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Mid-morning experimental techno tests man's commitment to being 6 Music listener

A MIDDLE-AGED man listening to 6 Music is gritting his teeth through a nine-minute experimental German drum and bass track before lunch. 

Tom Logan, a graphic designer working from home, is proud of his allegiance to the alternative station but admitted he seriously considered putting some Sade on.

Logan said: “I made the decision to be a 6 Music listener because I’m a serious and eclectic listener. It’s not just because they play Talking Heads and The Smiths.

“I love all music, but this stretched the definition of music. It probably goes down great off your tits on MDMA in Berlin. I, on the other hand, was trying to have a Belvita.

“Despite all my vinyl, I started to have sick, twisted thoughts about Absolute 90s. Or Kiss FM. Or whatever’s in the charts as long as it doesn’t have chanted, gutteral lyrics about darkrooms.

“Still I couldn’t admit defeat by turning it off. I’m still cool, I’m still alternative. I’m not some normie who only listens to Arctic Monkeys playlists, though I would pay real money to hear Mardy Bum right now.”

Fellow 6 Music listener Jules Cook said: “What you do is change over to Radio 2 ‘for the traffic’ and endure four minutes of Jeremy Vine talking to listeners about Britain’s favourite motorway services. After that a bit of sprechegesang bagpipe hardstep goes down a treat.”

'Our hood had a serious penknife problem': How to make your middle-class teenage years sound street

ZOMBIE knives in the news make you feel pathetically cosseted and middle-class. But by tweaking the facts, you too can have the benefits of a rough upbringing: 

Turf wars

To the credulous, sounds like a battle for territory between drug gangs. But a feeble scuffle in Congleton park between representatives of two rival schools, resulting in one being pinned to the floor within a minute and having his bag thrown on a shed roof, still counts. Although your opponent could exercise Machiavellian cunning and not turn up.

Knives at school

It’s no lie that you were sternly warned off bringing knives to school and kids you knew carried them. Usually penknives, but you would treat the dull, 6cm blade of Gareth’s Swiss Army knife with the same awe as an Uzi. Could it be used to kill? Theoretically. Given time. Though it may be easier to snip them to death with the tiny, tiny scissors.

The posse had guns

Oh, several kids you knew had guns. Yeah. Admittedly air rifles which, while dangerous to eyeballs and frogs, tend not to be favoured by cocaine importers but still. And the five-minute reload time means drive-by shootings took hundreds of passes and left the victims badly bruised.

Terrace weaponry

There was always a twat like Marcus showing you how to turn a Coke can into a slashing weapon (fold it, obviously), sharpening a 50p or making the infamous skinhead weapon of a newspaper tightly folded to make a rock-hard corner which is painful to be hit with. Marcus did not at any point run with any local firms. He’s a feng shui consultant now.

Everyone was in a gang

Omitting that these were primary school gangs recreating the adventures of the Famous Five, or the Red Hand Gang for daredevils, and they ended badly. There were no smugglers, no kidnappers, and the den you build got trashed by 14-year-olds. Essentially you sat in bushes.

You knew dealers

Both technically true and pleasingly reminiscent of Top Boy. Just change the drug from ‘25 keys of uncut Colombian’ to ‘a sixteenth of Moroccan black Steve got off his hippy brother’ and you were practically hanging with Tony Montana. And you can still roll a smokeable joint one out of five tries.

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