Now playing (I Still Have A Thing For Julie)

I went through a period at art school when I discovered lounge music. I thought I was being arch when really I was just feeling very tired. A year later I sold all the records but I still have a thing for Julie London. Her arrangements are good and she stays within her range. Although she always sang about the blues she never appeared to suffer. If gazing idly into the middle distance has a sound, Julie is it.

This was in the 80s when vinyl records were officially on the way out and could be purchased for a couple of bucks - a good thing considering that different Julie London albums shared many of the same tracks, or tracks that were so similar that they might as well have been the same. Their value was in the craft of their artlessness, the conjuring of melancholia as reliably as a soap opera: up come the strings, big pause and (rolls eyes, stubs out cigarette, casts sidelong glance at ribbon microphone) ... Julie! But without the exclamation mark.

Because Julie London's songs all sounded the same and because they were nearly all about the blues there's one track of hers I can never, ever locate even in this age of the interwebs. It's called 'The Blues' or 'You've got the Blues' or 'Get ready for the Blues' or something. There's a line about 'the clouds look like they'll overspill... in fact, you know they will... get ready, get set for the blues.' If you recognise this, please tell me - it will make me unhappy. Not a staring into the abyss unhappiness: just gazing idly into the middle distance between drinks kind of unhappy, which is a necessary tool for writing.

I'm listening to Julie on my iPod. I am being driven slightly crazy by the lack of a stereo system and often find myself staring at speaker docks. Portable MP3 systems look like crap to me: I can't see how something so similar to a cheap transistor radio could produce hundreds of dollars' worth of sound. My suspicions have been confirmed by Eric Taub in the NYT, who writes about docking devices manufacturer SDI Technologies:

'We recreated the $19.99 drugstore alarm clock radio and turned it into a $100 product,' Mr Ashkenazi said.

Those blues, those everybody hates you blues: they're gonna get you if you don't watch out.