The Abyss of Sinfully Good Fun

Clubs are not works of art. As a rule, a good club is based on a simple idea. Many start from the truth so memorably stated by Andrew WK: "We want fun and we wanna get wasted". Earlier this week, the second sign that a new club (which shall remain nameless) would be unutterably dreadful came when the PR insisted on sending me a full press release because "I imagine you get loads of clubs coming through, and we don't want this to go over your head, so this is to help you understand what it's about"*.
At the other end of the scale you have Club Popular. Everything they play was a UK Number 1 single. Simple, yet dazzlingly effective.
The thing that hits hardest is the sheer number of Number Ones. That I can recall, there was no Stock/Aitken/Waterman or Spice Girls last night, and I keep thinking of other Number Ones which didn't get an airing. Yet the hits just kept coming. The guest DJs had so many tracks they wanted to get out there that they kept fading them out after a couple of minutes - MoreFasterNow**.
'Doctorin' the TARDIS' was played, and rightly so, because that inspired The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way. In that book, the KLF claim that all Number 1s share more features with each other than they do with their supposed genre. I'm not sure if last night proved that theory or not, because the sheer mass of Pop slightly fused my critical circuits. I feel a bit like Green Lantern at the close of DC One Million: I've looked into the face of God and found it strangely familiar.
Though I am slightly annoyed that I have now cut a dash to 'Dirrty' on two consecutive nights and *still* not pulled Christina Aguilera. What else do I have to do?

The Chapel is a bit expensive, but a fine venue; it lives up to its name by having the DJ booth in a pulpit. But it is located in a tributary of Islington I've never encountered before, a numinously frightful land Arthur Machen would recognise and from which the building above Angel Tube is suddenly revealed as a Masonic nightmare. Fortunately, the only time this sinister genius loci infiltrates Club Popular is when the DJ who, to my eyes at least, looks remarkably reminiscent of David Blunkett takes to the decks just as 'Ghost Town' plays out...

( Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum )

"she was "living in a plastic box" and that her life would be "dominated by pain and suffering": is this the world's youngest Manics fan?

Incidentally, I'm taking Monday off again.

*The first sign that it would be dreadful is that they have the James Taylor Quartet and two of Atomic Kitten playing the opening night.
**Though this does make it even more of a puzzle as to why the Outhere Brothers got played twice...

(no subject)

A reminder to y'all that Sunday evening is The Kennel Club. Recommended to anyone who enjoys Rock (ie, not jamesward. If nothing else, the guaranteed absence of jamesward may encourage you to attend).

I am a great believer in archiving life. But when you're printing off old mails to free up inbox space, then going back and reading the contemporaneous journal entries of those involved, it's all too easy to be sucked back into the past.