I spend my entire life rigorously avoiding situations which might end in rejection, and then THIS happens.

I have just spent several hours stressing out over what could be so awful about my Goldfrapp blurb for Stylus Magazine’s Top 50 Singles of 2005, that they hired someone else to re-write it. Was it too personal? Too critical? Too laboured? Too obvious? Too facile? What? What?

TELL ME DAMMIT, WHAT?

Have I ever mentioned that I don’t deal too well with rejection?

Back on the home PC in Nottingham for the first time since Friday, I have just checked my “Sent Items” folder.

Well, whaddya know? Turns out that I sent Stylus THE WRONG F**KING WORD DOCUMENT. Not the one containing my two blurbs, but the one containing my votes, which I had already successfully sent a few days earlier.

So maybe I’m not a shit writer, just a dizzy klutz. At least I get to swap one form of self-flagellation for another. That’s something, isn’t it?

Because I abhor waste, here’s that unpublished Goldfrapp blurb in full.

Ooh La La – Goldfrapp.

At first hearing, this felt like such a crass reduction of past glories: all the tease, the sleaze, the ice-maiden freeze, squashed and squeezed into one blatant shot at the big time. And oh, did we really need to hear that tired old electro/glam schaffel beat again? Weren’t “Train” and “Strict Machine” enough? And did you really need to ram your point home by nicking the riff from “Spirit In The Sky”? We thought you were arty!

However. When “Ooh La La” hit the Top Five, and stroppy old Alison became pop’s new sweetheart, everything started to fall into place. What felt like a mere dilution of Goldfrapp’s craft revealed itself instead as a concentration of their very essence. (Über-Goldfrapp! Ur-Goldfrapp!) What looked like a blank space in place of a chorus revealed itself as the most thrillingly effective use of a single-note refrain since “Ca Plane Pour Moi”. Furthermore, what seemed like a poorly sequenced opener to the Supernature album – setting all the wrong expectations – revealed itself as the exultant, triumphant conclusion of the band’s live show.

Congratulations, Goldfrapp. Now you have your defining anthem.