Being a solitary freelance type, I don’t get to go to an office party. In fact, before I was a solitary freelance type, I worked in an office with one other man, who wasn’t the most sociable bloke on earth, in fact he was something of a sociopath; we’d spend most of the year sat in complete silence, communicating by email, and only exchanging words when we wanted to express irritation with each other, and that’s not the kind of thing you want to extend into a pub/restaurant/clubbing scenario. So I can honestly say that I’ve never been to an office Christmas party.

The nearest I’ve ever got was the Rough Trade Christmas party, which took place last night at Madame Jo Jo’s, in the heart of London’s Soho. Not your usual Christmas party, to be fair, in fact it was just a gig, really, but as part of Scritti Politti I did my best to pretend that it was happening for my benefit. An enormous inflatable Santa stood next to the stage, which was the sole gesture towards Christmas decor; I’d have enjoyed it more if Geoff Travis had put on a Santa costume and gone around the building handing out fat cheques, but that was never particularly likely to happen.

An interesting layout, Madame Jo Jo’s; obviously it was known for putting on adult entertainment, and between the stage and the audience area there’s a fairly large, uh, moat, which last night was filled up by the audience, but I imagine in the days when strippers were gyrating, said moat would be occupied by security guards, or perhaps vicious dogs and barbed wire, or even better just full of boiling oil, just to stop stripper-hungry men from grabbing a handful of stripper-arse. No-one tried to grab my arse when we went onstage at 8pm, but I don’t blame them, really. We played a short 8-song set, with Alyssa’s brother Roddy filling in on bass because she has sensibly gone to the considerably warmer southern hemisphere for a month or so. Highlights included me trying to do Alyssa’s vocal parts – in Alyssa’s warm Edinburgh brogue – during the coda of “Cooking”, and failing, and giggling. We finished off with two hastily rehearsed Christmas numbers; “Merry Christmas Baby” by Otis Redding, and, improbably, “Christmas Boogie” by the Davis Sisters, which you can hear a clip of here. This gave Green and I the opportunity to squeak the lines:

He was chubby and plump, a fat little elf
“He’s been eatin regular,” I said to myself

You missed a treat, there. Other treats included British Sea Power, who I’d not seen before. On the downside was the usual bollocks you get from security staff at Every Single venue in the West End; “no, you can’t stand there, stand here, no, you can’t sit there, no, you can’t take a mobile phone call on the stairs, no, you can’t take a can of beer from backstage into the venue, I don’t know why, you just can’t, I don’t care if people are drinking out of bottles out there, you can’t take that can into the venue, you must pour it into a plastic cup… ” Insanity. I tried 3 times to decant a can of Grolsch into a plastic cup, and ended up with 3 pints of foam; in the end I gave up and bought a bottle of Stella. Maybe that’s what they were trying to get me to do all along. Oh, and: “No, you can’t order a pizza and have it delivered to the backstage area, you’re not allowed to bring food into the building.” 10 minutes later, 3 pizzas arrived for security staff. Arseholes. Merry Christmas.