On music

According to my iPod, I have listened to the Divinyls ‘Ring Me Up’ 26 times in the last 24 hours.

You can listen to it here.

OD-ing on a song is very typical of me. I am currently recovering from recent overdoses of Don Henley’s ‘Dirty Laundry’; Roxy Music's 'Oh Yeah'; the Pixies 'Here Comes Your Man'; Placebo's 'Nancy Boy'; Flesh For Lulu 'I Go Crazy' and the Ga-Gas 'Our Lips Are Sealed'. These songs are the soundtrack to my second book (the first draft is done! I am tinkering with it right now and am sending it to my agent on Monday. So, in other words, it's blogcrastination as usual in Casa Burgess).



I tend to have, hmm, extreme fads. I don't think it's that unusual, is it? For example, if I’m going to snack on something sweet right now, I’ll only snack on chocolate-covered brazil nuts, and if I drink, I’ll only drink whiskey. This will last for a month or so until I tire of chocolate-covered brazil nuts and whiskey and discover something else. Or it may last longer. I ate one Tunnock's Tea Cake at 4pm every single day for a year. I cannot look at those marshmallowy little tykes now without throwing up in my mouth.

Films are a real problem, too. In the past I’ve gorged on The Saint (I know! I have no idea why either), St Elmo’s Fire, Mallrats, Dazed & Confused, Some Kind Of Wonderful, Sixteen Candles and a little-known Susan Sarandon film from the early 1990s called Safe Passage (I really, really have no idea why).

This is all odd and probably means I have mild Asperger's syndrome, which I am secretly quite pleased about.

I think it might be because I spent a lot of my childhood in Hong Kong, where there was deeply limited TV in the late 80s and early 90s, so my sister and I were allowed to rent one video each a week and would watch them over and over and over again. Hong Kong was a funny, isolated little pop-culture vacuum before cable and the internet.

Am I getting to a point? I don't know. Maybe. (It's exciting wondering, isn't it?)

Okay, this is the point.

For some reason, I’ve managed to keep my OK GO fixation under control where other pet songs and bands have died a wrought-out, overplayed death.

And this isn't some flash-in-the-pan band-love, by the way. This has been going on for years.

I first heard OK GO on Xfm in the summer of 2003. It was love at first air guitar strum.

Hearing ‘Get Over It’ still spins me into an instant air guitar stance: legs splayed, one foot slightly inwards, one arm holding the neck (neck? you know what I mean) of the guitar, the other power-strumming, with my shoulders jerking in a slow epileptic fit and my face in an angry rock-snarl. (Are you doing it? I bet you are.)

I’ve also bought tickets to OK GO six times and seen them just three times. This failure to see them is not entirely my fault. (It's not entirely not my fault either.)

The sixth attempt is next week. At the Empire in London. Their new album - which I can assure you is AWESOME, having heard some of the songs live in New York last year - comes out the same day.

I am excited.

PS: Do you think OK GO would ever consider a cover of Ring Me Up?