New year, new rules. The ANBAD Donkey (see Midweek Mixtapes passim) has been kindly retired.

Spending that long hovering in mid-air, whilst enduring various topically tedious photoshopped additions has left that particular ass exhausted. He is now convalescing in a lovely green field where James Blunt songs are played 24 hours a day.

His endlessly competent replacement, Lt. Frank Drebin, will ponder an alternative CD each week before plumping for the ANBAD Midweek Mixtape instead.

Speaking of which…

FIRST! Mind Enterprises will give you their EP in return for a tweet. How very now. Too High is …

This week my ears have been kindly plagued by The Pixies‘ Trompe Le Monde, an album that suddenly, pointlessly, emerged from the Pile Of Albums Past and thrilled me all over again. I love it when that happens. Little Eiffel! Little Eiffel!

The ANBAD Donkey gets Black Francisised to celebrate. And now here’s a mixtape, chiefly to remind me that there is still new music out there:

Twitter has brought us many, many wonderful things. I don’t need to list them – you’re probably tweeting your favourite celeb right now. However, this week, thanks to the combined tweets of @ryanpitchfork and @daverawkblog, I managed to view hopefully-fake, hi-res, super-veiny photos of Kanye’s meat and two veg. Thanks guys. The ANBAD Donkey celebrates in kind.

FIRST! Golden Glow was one of the many artists I wholly intended on catching at the In The City festival but didn’t for one reason or another (NB – probably due to watching D/R/U/G/S again). However, I did bump into …

John Peel’s anniversary was a couple of days ago, and, like everyone else over the age of 25, I joined in the happy reminiscing. The only person who influenced my musical education as much as him was my dad, and that was partly because he was a John Peel devotee too. Today, the ANBAD Donkey celebrates a hero.

Mixtape!

FIRST! Basketball have been on ANBAD before, but that doesn’t preclude their inclusion here – when a song like Suspiros de Chile plops into your lap, sharing with the wider world is not so much an option as a requirement.

Basketball …

It’s the Manchester-based In The City new music conference soon, and even stubborn contrariness can’t deter me from devoting the next few weeks to a huge new music event taking place on my doorstep.You’ll be hearing a lot more about ITC, but for now – check out the brilliant line-up of bands, some of whom are in this week’s Midweek Mixtape.

In The City was started by the late, and – yes – great, Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records. He enjoyed a wry look at many things, and this week, he’s admiring the Situationist construct of a …

This week I found out that the ‘seaside town that they forgot to close down’ that inspired Morrissey’s Every Day Is Like Sunday is Borth in mid-Wales. I lived near to Borth for a number of years, and can confirm that a light scattering of nuclear bombs, as also recommended by S. Morrissey, would do no harm. The ANBAD Donkey gets Welsh in celebration of the fact.

Mixtape:

FIRST! NYC UFOs could have conceivably added a few more letters to their name, and happily thrown in a PhD for added brains, an MGMT for some art-house pop, and some LSD …

Is it even worth mentioning last night’s Mercury Music Prize? It’s all a bit tiresome now, isn’t it?

Oh go on then – The Xx’s snoozesome and underwhelming album won the prize, doing precisely zero to dispell the idea that ‘the Mercurys’ are little more than an award for Coffee Table Album Of The Year. The Xx can now look forward to joining Speech DeBelle in the Mercury Prize section of desperate music shops nationwide. The ANBAD Donkey celebrates their crowning M-People style.

NB: The following Mixtape is at least as exciting as anything shortlisted for the prize. TRUEFACT.…

So, holiday time is really here now, and the chances are you aren’t actually reading this at all, because you’re turning a shade of lurid red on a beach on the Costa del Sol, letting your full English breakfast go down, and waiting to go for nueve cervezas before bellowing ‘Eggo y Chippo por favoro‘ at a humiliated waiter.

Thought: if we bring back straw donkeys from Spain as souvenirs, does the ANBAD Donkey bring back a straw human? Answer: YES [see above].

MIXTAPE:

FIRST! Francois Peglau is a Peruvian/Argentinian French musician living in London, which means …

Boring ANBAD Donkey t0day. He’s all out of footballers to mock. This one is what advertising people would call ANBAD Donkey Classic.

Here’s a really good mixtape though, not like all those rubbish ones that have cluttered up your life in the past.

FIRST! Love Ends Disaster – I’m going to be frank: there are moments when I wholly wavered whilst listening to Love Ends Disaster. There are times when City Of Glass Cowboys appears to be heading down the MOR safety-first route, like – hell – Keane. But every time, the band snatch the song back from …

In the last few exciting World Cup-themed editions of the Midweek Mixtape, the ANBAD Donkey has mocked, variously, zany no-catch goalkeeper Rob Green, wacky no-goals grump Wayne Rooney, and, inevitably, Carlos Valderrama’s hair.

This week, the donkey has an even easier job: he can simply use his natural form to adequately describe England’s performance against Germany. And so, with the usual tortuously tenuous connections to recent media events absent, we can just get on with this week’s mixtape:

FIRST! Josephine was described, rather self-grandly, by her PR people as a protegé. She seems more like a prodigy to me. …