Cuong Vu Come Play With Me CD

It's not hard, then, to picture the squalid "lounge", probably with a ceiling fan, yet equally probably one that does nothing to actually bother the thick air. It doesn't cost much to get yerself wasted at the bar on the ground floor, which is logical seeing that the place looks as it does. And this means you get all manner of human flotsam converging upon it, along with assorted students, Asia-heads, thrill-seekers etc.

, a sort of obvious first port of call for the bewildered, stupid, destitute and manic of the world who see the place and decide they must join in.

After all this, it would be almost disappointing if the beer weren't warm, so it is.

A bloke called Tony Kern did a very good film on this establishment last year called 'The Mitre Spell', which shows it up as a place of colour and character, a dignified Colonial flip-off to urban steel-and-glass. The Mitre in my head, however, the one that I've been on about so far, is a place entirely of fiction, a sort of Basement Tape of midgets, insomniacs and misfits, gone to seed for long enough to be mistaken for having charm.

And people still live in there, even if they won't go on living there for long. We've a cheeky bastard for a bassplayer, who strung together bits and bobs off sixties' Singaporean TV - that's Midnight at the Mitre, which opens the record - and if you are susceptible to these things, you might imagine one such resident, a bit far gone, too late at night, flipping channels and staring at not much, till we all realise it's about bloody time now and to hell with this bloke and all his troubles, and let's just kick the door down with some proper rock 'n' roll.

The rest of the record follows quite naturally.

In the making of this album, great amounts of beer were sunk (Tiger, cold, unlike at the Mitre), a guitar was smashed to bits (on Wheels, if you must know), a certain very kind Mrs. Vogel had her hospitality routinely abused (hairy men arguing in the living room at all hours etc.

), fellow musicians were met (or not, like in Come On where some of us have never set eyes on the horn players), sleep was lost, and years spent, mostly bickering about details.

At the end of this, this set now contains such gems as Tie Your Hands, which sounds to me like someone chucking a bomb into a marketplace and doing it a world of good, the hangdog Equal - a last minute (i.e., two years ago) addition that sounds shaggy in comparison with the rest of the record, but which might still be the most lovable moment on it, a cultural high-water mark in Spinning Lady, several songs about not being able to go to bed on time, social commentary and lifestyle endorsement in the gorgeous, choral Sixteen Cans - a modern prayer if there ever was one - and, on at least one song, the line, 'For whom does the yellow hyacinth bloom?', which is a question I ask myself each day.