My iPod plays such an integral part in my life that I often wonder how I ever coped without it. I have it on in my car, in my bedroom, when I am in the bath and when I am working at home, in fact I have it on now, keeping me company as I write another post that will have you all rolling around on the floor with laughter as you experience yet another blog  featuring untamed razor sharp wit that knows no boundaries or any knowledge of playing by a book of rules.

My iPod features, I am proud to say, an eclectic mix of music that allows me to feel relaxed, sombre, excited, aggressive or rebellious, depending on the level of my mood on that particular day. For rebellion I have The Pogues and The Men They Couldn’t Hang, for Sunday mornings I have Elbow or The Beautiful South, and for depression I have The Velvet Underground, Joy Division and The Smiths. For pretending I am an air guitaring stadium rocker for the benefit of my bemused postman, I have The Who and The Rolling Stones and for my neighbours I have Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash and The Jam. I even have Pink Floyd for when I want to experience what it is like to wear Brutus jeans and have an unhealthy appetite for looking like a 24 carat bell end.

However, I also have music on my iPod which makes me feel at a loss as to how it actually got there, it is as though someone sneaked in during the middle of the night and slipped it in on a rare occasion when Chinook pilots were having an evening off from sporadically awakening me with reenactments of a Baghdad airlift. These artists include Duran Duran, Dido and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, inexplicable choices that arrived from God know’s where and a as consequence, send me in to deep thought as to their origin. I can understand a woman approaching middle age listening to 80’s wank band Duran Duran, but any self respecting man of any age should not have such an album in his possession… So where did it come from?  I think I have remembered the answer!

A friend of mine let’s call him Gary for the sake of privacy (and because that is his name) was working at my house many years ago and he kindly offered me some American soft porn off his external hard drive, a gift I was reluctant to accept but did so purely out of politeness and a desire not to hurt his feelings. Later that evening when the house was empty, I decided, for purposes of curiosity, to view the offensive material to see what drove the carnal extincts of this very sick individual. Imagine my disappointment delight when I discovered that I had copied his girlfriend’s music on to my computer rather than the filth that he had attempted to corrupt me with… Fortunately the only “Girls on Film” I would be witnessing that night were on Duran Duran‘s greatest hits album. It’s hard to tell you just how relieved I was and the album remains on my iPod to this day.

Dido is harder to explain, it is an album that is so shit that I can’t even begin to describe it, yet it is on my iPod. Why? My only guess is that at some point, in a moment of madness, I decided that because she had sung in the background of an Eminem song – “Stan” – that I quite liked, she must be a good music artist in her own right. Wrong, it is actually a pile of nonsensical old bollocks. I really must work out some day how to remove music, it can’t be that difficult but I live in mortal fear of pressing a “delete all” button that will leave me with nothing but a costly and painstaking excercise downloading it all again. Despite being in the middle of Hatch Warren thanks to my old mates at BT, I experience an excrutiating download speed of 0.5 megabytes per second. So Dido remains, sporadically appearing to annoy me when I am on random play.

Tesla Girls introduced by Mega Wanker Dave Lee Travis

I will leave you with OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) a band I have struggled decide whether I like or not since they wrote “Enola Gay” in 1980. Quite why I am still confused thirty two years later I don’t know and quite why I have never fully found out what a Tesla Girl is, is another mystery equal to the one that made me download not one but two of their albums, perhaps Gary did more than one job for me? Every time that song comes on in my car or as it did in my kitchen earlier this evening, I always wonder what on earth a Tesla Girl is. I nearly found out a few months ago when my friend Nick’s partner, Paula, Googled it, but the answer was vague and basically guess work from the author. However ladies and gentleman, I have an exclusive on Bob’s blog… Yes, I am about to tell you what a Tesla Girl is.

Nikola Tesla was a brilliant Serbian scientist (whose experiments with electricity led to a system that brought electric current into homes so we could later enjoy our flat-screen TVs) and he was was a constant source of fascination to OMD singer Andy McCluskey one of the “electro pop” musicians of the early eighties. McCluskey was equally fascinated with Martha Ladly from Martha & the Muffins who unfortunately for him (McCluskey) was dating OMD’s graphic designer Peter Saville at the time. The idea of Tesla Girls was that they gave off electricity you see and Martha Ladly was, according to McCluskey, very clever, one might even say electric. By now you should be grasping the sentiment, basically that McCluskey liked electricity and that electric or intelligent girls were in fact like Tesla , some might say they were Tesla Girl’s!

If you are single, the next time you try to charm a woman, tell her that she reminds you of Serbian electro-scientist Nikola Tesla and I am sure you will be on to a certain winner.