Kewl Kidz Klub

So, we've been known to post the odd mp3 from an album that can be bought at Amazon, and we've also been known now and then to try and link said post to what's going on right now. We're not the only ones. We've also been curious about the etiquette behind posting mp3s to one's blog. Not sure whether it's already settled, or whether there's an understanding that if you need to ask, you shouldn't be doing it.

In any case, and our apologies to the author, whose work, and taste, we greatly admire, but we were a tad taken aback by this post. Making a distinction between "good" and "bad" mp3 blogs is a worthwhile endeavour, but to define it as entirely an exercise in obscurity seems to make the whole mp3 blogging business rather elitist, and seems to define rather narrowly the purpose of music.

It drew us back to a point of Julie Burchill's, (you can read it, here, or at least this is the most obvious example we can find, although she probably made it more than once), which was that women use music more as an emotional crutch than men, who usually find that music speaks to their inner collector. We don't completely agree with her distinction between the sexes, but we would agree that there's a case to be made that music is much too precious a resource to leave to dry fetishisation.

Just as there's music to jump up and down to, music to drive to, music to take drugs to, music to take drugs to make music to take drugs to, music to collapse weeping into the bed after you been chucked to, music to fall asleep to, and so on, there are blogs that could fulfil any number of obscure, divinely-ordained purposes. To restrict the practice to those with the rarest closet contents would seeem to risk turning it into some nightmare version of Heathers, and is, to be blunt, not very punk.

We know that to keep mp3 blogging a rarified pursuit is the sensible way to avoid unwelcome attention from the RIAA, although the evidence that labels want to exploit the process is pretty plentiful. That said, and channelling Pump Up The Volume, having a multitude of voices covering many angles in as many ways as possible would be a much healthier result. There's a DJ in all of us.

Which brings us to today's Desert Island AAC. We were working at this unwieldy college/commercial radio hybrid many years ago, and were, like thousand of disgusting hipster fetuses before us, subject to flattering attention from radio pluggers. We were deluged (apologies for the choice of word) with produce from a band called the Kings of Infinite Space.

They were signed to V2, Richard Branson's second stab at polluting the music business, and seemed almost perversely attracted to rock cliches, both sonically and aesthetically. Of course, we played their singles, naff as you like, relentlessly, but they still disappeared after one album, called Queenie. You can now find it at British indie record stores reasonably easily, although it, is, yes, out of print.

But the lyrics, silly as they are, make the whole exercise worthwhile. It's a ridiulous, but still sleazy, rush. And if the band wants to get in touch, then please do, and we'll have fries with that.

The Kings Of Infinite Space - "Cool"
Buy the single, or the whole album, here