Don Julio

MGMT - Time To Pretend

Beck - The New Pollution

The Mock Turtles - Can you dig it?

Michelle Branch - Are you happy now

Dean Owens - Days without you

Stereo MCs - Elevate my mind

Not the first, won’t be the last

There once was a Don from Oxford Our uses of rhyme did applaud Our meter much less He’s yet to confess His own little ditty was flawed

The Black Crowes - Jealous again

This Christmas no carols or hymns Or presents that meet all my whims No turkey, no cake All that I’ll forsake I just want to slaughter the Tims

The Sisters of Mercy - Lucretia My Reflection

You can take the boy out of AbMad, but you can’t take a “Swans can’t fly” theory out of the boy…

U.N.K.L.E - Rabbit in your headlights

Interesting stuff!

For those that like a bit of 90s shoe gazing, this is a powerhouse. To be played loud! Trivia fact is that Toni Halliday is the vocalist on Leftfield’s Not Forgotten. Oh, and the video is Dandy compliant, featuring as it does a sheep. What more could you want.

This is the bit I’m not sure about. We did, but surely because we’d not discovered an alternative. Once we did, we left all that in the rear view mirror pretty quickly. I know that’s not true if all cultures in the world - there are certainly examples in the americas to support your point. But in the “west” it seems incontrovertible. Parasitic is a good term for it. But even parasites are a product of evolution and pretty successful ones at that. Till they kill their host… Meanwhile, COYR!!

Stevie Wonder - I’ll be loving you always

Although didn’t she do some kind of deal with them so it always gets played first whenever anyone asks for Xmas music? I know record companies have been at that kind of thing since before Elvis, but demeaned her in my eyes. A long way from being photographed on a bed with Bobbie Gillespie!

Chesney Hawkes - I am the one and only

I’m in my 50s, grew up in the Shire and have spent the bulk of my life living in cities, including some of the biggest on the planet. i think we’re pretty fucked. Our genetically hardwired desire to consume calories where we can find them and to take rest where we can leads us away from any kind of existence in symbiosis with the planet On trips like this week’s to Prague (I’m as guilty as anyone else) I can’t help but wonder at our never ending drive to build more and more infrastructure and concrete over the world, fly planes to places we don’t need to go, and so on. The end result has to be catastrophic. There we all are in Irish pubs in Prague drinking overpriced beer so we can watch some men kick a ball about. Burning a load of fossil fuel to get there and then back again. It’s insane. There was an auld wifie in my village who had been to Aberdeen once, but as she said, “I didnae really like it, so I nivver went back”. In a similar vein, my son’s an anarcho-primitivist. I can totally see why. But he still came to Prague. And if I was scraping a living in a developing country somewhere I’d want better for my kids and would likely flee to the city. The incentives are all stacked against us. We’ve become our own worst enemies. We’re doomed.

Not sure which side of the fence I’m on re our abilities in Europe. Given some of the “diddies ” in the Conference League (recognising they all finished above us) then we weren’t completely out of our depth and with a kind draw might have scraped into the next round. But that’s about it. We were certainly not competitive in any meaningful sense. I guess that places me in the Moog camp I had the absolute fear we might sneak our way into the Europa League. Can you imagine? We’d have been horsed, week in, week out.

Gabrielle - Dreams

One of the few highlights of last night for me was the way Lobban stuck manfully to his task against what I thought was their best player. He didn’t always come out on top but you couldn’t question his attitude.

But that’s not really true, is it, because they’ve played almost completely different teams to us. Which is not to say we’ve covered ourselves in glory, clearly we haven’t. But you can’t even take anything meaningful from the table.

The Whispers - And the beat goes on