The madness of the music quiz machine

THERE'S a pub in London - I'm not telling you where - which has a very generous quiz machine. Scroll down from sport, general knowledge and cinema and you'll come to music. It's so easy-peasy I actually feel a tinge of guilt for relieving it of all those 50 pence pieces it splutters into my cupped hands.

Even when you hit the "advanced" button, and you get into what it calls "niche" questions - such as duets, songs about cars etc, there's no real degree of difficulty involved. It's hardly my fault that I know a bit about bands that no-one else (including the members of the band themselves) has ever heard of. Money for nothing and while the beer's not free, it's cheap.

Serious quiz people, who are good at more than the music questions can make a living, of sorts, out of pub quiz machines. You may think that you would have to have an amazing array of general knowledge facts and trivia at your disposal to launch an assault on the pub machine quiz but you don't. When you get away from whatever your specialised subject is, you will soon find that there are a number of shortcuts you can use in the general knowledge categories.

In the science category, for example, if you know your periodic table and the mnemonic HNAKXR (it's for the noble gases) and then build from that you should be ok. With geography, you should be fine with just the superlatives: the highest mountain, the longest river etc but also look out for those pesky questions about the capitals of US states - it's

never the biggest city in the state, it's usually a much smaller one. And do know something about European rivers - they crop up everywhere. Remember Frankfurt is on the Main and know a bit about the Rhine and the Danube.

For "football" you'll need to know the names of all the Premiership grounds and, if you're serious about it, all the winners of the FA Cup since the 1960s.

History is a bugger because the answer usually entails knowing a date. Either you know these or you don't.

And - completely unrelated but before I forget - the international vehicle registration symbol for Spain is not S. It's E.

There's simply no way around these machines these days without a basic knowledge of soap operas. You don't have to watch the programmes, but you do have to know (and this is always asked) the name of the central pub in the most popular ones.

Under music, again you have to know your superlatives (most number ones etc) and increasingly you'll have to know your rock lyrics. There are two supposedly awkward questions that come up again and again: Who sang the first line on Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas and which two politicians are mentioned by name in The Beatles's Taxman? Answers: 1. Paul Young; 2. Wilson and Heath.

As a warm-up, or even as an end in itself, there are a number of interactive DVDs you can now get, from the very well produced Heat Magazine - Interactive DVD Game to the potentially great Now That's What I Call A Music Quiz! The latter comes from the same stable as the phenomenally popular Now! series of compilation albums (and in case you need to know: there was no exclamation mark used on the Now! albums until the 18th album in the series and on the 20th in the series they moved the exclamation mark so that it now follows the word "music" not "Now").

Whatever about the ability of Now! to produce very accurate and representative compilation hits albums, they show themselves here to know next to nothing about the music quiz format. Not only is it inanely easy, it's badly presented and has far too narrow a range. Try instead the average-to-good Q - The Essential Music Quiz DVD (from the magazine of the same name) or if you really want the ultimate here, head straight for the fabulous Suggs's 80s Pop Culture Quiz - DVD Interactive Game, which you can currently pick up for a song on a certain site named after the second longest river in the world.