venta

It's Friday! It's about 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 some 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 are invited to Boogie At Your Desk (or Boogie Round The Christmas Tree if you're not in work) to:

Sultans of Ping F.C. - Xmas Bubblegum Machine

(If you don't want to download a file with an mp3 suffix, click here to get a zipped version.)

Well, you can't really Boogie to Fairytale Over New York which, as everyone knows, is about the only listenable Christmas hit there is. So instead we turn to the marvellous Sultans of Ping F.C. for our Christmas BAYD.

Xmas Bubblegum Machine is wildly out of tune, the bloke can't sing and the words don't make much sense. What more could you want from a Christmas tune ? It's a funky plastic rock and roll solution.

I'm not sure, though, that the Sultans of Ping are quite as trustworthy as I used to think.

My birthday present from ChrisC this year was an eclectic collection of CD and 7" singles. Each one featured a song I loved but had declared more or less unfindable (including the marvellous Beserk).

I'd long since decided that I'd never find Xmas Bubblegum Machine, but ChrisC had tracked down a copy of the single Michiko of which it was the B-side. Michiko is also fantastic, though my faith was shaken when I met up with a bunch of friends in Holborn a month or two ago.

Listen to the chorus:

Holborn to Holloway,
Holloway to Heathrow,
Heathrow to Tokyo,
Michiko, I love you.

Now... if you're in Holborn, what you really want to do is hop on the Piccadilly line and go straight to Heathrow. Going via Holloway would just be madness. How can you rely on a band who give such poor geographical advice ?

But I digress.

I observed on

lnr's journal the other day that the Sultans of Ping are playing in London and a few other places in the UK next year. Annoyingly, they're doing it when I can't go, but I expect anyone who isn't involved in the rapper world to be there.

Since I don't own any Sultans of Ping stuff other than this single, I'm not sure what to recommend. However, the general rule seems to be that fineness of music is inversely correlated to length of name, so:

Sultans of Ping F.C. - very good
Sultans of Ping - ok-to-good
Sultans - quite poor

Incidentally, today I am listening to the best Christmas album in the world, ever. Please note, this is not the same as The Best Christmas Album In The World... Ever!, which is mistitled.

Mine is called Who's Got The Crackers? and its compiler instantly became my Designated Hero of the Week. It ranges through the Ramones, Elastica and Mogwai to Helen Love, Sparks and Half Man Half Biscuit, and contains absolutely no renditions of Frosty The Snowman. I love it.