One week has now passed since Juande Ramos’s Tottenham reduced Arsenal to headbutting one another and I am still buzzing. Yes, we have since endured a dignified defeat to Man United in the FA Cup, but this I’m not too bothered about - local bragging rights are prize enough.

Besides, for "accidentally" spraying Arsene Wenger with celebratory champagne in White Hart Lane’s media suite after the match, I can forgive the players anything.

The victory was vindication for every long-suffering Tottenham supporter - and it is telling that even at 4-0, I was still convinced we'd screw it up. How I relished sending abusive text messages to my fiancée’s Gooner brother; how proud I was to find my fiancée herself had sent some too - at last she has switched her familial loyalties (though she did beg to differ when I stumbled home at 2am declaring that I had beat the scum 5-1).

Most satisfying is the marked change in my local neighbourhood, which lies on the fault line of the two clubs.

Stoke Newington is trisected by two main drags: the High Street leads down to Tottenham, and is the domain of Jewish wig shops, Irish pool halls and Turkish minimarkets; Church Street points towards the Arsenal stadium, a fashionable highway for young parents with buggies, lined by organic bakeries.

It’s a typical London contrast. You head to the High Street when you want a greasy cooked breakfast or an atmospheric pub to watch a game of football; and to Church Street when you crave an artisanal bun.

And this seems to exemplify the difference between the two clubs in recent years, Tottenham the slightly grotty, dangerous but somehow more honest; Arsenal the trendy, appealing, but dare we say a touch overrated.

In the normal run of things, the Arsenal tendency has the upper hand. There they sit, smugly watching their matches in their gastropubs, braying and grunting. When they win something, it’s insufferable. I still rue the excruciating day after the FA Cup final of 2005, when my bus was held up by the simian multitude, sent wild by the sight of something red. I hung my head meekly.

Now the secret brothers and sisters are out and proud. Tuesday night saw strangers exchange emphatic handshakes, even hugs. I communed a long while with a street sweeper and a local harmonica-playing anarchist. I am now on nodding terms with them, feel newly connected.

Of course it is absurd that a decision I took instinctively at the age of six should have so coloured my week, continue to make me smile transformed London into an adventure playground of bonhomie. But that’s football.

The words were an iron door.

"If your name’s not on the list, you’re not coming in. Your name's not on the list, pal."

The scene was the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen, at a much-hyped gig given by the New York quartet Vampire Weekend last Thursday.

But this tiny drama could have been played out at any venue, on any night in London - for we are city of blaggers, eyeballing the fat bouncer of chance, trying to claim a place on the guestlist of life. "But I am a VIP!" we cry. "I used to go to school with the bassist!"

Blagging is a social skill every Londoner develops at an early age. I remember fondly the days, aged 16, when I could still nab a child’s ticket on the bus and purchase a four-pack of Diamond White at the offie.

Later in life, the disorganised and the poor must develop their blagging skills to compensate for being unable to snap up tickets for a hyped-up concert the moment they go on sale. Whisper it, but it's usually easier to make up some colourful lie at the venue door than it is to get up at 9am nine months in advance. Being a journalist is a help, but not essential. We are further down the pecking order than genuine creatives - and who's to know you're not really the drummer from Franz Ferdinand?

However, back in Hoxton, faced with Vampire Weekend’s impassive American promoter, my persiflage was falling flat. I wasn't getting in. And here was the thing: I really should have been on that list, having already sorted it with the band’s publicist. Or so I thought.

"You got a press card, buddy?" asked the promoter. I don‘t carry one. "A business card?" Erm. "Well how am I supposed to know you write for this ‘Evening Standard’ then?"

How indeed? Were I blagging from scratch, I might have made up a more elaborate identity - the 3rd Marquis of Rutland say - but now I was made to feel as if I was lying when I was telling the truth.

But after five minutes' of garbage, I earned enough pity/contempt to be given a hand-stamp - I think he just wanted rid of me. But my ‘plus one’, my poor friend Malcolm, who has been lingering just out of picture this whole time, was denied. We retreated outside to bid farewell.

Malcolm pretended not to be disappointed; I grumbled and wondered (not too loudly) whether I ought to skip the gig myself in solidarity. Then Malcolm had a masterstroke. The stamp was not yet dry on the back of my hand. By pressing his to mine, he achieved a perfect imprint, reversed, it is true, but who would notice in the dark?

We reconvened in the middle of the crowd just as Vampire Weekend struck up. They sounded fabulous. If there's one thing more satisfying than a successful blag, it's subterfuge.

I am convinced that London Bridge exists in multiple dimensions. No matter how many times I go there, I never figure out the complex, multi-tiered system of wormholes by which one is supposed to leave the station.

So before I could make it to the theatre on Sunday night, to see the Factory company's semi-secret, semi-improvised take on Hamlet, I was forced to perform a brisk survey of the streets, running in the same direction but arriving back where I started, searching for the Southwark Playhouse. When you are clutching a frying pan, as I was, this attracts some bemused looks.

Why was I clutching a frying pan? Well, for the evening's underground theatricals, I had been told that the audience must provide the props. When I finally found the theatre, I ran straight into the back of famous actor Ewan McGregor, enjoying a night off from Othello. You can fault his Iago, but not his commitment to Shakespeare: he had brought an old accordion, a better class of prop than my greasy implement, but I daresay his salary is larger than mine.

Once seated, we were introduced to the wheeze. The actors, who do it for love not money, perform in whichever space is at hand - the Southwark Playhouse today, an abandoned glue factory tomorrow, say. Each knows the script of Hamlet inside out. They play Scissors/Papers/Stone at the beginning to decide who plays whom, and then perform the tragedy making up all movements and stage directions as they go along and grabbing props from the audience - a traffic cone, a butternut squash, a well-behaved human baby, etc.

It would be a mere gimmick if the actors didn't pull it off with such inspired conviction - more conviction, indeed, than there was to be found in the last dreary Hamlet I saw (Trevor Nunn's overpraised effort at the Old Vic).

So Laertes warned his sister Ophelia about men's motives fingering a phallic marrow; the Player King improvised a song as his campadre worked out how to play McGregor's accordion; and Claudius brilliantly employed a candle in place of a letter, reading the flame as if it were text.

Most daring, Hamlet plucked the baby from the arms of its mother to illustrate his "What is this quintessence of dust?" speech (you know, the one Richard E Grant does in Withnail & I). It was heart-in-the-mouth theatre, unbearably poignant, unrepeatable, screw Health and Safety.

Factory's Hamlet exists in the dimension where real life meets the stage, makes you see the dramatic in the everyday, the everyday in the dramatic.

Just a shame they never used the old frying pan.

See www.factorymembers.com

* Yeah, I know that's from Macbeth - but I don't have my folio to hand.

Or: why Vampire Weekend might resurrect the lost art of rhythm

Last year, the respected pop critic Sacha Frere-Jones wrote a cri de coeur in the New Yorker bemoaning the lack of rhythmic innovation among rock bands. The most highly praised "white" bands of the day - he cited Arcade Fire and Wilco - have ceased to draw any inspiration from "black" music, he complained, a far cry from the days when the Beatles and the Stones cited blues, R'n'B and Detroit soul as their main influences, or even when Talking Heads or PiL pilfered Afrobeat rhythms in the early Eighties. Where now is the cross-fertilisation?

Frere-Jones attracted a good deal of opprobrium for his thoughts, much of it well aimed - it is never sensible to generalise so broadly, or to criticise someone for something they don't do which you think they should. "The Cribs! Why is there no calypso on you latest album, you racists?!" Arcade Fire even felt moved to publish a response, demonstrating the exact points in their music where they borrowed from black artists. But though I have severe reservations - and numerous counter-examples - I can't help thinking that if the New Yorker didn't quite hit the nail on the head, he at least hit the nail, even if the result was a bent nail. "In the past few years, I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness. How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities?"

Leaving aside racially defined markers - and a brief cavil: I do think Britain is different on this score, with a more eccentric mainstream in which Lily Allen can borrow an old calypso tune, Lethal Bizzle can hook up with Gallows, Just Jack can dare to exist - I think it's fair to say that most mainstream rock music is not very rhythmically interesting. (Neither is mainstream hip-hop; pop is another matter). Put simply, once you're even vaguely attuned to a more complex rhythm - through funk, or tropicalia, or drum'n'bass, or classical, whatever - the even bosh bosh favoured by Coldplay, James Blunt, Snow Patrol, etc, becomes intolerably banal, like eating a plateful of unadorned rice. The deliberate, dullard pounding that opens Coldplay's In My Place is, for me, the epitome of this (a noughties update on the weedier thwacks that heralded Oasis's Live Forever); it is not the earnest lyrics that bother me so much as this square noise - see Chris Martin prove my point, left: the four's the thing. It sounds to me like conformity, a mortgaged version of the house beat they pipe out in gyms and discos, which I have always found impossible to dance to.

Two more rhythms dominate rock right now: the bom-chik-bom-chik-bom-ba-dam-da-dom-chik bustle (see The Strokes' Last Nite), nicked by the early pop-punks from Motown; and the bom-chsh-bom-chsh polka (see Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out), a rock version of a house-beat, popularised by the Stone Roses. But once you identify them, it's amazing how little deviation you'll find. To the best of my knowledge, Oasis have never even left the comfort of 4/4 time, never thought to try writing a waltz.

By contrast, one of the main reasons Radiohead continue to outclass their imitators is their dedication to messing with beats; 15 Step, the opener to In Rainbows, reimagines speed garage in 5/8 time; Morning Bell alternates 6/8 and 2/4; after much counting, I worked out that Pyramid Song falls into a very lolloping 4/4, so syncopated as to almost be free. You, the very first song on their very first album, signalled their intent, opening with a guitar playing ambiguous triplets that only fall into place when the drums enter in 6/8; throughout, the band tricksily drop a beat every fourth bar, switching occasionally to 5/8. I'm not sure how much this adds to the song, but it does prove that from the beginning the band were willing to practise hard to confound the listener's expectations - dropped beats are very easy to screw up. And Radiohead prove that nothing reinvigorates a sound like a change of pace and step.

Anyway, that's all a very long preamble to introduce the New York band Vampire Weekend, one of my (and many others') tips for the year, for what it's worth, and a band that seem designed in response to Sacha Frere-Jones's piece.

I first heard them on New Year's Day, on BBC6 Music, my ears pricking up to the interview with the band (college-grad indie kids at heart) before they played their first song. They explained how they arrived at their single, Mansard Roof: they enjoyed tuning in to the reggaton stations of the Hispanic ghettos of New York, and were intrigued that this form of music, currently the sound of the Carribbean, all employs the same dancehall beat - dom-der-dum: chik! - a sound you don't often hear elsewhere. So they nicked it, sped it up beyond recognition and grafted it onto a swing-style tune they had. The DJ played the results - and my goodness did it sound refreshing, new yet comforting, an Alka Seltzer of a song. I've since tracked down an advance copy of Vampire Weekend's eponymous debut, and it's a trick they are adept at performing, borrowing from Afrobeat or baroque - whatever - to invigorate their sound, which is basically Pavement-derived college rock (Pavement a band for whom Frere-Jones reserves a deal of scorn). The results sound complex, but the principle is idiotically simple - and, to become an old man for a minute, used to be second nature to the writers of pop songs. Just takes a bit of imagination.

Anyway, Vampire Weekend play the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen on Thursday.

It's a bloodbath. EMI, one of the Big Four record companies, home of the Beatles, Stones, Bowie and Kraftwerk, is to gather 2,000 of its 5,500-strong workforce in a strip-lit room, cut off the air-con and execute them one by one with a letter opener. I only hope Cliff Richard escapes the cull.

The chief butcher is a man named Guy Hands, whose private equity firm, Terra Firma, bought EMI for £3.2 billion last May hoping to turn around the firm's fortunes. He hopes the cull will save the ailing giant £200 million a year.

A business man, not a music man, Hands is not well liked. His appearance has led to such diverse protests as Paul McCartney signing his deal with Starbucks, Radiohead doing their honesty box thing and, now, The Verve threatening to withhold their forthcoming album. Robbie Williams, left, is particularly miffed. But the various honest office workers who have now lost their jobs will have less choice what to do with their talents: you can't really sell your management skills on the internet asking clients to pay what they think they're worth.

None of EMI's main rivals - Warner, Sony BMG, Universal - will be chuffed at the news. While EMI seems to have been spectacularly mismanaged, this is symptomatic of industry-wide ill-health in the days of iTunes, the Hype Machine and Billy Bodkins of Iowa burning the new Interpol album for his pals. The Big Four's strategies for dealing with the online revolution - criminalising their customers, imposing digital rights management - have failed; they are all backtracking fast. Rumour has it that one of Hands's schemes involves getting big corporations to sponsor new releases: Coldplay's fourth album, brought to you by BP and McDonald's. As I said, a business man, not a music man. But he has to think of something fast.

Among the general hand-wringing and the horror epitomised by EMI however, there is one pop music success story that has become an unavoidable fixture in the business pages.

You cannot open the paper these days without stumbling upon some gushing article banging on about how nang The O2 is. We all know that despite opening halfway through the year, the rejuvenated entertainment complex was the world's (third) highest grossing venue of 2007. We coo at AEG's ability to attract The Spice Girls and Led Zeppelin to play in their tent. Business types marvel at the deal O2 struck with AEG to rename that vainglorious dome.

As the public loses their appetite to pay for recorded music, they have recovered their desire to watch it played live - for real-life experience  - and as market leader, the O2 has capitalised. A glance at the list of the Top Ten Musical Earners of last year, published in Forbes magazine last year, proves that live performance is where the cash is. A latest record company wheeze, incidentally, is to buy into their artists' performance rights, effectively turning them into management companies.

Is the implication, then, that albums will soon cease to become the mileposts in an artist's career? Will we measure, say, Adele or Duffy's progress not through the silver discs they chuck our way but by their appearances at various arenas?

I used to find the demise of the record industry amusing. But eyeing the emerging model, I am not too sure. On my one unhappy visit I found the O2 to be a clammy, tacky, consumerist hell-hole with all the rock'n'roll credentials of Brent Cross Shopping Centre. The arena itself had muddy, soupy acoustics. True, there are excellent corporate facilities. It provides an all round entertainment experience. It is shortly to host a national Rock and Roll Hall of Fame hosting rare memorabilia from the likes of David Bowie and Arctic Monkeys. But I'm not sure I want to entrust the future of rock'n'roll to company that puts it on the same level as a day at Alton Towers and hopes to build a casino next door.

A glance through EMI's history books, meanwhile, reveals that for all their present woes, they have made an astonishing and lasting contribution to music history. The Beatles, to use the most obvious example, were nurtured and indulged by the company in a way that would be impossible now, but stands to EMI's credit. The last thing a venue like The O2 will promote is innovation - it thrives on bankable dinosaurs like the Spice Girls. The big draw of 2008? Celine Dion.

Resting on credentials is part of the reason why EMI is in such trouble. But finding and nurturing new talent as the company once did is surely the only way out of the present mess. Quite simply, the public will never tire of hearing new music and it is impossible to imagine that a way cannot be found to make this demand profitable. Alas, the way things are going, I fear this is ultimately bound to evolve into a sponsorship scenario not unlike the one outlined above; as The O2's packed hospitality suites prove, corporations love to buy into that creative stuff. And for a band, where's the line between, say, licensing your song for an O2 advert, playing in a giant, Dome-shaped advert for O2 and having your album funded directly by O2 bods who wish to be identified with your rebel schtick? Which, if you think about it means that, in market terms, the idea of rock'n'roll is worth more than rock'n'roll itself.

Just before Christmas, I asked my girlfriend to be my wife. "You might have put some clothes on", she said, "but yup, sure". Or words to that effect; I can‘t remember, I was drunk. But sincere - I had a ring and everything - and now we are engaged to be married, just like that.

So the festive season was more festive than usual, as friends and relatives toasted our good health and my derring-do with endless quantities of champagne. It was lovely.

I am still walking round in a cloud of smug - but now a biting new year has set in, and reality with it. Marquees must be ordered, caterers sampled, vows written, important choices to be made - Hello! or OK for the coverage?

This, in the words of a Peter Andre and Jordan song that a distant relation of mine had piped through speakers as he and his bride signed the register, is A Whole New World. The wedding industry is completely mental. One colleague, who got hitched last year, told me the best thing about being married was not having to plan a wedding anymore. I begin to see what he means.

Not only are there at least eight different Bride magazines, there is one publication devoted entirely to Wedding Flowers ("Your only guide to bridal blooms"). How do they begin to fill it?

There is even a men’s wedding magazine, Stag and Groom, lest you thought this was merely a women's game. I can only imagine what it contains - guides to the brothels of Bratislava for the stag do? Galleries of those revolting ruche ties and shiny waitcoats? "If I catch you reading it, the wedding’s off", my fiancée informed me, to my great relief.

One thing is clear: mere mention of the word "wedding" instantly quadruples the price of any given item. You couldn’t give a Christmas cake away at this time of year, but whack two cavorting figurines on the top and call it a wedding cake, and you would instantly have a queue of loved-up dolts trying to give you £400 for it. The wedding merchants are adept at that age-old trick of gently implying to madam that sir can't really love her unless he can afford the best for her.

I am not yet jaded, and the looping round of phone calls from our various excited mothers is immensely cheering. But it is sad that what begins as an earnest declaration of love ends up being so cynically exploited. "It's your special day", croon the girls in the dress shops, meaning: "two grand, or I'll make you look like a munter".

But I only know this detail from reports, as I was delighted to learn that superstition totally excludes the male from the dress quest. It's comforting to know that at least one marital tradition was thought up by a man.