There are some of those here, too, and some of them are even quite good. Yet itвЂ™s so impossibly chipper you could be forgiven for imagining it was another one of SuggsвЂ™ вЂњawrite, вЂowвЂ™s yer fartha?вЂќ moments. Listen to it again and youвЂ™ll hear a song as wracked with anguish and awkwardness as anything The Cure ever farted out. No wonder I flooded the Hungarian couple downstairs.Д®mbarrassmentВ was- and still is- my favourite. After a month of tireless rehearsal, I was note perfect, and this strange behaviour became not so much an accessory to cleaning my armpits but a ritual in itself.

Or at least I hope they could, bunch of fucking charlatans.ДЄnyway, I became rather inclined to singing the entire first three quarters of Divine MadnessВ to myself in the shower to obscure the sex noises coming from every adjacent wall of my flat. When I moved to Paris in 2010, I became absolutely rapt with self-loathing, not eating, turning up to work still riotously pissed from the night before, and above all, putridly resentful at everything.В While I canвЂ™t, in retrospect, claim that it was my employers who drove me to depression, I took to hating them with a passion so vicious that psychics in Roubaix, 150 miles away, could feel it in their cornflakes.

At first, I groaned: aMadness occupy a strange and not wholly benevolent place in my heart. The other day I woke up with Driving in my CarВ creating a bottleneck in my head. Purchased at Fopp, Torrington Place, October 2011 Plus, it features a song called The Old ManвЂ™s Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist RГ©gime): Left-Bank pretension and music so chintzy it could have (and probably did) feature on an ITV Christmas Special circa 1970- whatвЂ™s not to love? Except for the rubbish bits, obviously. This doesnвЂ™t come close to the miserabilist masterpiece that is Scott 3-В or even the avant-garde AOR of Climate of Hunter, but with highlights like Angels of AshesВ and Boy Child,В it still (just about) qualifies as one of my favourite records. And-Jesus!- how could the man who wrote Two Weeks Since YouвЂ™ve GoneВ and The Seventh SealВ have had anything to do with the lamentable He-Man anthem Get Behind Me?В IвЂ™m confused. Have you ever listened to Duchess? It makes Phil Collins look like Steve Reich. Although Scott 4В does contain some of the most hauntingly beautiful music IвЂ™ve ever heard (look up On Your Own Again-В I honestly donвЂ™t believe a more lovely 1 minute 45 seconds of music exists), it also holds a not inconsiderable amount of MOR dross. All I want to do is address a common received opinion that hangs around it like dossers at an art gallery opening.ДЄ lot of people claim that this is the best album Scott Walker (or Noel Scott Engel, under whose name it was released) ever put to tape theyвЂ™re wrong. As such, IвЂ™m not planning to write much about it: while I can acknowledge that it is a truly tremendous album, if I try to write an honest-to-god evaluation of it, IвЂ™ll probably just wind up pumping out the same tired clichГ©s that all its many fans seem to parrot every time ScottвЂ™s name is raised.

This is the cult classic of cult classics, a pseudy name drop which counts for more than The Velvet Underground, True RomanceВ and Catcher in the RyeВ put together.

Gorillaz demon days album liner notes