I will die after you, I’ll see to that

Getting to work at 7.30am is in itself a physically bad thing – it’s still cold and dark, you’ve not had enough sleep, you shave badly, trip over things etc – but the fact that you know it’s a bad thing makes it worse. If I wasn’t aware of the fact that anyone who deliberately catches a 6.52 train to work is an idiot, I would be a lot happier. I’m not sure how I could ignore this obvious fact; blunt trauma seems the most likely to be effective. The fact that I did this to make sure I got to a particularly pointless meeting on time that I knew was going to be pointless… that doesn’t help either. If you’re going to abuse your body clock it should be fun or accidental.

(Incidentally, I don’t care if you regularly get to work at 6am after three hours’ sleep. You know what? That makes you an idiot too. Sort your life out.)

Anyway, whilst going to work I felt the need to listen to some music, and spent a long time trying to find a particular Fischerspooner mix of a Kylie song that I’d downloaded last night – Come Into My World, if you must know. I couldn’t do this because I’d forgotten the name and I have twenty million songs on my iPod. This made me swear at my iPod, which is like Dick Cheney swearing at money and rather shocked me.

I have a certain non-bottom-based affection for Kylie, which I manage to maintain by not listening to very much of her music. It comes from a period in my early youth. Picture a small boy travelling by aeroplane to South Africa and being dependent on the piped music channels. As if it wasn’t bad enough having to stick sharp plastic nozzles into sensitive ears, the only people on the playlist were folk musicians and singer-songwriters. I can’t remember names but they probably included Tanita Tikaram.

Except for one entry near the end, which was Kylie. You should know that even at a young age I was a poisononous little snob, and Kylie was about as credible as… thinking about it I don’t reckon there’s an equivalent in today’s market, because even the most formulaic manufactured crap has at least a veneer of credibility these days. More sophisticated marketing, mainly, I think, and better production. Nobody then could have thought Kylie was credible, whereas there are actually some now who think Avril Lavigne is keeping it real.

So I wasn’t looking forward to reaching the Kylie, but when it did come through it was heaven. They’re not playing guitars! There are real electronic instruments! It’s not whiny-treacle slow… it actually has a meaningful BPM figure! Oh sure, it was something that was crap then and crap now – Locomotion, probably – but it was like a blast of pure pop menthol. And that’s why I like Kylie.

Again I would like to point out that this was before she had an arse, when she was just a buck-toothed frizzy-haired cardigan-wearing Neighbour. I don’t think I’d hit puberty anyway.

Chart music in the 80s was crap, though. It’s much better today. I’m right about this.