REVOLVER: THIS WEEK you find us in Princes Street Gardens, a verdant expanse directly below Edinburgh's stunning castle. It's 2am. Drink hasn't so much been taken as kidnapped and held ransom. Beside me is an A-list star of stage and screen.
He takes the first line: “I get the same old dreams, same time every night, fall to the ground and I wake up.” I take the second: “So I get out of bed, put on my shoes, and in my head thoughts fly back to the break-up.” We hit the bridge together: “These four walls are closing in, look at the fix you’ve put me in.” We reach for the air guitars. “Since you been gone, since you been gone, I’m outta my head, can’t take it. Could I be wrong, but since you been gone, you cast the spell so break it.”
Eveyone should sing and play air guitar along to Since You've Been Goneat 2am in a garden below Edinburgh Castle at least once in their lives. As potent as Rainbow's power ballad is though, it's not even the best song of the night. There is also Jane Wiedlin's fantastic Rush Hour(don't pretend you don't know it), ELO's Living Thing and Dolly Parton's Here You Come Again.
So moved by so many unheralded classics colliding into each other, I even ask the DJ to play a personal all-time favourite: Petula Clarke's Don't Sleep in the Subway. Here they understand.
This memorable night was convened by the Guilty Pleasures people. A well-loved and well-travelled club night, they have been providing “shameless, blameless fun” for the past five years. It began as a one-off event at a club in London’s Islington, but has become a regular at events such as Glastonbury and now, for the first time, the Edinburgh Fringe.
And after a day of having your head wrecked by torturously awful "experimental" theatre group and limp, lustreless stand-up, there's nothing like the first few bars of Pat Benatar's We Belongto cleanse the palate and bring a much-needed demotic dimension to the cultural overload of the Fringe.
It's remarkable how this mini-clubbing phenomenon began. The man behind it all, DJ Sean Rowley, used to have a "normal" music show on the BBC. One night, for a laugh, he slipped in Oh Loriby the Alessi Brothers (a song that makes The Osmonds sound like Slipknot) and the switchboard lit up.
“People were ringing up the station confessing to records that they loved but had been too ashamed to admit to since they were teenagers and it became uncool to like certain things,” he says. “Then I started to play these records at a festival and the reaction was incredible.”
And that says an awful lot about how attributes that should really have no place in popular music (notions of “coolness” and “shamefulness”) have been assigned over the years.
The musically correct will always be with us (slobbering over Animal Collective, or whoever it is this month), and their Orwellian “four legs good, two legs bad” reductionism – with its attendant name-calling and finger-pointing – makes much of the media media music coverage seem like something from the Salem witch trials.
Are you now or have you ever been a U2/Oasis/Coldplay apologist/fellow traveller? And while we’re at it: what should be the unadulterated joy of a Guilty Pleasures club night is undercut somewhat by the punters who turn up in ironic comedy attire – as if they somehow must place the whole event in between a pair of post-modern quotation marks. One couldn’t possibly fess up to liking these songs on face value, could one?
But what is there to be guilty about with these musical pleasures? These songs sold millions and contributed to the great popular music canon.
But enough already, I think that's the into to T'Pau's China In Your Handkicking in. At Guilty Pleasures we don't stop till we get enough.
