make me feel proud

M People were in Manchester last week, which meant that they were on heavy rotation on local radio. I hate M People more than I probably should. Manchester music used to be enjoyable on a number of levels. It was intelligent and scally, or depressing and danceable. It had a fully formed personality. It took an interest in things it hadn’t heard or seen before and tried to include those things in what it did next. Then back in the nineties it began to curdle into its constituent parts. There’s M People’s sales conference soul and then there’s the plastic gangsters from Burnage.

When I say sales conference soul, that doesn’t mean it isn’t dead classy, like. It’s definitely for senior team, brainstorming away that their country house hotel. Over at the Novotel off the airport strip road, the junior reps are getting “reach for the stars” and waving their arms about and going wooo!

That wretched woman’s wretched voice really gets on my tits. People say it’s soulful, but it sounds to me like a woman who’s been married far too long obviously faking an orgasm to humiliate the husband she’s grown to hate. And the songs?

What have you done today to make me feel proud

People say that’s inspiring and challenging, but I think it’s just fucking cheeky. Funny how the people you know who think that stuff like that is inspiring and challenging are also the people you know who never, ever read, except that every six months they’ll come up to you with that moonie look on their faces and push a book on you with their damp greasy hands and say have you read this yet it’s fascinating.

And you look at this thing they’ve given you and it’s always some piece of middlebrow total crap by Simon Winchester or Ian McEwan or Sebastian Faulks or Tony Parsons or Louis-de-fucking-Berniers. And you say, no thanks I don’t fancy it and she – and honestly, it is a she more often than not – says go on, you should be more adventurous and you think for fuck’s sake, you lot never read anything and then you go off in a great big mob down to the bookshop and come back with this pathetic thing and start waving it about like a head on a stick …

…and somehow she reads your thoughts and says it was a present and you say ah that explains it. The reason book sales have gone up so much is because they’re rectangular and easy to wrap and so they make great gifts for people you don’t really care about and the booker prize tells the people in te gift buying market that this is the book they can buy for their nephew who’s just going to college and the Orange prize is for the niece who’s just going to college and there’s something about adultery and shoes for the sister in law and there’s the ghosted autobiography of the highly paid suspected rapist, sorry footballer, for the sister in law’s kid to while away the time with while he serves out his ASBO and there’s stuff like Ian McEwen and Simon Winchester and Louis-de-Fucking-Berniers for people who don’t make any impression at all they just lie there like suet in the consciousness but they have to be bought gifts at Christmas …

…and you say, honestly, why do you fucking well bother with this? Why not stick to magazines like Heat and Closer and Point and Grunt and Dribble? Why not stick to bondage clown pornography? There’s more honest value there, and exciting colour pictures…

and she says: that’s not very nice. What have you done today to make me feel proud?

And you say: I’ve wagged my dick at a cripple. Now fuck off.