ANOTHER CLOSURE: Shame to hear that Liverpool's second-greatest clubnight, Voodoo (and I mean second to Liquidation, not The Big Supermarket That Is Cream) is going to close in a few weeks, not quite making a decade of cutting edge dance. Doubtless to be the subject of Janice Long fronted documentaries in years to come...
voodoo website - domain name shortly coming free...
Ink magazine reports on the 8th birthday - it all seemed so full of hope back then...

OF COURSE one of the most worrying things about the US imposing tariffs on steel imports is what this means for the Bruce Springstein. "He used to work the steel mills/ but the steel mills almost closed/ though US protectionism and a spot of restructuring guaranteed his job for the mid term" doesn't have the same ring, somehow.

NOT THAT: John Robb, and also not that Gomez, either...

DOTMUSIC SOLD: Dotmusic, which used to be the old Music Week website before the great web boom led Lord Hollick to sniff money and made it all consumer-focused, has been flogged to BT. They apparently want to build on the video and audio parts of the site to encourage people to take up broadband. Hmmm, it might work - BT at least has experience of running that service where you could ring up and listen to a top 30 track down your phone (advertised by a Punk Busby, of course...)

IMUSES BACK FROM LIMBO: Yay... good news... Throwing Muses have reformed. Like, the proper, full, band. Tanya and Kristen. Nothing before 2003, but there are twelve songs in the can already. Aaaaah.
NME reports - mixing already...

SORRY to hear that Tommy Boy have closed. Never really my first choice as a label, but even so...

PHEW: Of course, when bands release new stuff you wait with baited breath - if its an excellent band, you worry that they may have lost it. If it's Oasis, you worry that maybe - just maybe - they've found the spark that made them look as if they could be the band they clearly still think that they are.
Having heard The Hindu Times on Mark & Lard just now, I can breath again. The biggest laughing dog in all of rock still blusters and blows. Imagine George Harrison playing 'Does Your Mother Know?' by Abba on a sitar. Possibly in his death throes. It's now clear why this single took so long to get released - it's so half baked and lightweight, it would have needed jets scrambled to get it down out the sky...

NO SURPRISES: If I thought the Brits were too moribund to even bother mentioning, then I spose I should feel lucky that I'm not Irish. Their music awards yesterday saw everything bar newcomer and female going to either U2 or Westlife. Perhaps the saddest, most shameful prize was that the best Irish pop single of 2001 was, apparently, that cover of Uptown Girl Westlife knocked out for charidee. I'm sorry, but had I been totalling up the votes, and found that on the top, that people had decided the country had produced nothing finer than a one-shot take-off of a Billy Joel song that was irritating when it was first written, I'd have paid off the caterers, written off the deposit on the hall, and cancelled the event.
U2? Again? [BBC] - curse you, Mumba, you have foiled our duopoly...

STILL, MAKES A CHANGE FROM SMASHING GIRL'S FACES IN: Compare and contrast November 6th, 2001
Exclusive: So Solid Harvey speaks out against violence
Harvey from the So Solid Crew has spoken to Radio One for the first timesince the shootings at the London Astoria nightclub. The whole crew were at the venue celebrating Romeo’s 21st birthday last week when it happened - two men are still recovering from their injuries. Harvey told us he is sick of their image attracting unwanted attention and that trouble seems to follow them around. He says none of So Solid are in the business for that reason: “I don’t know what’s wrong with people to be quite honest, I don’t know how you can leave your house with that mentality that I’m going to start trouble or I’m going to shoot someone. It’s quite scary to think, you know what I mean? People are spoiling what is good, we’ve turned a new sound into something big and people want to spoil it.”
versus
Today
Ashley Walters, a member of garage act So Solid Crew has pleaded guilty to a
firearms charge in a London court.
Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC said the offence was so serious that a substantial custodial sentence was inevitable.
Walters, 29, from Peckham, south London, pleaded guilty to possessing a prohibited Brocock revolver at Southwark Crown Court.
A further charge of possessing the gun with intent to cause fear of violence was ordered to lie on file.
The allegation relates to an incident with a traffic warden in July last year at Canary Wharf, east London.
Prosecution counsel Stephen Holt said that Walters was in his car with his girlfriend, parked next to a meter which had expired.
He said that when Walters was approached by traffic warden Olufemi Onafeko, who asked him to either put money in the meter or drive off, an argument broke out between the two men.
The gun was never shown, but Mr Holt said the traffic warden was so concerned about the defendant's behaviour that he called police.
When an armed response vehicle stopped the car the weapon was found wrapped in a sock in Walters girlfriend's handbag.
Defence counsel Simon Pentol said his client was of previous good character.
The case was adjourned to 25 March, to allow pre-sentence reports to beprepared.
Walters's friends and family broke down in tears when they heared bail had been refused.
Previous to joining So Solid Crew, Walters had acting roles in TV dramas Grange Hill and The Bill.
So Solid Crew went to number one in the singles charts with 21 Seconds last August and they won a Brit award last month.
Still, at least we now know why so many SSC audience members turn up with guns... it's probably because they're scared they'll be shot at from the stage...

HEY! IS THAT WHERE THEY RIPPED THEIR STYLE FROM?: Yes, and now we're pinching text direct from www.ntk.net:
Forget Bob Dylan, Tony Bennett, Billy Joel - the most moving performance at this week's GRAMMY AWARDS came from old-time crooner Michael Greene, President of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, who waxed lyrical on the subject of the "comfort, solace and sweet celebration" that "the power of music" brings to the world. But then the lighting changed, the backing switched to monks chanting over a gothic trip-hop beat and, striding through the dry ice swirling across the stage, Greene went on to rap about how he'd personally witnessed the hood's darker side, where MP3 fans stole bands' livelihoods "one digital file at a time" - it's "out of control and oh so criminal", he wailed. The number ended with a cautionary tale of three kids he knew who fell in with a bad crowd, downloaded thousands of songs in a Morpheus binge, and are now presumably in the custody of the relevant authorities. Tragically, we don't have an audio recording of this potential floor-filler, but if anyone out there does, wouldn't it make a great remix anthem for our "World Wide Web/ of theft and indifference"? Also, from the way things are going, it sounds like he might just appreciate the royalties.
http://grammy.aol.com/features/speech.html
- been spending most my life/ livin' in a Napster's paradise
- the best bit about the speech is this bit:
Please say hello to Numair, Stephanie and Ed. In just a couple of days they have downloaded nearly 6,000 songs. That's three kids, folks. Now multiply that by millions of students and other computer users and the problem comes into sharp focus. Songwriters, singers, musicians, labels, publishers - the entire music food chain is at serious risk. The RIAA estimates that - now listen to this - an astounding 3.6 billion songs are illegally downloaded every month.
Yeah, but I do believe that some students actually spend some of their time working, rather than just desperately trying to download every song they can find. And one or two users in the UK waiting for Broadband to reach their area and their budget may be gagging at the thought of trying to download a song every minute and a half (which is what three users accessing 6,000 tracks in two days means, of course. And 3.6 billion songs a month? Isn't that everybody in the world downloading six songs a year? Isn't that hugely unlikely?