All I want for Christmas is a Monkee

Many mistakes are made at Christmas – Cliff Richard is responsible for more than his share – and one of them is to repeatedly feel surprised that the kind of manic, rising December excitement you felt as a child sags and dims in a way that is commensurate with the rest of the ageing process.

But lately I've been experiencing one strain of childhood fervour that does endure – that deep passion for a beloved item of clothing; something you would simply refuse to take off until it was wrestled free of your body, crumpled and gravy-stained, by parental sleight of hand and Herculean feats of distraction. Because there are two new items in the Jones lookbook that I have formed quite the attachment to since buying them a couple of weeks ago, to the extent that few hours have passed without me and one or both of them being in intimate contact.

Observe then, if you will, a few of my [new] favourite things – bobble hat (I have very delicate ears) and checked shirt. The former has met with mostly positive feedback. The latter has been euphemistically described by my mother as 'very relaxed'.



(Other noteworthy things about this picture: 1 Yes, this is a tantalising glimpse into my bathroom. 2 One forearm is not, as it appears here, longer than the other. That is the witchcraft of the camera's lens.)

If I thought that anyone was actually reading this so close to Christmas, I'd install a poll here, asking which icon of showbusiness I most resemble in this picture. Is it a) Benny from Crossroads (though his beanie was bobble-less), b) one of the main characters in The L Word or c) my personal preference:



I like to imagine I'm experiencing the early stages of exactly how Mike Nesmith's trademark look came about. He bought a new bobble hat one winter as he, too, had a chronic ear infection a few years previously and had never been quite the same since. Then he found he loved it too much to take off. I don't imagine his was from Dorothy Perkins, however.

And then I thought of this, which at the time I believed to be written by Mike Nesmith. Tireless research has revealed that it's actually part of the Goffin/King canon, but whoever is responsible, it speaks of being younger again, emotionally speaking, like the magic of new clothes and That Christmas Feeling.



Happy Christmas and all that.

Things I meant to post last week

Early last week, I was roused from my commuter-stupor when I saw a man who I was convinced played Danny Kendal in Grange Hill in the 80s. We got off the same train and I was transfixed by his head-down, purposefully shuffling gait – ambling down platform 14 at London Bridge station just as he used to turn his back on the school building and make for the gates, with the bellow of Mr Bronson ringing in his ears.
I think it's clear from this picture that it is DEFINITELY him – it's there in his thick black hair and diminutive stature. It's my considered opinion that he probably now works as a graphic designer or web developer. This is evinced by 1) leather elbow patches on a vintage-look jacket and 2) beard.

Similarly, when I first moved to London, and used to walk the [middle class bit of the] mean streets of Camberwell, I would, on occasion, see 'Bullet' Baxter. I'm sure that if I bumped into Johnny Depp buying Weetabix in the nearest Sainsbury's Local, it could not come close to eclipsing my excitement at these two fictional eccentrics from my childhood apparently walking their path out of my television 25 years ago, and all the way into my postcode.

It probably wasn't him.

Like many of our peers, my friends and I spent a significant portion of last week engaged in lengthy and involved discussion about whether we would attempt to go to see the newly reformed Stone Roses play next summer. There is no easy segue or close link between Danny Kendal and the Stone Roses, apart from, perhaps, that distinctive, nonchalant walk. A swagger in the case of Brown and co. A few daily portions of fruit and vegetables short of a swagger for Kendal.

Naturally, I have heard all the stories about Ian Brown's unconventionally impressive live vocals. I have heard Ian Brown's unconventionally impressive live vocals, but on that occasion, I had carefully set my expectations several legions below neutral, which enabled me to be pleasantly surprised. I have also read about the financial motivations that may be behind the Roses' new-found zeal for band life.

In spite of all this, there I was, sitting at my desk, excitement creeping all over every part of me, waiting for the news of the reunion press conference to break online, wondering if the Stone Roses would even turn up – just as, in 1995, I'd wondered if they'd even turn up at the Leeds Town & Country Club. They did. Grown men cried. In a good way.

But here's what I think I would really like to be doing when the Stone Roses take to the stage at Heaton Park next June. I would like to be in a friend's garden, staging 'the Headphone Roses', a glorified indie disco, listened to individually on earphones, because obviously we don't want to upset the neighbours, I mean we sorted the problem with the hedge out so amicably it seems like suicide to rock the boat.

It can't be my garden, because I don't have a garden. I have a flat roof outside my kitchen window. This would be fine if we kept the numbers right down, but even so, I don't imagine my downstairs neighbour would be too thrilled as we came crashing through her ceiling within the first four bars of I Am The Resurrection. There would be a 'support act' of course – a carefully compiled turn-of-the-90s indie playlist – followed by the playing in full of that golden first Stone Roses album, and there will be lots of dancing, because there will be room for lots of dancing, what with there not being 49,970 other people invading your personal space.

There would be cold beer at sensible, supermarket prices and upmarket organic red wine and barbecued burgers – we could, of course, undercook them slightly for an exciting hit of festival-food jeopardy. But in reality, of course they'd be reassuringly well done and served with that Waitrose celeriac remoulade that I really like. There would be a toilet that is clean, dry, fragrant, fully functioning and just a matter of feet away, so you would not hear the faint strains of one of your favourite songs drifting through the evening air as you exit a Portaloo and realise it will be over by the time you have legged it all the way back to your mates in the crowd, because the band has come on earlier than billed. YES JARVIS COCKER, I AM TALKING TO YOU.

I would perhaps scatter a carpet of half-eaten noodles and cracked plastic pint glasses all over the lawn for authenticity and 'colour'. But crucially, there would be NO DICKS THERE. And here I should make it clear that I could be talking about the crowd or the band. Only people whose occasional dickishness you are familiar with, and tolerant of – which is to say, your close friends and family – are allowed. There would be licensed taxis home, at a time that is later than your normal bedtime, but not, like, that late. We've all got DIY to do in the morning. No one will have to spend their journey home wedged in the corner of a surely-illegally-overcrowded bus or train carriage hoping that no one vomits on them, missing their stop because they are physically hemmed in by a league of bodies sweating cider.

The undoubted success of the night will lead to a franchise of similar 'music-listening experience' events, and eventually we will be able to eradicate the whole wretched business of live music altogether, and all the bad smells, discomfort and idiots that come with it. Jean-Paul Sartre said 'Hell is other people.' To that I say, 'Bonjour Jean. Je pense que nous devrions être amis. Voulez-vous venir à la maison de mon ami et écouter les Stone Roses?'

Who's in?

In which I remember that I used to write a blog

Hello. How have you been? You look good. Have you been working out?

It's been a while. We're all busy people. You know how it is.

But I'm still here, the gloves are still here, and I have definitely not abandoned the place, as someone abandoned this Barbie motorhome, just around the corner from my house.


Barbie is exactly the kind of doll who would get in her Barbie motorhome for a drive with some of the cool boys from the wrong side of town, then crash it into a wall and stroll away on her long, biologically impossible legs, leaving someone (her dad, I imagine) to pick up the pieces. And pay for them. And where's Ken in all this? Working all hours at Topdoll, just to get the money to buy Barbie some stupid necklace which she'll get bored of in about a week. God, Barbie is such a bitch.

Anyway, through the medium of poor iPhone cameraship, I can bring you the edited highlights of exactly what you have missed during my three weeks - three weeks! - of non-posting. You can tell things have turned to rust somewhat, Miss Jones-wise, by the fact that I had half my stupid finger over the lens in the picture above.

So in the last three weeks, I have been mostly:

1) Raging against the ill-punctuated.

Shame on you, TCM channel caption writers, you fool's.

Also at fault: the makers of novelty item "The Surprising Leg", found at a rainy faux-country fete.

I think you will agree with the packaging designers that yes, most certainly, it '"look's so real".

I feel there is a certain pragmatic flatness about the name, however. I have had a brainstorm with myself, vis-a-vis a blue-sky name for the product. I am suggesting 'Legs and Woah!' It is at once a hilarious play on the Top Of The Pops dancers of the late 70s, the period when, presumably, this hilarious novelty was conceived, and also suggests the expression of surprise emitted by the prankee on finding the incredibly lifelike demi-limb/limbs protruding from a closed filing cabinet, wardrobe or similar.

2) To quote the defunt we're-so-much-more-than-a-boy-band Busted, Sleeping with the lights on

That's because this dancing eyeless mask of Robbie Williams haunts my dreams after I spent two and a half hours standing behind it at a recent Take That concert.

3. What else? Well, looking for signs, as usual. The omens were particularly good ahead of the recent Marbury/Miss W (as was) nuptials. Nuptials is a ludicrous word, much beloved of magazines attempting to avoid the repetition of the word wedding by substituting it for a word never actually used by real people in the real world. I am not a real person, I'm a carefully constructed fictional character, so it's OK. See also 'locks' and 'tresses' for hair. And 'don' and 'sport' for 'wear'.

Anyway. The signs:

First, a heart-shaped crisp in my bag of Walkers on my train journey to Wedding Town.

Secondly, a double yolk in my B&B-breakfast poached eggs on the Big Day. Look at the two yolks of Marbury and Miss W, joined together in the albumen of eternity.

I don't know what it says about me that I then ate them both.

Anyway, it's nice to be back.

The Sun And The Rain

My friend Mr L and I went to see Madness on Friday night at the Royal Festival Hall. I'd say it's about as much fun as you can have on a Friday night, unless you have a ping-pong table and a trampoline in your house and you're staying in.

The people-watching was almost as good as the band-watching. Pearly king and queen. Men in fezes (fezs?). Many, many pork-pie hats. Under 10s playing air drums. Dad dancing. Mum dancing. Generally, a lot of dancing. Plus all the human resources necessary to set up a heavily over-staffed Buster Bloodvessel Lookalike Agency.

There was, I'm sorry to say, one sour note. Literally, an incredibly sour note. Around three-quarters of the way through the gig, Mr L and I were suddenly assailed by some of the ripest body odour I've ever experienced. It came, I think, from behind us, although as is often the case in these situations, its heady intensity was such that we may have been disorientated. At these times, you may even question if you are the source, but I firmly believe that if you can smell It, It's not you. I think perhaps a lady behind us, dancing enthusiastically in a vest, may recently have removed her jumper. Certainly the smell came over us in a great peal, as if being released from a thousand sweat-drenched sweaters as they are heaved up and over the head.

Unfortunately, I think the 'nutty dance' that accompanies any Madness performance may be one of the most odour-enabling of the modern world's dance styles. All that tightly clenched fist pumping only serves to work up some kind of sweat lather in the armpit area. Then, as your arms pump piston-like forwards and backwards, a kind of bellows effect is achieved, fanning the smell backwards, forwards and generally outwards towards your concert-going comrades.

I'm not sure which dance styles are best for protecting the sensitive nose of your fellow audience member (which is to say me). Pogo-ing and riverdancing both involve the retension of the arms stiffly by the sides. However, this is offset by the fact that both are highly energetic forms, and a degree of stink leakage is sadly inevitable.

Really, if people could agree to undertake nothing more than a gentle waltz at any popular music concerts that I attend, I believe everyone would benefit, not just me. I am always thinking of other people. Sometimes kindly.

Anyway. Remember this?



I do. I remember the songwords being printed in a fold-out poster mag I owned when I was 9, along with Right By Your Side by The Eurythmics and Union Of The Snake by Duran Duran (they, of course, were the subjects of the giant poster in the centre, which was why I bought it – although even I, blindly enraptured as I was, could see that Union Of The Snake was far from Duran Duran's finest work). Anyway, The Sun And The Rain has been in my head all weekend, not least because of the meteorological hysterics.

I've always fancied Suggs. I don't really know why.

So long, farewell...

From today, I will be absent from the blog for 10 days. I will obviously understand if you don't notice any difference. So till then, it is auf wiedersehen, adieu and...

...what is the best song with 'goodbye' in the title?

Is it this?

(Apologies for the slightly nerve-shredding sound quality.)



Or this?



Or something else..?

Melancholy Muppet Monday

Well, I don't know about you, but I could do with some cheering up. Even though I have just come back from choir and it is always a tonic, and we are learning Rehab, which is brilliant, the need for cheering remains.

Thank goodness for our occasional regular feature – so occasional it has only appeared on one occasion – Muppet Monday.

I think I may have posted this clip before, as a link, but never mind because a) this is my blog, b) this is my bad mood, c) it is one of my favourite ever songs, whether it is on the magical Muppets record of my childhood, or the Ella Fitzgerald albums my dad gave me when I was older.

In terms of sentiment, it is pretty much the opposite of needing to be cheered up. It proceeds from a position of already feeling massively cheered, but I am going to invoke either the power of positive thinking or total dislocation from reality.

*CAUTION! FEATURES SCAT SINGING*

**BY PUPPETS**



As I may have posted the above on a previous occasion, here is a back-up. It is a more thorough exploration of the whole cheering process. I mean, really, it takes you right through it. And it has Gonzo in it.

Muppet Monday*

A new regular weekly feature. For this week, at least.

This is one of my all-time, straight-up, no-lying favourite albums.


When I was little, this was one of my favourite tracks from it:



Obviously at the age of 6 I couldn't appreciate its incisive commentary on dating and relationships. I just liked the rhyming and the singing frogs.

*AKA Feeling Slightly Guilty About Not Having Written A Post For Ages And Also Being Distracted By Clips Of The Muppets On YouTube Monday.

Field music

I have been on a field trip this weekend, deep in Hyde Park, under the al fresco celebrity patronage of Stevie Wonder (Saturday) and Paul McCartney (Sunday). It was extremely kind of both these very busy men to arrange large-scale concerts purely to facilitate my work.

Here I have recorded my findings.

WARNING! Contains Level 2 swearing, specifically 'piss', 'twat' and 'wanker'.

1) A surprising number of women have undertaken the formidable fashion challenge of the jumpsuit. Well done, you plucky number. Apologies for expecting you, any minute, to break into some belly-dancing evening class dance-of-the-veils (for the strapless voluminous versions) or inhale sharply through your teeth and assert that you won't be able to come back and finish the job for more than a week as these boilers are notoriously tricky to source parts for (for the rest). I'm not very 'fashion' these days. (You see how I have carefully seeded the wholly erroneous impression that I once was. Smoke and mirrors, my friends, smoke and mirrors.)

2) The mass uptake of maxi dresses has become an epidemic. I'm yet to be struck down with total conviction, despite having bought one from New Look recently to wear to a wedding on Saturday, at which I anticipate there will be at least two other women in the same dress, all much, much more tanned than me. Not such an achievement since I am definitively the whitest woman in Europe, and thus, most likely, the world. The lure of the maxi would appear to be that it hides the now proverbial multitude of sins, but I fear that for all except the most willowy, it makes you look like you are all sin, giving the effect, from the neck down, of a Dalek in a valance.

3) When it comes to sun cream, more would appear to be more.

4) Sweet, sweet wanker-related schadenfreude is an intoxicating drug. Example: mouthy, beer-and-sunshine-marinated moron, balding, mid 30s – let's call him Pork Pie Hat Twat – attempting to persuade a much younger, cooler bloke to share his spliff (my lexicon of drug words is approximately at the level of Cliff Richard, probably), because we're alike, you and me, even though you are much younger and better-looking. I get you, you get me, yeah? We're just vibing off each other. My weed is your weed. Even though this is mostly your weed. We're like brothers, right? And no one's gonna stop us smoking a very small amount of soft drugs right in the middle of a 50,000 crowd of people and thus far from the eyes of any kind of authority whatsoever.

It has come to my attention through my recent concert-going history that the unsociable troublemakers at such events - testing the staff, vexing their meeker counterparts in the audience – are not 17-year-kids attempting to shrug off authority pre-adulthood, but despo 35-year-olds trying to assert that even though they now have a middle-management job at HSBC, a gold membership at Fitness First and a gas barbecue, they are STILL PRETTY REBELLIOUS. YEAHH! I'M TOTALLY STANDING ON MY SEAT, EVEN THOUGH I HAVE BEEN TOLD TO GET DOWN BY A SECURITY GUARD! SCREW YOU, 'THE MAN'! I AM INVINCIBLE!

Urgh.

Anyway, Pork Pie Hat Twat's phoney, stoney bonhomie was slapped down with such a gratifying look of 'Seriously, mate. Not. Cool,' by the younger man smoking, it was a privilege to witness it. There followed a short but embarrassing scene of begging which was dealt with mercifully swiftly.

(By the way, Pork Pie Hat Twat, Sainsbury's called. That white raffia trilby you're wearing belongs strictly behind their deli counter, on the head of someone who slices up finest breaded ham, and occasionally their own digits, for a living.)

5. In happier findings, it has now been proved that it is possible for me to emerge from a gig in Hyde Park without someone else's piss on my feet. At an REM gig a few years ago, in the so-called Golden Circle (sometimes the jokes don't even need writing), the man next to me pissed on the ground twice, showering my toes in splashback. On Saturday, Pork Pie Hat Twat's friend pissed in an empty beer bottle in front of me, set it down on the floor, and almost immediately knocked it over doing the type of dancing favoured by overweight men at Oasis concerts, sending a shallow tide of human waste towards my sandals. Luckily, this kind of thing doesn't seem to happen at a Paul McCartney concert. Some members of the audience would probably rather be voluntarily catheterised than have to urinate in a public place, or, in some cases, even use a Portaloo.

6) If you are a blind 60-year-old soul-funk pioneer, derided for some saccharinely commercial hits later on in your career, and now filling out those spangly, slightly tribal smocks a little more than you used to, I would suggest that performing an elaborate keytar solo lying down on the floor of the stage, during the very first number of your set, is a pretty cool way to prove that you've Still Got It.

7) All the Autumn Sunset hair dye and Frog Choruses in the world could not stop me loving Paul McCartney. Nor any amount of 'groovy' dad-banter:

'Who's ready to have some rocking fun tonight?'

Answer: ME.

Fight for your right to snack

Some of you, I know, have been knocking around here for a while. We've got to know each other a little bit, over the years. I know where you come from (hello Strasbourg!, hello Melbourne!), how often you come and how long you stay. You know my characteristics – good and, in particular, bad. I am quick to judge. I am easily irritated. I am a little bit of a snob. You'll have your own favourite. If you felt like keeping it to yourself, I'd be OK with that.

Probably you would not think of me as a law-breaker, a hooligan, a risk-taker.

Yet last week, the deeply conscientious security staff at the Shepherds Bush Empire felt it utterly necessary, with no brooking of argument, to dispossess me of these potentially dangerous weapons.


In the interests of safety (I am assuming) I was forced, against my will, to surrender a small bag of Nairn's Oat Bakes (Cheese) and an Eat Natural muesli bar to a nearby bin before entering the auditorium.

What exactly did they think I was going to do? Oat someone to death?

I understand the need to prohibit some personal food and drink items at a concert. One's own bottles, for example. The venue needs to protect their audacious bar price mark-ups, and in order to do this must outlaw the School Disco Hip Flask, aka a seemingly innocuous plastic mineral water bottle, topped up with the spirit of your choice. I also understand that plastic bottles, with an optional cargo of piss, can be used as missiles in the throes of the modern-music concert experience. It's possible it happens at Glyndebourne, too, but I've never been so it's hard to say.

If there had been, say, a watermelon in my bag, which I had somehow managed to shotput with immense force towards the stage, it's true to say that the Scottish indie scene of the 90s could have lost some of its best loved alumni last Tuesday night. Yet if, mid-performance, the band had seen a Nairn's Oat Bake landing on the stage, they would be inclined to think it was a small cardboard disc from the end of a party popper fluttering down from the rafters where it had been lodged since New Year's Eve, such is the flimsiness and wholly unappetising appearance of a Nairn's Oat Bake. (Luckily the taste is 93% Mini Cheddar.) Similarly, if you should drop some oaty, sultana-y crumbs from the balcony of the Shepherds Bush Empire, I honestly don't think they're going to kill anyone in the stalls. Gravitational acceleration really isn't all that.

I was hardly trying to cruise through the bag check with a piping hot and highly aromatic takeaway curry, or a large bag of rotten tomatoes labelled 'Don't forget to throw these at the band at some point during the show.'

Still, the security guard clung to the letter of the law like a young labrador with a particularly chewy slipper in its teeth.

I am ashamed to say that I didn't put up much of a fight. I did not stamp my feet and shout, 'I am a self-diagnosed borderline hypoglycemic! I must have my low-GI snackfoods!' I did, though, muster up an 'ARE YOU SERIOUS?' which was somewhere between sulky adolescent, incensed at their curfew, and customer of East Dulwich Sainsbury's being told there was no fresh coriander left on a Saturday morning.

I did not attempt to rally my fellow concert-goers into some kind of impassioned riot against the enfringement of my snacking civil liberties.

But next time, I will.

Almost certainly.

'Just remember what your old pal said...'

This week the Why Miss Jones Legends Tour rolled into the Southbank. Into the Southbank? Onto the Southbank? Whatever. Legends are beyond the laws of prepositions.

Out of all the hundreds of people hanging out in the many capillaries of the Festival Hall on a Wednesday night in May – the laptop lizards, heads down, engaged in Very Important Projects; groups of girls meeting up for after-work drinks who don't want to go to a bar because one of them is pregnant and they'd like to maintain the facade that their friendship is about so much more than alcohol; stylish yet vulnerable female bloggers in their mid-30s waiting to see Randy Newman with their mum – it's funny that the person who smells really very strongly of that damp smell when your washing doesn't dry properly, which is also a little bit like wee, that person who is sitting at the adjacent sofa to you in the bar, should then be sitting right in front of you during the concert. Lean forward a bit can't you, DampWhiff? I've got a cold and everything, but it's not that bad.

Randy Newman, if you're asking, was brilliant. I'm a compulsive clock-watcher at events like this. Not as much as at the theatre, where, over the years, I've missed some truly life-affirming dramatic moments because I've been craning to make out the hands of my watch in the dim lights of a nearby exit sign. Even if I'm having a Perfectly Nice Time, I'm still wondering how soon I can get outside and feel slightly less like I'm about to have a claustrophobic episode. Not with Randy. Were it not for the fact that I get really hungry about every two hours, I could have sat and listened to him all night. The last time I felt like that was with Lee Hazlewood a few years ago at the same venue, and he's dead now, so hang in there, Randy, won't you?

*Crunching change of subject alert*

One of my very best friends is 40 today. It seems ludicrous that I now have close friends who are 40. I realise this is galling to anyone over that age, just as I want to punish hard anyone who says, 'Oh my god! I'm 25! That's, like, SO OLD!' Still, the fact remains that most of the time, I can't believe anyone in my peer group is old enough to buy a malibu and Coke in a pub without a push-up bra and lipstick on. So here's Randy, without the satire and without the shadows – unless I'm blanking some very deep subtext – just for her.

I love the way that the best singers aren't always the best singers.

I'm sure the birthday girl couldn't care less about Randy Newman, by the way. I just couldn't find a good clip of Olivia Newton-John doing Xanadu.

'I have confidence that spring will come again...'

This weekend I embarked on the Miss Jones Legends Tour Summer 10. Stay your eager credit cards, though. This does not involve me renting the London Palladium and performing the highlights from my 36-year career of singing along to the stereo equipment of the time. [Set list: The Kids From Fame songbook, pre-1983 Disney favourites, Abba's The Name Of The Game, encoring with I've Never Been To Me; merchandise: tapestry kit where you can sew my face in wool, bracelet featuring the legend WWMJD? (What Would Miss Jones Do? Answer: nothing for as long as possible, then something will probably happen anyway to bring about a resolution.)]

No, I am in the audience, saluting various of my heroes, clapping vehemently, wiping away mascara-streaked tears of music-prompted emotion and thinking uncharitable thoughts about whoever is sitting next me when that person is not a close friend/family member.

So, Saturday:

Julie Andrews.

More specifically:

An Evening With Julie Andrews.

As you may know if you have read any papers over the last couple of days, this differentiation is kind of a big deal to some people.

My concert companion Ms H and I are big fans of L'Andrews. We have done the Sound Of Music tour in Salzburg. You haven't truly breached the barriers of global understanding until you have spent two hours singing along to The Lonely Goatherd with a multi-national group of strangers in a minibus. Look, here is Ms H recreating the classic Doh-Re-Mi sequence on the ACTUAL REAL STEPS. (You may, at this point, notice that I have learned some Photoshop skills other than 'Crop' and 'Save As'.)

So we were sufficiently au fait with the Julie Andrews back story to know that she would not be swooping up and down the octaves like a swallow with the head of Mariah Carey. Or the head of Julie Andrews in 1965. Also, Dame Julie is 74. Her voice was broken some time ago and, as a result of this, reportedly, so was her heart. Just as well she would be performing this rare UK concert in an intimate, atmospheric place, with the support of a small and friendly crowd:

Oh shit.

You would think that if you cared enough about Julie Andrews to stump up the ludicrous ticket price, you would know that a three-hour feat of vocal endurance and regular towelling-downs was not on the cards. And even given that, it seems that some people find it hard to be as tirelessly compassionate as me and Ms H. The likes of Angelina Jolie and Eddie Izzard are often bothering us with phone calls and emails asking how it is we can give, give and then give a little bit more. Emotionally, of course. Not financially. We've spent all our money on Julie Andrews tickets.

So we were full of love and care for the Julie Andrews Experience (they totally should have called it that), however compromised. I'm a sap at the best of times, which is why I spent two hours on Sunday afternoon watching A Cinderella Story starring Hilary Duff and Chad Michael Murray.

It was a strange evening, obviously. Unlikely song choices, bizarre vanity-project-meets-school-assembly storytelling. But also JA sitting on a stool, in shadow, listening to other people on her stage, singing her songs, because she can't, breaking your heart so it almost matched hers. And occasionally venturing a whole song for herself, slaying you with her sincerity and soul on My Funny Valentine.

So why did Dame Julie rent the O2 arena and make an attempt at late-onset career suicide? I don't know. I don't know everything, although this news may rock some of you to your very foundations. If you believe some of the FURIOUS and DISAPPOINTED and ROBBED concert-goers, it was to rake in great big treasure chests of lovely golden cash for her retirement fund. If you believe me (let's remember: a sap), she's trying to grab a little bit back of what was taken away from her, in the only way she can. That way is a little eccentric, yes, but most 74-year-olds are a little eccentric, and spending an evening with many of them would probably entail listening to them read out sections of The Daily Mail. Of course, some of the FURIOUS and DISAPPOINTED and ROBBED concert-goers would probably think that was kind of a good time.

Choir news

I've been looking at clips of choirs on YouTube, hunting for videos to put on the website of the choir I sing in. The P22 Chorus, a group of fifth graders from Staten Island, haven't exactly been starved of publicity, but let's hope they're hungry, because here's some more.

My favourite thing I've seem them do is The Cure's Pictures Of You, which I thought was the most, like, beautiful song, like, ever when I was 16. Who knows what I would have thought of it when I was 10 – but I would have loved to have a school music teacher like this guy...

'Rock and roll is here to stay...'

I love the way Alex Chilton sings, 'I've been trying hard against unbelievable odds.'



I'm sad that he won't be singing any more.

Also, this…

Not a big visual element to this post. Maybe you could look out of the window for a bit or take one of your stamp albums down off the shelf and flick through it, remembering all you achieved in assembling your collection. Be proud. Be nostalgic.

Coded message

Take a word from the title of each of these songs, lovingly/ditheringly harvested from my iTunes library, and you will discover a hidden and historically significant message.

(I couldn't find an embeddable version of this.)

Heartbroken I couldn't find a full version of this. Well, heartbroken is a bit strong. Slightly frowny, perhaps.

Toss-up between this and this.

Shameless reposting

The clip below was on the Holy Moly mailout this week. It is behind-the-scenes footage of The Stars recording the charity single We Are The World, all the way from 1985. These are proper, legendary, stadium-filling big guns and seeing them off-guard and making awkward jokes with each other, like strangers on the first day of a residential work conference, is weirdly moving – like those old clips of The Beatles I was droning on about a few months ago.

I don't remember too much about We Are The World. I was 11 years old and completely obsessed with Do They Know It's Christmas?, the UK precursor. That record featured all the bands that made me feverish with pre-teen longing, and it was better for shrieking along to at school discos in an effort to obliterate the sight of your so-called best friend slow-dancing to Phyllis Nelson's Move Closer with the boy you were seriously, this-is-the-real-thing-even-though-I-am-still-at-primary-school in love with. My charitable take on USA For Africa was probably something along the lines of 'GOD! They are TOTALLY copying Band Aid!' which suggests a consummate failure to grasp the purpose of the exercise. Band Aid simply blew my mind ('Duran Duran? And Wham!? And Spandau Ballet? In the same room? On the same record? *11-year-old head spins round and explodes*). I bought a special souvenir mini-magazine which, unsurprisingly, I still have 25 years later, and infuriatingly can't find right now.

This clip has many, many highlights, including:

1) Lionel Richie coming on like some flamboyantly smart-casual high-school drama teacher and teaching some of the biggest stars on the planet how to lean into the microphone.

2) Stevie Wonder getting the giggles just after Quincy Jones tells everyone off for being noisy during a take, while Paul Simon stands there silently, as anxious and tiny as Piglet.

3) Cyndi Lauper's clattering jewellery ruining the take.

4) As Holy Moly brilliantly noted, Lionel helpfully pointing out notes on the sheet music to Stevie Wonder.

5) The youthful, bed-headed, leather-jacketed Bruce Springsteen looking like some bad-boy-with-a-heart boyfriend from an episode of Blossom. His voice is such an explosive contrast to the silky vocal skills of everyone who's gone before that I find it impossible not to shout 'GO ON, BRUCE' right before his part comes in.

6) Michael Jackson at a point where, maybe, just maybe, he could still have found his way back.

Also, everyone involved can really sing.

You can see the full, finished video here, which is noteable for the presence of Bob Dylan. He's barely there on the behind-the-scenes footage, and I didn't remember him being on board at all, but that's probably because, at 11, I would have taken one look at him and said, 'Bore off, Grandad. You can't even sing. And your hair's stupid,' which, coming from a Duran Duran fan, would have been pretty rich.

Huey Lewis's fist of pure emotion, meanwhile, is also laudable. I have a lot of love for Huey Lewis. This is because my other twin obsession from 1985 was Back To The Future. Here is a picture of Huey's cameo in the film, taken from my Back To The Future souvenir magazine, which I found when I was looking for the missing Band Aid memorabilia.

Huey seems like the kind of man who would show you the inside of a wild bar, the outskirts of town, and every part of a good time (maybe this is a characteristic that comes as a package with the name Huey. The Fun Lovin' Criminals' Huey is exactly like this, but with added 'Seriously, I am ludicrously sexy' built in). Recently, someone I was working with told me that they had been to see Huey and his News at the Shepherds Bush Empire a few years ago. The magnitude of my jealousy surprised even me. I used to love the Sports album – which I bought from Woolworths in Bicester during a stay with my grandparents – so you can imagine how excited I was to hear I Want A New Drug playing in the background during this week's Glee. Maybe this will signal a path back from the critical badlands for Huey Lewis & The News. After all, it's working for Journey.

Or, er, maybe not.

(See part 1 of the We Are The World film here)

You make me feel alive (alive, alive)

Sometimes when celebrities are interviewed in publications like Smash Hits and The Guardian, they are asked to describe their favourite ever Christmas present. There is no deliberation for me. It was my first ever Walkman (or the Philips FM Sky Way in sleek navy blue, if you insist on specifics). It was a chunky box of delights with a long shoulder strap, like the kind of medium-sized handbag that was probably in vogue at the time, and it had three fat, clunking buttons - until they were gradually shed in the autumn of its life.

I wish I still had it to mount in a modish, framed glass box and put on my wall, as they would probably recommend in Wallpaper* magazine (their asterisk, no smart-arse footnote implied). I don't know what happened to the Sky Way, but perhaps when my mum moved house a few years ago, it was disinterred from a cupboard boneyard of twisted leads and chargers and fossilised electrical equipment, the relics of any family home, and perhaps she decided to let it slip quietly away. This is unlikely though because, to her credit, Mrs Jones has always been incredibly charitable towards our childhood treasures, providing any and all of them with a home for as long as we felt they needed it, without a murmur of complaint. Now I am more aware than ever of how emotionally valuable this kind of ephemera is, I am increasingly appreciative. No, I can only assume that it was I who pushed my faithful friend away in favour of a newer model that actually had some working buttons. I have no defence. I was young and my head was easily turned. I know better now.

I don't remember the precise moment I peeled back the wrapping paper, but I remember putting the first tape in and pressing play and being full of shock and wonder as I was told that no one else in the room could hear what was powering into my ears loud and clear. There was much taking off and putting back on of headphones to verify that this was genuinely the case. This truly was a Christmas miracle to me, and a new and thrilling private world had opened its portal. These can be hard to come by when you're 9.

Around this time - it may even have been the same Christmas - I also got the Rio album by Duran Duran. It was one of the first proper albums I owned (I am not counting Disney, The Muppets or Danny Kaye sings Hans Christian Andersen, although those are seminal records that were played incessantly in the Jones house. In any case, I think they were technically my brother's). The two of them - Rio and the Philips FM Sky Way - are still joined in blissful union in my heart, their enduring commitment to each other forged on interminable car journeys to grandparents' houses or far-flung domestic holiday destinations. I remember the constant, plaintive call to my dad echoing around the service station forecourt as he went to pay for a tank of petrol: 'Daaaaad, can you get me some new batteries pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?'

Despite having negotiated the ages of 15, 18, 21, university, moving to London, Madchester, Britpop, the rise of dance music (and the rites of passage that came along with them) I don't think any album in its entirely means as much to me. For better or worse, it is my Sgt Pepper, my Never Mind The Bollocks, my Meat Is Murder.

Even now, I listen to it and, with the zeal of youth still courageously flickering, I think, 'Come on, seriously, this is BRILLIANT. How could anyone NOT think this is TOTALLY COOL?' I remain utterly immune to the derision that was aimed at Duran Duran then and, to a lesser extent, now. I hear the opening surge of the title track and I am eight years old again, discovering pop music for the first time, assiduously typing out all the lyrics on my mum's typewriter, not understanding a word of them, carefully administering Tipp-ex with my tongue out for concentration, filing them away with obsessive compulsion in a ring binder with the PG Tips chimps on the front (at a young age, we also owned and loved our vinyl copy of Bernard Cribbins being Mr Shifter), rendering a version of the album cover on graph paper with felt tips. I was a child who loved graph paper.

I was talking about my devotion to Rio with my friend Mr Taylor last week (not John, Roger or Andy, although when I was 9 I probably would have counted them among my closest friends). Mr Taylor made the point (and apologies if I am misquoting him) that despite being a ludicrous pirate-shirted pop band, doubtless pastiching more edgy artists of the time, their artistic pretensions were sincere and even ambitious, which could probably not be said of their critical counterparts today. I am less concerned about that, though. The fact is, I still put that album on and find it madly exhilarating. All the albums that should define my youth and stir my heart - Stone Roses, Definitely Maybe, Different Class, Blue Lines - can only muster powerful but nonetheless isolated pangs. It all started with Rio.

You can't choose who you fall in love with.

Happy Christmas.

Bought to you by the letters D, I, S, T, R, A, C, T, E and D

So there's this post that I've been meaning to write for about two months, but I keep getting sidetracked – tonight by 40th birthday-prompted clips of Sesame Street…

'This one goes out to the one I've left behind'

If you are one of the more sensitive members of the band REM, I'm suggesting you might want to look away now. For on Saturday, looking mournfully out at me from the racks of East Dulwich's premiere charity shop was not one, not two, not… look, basically just keep doing that till you get to five – five! – different REM albums.

If you visit enough charity shops for enough years, you can plot a sagging curve of Britain's former music passions, and when exactly we fell out of love with them.

A few years ago, you could have bet your kidneys on being able to go into any branch of Oxfam and finding at least two copies each of Wet Wet Wet's Popped In Souled Out or A New Flame by Simply Red (yes, I owned both of these albums, what is your point exactly?). Now, apparently, we're no longer tied to the 90s (early Travis reference for you, early Travis fans) because on Saturday I found two unloved copies of Urban Hymns by The Verve. If you'd told any of my friends in 1998 that within 12 years they'd be dumping that particular CD in a charity shop, they'd have choked on their This Life boxsets (This Life video boxsets also currently very big in the Charity Shop Chart Rundown).

What I'm wondering is this: if you're a pop combo past your popular prime, is it worse to see several different albums bearing the band name you spent ages excitably/inadvisably thinking of lying unloved in a charity shop, or several copies of the same album? In the first scenario, one person (presumably) really, really doesn't like you. In the second, you are more casually disliked by a larger group of people, and also that particular album is quite emphatically a dead loss.

If it makes you feel better, Stipey, I bought Dead Letter Office.

She loves you

Is it still Beatles week? Please say it is. I wish it could be Beatles week every week. Sod Christmas, there's a song someone should really write.

I have realised recently that I could watch old clips of The Beatles hanging out in one studio or another in the 60s until my eyes pop out and roll away, and my mouth starts speaking in nonsensical, droll Scouse tongues. It is endlesly fascinating. 'Look, John Lennon's drinking a cup of tea. Tea! John Lennon! Just drinking tea! Isn't that amazing? Amazing.'

I am trying to understand why and it's giving me a headache. It is to do with seeing someone who has become untouchable, who now inhabits a symbol or has assumed their own kind of mythology, reduced to a state of utter, unguarded humanity. A version of their life flashes before your eyes that you never fully considered before, and it is the version that includes schoolfriends and nicknames and family and falling in love and feeling tired and feeling better and showing off to make people laugh; it is bones and muscles and blood and tissue; it is the realisation that they were once as young as you have ever been.

Now, when I see Lennon pretending to fall off his chair, Harrison shuffling through pieces of paper, the four of them chatting before a take, it makes me smile, but also gives me the overwhelming urge to cry. It is how I feel when I hear someone refer to my dad as John, and not as 'your dad'.

If you count up the years The Beatles had together releasing records, it's not so very many. Girls Aloud will have overtaken them before too long. Yet The Beatles seemed to age disproportionately during that time. Maybe it is because they did not have the same access to teeth whitening and eyelash extensions. Maybe it is because we know what came after and when we look at them during the darkening of the 60s, we're trying to etch some Hollywood-movie harbingers on to their faces. Maybe it is simply due to the transformative power of facial hair.

It is scientifically impossible to nominate a favourite Beatles song. It simply cannot be done, yet the world is full of the blindly self-confident who claim they have a definitive answer. I am a fool for their cover of Till There Was You (imagine if I was standing on a hill – I would be the fool on the hill for Till There Was You. HILARIOUS). I know it's as twee as a merry-go-round, and if they played it for Simon Cowell, he would probably say it was a bit cabaret. [It can only be a matter of time before someone in charge of an advertising budget gets Frankenstein-like with footage of The Beatles and The X Factor until it appears JPG&R are auditioning in front of Cowell& Cole. 'Lads? Four yeses. *Smarm*. I like you guys.' I'm stuggling enough with the advert for Rock Band]. But I love Till There Was You because McCartney's voice sounds like it's made only of youth and innocence and promise, and because if you cut me in half, I pretty much read 'twee' all the way through.

[Pre-clip warning: Macca's Head WaggleTM is in full effect during the following item, and may trigger a neurological episode in the same way as a flickering strobe.]

What kind of barbarian salutes The Beatles with a song they didn't even write? The kind of person who will do it again. I am also in love with Twist And Shout, because I spent Friday night dancing to it, and because it features in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which I saw at the cinema a few weeks ago. And Ferris Bueller's Day Off, like pretty much anything by The Beatles, comes at you with such absolute and untainted freshness, it is very nearly possible to forget all the things that have have gone rotten and got lost in the intervening years.

And now… some music

It seems like there are a lot of RIPs to be said at the moment. Today, it's for Ellie Greenwich, who co-wrote this:

And this:

Oh, and she produced this:

And all that – which is barely a fraction of it – makes her one hell of a gal in my book.