From Glasgow -- where we've been staying at Joe Howe's place near the Necropolis -- to Newcastle, where I play a show at the charming Star and Shadow cinema, run by an 80-year-old Geordie communist who used to take his didactic drama unit round the local mines and factories, raising class consciousness. My show takes the format of a Michael Parkinson interview programme -- Parky and I (he's a showroom dummy) sit on an Ikea sofa chatting about each of the songs I play. Sample dialogue: "This was from my Bataille / De Sade / Mishima period, Michael, I'm sure you went through one too -- around the time of your short-lived Channel 4 show, maybe."



The following day we leave Byker Wall, the award-winning 70s housing scheme where promoter Craig Wilson lives with Krista, his girlfriend (a Finn, Krista is the woman you see strapped naked to a trolley during "Trust Me, I'm A Doctor" in the Man of Letters DVD!) and head down to the Tyne, the Millenium Bridge, and Baltic Mills, the vast Tate-Modern-like arts centre perched on the Gateshead side of the river. The facade is dominated by one of Yoshitomo Nara's sulky toddlers. The shows inside are predominantly Japanese at the moment: Nara and Graf, Mariko Mori.



Mori I think has gone from being a 90s show-off to a 00s spiritual charlatan -- I don't have much time for her pseudo-spiritual dribs and drabs, and the 80 year-old Geordie communist in me can't forgive her for belonging to a rich family who own half of Roppongi. As for Nara, although I've been rather over-exposed to his work -- I've seen variants of this Graf show in Osaka and Berlin already, although it's localised each time -- I continue to find it interesting.



Yes, his little girls are twee as hell -- but they're spooky too. Yes, the puritan dollhouses Graf build around Nara's imagery turn the gallery into a theme park (the local element this time was a huge glitterball built into one of the facades, based on something Nara and Graf found in a local bar). But they give the encounter with Nara's imagery a whole new dimension, one which saves the whole project as far as I'm concerned. Nara and Graf continue to create magic -- contemplative spaces from an episode of Little House on the Prairie set on Mars. It would be a sour old man indeed who didn't find his inner child while negotiating the rickety walkways that connect one ramshackle hut, one disturbingly alien little girl, to another.



After the Nara show Hisae and I explored the relaxation / education centre on the first floor, a place of tactically mismatched chairs, plasma screen TVs showing interviews with the artists, toys and tiny tables for children. It felt really good to be there, and to watch the pedestrian bridge outside winched up and down for the ships to pass through. Sure, the dominant tone of Baltic at the moment is an infantilizing one, and the development smacks of a bid to use culture (friendly, reassuring, childish culture) as an engine for redevelopment. But at the same time, when you see the new electric buses with their organically-shaped windscreens dropping new visitors outside the impressive building, you can't stay cynical.

Talking of cynical, I picked up the latest edition of Modern Painters in the Baltic giftshop. The magazine has got even thinner -- fewer ads -- and sports a new look which might as well be a demonstration that style-mismatching as often leads to visual disaster as the distinguished eclecticism seen amongst the chairs upstairs. Diarist Matthew Collings seems more dyspeptic than ever, somewhat less enchanted by the contemporary art scene than even Brian Sewell.

Under the heading "Evil Zeitgeist", Collings (who's in New York) begins: "Art today is understood as a series of moves that you have to comprehend and absorb, in order to position and advance yourself in a game for a group of people whose creativity has become repellent without their realizing it. That is, if you're an artist. Your whole role in society has become weirdly hateful. What on earth happened? The shows roll by, feeding the art industry, not feeding anything else, just seeming like object versions of shouting, or someone reading familiar, acceptable meanings off a list, or idiotically droning or mumbling in a childish attempt to come across as a mystical genius or someone highly educated. It's very rare to see a contemporary art show that isn't like toys for children."

While I have to say that "childish attempts at mystical genius" and "toys for children" are absolutely perfect descriptions of what was on show at Baltic, I don't share Collings' despair. Sure, we read that kind of blanket statement and recognize something generally true -- there is a lot of toxic jockeying, especially in cities like New York where everything is all about money. But the encounter with art still takes us to places we can't reach any other way.

I'm not sure if the "evil" part of Collings' picture enters because artists are pretending to be childlike themselves, or treating their audiences like children, or whether it's the combination of that with the world of money, or the combination of all this with Modern Painters' decreasing advertising revenue. But being reconnected with your inner child isn't such a bad thing to have happen, in a huge post-industrial building full of tiny wooden huts, after a journey across a pedestrian bridge or via a blobby green electric bus.

Hisae and I are in Glasgow, staying with Joe Howe / Germlin. Here's a glimpse of the excellent Jim Lambie installation at GoMA; concrete wedges of vinyl albums and crosshatched floor tape filling the elegant Victorian hall.



We'll try and see the Harry Smith Anthology Remixed show at CCA tomorrow, and maybe Recoat Gallery, before heading off to Newcastle to play the Star Cinema... and maybe see Yoshitomo Nara and Mariko Mori at Baltic Mill. Details of the Momus shows in Newcastle (Wednesday) and Glasgow (Sunday) are on the LastFM Momus events page.



Here, from the NYLVI blog, is a video of King Solomon's Song and Mine and Violets from my Berlin show two nights ago.

The Vice Guide to North Korea is a 14-episode account -- made at some risk to the journalists -- of a heavily-guarded journey through North Korea. I found it fascinating, but I did notice some dubious ideology creeping in, especially in Episode 12, A Schoolchildren's Palace, billed as "meeting the country's creepily over-talented future generation".



Here Shane Smith edged towards that journalistic-political cliché I call the "we don't like how they treat their women / children" school. Basically, the idea behind this move is that in any given culture, men are responsible for the ideology, and women and children are helpless victims and hostages. The implication is that, although the men are a lost cause, the women and children could be captured and brought to some other culture, where they'd be much happier.

This "much happier", in Smith's account of North Korean children, involves being a lot less motivated and talented. "One of the most fun-slash-sad times," Smith says in Episode 12, "was to see the best-of-the-best school in Pyongyang." After showing some child prodigies playing musical instruments larger than themselves, Smith decides that "it's so sad because these great kids are learning and learning for the state". But what's wrong with learning -- to exceptionally high standards -- for the state, and at the expense of the state? Are these children really to be pitied? Mightn't they be -- as well as "great kids" -- fervently ideological admirers of Kim Jong Il, believers in North Korea's superiority over South Korea, and convinced that their "creepy talents" could only have been advanced so far in the particular system they were born into?



And mightn't the show they're preparing for -- a show in a land of shows, some of the most spectacular in the world -- be the intense focus of their lives, and a source of enormous pride for them?

I'm certainly not claiming the North Korean system isn't deeply problematical, but I wonder why we insist on the universal innocence of women and children when we look at cultures which are very different from our own? And I wonder whether the implied transferability of these women and children to our own system (where they'd be "healthy and free", of course) isn't a relic of the unpleasant imperial practices of rape, pillage and plunder: the strategy of killing all the men in a conquered zone and capturing all the women and children.

For some reason -- partly because they're readers of this blog -- I've got friendly, over the last couple of years, with a bunch of students at UDK, the Berlin art college, and specifically from the Art in Context course there. This weekend the UDK opened its doors for its annual Rundgang, a degree show or "walkabout" so vast that one visitor we saw had opted to do it on rollerskates.



There was certainly enough on display to eat up, delightfully, an entire afternoon. Building after building, studio after studio, floor after floor was filled with new student art -- plus the obligatory paint-spattered stools, niched classical friezes with broken fingers, orange gaffertape signage, filthy fridges filled with beer, and other signifiers of eternal art school bohemia.



It almost felt like a biennial, but with a vaster range between the awful and the excellent.



Aus Dem Context, the Art in Context room, was undoubtedly the best thing in the whole school -- and I don't just say that because it's my friends' department! In contrast to the stale rooms of paintings and sculpture elsewhere, Art in Context's multi-disciplinary, meta-ish, museum-like, curatorial approach felt much better in tune with what's happening in the wider art world, as well as being much better connected with society.



There were displays devoted to "the flea as metaphor", Relational Aesthetics tables where "art advisors" guided aspiring artists through the likely pitfalls of their chosen careers, models of the monkey houses at Berlin Zoo, a section about experimental chairs, and a corner by Viola Thiele -- one half of a band called Mosh Mosh -- about the crossover between art and pop music which included big panels about Miss Le Bomb, David Bowie, Sun Ra and Goodiepal. This excited me because I've just written a song called "Goodiepal". Thiele spelled his name wrong in her presentation ("Goodypal"), but redeemed herself by offering this excellent picture of the reclusive Danish electronic music genius:



I think my favourite piece was a chart of elephant representations by Uli Westphal, Elephas Anthropogenus, a tree diagram showing the way humans have classified and represented elephants over the centuries. When we see such representations in museums, it's usually the elephant which is seen to evolve over the millenia, from mammoths to today's Indian and African species. In Uli's diagram (from her diploma Vom Elpendier zum Olifaunt) it's our own perceptions which change, from the ludicrously phantasmagorical to the banal.



It's also a piece about drawing, about hermeneutics, about the style of didactic design, and about a certain German pedagogy. I can't help relating it to my Click Opera piece The blind gaijin and the Japanese elephant, which was also about how we know what we claim to know, and how we draw what we see.

More rundgang pictures on my Flickr page. Oh, and if you're in Berlin, don't forget that I play tonight at West Germany!

There's a mathematics of desire, and both men and women are intuitively aware of the numbers. Take the so-called "hourglass figure", for instance. The formula is that you divide waist circumference by hip circumference. The "hourglass" ratio is around 0.7, which means that the waist is about 70% of the girth of the hips below it. To make a perfect "hourglass", the breasts should then match the hip width. That shape is "curvy" and "feminine", but only 8% of women actually have it.



Research into the hourglass figure has thrown some curveballs: women with large breasts and narrow waists have higher hormone levels, the BBC reported in 2004, and are more likely to get pregnant. Then some research in 2007 seemed to find that curvier women are smarter and live longer than other women.

Scientists also looked at when and where the preference for the hourglass figure emerges, and found that it's not shared outside Western cultures (developing cultures prefer fatter women, a sign of nutritional health) or amongst pre-pubescents. Whereas 10 and 11 year-olds of both sexes express a preference for hourglass-shaped women, 5 or 6 year-olds prefer thin figures "which probably closely mirror their own shape", according to one Queensland University study.

If you have an hour or so to waste (I almost wrote "waist"), Long Dong's collection of Akira Gomi's taxonomic photos of naked women, Chinese and American, makes for fascinating viewing. We instantly know how we feel about each image, and the cues are geometric and mathematical ones, a matter of shapes, dimensions and ratios.



Those pictures are still and inexpressive, though -- a whole different set of "semantic angles" emerge when a body goes into motion. The pictures above are from a yoga video by eccentric Japanese vlogger Naganonoteiou. What interests me here is how some of the poses she strikes -- specifically the angles her legs are held in -- are "normal", others become "lightly erotic", others again way too blatant and over-the-top (reading a book with her feet, bent over backwards) and blow the appeal. This suggests that my brain assigns specific sexual semantics to small differences of posture; that there's a "geometry of sex".

I reject the cultural determinism of the Queensland study, though; I don't think the age you are or the culture you come from determines how you respond to this sexual geometry. Despite being a Western male, for instance, I find little appeal in the classic Sophia Loren hourglass figure -- this may be because of some innate horror of reproduction, or it may be because of strong positive associations with less curvy Asian women. Osyama from the Tokyo Bopper store (whose staff members are celebrated daily on the Merry Daily blog) represents my current ideal figure; the particular geometric relationship that concerns me, when I see pictures of her, isn't her waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), but speculation on whether her super-thin legs really do stay parallel all the way up to the top.

Then again, tastes change; I used to prefer Yama-Sama.

I decided to do a little slideshow for my Post-Materialist slot in the Times this week -- basically, these are all the chairs I photographed this year, crammed into a short YouTube video with a somewhat rushed commentary.



Judging by the comments, while some found 5000 Years of Chairs in 5 Minutes "very interesting", others were mystified. "What’s the point?" demanded Steve, apparently some kind of academic, "If I received this presentation from a student, I would fail him/her." Jared's jab was more sly: "The anticipation of a conclusion or insightful comment kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time!"

I figured people wouldn't want a ton of editorializing in a little slideshow of chairs, but for the record here's the thinking behind the piece.

1. Things are just as valid and interesting when they're in use out in the world as they are when they're new and standing in a showroom, and possibly more so.

2. This is what Rem Koolhaas called (in a recent edition of Domus D'Autore) "post-occupancy design" -- the stuff that happens to design after it's left the designer's workshop (and architecture after it's left the studio) is the real test of its quality and character. Occupancy and use shouldn't see the designer and the architect melting away. They should stick around, take notes, and take photos. The processes of time and decay can be beautiful. The way people use stuff and adapt it can be instructive.

3. You don't have to buy stuff to be smitten with it -- public furniture that we just see on our travels (and maybe photograph) is worth writing about too. That's one of the things The Post-Materialist is all about.

4. There's also the idea that things come full circle: the slideshow takes us from paleolithic stone benches on the island of Orkney to modern concrete benches in the same place. There's a "before industrial design" and an "after industrial design", and they look remarkably similar. That's something I think Jan Lindenberg's Sweatshop 2.0 project was about -- coming up with chair design that deconstructs the distinction between amateur and professional, between the past and the present, between new and secondhand... and between shelves and chairs!

5. One word: recycle!

Finally, though, the slideshow is a little tribute to the dizzying diversity of forms out there, and about the kind of beauty -- or ugliness, or oddness -- that compels you to turn your camera on an inanimate object. Do I get to graduate from your course now, Steve, whatever the hell it is?

Two things Click Opera is always banging on about -- how money doesn't equal happiness, and how life in the Anglosphere sucks (largely because money doesn't equal happiness) -- were underlined this week by two reports about the quality of life in Britain and America. First, on Wednesday, U-Switch released their European Quality of Life Index, a survey of life in ten European countries ranking them according to 19 variables, including income, tax, the cost of essential goods and services, and the weather. Despite having the highest household incomes in Europe, Britain and Ireland were ranked lowest for quality of life, at 9 and 10 respectively. France and Spain came highest.



Life in Europe's two English-speaking countries -- which both saw huge market-driven economic booms over the last decade -- was rendered miserable not just by poor weather (Britain gets 17% less sunshine than the European average) but by diesel prices 18% above average, Europe's second-highest unleaded fuel prices and its third highest gas (49% higher than the European average) and electricity prices, as well as by Europe's highest food and property prices. So although British families earned £35,730 (more than £10,000 above the European average of £25,404) per household per year, high prices ended up putting them way behind the lower-earners on the continent in terms of quality of life. Winning the money race, it seems, isn't at all the same thing as winning at life.

Of course, how you spend your money is key. Britain spends less on health and education than its European neighbours; just 8.1% of British GDP goes on health, compared with over 10% in France and Germany. As a result, Britain has only 2.5 doctors per 1000 residents, compared with 3.4 in France and 3.5 in Germany. As for education, Britain puts 5.5% of GDP towards that; the Danes, for instance, spend 8.6%. British people retire later than anyone else in Europe and get fewer holidays (just 28 days a year, compared with Spain's 36). They live shorter lives -- life expectancy in the UK is 78.9 years, compared with 80.9 in France and 80.7 in Spain.

So there it is. Britain and Ireland have the highest average incomes in Europe, but come bottom in terms of quality of life. British households earn £35,730 but are miserable. Spanish households earn on average just £16,800 a year, but low taxation and cheaper prices make that money go a lot further, and other factors -- sunshine and a whole different approach to priorities, let's call it l'art de vivre -- make life much better in the Latin countries. "Clearly, when it comes to the good life, income is less important than free time, sunshine and cheap commodities," concluded one report of the findings.



America also scored poorly this week, this time in a report entitled The Measure of America funded by Oxfam America, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Conrad Hilton Foundation. In a piece entitled US slips down development index, the BBC summarised the report: "Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed nation... the US ranked 42nd in the world for life expectancy despite spending more on health care per person than any other country." The US has a life expectancy of 78 (the same as Britain's), but vast inequality between its richest and poorest groups. It has more children (15%) living in poverty than any other advanced nation, and the most people in prison. One in four Americans are now officially obese. They also underperform educationally: "25% of 15-year-old students performed at or below the lowest level in an international maths test -- worse than Canada, France, Germany and Japan".

"Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living," wrote Sarah Burd-Sharps, the report's author. Asian-American males have the best quality of life and black Americans the lowest. The place with the highest human development index in the US is Manhattan, the place with the lowest is Mississippi -- which also happens to be the state with the highest obesity levels.

The exact relationship of money to the problem is ambiguous. For American website ZDNet Healthcare "the bottom line is that in the U.S. your lifespan is closely correlated with your bank balance". For UK newspaper The Independent, "despite an almost cult-like devotion to the belief that unfettered free enterprise is the best way to lift Americans out of poverty, the report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities".



What the newspaper reports didn't go into is the wider question of how philosophy has shaped these results -- specifically the philosophy underpinning Anglo-Saxon capitalism. For that, you need to turn to Tristram Hunt's BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature about Adam Smith, Ideas -- The British Version: The Free Market. Standing in front of Bank station and the Bank of England, Hunt describes "a landscape of commerce and enterprise -- high end restaurants, chic retail boutiques, corporate HQs, and the sense of money at work. What this landscape is about is the free market.... The wheels of commerce are at work; a de-regulated process of exchange and contract that's creating wealth all around me." It's also creating poverty, and not just the financial kind.

Getting ready for next week's shows in Berlin, Newcastle and Glasgow, I've been programming some new backing tracks for old songs. Some of them I've never performed before live. The retro format started when Craig Wilson, who's organised the Newcastle show, asked me to make quite a long, intimate, cabaret-ish show, something like "An Evening with Momus". So I decided to do a song from each of my eighteen (soon to be nineteen) studio albums. The Berlin warm-up will feature the same set, but will be "An Auction with Momus and Michael Portnoy", with Michael haggling my prices down between the songs, dressed as a fish auctioneer. The Glasgow show will concentrate on the future, featuring a live collaboration with Joe Howe, who's working with me on "Mr Proctor" or "Cig Jam" or "Joemus" or whatever we end up calling the new one.

Here's the Berlin / Newcastle set-list -- with a glimpse of me, slightly drunk, singing a scratch version of The Cheque's in the Post.

1. King Solomon's Song and Mine
(from the 1986 album Circus Maximus)
A new version of a song I now realize was very influenced by The Passage. The "Alison" in the lyric is Ali Smith, with whom I was hopelessly smitten at university, and who's now one of Britain's most famous novelists. Ali was one of the first people I sent a copy of Circus Maximus when it came out. Having never much liked my poetry in the Creative Writing Group, she was surprised by how well it turned out!

2. Violets
(from the 1987 album The Poison Boyfriend)
I've often been rather passive-aggressive about songs people like, preferring to make them listen to the songs of mine I like instead. Violets was the song on The Poison Boyfriend people who didn't really like my other stuff liked. And actually, now it's had the rather cheesy session accordion licks removed, I really like it too! Especially the end, where I go all Paolo Conte.

3. The Angels are Voyeurs
(from the 1988 album Tender Pervert)
Done as a piano song, this is from the height of my Mishima Period (when I was so abject I could only afford sperm- and blood-coloured paint). Something about the arrangement of this one (very cabaret) makes me dream of a West End musical arranged around my songs. It would be a hell of a lot more spunky than Mamma Mia!

4. The Hairstyle of the Devil
(from the 1989 album Don't Stop the Night)
My big hit! And I've played it surprisingly little. Passive aggression again, perhaps, but I don't really think the tune is strong enough. Good lyric, though. It's a Brazilian soap opera, really.

5. What will Death Be Like?
(from the 1990 album Monsters of Love)
There are various new versions of this song floating around -- an acapella version will be released at some point on a record associated with the Great Pyramid project in Germany. This is the backing track from my performance at the Pyramid Gala at HAU1 in Kreuzberg a couple of months ago, dominated by a fuzzy distorted bass.

6. Marquis of Sadness
(from the 1991 album Hippopotamomus)
I actually picked this because it's the favourite song ever of Phespirit, who runs the excellent Momus lyrics website (which has been a great resource as I re-learned these old songs). "The Marquis of Sadness remains the greatest of all Momus's character creations; Phespirit's ideal fantasy lifestyle," the man says.

7. Summer Holiday 1999
(from the 1992 album Voyager)
This is a spooky mid-noughties remake of my contribution to the 1990 Fab Gear compilation (the founding record, some say, of Shibuya-kei), and my love song to my very first Japanese girlfriend, Junko Shoji. I'm particularly fond of the central Asian bagpipes on this one, a weirdly-tuned sample I made in Tokyo while recording Oskar Tennis Champion.

8. The Cheque's in the Post
(from the 1992 album The Ultraconformist)
A new backing track for one of the more personal songs on the neo-cabaret record I made in 1992 for Mike Alway's Richmond label (in defiance of my Creation contract, which is why we had to pretend it was a live record). I remember (with half a tingle, half a cringe) each episode, each sin, each girlfriend detailed in this song.



9. Platinum
(from the 1993 album Timelord)
This backing track is actually the original demo, rediscovered on an old cassette tape, of the song. It's got all sorts of key changes which didn't make it through to the album version, and will probably trip me up when I do it live.

10. Red Pyjamas
(from the 1995 album The Philosophy of Momus)
This song is a hidden gem, and this version of it packs more punch than the one on the record, though it comes from the same session. The sounds are mostly from a Nintendo GameBoy; after my first two trips to Japan I wanted to make a computer game-sounding record, and this comes from a 1993 session in my flat on Cleveland Street. The mix between sentimental themes and this tiny robotic music is one I still find poignant.

11. London 1888
(from the 1996 album 20 Vodka Jellies)
Time Travel and Japan feature big here: I'm rediscovering London from a Japanese point of view. More specifically, a gay Japanese point of view (the Marquis Matsugae is a gay socialite who comes to London to meet Oscar Wilde and, he hopes, Sherlock Holmes).

12. His Majesty the Baby
(from the 1997 album Ping Pong)
Perennially popular with people who hate -- and, oddly enough, people who love -- babies. I recently met the man who shouts out "Nick, you're a legend!" on the record, on the street in Berlin. He's called John Quin and he writes for Map, the Scottish art magazine, now.

13. Born to be Adored
(from the 1998 album The Little Red Songbook)
I should probably have chosen a never-performed song from TLRS, maybe "A White Oriental Flower". If I have time I'll program a backing for that.

14. Stefano Zarelli
(from the 1999 album Stars Forever)
microworlds will be happy to see this one, but I chose it because it's one of the better pop songs on Stars Forever, and there's something really exhilarating about singing it. Maybe it's all the falsetto!

15. Going for a Walk with a Line
(from the 2001 album Folktronic)
One of my own favourite of my songs ever, the lyrics in this one are based on Paul Klee's diaries and painting titles. "Robert the devil" was the name of his favourite paintbrush, and "An Elderly Phoenix" is a typically-brilliant Klee canvas title.

16. A Lapdog
(from the 2003 album Oskar Tennis Champion)
I still find Oskar an intriguingly odd album, sort of Eislerian, filled with Tokyo postmodernism. This song was written after I had dinner with a very beautiful woman who fawned over a lapdog rather than me, so I suppose it's a sort of song-cousin to His Majesty the Baby, fuelled by a similar "pathetic jealousy".

17. Lady Fancy Knickers
(from the 2004 album Otto Spooky)
This is a pop song heightened to lurid garishness in the mind of a madman. Actually, it comes out of the Tokyo Oskar sessions, not the Berlin Otto sessions. The lyrics were gathered from descriptions of art in a copy of Frieze (little did I know I'd be writing them one day!). I really love singing lines like "spooky foxgloves at the pink pine igloo" and "the etiquette of public information display".

(Additional pop fact: The "lady fancy knickers" of the title is Geraldine Ferraro, the American politician who made waves recently by saying Obama owed everything to being black. She owned the Lafayette Street building housing secondhand clothes shop Smylonylon in New York, and when her rent increases forced English eccentric Chris Brick out, he scrawled "Lady Fancy Knickers, gee up, ya ya!" in the shop window as an insult to Ferraro.)

18. Nervous Heartbeat
(from the 2006 album Ocky Milk)
This has become a live favourite, accompanied by a Marcel Marceau-like mime in which I turn saluting and wiping away tears into the same slow gesture. I don't think I've ever got the lyrics right, which shows that if you want to learn Japanese, writing mneumonic songs probably isn't going to help.

19. The Mouth Organ
(from the forthcoming album)
This song originally appeared on the 2003 Milky album Travels with a Donkey. For the Joemus album I've made a completely new version, very wonky and lurchy, and it's one of my favourites from the new sessions. It's an anti-car song, and I ended it onstage at the Faraday Festival saying "One day we'll live in a post-car world". The sentiment got a surprisingly big cheer.