Crack-pipes roasting by an open fire. Junkies nipping at your toes. Yuletide drugs mixed with music that’s dire. And fat middle aged women dressed up like ho’s.

Yes, it’s yet another celebration with Chew The Fat! the steaming yuletide logs of the dance music world floating menacingly in the U-Bend of Christmas. Everybody knows that with some vixgra and some mistletoe, and perhaps a sprinkling of Rohypnol, the Christmas party scene is open season for endless consumption, chronic humiliation and frantic dry-humping of your work colleagues after eight pints of justice-juice.

It’s the time of year when Fatmail reflects on the highs and lows of the year just gone, and realises that another year of underpaid literary self-flagellation for little or no reward has lumbered by once again. Any self-respecting back-room marketing gimp would have begun questioning whether the chances of a promotion might be on the cards, but not us. All we have to look forward to is a game of ’soggy mince-pie’ in the stock room and another decade of writing a progressively less entertaining sales promotion newsletter for the price of a hand-shandy and a cup of tea.

But you’ll be delighted to hear that, despite rumours of our demise, Fat will return to London’s popular West End this Friday like a particularly unpleasant bout of piles, clinging to the spotty arse-cheeks of your weekend, causing mild irritation, painful itching and the inability to sit down.

So read on, Turkeys, for at least two opportunities to be fisted by the pale, clutching fingers of Fatmail, and have your giblets and entrails clawed out to make a messy mid-morning treat for the family dog… enjoy your Christmas dinner!
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You’d have to be terminally ill to go through the whole of Christmas without spending at least four hours in an excruciatingly claustrophobic social prison, mixing with people you’d rather undergo voluntary flaying of your urethra than spend time with, listening to music that makes you long for the sweet release of a violent and painful crucifixion.

But while some people find the office Christmas party fits this bill quite suitably, others, many of whom don’t work at all, seek their thrills elsewhere. And that’s where the Fat! pre-Xmas fxckfest comes in.

This Christmas, rather than sitting in stony silence with the hated siblings and spawn you grew up with, you could be rubbing shoulders with some of the least important dance music entertainers this side of Reading.

And the Christmas-crackheads in this year’s festive advent are:

THOMAS SCHUMACHER – when it comes to repetitive, relentless techno that makes you shxt your lungs out, the Germans always deliver the goods. Tonight’s teutonic marching marshall is sponsored by Lidl, who smuggled Schumacher into the UK with a consignment of cold meats. Feel his thrusting techno truncheon tonight at Chew The Fat!

ELITE FORCE – from techno to tech-funk, we really are going to the lengths and breadths of dance music with this line up. Elite Force, despite having a name that even Toys-R-Us’s product designers might cringe at, will tonight be taking his proud place as the slightly minging sausages-wrapped-in-bacon to Schumacher’s techno turkey.

PLAZA DE FUNK – despite being named after a slum in Venice notorious for ladyboy bukkake experts, it’s a warm welcome for the “Square of Funk”, along with his an entourage of swarthy monobrowed girl-botherers in tow.

With ressies Kid Blue in support, plus CTF’s Eastern European main man DJ I.F.U. casually avoiding the Home Office spooks with his fake passport of electro breaks, it’s another international passport to abject banality at London’s unhealthiest club night.

BLACK RABBIT – Tonight’s guest in the lounge is one of Fatmail’s biggest fans; a lady who gets so juiced up about reading this occasional verbose shit-torrent that her PA has to wring her out like a damp tea-towel before she’s even got to the second paragraph. If only the writer of Fatmail wasn’t a wizened, hunched, half-mutant ephedrine-addict locked away in a filthy back-room of a south London squat, we’d be straight round there with a tub of snake oil and a bollock-clamper.

Now, having read the above, Lottie will no doubt be eagerly anticipating the possibility of bumping into her literary heroes this Friday by dragging her privates around the club and leaving a trail of Lady-Frieze in her wake. Mind your step, Fat! Fans.