No Rock And Roll Fun

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: Bloody little, it's summer

For purposes we can only begin to speculate over, Radio Times has given its main interview spread to Kelly Osbourne. The wafer thin explanation is that The Osbournes is in MTV this week, but it's halfway through a series that's doing badly even by the standards of a minority channel. She doesn't have anything to say, except that Ozzy is like a walking anti-drugs advert - which shows (glancing at jack) just how poorly anti-drugs campaigns work, we guess.

The NME has managed to choose a terrible cover - the drummer from the coral with his gob open - it looks like the sort of thing you'd see on a low circulation regional paper where the designer and the photographer are the same person, and not overseen by an editor. We're in for one of those issues, then.

News: The Strokes are just one week away from finishing work on the new album - which suggests that they must have actually started it about last friday evening, then.

Fran Healy decided he wanted Celtic fans to sing on the new record, and went down to record them during a friendly with Fulham. The home team's groundkeepers turned the sprinklers on him, which shows they're better music critics than most of the writers for broadsheet arts pages. It also emerges that Fran "feels patronised by the press", presumably because they treat him like an affable buffon rather than spending time questioning his viewpoints and beliefs. That's not them patronising you, Fran, that's them being kind to you.

The Polyphonic Spree's missing robe has been found - it seems even the thief found the whole story so dull he wanted nothing more to do with it.

Moby is excited that his name has been adopted as slang for the complete removal of a female's pubic hair. He'll doubtless be equally delighted that we've been using the slang term for a female's pubic area to describe him.

Courtney Love is being turned into a cartoon figure... which isn't saying very much, really, is it?

Damon Dash is supposedly worth USD200m. Yeah, and lastminute.com shares are my pension scheme.

There's some pisspoor writing in this week's issue, frankly: an article is headed "Jack White's Last Gig" - he broke a finger, he didn't die; Coldplay are described as being "relegated" to a 150 person venue at the Sydney Opera House, despite this being a specially arranged gig (we'd like to believe that Coldplay were stiffing down under, but... it just ain't so - Chris Martin joked about being relegated, but that doesn't make it a fact; launching their Reading and Leeds carshares, the paper counsels "we suggest you don't exchange home addresses for safety reasons" - so, presumably, climbing into a car with a complete stranger involves no risk whatsoever; in the T in The Park survey, nobody has seemed to notice that asking someone to rate their experience of the festival and giving them the option of 'over-rated' makes no sense whatsoever. And two articles about Glasgow bands - in the course of which we discover little more than Dogs Die In Hot Cars and Fraz Ferdinand are from Glasgow - is apparently the excuse to claim there's a New Jock Revolution.

Frank Black CD picky thing involves Iggy Pop, The Beatles and Peter Paul and Mary.

Alison Goldfrapp has a nice story about when she was working in Agent Provacateur; a man asked to see stockings and then started to masturbate himself in, um, thanks. She did the job for a week. It's not clear whether the man involved cummed all over anything.

Given Danish Junior Senior, there are some pointless, aimless Euro questions - oh, a gag about cucumber straightness. Wasted opportunity.

"I can't wait to get back to Hoylake and mow the lawn" announces one of The Coral, before detailing how Hoylake is full of pdf files. The more we see of The Coral, the more we start to suspect that their wackiness is more what they feel is expected rather than what they feel; a sub-Vic Reeves whimsy rather than the disjointed glow of a distracted mind. James tells us that "big pylons and big induistry look like a big nuclear disaster" as he tries to explain his songwriting - but, no, no they don't. It's not a very good observation at all. It's all like the Dreaming of You video - the cycling with a backdrop, the man in the bear suit, the phone box on the beach; it's all stuff that doesn't quite feel like they're doing their own thing.

reviews
albums
black rebel motorcycle club - take them on, on your own -"a masterpiece", 9
holly golightly - truly she is none other - "a world where its 1957 forever", 6
mondo generator - a drug problem that never existed - "they have tunes", 7

singles
sotw - hot hot heat - no, not now "HHH brush off those Cure comparisons"
relaxed muscle - billy jack/sexualized - "jarvis yelping 'sex sex sex sex sex like a mad, horny labrador"

live
kings of leon - camden - "still some way to go"
elbow - kings cross scala - "Doves"
the hiss - brighton free butt - "hiss-teria looms"

and that's it. We can't wait until summer's over and music starts again.