One Hundred Things To Do When You're Dead Drunk...

...you can sense already where this is heading, and you'd not be wrong. Those lost moments when alcohol commands the stage; brain, conscience, fiscal probity, etc., all banished mute to the wings.

The act itself - written, directed and performed a bottle soliloquy - need not be awful, merely unhinged, unexpected and utterly untoward. Very personal too. One is not talking of some ghastly public display of moral turpitude, tale of which is round the village 'ere one is half-way to perdition; but rather some matter or moment of inner silliness distressing none and hurting none more.

So behold 'One Hundred Things To Do When You Are Dead Drunk" #1:

Traffic, now there's a band. Couldn't abide them first time around between you and me. A veritable mish-mash of styles, all with layers of embarrassing English whimsy. One minute quite groovy rockers-lite, next some half-decent, mystical coves in fey Albion mode (a little of that going quite a long way thank you), but then falling over themselves dissolving into fits of schoolboy giggles at some silly impish nonsense.

The occasional gem of course - 'No Face...etc.', 'Low Spark...et al.' and, above all dear 'Dear Mr. Fantasy', anthemic in quite the right manner for the time. A band for the pick 'n' mix Ipod generation if ever there were one. Pick the few treasures and deep six the rest! ('Hole in My Foot' eh? My arse rather!)

That last though presumes one is, and one absolutely isn't - Ipod-man I mean. 'Twas hard enough letting go of vinyl for CDs, but that was it as far as this dude was and is concerned. At least there was some residual tangible thing qua thing with a CD - an object to have and to hold - even if no one ever rolled a decent joint on their tiny, plastic covers.

Did I ever give the typology of the very different highs to be had from a joint rolled on a mid-period Grateful Dead album sleeve as opposed to, say, an early Bob Dylan? No? Probably best just left to the quietude of history, lest Tom the Bish should ever glance at these idle pages! (But do try - if you are that way minded, and not if not - doing a five-skin spliff on the inner cover of the Allman Brothers Band double-album 'Each A Peach'. That extended hippy-happy world graphic will give you something to fall into until the morn' I can tell 'ee.)

But here we were, late one night, not stoned of course but seriously tipsy. And what should happen? A sudden, inexplicable, irresistible urge to hear Traffic once more. Do not ask from whence it came this compulsion, for I knew it not then and could not tell it now.

But came and rested it did. Traffic must be summonsed from the grave of youth to haunt the hearth of the ancient. Now had one been an ancient versed in this music 'downloading' malarkey no doubt the appetite would have been satisfied - satiated rather - in but a few twirls of apposite computer knobs and dials. Google this, click that and hey presto out she comes.

And if one had, would one have even recalled the doing of it the next day, let alone remembered either the pleasure or the pain? (We are talking some serious level of inebriation after all.) Well no, one wouldn't have. Possibly a faint returning wisp of memory a few days later: "Did one? One did! Lord above, fancy that!" etc.

Not me though. Luddite to the core, mastery of the fell desire was the ordering of the requisite CDs that have duly arrived today a week or so after the squiffy night in question. All right, that did involve a certain online activity complete with site search (Germany seemed to have it all for some reason), placing of orders and confirmations of dispatch, etc. The upshot though is that - now, later, and largely sober - I have three fine Traffic CDs to be consumed at my leisure.

The moot point remains: does one dare listen stone cold sober to music of one's long abandoned youth, risk rending the veil of forgetting unaided, unjuiced?

Things To Do When Dead Drunk #2 - listen to early Traffic?

Time shall shortly tell.