Friends

Last night I was an invited guest on Leith FM to promote my chamber choir's concert tonight (St Johns, Edinburgh, tickets only £8).

Its run and staffed by volunteers through donations, and really focusses on the community, which is great. You also get adverts like "Hi, this is maureen from the drop-in cafe just to say we'll be closed tuesday" which is awesome.

I ended up just blethering for about half an hour about music, christmas and why drunken singing is great for you. Hopefully I plugged the gig enough times, and didn't talk too much rubbish. Mainly it was just gratifying to be able to talk about choral music with the passion I feel for it to an audience.

I think i might have promised to put together a four part arrangement of Fairytale of New York however.

It cant just be me that saw the headline Heather Mills Lined Up for Dancing On Ice on BBC news and thought, So, do they just push her after that and hope for the best?

The Top 40 has been irrelevant to me for some time now, certainly long enough that I couldn't tell you who presents it, or what has been number 1 at any given week this year. The last time I was aware of it's importance was last year, as part of the X Factor Hallelujah cover release, that then made everyone run out and buy the Leonard Cohen / Jeff Buckley version in protest.

Seems that Sony have decided to generate their own counter culture this year in a deliciously wicked move. The crux is this: if you don't like X Factor - buy Rage Against The Machine's seminal Killing in the name of - the track beloved of angry teens everywhere, and steeped in folklore as the track that got Bruno Brookes to inadvertantly broadcast the word "fuck" 15 times on national radio. The whole Rage Factor! campaign, so publicly denounced by Cowell, ticks all the right boxes, except for a few wee problems:
Firstly, RATM are on the Sony label too - so they get your money either way.
And secondly, it seems the registrar of the ragefactor website, Neill Ridley, is a former A&R man for BMG (could be coincidence of course).

Showing it to the man, there.

We've been watching Nigella on some cable TV channel, as she prepares for christmas like some wanton hussy, all cleavage and liqueur.
(A fun parlour game can be had by appending every enthusiastic description with much like myself, which never gets old, and has on occasion forced us to pause and recover our composure. Plumteous beauties indeed.)

Cooking as she does, sans apron, in her fire hazard of a kitchen (the sheer number of candles would take most of december to light; sod the expresso martinis) she does remind me of a little girl (shutup, not like that) cooking for mummy - everything is overspiced, over sweet, over enthusiastic. I suspect her actual christmas dinner would have me longing for something savory.

That being said, we have bought her book, and I'm looking forward to trying her Christmas (and chocolate, natch) cake.