Where's Celine Dion gone?

Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon is an amorphous piece of ambient trickery. It was composed in what is known (although quite possibly only to Eno himself) as the "holographic" style. This means the song was written according to mathematical principles. With Thursday Afternoon, Eno constructed a weird musical Mobius strip-style tune. It's just a series of repeated loops that ebb and flow their way over the course of an hour or so.

New York writer Wendy McClure had her first up-close-and-personal encounter with Thursday Afternoon in a local bar. She had only gone in for a quick drink but found herself rooted to the spot by Eno's tune. The weird thing is, someone had played it on the jukebox.

There are certain artists you never, ever expect to hear on pub jukeboxes. Brian Eno is one of them. Meat Loaf, yes. Celine Dion, yes. Bryan Adams, yes. Eno, no.

McClure wrote a blog about her Eno-on-the-jukebox experience. She recounted how most people in the bar thought the jukebox was broken because the same sound loop kept going on and on for over an hour. Some college kids referred to the track as "Yoga Music". Other people wanted a refund because they had been waiting for ages for their selections to come on and now had to leave.

Many people wished McClure hadn't written about her experience. She had unwittingly lifted the lid on the activities of a secret society. She had exposed the hitherto private world of "Wyatting". The newest cultural buzzword on the block, Wyatting is either an act of show-off snobbery or an act of mischievous subversion. Or both. Or neither.

Wyatting is only possible because of the invention of the internet-connected jukebox. Whereas before you had a limited amount of popular bestselling albums on the jukebox, now you can access up to two million tracks.

Wyatters, as they are known, are people who play music by Robert Wyatt on internet jukeboxes. Wyatt used to be the drummer with the prog-psychedelic band Soft Machine and has since gone on to record a number of experimental, freestyle jazz-rock albums. It's not the sort of music you would ever expect to hear on a pub jukebox - which is precisely the point of Wyatting.

A particular favourite for Wyatters would be the 1991 album Dondestan, which some people would politely term "challenging".

Some see Wyatting as a futile and puerile gesture; others see it as a subversive act. Others still find the whole thing very hilarious indeed.

While, at the moment, Wyatting remains a cult activity, each week brings more reports of successful missions carried out in pubs, especially on weekend nights. Obviously the original idea was to play only music by Robert Wyatt. But the basic premise has now been stretched and there have been reports of people playing tracks from such albums as Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. This, however, is ideologically suspect and can only be referred to as Wyatting-lite.

At the other end of the spectrum is a militant wing that seeks out the most obscure and discordant music ever recorded. These people are known as Merzbowists. They are Wyatt apostates who have switched their allegiance to the Japanese noise-experimentalist Merzbow, who makes Throbbing Gristle sound like Enya.

This is revisionism gone crazy. Anyone can play horribly discordant music on a pub jukebox, and the Merzbowists are in danger of giving the whole game away. Robert Wyatt was selected for a very good reason: his music may not be jukebox- friendly, but it doesn't arouse that much suspicion that a conspiracy is in place.

If you find yourself near a jukebox this weekend, make sure you make the Wyatt decision.