“It’s Christmas time and there’s no need to be afraid”, goes the song. Thing is, it’s when our loose cannon of columnist is at his most dangerous…
I’m drizzled with sizzling techno. Proper moist with it. I get so hot when I slap a four/four beat onto my gramophone, I sweat with joy from every orifice. Even my earholes. Come to think of it, especially my earholes.
When I heard Orbital’s latest track, I had to sluice myself out with a mop. I’m like a dog on heat if you replace “dog” with “sweaty music columnist” and “heat” with “leaking water bed stained with unspecified juices”. I think I might be having a musical menopause.
I flushed so much last time I went clubbing, I had to disrobe and roll around in nice cooling floor lager. “Tennants?” grunted the taxi driver, looking at my dripping face through his mirror. “Yeah,” I replied, after which he drove my soggy naked butt home in silence.
I never had temperature swings as a teenager. I did all the normal things school kids do: homework, video games, graffiti, banging my willy with a Bunsen burner to see what it would do. Everything was boring. Despite my pimpled body seething with hormones, I was pretty much a husk.
And then I discovered rave. Hooded tops in the summer. Basement clubs that doused the air with perspiration and pumping beats. Pockets full of questionable chemicals. Lukewarm kebabs on frozen morning streets. It was sexy and disgusting and amazing and extremely unhealthy.
So while my friends did sensible things like become stockbrokers in air-conditioned offices, I traipsed from one underground hotbox to the next looking for that perfect beat. Somewhere along the line, my inner thermostat broke.
Now, as an ageing ex-raver, I’m leaking stress juice all the time. My doctor tells me to blanket myself on a rocking chair and relax to Michael Bublé. He also told me he’d seen U2 three times in the past 10 years – in the past 10 years! – so to be perfectly frank his opinions can take a running jump into the Manchester Ship Canal.
I’m not going to age moderately. I want to spurt and flush and gush until my inner thermometer pops. I want to shove ‘Love To Love You Baby’ down my eardrums until they weep with ecstasy. I want Lil Louis’ ‘French Kiss’ to reduce me to a steaming cauldron of dribble. I want to listen to Kraftwerk until I slosh.
Sexy time is a challenge. I can’t be the only one for whom musical zeroes and ones are like sonic Viagra. I’m quite vanilla when it comes to the bedroom, by which I mean I need to be smeared in ice cream to keep me from boiling over like an unattended hob. I was flapping my googlies the other day with some bloke I’d met at a plumbing workshop – I’m trying to be grown-up, alright? – when my Eurythmics ringtone chimed on my phone.
By the sweet dreams of Zeus, I instantly gronked my mizzle-conk right over his narps and there was juffery all on the ceiling. “Is it always like this?” he asked while swooshing his face under the toilet hand dryer. “Yeah,” I replied, my wet hand yanking the flush. The water gurgled as I dropped my phone down the u-bend.
Baste me with your breakbeats, but for crap’s sake bring a towel. Even better, don’t be like me. Stay away from digital beats. Beware your ringtone. And most of all, stay cool. Stay literally cool.
