HAVE YOU just woken up after an evening of festivities? Yes? Like as not, the house looks as if Oliver Reed and Sons have done a spot of redecorating.
Foreign feet protrude from the broom cupboard. Despite your no longer knowing anybody who smokes, every coffee mug and flower vase overflows with furiously extinguished filter cigarettes. What’s this green stuff caked ominously around the lip of the umbrella stand?
Well, you were thinking of moving soon. Weren’t you?
In recent years, a new form of digital filth has made such mornings that little bit more nauseating. Peruse the still-open iTunes dashboard and – if it is visible beneath the layers of pork rinds – you will spot an array of horrid songs you simply don’t remember buying.
At 3.30 in the morning, with more gin in the veins than blood, even the most discerning music fan will lose all sense of discernment.
The enthusiastic partygoer may, when so discombobulated, power straight through guilty pleasures – a bit of Mudd, a touch of post-Let’s Dance Bowie – and career onwards into unmitigated slush and low-end roustabout.
Faint memories claw their way towards the frontal lobes. "You've never heard the end of Les Miserablesssss?" somebody (you) said. "Awwwww man. Jean Valjean ish, like, dying and all the other dead people are, like, shinging him up to heaven."
A degree of furious keyboard hammering followed. The computer narrowly survived near proximity to an upended can of Golden Warsaw “value” lager. Someone’s awful voice (yours) began making the sort of noise you’d expect Gerard Butler to emit after snagging his scrotum in a thistle bush.
“Take my hand and lead me to salvation!” the voice squawked before fatally losing its way. “Erm. Blah-de-blah Blah-de-blah- de-ATION. Something, something, something. To love another person is to see the face of GOOOOOOOD!”
That awful cod-operatic pabulum is bad enough. Peer into the “recently added” folder, however, and more appalling atrocities offer further evidence of the damage wrought by east European hops.
Here's Amoureuseby Kiki Dee. Here's Kung Fu Fightingby Carl Douglas. Here's Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison. Was somebody composing a playlist for the CIA to blare outside the latest blockaded South American drug baron?
There is a point to this. It has just become too easy to buy stuff these days. In times past, you were, when drunk, forced to settle for whichever scratched records lay dustily around the host’s apartment.
If he or she happened to have a copy of Brown Girl in the Ringthen that was all very nice. Deprived of ghastly 1970s Europop, the partying idiot had, however, to exercise a degree of creativity with the material available. You might, perhaps, discover that – against all the odds – Vier Letzte Liederby Richard Strauss offer the perfect accompaniment to a game of Twister.
Singing along to Magazine's A Song From Under the Floorboards, Howard Devoto's timeless post-punk take on Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground, offers a much more satisfying challenge than mouthing the platitudinous guff in Jennifer Rush's The Power of Love. (Yeah, this writer really knew how to par-tay.)
Buying music – and, to a lesser extent, books – has lost a great deal of its romance and excitement. If you lived in a provincial city during the late 1970s, then you really had to fight to get your fingers on the latest new-wave Meisterwerk. Keith Richard once joked about travelling miles just to look at a particularly obscure blues record.
The process of purchasing sound had as many formal stages as had a medieval betrothal. You'd read about the work in the NME.You'd hear a drifty version – battered by the airwaves – on a barely audible transmission of the J ohn Peel Show.
Then eventually the LP would arrive in Pop Sounds emporium and, after admiring the delicious sleeve and breathing in the new- record smell, you’d finally place the blasted thing on a turntable. Unimaginably thrilling.
We have also lost the faint degree of risk that used to hang around record shopping. Unable to listen to snatches of any track before slapping down the loot, the keen record enthusiast was, when venturing into more obscure territory, forced to gamble on a tasty cover, a familiar bass player or a particularly delicious band name.
Who among us does not regret taking a punt on Peter and the Test Tube Babies? (Hello? Hello?) Who was not rewarded by plumping for Black Moth Super Rainbow? (Am I all alone in here?) And yet. If some class of demon had turned to any one of us, when young, and offered us the power to buy virtually any record at virtually any time, we would have gladly entered into whatever Faustian pact the beast was proposing.
We would, however, never have imagined that in a few decades' time, we'd use that capability to download To Sir With Loveby Lulu.
Pass me another can of Wroclaw XXX.