It's coming home, it's coming home, it's coming, Fatboy's coming home

I am a lying philandering whore.

Okay, I take back the 'philandering' bit. And 'whore' may be overstating my case.

But you may tattoo my bonce with the word 'liar', for that is what I am. My Blogger profile details pin me down as a "Manchester writer, DJ and man about town". This is disingenuous.

The 'town' I was referring to was Macclesfield. It has been my place of work for the past three years. It's a strange place, inward-looking and not really sure what it is. But it's picturesque in some places, and the charity shops offer treasures for which Gollum would kill.

However, Macclesfield is not Manchester (photo of Oklahoma Cafe door by Dullhunk). I am a proud Mancunian. I have been risking life, limb and lobes on long public transport journeys into the Cheshire town, often feeling I should be working back home, in the holy city that gave the world Shameless, the Hacienda and, er, Jay Kay from Jamiroquai.

So... I'm proud to announce the birth of my new-- oops, sorry-- I'm proud to announce I will be working back in Manchester from tomorrow. I have a new job with Blackwell's university bookshop. It should afford me more time for blogging, writing, shopping lists, scratching, stabbing and anything else that can be done with a pen.

It's nice to be back home. I see you've kept the place tidy.

A low-denominator, low-rent scally by any other name would smell like sweets

When I was young and unwrinkly, I went flyposting to promote a night called Automa.

In my misty dreamcloud memory, I wore a hooded top and tried to look street despite spilling wallpaper paste all over my trousers.

It was a partial success. Manchester was plastered with Automa posters right up to the point where I got chased out the city by some bad boy gangster types.

You try running when your legs are stuck together.

It was no surprise, then, to find these Warehouse Project posters discarded near my house. They advertise the weekend just gone, headlined by the leg-end in his own lunchbox Dave Clarke.

The perpretrators of this oft-tolerated crime of flyposting have probably been strangled by some razor sharp bling or, even worse, been made to listen to a 50 Cent album all the way through.

Or maybe, just maybe, they couldn't be arsed and went to the pub instead.

There's an art to a good poster. These ones promoting the Warehouse Project are instantly recognisable thanks to a basic template they use for all of them.

Thank goodness too for Bill Drummond's understanding of a poster that does what it says on the tin, or Underworld's eye for a brilliant image.

Just save us please from the anti-Christ of quality, the Bop.

This infernal itch of a night continues to drown Manchester in low-denominator low-rent advertising that promises, "whilst the rest of club land goes high class, the Bop remains true to its roots... drinks prices are still dangerously low."

They add, "a relaxed dress code means you do get the odd scally". There is no other kind of scally, surely?

This blog post has been brought to you by my inflated middle-class Grauniad-reading ego. I'm off to clean my trousers.

You can take the cinema out of Michael Owen but you can't take Michael Owen out of the cinema, not without force

It's been a while. The last time I posted pub quiz questions on the Fat Roland blog, men were boys, sheep were lambs, and Virgin Pendolinos were loo rolls with jammy dodgers for wheels.

Last night, my bearded cohort Nine Tenths Full Of Penguins and I hosted a quiz in Ye Olde Cock in Manchester, where 'Olde' is pronounced to rhyme with 'mouldy'.

So here are the questions. It's about sport, of which I know little. A brace of questions have been felched from other internetwebsites, but most of it is my own work, miss.

If you reply with answers, I will mark you - no googling please. The real factual answers will materialize in a few days in the comments below this post.

Question one. What’s the perfect score in ten pin bowling? (1 point)

Question two. Let’s play Soccergram! Rearrange the letters of a football personality to find the longest word you can, e.g. from 'Michael Owen', the longest word you can get is 'cinema'. The football personality is: Sven Goran Eriksson. (1 point, plus a bonus point if you can find a nine-letter word)

Question three. The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896. How many women competitors were there? (1 point)

Question four. Part one: who was the last Formula One driver to die at a grand prix (whilst driving in practice, qualifying or a race)? Part two: which past or present Formula One driver has a name that contains nine consecutive letters spelling out a London borough? (2 points)

Question five. The exact distance of a marathon please, in miles and yards. (1 point)

Question six. Let’s play Soccergram. Rearrange the letters of a football personality to find the longest word, e.g. from 'Michael Owen', the longest word you can get is 'cinema'. The football personality is: Ruud van Nistelrooy. (1 point, plus a bonus point if you can find a nine-letter word.)

Question seven. Andy Murray is the UK number one singles player. In what is Jamie Murray the UK number one? (1 point)

Question eight, and yes this one was taken from another website. Part one: black is always with blue, red is always partnered by yellow. What is the sport? Part two: throwing stones at houses. What is the sport? (2 points)

Question nine: Rugby Union. Wales vs Fiji on Saturday. What was the score? (1 point)

Question ten: Match these people with their sports. The people: Barry Bonds, Beth Tweddle, Bobby Dazzler, Yesica Bopp. The sports: Baseball, Boxing, Darts, Gymnastics. (1 point for each correct match)

Like, clockwork monkey bands are so September it's untrue (a vid from mum)

Let's end September on a distinctly odd note. Or rather, let's end September on a distinctly odder note.

Instead of my previous scheme to review the fourth múm album Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, I've decided to thrust upon you, my unsuspecting reader, the promotional music video to a single from that record, the disquieting They Made Frogs Smoke Til They Exploded.

With muted brass and whirring beats making them sound like some kind of clockwork monkey band, it's quite a departure from their classic Finally We Are No-One.

And this oddly mesmerising vid is going to do nothing for PETA members or anyone of a fickle disposition. You can tell from the title. Frogs. Smoke. Explode.

Store Street blues: waddling with the scrotes, the clubbers and the tokers

I'm trotting under a brick-clad bridge down what feels like a road to oblivion when a wiry scroat of a man asks me for money.
Or rather, he asks me for the time. Then money.
I put on my skint face, apologise and walk on. He summons all his fury and describes what he's going to to with my skull if I don't cough up cash.
With a dark but open street ahead, I hurry on to safety with his threats ringing off the brickwork behind me.
Store Street has never been my favourite road in Manchester. I have to make it safe somehow.
If only I'd had The Tattooed Bouncer with me. He was a vicious looking gentleman with ink all over his head, and he impressed me once at a Plaid gig by dragging a casual drug toker out of the Music Box by his throat.
When I say 'impressed', I mean 'terrified'.
But sadly he has died, a claim the deceased bouncer has since owned up to according to local news reports. Fat use for next time I waddle down Store Street.
Here's another idea for making Store Street safe. When there's thrills and pills in abundance, you don't get threats of violence, so maybe someone would be kind enough to convert the street into a clubber's paradise.
Maybe, just maybe, we could bribe some of the great names to spin some plastic mp3s: Armand Van Helden, Layo & Bushwacka!, Dave Clarke, High Contrast, Jeff Mills, Aphex Twin.
I'm free this weekend, so it could run from then until, say, New Year's Eve. It's a crazy idea, and it will never happen. Hold on, the phone's ringing...
...yes? Store Street, yes. Behind Piccadilly train station.... they're doing what? The Warehouse what?
It seems my Store Street blues are over for a while. Maybe now I could walk arm in arm / headlock with the Deceased Bouncer, with scroats fleeing in the other direction down my brick-clad road to oblivion.
Thank you, Warehouse Project: you are about to make the city a more magical place.

mpSunday: Mouse On Mars' Do It

So many chaffinches to tar, so little time.

In between abusing small creatures, I like to make a few tweaks to my Fatblog. So I've put all the photos from the right hand column into a metal bin and burned them (along with a baby budgie) because they were adding nothing of value just sitting there for months comtemplating their digital naval.

Instead, I have nailed a blogroll onto the side of this page (using bunnies as hammers) and given it an utterly pleasing name: Fat Roll.

I don't want to list every one of the 60 sites I store in my electronic reader sprocket machine, so I will list ten at a time and rotate. And after I have turned myself 360 degrees, I will rotate the blogroll. Oh, the humour.

So a million apologetic camels if your blog isn't there yet, especially if you link to me; you will get on there, honest.

Time for a free ditty. mpSunday is my semi-regular series of free mp3s. I am slowly giving away my entire record collection, although you have to be snappy because as soon as I post a new mpSunday, the mp3 from the previous mpSunday is deleted.

Twiggy-fantasist Patroclus said I have "awful lot to teach the world about Autechre and Mouse on Mars (pictured)" on the Tim Footman blog post that inspired me to install said blogroll.

So here is a five-year-old Mouse On Mars track that had the crowds a-bobbing and a-picnicking (on chaffinches) at a festival gig about a month ago.

mpSunday right-click and save target as: PLOP! This mp3 is no longer available. Click here to see the latest mpSunday.

Brian Eno's garter, a lack of gurning mentalism, and Kraftwerk transvestites

A decade of pushing buttons for Bjork, including shaping sound on the stunning Dancer In The Dark, has not done Valgeir Sigurdsson (pictured) any harm.

Quite the opposite. He has stepped from behind the knobs to produce Ekvílibríum, his debut album on his own Bedroom Community label.

His LP starts with feet on safe glitchy chill-out land, but he eventually hoists himself up onto Brian Eno's garter and catapults high into heavenly string-laden non-anthems, especially on the spacious Equilibrium Is Restored.

Sigurdsson can't tell eerie from airy, so some of this album lacks the intended atmosphere, but it works if you like Bjork and Sigur Ros' more ethereal moods.

And while we're on an Icelandic tip, I'll get round to reviewing múm's Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy when I can be bothered to get out of my curry-stained threadbare armchair. I bet they can't beat Finally We Are No-One.

High on a cloud somewhere, just above Eno's flying garter, is a surprisingly chilled out Mu-Ziq and his new record Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique.

He has locked away his gabba-gabba-hardcore-wherez-me-light-stick breakcore of previous offerings in favour of a sound that made me as sick as my cat (see past post) within three tracks.

The album's suffocated in detuned Boards-style melodies, which creates a see-saw effect right where your dinner's settling. Each track induces a sense of nostalgia, but only it sounded just like the last one.

Bring back the gurning mentalism, please Mr Ziq, because you're making us, er, siq.

It seems a little late to be reviewing Simian Mobile Disco's Attack Decay Sustain Release, but I need to up the tempo somehow. And it damn well should get the blood pumping thanks to more than a slight nod towards the jacking acid of Daft Punk and the energetic nerdiness of !!!.

I shudder at the thought of being A. N. Anonymous 4-pill clubber sweating over Mixmag on the bus going to my office job in the morning, so I avoid this kind of obvious house music party fodder.

However, it is simply addictive.

Plugged into the mains and with more quirky savvy than Kraftwerk transvestites, Simian's album of hurricane-force dance funkers deserves to have sex with every festive celebration's mp3 player this Christmas.

Narrating icon presumes a little too much, i.e. an ability to actually narrate

I can't tell a Picasso from a Punto, but watching Formula One motor racing makes me as excited as playing Wipeout 2097 with Future Sound Of London's We Have Explosive pummelling my ears. (Yeah, I still have a PS1.)

This Sunday I become an F1 pundit on a sports show called Talking Balls. I'll be foaming at the mouth about the race at Spa Francorchamps in Belgium, my favourite F1 track, and fuming at the ears about McLaren and Alonso spying their way to success.

If F1 isn't your thing, and why should it be, then don't fear. I won't start blathering about it on this site when I've got another site to do that.

But if you do tune in, then do it on Wythenshawe FM from 7pm this Sunday September 16th. Lock on to 97.2FM if you're within a gnat's thong of Wythenshawe, or listen online on their website.

Oh and I'll be using my real proper full name, which is an anagram of 'I on racing rant' and also 'narrating icon'.