The definitive top ten Aphex Twin facts

To celebrate April 14th, named by many as Aphex Twin day because of his classic 2001 track Avril 14th, here is the definitive top ten facts about everyone's favourite windowlicker.

1. Aphex Twin's real name is Richard D James. The D stands for 'down south' which is where he lives.

2. The '26 Mixes For Cash' scandal nearly ruined his career. Since then, it has been illegal for members of the House of Lords to procure drill 'n' bass remixes without declaring them.

3. Aphex Twin once owned a tank. His favourite trick was to put a goldfish on the passenger seat and ask it "how do you drive this thing".

4. His comeback album Syro used, at some point in the recording process, every instrument ever created. Apart from the five-string banjo. And the tuba.

5. The old woman who gets screamed at in the Come To Daddy video was played by Aphex Twin after a particularly long day in the studio.

6. Aphex Twin made tracks while lucid dreaming. He installed a full studio inside his head, enabling him to work while asleep. This is why he has a USB port in the side of his head.

7. He once uploaded so many tracks to Soundcloud, Ed Sheeran has been number one ever since.

8. His first album was Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which incidentally are also the measurements of his bust and hips.

9. His pseudonyms have included: Nasty Window, Twinny McTwinface, Billy Skinhole, Polygon Idiot, Tssk Tssk, Hello Brian, Susan Boyle, Caustic Postman and AFC BOURNEMOUTH.

10. Aphex Twin has wonderfully soft hair. He puts this down to never playing the tuba. No-one likes tuba.



Futher Fats: 26 Mixes For Cats: gratuitous twits and puns (2011)

Further Fats: Top ten ways to write a top ten music list (2012)

Further Fats: All things Aphex Twin

Fat Roland's number one album chart death rant

This year, the pop chart will deposit its territorial wastage on another milestone: the thousandth UK number one album.

But before we get all rose-tinted about the South Pacific spending sixteen months at number one, Simpsons-ified versions of Beatles album covers and Orbital showing everyone how a dance music album should be done, let me first spray a phialful of caution in your face.

The album is officially dead.

Kaput. Extinct. Its tongue is lolling. It has crosses for eyes. The album is exactly six feet lower than the soles of your shoes. It is dead.

Simon Cowell's bungalow

This is nothing to do with the much-fondled arguments about unbundled mp3s and the like. Everyone knows great albums are still being made and it will be a cold day in Simon Cowell's bungalow before the general public gives up on the idea of the pop album.

No, this is because the last few number one albums have been beyond horrible.

They have made me want to squeeze out my eyeballs with my buttocks before repeatedly eating and then regurgitating them until I puke out every last one of my internal organs only to use the resulting colon-mush to smother my ears in damp, decaying human insides because, and I repeat, the last few number one albums have been beyond horrible.

Let's look at the evidence. In October, we had yet another number one album from a woman who has the most appropriate surname since James Blunt: Alexandra Burke. This was quickly followed by an emaciated megamouth in red PVC, Cheryl Cole. She may have called Lily Allen a "chick with a dick", but that doesn't make her 3 Words album any less noisome.

If only she had some tunes, it would smell better.

Poor death metaphors

Then in November came the idiocy that was JLS by JLS, in which a doctor tells them they are about to die because of an embarrassing abundance of poor death metaphors in Beat Again ("I need love CPR," they waffle, although performing chest-pumps on a healthy adult can lead to broken ribs and internal damage… let's hope, anyway).

When JLS lost the top spot after one week, there was even more X Factor nonsense with consecutive number one albums from the franchise's out-and-out stars, Leona "Does Anyone Remember Me" Lewis and Susan "Same Nickname As Leona" Boyle. Between them, there's more screech than a box set of Saved By The Bell.

And so, as 2009 reached its disgusting climax to make way for the post-coital cigarette of 2010, who saved us from such X Factor nonsense? Who, dear reader, who?

Sinatra-defiling cheese-monger

Only award-hoovering, Timberlake-mimicking, Sinatra-defiling, Santa-impersonating, cheese-mongering muzak-churning ice hockey bore Michael Bublé. There is nothing crazy about his Crazy Love album. He provokes fan comments such as "thats ridiculace, michael bublé is amaing" (sic). In this Darwinian world, he should not exist: he is rubella / Betamax / Nightmares On Wax's cutting edge.

And yes, Bublé appeared on X Factor.

The next number one album was Sunny Side Up by Paolo Nutini, a six-month-old album of beigeness that makes Travis' The Man Who look like death metal. And if you think his music exists solely to soundtrack montages in Scrubs and One Tree Hill, you're right, it does.

The current number one is by Florence And The Machine and, sweet sweet reader, I don't need to tell you that she's seventeen levels of wrong. The Source are probably rolling in their grave at her treatment of You Got The Love. It least, though, it's a proper album by someone slightly more contemporary than Cliff Richard.

We'll probably get our thousandth UK number one album in May, and it will warrant some column inches from geeky Guardian journalists.

I can guarantee you, though, it won't be as influential as the 100th number one (John Lennon's Imagine) nor as stylish as the first (Sinatra's Songs For Swingin' Lovers). It will simply be a little poot of air in a vast chasm of nothingness because, on the basis of quality number ones, the album is well and truly deceased.

Bored at Rustie, tapey-fingered whingers and stuffed lycra

Hello, December, you snowbag of Christmas fun, you.

Here are some things you may have missed recently, mainly because my Twitter account has shrivelled and died and so your premier source of electronica information has stopped. In fact, you've probably been so bereft without me tweeting, you're no doubt huddled in a corner shivering and dribbling.

- Rustie has dropped a bomb in the shape of a Crookers' No Security remix. Legendardy squawkbox Kelis has sassed herself all over this track, and her vocals work well with his computer-game take on the track. Having said that, it's the first thing Rustie has done that has bored me a little. (Crookers pictured above.)

- The Grauniad has been musing on the death of hip hop. Writer Simon Reynolds places it around the time of Nas' Hip Hop Is Dead, or maybe when Timbaland declared his love for tapey-finger stadium whingers Coldplay. He wins points for slagging off auto-tune, but loses points for using the dismal contraction 'slanguage' (surely, 'slang' would do?).He says:

"I still hear quite a lot of bump and skitter in street rap but there's a pedestrian familiarity to the beats: they do the job solidly enough but they're the rhythmic equivalent of comfort food, reflexively tugging at your hips and shoulders but never approaching the stark strangeness of early Noughties productions like Ludacris's What's Your Fantasy or J-Kwon's Tipsy."

I think he's got a point, although there's a danger in judging the healthiness of a scene based on what's in the charts. If you took that as a bellwether, most techno genres have supposedly never existed.

Still, I think there's a wider malaise: we haven't had a true musical revolution since rave. The Beatles made music fab, punk stuck a safety pin in that bubble, while rave danced all over the eighties' grave. What since? Drippy guitar geeks? Videos stuffed with girls in tight lycra? Susan Boyllocks?

- Finally, Eclectic Hermit has come back into the light, smothering us with some Ninja Tune scrumptiousness. Welcome back.