"Are you here for my pleasure, or are you going for gold...?"

Nine months on from that glorious July 6 decision, and London's successful bid for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics has now given birth to... the first official International Olympic Committee visit to make a check-up on our preparations.
The most fun I've had in my current, limited job was steering all our 2012 bid coverage, and especially trailing round behind IOC Evaluation Commission members on their tour of the Stratford scrublands and just-about-beyond in February last year.
I didn't bother to follow them up to the top floor of a Newham sheltered housing block today, having already enjoyed the view last time.
That was indeed an entertaining day.
The delegates had started that drizzy February Thursday driven by coach through the unprepossessing streets of Tower Hamlets and Newham.
Dingy brown-brick houses, sorry shops and rusty industrial outposts outnumbered the occasional flashes of colour, including an unlikely Porsche dealership.
But once they reached the top floor of the 20-storey sheltered accommodation block, Holden Point, the delegates could goggle over what would become London's 500-acre Olympic Park.
Coloured blimps perched above where the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium, the Olympic Village for 17,000 athletes, and hockey, swimming and cycling arenas would grow.
The existing 'wastelandscape' of goods yards, unsightly university halls of residence and East End Blitz debris would be cleared for a thriving Olympic park, restocked River Lea and figure-of-eight railroad.
Okay, you needed a Jonathan Edwards-style leap of imagination to picture what it could - would - become by 2012, but it was - and will be - well worthwhile.
The finest piece of writing since joining my current paper was the lengthy, impassioned document I put together for my editor, desperately striving to convince him why I should be sent to Singapore for the July decision, but sadly our company finances didn't stretch quite deep enough.
Instead, I spent the day in Trafalgar Square, enjoying the tension while remaining convinced throughout we would get the nod.
Actually, amend that. I had bullishly believed all through the bid process that London could and would triumph, despite the all-surrounding scepticism. It was only on the Wednesday morning itself, as I awoke, that I suddenly thought: "Wait a minute - maybe we're not going to do this after all!"
Thankfully Jacques Rogge came out with what the following day's Guardian front-page wrongly described as: "One sweet word: London".
Not quite. It was, in fact: One sweet syllable - "Lon-", all that was needed to send the sardine-packed Trafalgar Square crowds somehow manouevring enough room to joyously punch the air.
Sadly, we weren't to know the following day's tragedy so sharply to taint the triumph. At the time, the only downside seemed to be the inevitable, incessant repeats of Heather Small's awful anthem, "Proud".
I still can't quite believe how five of the world's major, most glamorous and significant cities were all vying for the prize at the same time, anyway.
Surely there would have been a good case for all of London, Paris, Moscow, New York and Madrid being given the Games, sealing up five consecutive host cities in a row.
But then again, it was very odd seeing so much effort and expense being spent on sucking up to the creepy IOC itself, the closed-shop club which just can't lose - the host city does all the work, picks up all the tab, yet everyone fawns over the 117 magic members of this overarching elite.
As I wrote at the time, albeit-inevitably just failing to find space among the pieces I did get printed...
ONE has been jailed for plotting to kill his country's leader, another narrowly escaped jail for bribing his government with £600million.
One is on trial for allegedly taking thousands of pounds in political kickbacks - another led Idi Amin's murderous army in Uganda.
Several have survived being found guilty of corruption in one of sport's greatest scandals.
A few are international nobility, including a Crown Prince, a Grand Duke and our own Princess Royal.
And others are undisputed kings and queens of track and field, boasting a glittering haul of Olympic gold medals.
Yet all 117 members of this very motley crew will have all the importance of aristocracy to London's Olympic hopefuls.
For they make up the International Olympic Committee, who decide on July 6 which city will host the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The IOC nowadays is keen to be seen as cleaner than clean and expelled ten members who took bribes to back Salt Lake City's bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics.
New IOC president Jacques Rogge has since barred members from visiting candidate cities and was quick recently to stamp on London's offer of free flights for athletes.
But as London, Moscow, Madrid, Paris and New York spend millions fighting for the IOC's favour, it is worth considering how tainted the organisation remains.
Six members implicated in the Salt Lake affair are still on board, while another four have survived a similar investigation surrounding the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Even post-Salt Lake, the IOC very nearly elected not Rogge, but a man now languishing in jail for embezzling £1.85million.
Helpful Salt Lake contacts put Un Yong Kim's son John Kim on the payroll of an American firm to get a green card, while the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra organised rehearsals for his pianist daughter.
But ex-secret service head Kim was given 'the most severe of warnings' but stayed on the IOC until his forced resignation last month.
This came almost a year after he was given a two-and-a-half year sentence in South Korea for embezzling corporation donations to the World Taekwondo Federation.
Another South Korean, Samsung boss Kun Hee Lee, is still on the IOC despite a suspended sentence in 1996 as part of a group bribing the country's government with £600million.
The IOC similarly retained Lassana Palenfo, jailed for a year in July 2001 for plotting to kill Ivory Coast leader, General Robert Guei.
Another jailbird, Ivan Slavkov, at least is expected to be sacked next week for telling undercover Panorama reporters he could help 'buy' IOC members' votes.
The Bulgarian member was unable to make the 1993 vote on the 2000 Games because he was under house arrest on fraud and firearms charges.
He had also spent 44 days in prison on 1990 for illegal ownership of firearms and foreign currency, and missed the 1992 Barcelona Olympics after Bulgarian police seized his passport.
Sydney organiser John Coates admitted offering fellow IOC members Charles Mukora and Frances Nyangweso £19,000 each and free stays at London's Dorchester Hotel if they backed his city's bid.
Mukora was sacked from the IOC, Nyangweso reprieved - despite being the barbaric Idi Amin's defence chief throughout the 1970s.
Finnish member Peter Tallberg refused to quit despite all three of his sons receiving jobs in countries seeking to host the Games between 1996 and 2004.
Sydney also arranged a job interview for the son of Tunisia's Mohamed Mzali,
And Sydney was also forced to drop Australian member Phil Coles, who received holidays, ski lessons, equipment and Superbowl tickets from the Salt Lake organisers.
One letter from Salt Lake president Tom Welch even promised Coles: 'Fresh snow will be ordered for your forthcoming visit.'
The IOC ordered him off the Sydney organising committee and the Australian Olympic Committee - but kept him for themselves.
Other surviving members mired by Salt Lake include Holland's Anton Geesink, severely reprimanded after an academy bearing his name was paid £3,500.
Panama's Meliton Sanchez Rivas was caught red-handed when arrested for touting 300 tickets outside the main stadium of the Barcelona Olympics.
The IOC has also been shaky on drugs - independent inquiries have criticised Holland's Hein Verbruggen and Italy's Mario Pescante for covering up doping scandals in cycling and football, respectively.
And while France's IOC members will not vote unless or until Paris is eliminated, the country has been embarrassed by Guy Drut's trial for alleged fraud.
The former sports minister is one of 47 defendants accused of receiving kickbacks from contractors renovating schools in Paris.
And then there is Fifa president Sepp Blatter and his predecessor Joao Havelange, both immensely controversial football figures who have faced - and denied - widespread allegations of sleaze.
Yet for the next week or so, they are the 'special ones' who the candidate cities dare not criticise - explaining why Sebastian Coe was so quick to withdraw London's mild funding incentives.
Michael Liebreich, who represented Britain at the 1992 Winter Olympics, warned: 'There is nothing wrong with the idea of offering financial support to athletes from poorer countries. The problem is with the wider Olympic family, which contains some very unsavoury people indeed.
'The IOC are not people who look good under scrutiny. The Olympic movement will lurch from scandal to scandal until there is root-and-branch reform.'

"Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look...?

Ever since the nine-year-old me sat through a long-ish drive to Woburn Safari Park, with my parents pushing Rock'n'Roll Music - Volume One into the cassette player, there have been four people who have meant more to me than anyone beyond family.
Their names are John, Paul, George and Ringo.
And, yes, there was a "One-two-three-FOUR!" introduction involved.
I'm always instinctively suspicious of people who claim they don't like The Beatles.
Like grown men who insist they're not football fans, can't and won't understand the game indeed...
Weirdoes...
But since I started straggling together every stray copper, until I had enough to pay £5.99 for Rock'n'Roll - Volume Two or Beatles Ballads or - soon enough - proper, original albums-as-first-released, the Fab Four and pretty much all they spawned has been my happiest obsession.
I will even hurl myself into fevered defences of "Frog Song" Macca on occasion, though I shall restrain myself now.
But I did wonder, about a year-and-a-half ago, when ponderously moving home from Worthing to Barnet, whether my too-hefty book collection was perhaps a little too Beatle-heavy.
I could, in fact, fill a whole bookshelf with Beatles tomes, distinct entirely from the CD cabinet stuffed with Please Please Me to Abbey Road, Live At The Star Club to Anthology 3, All Things Must Pass to Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, Bossa Nova Beatles to The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, bootlegs taking in Wings, the Travelling Wilburys, the All-Starr Band and etcetcetcetcetera...
And yet, and yet... I can't let any of them go.
And indeed, I can't keep adding to them.
My brother Noel, as part of his valedictory bridgegroomly speeches, handed each of his siblings a book token (nicely-judged - I'd have been desperately disappointed with flowers), and I set off for Waterstone's a few days later with full intentions to finally buy the Peter Cook anthology, Tragically I Was An Only Twin.
And yet, and yet... what catches my eye but a glistening silver Beatles book which has somehow evaded my attention for - the inside page incredibly tells me - almost two whole years...?
The Beatles: Ten Years That Shook The World - a collection made by Mojo magazine, trawling together features, reviews and interviews by some of the most venerable music hacks around. Oh, and plenty of gorgeous glossy photos, too...
It's not really a handy book to browse on the daily commute, but since buying it - within about seconds of spotting - I've had it propped up on my dinner table for every evening's entertainment...
And still been surprised by some of the insights, despite an adolescence often spent poring over that monthly pedants' special, The Beatle Book magazine (having convinced the local newsagent to order in copies, with a stern astonishment he didn't stock them already...)
For no reason other than, well, I dunno, here are a few of my favourite Beatle books...

* The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology: Well, of course... 367 pages of riches which, were they not of such shiny silver, you'd swear were solid gold in all essences...
The TV series itself was a revelation, even for the most knowledgeable Beatles obsessive, purely for the special aura each interview carried, the rarest of rare tapes and footage somehow unearthed beyond the call of duty - and the lavish loving care and attention given to each second. Though I did feel slightly sorry for the sole stooodent who was turfed out of our hall's TV room for the first episode, having happily booked the video to watch a tape of some old "Hitchhiker's Guide" episode only for a band of us Beatle-niks to march in and brook no argument...
But the CDs. And the DVDs. And, oh yes, the book too...
Random highlight: (When the Hell's Angels invaded an Apple Christmas party in 1968)
NEIL ASPINALL: "They did get asked to leave Apple. I asked them, but they got into that hippy language: 'Well, you didn't invite us, so YOU can't ask us to leave...' In other words, as George had invited them, so George was going to have to ask them to go. I think George did it very well - I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was like: 'Yes/no - Yin/Yang - in/out - stay/go. You know - BUGGER OFF!' And they said: 'Well, if you put it that way, George, of course...' and left."

* Geoffrey Stokes, The Beatles - 25th Anniversary Special: The first glossy silver Beatles hardback I owned, and proudly autographed and addressed by myself, I now discover... Large print and double spaced, but tells a very straight, comprehensive story with plenty of appropriately-sepia prints and a 1979 introduction by Leonard Bernstein.
Random highlight: Bernstein eulogising "the frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation, the utterly fresh lyrics, the Schubert-like flow of musical invention and the Fuck-You coolness of these Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse".

* Ian MacDonald, Revolution In The Head: The Beatles' Records And The Sixties: Perhaps the most readable and reasonable of the many pseudish, detailed analyses of each and every Beatles song, bar-by-bar, by the late great NME historian. The closing chapter writing off the sheer evilness of ALL modern pop music is perhaps a little unnecessary and heavy-handed, but even at its most technical, the insights into each song - and, indeed, recording - manages to throw fresh light on even the most familiar pleasures.
Random highlight: "Conceded by Lennon to be the best song on Abbey Road, SOMETHING is the acme of Harrison's achievement as a writer. Lacking his usual bitter harmonies, it deploys a key-structure of classical grace and panoramic effect, supported by George Martin's sympathetic viola/cello countermelody and delicate pizzicato violins through the middle eight. If McCartney wasn't jealous, he should have been."

* Michael Braun, Love Me Do! The Beatles' Progress: Perhaps the most cherishable, underrated Beatle book, this was published in 1964, the full flush of Beatlemania and yet full of both transient, off-the-cuff commentary and lasting insights into the madness which would actually endure... Jelly babies, Elvis, hysterical to-ing-and-feverish-fro-ing of the world's Press, and that famous Fab Four hack-charming wit - as actually experienced, not told from afar with nostalgianecdote-ishness at its most avariciously "whimsical"... Braun should have been what Hunter Davies became.
Random highlight: "Before the reception the Beatles met the Ambassador and Lady Ormsby Gore at the Embassy residence. When John is introduced to him Sir David says: 'Hello, John.'
'I'm not John,' says John. 'I'm Charlie. That's John,' and he points to George.
'Hello, John,' says the Ambassador, turning to George.
'I'm not John,' says George, 'I'm Frank. That's John,' and he points to Paul.
'Oh, dear!' says the Ambassador. 'I'll never get these names right. My wife is much better at remembering names.'
...
Several hours later, Sir Alec Douglas-Home met President Johnson. The President remarked, 'I liked your advance party, but don't you feel they need haircuts?'"

* William J Dowling, Beatlesongs: A curio, both slapdash and comprehensive in its own strange way, running down every song officially issued by The Beatles and running extracts from many other books and magazines under the various categories "AUTHORSHIP", "RECORDED", "INSTRUMENTATION", "CHART ACTION", "MISCELLANEOUS" and "COMMENTS BY BEATLES". Hardly definitive, but a fun, browse-able beginning.
Random highlight: The way it splits each song's authorship into constituents of "1.00" (eg. "Birthday" is 0.7 McCartney and 0.3 Lennon), so credits are calculated for George's sister Louise Harrison (0.05 of "Piggies"), Yoko Ono (0.25 of "Revolution #9") and Thomas Dekker (0.3 of "Golden Slumbers"), for example...
If you don't want to know the overall result, look away now...
Lennon wins, with 84.55 to McCartney's 73.65... So now you know.

* James Henke, Lennon Legend: An Illustrated Life Of John Lennon: The book's basic text adds little new to the familiar story, but the additions are stunning - removable replicas of Lennon's old school reports, his Lewis Carroll-esque self-produced school magazines, A Hard Day's Night and How I Won The War posters, handwritten lyrics sheets, Ed Sullivan Show tickets, avant-garde artwork, scrawled-across Press releases... For the inner light, the inner child in every Beatles fan!
Random highlight: (From his school report) "French: A disappointing result. He is so fond of obtaining a cheap laugh in class that he has little time left for serious concentration.
Mathematics: He is certainly on the road to failure."
(From his school-scribbled publication, "The Daily Howl") "News about Firework Night (Fred's birthday) - The sad news has just come through that only 80 people above the age of 76 were killed. Most of the spoilsports just lost their sight, and maimed for life. And it wasn't for want of trying."

* Tony Barrow and Robin Bextor, Paul McCartney: Now And Then: Seemingly inessential yet glossy 2004 hardback, split into two sections for former Beatles Press officer, the garrulous Tony Barrow, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor's documentary-making dad to record their various impressions of the man Macca, but manages to be throw in plenty of little gems of fresh observation - especially the homely descriptions of Robin'n'Paul sharing pints of home-brew (made by Macca, and bottled with his own home-printed label) as they look out over the Sussex Downs from Paul's Peasmarsh pad, before the old man moves to the piano to bash out a tipsy Long And Winding Road...
Robin - lovely chap, one lucky sod nevertheless...
Random highlight: (Robin Bextor) "George Martin once said to me in an unguarded moment that I should imagine for a moment getting up in the morning determined to spend as much money as I could. Buy a car in the morning, walk down Bond Street and stop in every shop and buy more clothes, records, watches, anything, dine in the best restaurants and go to the best clubs and then get home laden down with wordly goods late in the evening to realise that you had earned far more than you spent that day - that is what it is like being McCartney. Finance simply isn't an issue with Paul now."

* Andrew Solt and Sam Egan, Imagine: John Lennon: A hefty paperback released to accompany the skilful 1988 film, this deftly collates a load of Lennon quotes alongside plenty of photos from Yoko's private collection - especially homely and emotional as the 1970s move on and especially in the final, poignant 1980 chapter.
Random highlight: 1980 - "We're not selling ourselves as the perfect couple. We have our problems, we've had our problems, but when I was singing and writing this and working with her, I was visualising all the people of my age group and singing to them. I hope the young kids like it as well, but I'm really talking to the people that grew up with me. I'm saying, 'Here I am now, how are you, how's your relationship going, did you get through it all, weren't the seventies a drag, here we are, well, let's try and make the eighties good, you know.' It's not out of our control, I still believe in love. I still believe in peace... Where there's life, there's hope."

Of course, there are many many more - for example, Hunter Davies's workmanlike authorised biography from 1968, updated in 1985. Philip Norman's fizzier account, Shout! Albert Goldman's compelling, yet over-reachingly scandalous The Lives Of John Lennon. Blackbird, Geoffrey Giuliano's pale photocopy of a Goldman-job on McCartney. John's joyous "Daily Howl" updates In His Own Write and Spaniard In The Works. George's own intriguing indulgence, I Me Mine, Ringo's homely Postcards From The Boys. Mark Lewisohn's chronicles of every "day in the life" of every Beatle or Beatle-associate you could ever imagine...
And new, newer releases a-plenty...

I might just get through a few more book tokens yet...

Get your kicks on Route 66... or else rock with me on the A23?

(from The Argus, Brighton - Saturday, September 6, 2003)
Lou Reed has done it for New York, Bruce Springsteen has done it for New Jersey and Ray Davies has done it for London.
All have immortalised their home territories in pop music, from Reed’s Greenwich Village bohemia to Springsteen’s desolate factories and docklands to the Kinks’s Carnaby Street dedicated followers of fashion.
Sussex has its share of rock’n’roll connections and not just as a comfy country retreat for wealthy megastars such as Sir Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Brian Ferry.
Brighton has long been a hotbed of up-and-coming talent, as well as a favourite haunt for rockers - and, of course, mods, most famously portrayed in The Who’s film Quadrophenia.
But Worthing, Eastbourne and Shoreham will never evoke the same aura of rock history, glamour and edge as the likes of Detroit, Harlem and Seattle - or even Liverpool, London and “Madchester”.
So surely anyone hoping to compile an album of pop songs inspired by Sussex might struggle to fill even an EP?
Actually, no.
Even without radio DJ Terry Garoghan’s Brighton-championing songs which, while popular with fans, fail to meet my criteria of troubling the Top 75.
Anyone who is not a pop music anorak may care to turn the page now.
But in the spirit of the king of home-taping obsessive featured in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a track listing for a notional Now That’s What I Call Sussex!-style album could look a little like this.
Every DIY rock compiler knows two of the most important elements to a proper mix tape is the title and the opening track.
Brighton Rock is an obvious name - and a predictable one.
Perhaps, with hat tipped to Ian Dury, Sussex And Drugs And Rock’N’Roll would suit instead.
And who better to usher the listener into this sonic tour of the South Coast than the unofficial king of Brighton and Hove, Fatboy Slim?
The Hove-living-and-loving DJ, real name Norman Cook, included the celebratory track YOU’RE NOT FROM BRIGHTON on his 1998 album, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.
The lyrics may not give Bob Dylan any sleepless nights, consisting merely of four phrases repeated: “Funk as we used to play”, “Said check baby, check baby, check one-two”, “Here we go, now here we go” and “You’re not from Brighton”.
But the sound, and the spirit suggested by that taunt to those unfortunate to be from elsewhere, would get things off to a flier.
Following one of Brighton’s trendiest stars would be a famous son of Sussex who hit the big time long before Norm was even crooning with The Housemartins.
Seventies star Leo Sayer was born in Shoreham and, according to his song writing partner David Courtney, the town was a key influence on his early material.
THE BELLS OF ST MARY’S, from his 1974 album Just A Boy, was inspired by the church in Shoreham and his experiences playing at a nearby folk club.
It includes the lyrics:
“He used to play mouth organ in a folk club they called the Lady Jane,
All the sounds as his friends and he would holler:
Songs of love and songs of pain…
And so he listens to the bells of St Mary’s and so their echo haunts him every day.”
Courtney said: “All Leo’s early stuff was written around here - Leo was a Shoreham boy and that really comes across, especially on Just A Boy.”
Before Leo launched his own singing career, he and Courtney wrote songs for Roger Daltrey’s solo LPs.
And no Brighton album would be complete without a contribution from the band he fronted, The Who, a key part of Brighton’s reputation as a Mecca for mods.
PINBALL WIZARD, from 1976, is a rare example, though, of a Who track that actually mentions Brighton:
“Ever since I was a young boy
I played the silver ball,
From Soho down to Brighton
I must have played them all.”
The kids pulling levers, pressing buttons and emptying their wallets in Brighton’s amusement arcades of today would probably better recognise the opening riff from ‘Let Me Entertain You’ by Robbie Williams.
But in the battle to get on this play list, Robbie loses out on two counts.
One, he has no Brighton connection.
And two, his riff-ripping-off song is quite frankly nowhere near as good. But you all knew that anyway...
Paul Weller, however, has plenty of connections to Brighton.
He has paid frequent visits, including his last gig with The Jam at the Brighton Centre in 1982.
However, it is to two more unlikely Sussex locations that he refers in SATURDAY’S KIDS, from the 1979 Jam album Setting Sons.
The song paints a picture of late-Seventies working-class youth culture.
The tone may seem sympathetic but their apparent lack of ambition is nailed in the lyric:
“Save up their money for a holiday
To Selsey Bill or Bracklesham Bay…”
Now Selsey Bill certainly isn’t very rock’n’roll.
But somehow it has managed to find its way into two notable pop songs.
Madness, contemporaries of The Jam, had a more familiar - and cheerier - hit with 1982’s DRIVING IN MY CAR, in which Suggs sings:
“I drove up to Muswell Hill,
I’ve even been to Selsey Bill.”
Well, good for him.
David Bowie may be one of the world’s biggest, most acclaimed stars but he is not universally popular down this way.
Worthing poet Shuna Shelley believes his 1977 single ‘Heroes’ plagiarises a poem called ‘The Heroes’ Epistle To Bowie’ she sent him in 1974.
Her poem included the lines:
“Well, we can be heroes
Just for our day
I, I will be king,
And you,
You will be my queen
And I wish,
I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim”.
Bowie’s song includes the words:
“I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen.
We can beat them, just for one day.
I, I wish you could swim like the dolphins,
Like dolphins can swim.”
But Bowie, who denied the plagiarism claims, is included here for a different crime against Sussex - and against music itself.
His 1973 children’s song THE LAUGHING GNOME contains the lyrics:
“Well I gave him roasted toadstools and a glass of dandelion wine,
Then I put him on a train to Eastbourne.”
This namecheck, and the fact the town gave the world Toploader, are Eastbourne’s two claims to rock’n’roll fame - or, perhaps more accurately, infamy.
Suede front man Brett Anderson, an ardent Bowie acolyte, grew up in Lindfield, near Haywards Heath, but his band seemed to have a rather stronger fixation with Worthing.
Anderson once nominated the place as one of his favourite two in the world - along with London.
The seaside resort gets mentioned in THE NEXT LIFE, from Suede’s eponymous debut album in 1993:
“Stars in our car we can drive away from here,
Far away, so far away,
Down to Worthing and work there.”
The more geographically-ambitious track, Europe Is Our Playground, features the reference: “From Spain to Camber Sands”.
Like Selsey Bill, Camber Sands has two bites at the pop cherry, cropping up at the very start of PULLING MUSSELS FROM A SHELL by Squeeze in 1980:
“They do it down in Camber Sands,
They do it in Waikiki.”
You don’t often hear those two places mentioned in the same sentence.
Queen included a song called BRIGHTON ROCK on their 1974 album Sheer Heart Attack, telling of two lovers called Jimmy and Jenny who presumably meet in Brighton though it is not mentioned by name.
Another track called BRIGHTON ROCK featured as a B-side for Nineties Britpoppers Elastica, whose bassist Annie Holland came from Brighton.
It begins:
“We were sauced right there on Brighton beach,
You a Goth and I was such a peach,
I sought to be the best at it,
PC Plod he still arrested it…
Your name is carved on my Brighton rock,
My name can be your mental block.”
It may be significant that singer Justine Frischmann - Anderson’s ex - reportedly began her romance with Damon Albarn when Blur performed at Brighton’s Zap Club.
Though it is admittedly difficult to imagine even the changeling Damon as a Goth, it must be granted.
The spirit of Brighton Rock - Graham Greene’s version - is summoned by Morrissey’s lovely NOW MY HEART IS FULL, from 1994’s Vauxhall And I LP.
In a lyric which appears a trawl of Moz obsessions and impressions, he name checks “Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie, Cubitt” - the hoodlums from Greene’s 1938 novel.
Indie pop intellectuals Black Box Recorder closed their 2000 album The Facts Of Life with with the elegiac GOODNIGHT KISS, which swoons:
“From Blackpool tower, to Brighton Pier,
Turn the lights off, we know there’s no one here -
Goodbye, goodnight.”
Contuing the link between the two far-apart beach resorts beginning with B, The Beautiful South’s 1989 track ON BLACKPOOL claims:
“I wasn’t sure if it was Marx or Hitler that was in this year,
I hadn’t been to Brighton for a while so it wasn’t clear.
So imagine my surprise when I opened my eyes to find
It was the liberals who were hip to sloganeer.”
No prizes for guessing who turns up in SHERIFF FATMAN, Carter USM’s 1989 rant against ruthless slum landlords:
“Now he’s moving up on to second base
Between Nicholas Van Wotsisface.”
Equally splenetic is SO WHAT, recorded first by late-Seventies punks The Anti-Nowhere League and covered more recently - and improbably - by American heavy-rockers Metallica.
The song begins:
“Well, I’ve been to Hastings, and I’ve been to Brighton,
I’ve been to Eastbourne too.
So what? So what?
Who cares? Who cares what you do?
Yeah, who cares? Who cares?
About you, you, you, you, you?”
It then descends into a feast of filth hardly suitable for a family newspaper such as this - even if the album could claim perhaps some much-needed streetcred with one of Tipper Gore’s stickers warning of bad language herein….
For achieving the unlikely union of Metallica and Sussex, the cover version deserves its places and the album’s final say.
Now all we need is a record company willing to take Sussex And Drugs And Rock’n’Roll from the bedroom to the boardroom to a music store near you.
So, who wants it?
Don’t all rush at once…

Quite astonishingly - and depressingly - we somehow managed to put together a 'follow-up' album for an even more desperate follow-up feature a few months later: crowbarring in alternate versions of PINBALL WIZARD and SO WHAT by Elton John and The Anti-Nowhere League respectively; ONE WAY by The Levellers (it seems fairly clearly to be about their hometown of Brighton, without actually namechecking the place - good enough for me); MARIO'S CAFE by St Etienne (it may be about a diner in Camden but it does mention, er, Chris Eubank...); RUMBLE IN BRIGHTON by The Stray Cats; ROBOT HOLIDAY by The Spizzles ("No more work for one whole week, oil my joints so they don't squeak, I'm going to Brighton in the sun, I sit in deckchairs, have some fun" - amazing these boys aren't megastars by now, isn't it...?); Al Stewart's NOT THE ONE set in The Lanes, and also his MANUSCRIPT tripping to Worthing, where "it rained and rained" - yep, from my 18 months living there, that seems accurate...; the poignant WWI ballad MAGINOT WALTZ by the underrated Ralph McTell...
Oh, and one track I'm half-glad, half-somehow-sad never to have actually heard, only read of: the seminal I'M GOING TO BRIGHTON by those early-Eighties legends Renee and Renato.

If anyone does indeed have a copy... I'd advise you to keep it very, very and, indeed, very quiet...