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It's Friday! It's three o'clock! It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!

Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap on Fridays this year.

I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.

Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.

If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.

This link will expire at some point in the future.

Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:

New Model Army - Ambition

If, twelve years ago, you'd asked me my favourite band, I'd have answered without hesitation: New Model Army. From the day I first heard Thunder and Consolation (on vinyl, no less) they became the most important band in the world.

These days, if asked my favourite band, I tend to um and er. I'm not sure I've got one. I'm not good at choosing favourite anythings - maybe I could provide a top ten, but not in any order. Officially, no one has ever displaced NMA. In practice, I don't dig the NMA albums out so often these days - although on 5th September I'll still be down the record shop with my money clutched in my grubby little paw.

My taste in music has broadened in all directions. Perhaps more relevantly, my music collection has grown. When I was seventeen, the five NMA albums I had practically on repeat represented about 50% of my CD collection; these days my...
<counts>
... 15 or so NMA disks don't even make up 5%.

In recent years, I've listened a lot to eight, the latest NMA studio album (released 2000), and the recently-released live and rarities albums. Earlier in the week, I put on No Rest For The Wicked (1985). One chord into the opening track, Frightened, and suddenly I was back in my beloved green and grey bedroom in Darlington, standing on the dark side of the room by the stereo, my A-level coursework lying in the light of the desklamp.

And yes, even if they're no longer the automatic answer to "your favourite band?", there's never been, and probably never will be, another band like NMA for me. The words, particularly of the songs from earlier albums, are buried so deep in me that I don't think I'll ever forget them. When, at

smiorgan and

triskellian's wedding last year, I was happily dancing to indie classics,

secondhand_rick casually mentioned that you can tell I'm an NMA fan from the way I dance. I'm not sure he meant it as a compliment, but I took it as such.

By contrast to REM last week, I think I know NMA too well to be able to recommend one album. I think the acknowledged "best" album is Thunder and Consolation. If you like The Jam, if you like your music a little on the spare side with great basslines and searing lyrics, go for No Rest For The Wicked. If all this talk of vitriol and rock scares you, then eight is probably more approachable.

In some ways, I don't think early NMA - whose lyrics were a swirling cloud of rage, politics, frustration and harsh justice - really suit the context of BAYD. Boogie is a fluffy word, suggestive of bouncy pop beats and shallow lyrics. People commented when I posted Down In The Tube Station At Midnight that it wasn't really BAYD material.

But music is there for all seasons and all emotions, and sometimes a dancefloor is as much about anger as it is about light-hearted pop. Turn Ambition up loud and Slam At Your Desk.