12 inches of pure pleasure

I'm (un)lucky enough to work near HMV on Oxford Street in London, so at least one lunch hour a week will be spent wandering aimlessly around the various floors of Europe's biggest branch. However, in recent months my attendance has thinned out due to my new found love of vinyl.

Purists amongst you will scoff at the fact that I have only recently got into this particular musical medium but to be fair, I grew up in the era of tapes and CDs, with vinyl well on the way out by the time I was old enough to buy stuff myself. Mind you, I probably should never have been allowed to buy things myself as my first purchase was East 17's Walthamstow album.

So for a recent significant birthday, Hot Chick got a record player. Since then, I have hemorrhaged a chunk of loose change in charity shops because ladies and gentlemen, vinyl is fucking amazing. On no other format can you walk into a shop and procure the Best of Louis Armstrong, Queen's News of the World and Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms album for less than £2. I get a wave of excitement every time I walk past a stinking old box of 12-inches, which despite sounding heroically homosexual taken out of context, is a thoroughly enjoyable feeling. Once you've waded through the plethora of Johnny Mathis, Cilla Black and various album releases from close-harmony singing Welsh males the variety on offer is devastatingly immense. Dire Straits' Alchemy live album is one of the best things I've listened to this year, Thin Lizzy's Johnny the Fox is pure brilliance (and a personal fave of Hot Chick) and Difficult to Cure from Rainbow includes Spotlight Kid, which is a moment of heavy-meets-prog wonder. And picking up Led Zeppelin and Blue Öyster Cult's debut albums for next to nothing? Don't mind if I do.

Of course the other good thing about buying vinyl is that music you wouldn't purchase becomes infinitely more appealing - virtually everything is worth a 50p investment, with the exception of anything by Ocean Colour Scene, 3OH!3 or Simply Red. I picked up Jim Reeves Good 'N' Country, Holst's The Planet Suit and something called It's Party Time, which features party classics such as Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner and has an amazing photo of old women dancing on the front.

That's the other point; the artwork is fucking brilliant. ELO's Out of the Blue gatefold can only be the result of extensive narcotic use and as for 1984 by the mighty Van Halen? Seminal.

Plus, a big chunk of the money you give to charity shops goes, unsurprisingly, to charity, which makes you feel a whole lot better about buying yet more music to clutter up your house. Luckily, the wife is as much of a music junky as I, otherwise I'd end up on the street with nothing but The Best of Blondie as a pillow.

Bye for now gangsters
M
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Here we go again...

Apologies for my unexplained hiatus over the last couple of Fridays; me and Hot Chick have been moving house so a lack of Internet connection has resulted in my unblogitute. I thought some of you may get all emo and start cutting if you had to wait until Friday so here's a nice Monday treat for you.

No we've got that business taken care of, onto the really important stuff: why I'm not going to Sonisphere 2010.

The lineup for this event is so good that I've filled my pants a good six or seven times. But we've been over that before. Download 2010 announces it's headliners today and AC/DC are looking like the bleedin' obvious big hitter but aside from that, look at the other key facts; Download 2010 marks the 30th anniversary of heavy metal on Donnington's hallowed grounds. The capacity has gone from 80,000 to a bafflingly huge 110,000. Tell me there isn't going to be some insanely epic names needed to shift those tickets? Think of all the bands that have played over the years - imagine a "best of Donnington" lineup. Yeah, you like that, don't you? You dirty sl....sorry, getting all excited.

Here's the rub; Download could easily shift the numbers if they got some of the poppier bands of late. The danger here is that if cuntyball fuckwarblers Metro Station or spasticated wankmonkeys Plain White Ts are there you may see news reports of an overweight skinhead committing mass murder with an over-priced Yorkshire pudding. But you take the rough with the smooth. The other lot with money to burn are the 30-40 year olds, so rumours of Van Halen and the imminent demise of The Scorpions suggests a possible repeat of Download 2009's epic 80s power rock lineup win. Plus, with Corey Taylor refusing to miss a year, Stone Sour are a pretty hot favourite for a bit of new album promotion which is a big hit with this mother fucker, then there's Soundgarden's reformation, and so on and so forth...

Isn't variety the spice of life? Download has and always will mix the brutal with the melodic, the hardcore with the mainstream, the good with the shit, and I for one am a big fan of absorbing many types of over music over the weekend.

But perhaps the most important reason of all is that Hot Chick (and I shall be slaughtered for broadcasting this) is also celebrating her 30th anniversary of being on this big ol' hunk of space rock this year. As such, what kind of gentlementaller would I be if I didn't let her pick the festival this year? After all, she gets dragged along to a lot of shows she wouldn't choose over the rest of the year so it's only fair, innit?

Don't get it twisted homies, I'd love to be at both Sonisphere and Download but that's gonna be crazy expensive and damn impossible G.

So to conclude this Monday broadcast, it looks like MADman will be at Download 2010. Provided I can nick enough bags off old women and steal the lunch money off of enough school kids to pay for the tickets.

Now it's Monday morning so stop reading this and do some fucking work. It's your fault the world's in a recession.

M
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