IS IT THE INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF THE HUBRIS?: Robbie is begging for Americans to vote for him, like a man who can't even afford a digital street team - since the 'breaking America' clause was what swung the contract for EMI, he must be fuming now, surely? We'd loved to have been at that meeting: "Right, what's the plan?"
"We thought you could tour round the US playing shopping centres and begging for airplay on small radio stations. It worked for Tiffany."
Meanwhile, falling even further is Madonna, whose new album is moving so slowly out of record shops its believed to have inspired the gridlock britain drama on BBC TV this week. How we chortled when Posh went to Woolworths; but to drop on the scale of Madonna having to tramp down to HMV to sing a couple of songs, Victoria Beckham would have had to have got a job stacking shelves in a Kwik Save music department.
Best of all, she didn't seem to realise. She harrangued the poor sods that they should go and do something with the energy and love they had for her, or words to that effect. She didn't seem to realise that the audience comprised almost entirely of gay men, a warning sign that she's waned from starlet, through curiosity to end up as walking tragedy. Her performance could best be described as distracted - she might have paid lip service to being blessed and lucky to be there, but the delivery of the songs weren't even 'will this do' but 'make it stop'.
You're doing instore performances, Madonna. You were once Like A Virgin. Now you're Like Atomic Kitten. If you're struggling that much to keep an audience, you might want to learn a little more humility, or you're going to need to struggle a whole lot more.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE SIX MONTHS, FOUR THOUSAND MILES AND A MILLION UNSOLD RECORDS MAKES:
"Williams insisted he was not interested in cracking the lucrative US market. "I can't be arsed," he said." BBC report on Robbie Williams in Berlin, November 2002
"Robbie Williams has begged Americans to support him in his bid to crack the lucrative US market. The former Take That star asked 15,000 fans at a New York concert to phone local radio stations to urge them to play his latest single. 'Even if you don't like it, can you ask for it?' he pleaded with the crowd." Ananova reports on Robbie Williams in New York, May 2003

VIDEOWATCH: We're enjoying watching the new radiohead video (constantly on upon MTV2, under an 'exclusive' banner) which features Thom Yorke wandering about a wood - at first like that Metz judderman commercial from a few years back. Then he peers through a window and watches all the creatures of the wood having tea. I suspect it might be an idea lifted wholesale from CS Lewis. Whatever, it dearly makes you wish that Thom had stuck to his promise not to make videos.
Meanwhile, there's also that Blur video cropping up a lot at the moment - the one which uses bits of Correspondent cut up to show a US marine moping about on a boat. What nobody seems to have picked up on is how this seems to be Damon Albarn having his apple pie and eating it - it could be read as an attempt to explore the human dimension of conflict - she's just a person, too, dragged far away from home by the demands of her President's foreign policy, missing her boy, in something bigger than she can control. On the other hand, it does all this while being - to the eye unaware of Damon's stance - a video that could seem to be standing on a chair in a baseball field chanting "USA! USA! USA!", showing one of our brave boys - erm, girls - doing a difficult job in difficult circumstances, suffering to help them iraqis come to their senses and make the world a safer place. In other words, it could be comfortably shown in the US without any trace of a nasty, career hobbling anti-war sentiment. Shrewd, but perhaps a bit cowardly.

CAN'T SING, CAN'T DANCE, HAS BREASTS: Meet Inul Daratista who - as the headline here suggests - appears to be Asia'a answer to Christina Aguilera. Except, presumably afraid Christina's method of thrusting them up and out of clothing is a little too subtle, she's chosen a name which means 'the girl with the breasts'. Of course, this sort of thing goes down less well in Indonesia than it does even in Wal-Mart.

WHO JUDGES THE SONYS, ANYWAY?: The results of the Sony Radio awards are a bit of a puzzle - the speech awards (Humphrys, Radio 4, BBC7 and so on) all seem to make perfect sense - but the music show awards are just incomprehensible. Christian O'Connell the best breakfast show in the country? I can only presume this is a result of deciding to share the awards around a bit beyond the BBC, and assuming that the show appeals to The Young People of Today. Without, of course, asking any. Any way, um... congratulations, Christian. Now, how's the show on Five doing?

BORN TO RUN; AGED TO DO SO QUIETLY: There's a bee hidden in the flowers handed to Manchester's Springsteen fans as a judge allows Bruce's Old Trafford gig to go ahead - the judgement allowed the gig because "we have given a great deal of consideration to the profile of this particular artist and the maturity of the support which he attracts" - or, in other words, legally Bruce fans are now too old to be a nuisance. Is this fitting for a man whose Born To Run is still, as far as we know, the Youth Anthem of New Jersey?

FORGOTTEN ROCK BOOKS - POSSIBLY A SERIES: Spotted on a shelf in Oxfam's overstock store for 69p: The Times Newspaper's 'With Geldof in Africa'
If anyone's got any other long forgotten rock titles they think we should remember, drop us an email... xrrf-books@bothsidesnow.co.uk

THE DESCENT INTO CABARET ARTIST-DOM CONTINUES: 'I feel so at home in France' trills Madonna, thanking the country for opposing war in Iraq. Presumably this is why she felt she didn't have to; indeed, going to the lengths of remaking a video lest she be considered anti-war in the key US market.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR ROBBIE: They might be clinging to the official line that she's not been dropped, but rumours suggest Kelly Osbourne has been dumped by Sony after only 150,000 copies of her debut album got swapped for cash in the States. Makes Robbie's big support slot on her American tour seem somehow less glitzy, doesn't it?
[Finders fee: Robert Lavine]

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE... IT'S NOT GOING OUT WITH SOME SKANK ON IT...: Interesting piece by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in the MediaGuardian detailing the pangs felt by the New York Times when it put Britney on the front page; what's also curious is the insight he gives into the debate at the Guardian over whether they should have carried so much, so prominently about Kurt Cobain's suicide. His verdict is that it was right to, showing readers of the future that what was important to them was important to the Guardian, too. He hasn't stopped to consider that many of us who were wandering around blinking the Saturday morning after the body was found were already, actually, long-term Guardian readers.

WELL... MAYBE: BBC News seems quite confident that "[t]he police caution for musician Pete Townshend is a chance to put the episode of paedophile allegations, headlines, public scrutiny and uncertainty behind him, as if it's not now a black mark that will follow him around forever. A slight curiosity remains, though - Mr. Townshend says "The police have unconditionally accepted that these were my motives in looking at this site and that there was no other nefarious purpose, and as a result they have decided not to charge me. I accept that I was wrong to access this site, and that by doing so, I broke the law, and I have accepted the caution that the police have given me." So a man who the police accept wasn't up to anything wrong accepts a caution and agrees to sign the sex offender's register quite happily. Maybe.

CHIX PIX ON PAX NIXED: They're not going to put the Dixie Sluts on Tea Bags, but Liptons are going to stick by the band's tour and continue to sponsor that. Actually, if Liptons were shrewd, they'd return to their original plan to put pix of the Chicks on the packets, but use the Entertainment Weekly nude snaps. They'd sell to the desperate for a date market, and sell loads more to people buying the packets for a ritual burning.

THERE'S TOo MUCH ARM IN IT: Apparently Tim from Ash's arms have swollen up enough to hospitalise him - insert masturbation gag here. Just in passing, if nme.com is going to lift its news stories from fan websites, shouldn't they provide a link to the source?

THE TROUBLE WITH HAIRY: Christina said she's dyed her hair black "to look more mature". Lamb dressed as mutton? She might also want to give consideration to how many girls over the age of about twelve would think that red dress is any way sexy or alluring.
Christina, here's a hint: how about making your music a bit smarter, a bit less 'look-at-me'? That might do wonders for how mature you seem.

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: Blood and bruises edition
"I want to have sex with a man" is the frankly unsurprising claim from Robbie Williams on the front of Heat - we'd have assumed that was up there with Elton John saying "I think I ought to buy some flowers" or a toddler requesting a glass of water. But let's maintain the fiction that Robbie doesn't know the love of a good man, and ask: if you're so rich, why don't you go to an escort agency instead of a listings magazine?

Bust have got an issue dedicated to treating age with respect - you might wonder why they support this laudable aim by having a special edition rather than just routinely featuring older women in the magazine on a regular basis. Chrisse Hynde pops up; so does Yoko Ono - which shows that age doesn't always bring wisdom with it.

Talking of getting on, the Appleton sisters are on the cover of InStyle and it looks as if the strain of dating the two Liams (and struggling to keep afloat a career that is about as buoyant as a cross channel pedalo) is really taking its toll. Indeed, putting them on the cover of InStyle is akin to giving the front to Shirley Williams.

The Independent on Sunday travels to Tennessee to catch up with Cerys Matthews as she readies her first solo album for release. She seems sober, happy and well, happy for company but suspicious of published interviews. Whether a life of less booze and happiness makes for great art, we'll have to wait and see.

There's only one thing worse than Julie Burchill being deliberately contrary to show us how clever she is, and that's when she thinks she's being contrary but isn't. In this week's Guardian Weekend, she turns to Madonna and makes herself look a bit of a knob by condemning the slavering review-fools applauding Madonna's new album, apparently blissfully unaware that not even Guy Ritchie would have been able to write about a record which rhymes "Mini Cooper" and "Super-dooper" without snickering up his arm. Next week: Julie knows it'll upset the liberal bedwetters, but she really doesn't think SARS is a good idea.

Is X-Ray always going to come with a free CD? This month's is rather good - Placebo XFM session track, Alpinestars, Smog. Oh, yes. The Dandy Warhols are on the cover. Inside: Nina Persson of the Cardigans doesn't like the underground as it fucks up her sense of direction, Maya, aka Donna F, grew up on a diet of REM and XTC; Dave Gahan believes you'd be better off putting your faith in Chris Martin than in a politican - personally, I'd rather see Chris Martin trying to solve the crisis in the NHS than making records, so maybe it's not a bad idea. We could also get Angela Eagle and her sister to be the new Cheeky Girls; Pink Grease suggest men wear crotchless jeans with no pants; Lauren Laverne says the coolest people she knows are all over thirty - as, indeed, we are; Bill Callahan from Smog loves boxing - he says because it's "two people and their fists", we reckon its sweaty guys in white shorts; Courtney Taylor, of the Dandys says he cut his hair because he was scared of people having the same haircut as him - for some reason he's chosen a new style that will scare the tall one out of fischerspooner and Nick Rhodes as a riposte; Electric 6 got an extra member to make their name accurate and describe Gay Bar as "a collision between the lesbian boom and Pulp Fiction" (that's girlies touching themselves while their eyes create Uma Thurman shaped blobs, isn't it?); the 80's Matchbox B-Line Disaster seem bemused that most of their fans are older than them - jesus, guys, the level of drugs you appear to be doing, it's only horny-handed survivors who can cope with liking you

3D explains the child porn stuff: it seems he'd paid three bucks to gain access to a porn site whose parent company also ran kiddie porn sites. When they got busted, all the customers of the parent company were pulled in, regardless of whether they'd stuck to harmless pictures of half-starving prostitutes peeing on each other or actually downloaded kiddie's winkles. If this is true - and we've no reason to doubt it - there's a lot of questions to be raised as a result that deserves better airing than half way down a review of a British music magazine. Like: Is the famous Operation Ore list really a list of people who've ever paid to look at porn, ever, from companies that also sold kiddie porn? Because if that's the basis for the police smashing down people's doors and lives - that they had dealings with a company that also sold bad stuff - that's incredibly shabby and scandalous.

X-ray's album of the month is the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Fever To tell; Blur's Think Tank is shrugged at - "between the so-so, low-fi dub doodles there are moments where ... Blur sound like frontrunners"

Q also has a CD (we should point out, to be fair, so does Bang - although in that most harsh of judgements, most of the copies have had the CD pinched but nobody's bothered to take the magazine), and it's also got Placebo on it, but it's just an album track. The cover, however, has got Meg and Jack, and they're covered in blood. Actually, it's red paint that's obviously meant to look like blood, so instead of being all scary like they've run amock in an American High school, it looks like fingerpainting's got out of hand in the Tumble Tots. Genuinely scary photos, however, are Mick Hucknall lookign like Marlon Brando - except, of course, Brando made Streetcar Named Desire and Hucknall made Fairground - and Dave Gahan now. If ever you wanted to stop kids from taking drugs, just show them how sexy Dave's ended up, To make matters worse, he's pissing on a fan's letter, and the very end of his peepee is poking into shot. My fourteen year old self is hoping that I've forgotten my 'giving Dave Gahan a blow job' ambition.

Kelly Rowland is interviewed. Does she have broad music tastes that will surprise us? "I love Nirvana's old record with the baby on the cover in the water - that is my favourite record to this day." Do any readers have favourite records they don't actually know the name of but can describe the cover as if their PR had given them a tensecond flashcard demonstration in the style of Giles training a potential who speaks no English?

More suprising - because more credible - is the discovery that Tony Benenett enjoys playing darts. And freely admits to hoovering up coke during the seventies on the grounds that Kennedy had been shot. Which, we calculate, means that Bush being president would allow us to get away with shooting all the drugs into the world into our eyeball. While being fellated by our - yours and my - mothers.

Craig David talks at length about training shoes. How much they cost; how cool certain sorts are. Craig, you might claim in song to have spent weeks and weeks shagging girls, but a man who cares about the colour of the trim on reeboks doesn't seem like a man who's touched many girls on the bottom to us.

Talking of people lying about having shagged girls, here's tatu. Q's battle-scarred photographer describes them as "cunts" and has such a tough time trying to photograph the women that he takes up smoking again. They have nothing to say, they're nasty - not as in Dre nastiness, just plain unpleasant to be around - and the few words they do manage are either put there by their manager or their Press Officer. A former MTV presenter on hard times. Imagine, for a moment, if you stripped out the Russian-ness: what we've got is Suzanne and Kym from Hearsay pretending to be three years younger and a lot closer than they really are, being fed saucy lines by Simon Fuller, and having their day-to-day cares seen to by Lisa I'Anson. Only with less good grace. Jesus, have we sunk this low?

Q's main review is that Madonna album - "this is an album about being Madonna." Which is nothing new, but now Madonna is just about being Madonna. Nothing left to say.

"I feel I embody a lot of ideas that are out of fashion. A lot of women don't go for thoughtful, compassionate and kind" reckons Jack White. Thats right, Jack, and men don't have any interest in tit size. He also believes that "the morals of kids are dying - parents don't care if kids swear at them" - which, surely, is more a sign that parenting skills are dying rather than kid's morals.

Maybe the White Stripes will save us all - they're certainly around a lot right now - the cover of Interview; even on the cover of The Big Issue. For the homeless mag, it's the interview from the Australian Big Issue, in which the excuse that whole pretending to be brother and sister thing as " abit of a joke that got out of hand..." Jack's scared of dying because he's hit 27, the age which took Kurt, Jimi and Janis. But on the bright side, Jesus made it to 33. There's a picture in the Big Issue of Heuy Lewis and the News, who now look like Huey Lewis and The Junior Finance Minsiters of the G8. Huey doesn't eat before gigs because "you can't sing the blues on a full stomach." Maybe not, but if all you're doing is Hip To Be Square and The Power of Love, you could probably get away with a finger buffet and two helpings of death buy chocolate. And a side of pork.

The nme has got a psychedelic cover because, erm, its leading on the Music. Really leading, because the page three news lead is 'Music play gig in Blackpool." The band played in a venue where some other bands have played before. The hardcore fans interviewed after the gig said the band were very good. "They were good" said a fan. Another fan added "it were magic, our Maurice." After the gig there, the band played some more gigs, somewhere.

In other news: The guy who used to play Joe in eastenders went to a festival in California; two pages are wrung from Jack osbourne goes into rehab - "he is said to have suffered from insomnia and depression... If there is another more serious reason [our emphasis] the Osbournes could be about to cancel the most lucrative franchise in TV History." We're not sure what this has to do with the billion pounds or so turnover generated from forty years of Top of the Pops; Eminem has gone to detroit, apparently to make record labels realise "there's talent in detroit." If only someone from Detroit could help him in this task, but all the while the papers are full of The White Stripes who will ever notice Detroit talent?; Kinesis are cross because they think that Top Man is ripping off their designs on tshirts. Next week The Bluetones accuse Miss Selfridge of stealing their knickers; Augie March release a single in the Uk for the first time next week.

Indian Rags run a pair of ads: "If you have no rights to fight 4 we don't want you to buy our products." One of the ads is of a woman, tits out, suckling a teddy bear - apparently in the interests of 'maternity rights.' You can only imagine the number of meetings this godawful, misjudged campaing had gone through before it made it into print.

Nada Surf do a Cd burning thing - Kinks, Lyres, Shins.

Although Adam from the Music was six when the Roses played Blackpool, do we really believe him when he says they're not an influence: "i don't know fuck all about them." Or maybe the double-negative was intentional, since he knows enough to call John Squire shit.

The nme asks people what their favourite summer songs are. James from Busted chooses Black or White by Michael Jackson. Alec Empire chooses 'Heroin.' You see the problem we have with Busted?

Radiohead take us through the new album, track by track. Apparently Thom doesn't want to take responsibility for the words of Go To Sleep, because "they were beamed from somewhere else" which, funnily enough, is the same excuse our cousin Timmy used when the cops found three growbags with dope plants in them. Didn't stop him from getting six months, mind.

The Vines answer questions; they come across well, but fall apart when confronted with the war. Asked if they're scared to commit because of american sales Craig says "Listen, it's not about America and it's not about places... we have no comment because when that bridge comes we'll cross it. Let's just say that it starts with R and the Beatles had two songs named after it." Right. A man too scared to have an opinion on the Iraq war is going to be on the barricades, is he? Of course.

reviews
lps
marilyn manson - the golden age of grotesque - "same old, same old", 4
pink grease - all over you - "the genius pips it", 7

they really don't review many records any more, do they? Or gigs?

sotw is 22-20s - such a fool: "Lincoln, you are officially cool"

live
ms dynamite - brixton -"at worst, its jumped up Ricki Lake'

and finally, back to the guardian. back to madonna. Rod Liddle earns a stern look of disapproval for slagging off the Lemonheads Mrs. Robinson, but we forgive him for ticking off Julie B for not going far enough with her slagging of Madonna. He also recalls once reading an album review in the nme which read, in full: "You're shit: fuck off." I bet most NME hacks of today wish they got half as much space to review a band in.

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: Blood and bruises edition
"I want to have sex with a man" is the frankly unsurprising claim from Robbie Williams on the front of Heat - we'd have assumed that was up there with Elton John saying "I think I ought to buy some flowers" or a toddler requesting a glass of water. But let's maintain the fiction that Robbie doesn't know the love of a good man, and ask: if you're so rich, why don't you go to an escort agency instead of a listings magazine?

Bust have got an issue dedicated to treating age with respect - you might wonder why they support this laudable aim by having a special edition rather than just routinely featuring older women in the magazine on a regular basis. Chrisse Hynde pops up; so does Yoko Ono - which shows that age doesn't always bring wisdom with it.

Talking of getting on, the Appleton sisters are on the cover of InStyle and it looks as if the strain of dating the two Liams (and struggling to keep afloat a career that is about as buoyant as a cross channel pedalo) is really taking its toll. Indeed, putting them on the cover of InStyle is akin to giving the front to Shirley Williams.

The Independent on Sunday travels to Tennessee to catch up with Cerys Matthews as she readies her first solo album for release. She seems sober, happy and well, happy for company but suspicious of published interviews. Whether a life of less booze and happiness makes for great art, we'll have to wait and see.

There's only one thing worse than Julie Burchill being deliberately contrary to show us how clever she is, and that's when she thinks she's being contrary but isn't. In this week's Guardian Weekend, she turns to Madonna and makes herself look a bit of a knob by condemning the slavering review-fools applauding Madonna's new album, apparently blissfully unaware that not even Guy Ritchie would have been able to write about a record which rhymes "Mini Cooper" and "Super-dooper" without snickering up his arm. Next week: Julie knows it'll upset the liberal bedwetters, but she really doesn't think SARS is a good idea.

Is X-Ray always going to come with a free CD? This month's is rather good - Placebo XFM session track, Alpinestars, Smog. Oh, yes. The Dandy Warhols are on the cover. Inside: Nina Persson of the Cardigans doesn't like the underground as it fucks up her sense of direction, Maya, aka Donna F, grew up on a diet of REM and XTC; Dave Gahan believes you'd be better off putting your faith in Chris Martin than in a politican - personally, I'd rather see Chris Martin trying to solve the crisis in the NHS than making records, so maybe it's not a bad idea. We could also get Angela Eagle and her sister to be the new Cheeky Girls; Pink Grease suggest men wear crotchless jeans with no pants; Lauren Laverne says the coolest people she knows are all over thirty - as, indeed, we are; Bill Callahan from Smog loves boxing - he says because it's "two people and their fists", we reckon its sweaty guys in white shorts; Courtney Taylor, of the Dandys says he cut his hair because he was scared of people having the same haircut as him - for some reason he's chosen a new style that will scare the tall one out of fischerspooner and Nick Rhodes as a riposte; Electric 6 got an extra member to make their name accurate and describe Gay Bar as "a collision between the lesbian boom and Pulp Fiction" (that's girlies touching themselves while their eyes create Uma Thurman shaped blobs, isn't it?); the 80's Matchbox B-Line Disaster seem bemused that most of their fans are older than them - jesus, guys, the level of drugs you appear to be doing, it's only horny-handed survivors who can cope with liking you

3D explains the child porn stuff: it seems he'd paid three bucks to gain access to a porn site whose parent company also ran kiddie porn sites. When they got busted, all the customers of the parent company were pulled in, regardless of whether they'd stuck to harmless pictures of half-starving prostitutes peeing on each other or actually downloaded kiddie's winkles. If this is true - and we've no reason to doubt it - there's a lot of questions to be raised as a result that deserves better airing than half way down a review of a British music magazine. Like: Is the famous Operation Ore list really a list of people who've ever paid to look at porn, ever, from companies that also sold kiddie porn? Because if that's the basis for the police smashing down people's doors and lives - that they had dealings with a company that also sold bad stuff - that's incredibly shabby and scandalous.

X-ray's album of the month is the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Fever To tell; Blur's Think Tank is shrugged at - "between the so-so, low-fi dub doodles there are moments where ... Blur sound like frontrunners"

Q also has a CD (we should point out, to be fair, so does Bang - although in that most harsh of judgements, most of the copies have had the CD pinched but nobody's bothered to take the magazine), and it's also got Placebo on it, but it's just an album track. The cover, however, has got Meg and Jack, and they're covered in blood. Actually, it's red paint that's obviously meant to look like blood, so instead of being all scary like they've run amock in an American High school, it looks like fingerpainting's got out of hand in the Tumble Tots. Genuinely scary photos, however, are Mick Hucknall lookign like Marlon Brando - except, of course, Brando made Streetcar Named Desire and Hucknall made Fairground - and Dave Gahan now. If ever you wanted to stop kids from taking drugs, just show them how sexy Dave's ended up, To make matters worse, he's pissing on a fan's letter, and the very end of his peepee is poking into shot. My fourteen year old self is hoping that I've forgotten my 'giving Dave Gahan a blow job' ambition.

Kelly Rowland is interviewed. Does she have broad music tastes that will surprise us? "I love Nirvana's old record with the baby on the cover in the water - that is my favourite record to this day." Do any readers have favourite records they don't actually know the name of but can describe the cover as if their PR had given them a tensecond flashcard demonstration in the style of Giles training a potential who speaks no English?

More suprising - because more credible - is the discovery that Tony Benenett enjoys playing darts. And freely admits to hoovering up coke during the seventies on the grounds that Kennedy had been shot. Which, we calculate, means that Bush being president would allow us to get away with shooting all the drugs into the world into our eyeball. While being fellated by our - yours and my - mothers.

Craig David talks at length about training shoes. How much they cost; how cool certain sorts are. Craig, you might claim in song to have spent weeks and weeks shagging girls, but a man who cares about the colour of the trim on reeboks doesn't seem like a man who's touched many girls on the bottom to us.

Talking of people lying about having shagged girls, here's tatu. Q's battle-scarred photographer describes them as "cunts" and has such a tough time trying to photograph the women that he takes up smoking again. They have nothing to say, they're nasty - not as in Dre nastiness, just plain unpleasant to be around - and the few words they do manage are either put there by their manager or their Press Officer. A former MTV presenter on hard times. Imagine, for a moment, if you stripped out the Russian-ness: what we've got is Suzanne and Kym from Hearsay pretending to be three years younger and a lot closer than they really are, being fed saucy lines by Simon Fuller, and having their day-to-day cares seen to by Lisa I'Anson. Only with less good grace. Jesus, have we sunk this low?

Q's main review is that Madonna album - "this is an album about being Madonna." Which is nothing new, but now Madonna is just about being Madonna. Nothing left to say.

"I feel I embody a lot of ideas that are out of fashion. A lot of women don't go for thoughtful, compassionate and kind" reckons Jack White. Thats right, Jack, and men don't have any interest in tit size. He also believes that "the morals of kids are dying - parents don't care if kids swear at them" - which, surely, is more a sign that parenting skills are dying rather than kid's morals.

Maybe the White Stripes will save us all - they're certainly around a lot right now - the cover of Interview; even on the cover of The Big Issue. For the homeless mag, it's the interview from the Australian Big Issue, in which the excuse that whole pretending to be brother and sister thing as " abit of a joke that got out of hand..." Jack's scared of dying because he's hit 27, the age which took Kurt, Jimi and Janis. But on the bright side, Jesus made it to 33. There's a picture in the Big Issue of Heuy Lewis and the News, who now look like Huey Lewis and The Junior Finance Minsiters of the G8. Huey doesn't eat before gigs because "you can't sing the blues on a full stomach." Maybe not, but if all you're doing is Hip To Be Square and The Power of Love, you could probably get away with a finger buffet and two helpings of death buy chocolate. And a side of pork.

The nme has got a psychedelic cover because, erm, its leading on the Music. Really leading, because the page three news lead is 'Music play gig in Blackpool." The band played in a venue where some other bands have played before. The hardcore fans interviewed after the gig said the band were very good. "They were good" said a fan. Another fan added "it were magic, our Maurice." After the gig there, the band played some more gigs, somewhere.

In other news: The guy who used to play Joe in eastenders went to a festival in California; two pages are wrung from Jack osbourne goes into rehab - "he is said to have suffered from insomnia and depression... If there is another more serious reason [our emphasis] the Osbournes could be about to cancel the most lucrative franchise in TV History." We're not sure what this has to do with the billion pounds or so turnover generated from forty years of Top of the Pops; Eminem has gone to detroit, apparently to make record labels realise "there's talent in detroit." If only someone from Detroit could help him in this task, but all the while the papers are full of The White Stripes who will ever notice Detroit talent?; Kinesis are cross because they think that Top Man is ripping off their designs on tshirts. Next week The Bluetones accuse Miss Selfridge of stealing their knickers; Augie March release a single in the Uk for the first time next week.

Indian Rags run a pair of ads: "If you have no rights to fight 4 we don't want you to buy our products." One of the ads is of a woman, tits out, suckling a teddy bear - apparently in the interests of 'maternity rights.' You can only imagine the number of meetings this godawful, misjudged campaing had gone through before it made it into print.

Nada Surf do a Cd burning thing - Kinks, Lyres, Shins.

Although Adam from the Music was six when the Roses played Blackpool, do we really believe him when he says they're not an influence: "i don't know fuck all about them." Or maybe the double-negative was intentional, since he knows enough to call John Squire shit.

The nme asks people what their favourite summer songs are. James from Busted chooses Black or White by Michael Jackson. Alec Empire chooses 'Heroin.' You see the problem we have with Busted?

Radiohead take us through the new album, track by track. Apparently Thom doesn't want to take responsibility for the words of Go To Sleep, because "they were beamed from somewhere else" which, funnily enough, is the same excuse our cousin Timmy used when the cops found three growbags with dope plants in them. Didn't stop him from getting six months, mind.

The Vines answer questions; they come across well, but fall apart when confronted with the war. Asked if they're scared to commit because of american sales Craig says "Listen, it's not about America and it's not about places... we have no comment because when that bridge comes we'll cross it. Let's just say that it starts with R and the Beatles had two songs named after it." Right. A man too scared to have an opinion on the Iraq war is going to be on the barricades, is he? Of course.

reviews
lps
marilyn manson - the golden age of grotesque - "same old, same old", 4
pink grease - all over you - "the genius pips it", 7

they really don't review many records any more, do they? Or gigs?

sotw is 22-20s - such a fool: "Lincoln, you are officially cool"

live
ms dynamite - brixton -"at worst, its jumped up Ricki Lake'

and finally, back to the guardian. back to madonna. Rod Liddle earns a stern look of disapproval for slagging off the Lemonheads Mrs. Robinson, but we forgive him for ticking off Julie B for not going far enough with her slagging of Madonna. He also recalls once reading an album review in the nme which read, in full: "You're shit: fuck off." I bet most NME hacks of today wish they got half as much space to review a band in.

UH-OH... BIKINIS: Wal-Mart caves in to small but vocal Christian bigots ("responds to customer demand") and kicks FHM, Maxim, Stuff off shelves.
Asda, WalMart's UK bitch, doesn't intend to follow suit.
In the US, Walmart doesn't sell much more than three percent of these titles total newstand copies.
In the UK, they're amongst Asda's best sellers.

CLEAR CHANNEL IN SOMETHING NOT EVIL SHOCK: A couple of weeks ago we speculated as to why no band has yet thought of offering MP3 downloads of all their gigs. We're not quite there yet, but Clear Channel have been piloting a scheme where almost instant official live bootlegs can be picked up by fans as they file out of a concert. This is the sort of positive move we, erm, haven't come to expect from CC or the record industry in general - obviously, major label acts haven't been able to take part; but it's a step forward from merely complaining about the losses represented when illegal bootlegs hit the market. A fresh, crisp, mixing desk copy of a gig; no need to wait and the band make money off it - who's losing out here? Apart from the guys who make the suitcases used by the guys in Camden Market?

PETER ALLIS IS THE NEW JOHN PEEL: Yesterday, DJ Spoony as pro-celeb golfer. Today: Justin Timberlake turns golfing commentator. Tomorrow: A joke involving Tatu and the phrase "because there's more than a hole in one."

VERY OLD DEAD PEOPLE SINGING: Nope, not Status Quo: The Musical. Well, not quite, but Elton John's Interview With The Vampire musical must be close, surely?

COMFORT IN SOUND STUDIOS: Robbie Williams might not be making it in America, but at least he's getting voiceover work. Mind you, so's Tony Slattery.

CYBER TOILETS FOR GLASTO: With a report on chemical toilets with web browsers built in (handy to email a "I've got no toilet paper" distress messages), it seems Microsoft even misses shipping date for April Fool gags.

THE SOUND OF MONEY DRYING UP: Playlouder reports that Tatu have been trying to get people to turn up for a video shoot by begging them from stage. What's really interesting, though, is that they were careful to ask for girls over sixteen. Maybe they're realising that the stench of scandal can work against them, too.

STUPIDITY UPON STUPIDITY: For some reason, a Colorado Radio station has suspended two DJs ... for playing the Dixie Chicks. Thank god they didn't do anything really bad, like questioned the wisdom of cutting out large swathes of the Iraqi opposition from the decisions being taken on the country's future...

RICKY'S ROOTS: Ricky Martin's recorded his new album entirely in Spanish because his star has waned in the English speaking world and so he needs to suck up to his core fanbase ("because he's conquered the English speaking world", apparently). He's got a neat new line for people who ask him about his sexuality - apparently it's something you do in the mirror. Maybe, but make sure you wipe it down before mummy needs to check her make-up, you dirty boy.

COCK'S OFF AGAIN: Robin Hitchcock quits Soft Boys. Again.

BRUCIE, TARBY... SPOONY?: Tomorrow afternoon on BBC2 there's a pro-celebrity golf thingy - as you'd expect, Ronnie Corbett, Peter Allis and Steve Rider are all involved. But so is Radio One's very own DJ Spoony. Go and look in Radio Times if you don't believe me.

WHERE THERE'S A HIT, THERE'S A PUNCH: The trio of Craig Anderson, Nicholas L. Carnagey and Janie Eubanks have been investigating violent music and if it can make people do bad stuff like hitting and punching and screaming, on behalf of the American Psychological Association. And guess what? They've found it does. [postscript document]

This isn't some join-the-dots study, it should be pointed out. This is proper, grown-up science – they're thinking people, as this shows: "There are numerous differences between watching violent television, playing violent video games, and listening to popular music. One is the lack of a video component to audio-only music." See, they've spotted that music doesn't have pictures. That's something yer layperson might miss.

And don't think it's an easy job, either: " Some rock music songs have such garbled lyrics that they have given rise to debates about what the lyrics are (e.g., “Louie, Louie”; “Inna-Godda-Da-Vida”) - not like nice old video games, who make the smashing of a rock into someone's head explicit and easy to quantify. Maybe 'Louie Louie' is actually encouraging our kids to smash their teacher's faces off with chalkboard rubbers, but we can't hear the threat?

But the muttering doesn't matter. Why not? Because if " listeners are capable of recognizing themes of music (i.e., violence, sex, suicide, and Satanism) even when it is difficult to comprehend specific lyric content" then it must clearly follow that they're picking up on the words even if they don't understand them. So, you Christian Rockers, all the singing about how great Jesus is doesn't work, because you sound like Satanists.

And you might think that since songs may sing about the Killing of Georgie without actually showing the kid being stabbed repeatedly in the throat by a bloke with a broken bottle, that makes a violent song less nasty than a violent video, right? Wrong! Because " The lack of visual images in music both allows and requires listeners to imagine details. Concrete images probably play a major role in transfer of ideas from the video world to one’s own real-world situations. […] The lack of concrete images in violent music may well allow listeners to imagine audio antagonists similar to real-world antagonists. Thus, there are reasons to expect violent-lyric songs to be either" See? Eminem might be thinking only about raping lesbians with specific, lesbian style haircuts and dungarees, but because he doesn't show you what sort of lesbian he's thinking about, we'll be assuming any woman we suspect of being gay is now a target for the actions Eminem has instructed us to carry out. In fact, this reasoning seems to run, we'd have been better off watching a video of Eminem raping someone, so that we'd only be likely to assault someone who looked like the victim.

Our gang of three concede that studies into lyrics in the past haven't found any correlation between hearing violent songs and being violent, but that isn't going to stop them trying to prove the reverse. So, let the experiments commence:

Experiment One: Using Tool's "violent" Jerk-Off and the same band's "non-violent" Four degrees (a favourite, of course, with Gandhi), fifty nine studes were played one or the other songs and asked how they felt. Guess what? Although both songs sounded similar, the people who heard the one with angry words felt more aggressive than the ones who heard the other. Interestingly, nobody felt aggressive enough to refuse to fill in an idiot questionnaire, or punch someone for making them listen to tool. Curiously, girls felt more aggressive than boys, which the research team decided to put down to how girls don't like heavy rock and so were probably pissed off at having to listen to it. Encouraging to see they're not building their experiments on lame assumptions, then.

Experiment Two: Pretty much the same, only this time the aggressiveness or otherwise was going to be checked by seeing how people felt about certain words. For this, we have to accept that the words that are meant to be always aggressive actually are – yet it included words like "butcher", "knife" and "blood", which don't actually fit the always aggressive archetype, surely – or do our three researchers feel threatened every time their universities exhort them to 'give blood'? Anyway, again, they say violent words begat pairings of words as being more violent.

Experiment Three: This time, fifty students; four 'violent' songs, four 'nonviolent' songs. The students hear one of these songs and are then… timed. As they read out a list of aggressive and non-aggressive words. Our understanding of the results is that listening to violent lyrics proved to allow the listeners to read the list of words out faster. Now, even if we try to not panic at the thought of the headlines: 'Beastie Boys Make Speed Readers of Nation's Youth', we might wonder if this proves that hearing aggressive words makes you more aggressive, or merely has them further forward in your mind and able to come up with them that little bit faster?

Experiment Four was designed to see if having the violence in a humourous context made any difference. " The songs were “A Boy Named Sue” (violent) by Johnny Cash (Silverstein, 1994) and “Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh!” (nonviolent) by Allan Sherman (1991). Hmmm, so a song which is about a man coming to terms with his absent father – choosing to hug him rather than kill him – is violent; a song which lists an array of unpleasant fates – including being eaten alive by a wild animal, and contains the vaguely homophobic bit about "no sissies" is non-violent? Fair enough. The conclusion was that while the humorous context cancelled out the violent content (something that I'm not sure Emienm tracks would support) it doesn't stop violent thoughts brewing away when you listen to them.

Experiment V is a song by Kate Bush

Experiment five was the same thing, but larger, using Weird Al Jankovic and Violent Femmes as humorous and non-humorous respectively, with a violent and non-violent track from each. Results were pretty much in line with what we'd been led to expect.

So, if you accept the wonky methodology and questionable assumptions of the research, do we have a problem? Well, the team accept they've only got as far as "proving" that listening to violent music can lead to the brewing of violence, but, of course, this means "research on potential violent song effects on aggressive behavior becomes even more important now that we have clearly demonstrated that such songs increase aggressive thoughts and feelings." The first rule of science is that your findings should always clearly demonstrate where the next research grant needs to be lavished.

ARE WE NOT POORLY DRAWN BABIES? WE ARE DEVO: Scary thought of the week from an LA Times piece on former rock stars turned soundtrack hacks - not so much that Wendy and Lisa, released from the need to wear corsets while working with Prince are now scoring Crossing Jordan, but one of Devo - songwriter Mark Mothersbaugh - is the man who makes the music for Rugrats. Blimey.

OH GOD, MAKE HIM GET BACK INTO THE STUDIO QUICKLY: We admit it, we were painfully wrong. When they said Oasis was taking a break for a year, we thought it would keep us Gallagher free. Instead, it's like when your dad retires and spends his days getting under your mam's feet pottering about because he hasn't got anything else to do: Noel keeps popping up doing 'surprise' gigs. Like Cliff Richard at Wimbledon that time. Couldn't he get himself a little job doing old ladies' gardens or something to keep him busy?

FUN WITH MADONNA: (and it's not often you get to say that these days) as Boycott the RIAA offer you the chance to remix her stupid anti-piracy spittle. [Ta, need to know.]

BLAIR AT FIFTY: It gave Today the excuse to interview the always amusing Mark Ellen about discussing King Crimson guitar solos with little Tony. On a rock heavy show, they also found space to chat with Led Zep about the forthcoming box set madness.

IT'S THE ONLY CHART THAT COUNTS. COUNTS PEOPLE RINGING IN REQUESTS TO THE BOX, THAT IS: This town ain't big enough for three charts and now they've started to squabble amongst themselves over what the most accurate measure of what MediaGuardian calls "teenager's" most popular tunes are (erm, surely the chart is meant to reflect national tastes?). The BBC says that getting someone to buy a single proves how popular it is. EMAP - daddy of the fledgling Smash Hit chart - suggests the cash relationship shown by selecting a track from Sky is equally important. It depends, of course, on whether you want a chart that reflects sales, or tries to measure devotion (although counting up votes on Smash Hits TV and the Box is surely, simply saying to record labels 'Dial this number to boost your chart position - but check with your accounts department first'?).

PUNK ROCK, 2003 STYLE: How 'punk rock' is a punk rock label founded not on the DIY ethic, but on a twenty thousand dollar grant. From Nestle?

SAME THING, SURELY?: Sally Webster, on tonight's Corrie:
"She wasn't dressing like a tart, she was dressing like a popstar."
Later on, Rosie ("she") reprises the song she sang for her girlband audition - it's (of course) Atomic Kitten.

A LOCAL SHOW FOR LOCAL PEOPLE: Now, while we've been quite relaxed about the whole Radiohead/Glasto ticket ebay scalping scandal, we're a whole lot less relaxed about the number of Paul McCartney tickets being offered by people on Merseyside on Ebay right now, and we hope that Liverpool City Council will be able to assure us that having cheated with the distribution of the tickets [McCartney wanted 5,000 sold to Liverpool people; 3,900 went to Council workers who were able to reserve them before anyone else] that those same workers aren't just flogging them off on Ebay at a massive profit. I'm sure they'll be able to tell us that not one of the tickets they sold has wound up being scalped... because to enable tickets to be first unfairly distributed and then flogged on would be a staggering display of incompetence...

THIS MIGHT BE THE SADDEST STORY: Nobody comes out happy from this tale of a fourteen year old who dragged her mum and sister on a nineteen hour round trip to Sligo and ended up seeing the wrong member of Westlife... Sure, everyone puts on a brave face, but...

The No Rock Bank Holiday Excursion: Lennon and McCartney's houses

So, living in Liverpool you can't help doing Beatles related things - you walk for a Mexican breakfast and you have no choice but to take Penny Lane; you can't avoid the bloody yellow submarine by the Albert Dock; even the most careful shopping trip can spit you out into the horrible faux Cavern Walks. And every longest journey starts at the John Lennon Airport. And so on it goes: LIPA, the Pilgrim; the fake 'beatle street' signs - it's like the City is seeking to make ammends for the crass stupidity it exhibited in the 70's when it - d'oh - bulldozed the Cavern to make space for a council carpark by turning every step into a Fab Gear Genuine Beatle step. So, you can't avoid it, even if you wanted to.

But to actively seek out Beatles shrines, that's a different step. However, a damp bank holiday weekend, a National Trust membership and time to kill makes the childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney seem like a good idea. Plus, of course, the National Trust do claim that as well as being the place where the boys learned their guitars, the houses are attractions in their own right - restored just the way they were - so there's an added historical factor that gives the Beatle Cynic an academic excuse to cover his embarrassment.

To keep the neighbours happy, you can only gain access to the places by heading off down to Speke Hall and clambering onto a minibus, giving it all a feeling of a school trip. Of course, the bus plays the Beatles and a short informative but informal introduction to the Beatles. The tone is a little odd - the National Trust isn't exactly your go-to guy for rock history, so when they tell you that Lennon is important, it doesn't have quite the same ring to it as when they're enthusing over a piece of coastline or the guttering on a nineteenth century barn; furthermore, judging by the comments books, pretty much everyone who gets on the bus is already placing Lennon somewhere on a scale amongst (depending on personal preferences) the dali lamas, elvises and mothers theresa and mary, so it's probably not especially neeeded either.

You kick off at Mendips, where John Lennon grew up. If you've ever wanted proof that his knowledge of working class heroism was on a par with our knowledge of Chicago (something seen in passing from a window, but never visited), here it is, in all its nice, middle class glory. For me, the place is eerie - I'm not wandering around wondering whereabouts he stood to write Please Please Me, but having vivid flashbacks to visiting great-aunts in the seventies, whose homes were exactly like this - down to the Izal medicated toilet paper and the gloss-painted kitchen cabinets. Mendips is done really nicely - a brief chat from the custodian (he lives in room where John's Aunt Mimi used to have student lodgers; he doesn't reveal if he baths in the post war tin bath) and then you're left alone to roam about - peer through the windows at the street where Lennon's mum was mown down by a speeding off-duty policeman, glimpse behind the cloth in the kitchen (a decidedly non-period washer drier) and flick through the numerous comments books around the place - "Why are we writing in so many books?" asks one visitor.

Then back onto the bus, and its off to Forthlin Road. Before Yoko bought Mendips for the NT, this was the Beatles tour on its own - the place where McCartney grew up. As the minibus heads there, we're told that as well as being the Macca shrine, it shows how the Trust is committed to buying places which reflect the life of ordinary people - this is the first council house purchased for the nation. It isn't quite like that in reality, of course; Mendips balances the period detail with Beatlebilia well - you're in the house before Alan Williams, Hamburg, Love Me Do; seeing the walls that Lennon's imagination needed to explode beyond; Forthlin Road is much more a church for McCartneyism - in a bid to squeeze in an audio tour narrated by Paul, Hunter Davies, Mike McCartney et al, lots of early photos, some Beatles magazines, LP covers and other such factors, the sense of a family home is lost. There's an outside toilet still, and a nice view over the Police Training College; flowers in the garden and an old twin tub machine to illustrate the trouble Paul's Dad had trying to bring up his lads after his wife died, but it still feels more like wandering round a museum than visiting someone's home.

Then its back on the bus, back to Speke Hall. And has it made a difference? Well, not really - as we get off, airplanes taxi along the runaway at John Lennon, beneath the stupid cartoon self-portrait logo, and I wince just the same. And nothing will make Band On The Run forgivable. But there is something about seeing the places where knees were scuffed and fingers cut on first guitars which does take away some of their pomp; gives Sir Paul and Saint John back a little of their humanity. The tape may ramble on about how huge and important the two were, but the funny thing is? The tours make them seem much more impressive, because it undelines how ordinary they were.

NOT QUITE ON A SCALE OF THE ANTI-WAR PROTESTS, IS IT?: Dixie Chicks play Florida. How many turn up to protest? One bloke. Not even a dog. Proof, if it be needed, that a nude photoshoot can damp down the strongest opposition. Let's hope that Iain Duncan Smith doesn't think of this.

MORE WOE FOR JACKO: He's being forced to give up his low-tax status for Neverland - the cheeky monkey has been claiming that his big ole' themeland of child lovin' joy was a ranch, whereas a visit discovered the place covered by giant outdoor tv screens, primate houses, and go-kart rinks.
This reminds us of the joyous reason why the Pyramid stage at glastonbury wasn't actually a proper pyramid, as Michael Eavis had been forced to lob off the top to make it count as a cattle shed rather than a permanent structure. Nowadays, of course, Mean Fiddler would probably have just raised the sea level a bit instead and charged festival goers for the privilege.

LOW BANK HOLIDAY HUMOUR SLOT: When we heard the granite faced old rock man had collapsed into the sea after a century-long battle to shore him up, we assumed that mortality had caught up with Keith Richards. Boom, and if you will, boom.

NOT BORN TO DO IT: Craig David has had a pop at singers who think they can also be actors. Erm... is this the same Craig David who says he'd like to dabble with acting at some point?. Craig... can you (inevitably) fill me in?

ONE BIG... WHOOPS: The bad weather (in Manchester? Who could have predicted that?) led to Radio One having to pull the first day of its big weekend, although, unfortunately, nobody seems to have told the Radio One website team which has a shiny site dedicated to events that didn't quite happen. Still, the non-happening happening might at least have given people the chance to ponder exactly what Judge Jules meant when he said "I tell you what, people will be very happy on Monday morning when the bank holiday weekend's over, because it's traditionally a physical and financial blitz , and to provide someone with a third off their budget for a typical bank holiday weekend, particularly a bank holdiay that falls so soon after the last one, I think we at Radio 1 are going to be quite popular with people's bank managers and their pockets in general."
Radio One quite popular with pockets then. Is it Jules' party lifestyle that means he hasn't actually got the concept of a bank holiday weekend stretching for three days, do you think?

PRESS PLAY AND RECORD: Following on from the Media Player posts yesterday, Gary Marshall got in touch:
Just reading your thing about media players. You're right that the current incarnation of Windows Media Player isn't a bad bit of software, but it's worth remembering that for years, Microsoft's product was completely outgunned by pretty much everyone - winamp, real, liquid, etc etc etc. They've learned from their mistakes, though, and in fairness to MS the latest version of WMA kicks the arse out of MP3 and other ageing music formats.

You wrote: "if WMP becomes the only show in town" - it already is. Pretty much every digital download service uses WMA at the moment, and while Apple's move is nice, it's not really significant due to the tiny market share for Macs. That might change when the rumoured iTunes for windows comes out, but for now when it comes to legal music then the choice is pretty much WMA, WMA or WMA. There are exceptions - Wippit.co.uk and eMusic spring to mind, both of which use MP3 - but not very many of 'em. MS has also been very proactive at getting hardware support: most portable MP3 players from the likes of Creative support WMA, whereas MP3pro, Ogg Vorbis support etc is still almost non-existent

As for other player suggestions: I rate MusicMatch Jukebox on PCs, although if you're really against DRM and stuff then get into open source Ogg Vorbis files instead of this MP3 malarkey. You can get plugins for players such as Winamp and it sounds fantastic :-)

To take a couple of your points - you're right that early versions of Windows Media Player was rubbish, but then one of the ways Microsoft got to be biggest was by letting other companies do all the research and development, and then - once the product is starting to get refined - pinch all their ideas and exploit the monopoly position and bigger firepower of Windows to ram their copy home. I'm using Internet Explorer as I write this - it's a nice piece of software, I feel like I should really be using Opera or Mozilla or something that doesn't have the stentch of Microsoft all over it, but... even Safari fucks up on simple things like the default font; I tried to use it for a while and although the functions built in are wonderful, not being able to read the stuff on screen without having my eyes burn like Graham Coxon peering through Alex James' bedroom keyhole was a bit of a minus point. And you just know rewind - probably called 'snapback' or something - will be in IE7.

As for all legal digital downloads being in .wma - I'm not sure things are quite that bleak. Most sites maintained by bands rather than labels seem to opt for .mp3 format, and the BBC sites are always trigger real player - except for the experiments they're doing with Ogg Vorbis. (Talking of which, don't you wish they'd chosen a much, much less offputting name for the format than that? Why not give it a really friendly name like 'Virus Ladened Harddrive Wiping Format' or 'Obscuarntis Latinic Taggis Forus Eggheadicus'). But, yes, it does feel like we're at the stage where the battle is lost...

ROCK'S OFF... FOR HOW LONG?: Where's it gone? The spirit of '76, we mean? Well, P-Rock TV has disappeared from the Sky Digital package and online is promising this is just a temporary blip while it sorts out re-financing.
The "bye... for now" message on the p-rock website is curious - the team who brought the channel on air claim they were three snarling upstarts who knew nothing about TV who wound up getting higher figures (they claim "600,000 viewers" a week) than channels with larger launch budgets. There's a bit of moaning at the lack of support from advertising agencies, although if they really were expecting Mazda to be placing 'zoom zoom' ads in the middle of lo-budget punk vids they didn't only know nothing about TV, they must have known nothing about anything. Their own figures say they had one of the highest ratings for ten to twenty-four year olds watching Sky, but that's such a broad audience group as to be almost useless - very few products sell well to kids moving to high school and first time home buyers.
If the team do come back - and we kind of hope they do, it would be nice to think you can launch a music channel with almost no cash behind them - they might want to think about not merely overthrowing the traditional channel launch model, but also coming up with a different way to fund the station through advertising. MTV2, when it first introduced advertising, attempted to create a new model by offering bands the chance to plug their gigs on the channel, but it never seemed like this idea was given the support it would have needed. Maybe this is something P-Rock could look at resurrecting?
[Big thanks to Simon Tyers for bringing this all to our attention]