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Michael Jackson top 20

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1. Michael Jackson is dead. Look, some random guy posted a film of himself on YouTube on Thursday, paying tribute. A lot of people appear to be doing this. ‘Keep his name alive, try to forget about all the crazy stuff,’ concludes random guy.

2. In that same spirit, I’m honouring the memory of the late King of Pop by writing a blog that claims to be about Michael Jackson but is actually about us and how interesting we are. I’m also going to do it as a list, the way everything in the media seems to be done now, even when it’s not really a list at all but just a series of vaguely related things broken up in case you get bored.

3. After all, how better to pay tribute to a man whose life story is so much about extreme narcissism? The vainer-even-than-Joan-Rivers narcissism of surgery so severe and self-destructive that you barely look human any more, and parts of your new face actually start falling off. The vainer-even-than-Charles-Foster-Kane narcissism of turning your home into a vast self-mythologising monument to your own lost childhood. The vainer-even-than-Idi-Amin narcissism of continuing to aggressively, expensively market yourself as the King of Pop for years after you’ve ceased to have any convincing claim to that title (to the point where you end up looking more like a mad, deposed dictator-in-exile than pop royalty, especially when you start floating statues of yourself down the Thames). And let’s not even get started on the weird, unsettling narcissism of naming your children after yourself while using your wealth to push their mothers out of their lives.

4. As Paul Morley put it in the Observer today: “The whole thing concluded the only way it could - in a resounding blast of grotesque but compelling publicity for a figure who had become all that he had become - the king and the imprisoned, the adored and the humiliated, the accused and the indulged - because of publicity. Jackson had been publicised to death.”

5. Then again, Paul Morley is always writing things like that, things that sound cleverer than they probably are by carpet bombing your brain with pop cultural references and far more adjectives than necessary. Paul Morley is a narcissist too.

6. But anyway, enough of Michael Jackson. Let’s get on to US. Let’s publicise ourselves, celebrate ourselves, talk ourselves up. Write a blog that’s a big towering monument to how fabulous we are.

7. Er…

8. Oh yes, as of this month we officially have a song in a Hollywood movie! The film is called Spread, and it’s got Ashton Kutcher in it. It’s about a handsome, incredibly narcissistic young LA guy who has no job or home, and who survives by seducing rich older women and then living in their houses, at their expense. Here’s the trailer. Our song isn’t in it.

9. Our song is in the actual film though, soundtracking the moment of Ashton’s emotional awakening - when he realises that all this sleeping-with-rich-women-for-money business might not be making him happy, and that the girlfriend he’s just stupidly walked away from in a fit of jealous pique might have been the key to his happiness, and that he might now have lost her forever. ‘Let her go,’ I sing to Ashton just before our song, But My Heart Is Broken, fades out (just before, annoyingly, the best bit of the song). But he can’t let her go, and flies across the country to find her. It doesn’t work out. If only you’d listened to me, Ashton!

10. One of the problems of having your song play in a key moment of a film is that, when the song comes on, you stop paying any attention at all to what’s happening in the story and just listen to yourself singing with a smug, narcissistic grin on your stupid face. Which means that Ashton’s big emotional awakening passed me by completely. It was a bit like going to the toilet just before Darth Vader says ‘No, I am your father!’

11. Of course, by the time the film is actually in cinemas across America in the autumn (as opposed to premiering at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where we saw it on Monday), our song might have been ditched in favour of the new Snow Patrol single, so this will no longer be a problem.

12. We will not get ditched in favour of Snow Patrol, though. We are amazing and fabulous and interesting. We’re probably going to be in Ashton’s next film too, I bet. Maybe he’ll even Twitter about us.

13. Ok, I think I’ve exhausted this topic now. What else have we achieved recently?

14. Oh yes, we’re playing at festivals now. Here’s us on stage at the Garden Party last weekend, poncing about in front of everyone. It’s a boutique festival at Kelburn Castle in Largs.

Kelburn

15. Admittedly, we only played in front of about 50 people, which we’ve decided to blame on James Yorkston being on stage at the same time as us. We also got upstaged by two girls playing tennis in front of the stage. But it was a lot of fun. The festival is in a beautiful place, a country park on the west coast of Scotland. There was a waterfall, and a garden. We camped and drank wine and ate fruit loaf in the sunshine. Next year, Glastonbury! Maybe.

16. What else? More self-promotion. Oh yes, Laura and I just spent a week working with the National Theatre of Scotland, developing a show which, if we manage to pull it off, will be like nothing anyone’s done before, ever. In a good way.

17. IF we pull it off, and if no one else does it first before we manage to.

18. Meanwhile, we’re doing a different show at the Arches Live festival in Glasgow this September. It’s going to be fantastic.

19. Except that I decided over the weekend that the script doesn’t work at all at the moment and that I might have to completely rewrite it. Damn it.

20. It’s hard work, this narcissism business. You build yourself up, but if you have any perspective at all you can’t help knocking yourself down. You feel pleased about your achievements, but you can’t help worrying that you’re deluding yourself and that you’re actually completely useless. We’re a lot like Michael Jackson in that respect.

Andrew

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