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Simon Reynolds' much-feted Rip It Up And Start Again is an entertaining but ultimately shoddily researched book about what he describes as 'post-punk'; he has far less grasp on the literary and artistic cultural references he bandies about than he and his band of nostalgic mostly fortysomething readers might like to think. But that's rock writers for you. Anyway, enough of that.

On a personal note, it's irritating how Reynolds' included unverified quotes from Neil Megson get lazily regurgitated in various quarters, and once again, in this month's Wire magazine, Megson eagerly jumps at the opportunity tossed in his direction. And before I continue, I should state for the record that I admire both Chris and Cosey, nor do I have a problem with Sleazy (despite not being especially familiar with his latter-day work).

Hippie Megson has been playing the numbers game since the early 70s, trying his luck at almost any thing in the hope of hitting the big celebrity jackpot that, like the grapes to Tantalus, so sadly seems to keep eluding him. And despite the bold bulimic rhetoric he utilises in conversation, Megson in all that time - with the assistance of his trusty sidekick, the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary - has not managed (in my opinion) to write one single half-decent set of lyrics. His continual griping and posturing and bitching and rationalising and whingeing and namechecking and boasting says a lot more about him than it does about anyone else: a subtext of why he doesn't get the recognition and public love for everything that, at least in his own addled moral worldview, he feels he's invented or achieved, and donated to the world.

The ironic and disappointing truth is that he's not a man in drag at all, I really wish he was. He's Nicholas Fairbairn with piercings.