A friend of mine has returned from a holiday in sunny California with a copy of KT Tunstall's Christmas EP.

Very nice it is too in a "holiday season" kinda way. However my problem with this particular slice of festive fun is with her version of Fairy Tale Of New York. It's a fairly straight cover duet with Ed Harcourt and so far so good...till the insults start to fly...

"You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy blagger"

err...excuse me? You cheap lousy what who now???

Good god woman if you are going to cover the best and least sentimental christmas song ever then have the decency not to bowlderise it!

I even went back over it and while I THINK Mr Harcourt sings the line "You're an old slut on junk" correctly he's given it such a drunken slur it's hard to tell.

So cards on the table - I'm 6 foot 4 inches tall and weigh in at 20 stone. I am, by any definition a big bloke. I also happen to like to stand at the front at a gig. Frankly if you ain't in the front row then what's the point? In order to facilitate this particular habit, I have been know to stand at the doors for several hours before opening hours, usually attracting the worried looks from the various door-staff concered at to my mental well being out in the cold [ and given that I live in the North West of England - usually the rain ] to see some tin-pot band no one ever heard of. Also in my efforts to maintain my "front row centre" coveted spot I will also suffer the usually rubbish support act [ If I have to listen to Breaks Co-op one more time...] I like to think given that level of dedication [ or call it loonacy ] that I've paid my gigular dues and do NOT have to move out of the way of some 4 foot nothing woman [ and it always seems to be a woman ] poking me in the back asking me to let her through cos "you are tall and I am short" I reply calmly though not always politely that their mistake was a] to arrive late and b] choose to stand behind me, and NO I WILL NOT MOVE.

I'm thinking of getting t-shirts printed with "can't see? well you move 'cos I wont" on the back

or am I just wrong?

I went to see Crowded House last night @ the Manchester Arena and very good they were too...and made two hours just fly by, with much less general larking about and 'tween song badanage than the Bristol show back in March.

Most embarrassing moment for me however was bumping into Matt Sherrod outside the venue and mumbling "ere, you're the drummer aren't you?" [d'oh!] Bless him for the very nice man he is, he said "that's what they call me" and promptly held out his hand and introduced himself...