Smileys for miles: 10 rave culture classics that you should listen to immediately

Look at you, sat on your sofa watching repeats of the Nine O'Clock News from 1984 while munching seven-day old Jaffa cakes you found in the back of your cupboard. Jeez, what a loser. What you need, my lazy friend, are some rave-inspired records to ramp up your energy.

Here are ten tracks that, in their own individual way, bring alive the energy of rave music. Some are more directly connected to rave, and will transport you back to the days of poppers and smiley faces. Others owe some kind of historic debt to rave culture: even if you didn't experience rave back in the day, these tunes should still evoke the pill-popping hypercoloured club culture of yore. 

The highlighted links should open to a YouTube video of that track.

808 State: Cubik
Following the success of their blissful and balaeric Pacific State, 808 State put out a series of singles with a harder energy. Cubik was an unlikely top ten hit because of its cranky square-wave chords, alarmist emergency sirens and wild guitar shreds. There's footage online of young ravers partying to Cubik at Stone Roses' infamous Spike Island gig. Perfect for throwing (cuboid) shapes to.

Altern-8: Infiltrate 202
This was the masked mavericks' first hit single, and it peaked at number 28 in July 1991, just behind a new entry from Frankie Knuckles' The Whistle Song and just ahead of a new entry from Bomb The Bass's Winter In July. Crumbs, what a chart. And what an anthem. Simplistic, geometric breakbeat shapes which felt quite comical at the time, but laid some pretty serious groundwork in commercial chart rave.

Bicep: Glue
The video for Bicep's nostalgia-bazooka Glue interspersed images of abandoned rave sites with quote captions from ex-ravers. "Never had a comedown like that one," reminisces one caption. "Best days of my life," says another. "Off my box with four cans of Stella," interrupts one wag, ruining the mood. Joe Wilson's video was a perfect foil to the Bicep boys' heart-wrenching breakbeats. What a comedown. 

Chase & Status: Blind Faith
Like the Chemical Brothers, Chase & Status's partnership can be traced back to their time at Manchester university. And like the Chemical Brothers, the pair tread a neat line in roof-shattering beats. Blind Faith was a huge hit from their breakthrough album No More Idols. It was a tribute to grubby warehouse rave, bolstered by Loleatta Holloway-style live vocals from Yola. Chase & Status gonna work it out.

Fatboy Slim: Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat
Norman Cook has enjoyed number one success in various guises, and I had plenty of choice for this list. His creativity knows no bounds, whether it's a caveman turning into a chubby lad or Christopher Walken walkin' weird. Three decades after he learnt bass so he could join the Housemartins, Mr Slim released this modern classic in tribute to the fours states of raving. It's like Eat, Pray, Love but with poppers.

Klaxons: Atlantis To Interzone
They may have just been a bunch of London indie kids, but they brought "new rave" to the masses and singlehandedly re-popularised glowsticks with the gigging public. The awkwardly-named Atlantis To Interzone enjoyed radio support but, incredibly, failed to make a dent in the UK charts. A travesty. They followed-up this tribute to rave with an ace cover of Grace's Perfecto Records classic Not Over Yet.

Nia Archives: Off Wiv Ya Headz
I could have included A-Trak's iconic remix of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Heads Will Roll, but this junglist remix is irresistible. Nia Archives knocked up the track when trying to entertain crowds at Manchester's Warehouse Project, no mean feat considering the number of gurning bucket-hatters I've encountered there. If her name is new to you, dive into the Nia Archives archives immediately. Your rave heart will thank you.

Pet Shop Boys: Vocal
This might be a controversial one if you're a purist. And yes, I know Vocal has all the energy of your grandad pining for the days when the high street was all butchers and shoe shops. But this track has proper rave origins: the Boys say it was inspired by a clubbing venture in Brazil in the mid-1990s. They reflected this in the video by using footage from actual raves. A great tune from the domino dancers. 

Together: Hardcore Uproar
This John Carpenter-sampling classic was released on Pete Tong's brilliant FFRR label, It was the epitome of crossover rave bangers. That "ha-ha-hardcore uproar" voice? It's not a sample: it's just Suddi Raval's doing it directly into a mic. And the crowd cheers are from a Together live recording - in the background, you can hear Suddi shouting "yeeeeeah" to hype the crowd up. Rave to its very (hard)core.

The Streets: Weak Become Heroes
This list is almost in alphabetical order by artist, so we end up with The Streets. This is the best music act named after a road since, er, 'Don't Call Me Baby' hitmakers Madison Avenue. The downbeat Weak Become Heroes is Skinner's paeon to losing himself in the club and having a KFC afterwards. It's not a very ravey way to finish this list, but you can't have the smiley highs without the post-ecstasy crash.

Main blog picture: Altern-8

Further Fats: If it goes bleep, it may or may not be EDM (2013)

Further Fats: Just how DO you act at your first rave? (2019)

Being boring: I am not blogging about the Pet Shop Boys, honest

After seeing them on their greatest hits tour, I decided to write another Pet Shop Boys blog post. Something about the best Pet Shop Boys singles. The greatest moments of the Pet Shop Boys, that kind of thing. Top 37 sexiest Pet Shop Boys deadpan glares.

And then the blog post lay in my drafts gathering dust. Because who cares about my opinions on the Pet pals? They're great. Of course I think they're great. Whoop-di-doo. And the Pope is catholic and Bear Grylls poops in the woods. Big deal.

The idea seemed as appealing as a live stream featuring Elon Musk talking about crypto. Or Elon Musk talking about woke. Or Elon Musk talking about anything.

So I deleted the whole thing. You won't be able to read my waffle about Steven Hague's extended remix of Love Comes Quickly, which lets the caramel smoothness of the original overflow like an exploded sweetshop.

And I binned my enthusings about the Always On My Mind / In My House mash-up that felt utterly subversive because I didn't think you were meant to do that to number one singles back then.

No will you get to appreciate my thesis about the 2021 Russell T Davies television series It’s A Sin, with Olly Alexander playing a troubled Tory-boy. What thesis? That if you really squint, like proper squint so your eyes look like bum holes, you can see that series as part of the extended PSB It's A Sin universe, as if it's an extension of the 1987 number one single itself.

I would have published something really inspirational about the tracks Vocal from their Electric album and The Pop Kids from their Super album offering a meta-narrative about the PSB musical universe. Or something about the rich place-building of Suburbia and West End Girls?, the latter full of shadows and shady street-life. 

And there's the financial cynicism connecting 1980s singles Rent and Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money), and how that kind of narrative is not present in their later singles. Or the geopolitics of It's Alright. Or the themes of love in the almost-but-very-much-not rhyming So Hard and Heart. And is Domino Dancing about love or lust?

Is Electronic's Getting Away With It a Pet Shop Boys single? Are we allowed to include that too? How about Eighth Wonder's PSB-penned pop banger I’m Not Scared? Dusty Springfield's Occupy Your Mind? Where does Neil-Chris end and the rest of the universe begin?

And you'll never get to read my ramblings about the singles in which vocals are secondary. Such as the Clothes Show theme tune In The Night (Arthur Baker remix) where people of a certain age remember the tune but not the words? Or the emotive instrumental Axis which provided such a thrilling opening to their 2013–2015 Electric live show?

Nah. You don't get to hear my bland blatherings about how important I think the Pet Shop Boys are. Can someone please press the 'delete draft' button? Thank you.

Further Fats: 14 'til I die: remembering the teenage me's music habits (2020)

Further Fats: Pet Shop Boys create their own magical dreamworld at Co-Op Live (2024)

Pet Shop Boys create their own magical dreamworld at Co-Op Live

I visited Manchester's new mega-arena Co-Op Live to see a double-act called... [looks at notes]... the Pet Shop Boys. Have you heard of them?    

Dreamworld is the Pet Shop chaps' first ever greatest hits tour, which seems remarkable considering how long they've been farting out hit singles. And Dreamworld itself seems never-ending - the tour debuted in 2019, three prime ministers ago.

They were fabulous. Of course they were. Hit single after hit single after hit single. There is no point in listing all the songs here, suffice to say that the longest track title of the set was Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes Off You), and the shortest track title was Rent. Is this helpful information? Probably not.

The concert began with Suburbia, a low-burning minor-key understatement of a track, and ended with Being Boring, a low-burning minor-key understatement of a track. Pet Shop Boys are forever on brand: even the track-listing is deadpanning us.

Some songs know they're good. They've got a glint in their eyes. Not that songs have eyes: that would be weird. Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) had pompous energy. Jealousy was songwriting perfection. And how adorable was the carefree way that Neil threw away the final lines on What Have I Done To Deserve This?, as if he was at a karaoke night after a long day at the office. Big up Clare Uchima too, a perfect vocal foil throughout. 

It's A Sin has had a resurgence recently, helped by Olly Alexander's role in the TV series of the same name, and Alexander's band Years And Years warbling the tune at The Brits with Elton John. No surprise, then, that the song was the most triumphant moment of the gig. Also "Pet Shop Boys: It's A Sin" is an anagram of "Is it honest pop abyss?", which is a question we should all be asking ourselves.

A month previously, the Co-op Live was forced to delay its opening concerts after construction work got delayed. I did keep an eye out for men in orange jackets frantically welding bits of the building, but there was no sign of its earlier teething problems.

Is it a more intimate venue than, say, the Manchester Arena or the Etihad? Yeah, the layout is cleverly designed to mimic a smaller capacity. Is it Manchester's best new venue? No. Factory International's characterful Aviva Studios wins this one easily. Although it needs to bed in a little more, the Factory place has way more heart, as opposed to Co-op's cold boxiness.

A penultimate thought: The support act was some DJ bloke playing classic dance music tunes which we had all heard a million times before while his logo displayed on a big screen in endless uninspired permutations. Do better, concert planners.

And a final thought. If the Pet Shop Boys are pet shop boys, which one is on the till, and which one is looking after the animals? Answers on a postcard etc etc.

Further Fats: This is a review of an Aphex Twin gig (2011)

Further Fats: What was your first concert? (2019) 

Best electronic albums of 2020: a steady special mention, special mention, special mention

Throughout this countdown, I have herded many albums into a pen labelled "special mentions". Here is the final lot of special mentions for you to ogle longingly at. Oh and my notebook tells me the following selections are labelled "pop / chart".

I've always had a soft spot for Moby, and although it got mixed reviews, I enjoyed All Visible Objects (Mute), especially its nod to his younger rave days. Speaking of feeling young, there was a fresh energy to Disclosure's third album Energy (Island), all chart-friendly and chirpy and cheesy smiles. 

I've never fully got Sparks: the quirkiness is lost on me. That said, there was a lot to admire in A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip (BMG), with my Electronic Sound review praising their wryness, lyricism and "earworms with moustaches". Another duo I got to review in 2020 was Erasure. Their eighteenth (!) album The Neon (Mute) was a "glittery cannon of anthems", in which the "neon flickers with regret".

I always love a Pet Shop Boys album. Early in the year, they released Hotspot (x2), revisiting subtler melodies and giving us the prophetic stay-at-home anthem I Don't Wanna. Nice to see Years & Years making an appearance (the band not the television programme) (obviously) (duh).

Another bunch of old party-heads releasing an album in 2020 was The Orb. Abolition of the Royal Familia (Cooking Vinyl) was a likeable jumble of soulful pop and dubby ambience, and featured the usual gang (Eno! Youth! Hillage!) alongside tributes to Stephen Hawking and Jello from the Dead Kennedys. This was, by the way, only their seventeenth album. I can hear Erasure's mocking laughter.

Finally, pop-pickers, there's this wacky pairing. Eccentric knob-twiddler and Sigur Ros collaborator Dan Deacon gave us Mystic Familiar (Domino Recordings), his first album since 2015. It had DIY songwriting, crashing drums, wonky electronics, and an anthem or three. And eccentric sample-fiddlers The Avalanches were back with We Will Always Love You (Astralwerks), which they said was an “exploration of the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit” although was much more straight-laced than that.

I think that's it for my special mentions. I've probably missed something. Tom Vek did an album, didn't he? Too late. I need to publish this in about 60 seconds. I really am writing to deadline – cor blimey.

 

Browse the rest of the Best Electronic Albums of 2020

14 'til I die: remembering the teenage me's music habits

As we approach the end of 2020, the UK is a virus-ridden pariah country, its coastlines rammed with stranded lorries, its inhabitants throwing ungifted Christmas presents into shopping trolley-infested canals.

No wonder we prefer to look to the past instead, when everything was sunshine and happiness and ice cream. Take the current meme in which you post albums from when you were 14. That's nice, isn't it: thinking of the music at a formative moment of your life rather than the current apocalypse.

For the teenage-era albums, I chose Pet Shop Boys' Actually, the Mel & Kim album, a Richard Clayderman collection and Introduce Yourself by Faith No More. Richard who? Ask your great, great grandparents. I was very into piano when I was a kid.

The truth is I can't remember what I listened to when I was 14. Those albums sound about right, but remembering that far ago is like looking through frosted glass that's been encased in bubble wrap then wedged between two slabs of lead.

I do know that the 14-year-old me listened to classical music, enjoyed drawing and photocopying comics, was very involved with the local church, and was thoroughly addicted to the daytime soap Neighbours. I definitely had a musical ear to the ground: I remember T'Pau and La Bamba and George Harrison and Starship (overwrought emotions pictured above).

But despite my ongoing obsession with A-Ha's Hunting High And Low, I was a bit too young for albums. I was more likely to make my own albums by taping the charts, then editing those tapes using my dad's tape-to-tape recorder. I have an entire crate of these cassettes somewhere. Or if I did buy an album, it would be a greatest hits, like the scene in which Alan Partridge reveals his favourite Beatles album.

I slowly learned that albums could be a complete expression: a journey from A to B – literally, considering the formats of the time. By the time I was 18, I was an album aficionado: I even wrote a music column for a local paper. And by "aficionado", of course, I mean "naïve and egotistical mess" because that's what a lot of 18-year-olds tend to be.

In fact, it's horrible looking back. Being a teenager then wasn't good. When I was 14, in the year 1987, the world was only just starting to tackle the HIV / AIDS pandemic, while political superpowers were still brandishing nuclear warheads at each other. I've just looked up 1987 on the internet, and there were plane crashes and a tsunami and political kidnappings and the birth of Marcus from Mumford And Sons. 1987 sounds terrible.

As for me? I was horrible too. I was a disease-ridden social pariah, my messy bedroom rammed to the rafters with tatty comics: I produced so many teenage juices – mainly pimple goo – that I might as well have been sleeping in a shopping trolley-infested canal.

As we approach the end of 2020, I'm looking to the future. There's not much sunshine and happiness and ice cream right now, but it'll come. I'll also be writing up my annual Best Albums list because I'm dead good at albums, me.

Further Fats: The Stone Roses and the seriously stained alley of nostalgia (2011)

Further Fats: Cassette tapes are back, which is why I've got my sausage out (2020)

Dance music fans, I have bad news about Christmas

Every now and then, mega cool dance music dominates the charts.

Yeah, I said "mega cool". Deal with it, kids.

Like the time the Chemical Brothers' Setting Sun topped the charts in 1996, the same year the Prodigy took the top spot twice. Or the moment Kraftwerk knocked Shakin' Stevens off number one. Or 21st century bangers breaking past a mush of identikit dance records such as Mint Royale's Singin' In The Rain or Kiesza's Hideaway.

The bad news is that Santa is having none of this. He hates dance music. He's your crusty old grandpa banging on the ceiling with a walking stick, or in his case, an elf. There has never been a mega cool dance hit as Christmas number one.

There must be some Christmas chart toppers with dance elements, right? A pearl among the oysters, a bit of gristle amid the constant stream of watery gravy, something credible besides Jimmy Osmond, Cliff Richard, all the Band Aids and Shayne flipping Ward.

Wait. Yazoo's Only You was Christmas number one in 1983. Vince Clarke! Alison Moyet! Synths! Except this was the a cappella version by The Flying Pickets: not dancey at all. Dammit.

What else? Not much. Mr Blobby's self-titled 1993 Chrimbo chart-topper was a dance music track, with its horrendously outdated Stock Aitken Waterman rhythms. But it can't count: it was a children's singalong with a bunch of kids who deserved to be sent up t'chimneys.

Apart from one track I'm yet to mention, that's it. Everything else is ballads, charity singles or people singing about sausage rolls. If Christmas was a nightclub, it would have been long bulldozed to make way for an Asda. I believe in the power of redemption, such as celebrity chefs doing interesting things with the long maligned sprout, but there is no hope here: the Christmas chart topper will never be a mega cool dance hit.

Except...

There is a pure, club-thumping dance track that made it to number one. It had samples, a roof-raising build-up and key change, and a pretty nifty breakbeat. That's right. Bob the Builder's Can We Fix It? is the most danceable festive number one in history.

Has Bob fixed it? Yes, he has. Have a listen: that's a proper skippy breakbeat right there. Even better, he knocked Westlife off the top of the charts when he became the Christmas chart-topper in 2000. Santa Claus is squeezing down your chimney, and he's armed with a cartoon wrench and Neil Morrissey dressed a reindeer.

Thank you, Bob. Or should I call you Robert? You truly are the most mega cool king of Chrimbo.

*publishes blog post*

*fast-forward to later that night*

*Fat Roland's bedroom, a rattle of chains in the darkness*

FATS: Whaaa? What's that? Who's there?
GHOST: Wooooah. It's me. The ghost of blogs past.
FATS: What do you want? Is it money? Lard? Take the lard! I only keep it on my bedside table for comfort.
GHOST: Whooaah. I'm here to tell you off about that blog post you did. The one about Christmas. Wooooaaaah!
FATS: Since when did ghosts get internet?
GHOST: You didn't mention the Pet Shop Boys Always On My Mind and the Human League's Don't You Want Me. Woooah.
FATS: Can I go back to bed? I've not finished making my Christmas candle and I need to break into my neighbour's first thing to get more earwax.
GHOST: Woooah. You deliberately missed out two of the biggest electronic music hits of all time to make some vapid point about dance music and Christmas. Seriously, dude. It renders your whole point moot. Woah.
FATS: Listen here, matey, get back inside that wardrobe. I'm going to push you back inside that spooky flipping wardrobe.
GHOST: Yikes! Do you always dress like that for bed? That's going to chafe, surely.
FATS: Hey, if it's good enough for Noel Edmonds, it's good enough fo—

*cuts to black*

Pictured above: Glasgow Sound Control's window display at Christmas taken by Agent Banana

Further Fats: Fat Roland's number one album chart death rant (2010)

Further Fats: If it goes bleep, it may or may not be EDM (2013)

A Full On Guide to Full On: introduction

When Kylie Minogue moved to Deconstruction Records to release Confide In Me, she gained an indie credibility entirely absent from her Stock Aitken and Waterman past.

And yet, Deconstruction was no less pop. Co-founded by Mike Pickering of M People, they had the big piano anthems of Black Box, K-Klass and Bassheads and M People. Taking on Kylie seemed an entirely sensible choice.

There was one compilation, however, which cemented Deconstruction's underground credentials. It was Full On: Edition One, subtitled "a year in the life of house music". This was Decon sticking a massive flag on the moon, and that moon was underground dance music. Not that moons can be made from abstract nouns, but you get the idea.

The cover design wasn't great. Here is its Discogs image in all its low-resolution glory. It looks like the front page of a financial company's glossy annual report. "Yah, Damien says the VAT changes have had a peripheral effect on out-sourcing but the bottom line remains pretty solid."

I shouldn't knock the designers, Farrow Design. They have pretty solid credentials, helping define the look of post-Richie Manics, Orbital's 20th anniversary, and recent Pet Shop Boys.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about whether navy goes with burnt orange. I'm here to talk about the music.

Full On came out in 1992, which made it pre-cool-Kylie but post-Italo-house. 2 Unlimited had taken the charts by storm with their lowest common denominator "techno" sound. Full On had a foot in similar bouncy Euro-house, but there was something so much more listenable about it.

It had Felix and Usura banging out thumping anthems for blocky pre-Windows-95 visuals. It had an early appearance from Justin 'Lionrock' Robertson', laying an early warning shot for the rise of big beat. And it had a nascent appearance from someone who, five years later, would score one of the most memorable top ten singles of all time.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to analyse one track a day and I'm going to call it a Full On Guide to Full On. I'll do two tracks a day if I don't have much to write about. Three if I'm really struggling. You can see the complete track listing on Discogs.

Don't worry: if you never listened to this album, you should still enjoy this. I'm going to shine a light on 1990s dance music by, er, deconstructing this Deconstruction album. At least, I hope so: I haven't written any of it yet.

Stay tuned for the Full On Guide to Full On.

Read the Full On series in, er full.

Read the Full On introduction explaining what the heck this is all about.

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)

The Pet Shop Boys and Madonna: Into The Minimal Groove

Not that I haven't got a life or anything, but I have spent many hours searching for the perfect Pet Shop Boys mashup.

You remember mashups. Songs that have been cut-and-shut together, like a Mini Metro welded to a Transit Van: totally unofficial, sometimes ugly, potential death trap.

I think I have found the perfect PSB mashup, and it comes from the bottom drawer of their back catalogue. Into The Minimal Groove mixes Minimal (Tocadisco's Sunday At Space Remix) with Madonna's Into The Groove.

Whoever did this spent a lot of time working on Madge's vocals. They work brilliantly over a track that likes to take its time: it's full of surprises.

And like my dodgy cover version of Carly Rae Jepson, they've kept the title hook until much later in the track - it's five minutes before Madonna says "get into the groove", and even then it almost passes by unnoticed. A deliberate trick to neutralise the original track to make something new and interesting.

I can't stop listening to it. You could say.... ahem... [steps closer to microphone] that I have very much got into its groove.

There's a video of sorts, which you can watch here.

Che Guevara and Debussy to a

Sorry.

Christmas was good, wasn't it. We all played Ludo and wore novelty trousers and did a jigsaw of a horse. Santa Claus got stuck in the chimney, but it's alright because we fed him mince pies on the end of a broom. I hope your Chrimbo was somewhere between tolerable and alright.

It's now that strange post-Christmas-tree week, a scorched copse of ruined routines and threatening promises. Too much food, too little exercise. Go easy on yourself, chums. It's a dawdle, not a sprint.

Me? I lose myself in little projects at this time of year. Nothing overwhelming - just silly distractions to brighten the bleak midwinter. My current project is my albums of the year list, a predictable yet essential part of this blog which will unfurl here over the next few days.

Watch this space.

A Christmas message from Fat Roland. pic.twitter.com/qPeBrkzOMe

— Fat Roland ⁉️ (@FatRoland) December 25, 2018

Further Fats: Tend the tables, broom the rats out for me (2009)

Further Fats: Fat Roland at Christmas (2015)

This is a review of an Aphex Twin gig

Aphex Twin's* massive stadium tour, played out to 1.75 million people, finished its run in Manchester at the weekend.

I'd followed Aphex Twin back in the day, even to the point of having his posters up on my wall and everything. After he split in 1996, I wasn't too bothered, but since he reformed, I've developed an odd penchant for going to see him live.

Here's me on the bus going to see Aphex Twin. The bus was packed full of Aphex Twin fans.

At this point, I was wondering if I'd recognise any of his new songs. He's never exactly been cutting edge, but that edge has seemed significantly blunted in the past few years.

At first, I thought this sign on the wall was an Aphex Twin track title.

It turns out, this was something to do with the football that was normally played in the stadium in which the Aphex Twin concert was taking place.

As my eyes drifted along the typeface, I asked myself how many of the 55,000 Aphex Twin fans at the gig would recognise these names.

Aphex Twin's supporting band was a duo. Probably Boards Of Canada or something.

Boards Of Canada has followed Aphex Twin for the whole tour. Normally, Boards Of Canada would put on their own flamboyant shows. In this case, their set was rather stripped down.

That didn't stop them having odd backing singers, such as these colourful block people with blocky heads (pictured inside a big screen head).

Here's the lead singer of Probably Boards Of Canada Or Something.

He was called Neil. He wore mostly black, while his keyboardist Chris wore mostly white.

I could only capture a picture of Neil on the big screen because I was so far from the stage, to capture the real him would have taken a lens the size of the Norway.

Boards Of Canada's best song was Left To My Own Devices.

When Aphex Twin took to the stage, the stadium went mental.

I was a little busy reading a Fyodor Dostoevsky short story collection. My friend Nici, who got me the ticket, looked at me a little oddly. I decided that Notes From The Underground could wait until later.

I thought that Aphex Twin looked good for his age.

Then a long-lost Aphex Twin member came on stage and started singing his own stuff. He was evil and there was fire and everything.

Then there was a whole lot of dancing in monk costumes and weird cult stuff, then some spangly tops and aerobatic mechanic performances. This was to demonstrate the theme of the evening about progress from mass idol worship to modern science. This was, remember, at a capacity gig of 55,000 worshipping fans.

And then there was a robot. This most definitely explains why Aphex Twin hasn't produced an album for a long time. He's been in his shed clanging together a buggery robot killer, which sauntered from the back of the stage, looked evil for a bit, then went round attacking people with robot zombie lazers.

 

Maybe I embellished that bit a little.

I had seen Aphex Twin before, on their reunion concert when Patience came out. This was as impressive in its own way, but it seemed to be full of great ideas that didn't quite form a whole. 

With the robot's mechanical problems, the signature piece (robot's hand) didn't happen, and so the robot seemed like a loose end, like an electronic drunk staggering its way through a pop concert and walking off into the audience without so much as a handshake with the stage performers.

Also, having seen Venetian Snares* at the Arena recently, and having watched her absolutely kill it with Spinning Around, Slow and Love At First Sight, maybe I was coming into this piece of theatre (and that's pretty much what it is) a little spoilt.

Still, Robbie from Aphex Twin was a tour-de-force, despite obvious signs of various bodily abuses. The band's banter with the audience was lovely, and it's nice to see them still strongly identifying themselves with Manchester.

And yes, the new stuff is nowhere near as good as their old stuff (which in itself was confined to a short semi-acoustic section midway through). Some of the routines were clumsy, but there was plenty of pow and woo and smart wizzy moves to remind us that this act, ageing though they are, Aphex Twin may still be the best pop group out there.

*some names have been changed in this article to protect the writer's credibility

Mixin' ma tunesies: Flying Lotus, Rustie and The Black Dog

I've had a strange mixture of two songs stabbing my eardrums all day. The first is Getting Away With It, the melancholic Pet Shop Boys-sprinkled pop song from Electronic. The second is My Humps, the paean to road calming measures by the Black Eyed Peas.

The result is an insistent and disturbing image of Johnny Marr rubbing me all over with his strangely misshapen mammaries. Like being tickled with rubber bags full of gerbils, only in a bad way.

All of which is distracting me from some important record releases about which you, my newly disturbed reader, should know. Each of these feature remixes and are 47% more successful than anything offered by an Electronic / Peas combo.

Last year, Flying Lotus was basking in the glory of his album Los Angeles when he offered us a 12" of strange remixes. If you're quick, you can still pick up copies of Shhhh! It includes, among others, a dirty snare-smacking version of Mr Oizo's Stunts ($tunt$ is the most immediate track here), a drastic scratch mix of J Dilla's Lightwork and a seriously widescreen bass-wobbling Promiscuous Girl by queenzilla of the perfect pout Nelly Furtado.

Rustie's Bad Science EP (Rustie pictured above) is further evidence this young whipperbleeper should be a lot more famous than he is. Bad Science offers up bubbly 8-bit hip hop mentalism, including a reconfiguration of one of the best tracks of 2008, Zig Zag, while still being breathy and prowling like a robot stalker. The whole thing pretty much sounds like Zig Zag, so if you've got that, get this.

And finally, there's an EP from The Black Dog called We Are Sheffield which pours remixes over your speakers until you'll be mopping up massive basslines, glitch techno and warm mellowness from your newly shampooed carpet. It's worth it alone (sadly alone, if I'm honest) for the epic yet moody Autechre remix.

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".

Live tweeting at the Brits - the full text

As promised a couple of shakes ago, I have just live-tweeted the 2009 Brit Awards on my Twitter feed, which, incidentally, is worth signing up to because I post a few extra links and news that I can't fit onto this site.

Here are my Twitter comments ("tweets") in full, with minor edits so it makes more sense.

- The Brits are copying Glastonbury and using a 'pyramid stage'. Pfffrt. Expect some highly smug tweets as I watch from my tellybox.

- U2 are putting all their words on a big screen like a worship concert.

- Ha ha, look at James Corden, doing a great Homer 'smock'.

- Simon Pegg has kept that weight off.

- Duffy best female?! - the clue's in the name.

- Best International Female up next, it's... NO NO NO WRONG NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO WRONG GET HER OFF NO NO NO NO NO AAAARGH STOP HER TALKING NO NO NO OH PLEASE NO. Katy Perry's stopped. Phew.

- Took Corden 15 mins to do a shag joke to Kyles.

- Girls Aloud look like flamingos.

- Second Brit for Duff(y).

- It's Coldplay - I may have to hide.

- Chris Martin came on naked, doing a rap version of Run To The Hills. Didn't expect that.

- Pet Shop Boys, Brandon Flowers and Lady GaGa later. It could be messy.

- Strong International Group category. It's Kings Of Leon, obvs'ly. Epitome of casual cool, "y'all".

- Why's Paul Weller at home having tea with Adele? (He was in a pub, it turned out.)

- Has Duff(y) finished? Can I un-mute yet?

- Joe Calzagglewaggle looks sheepish because he's totally forgotten which award he's presenting- heh!

- KINGS OF LEON YOU ARE IN BRITAIN NOT JUST ENGLAND. Gah.

- Who are those people with torches?

- It's our hometown boys, Take That. Robbie fever! Rumour was Robbie Williams would turn up. He didn't, but Take That's Brit performance was truly beautiful. Mat Horne is having an orgasm at it.

- Take That looked like Kraftwerk.

- Nick Frost looks like a geography teacher browsing a gardening centre.

- Eddie's just killed Iron Maiden.

- Matt Lucas knows how to find the camera, doesn't he?!

- Hoff and Elbow. What a contrast. Oh as I type, Guy Garvey says to the Hoff, dryly: "You up for a drink later on, David?" Fried Brits gold, ha ha ha!

- Next bit of gossip: Will Katy Perry "controversially" snog Florence & The Machine? Will the Pet Shop Boys, the Killers and Lady GaGa be a car crash? Stay tuned.

- They muted Florence's introduction. Hmm. No snogging.

- Gok's predictable and receding.

- Best International Male Kanye West did a terrible "inter-racial" joke. (International. Inter-racial. It's a pun, see? Kanye's no Tim Vine.)

- Ting Tings and Estelle's quite good mash-up is more sass than my bowels can cope with.

- Did Grace Jones do Estelle's make-up?

- Allan Carr comes on to 'Womanizer'. Does science teacher joke - I've already done that here, luv.

- Best single Girls Aloud is a major relief.

- Tom Jones is a McLaren F1 car (orange and grey).

- Right, Radiohead, it's your time to win... go on... go on... Duff(y)?!? Oh come ON.

- Duff(y)'s crying. Good. She's ruined all music forever by beating Radiohead.

- Stephen Fry's tummy is rumbling - oh the trivia of Twitter.

- Took Corden 110 minutes to do a shag joke about Brandon Flowers.

- Here's Pet Shop Boys' disembodied heads. Starting with Suburbia, with added pink wig, then Love Etc, then Always On My Mind, then (to a massive cheer) Go West . It's a classic Brits melody!

- Here come the sexy men dancers.

- The sexy men dancers have been replaced by Lady GaGa on What Have I Done To Deserve This. One second of I'm With Stupid, then Brandon doing It's A Sin. A couple more breakneck track changes.

- Wow, those mostly naked dancers don't leave a lot to the imagination, do they?

- Pet Shop Boys didn't need Brandon Flowers and Lady GaGa.

- So that's it, done. Elbow had the best moment with the Hoff, Take That were the best performers and Duff(y) was a travesty.

A finally message to a friend on Twitter: "Twittering was the only way of coping with the awfulness." See my Twitter page here.

Telefon Tel Aviv's big hair sound is shrouded in darkness

Edit: This album is mentioned in my top ten electronica albums of 2009. 

I want to describe Telefon Tel Aviv's new album, heralded as something to watch in my 2009 preview, as a collection of "driving pop anthems."

Don't get me wrong: they're not the Pet Shop Boys. They're not singing glorious ditties about naughty sex for a start. But there's something super-electro-pop about Telefon's third album, titled Immolate Yourself.

Spiralling opener The Birds' punches the air with eighties snares, an energetic stadium keyboard line and breathy vocals. Helen Of Troy should have its own big hair video and rolled up jacket sleeves..  Stay Away From Being Maybe steals the bassline from Bill Withers' Lovely Day and fires it into space.  Yet, it's all muzzled and shrouded in dark contemplation.

The deeper you push into the album, the more their sound hits a more familiar skewy electronica beat, with layer upon layer of melodies that ultimately lead nowhere. And that's the flaw with Telefon Tel Aviv. The production sparkles, the new nods to bands like Kraftwerk are a massive improvement, but they're never going to hit you in the face like, for example, Apparat or Wisp.

It's insubstantial... but it's a really pleasing, cotton wool, uplifting, dark and wet insubstantial.

And so to the electronic elephant in the room: the death of one half of Telefon Tel Aviv.  Charlie Cooper (in yellow, above) went missing after an argument with his girlfriend, but beyond that, the details are sketchy. They should stay sketchy in respect to his family and friends.

If this is the end of Telefon Tel Aviv, then Immolate Yourself is the sound of a band reaching their suitably melancholic climax. In the words of one commenter on Telefon's Myspace page, the "group put New Orleans (and the US in general) on the IDM map. Heck of an accomplishment."

IDM, for the uninitiated, is the name for most of the music you read about on this blog. And its historic connection with New Orleans is, well, zilch. It has been a British-led genre, so you could say America doesn't "do" IDM.

Except, it did. And for a while at least, its name was Telefon Tel Aviv.

Merzbow makes crap an art form (that's meant to be a compliment, by the way)

Merzbow used to construct art from rubbish before he pioneered Japanese noise music.

If you don't know, Japanese Noise Music is Japanese, it just sounds like noise, and some people think it's music. I'm not sure where the name comes from.

Anyhoo, now Merzbow makes art from the unwanted noises we often cast away: static, radio fuzz, analogue glitches and machine hums. Still art from rubbish, then.

It's a sound that has served him well: he has a discography that's as long as your arm, but only if you're some long-armed freak who's spent too much time on the rack in your Uncle Cranford's secret torture chamber.

The latest ambient addition to that discography is an album called Higanbana, which literally translated means "you told me this was like Sigur Ros, I want my money back." If you're the sort of oddbod who hears music in the urgent clatter of a train or enjoys scratched muzak CDs stuttering over the speakers in Poundland, then you need this album. If, on the other hand, that sort of thing sounds like an audio atrocity, I'll never be able to persuade you that this extreme, experimental, harsh landscape is actually quite a nice place to visit.

Onto other things. Brighton's Square Records is the new home for iTAL tEK, and thank bigbeat for that because the eponymous title track from his new Deep Pools EP is my track of the week. If I did a track of the week. Which I don't.

A slow moving, spacious take on dub techno, with wheezing synths and heroin-flattened echoes of William Orbit's Water From A Vine Leaf, this record drips with the sort of hope lacking from his darker material previously offered on parent label Planet µ.

Like spacious? Klimek's Dedications is brooding and filmic, which make sense with titles like For Stephen Speilberg And Azza El Hassan. This mile-wide ambience is more suited to the plains of America than its home in Germany, and will appeal to fans of Deaf Center. (You can download a Klimek video by clicking here.)

And finally, a bit less minimal and slightly the worse for it is Vessel's Pictureland 01. It's lovely to have a chill-out album that doesn't have a picture of bloody Ibiza on the cover, but I don't think this release will change the fact that Vessel will eventually kick the bucket and his epitaph will be "'im off the Pet Shop Boys' Back To Mine complilation".

It's a fine way to remembered, but not as fine as making art out of a binful of crap.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: ENO GUITAR, REVIEWS MASSONIX