No Rock And Roll Fun

MY BRIEF WILL DION: In one of the oddest legal fights since, ooh, last week, Muse are suing Celine Dion for pinching their name for her upcoming tour. The Canadian one is intending to brand her Las Vegas schmalzamooze Muse - presumably in the hope people will misread the poster and pay in the mistaken belief they're going to see 'Celine Dion - Mute'. Muse's point is that they still believe they're going to break America, and they believe that Americans might get confused between Dion's winter-of-career night in Vegas and a bunch of spiky haired nuGoths from Devon. Now, while we can see it as a refreshing change that one of "our" bands is finally getting the chance to kick some butt back after years of band names losing out to pisspoor US suits (Suede beaten by a cabaret singer; Verve by a jazz label; Charlatans by a nearly defunct 60's act; And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead by a puppet theatre in Idaho), we really wish that Muse had decided either to turn the other cheek and demonstrate that, really, nobody gets these sort of things muddled up, or at least take the fairly generous GBP32,000 payoff from Dion's people and make the best of it.
Because, firstly, its not as if calling a band Muse is the most original of moves, anyway - it's like the battles between the seventy-three acts called Revolver, which boils down to the question 'who ran out of inspiration first?' - and, more importantly: It's Celine Dion. For some reason, incredibly popular. And, we'd imagine, her fans are more likely to stumble into a Muse gig by mistake than Muses' are to wind up in the Las Vegas Enormodome by accident.
A separate action, in which the makers of My Little Pony accuse Dion of the unauthorised use of Pinky Pony's face, remains unsettled.