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Comedy writer Ian Martin stumbles through our back catalogue, making random observations and proposing a toast to Ace Records’ eclectic avenue of dreams.

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What’s a “guilty pleasure”? I’ll tell you what it isn’t. A guilty pleasure is NOT just a really good pop song some dickhead likes.

You know the sort. Pop-up celebrity, crowdsourced personality, cultural smartarse. “My tastes are so eclectic it almost physically hurts me…” he murmurs to himself in some frictionless Sunday supplement profile, making you want to physically hurt him. “Oh I listen to everything, from Run The Jewels to Baroque opera. From cool jazz on my beloved collection of 78s to the really impenetrable bits of Penderecki delivered directly via neural implant into my hippocampus…”

Here he will perhaps allow a coquettish smile to fall like dappled light across his facial ladygarden. “And you know what? It’s cheesy I know but I confess I have a soft spot for Tamla Motown. Especially anything by Marvin Gaye. OK sure, it’s a guilty pleasure. But sometimes you just need something sweet and frothy, right?” Shit off, you snobgoblin.

FACT: guilt is an internalised emotion, pop-pickers. The concept of musical guilty pleasures only makes sense if the person judging you, making you feel guilty, is YOU. In the privacy of your own kitchen, why would you feel guilty if nobody’s there to mock you? Because YOU’RE always there to mock you. Example: Now You loves that old ELO track. Yeah, that awful, peppy knock-off Beatles track which was so comprehensively despised by Then You. Now You distinctly remembers Then You and your Then Mates being pretty nasty about Jeff Lynne And His Mulleted Hommage. Then You sneers at Now You still. Look at him, the little bastard, with his acne and his backcombed hair and his insufferable pretension and by the way terrible clothes. 

Nor should guilty pleasures be confused with musical differences. You should see my wife’s face when she returns unexpectedly to the house to find me alone in it, doing what a lot of blokes do while alone in the house - listening to the Beatles. I love them, she hates them. I suppose there is sort-of guilt. She feels sort-of guilty if I switch off the Beatles, I feel sort-of guilty if she has to listen to them. Oh, and please don’t make that citrus face at me and suggest I “use headphones” either. That’s not how 20th Century People listen to music. We like our music to gush and tumble through several cubic feet of air, painting the floating molecules with sound, thanks very much.

And on the subject of being a 20th Century Person, allow me to suggest that the “guilty pleasure” has been reinvented by 21st Century People as a shaming device. Fifty years ago it was OK for me to like blues music. Like a lot of white boys, I came to Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker and the rest via rock and roll and white boy R&B. Fleetwood Mac, all that lovely Blue Horizon stuff…

But try telling Twitter you like blues and watch the revisionists recoil in disgust, as if you’d just said you like golliwogs, segregated education and plantation minstrels. Well I’m so sorry, humourless Roundheads of New Puritania, I can’t unlike what I liked then and still like now. I won’t be guilt-tripped into discarding my musical youth as colonialism and misogyny. I’m old now but still white, and I like hip-hop too which infuriatingly may contain racial allusions and bitches and whatnot and I am bored stiff by my own argument so HERE ARE MY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE CATALOGUE OF ACE RECORDS MY MOST FAVOURITE RECORD COMPANY EVER. Not really recommendations, actually. I don’t know what you like, do I? But this is what I like.

Please note we will be closed for Christmas between the 22nd of December and January 2nd 2013. Our online shop will stay open over the Christmas period. All orders will be processed when we get back on January 2nd 2013.

Season's greetings from all at Ace

Robin Ince is co-presenter of Radio 4's Sony Gold winning Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox. He is currently touring the UK and is off to the USA and Australia in the spring with his shows about science, music and fury. He also presents a weekly music podcast called Vitriola Music with Michael Legge. He has recently written and presented documentaries on comedians and melancholy, the history of self-help, Schrodinger's cat, and Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds.