Greetings pop pickers! I figured that this being the time of year when people go nuts for lists, mainly of presents for “Santa” admittedly, then I might as well take part by giving you my Christmas album Top Ten. I hope that I’ll be only one of many bloggers to do this, so that just about justifies my “Porno Galore II: Orgy of the Xmas Blogs” header at the top of this. Moving on, here’s my top ten Christmas albums, please add your top ten or top five or top one or why you don’t like Christmas albums as comments.

Martin (1977) was the film that revealed director George A. Romero’s desire to emulate the middle-brow success of ‘horror’ author Stephen King. It is the tale of a teenage boy who believes he’s a vampire. Obviously, and as Romero confirms in a making of documentary you’ll find on the Arrow’s ‘2 Disc Special Edition’, he isn’t; in ‘reality’ he’s just an alienated psycho. The central character comes from a dysfunctional family who believe they suffer from a vampire curse. Despite this, Martin can eat garlic, attend church and walk about in sunlight. His main problem is he is confused and the only way he can get laid is by drugging women; he also murders his rape victims by slashing their wrists with a razor, and then drinks their blood.

The label tells it like it is – “Beat Beat Bea_t was a German music programme that ran during the sixties. Not to be confused with the other well known German pop programme Beat Club. Beat Beat Beat was broadcast out of Frankfurt commencing in 1966.” Well you wouldn’t want to confuse the two programmes as far as getting the DVDs of material from them is concerned, coz while the Beat Beat Beat (ABC Entertainment) disks give you classic mod, British Invasion, freakbeat, pop and even soul performances, on the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 (Eagle Vision) you apparently get Deep Purple, The James Gang, Johnny Winter, Santana, Procol Harum, Nazareth, Free, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, The Kiki Dee Band, Johnny Rivers, The Hollies, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Doobie Brothers, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night.

San Francisco based novelist Peter Plate came up in conversation the other night. I was at the launch of the Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge edited tome The Form of the Book at Art Words new Broadway Market shop, where I ran into some people I hadn’t seen for a while and we started rappin’ about mutual friends. None of us had been in contact with Peter Plate for a year or two and he became the focus of our conversation. While we were still in touch with him, he refused to do anything on the internet: he seemed to see it as a vehicle for police surveillance.

The other day as I was eating out (and no I wasn’t with my girlfriend Tessie Talk), Gang Starr’s Moment Of Truth album was playing in the background. I find Gang Starr’s earlier work a mixed bag but there are some good tracks among it. That said, by the time they made this 1998 album they were so self-obsessed and up their own arses that their rhymes were a shower of shit. It should go without saying they wouldn’t have recognised a ‘moment of truth’ if it had hit them on the head with a brick. There are a lot of rappers I prefer to Gang Starr, but Moment Of Truth remains an excellent example of how the CD rather than the MP3 ruined the pop/rock/rap album….