iTunes Not My Tunes

A woman as worldly as Judy is able to exact revenge in many subtle and far-reaching ways. She’s not one for the immediate retribution. Any handsome TV star husband who happens to forget her birthday can sleep soundly in his bed for at least a month. There will be no sudden smearing of Vaseline on the bottom of his slippers. No extra-strong horseradish will fill his favourite jogging pouch. She won’t even use his favourite Mach 5 to shave south of Venezuela. Judy’s revenge is a long term operation, to be measured in the months and years. Think of it like old age but with more certainty that you’ll be deeply unhappy by the end of it and possibly missing the hearing in one ear.

This week’s justice was meted out in a uniquely cruel fashion. I’m sure that one exists but I haven’t yet worked out what particular outrage I had perpetrated to account for King Singers finding their way into my iTunes library. I discovered this yesterday, as I sat on a train, enjoying the random shuffle feature on my new iPod Touch. I had been listening to some late period Johnny Cash and watching the English countryside zip by when I was suddenly set rigid in my seat, my teeth creaking, flaking, and cracking as my jaw clamped down hard at the noise of close harmony singing suddenly leaking in through my audio holes. The song was something called ‘Here We Come A Wassailling’. I’m not too sure how you wassail or if it’s a good thing for a group of middle aged men to be doing while maintaining close harmony. But when injected straight into a man’s ears, the effect is like a syringe filled with air plunged into an artery.

The King Singers are Kryptonite to all my super powers. I have been known to choose to live in certain counties only after I’ve checked that there was not a single King Singer within its borders. Yet there they were, as conspicuous and cruel as Zimbabwean justice alongside my many hundreds of tracks by Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Neil Young, Serge Gainsbourg, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and John Cale. Those are the artists who provide the mood music to my life. The King Singers are something else. They are the horse’s head left beneath my pillow; the punishment beating that had been coming for some time but was more painful than I had ever imagined.

When I got home, I decided that action had to be taken. By syncing my iPod to an iTunes library contaminated by Judy’s vengeance, I had inadvertently put myself in danger of not just the King Singers, but evils far greater. After using iTunes for many years, amassing a quite vast mp3 collection, the current Madeley catalogue runs to some 20 gigabytes of music. Yet as I paged slowly through the listing, I began to spot records that could only have been put there by a malicious hand, a tone deaf ear. The album titles said it all:

Adam Faith Sing Some God Awful Christmas Hits.
James Galway Pumps Bilge Through a Length of Brass Tubing.
Roger Whitticker Whistles Brahms
Nana Mouskouri Snorts Through A Moustache
Daniel O'Donnell Mallets Chipmonks.

I’ll be honest and admit that I didn’t take much notice of the exact album titles so I’m using some poetic license based on what I heard. I think it gives you a flavour of what I was up against. As much as I love Terry Wogan, there’s no good reason to find his Floral Dance in my library, so I quickly hit it with the defoliant. The same is true of a few other tracks and I knew that I had to delete. There would come a time when the game of iPod shuffle roulette no longer fell my way. I wanted to be sure that no hammer fell on a chamber filled filled with the sound of the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band playing Pink Floyd.

After an afternoon’s work, I thought I was done. However, there was one remaining evil and it only made itself known to me this morning.

I was sitting on the train to Manchester, ahead of my usual two days of hard-baked misery. The carriage was quiet, as to be expected at half past six in the morning. I was trying to buttress my sagging spirits by reading Molesworth and listening to ‘The Raven’ from the album ‘Sunday At Devil Dirt’ by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan. It’s a great album, reminiscent of Tom Waits crossed with Cash, and I was deep into the zone when the track changed and my pod shuffled.

‘Holy shit!’ was my response.

I make no apology for this. I was listening to the William Tell Overture, which wouldn’t itself have warranted such a response except this version was recorded by The Swingle Singers, or as I like to call them, The Eight Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You can get a taste of the horror here.

Which brings me to my current situation, sitting looking at a wall poster describing the problems of deforestation in south east Asia and plotting points on a map of Blackpool (high-level production work which only those of you in TV will hope to understand). Even given such exciting tasks, it’s hard to find much enthusiasm for life when you’ve been assaulted by the Swingle Singers so early in the day. It’s not as though I’d had chance to arm myself. It’s not as though there were many planks of wood with rusty nails in the end. But I do hope that it shows that you should always take care with your mp3 collection. Do you know what’s in there? Do you know who put it there? And do you know what will happen if some of those tracks ever get free?
I’m just warning you now. Don’t become the next victim. The last thing we need this year is another Swingle Christmas.

Spice and Swingle

I’m often asked where I stand on the Spice Girls. I usually answer: with one foot on Scary’s mouth and the other stamping alternatively between Posh, Ginger, Sporty, and Baby.

The Spice Girls don’t fit into my blueprint for a perfect world. The problem with these invented bands is the same as with nuclear weapons: we can’t uninvent them. The best we can hope to do is encase them in concrete and dump them in the mid-Atlantic trench, hoping that in a few hundred years, our descendants might have the technology to deal with them.

‘Must you always reduce things to absolutes?’ asked Judy this morning. She was sitting by the phone, trying to get through on the Spice Girl hotline to order tickets for their world tour.

‘So I take it that you think it unreasonable to scuttle Ginger Spice in the middle of the ocean?’ I asked. ‘I hear that these wrecks can be very good for fish. Can you imagine all the schools of cod that would be attracted to breed between her thighs? We’d soon have the fish stocks back up to pre-Spanish levels.’

Judy just glared. She loves the Spice Girls. She plays them at every opportunity. I could recite lyrics to you but then I’d have to flagellate myself for hours as punishment. You might say that Judy’s taste in music is not unlike a ex-Beatle’s taste in women. This morning, I was browsing the web when some music started to play on a website I’d visited.

‘Oh,’ she gasped, ‘what’s that?’

I well knew what it was but feared mentioning it. ‘What’s what?’ I asked, trying to close the bloody browser window.

It was too late. Judy had discovered The Swingle Singers and, an hour later, their complete back catalogue was on its way to our home. Hence our prolonged discussion on music and why Judy had decided to defy me and book tickets to see the Spice Girls.

‘You’re just moody because I’m going to see them live,’ she replied, cradling the phone on her shoulder as she waited for an operator.

‘You’re almost right,’ I replied. Judy looked surprised but before she could offer to buy me a ticket, I thought I better explain. ‘It just depends on how we choose to pronounce “live”. I admit that I’m disappointed to see them live.’

She tutted. ‘Again with the overstatement for comic effect. You’ll be asking Jeremy to see if you can get a column in a newspaper.’

‘Not a bad idea,’ I replied. ‘You’d think that the Guardian or The Telegraph would want a man of my strong convictions, ready wit, and able to turn out a vast number of words in a short period of time. On a good day, I’d say I could write twice as much as Rod Liddle. And some of it would even make sense.’

‘Though not on the Spice Girls,’ smiled Judy. She was thinking, I suppose, that she’d won the argument. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women like Judy are part of the problem. The first thing you do when you want to cure a person of a habit is to make them admit they have a problem. Spice Girl fans stand in the way of our curing the poor things of the delusions they suffer. The Spice Girls have made millions through songs that have all the musical complexity of a bag of manure falling over in a heavy gale. Rather than being fashion icons, they dress like transvestites and make Danny La Rue appear conservative. Yet beneath the glitzy surface there are further glitzy surfaces. Dig a little deeper and you’ll come out on the other side wondering what happened to the middle.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ I said as Judy carried on humming like a Swingle Singer.

‘Hmmmm boop boop da dee dah da da,’ she said.

She was still saying when I came back with my coat.

‘I might be some time.’

‘Dee da doo de da…’

‘I’m thinking of faking my own death and rowing a canoe to Panama with Bill Oddie.’

‘Ya de dah doo dee da de da dum de da…’

There was no point arguing with that. Between the Swingles and the Spices, it’s a wonder that I have the enthusiasm to keep on drawing breath.