea.

However, there's a problem or two. There's too much flag about this flag. Electronic music should be more creative than this. And the existing Aphex logo is black and white, which are the flag colours of his native Cornwall. No, we can do better.

This is my flag design based on Leftfield's Leftism. The shark jaw is pretty intact, and the embedded camera is represented by a series of circles. You do get animals on real-world flags – Wales has a dragon and Bhutan has a, er, dragon – but bits of bones are less common. Should flags have teeth? Vexillum dentata?

A simple T. Or is it? This one breaks a cardinal rule of flags: no fades. However, the speaker design feels geometrically pleasing. The KLF were notorious for their flag-flying, banner-raising live performances, so this redesign of their 1991 album The White Room seems apropos. The flag of Mu Mu Land.

Here is a flag version of Autechre's Oversteps album.  I did consider the designs for their numerous NTS releases, which were plastered with brilliantly blocky Designers Republic fonts. But I couldn't resist this more basic artwork, which is, essentially, the Japan flag with all of its colour and joy removed. Very much like an Autechre live performance, in a good way.

It was either this or the brown album. One thing I've noticed about actual national flags is that the colours are often bold. Look at Bangladesh's contrasting eye-popper or Seychelles' vivid fan of fun. Eyes will certainly be popped with this flag, based on Orbital's green album (Orbital 1). This flag feels lickable, which is something I always look for when hoisting a banner. 

I was drawn to Man-Machine by Kraftwerk because of its colours, and the geometry of the album text in its upper corner. But how to represent the band itself? Four simple polygons. And what are flags other than an arrangement of polygons. The main down side of this one is that once you think it looks like Hitler, that's something you can't get out of your head. Dammit, that's ruined it. Shouldn't have said anything. Sorry.

Flags are not bad things. They're fun, and we all want to cling on to identity and community. But let's keep them fun: everyone loves a bit of bunting. However – and this is just a suggestion – maybe let's not use flags to cause division and intimidate the vulnerable. If you're using a flag as a weapon, you are the weapon.

Further Fats: Blowin' in the wings – why protest songs should return to centre stage (2009)

Further Fats: I'm too techno to be Brexit (2017)

Just Stop Oil and The KLF: from protest paint to pyramid schemes

Just Stop Oil have thrown orange paint at Stonehenge, making the ancient stones looks slightly prettier than they were before. A BBC reporter said the paint attack left onlooking tourists "slightly bemused", which is how tourist look anyway, so I don't know how they spotted the difference.

The stunt was designed to highlight the UK's continuing reliance on fossil fuels. Personally I'd knock down Stonehenge and chisel the monuments into stone wheels so we can all drive around like Fred Flintstone.

A bit of colourful powder paint is not the greatest threat Stonehenge has faced. Let's not forget K2 Plant Hire, an organisation set up by art popsters The KLF for the specific purpose of demolishing the historic landmark. Yes. Demolishing it. With bulldozers and everything.

The band decided that their stone-crushing plan was unworkable. Something to do with the landmark being too close to military airspace so it would be too difficult to use helicopters to put Stonehenge back together again. You think I'm joking, but I'm not.

There is photographic evidence of the KLF up to no good at Stonehenge. Have a look at the 25th June 1988 edition of the NME. On the cover, you will see the KLF – known then as The Timelords – hanging out at the 'henge. In the foreground of the photo? Gary Glitter dressed as an evil magician. Yoinks! Lock up your grandmother and your children!

The demolition plan inspired a story Bill Drummond wrote for the 1998 short story collection Disco 2000. The story, called Let's Grind, or How K2 Plant Hire Ltd Went to Work, tells of an attempt to purchase the Rollright Stones, a less impressive structure somewhere north of Oxford. Tom Baker once shot a Doctor Who story there called The Stones of Blood, all about alien druids and stuff. 

Incidentally, as a protest against the costly and then-pointless Millennium Dome, K2 Plant Hire also promised to build a "People's Pyramid", which would be free to access and open to all kinds of abuse.

"Climb it, paint it, polish it, eat your sandwiches on it or chip it away. It will stand for as long there is any of it left," promised K2 in a statement on their website, while appealing to the public to donate bricks.

The KLF's arty agitations seem to chime with Just Stop Oil's various attempts at paint-throwing and supergluing and tomato soup tomfoolery. Remember the KLF's National Theatre paint daubing? Maybe the JSO gang need a hit single or two. Pop on some horns and prance around on Top Of The Pops. Hang out with Gary Gl-- actually, no, scrap that. Bad idea. BAD IDEA.

Further Fats: Blowin' in the wings: why protest songs should return to centre stage (2009)

Further Fats: The KLF will rise again, and they may or may not go "baa" (2017)

Further Fats: 

Top ten best electronic music albums of 2021: Eris Drew – Quivering In Time

 

Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents another brilliant album:

Eris Drew – Quivering In Time (T4T LUV NRG)

Let's start this review by widening things out a little – in a rather unexpected direction. The KLF's gonna rock ya.

In 2017, Eris Drew revealed her belief in a healing goddess power she called The Motherbeat. She did this in a YouTube video which pinpointed her revelation as coming "23 years after the fire". Which fire? Stay with me...

In the same year, 2017, writer Daisy Eris Campbell directed the KLF's art show comeback. The KLF's big return was massive news for us electronic music heads. And what the KLF lads do 23 years previously? They burnt a million quid, to the shock of tabloid naysayers everywhere. One of the most famous pop music fires after Jacko's Pepsi hair shocker.

So in 2017, Eris revealed the Motherbeat and another Eris helped the KLF return to the art world, both of which happened "23 years after the fire". 23 is also a number associated with Eris, the goddess worshipped in the satirical religion of Discordianism. The KLF built their situationist publicity mongering around the world of Eris the goddess – it's where "The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu" comes from. Erises everywhere!

Phew. Let's get back to the most important Eris, namely the one who here presents her debut album on the label she runs with partner Octo Octa, also an amazing producer. Quivering In Time is brilliant. Recorded in rural New Hampshire, there's a joyful spirituality here that expresses itself as pure dancefloor mayhem. Poppy house beats! Rolling breaks and perky melodies! A rogue clavichord! 90s vocal interjections! 

If Eris Drew was hoping to channel the wild spirit of the KLF in her work, it's here in spades. The Loaded-sampling The Message / Ride Free is pure pop, the shimmering vibes on Quivering In Time is straight from Trancentral, and Pick 'Em Up's melody is as direct as any horned mu-mu chant.

It's just so damn fun. The Motherbeat is pumping loud and clear.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021. Read it all here.

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)

Teapots

Teapots.

That's it. That's the blog post. Just the word 'teapots'. Thanks for reading.

Issue 64 of Electronic Sound magazine is all about John Foxx (not actual fox) And The Maths (not actual maths), but the most important bit, as ever, is the inside back page. On this page, you will find my regular Banging On column (not actual column).

This month's rant is about how to have a number one hit single, inspired by the KLF's legendary Manual. The best sentence is "if I had a beard like that, my trouser topiary would be on the front page of National Geographic", but don't take my word for it. Order the issue 64 print edition here, or upgrade to the version with the vinyl if you're feeling fancy.

I got to illustrate my column again this month, but instead of an illustration, I just took a photograph of Kraftwerk with a load of teapots (see above). What? Yes, it's an actual photograph. It only looks like a cartoon because of the photo realism.

The picture is relevant to the content of the column, honest. Not that I know much about teapots. I've never owned one. I had some builders in once, so bought a box of teabags, the only tea bags I've ever bought. I used two teabags nervously making tea for the builders and let the rest of the box go past its use-by date. Tea is horrible, and I'd rather drink healthy stuff like Pepsi, Blue Nun or Toilet Duck.

I probably shouldn't title this blog post "Teapots". It'll kill any Google ranking. And one thing I've learnt from fifteen and a half years of blogging is how to get hits by doing a words good proper. Is writing about tea popular on the internet? Do people google 'tea'? If I keep mentioning tea, will people arrive on this blog post looking for information about tea?

Anyway, that's the blog post (not actual post). Thanks for reading.

Further Fats: Tick tick tick tick bleep (2012 – the first Electronic Sound)

Further Fats: Why did the Fat Roland cross the road? (2017 – contains a tea drinker)

Calvin Harris launching an acid house project is the biggest music news of all time

Calvin Harris launching an acid house project called Love Regenerator is the biggest music news of all time.

This is like One Direction relaunching as a thrash metal band. Or like The Beatles returning as a drum 'n' bass act. Or like Jive Bunny revealing that all the music was made by actual bunnies.

Last month's Love Regenerator 1 EP hit a million streams in just three days. It was apologetically clubby, summoning the spirit of acid pioneers Phuture and so much more. We're talking fat pianos, liquid breaks, choppy vocal samples and filter-tweakin' squelchy goodness. All the best of the underground 1980s and 1990s.

Like a worm with an embarrassing zit, acid house has remained defiantly underground. We've had Voodoo Ray, Josh Wink and S'Express, but all of this was a long time ago. Justin Bieber was still in Calvin Klein nappies when Higher State of Consciousness was released.

So when the biggest DJ in the universe (probably) goes acid house, this is big news. It could mean the first mainstream exposure of acid house for 25 years. Imagine the BBC News at Six being presented by a Tamagotchi. THAT'S how much of a revival this is.

In the words of A Guy Called Gerald's 1989 top 20 hit Voodoo Ray:

"Ooh-oo-hoo ah-ha ha yeah
He-hey-ya hey-yah ah-ha ooh hey-yah ah-ha ooh"

Exactly, Gezza. That's exactly how I feel.

Calvin Harris has a second Love Regenerator EP arriving later this week. I'm not sure we can cope with this. It's like the earth being struck with two dinosaur-destroying meteors rather than one. The shockwave of this second EP will be so ground-shaking, no-one else will make any music for months.

Harris has been previewing bits on his Instagram and I can declare that, in the parlance of modern youth, it is banging. Proper banging and no mistake, missus. I'm sorry if my street talk is alarming to you, but I am well cool.

Unless Def Leppard return as a KLF tribute act, Calvin Harris going acid house remains the biggest music news of all time.



Further Fats: I love acid and the acid loves me (2015)

Further Fats: "Acid house - it's not real music, is it" said the idiot (2019)

The KLF will rise again, and they may or may not go "baa"

The KLF have the internet abuzz with rumours of their return, a subject that has been well covered here, here and by Jimmy KLF in this tweet:

The Information is @K2PLANTHIRE

— Jimmy Cauty (@jamescauty) January 5, 2017

The KLF are my favourite pop band. Their so-called stadium house trilogy of What Time Is Love?, 3am Eternal and Last Train To Trancentral set my teenage brain ablaze. Their guerrilla grime. The horned hoods. The mock mythology. Following in the path of Snap!, Adamski and Enigma, it all kind of made sense.

I was too young for Doctorin’ The Tardis several years earlier. I remember seeing a car in the video and deciding it wasn’t as good as KITT from Knight Rider. And by the time they took on America or the time they didn't even offer Tammy Wynette an ice cream, I was less interested. Wasn't 'my' little secret anymore.

However, their greatest success was hardwiring baffling and conflicting codes into my system. Destruction is art, art must be destroyed. Having hit singles is easy: let’s delete all our hit singles. You need pumping beats in your tracks; let's make the albums ambient. We are all bound for mu-mu land, even though that never seemed leave the M25. They were, as the saying goes in this grim north, reet punk.

And oh the questions, the many questions. Why is he in a wheelchair? Is he angle-grinding his guitar? Why is she on a boat? How can time be eternal? Is that a rhino horn? Why is he firing a machine gun on TV?

The barrage of content overload, message upon message, chimed nicely with Zoo TV’s fuzzy postmodernism. Y’know. When U2 were good. The K Foundation, as they became, were much more than a music group. They burned money. They tried to demolish Stonehenge. They made videos, books and art. I still own ten pieces of the $20,000 painting that Bill Drummond sliced up.

This reunion as the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu could be anything. It might not be music. It might be a second Manual. It might be a cube of lager. It might be a dead sheep. Or an alive one, listening to old KLF hits on headphones, confused.

Still. In whatever form, the KLF will rise again. Here they are on Top Of The Pops in their Ancients guise.



Further Fats: Blowin' in the wings: why protest songs should return to centre stage (2009)

Further Fats: I am having a constructive conversation on Youtube about the KLF (2012)

I am having a constructive conversation on Youtube about the KLF

Click here (or the picture) to make this bigger so you can read it with your eyeholes. And naturally, I'll keep you updated on the discussion in the comments below this here post.

Further Fats: This is not a brave new world: it's just another house group

Bleep Years day fifteen: The Orb's Blue Room (1992)

Bleep Years continues. Join me on an amazing journey of discovery into my dull life. This time, it's a track from 20 years ago which, for those with calculators, makes me at least 20 years old.

1992: The Orb's Blue Room

At the turn of the 1990s, The Orb released three killer singles: Little Fluffy Clouds (which took an aeon to grab its deserved place in the top ten), Perpetual Dawn and Blue Room. Despite the diminutive fluffy clouds hanging in the public's memory for a long time afterwards, it was Blue Room that scored the highest chart position of the three.

Blue Room was remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, the band's appearance on Top Of The Pops was no doubt a surprise to them. They turned out one of the show's most memorable performances: no-one has since played chess so intensely on a peak time music programme.

And secondly, The Orb messed with the chart rules. By 1992, the KLF had become notorious for their coldy-calculated, ice-cool undermining of the rulebook. At the time of Blue Room's release, the the maximum allowable length for a single was 40 minutes. Most people would assume that meant the main single plus all the remixes. The Orb's track Blue Room came in at three seconds short of 40 minutes, giving radio stations heart attacks and giving The Orb the strange honour of having the longest hit single of all time.

I was totally lost in The Orb's music back in the day: their dense audio worlds spun alien webs inside my addled noggin. It's only with hindsight that I've realised that, to some extent, I've also always aspire to their principles of 'event' performance and messing with the established rules. As for their chart record? They've changed the rules, so don't expect a Blue Room 2.

So Greater Music Police have been tweeting every 999 call...

Call 1: Report of murder of deputy sheriff and his immediate superior. One suspect in custody. Keeps asking what rhymes with 'lion'.

Call 2: Silly-haired man found igniting blazes. Has apparent tourettes.

Call 3: Five black Americans arrested for using course language to police officer. Seemed to object to our "badge and mother-effing traffic gun."

Call 4: Four post-punk Londoners Three reggae-pilfering new wavers* arrested impersonating officers of the law. The blondest one waffled about tantric sex: re-arrested for being a gobshite.

Call 5: Scotsman and Liverpudlian caught driving around in an old police car, towing an ice cream van. Cargo included heavy artillery, a list of northern cities and several dead sheep.

Call 6: Eccentric man-child caught breaking and entering before attacking a woman, leaving bloodstains on the carpet. Victim's name is Annie.

Call 7: Australian woman found bludgeoned by river. Rose found in mouth of victim. A wiley Hugo Weaving lookalike was seen fleeing scene.

Call 8: Welshman complaining of theft of sun from heart. Was asked to remove balaclava but refused.

Call 9: Young men in chemical masks found in a hypnotic st-8. Had to activ-8 back-up. Won't stop bloody dancing.

Call 10: Smirking gangsters caught running around robbing banks. Evidence of cartoon-dog-based drug taking.

Call 11: Fight broken up between reptiles and local petty criminals. Eye masks seem colour co-ordinated with Teletubbies. Started doing dance routines. Probably mentally unstable: did not intervene.

Call 808: Report of sample theft by Manchester ravers...

If you want some time to figure some of these out, try to ignore the tags below this post!

*see comments section

This is not a brave new world: it's just another house group

I could cope with "skweee" and its stripped-down aquafunk that leaned heavy on the pitch wheel.

It was a stupid name for a genre, but then again so is "new rave" and, for that matter, "rock". Chairs rock. Weebles rock. Boats rock. The one thing long-haired leathered-up guitar gods do not do is "rock".

But now we're supposed to believe there's a new genre called "brave".

Axwell of top ten chart ticklers Swedish House Mafia said in a Newsbeat interview recently (and repeated again on the news today): "It's a new genre we made up, we're calling it 'brave'. It's not rave: it's a little bit more ballsy than that, so that's why it's called 'brave'."

More ballsy than rave? More ballsy than Altern8 and their chemical attack masks? More ballsy than the KLF firing machine gun blanks into a crowd (pictured)? More ballsy than the skipload of wrong-uns I used to trough down my neck at Tribal Gathering?

Crikes, that paragraph made me look old. In the Swedish House bloke's defence, he does add the comment: "We thought of that five minutes ago. We like it a lot."

But no, it's rubbish. Yeah, our pop band's sexy, so we're going mash sexy and pop to bring you "sop". Yeah, our rock band's crazy, it's crazy rock so we're going to call it "cock".

Swedish House Mafia, your argument fell down the moment you wedged your genre into your name. This is not a brave new world: it's just another house group, albeit with a neat single that sounds better without the annoying vocals.

Although I've still quite a fondness for randomNumber's self-proclaimed genre "Northern wrongbeat", anyone who invents their own genre is mostly a "toffist".

Oh, I'm sorry, did I not mention that? I've invented a new genre of idiot: "toss-faced egotist". Toffists of the world unite!

Chosen Words: Q is for Queen

Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Yes, that Queen. The prancing dead bloke with the moustache and the chest. The asteroid-explosion-haired guitarist. Yeah, Queen.

Because Queen started something. Or rather, Vanilla Ice started it when he stole *that* bassline from Queen and Bowie's Under Pressure for his 1990 hit Ice Ice Baby.

The age of the sampler truly arrived with that record. It used to be the preserve of novelty acts or one-hit wonders (MARRS, Jive Bunny, Black Box). Subsequent massive hits by Enigma and the KLF dragged the technology kicking and st-st-stuttering into the trendy mainstream.

The subsequent controversy over Vanilla Ice blatantly stealing his sample was a spooky omen of many troubled arguments about what can be nicked and what counts as digital theft and "what, is that Loleatta Holloway, AGAIN?!"

When a doctor asks you for a urine sample, use the container provided: weeing into your Akai will not impress the NHS. Take heed 'cause I'm a lyrical poet.

Top five examples of sampling going too far:

- Jive Bunny
- funky drummer / amen break
- Scooter (pot) sampling the KLF (kettle)
- advertisers using cut-up techniques because it's "urban" or "street"
- every Puff Daddy and Kanye West chorus ever

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jackson was a hero to most...

I've had to rush to hospital when a family member had a heart attack. I've had to do CPR in a desperate attempt to save someone's life. I still get flashbacks about both, so what happened on Thursday at the home of Michael Jackson was nothing more than a basic human tragedy.

My heart goes out to all involved, in the same way I winced with recognition when I saw the two princes at the funeral of Princess Diana. We're flesh, we're blood, and we bleed with the best of them.

Having said that...

Michael Jackson was a hero to most, but he didn't mean sha mon to me. The way he used narrative in his Thriller videos confused my nine-year-old brain. Pop songs were meant to be instant and intense and fleeting, like a magnesium fire.

The mixture of fantasy (zombies) and credibility (street fights) somehow eluded my leafy South Manchester suburbia. I was more of a Pet Shop Boys kinda guy.

But I admit, Jacko produced some amazing pop music. The basslines and the keyboard riffs on Thriller should be studied by generations of budding musicians. And those studiously-scrawled notes should be tucked neatly into the inside front cover of KLF's The Manual.

One pundit said Michael Jackson had many careers, over and over again. Yes, he did, but only until Bad.

Dangerous was a plethora of wailing over-production (put that guitar down, Slash!) - he didn't even sing in tune on Give In To Me. And it will come as no surprise to you that Earth Song is an anagram of 'The Groans!'

They Don't Care About Us was a little clue for what was to come when he released the worse-than-awful Invincible album. The supposed king of pop couldn't string a basic tune together; the thought of any further Michael Jackson material filled me with a throat-splitting, spine-scraping dread.

I don't think Jackson ever saw himself as anything more than the pretty, smiling young man in the Rock With You video. His Wildean worship of youth, set in stone by an abusive upbringing, led to a public and personal downfall.

In that sense, Michael was a tragic victim of his own upbringing.

But, as another eternally-young costume-wearing saviour of the world once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Michael Jackson's many transgressions, which I don't need to repeat here, were totally unacceptable and were an appalling abuse of the power that he held.

As a black musician, he changed things forever: that is a whole blog post in itself. But he had a woeful lack of accountability. He valued his image - or his own hazed imagining of his image - above his duty as a parent.

Once you are as big a role model as he was, it doesn't matter how much you waffle on about saving the children and bringing world peace: integrity is something you do, not something you say.

As his legacy descends into the inevitable lawsuits and counter-accusations, I'll remember Michael Jackson as a deeply troubled, and troubling, man.

He was both the abused and the abuser. He made the best and the worst music in the world. So yeah, maybe he meant something to me.

And the most amazing thing I have learnt from researching this post? Quincy Jones' middle name is "Delight".

Max Tundra brings his sesame streetfunk to Manchester

So then, me and my chum packed our party bags and jollied off to a Max Tundra concert.  It was one of those events we'd been talking about for ages.

The venue was the Deaf Institute, Manchester's gigging force majeure. We delayed setting off because there were some dodgy lads hanging outside my gaff, and I feared they might break in and steal all my chandeliers and brass candlesticks. We then spend fourteen years in the bustling queue while we spectacularly failed to get a refund on a pre-paid ticket. We then queued for non-alcoholic lager (him) and a diet coke (me) because we're on health kicks.

So we missed support band May68.  A BBC review said they "don't make music; they make addictive little bombs."  Bombs are frightening enough without them being addictive, sheesh.

May 68 are named after Charles De Gaulle's least favourite month (ask your French grandfather, if you have one). They're relatively new onto the Manchester scene, and they're a bright pop baguette with an extra helping of CSS sauce.

The be-masked Wave Machines also supported.  They're Hot Chip-inspired art-poppers from Merseyside who sling their funk way below the belt. Their set had one sparkling gem in the form of Keep The Lights On. It sounded like the Bee Gees and David Bowie getting dirty with Grace Jones.

Finally, to the Max (pictured).  I hinted at Max Tundra's trademark stage spasms in this piece back in October, but it struck me for the first time that he is a man who seems constantly surprised by his own music.

He will buy an instrument (a kalimba, a children's toy microphone, a glockenspiel) to use once in one bar of one song. The result is a man running around the stage trying to keep up with his own incredible music.

So we had the skippy frantics of Orphaned, the speed-freak r 'n' b of Lights, the sesame streetfunk of Which Song, and the bizarre other-worldiness of his "cover" of KLF's What Time Is Love.

The dodgy lads didn't steal my brass candlesticks. But me and my chum did make off with fuzzy warmth in our guts from Max's melody and deadpan pleasantries. "Anyone here from the Owen's Park campus?" says Max, no doubt recalling a quick read of Google maps on the way to the gig.

Max Tundra is a definite for your diary next time he's in town and, no, it won't matter if you miss the support band, or if you have to pay for a friend who didn't turn up, or if some robber nicks your widescreen cafetiere while you're out.

Because watching a constantly startled Max Tundra is worth every penny.

Future Sound Of London hog the limelight. I'll be in my bathroom.

The Future Sound Of London are a bunch of selfish bumholes.

By my reckoning, they've had seven album releases in the last 12 months. Seven. I don't think I achieved seven of anything in the past year.

I probably had more than seven poos, but that's about it.

Here's the evidence. They started with the Pulse EPs, an album-length rerelease of old things they did under different names before Coolio was in the charts.

Secondly, they continued the blowing-off-the-dust theme with From the Archives Vol. 4, which boasted more than a smattering of tracks from old LPs (ISDN, Dead Cities and Lifeforms).

Environments, their long-awaited album in July, was a shuffling of old material that did a pretty good impression of the classic KLF album Chill Out.

About the same time, Amorphous Androgynous released The Peppermint Tree And The Seeds Of Superconsciousness. What's that got to do with Future Sound Of London? They're the same band.

The fifth album of the year was Yage's world-music offering The Woodlands Of Old, featuring an ex-Propellerhead on drums. Yage is FSOL's engineer. Except Yage isn't, because Yage is actually the guys from FSOL pretending to be their engineer. Confused yet?

They followed this up with the fifth volume of From the Archives Vol.5, alongside a second volume of Environments. That's seven albums, people. They are the James Pattinson of the music world.

I think they are being selfish. Hogging a whole year like that.

They also released a recording of oscillators that reacted to the movement of clouds across the Sun. They are working on a musical remix of a film directed by an Oscar-winning animator. And their gig later this year, as I mentioned in my recent 2009 preview, opens up the possibility of them performing their first new live material for 12 years.

Despite all this, I still think the only guaranteed pleasure in life is having a poo. Think on, FSOL.

mpSunday: In the latest of a series where I give away free music (now not necessarily on a Sunday), get your teeth around this Wipeout 2097 classic. PING!  This mpSunday has now expired.

Max Tundra does Prince while, by the look of the picture wot I edited in Microsoft Publisher, the Von Trapps do LSD

The bejewelled crowd bustles and hums in a room glistening with gold carvings and low-slung chandeliers.

A woman in white announces, "Ladies and gentlemen, the children of Captain Von Trapp wish to say goodnight to you." She raises her hands in awkward invitation and the hum foams up into chatter and gasps.

Down the stairs of the grand hallway descends a music sensation that will be remembered for generations.

It's a topless Max Tundra balancing a huge tooth hat on his head.

Yes, the master of bizarre pop and lord of the 8 / 16 / 4 / 0.5-bit opus is back with a busy electro-fuzz single (see the video featuring the tooth hat here) that boasts the Sound Of Music's So Long Farewell as a b-side.

He's done well: he's gone for the obligatory cowbell, but I'm not sure how that thumping 808 snare would sit with the delicate Von Trapp kids (pictured).

It bodes well for Tundra's third album next week, Parallax Error Beheads You. Expect the usual suspects saying it's messy and as busy as an OCD bee, and there should be the usual stampede of comparisons to Nintendo / Sega / insert generic bleepy video game console here.

Time for an mpSunday, where I give away my record collection (but only on a Sunday, mind). This track was the first glimpse we had of the potential brilliance of Max's new album. It's him doing an uncomfortably straight approximation of a geeky Prince.

mpSunday (right click and save as): CRAASH! This mpSunday has now expired.

Which reminds me. If anyone is hoarding an mp3 of Tundra's version of the KLF's What Time Is Love, cyber-slap me. And yes it is okay to use the 'cyber' prefix again.

A ticket to ride: bumbling into MC Tunes and putting the green suit away

She bounces up to me like Tigger on catnip and starts squatting on the dancefloor. Her bum is pointing in all directions at once and, with alarm bells clanging in my head, I scan the room for a precautionary mop.

She says to me, "You need to dance with your hips. Like this."

For a scruffy haired loser who shuffled around in a painful green suit and wine red tie, a dancefloor was very much like a barbeque is to a penguin; it was a new thing to me and the heat was causing chafing.

It's the Herbal Tea Party in mid-90s Manchester and I'm being taught to dance by an enthusiastic stranger. I must have looked as stiff as a door if I needed a punter to dive in and rescue me from complete humiliation.

The Tea Party stands now as a monster club night in darkest Hulme that has never enjoyed the continuing exaltation of its bigger counterpart, Manchester's Megadog. It's a shame, especially for HTP's very own Dr Frankensteins, co-creators Ian and Rob Fletcher.

Thanks to them, electronic music bowled me clean over, especially when:

(a) I bought Orbital's brown album purely based on an amusing review in the NME;

(b) as a hack, first interviewing one of the Fletchers (I forget which one) but being drawn by a One Dove record playing in the background. I'd never heard proper, creative dance music before, barring the KLF, The Orb and assorted chart rave bands.

There isn't much about the Tea Party on the internet near me. A few forum mentions, but then this gem of a photograph (above).

It's a ticket, posted by Armcurl. It shows (then) South Manchester's finest DJ Justin Robertson lined up beside Charlie Hall and his Drum Club. And there they are. Resident Rob Fletcher plus Inner Sphere Space which, if I remember rightly, was his brother Ian.

Okay it's just a ticket, but this photo represents my bumpy (and grindy) ride into the clubbing world.

I never really became 'cool'. I was frightened by the owner of Birmingham's Beyond club once because he offered me a beer. And I once bumbled into MC Tunes, who threatened my very life just by casting me what he thought was a casual glance.

And I never got into tea either, despite the best efforts of Mr Scruff to make it the tipple of choice for Manchester clubbers.

But I did learn to dance a bit, and the Herbal Tea Party turned a scruffy haired loser into a shaven-haired loser with a penchant for Higher Intelligence Agency, Drum Club and Sabres Of Paradise. Thank goodness I never needed the mop.

Sound the klaxon for Gloria Hunniford's cleavage and something about the Waterloo line and dogging in tube trains

The Klaxons once got caught pouring treacle down Gloria Hunniford's cleavage while dressed in inflatable saxophone suits as they supposedly prepared for a Dadaist sound poem version of J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls.

Such revelation should come as no surprise here on the Fat Roland blog. On a July post with the beguiling moniker I'm quietly rooting for the Klaxons but this is a post about Fopp's flopped shops and not the bloody Mercury Prize, I not only suggested HMV could invest into Fopp (they did), I plumped for the new rave protagonists to win the Mercury (they did).

This makes me into some kind of messiah, so it seems shrewd to spread my insight and present my top ten of fascinating facts about the Klaxons.

(If you're not quite sure what a top ten is, it's the kind of thing bloggers post when they don't give an arse about their blog any more. Before you worry, I do give an arse, sometimes at half price.)

The treacle saxophone thing can't count as fact number one because I may have made it up. I do know, however, that they are the fourth biggest band ever to come from Dumfries and their Golden Skans single is something to do with x-ray machines and urine.

Okay, no, wait, I can do this.

Fact number one: Steve Lamacq is a former member of the Klaxons but was politely asked to quit because of his boy band looks.

Fact number two: The genre 'new rave' was originally coined by Bob Monkhouse to describe the up-and-coming comedy act Hale and Pace.

I've checked Wikipedia, and neither of those facts are on there. So let's just rewind:

Fact one. Something about the Waterloo line and dogging in tube trains. They have light sticks but 87% of the band are colour blind. Fact one. Their next single is Lady In Red in a non ironic way. That rumour about Connor Nichols, James Righton and a blow-up doll of Leo Sayer. The Klaxons were going to call themselves The KLF; they stopped spelling at the third letter. Fact one. Two of the band members' middle names is Susan.

I can't do this. This is a post about the bloody Mercury Music Prize. Fact one: The Klaxons won it. Facts two to ten: The Klaxons deserved it. There, that'll do.

Minus ten Roland points for any journalist who concludes his or her article promising great things for the band with the derivative final line, 'it's not over yet for the Klaxons'.

Bill Drummond is going to be at Greenbelt...

...so says my playbuddy Fil whose letterbox spewed a flyer claiming the KLF genius will appear at the UK's premier post-evangelical fest.

Me wonders if this is something to do with a chap called John Davies, a curate based in Liverpool who is a Drummond obsessive and Greenbelt's SoulSpace organiser.

A search for "Bill Drummond" on Greenbelt's website turns up no results in exactly 0.4 seconds. Why do they need to tell me it took 0.4 seconds to find nothing?

Fil reckons it's all a practical joke and Drummond won't turn up, replaced instead with a grey stick.

Here's a grey stick for sale at a handsome price of 56 Australian dollars. Drummond may be interested in buying this expensive bit of twiggery. After all, he has got money to burn.

A search for "grey stick" on Greenbelt's website also turns up no results in 0.4 exactly seconds. A coincidence? I think not.