Dealing with estate agents is a traumatic experience (the one who is currently harassing me with daily inane phone calls seems to have the IQ of a pot of creme fraiche) but it can be made more fun by taking some of the most cliched phrases they use as boob-related double entendres. Look below to see what I mean.

Proudly positioned

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Perfect for entertaining

Lovely features

Stunning view

Original fittings

In need of refurbishment

By SORCHA DALY

Photo by Alex Sturrock

Photo by Alex Sturrock

Dash (R), the sensitive method actor, shuns the spotlight as Uggie laps it up in a cheap polyester bib. Ewww. Sack the stylist, Ug!

Who else is a bit sick of Uggie? I mean, yeah, he was great in The Artist and that trick where he pretends he’s been shot is really good, but he’s pretty full of himself (see below left). You don’t see other award-season chumps wandering around with their Oscars in their pockets. Uggie, please, take off your Palm D’Og collar (see below right), you’re embarrassing all of us.

It’s time to step aside, Charlie Big Potatoes, because there’s a new dog in town. And it’s your brother. Uggie’s younger, more handsome sibling, Dash, who acted as stunt double in The Artist, is poised to take over Hollywood. Dash is like the Luke to Uggie’s Owen Wilson, the Emilio Estevez to Uggie’s Charlie Sheen: more charisma, more charm, better looks and less psychosis.

SORCHA DALY

It is rare that I, Paul Morley, find myself as enraptured with a recording artist as I find myself now enraptured by one K Koke, a rapper hailing from north-west London’s forsaken Stonebridge Estate. Life here is a Hogarthian nightmare and the progress of our modern-day rake, Mr. Koke, is fascinating to witness. His stand out seven-inch single, ‘Are You Alone Fam?’, is a three-minute slice of vicious revenge laced with an emotional depth that is present in the work of few other lyricists working today. The song tells the story of ‘Spider’, known to Her Majesty’s government as Darren Mathurin and to some of his less charitably minded fellow estate dwellers as ‘rabbit dick’. Spider ‘turned grass’ on some of Mr. Koke’s posse in a bid to curry favour with the boys in blue. Well, that shit wasn’t going to fly on Stonebridge. Spider’s evidence led to no convictions, but as far as Mr. Koke was concerned his former friend was a ‘jake prick’ who needed to be torn apart through the medium of popular song. It’s nothing new of course. After all, Buddy Holly himself laid down a series of (unreleased) albums dedicated to barracking his enemies and you don’t need me to tell you that in the world of ‘urban’ music the ‘diss track’ is as old as the form itself (Bambaataa, Smalls, Dogg et al). So when Mr. Koke’s song landed in my inbox you won’t be surprised to know that I let out a big old yawn. Really? I thought. Another song about street characters turning snitch… please… But then, well, then I gave it a listen and the layers of meaning that came through broke their way past my Mission of Burma t-shirt into my formerly cold heart. Allow me to move in for a closer reading of some of the lyrics.

Yeah, yeah, are you home fam?
Shit… you on the roads. Damn

This is, of course, addressed to Spider, as the whole song is. The ‘roads’ here are various. Yes, they are the actual roads, the roads you and I use. Roads like the M40, the King’s Road and the Essex Road. But the ‘roads’ are a liminal space, an area away from the hearth, where the pushing of drugs is the work of the day and the cold wind gets under your parka. Here, Koke seems to be haunted by a childhood memory, a half-remembered fragment from a car journey in which he turned to his mother, asked her if they could stop at a Little Chef and was told that they had no time to stop. The heater in their car was broken. There was little comfort to be had. Such is Koke’s milieu.

Yeah, yeah, are you home fam?
Remember when we used to chill and smoke weed?
I was a young’n, used to think you was a OG [sic]

Koke here invokes the platonic ideal of friendship: the old teacher, the young master. It is hard to tell whether, as with the Greeks, anal sex played a part in the relationship between Spider and Koke – and it is perhaps best not to speculate. Their friendship is a paradise lost. For Koke, a troubled man from a broken home, the support and kinship of Spider must have proved invaluable. The smoking of weed, the symbolic act of bonding, is a potent reminder of what has been lost. Spider’s expertly rolled joint is Proust’s Madeleine, evocative of times past.

When it was beef we used to dress in black [and] hold heat
Tryin’ to make it through the rain on these cold streets

Streets, rain, the cold – these recur again and again in Koke’s best work (see ‘Cold Roads’). Stonebridge, it seems, is notoriously colder and wetter than anywhere else in London. Thermal wear is as armour was to a medieval knight: an invaluable protection from malevolent outside forces. We can picture a young Koke, enthrall to his master Spider, wearing his friend’s North Face puffed-out jacket, smelling that familiar smell, that smell that reminded him of home. Spider, we imagine, always had the finest thermal wear. The ‘tightest garms’, if you will.

You know the road, you know the code, you know you don’t speak
But you told and ratted on your co-ds
So for that you forget that you know me
You will never have a home back in Stone B
We don’t condone in that, we don’t condone in rats [sic]

Stonebridge here becomes ‘Stone B’, so familiar is Koke with his territory. He lays claim to the ownership of the estate with his use of the familiar. Spider no longer has a home ‘in Stone B’ and, more than that, he can no longer refer to the estate as ‘Stone B’. He must call it ‘the Stonebridge Estate’. Spider has been cast out of the family he must dwell, as Cain did, in the land of nod (Kilburn). He is the rat, cast out of the riverbank, without a mole to call his own. He used his rat teeth and now the avenger, Koke, is ripping those rat teeth out.

So, on the real, we don’t feel for snakes
We ride birds, we don’t deal with jakes – and that’s that, pussy

The language here is magnificently baffling. Mr Koke does, however, reveal his fear of snakes – which is telling since it is a fear a weaker minded person might be ashamed to reveal.

Are you alone fam?
Yeah, you’re on ya own. Damn.
Are you home fam?

Here, the second layer of meaning comes perfectly into view because, of course, this song is about Koke as much as it is about Spider. Koke, the outsider with the poetic soul, the writer of words and music… When he asks Spider if he is alone, he is also asking himself. ‘I’m also alone, matey’, he is telling Spider, ‘I have no home. My Xbox has broken and I’m out of Pot Noodles. I’m always “on the roads”. It gets cold.’ We can see Koke, his threadbare coat bulled round his shoulders, looking to the sky, pleading with an unforgiving God who, at any rate, does not exist. We are inside Koke’s emotional prison and we are doing 25 to life.

The party’s over, you don’t look so good
You turned snitch, now you don’t look so hood
You turned bitch, you probably should tek wood
Ya cutie, your life should get took [sic]
I’m too street for ya half-way crooks
Get guilty and try and pass they book [sic]
Spill beans cause their arse is shook

Koke sometimes seems to not know what he is saying. He is caught up in a medley of rage and longing. This is his ecstatic truth. He is Fitzcarraldo, dragging his emotional boat over the mountain of hatred. However, the use of the word ‘cutie’ strongly implies Koke is still in love with his betrayer.

I can’t lie, can’t even pretend
It’s click-clack when I see you… it’s skengs
You get nabbed if we see you in endz
Fuck Spider, police bwoy. You hear that: fuck Spider!

‘Fuck Spider’ or ‘fuck me, Spider’? Or, ‘love me, Spider’. Koke, who would often hold Spider’s hand in a thunderstorm, is pouring his pain into hatred. He is protesting too much. Moved to extremity, he has nowhere to go. Moved to tears, I cannot move from my desk. From now on, nothing is the same. Can we ever claim vengeance? Will I ever be able to listen to anything else ever again? Am I doomed to reside in Koke’s emotional prison, trapped in his haunting vision of the cold streets, his doomed re-enactment of ancient grievance?

PAUL MORLEY

As told to Oscar Rickett

There are few dogs from better ‘stock’ than Bo Obama; his owner is the current U.S. President who was given him as a present by Ted Kennedy. As such, it’s unsurprising just how amazing this little guy is. When he’s not high-fiving pilots on Air Force 1 or holidaying in Hawaii, Bo spends his time playing football and going for runs with his dad. Bo (whose name sounds like a Home and Away heartthrob, don’tchathink?) is also the only little guy I know who could still make the bitches swoon wearing a multicoloured floral lei. And – oh my God! – look at his thick, curly hair and little tongue and floppy ears and the way his fur wiggles when he runs. He’s so cute!

SORCHA DALY

Last night was, as my close friends in the grime scene say, “A LOT” (shout out to Tinie!). Ya boy Ed was on a wave like I was riding on the crest of a Japanese tsunami (no offence intended to my fans if you or anyone you know has ever been affected by a tsunami). I bagged a couple gongs, sang a little song, wrestled my way through the press throng, went home and smoked a bong – nothing long.

The highlight of my night was meeting Rihanna, who was terribly pleasant and extraordinarily choong. She told me she had insomnia issues, I told her if she needed a ghetto guy to come and sing her a sweet lullaby, I was her guy. She didn’t catch the last part and told me to let her know if I knew of someone who fitted the description. That made me feel quite shit.

Adele cheered me up, though. She totally owned the past year and last night she absolutely merked it. She raised her gunfingers in a salute to urban Britain and her middle finger to the establishment. Good grief, was that a par-and-a-half when she was cut off at the end, though? I would have been utterly mortified if I’d been in her creps.

Do you see that ominous, fleshy shadow on the horizon, bulging like an elephantine balloon full of half-digested cheesy-chips and flat Coca-Cola? That, my friends, is something called obesity, and one day soon it’s going to kill us all. We have one chance to avert this impending, chocolate-milkshake flavoured disaster. His name is Jamie Oliver, and he alone can hold back the tidal wave of mayonnaise that’s about to engulf the world.

This isn’t true. The reality of the situation is that some people are fat because they eat too much and then don’t run anywhere. This is pretty straight-forward. Do we really need a faux-Cockney to tell us this in a condescending tone? No, we really don’t. Here are some more things about the fat-tongued bore that annoy me.

His hair
I usually don’t care about what the top of your head looks like, but the reason Jamie Oliver is an exception is because it’s obvious he’s trying to do something with it. Thought and planning has gone into it. There’s been a meeting with a hairdresser at some point and someone has asked (presumably) for a shaggy almost-mullet that can sort of be spiked up into a quiff/mohawk. What is that? Does it even exist as a haircut? Whatever it is, it makes me wish it was possible to send people letters laced with contractible alopecia.

The hats
You’d think, given the awfulness of his hair, I’d be happy about anything that would cover it up. But no, it gets worse. Again, I feel there have been meetings about this and his choice of mock-shabby trucker caps is intentional. Covering up his hair with those hats is the equivalent of finding a dog poo under your sofa and hiding it beneath a thick layer of vomit.

The constant weeping
I’m specifically talking about his TV series, Jamie’s American Food Revolution. It was only marginally more successful (from our point of view at least) than the actual American Revolution, and that’s only in the sense that there weren’t as many fatalities in Jamie’s version. As far as damage to national pride goes, I’d say they’re about the same. Kids like chicken nuggets. Have a cry. A dinner lady doesn’t want to spend an extra three hours slowly sautéing garlic for tomorrow’s clam chowder. Have a cry. You haven’t seen your family for two whole hours. Have a cry. Just cut an onion. Have a cry. Geez. Think of all the droughts his tear ducts could have prevented if they’d only commissioned Jamie’s Ethiopian Food Revolution instead.

His public demonstrations
Imagine a quantity of sugar large enough to fill a school bus. That’s a lot of sugar, right? Oh wait… What’s wrong? Are you having trouble picturing that? Is it too much sugar for your mind to handle? How thoughtless of me to presume you’d understand that when I said ‘a school bus full of sugar’ I meant ‘loads and loads of sugar’. Thankfully, Jamie is on hand to explain this nigh incomprehensible idea. To demonstrate that a school bus full of sugar is A LOT of sugar he literally fills a school bus with sugar. To me, that seems like a big unnecessary waste of sugar and a school bus.
You see, if someone were to say something like, “That guy’s tongue is as fat as eight whales,” I don’t need a visual demonstration. I’m familiar enough with the number eight and the approximate size of whales to know this person is saying that this guy has a really, really fat tongue.

That he has the audacity to lecture people about healthy eating when he is actually quite fat himself
No one likes a hypocrite.

His awful, awful band
When Jamie Oliver was 13 he started playing drums in a band called Scarlet Division. They carried on for OVER A DECADE, touring and even releasing a single that got all the way to the heady heights of number 42 in the charts. If I’d stuck with things I thought were cool when I was 13, I’d currently have two complete sleeves of Tim Burton tattoos, the world’s largest collection of Warhammer Orcs and a room in my house dedicated exclusively to my N64.

I’ve just spent about an hour going through (hopefully) all of Scarlet Divisions’s videos on YouTube and now feel informed enough to have a valid opinion. And it is this: Jamie Oliver’s band, Scarlet Division, play the blandest kind of music there is and if Jamie were to make a soup that represented his band, he’d just fill a bowl with lukewarm water and call it a day. Obviously this would involve a lot of hand gesture acrobatics and spluttering, so by the end it would be more like a bowl of lukewarm water with a light drizzle of saliva. Yum!

Jamie’s Dream School
There was enough wrong with the trailer for this – let alone the actual series – that watching it made my blood pressure get so high I thought I was going to explode like Stephen Dorff at the end of Blade. Let’s break it down into the moments with the highest chance of giving me an aneurysm:

0.00 – That’s not a picture of a school. That building could be anything. It looks more like a textile factory. I guess that’s the point he’s trying to make, that normal schools are dull and boring (much like textile factories). Luckily, he’s written SCHOOL so there’s no confusion. Jamie hates confusion (see the sugar/school bus debacle above). Thanks for clearing that up for us, Jamie, because we are all thicker than medically brain-dead shit.

0.14 – “What would happen if you could turn a school into a dream school?” I know I was giving him a hard time about over explaining the obvious earlier, but this is such a meaningless, vague question it makes me want to bite out chunks of my own arm. All the dreams I ever had about school involved surprising amounts of nudity on my part, and even more surprising amounts of disregard for said nudity on everyone else’s part. So in answer to your question, Jamie: I would come in everyday completely oblivious to the fact I am totally naked and then, perhaps naively, hope none of my classmates notice. And that little camp, self-assured wave at the end as if he’s just asked the most poignant question since Aristotle popped his sandals made me go into a four-day long rage coma.

0.19 – He got on the phone to the most amazing teachers he could think of. Like David Starkey, everyone’s favourite casually racist historian. Nice one, Jamie.

0.30 – Simon Callow I’ll allow. He’d be a pretty good English teacher. Better than the one I had when I was 16 at least. Mine had a toupee and once, he tripped up, bashed his head on a nail and had to wear a bandage on his forehead instead. For two months. Quite possibly the greatest two months of my life.

0.36 – “For some of these kids, it might be their last chance.” Whoops. How did this slip through? Jamie you said ‘kids’ when you meant ‘C-list celebrities’ (excluding Simon Callow, he’s at least B+).

0.39 – Ellen MacArthur? This is dangerous, Jamie. What if she can’t find her pen and you get a paper cut at the same time? You’ll both start bawling your eyes out and we’ll have a lot of drowned children on our hands. (More specifically, YOUR hands. I want no part in this).

0.45 – Next up to tell your children what to think is Alistair Campbell. I checked with the internet and it told me he was unequivocally evil (and a secret alcoholic).

0.55 – “Nothing to do with me, Miss.” Never a truer word spoken, Jamie. You’re just the chubby face of this terrible, terrible idea. What are you doing around schools anyway? Aren’t you a food guy? Maybe leave teaching kids to people who professionally teach kids.

JOE ILEY

If you are planning to throw a party, I strongly advise you to follow the below instructions to guarantee a good time is had by all.

Make a Facebook page
Apparently this is “a great tool for promoting events” and is “the most important thing you can do before having a party”. Set up a page and then move on to sorting everything out. I’ve included an example of what this page will probably look like, if you’re struggling to picture it.

Do you know anyone?
Does anyone know you, more importantly? If you think that there are some people out there who are willing to spend their time with you rather than whatever it is they normally do, then try and get in touch with them somehow and tell them that you are having a party. There is a saying somewhere about crowds, which defines it as three people, so you will need no more than two friends to turn up. If more people come, that’s OK but don’t invite too many people because then bad stuff will happen and it will end up on the news (I’ve seen this happen many times in the past – it’s not nice).

Do you have a place to have your party?
The Raver’s Manifesto has the following to say on the subject:

“We continue to pack our bodies into clubs, or warehouses, or buildings you’ve abandoned and left for naught, and we bring life to them for one night.”

Not only is this very deep and extremely philosophical but it opens up a world of possibilities about where you can have your party. For example, I have a shed in my back garden, which has a BMX and some oily rags in it. This would be the perfect location for me to hold my party. If you know anyone who has a club, warehouse or abandoned building then get on the phone to them and ask to borrow it. If they get tricky then just build a place and abandon it. Sorted, as they say.

The right clothes
Fashion can be a quandary for a lot of people but luckily I have managed to circumvent any issues you might have. A quick Google Image Search with the words “nice party clothes” comes up with the following results.

Guys, don’t worry about the pink shirt thing. If it’s OK for the mega-macho rapper Snoop Dogg (pictured above) then I think it’s fine for everyone else.

Alcohol and drugs
Now there are some serious issues of legality here. If you are planning to sell alcohol (you will have to do this to cover the costs of your decorations and hire of the disco ball) you will need to get a temporary events notice. These are easy to get from your local council and only cost £27.

If you are planning to have drugs then please let me know so I can inform the authorities, as drugs are very much illegal and I am not about to stand aside and let you break the law.

Decorations and lighting
How to DJ (Properly) by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster (2002) covers this area succinctly and with some good humour.

“Darkness encourages dancing… Decorations: Hard work but worth it. Balloons, streamers, murals, fabric, hangings…”

I have enclosed a picture of my shed, which is decorated and ready to go for my party. Please note the darkness.

The best music
Music is not my strong point, as I don’t like it, but many others may ask for it so, again, I defer to a higher authority. This is Greg Harewood’s Ten Best Party Songs of All Time. Make a CD of these ten songs, play it on loop and everyone will have a really good time.

1. “Get The Party Started” – Pink
2. “I Gotta Feeling” – Black Eyed Peas
3. “Jump Around” – House of Pain
4. “Come On Eileen” – Dexys Midnight Runners
5. “Whoomp There It Is” – Tag Team
6. “Walk This Way” – Aerosmith and Run DMC
7. “Celebration” – Kool and the Gang
8. “Sweet Home Alabama” – Lynyrd Skynyrd
9. “Y.M.C.A.” – Village People
10. “Love Shack” – B-52′s

You can refer to the original and excellent article by Greg here.

Cleaning up
So your party is over and everyone has drank, danced and been merry. Now that’s all well and good for them but who is going to pick up those ruddy Pringles tubes?! Your guests are, that’s ruddy who! Turn those lights on and pass round the dustbin bags, marigolds and cleaning products and tell your fellow ravers to get to it. This doesn’t have to be the end of the fun though. Make a game out of the process by playing a little something I invented myself called Musical Clean-up. This is just like the once popular Musical Statues but with more movement and disinfectant. The game ends when everything is exactly how it was when you found it.

Now if you’ve timed this properly everyone should be able to get that last tube home after the night of their life! Good luck!

TOM O’NEILL