Friday bring-a-curry dinner for six. Rude amounts of food, if we'd ended up having the naan bread as well, we would have come close to meeting the entire calorific consumption of Bangladesh for 1973. Bloody marvellous with each dish having the full attention of each maker so there was no can't-be-arsed fade off for dishes four and five. I made a Charmaine Solomon curried duck with potatoes and cabbage (I subbed the cabbage for silverbeet leaves for a bit more oomph) as well as a mint and spring onion chutney and half a litre of cucumber raita – bringing the total up to 1.5 litres. Strategy of eating a bit, waiting, and going back later, proved most successful in making a dent in it all. Passing the time was our host's very good idea of everybody bringing a CD with their ten favourite songs on it, loading them all up, and then putting it all on random. Guess the person's song was fun and it there's much pleasure in listening to music that's outside your regular tastes but carefully chosen and an education. There was no Jive Bunny, nor were there 60 Pixies songs. Dire Straits appeared and that was AOK by me. Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus proved rarer towards the end of the evening in favour of fade out/in/out and through composed bits of Eighty's epicdom. No fights either. Something very Rawlsian about it but I'm not sure what. Not an easy thing to pick 10 and I ended up with an undecisive set with a few hybrid songs to fill a few gaps and round it out a bit.
My eventual top 10 were AC/DC-Ballroom Blitz; Groove Armada – I See You Baby; Shake – Kristin Hersh; Sonic Youth- Kool Thing ; Queens of the Stone Age – First it Giveth ; Butthole Surfers – Sea Ferring; The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog; Pixies – Here Comes Your Man; Anthrax and Public Enemy – Bring the Noise; Matthew Sweet – Evangeline.
No arguing.