Hercules and Love Affair - 'Blind'

I don't care. I know I'm not supposed to like this. It's... dammit, it's disco, okay, a word I generally only use pejoratively. When I grew up an anorak-wearing indie kid, the battle lines were drawn, and disco (along with cock rock, admittedly an unlikely bedfellow) was the enemy. And although I'm ever so pro-gay in my white, middle class, liberal way, I happen to fancy, you know, girls. Further, you'd never get me inside a nightclub. Hate the places. Music's too loud, beer's shit and I've never been to one that isn't a meat market. Give me a dark, gloomy and preferably smelly pub with three misanthropic old blokes and a packet of pork scratchings any day. Hey, that's a dream night out. Life is miserable; work with the grain.

But fuck it, this is brill and you'd have to have rags stuck in your ears not to realise it. Back in the days when I cared about this website and used to try to talk about music and stuff on it, I declared my mixed feelings about this guy Antony from the Antony and the Johnsons, and how a particular song had utterly floored and convinced me. Went to see them at the Barbican shortly after that, some pretentious art thing where a series of women slowly revolved as the man sang, some of them, thrillingly, undressed. (I've seen so much nudity in the name of art. Occasionally you go to the theatre and someone doesn't take their clothes off, although you can usually get a refund.) Anyway, he sings on this one and he sounds great - he has a fabulous, almost terrible, voice - against a cheesy and smooth disco track which is utterly of both of its times - about 20 years ago and because of that, completely now.

Of course you buy this on 12" and it doesn't include the best version, which is on the LP, although alongside some useless remix by some bloke or other there's a classy Frankie Knuckles mix, which takes me back to that brief interregnum when I utterly rejected guitar-based music for the abstract thrills of late house and early techno. The LP's got to be great anyway, having heard a fair chunk of it via illegal downloads on the office computer, while vaguely wondering why no one's got round to sacking me yet. But I find downloading just fuels more buying, which makes it okay, and this lot are added to the massive list of LPs I now need to get, work demands having intervened two weeks running to prevent me from venturing to the record shop. What's with everybody - Teenagers, Fuck Buttons, Crystal Castles, Be Your Own Pet, Nick Cave, Youthmovies - putting LPs out at the same time anyway? Some planning, please? I'm under a lot of pressure here.