Reluctant as I am to throw my weight around here at Blackbridge Communications, one rule I enthusiastically enforce is that no Christmas music can be played in this place of business until the 1st of December.

A couple of days before the curfew I was working away when it came to my attention that my colleague Jocelyn Marie Keith was breaking this rule, and on work property to boot. Recriminations, I can assure you, were swift. But now we’re safely into December and so I thought I’d give a list of some of my own personal Christmas musical favourites with the caveat that they had to be on Youtube in order to be readily shared. Sadly, this meant the absence of James Brown’s ‘Santa Claus Please Stop First in The Ghetto’.

1) When I was growing up, the most regular noise heard at Christmas time was my brother and I bickering. If you grew up in the US of A however, it seems your Christmas fun was soundtracked by a moustachioed jazz musician. Vince Guaraldi – for it was he – composed the music for the animated Peanuts cartoons, including the Charlie Brown Christmas special which seems as ubiquitous as Top Of The Pops, er… used to be over here. I spent one Christmas in the USA; it involved a truly memorable Christmas Eve spent in a Polish church in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Anyway, the whole soundtrack is great. Seasoned Blackbridge watchers might have noticed this song playing on our very first Christmas HTML email. Fortunately for our nascent organisation, Charles M. Schulz’s lawyers didn’t: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RRm5qofw5vs

2) Nostalgia, as the joke goes, is great, but not what it was. Ever the sentimentalist, what could be more nostalgic than a nostalgic song about being nostalgic at this most nostalgic time of year? ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! - we’re talking about you. How quaint does it sound now, in these days of ringtones and downloads, that it was released as a “Double A Side” with ‘Everything She Wants’ so radio stations played that once the New Year arrived and people kept buying it. While I like the video in the snow with Andrew and George and Pepsi and Shirlie and all of that, here it is performed by a truly great artist, an epoch defining legend of our times, Crazy Frog… No, not really: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=naiYu9KtA4I

3) Up until about five minutes ago, I was not only convinced that ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘I Saw Three Ships’ had the same tune, but that both were composed by King Henry VIII. Thanks to the interwebs I now know that both my facts were incorrect. Great. Anyway, I Saw Three Ships is my favourite Christmas carol, even if the picture it paints is rather unlikely - Bethlehem isn’t near the sea. But then again, did the Little Donkey really have a heavy day? Did Cherubim and seraphim really throng the air? Either way, here are some very polite looking choirboys singing it. Interested to reflect that ten years later they’re probably all chain-smoking hoodies, lingering unsavourily outside the KFC in Cambridge. Especially the one guy with the glasses: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=waTafOG-QoQ

4) I could be here until next Christmas going on about Donny Hathaway. Instead, this is him singing ‘This Christmas’: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nJO_kdkrj1g

5) Why oh why do people like to bleedin’ go on about how ironic it is that ‘A Fairytale of New York’ continues to top polls of things like the best Christmas song evah, when it’s all about drunks and sin and misery? In my experience, that isn’t too far removed from the reality of Christmas, especially the first part. But my favourite Christmas song isn’t – as the lyrics say – about Christmas at all. Take an authentically smudged Spectoresq Wall of Sound production complete with Christmas bells and add a rather droll tale about driving through Scandinavia and you get Low’s ‘Just Like Christmas’. They chose the band’s ‘Little Drummer Boy’ for the Gap Christmas ad, but they should have gone for this one. Just love those drums: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=A-rvWoVX3t0

6) On the subject of Phil Spector, I have to include a song from ‘A Christmas Gift to You’ which I got as a Christmas gift to me when I was about 16. ‘Winter Wonderland’ and ‘Sleigh Bells’ and so on may be the best known, but I’ve had a soft spot for Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ take on ‘The Bells of St Mary’: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=liQCWYo4i6k&feature=related

7) When I was growing up, my father would always reply “peace and quiet!” when you asked him what he wanted for Christmas. Not this year though, it’s a book about Picasso. But what do you think a new guitar (which won’t play out of key), a basket three feet tall, some shoes with lots of sole and some mistletoe have in common? Well: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=enxc3qOd-9Y

And so there you go. Merry Christmas…

PS Not sure how I forgot about this one.

I went to a party on Friday night. The sort of party which rules out further weekend runnings of any kind, let alone cultural. Be that as it may, it is the closest I’ve ever come to knowing what it was like during prohibition: it was held in some strange sweatshop looking building in Bethnal Green; you had to wait for and then get it in a lift with slidey doors after saying a password (sadly, I didn’t hear what the password was), go up five floors and there you were. A little bar and you could smoke! I can take it or leave it nowadays but kisses to be sweet must be stolen.

By 3pm on Sunday I was feeling fine and having listened to an commemorative ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ (with the late Humphrey Lyttelton on fine form), was ready for the latest episode of the Radio Four adaptation of Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance To The Music of Time‘. Condensing a twelve novel series into six hours of radio isn’t going to be easy - you might as well try and make it a haiku. The Channel Four adaptation from a few years back was very enjoyable - lovely choice of music - and similarly, the adapters opted to choose a few episodes from the novels and dramatise them, this time retaining the narrator’s voice to introduce the scene and then reflect on its meaning. It works really well.

Anyway, talking of difficulties of adaptation, a literary genre I literally couldn’t be further from enjoying is anything about travel or, like, the wider world. Especially if it involves a bit of personal growth or suffering or something unpleasant like that. I’m quite happy to read a Raymond Chandler novel set in Los Angeles in the twenties as Marlowe generally just cracks wise, gets a split lip, chats with some blonde starlet and solves a chess puzzle while remaining thoroughly cynical throughout. But all this Kiterunning in Japan or being a Geisha in Afghanistan and so on. Nah. (Worryingly, I realised the other day that I’ve only breeched the M25 once in 2008, and that was when I had lunch in Whitstable, even if I did get home after midnight. Right now, I don’t even have a valid passport.)

So, when my friend started telling me about this book he was reading about this Australian guy who lived in India, I was a bit sceptical. He said it wasn’t the sort of book he’d normally read. He said it was pretty dreadfully written. “Overwritten” in fact. And 1,000 pages long. Hmmm… Then he started telling me how it has basically taken over his life for a week, virtually at the cost of eating, sleeping, interacting - this was backed up wearily by his wife - so I promised to give it a go. I bought the book in Foyles and indeed, he was right. It’s pretty awful, especially at the start. Florid, too wordy. But heavens to Betsey, you just can’t stop reading the thing.

I’ll try and explain - Australian guy escapes from prison, goes to India, becomes a doctor in a slum, then a gangster, then goes and fights in Afghanistan… It’s all kind of a true story, but kind of not. I wouldn’t advise anybody to read it now, wait until you’ve got a long journey to go on (not by my standards, which would be Harrow-on-the-Hill or Streatham, but like Paraguay or something) and buy it at the airport. The flight will fly by. In fact, you’ll probably end up asking the pilot to circle around for a bit before landing. Like ‘A Dance To The Music Of Time’, an adaptation isn’t going to be straight-forward, but apparently Johnny Depp has bought the rights and is going to star in a film version; will be interested to see how that turns out.

Ho hum. More next week.

Ahem. I have been absent from the blog of late; happily we’ve been very busy here at Blackbridge Inc. and while I’ve been up to all kinds of stuff from going to my first boxing match to seeing an awesome jazz gig to eating lobster in East London to watching Arsenal thoroughly not win the league, I have been not really writing about it.

But anyway, we are where we are. And I went to the National Portrait Gallery on Sunday. My co-visitor was mainly keen on taking photos of the ears of marble busts and examining any paintings of lace; that said,we both paid attention to a great exhibition they have of portraits from the first part of the 20th century - everybody from Kingsley Amis to General Montgomery, Walter Sickert to TS Elliot. I also saw a bust of Sir Noel Coward, taken from a face mask - he was a tiny man. Tiny.

Talking of ‘the Master’, I read over the weekend that the 19th of April is “record shop day”. Sad that it has come to that really; they’re dropping like flies. The best record shop I ever visited - or rather the shop with the best owner I ever met - was in Fargo, North Dakota, as in the Coen Brothers film. Previously, this guy had a shop in Minneapolis where I was living and a friend of mine knew him; he’d left the Twin Cities record community under a bit of a cloud in a dispute over the ownership of a Beatles Butcher cover. I was going up that way to see my then girlfriend’s parents and managed to persuade her that a two hour diversion followed by a similar amount of time looking through a room of dusty records was perfectly acceptable. What can I say? ‘4 Weddings and a Funeral’ had just come out in America and my stock has never been higher.

My friend had called ahead to say we were coming and in my girlfriend’s Honda Civic we headed north. A bit too slowly as it happened; we must have left late and were still miles away when my hard-fought diversion was cancelled despite my very best Hugh Grant-esq pleading. I called my friend when we got to Crookston (home of the world-famous Sugar Beet Museum) and he promised to ring Jim and say we’d come back on Sunday for definite. Sure enough, a couple of days later we left early and got to the place in a little strip mall in Fargo and sure enough Jim was there. A friendly fellow, grizzled hippy-type. “I’ve just got here myself, Keith said you were coming today so I went and got a twelve pack” - a twelve pack! - “while I waited for you”. I was glad he had; I went through his records while drinking his kindly offered bottles of Miller and found some brilliant stuff: Shamek Farrah’s ‘First Impressions’ on Strata East, a psych-rock Loading Zone album (that Youtube clip is WELL weird), a great Jackie and Roy album, lots of soul - hell, he even threw in three Dean Martin records for my girlfriend as “today is his birthday so they’re free”; it probably wasn’t his birthday.

What I also picked up and probably paid a couple of dollars for were some records as unlikely to end up in a North Dakota record shop in the midday sun as I was, two albums by the aforementioned Noël Coward, both of which - by coincidence - I had listened to while lounging on Saturday afternoon.

The Live in Las Vegas one is superior; it’s absolutely hilarious. And surprisingly risque for the time, I can’t recommend it enough. Best of all is his update of Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’ - I read a great biography of Porter while on holiday in Spain a few years ago and it listed quite a few of the wonderfully salacious unpublished lyrics from his more intimate live performances. I’ll perhaps not mention them all here.

Right. That’s it for now, more next week. Honest.

Camden! I was talking to someone the other week about how when you’re in your early teens, Camden Market seems like the most amazing place in the world - remember the sensory overload when you turned right out of the tube station and headed up to the market? It felt kind of dangerous. Edgy. And there were goths. In fact, I’m starting to feel that the Brick Lane area is becoming a bit like it; maybe it’s the influx of an element of society I recently overheard being described as “all those crustie Euros”.

Of course, there still remain a few good reasons to go to NW1: the Jazz Cafe (though I try and boycott it on principle owing to their greedy ‘booking fee’), Primrose Hill - the hill not the terribly precious conurbation bit - and there’s a pub I quite like on Delancy Street, a road name I’ve long been a sucker for; though having also been to Delancy Street in NYC, while I appreciate Lorenz Hart hasn’t felt any balmy breezes blow there or indeed anywhere else recently, it sure ain’t fancy any more. On that theme I did go and have a Chinese meal on Mott Street and while I wish I could say it was incomparable, I just remember the menu being somewhat tricky to navigate.

Anyway, I didn’t go to Camden this weekend, but I did go to the Camden Town Group exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s great. And isn’t all ambiguous if disconcerting scenes of the artists’ charladies in drab bedrooms, though there were plenty of them. Indeed, appropriately enough considering last week’s blog, there were also several of Walter Sickert’s famous if somewhat murky paintings of the clientele and the stars of London’s music halls.

Outside of his paintings Sickert is probably best known today because of the American crime writer Patricia Cornwall’s theory (and book) about him being Jack the Ripper. I read that book - for sale in the Tate shop oddly enough - very quickly while on holiday in Paris and it is worth a look though I was somewhat underwhelmed by her evidence. I think it is safe to say that she really, really wants it to be true.

I’m going to see Arsenal play Blackburn Rovers now. Not in Miami, Hong Kong or Tokyo either. Not yet.

Oh, and as *insert ‘first signs of spring’ cliché here* I found myself humming the old standard ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most’ this morning on the way to work; a lovely song whoever does it (though Mark Murphy does it the bestest) and particularly loved by me for the inspired couplet which rhymes “College girls are writing sonnets” with “but I’m up on the shelf with last year’s Easter bonnets”.
More next week.

Nostalgia, as the joke goes, is not what it was. I spent most of Sunday morning listening to old time Music Hall records - not the first time some of these would have been heard in London E2 I’ll warrant. And needing to go to the shops anyway, I strolled up to where I was led to believe Bethnal Green’s Foresters Music Hall had been, but there wasn’t really much to see there anymore. Of course not.

For some reason I struggle to understand that previous eras could be nostalgic for their pasts in the same way as we are, but that’s stupid - in the 1950s the Music Halls would be packed with people singing along to the very same songs I was listening to preserved on scratchy 78’s from the twenties and thirties, almost equally disconnected from their life and times. And what songs they are! To name but two I particularly enjoyed - Leslie Sarony’s ‘Ain’t It Grand To Be Bloomin’ Well Dead’ is a curious concoction; the narrator cheerfully imagines his funeral, obviously without any aitches : “Look at the flowers, bloomin’ great orchids, look at the corfin, bloomin’ great ‘andles - ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!” The way Sarony sings “grand” with a distinct emphasis on the “a” seems to crystallise an entire era in one syllable. And sounding very contemporary today is Lily Morris’ ‘Don’t Have Any More, Missis Moore’ - warning against binge drinking and unprotected sex no less, with the prescient advice “Double gins give the ladies double chins”. Great fun.

I suppose this stuff has a resonance for me as my parents used to sing some of these songs around the old joanna when I was a child, though I’m not actually in my seventies, despite the impression this might give. Amongst many, I remember ‘Loves Old Sweet Song’ - a genuine Victorian ballad as opposed to some of these later songs and in particular, the awesomely lachrymose ‘Ticket To Heaven’ - I can’t find the lyrics on the interwebs, sadly but can try and sum this masterpiece up: man is knocked over while working on the railway and thought dead. His child (perhaps bringing him lunch) arrives on the scene to hear that poor Bill (I think it was Bill) has gone to heaven and proceeds to the ticket office and the tremendous chorus arrives:

Give me a ticket to Heaven, please.
That’s where Dad’s gone, they say.
He’ll be so lonely without me
Travelling all that way.
My mother died when I was born, Sir.
And left Dad and me all alone.
So give me a ticket to Heaven, please,
Before the last train has gone.

Amazing. And before you can barely read on through your tears, I can point out that in the final verse it is revealed that “though injured, he has not been killed” and father and child are reunited. The Victorians and Edwardians just loved this kind of sentimental stuff, bless ‘em.

There are also a couple of recordings by comedian George Robey on the record I was listening to - the so called Prime Minister of Mirth. And waxing nostalgic, the Sir George Robey (named after him) was a horrible pub in Finsbury Park which held dub nights when I was a teenager (the Proustian aroma of these events is not similar to the smell of Madelines) and years later - when the place was briefly run by the folks who owned Hoxton Square’s the Blue Note club - I remember playing records there and literally emptying a room full of people with the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ‘Theme De Yo Yo’. Should have stuck to the man himself.

Anyway… I know that there is another popularity contest going on in the US at the moment (I write this on ‘Super Tuesday’) but the return of American Idol is obviously good news, even though it’ll struggle to beat some of last year’s contestants: beatboxing pixie-boy Blake, no necked and strangely sex-less belter Melinda Doolittle and of course, pony-hawked Sanjaya - should have put when he made that girl cry as one of my highlights of the year. It’s only once they go to Hollywood (”baby!”) that it gets interesting so I still have a few weeks to persuade my colleague Nik Dowlet to write an American Idol blog for the site. Here’s looking forward to that, dawg.

More next week.

There are things in life which are good (Clive James, espressos, Cesc Fabregas, the Vietnamese soup place around the corner) and there are things in life (when the bagpipes start on ‘Mull of Kintyre‘, getting wet walking to work, losing things all the time) which ain’t. To the latter list, you can certainly add being ill at Christmas.

Like a million other people in the UK, I had that ubiquitous sick thing. It’s not fun. Instead of having a fine lunch and lingering over red wine and four types of cheese from the Neal’s Yard Dairy, I spent Christmas Day in bed having bizarre lucid dreams - including one involving me being kidnapped and trying to find my laptop because they wanted a copy of the new Burial album. But anyway, I’m better now and things could be worse.

There’s plenty to be excited about in the new year and I’m looking forward to hearing, seeing, doing and reading some good stuff in 2008. But before 2007 fades, here’s a list of some of my favourite things from the year:

1) Walking into a simulated cloud at the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

2) John Cale’s terrifically austere version of LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All My Friends’; better than the original (though I love that piano line) - why bother getting some Hoxton/Berlin fool to remix it when you can hand your song over to a Welsh avant garde legend?

3) My friends Scott and Alice’s website Pinglewood - I’m terribly biased I’ll admit, but it is wonderful.

4) Brian winning Big Brother. Or more specifically, me getting £140 from the bookmakers as a consequence.

5) Loads of Victorian literature. Read very little new fiction this year, but spent some happy times reading or re-reading ‘the Moonstone’, ‘The Woman in White’, ‘the Good Soldier’, ‘New Grub Street’ and finally getting around to reading George DuMaurier’s ‘Trilby‘ - that’s some pretty mad stuff right there.

6) My piano attempts. I need more practice that’s for sure - but like books, a piano does furnish the room. Maybe that should be an ambition for 2008?

7) The Goshka Macuga Art Now show at Tate Britain; saw a lot at the Tate this year (Millais was good, Gilbert and George great to start with, Hogarth excellent) but this exhibition was the only show where you could sit on a wooden chair, put on headphones and hear a recording of my father talking.

8) While the Saturday magazine can increasingly do one as far as I’m concerned, I found a lot to love in the Guardian and the Observer this year - Simon Hoggart’s column, Hadley Freeman’s fashion advice, the cryptic crossword which I’m finally starting to make some proper progress with, Charlie Brookner in the Guide - and Victoria Coren’s Observer column about the death of her father Alan Coren was one of the most moving things I read all year.

9) My ‘Keep Calm and Carry On‘ poster; hopefully not too much of a cliché quite yet.

10) Plenty of album reissues came my way in 2007 but my favourite was the deluxe edition of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On‘; the deluxe ‘What’s Goin’ On’ had its moments, but this one had a whole CD of unreleased songs from the sessions - some are unbelievably good.

So there we are, happy new year to you all.