Tee-hee. Deeply unfashionable, this. Everybody seems to hate it. The fact that you can buy it on Amazon's marketplace for £0.01 is ample testimony to that. Before I could prompt her with the question, Lucy volunteered, "I hate this music — who is it?" My friend Jo is a big Small Faces fan, and considers M People's cover of Itchycoo Park one of the greatest crimes against culture in the 20th century. I rather like it, and — confession time — I got to know it before I'd ever heard the original. Should I be embarrassed by that? I don't see why. And notwithstanding the "handbag house" jibes against M People, I don't consider this album a guilty pleasure. It's got some good pop music on it, well performed, and I feel no guilt about liking it. In fact I'm rather proud of the independent-mindedness that eschewed buying Oasis and Pulp albums in favour of M People in the mid-'90s.
In those days M used to insist on watching the Chart Show on ITV on Saturday morning, and it became part of our weekend routine. Thus I was exposed willy-nilly to the likes of Simply Red's Fairground, Natalie Imbruglia and Texas. I quite liked Texas, too, but never got as far as buying one of their albums.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not going to defend M People to the death. The truth is that after the first five songs on the first disc the rest of the music sounds like second-rate padding. And even those first five songs each outstay their welcome by about two minutes.
With Xenakis, Lee Perry and now this, it's certainly a week of fairly extreme jump-cuts.
 MusicBrainz entry for disc 1
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