I played a gig with Keith on Saturday night, at my friend Helen’s party in a front room in Homerton. I believe it was the wonderful Hatfield And The North who once said that there’s no place like Homerton, and while that isn’t quite true (Hackney and Dalston are fairly similar, for a start) it was as good a place to spend the evening. Gigs in people’s houses are almost always awful – mainly due to concern about noise levels and concern about what the neighbours might think; Helen dealt with that by inviting the neighbours, so we knew what they thought, because they stayed in the kitchen getting drunk while we played. Fair enough.

I’ve spent the last three days compiling an enormous document of musical genres to help a friend with a book project he’s working on. Describe the genre in 10-15 words, a couple of example acts, and then give the relationship to other genres, so he can put it all into a gigantic diagrammatic representation of musical styles. It sounds easy, but I ended up with about 120 genres to do – and that was after slimming it down considerably by knocking out the genres that were made up by one band in order to contain them, and them alone, thus giving the impression that they somehow operate outside the normal conventions of rock and roll but actually sound exactly like Shed Seven.

Anyway, it was an interesting exercise – I now know the difference between Black Metal and Doom Metal, for example – and indeed Epic Doom, Drone Doom and Deathdoom. I was just daydreaming about going on Mastermind to answer questions about Drone Doom, and John Humphries asking a question about Lacuna Coil, and me refusing to answer, saying “No, sorry, John, that shit is Deathdoom, not Drone Doom”, and then only getting 2 points in the first round because of the ignorance of the Mastermind researchers, but then being equally appalling in the general knowledge round and being laughed off the set by the cameraman, who by coincidence was a big fan of Deathdoom.

One chain of influence I particularly liked was the list of genres that goes Hardcore Techno > Gabber > Speedcore > Splittercore > Extratone: each one is faster than the one before, so Speedcore is about 250bpm, Splittercore 500bpm, and Extratone is above and beyond 1000bpm. If you wondered what that might sound like, YouTube offers us this helpful selection (warning, these songs do not in any way sound like “Albatross” by Fleetwood Mac. They make Napalm Death sound like Flanders & Swann.)

I wrote about World of Warcraft in The Independent last week, and ended the feature by saying that I’d moved the game to the trash because I couldn’t trust myself not to fritter my life away playing it. Well, in a moment of weakness I got it out of the trash again, and my troll mage, Kohntarkosz, has now reached level 19. If anyone would like to help me vanquish some marines in Northwatch Hold, please come and give me a hand, because when those bastards gang up on me I die in about 5 seconds flat.