No Rock And Roll Fun

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: "Punk's not dead? Of course the punk's dead, you silly boy, he's heroined himself all over the walls" edition
We've lived a very long and fruitful life, and seen many interesting things. But even we can still be surprised. If you'd have told us this time last year that the New Statesman letters pages would be carrying a debate on Tears For Fears' lyrics, we'd have asked you if you had some hard evidence. Oddly, though, that's exactly what happened this week.

So, it looks likely that X-Ray is is on its way out, following Bang and (admittedly through choice) Careless Talk into the Top Shelf area of TV Cream. And, it seems, The Dandy might also be going, too (which does count as a pop paper, because Desperate Dan once floated off into the night with the Spice Girls).

Still holding on is Mixmag, the dance title which tries to pretend these days its about anything but. The latest issue is yet another Drugs issue, providing another snapshot about whatever drucks it is young people are cramming down their necks right now. The trouble with drugs specials is, unlike sex specials, there's only a limited amount of stuff you can say about drugs, whereas interesting new aspects of fucking are always presenting themselves.

Of course, the big shake up for all the music titles is the arrival in the next couple of weeks of Nuts and Zoo - not Dandy replacements, although (from what we've seen) they require roughly the same reading age. Zoo - dubbed by sniffy members of staff at its stablemate FHM "the Weekly Wank" - and Nuts, the IPC clone both give off the air of the Daily Star written on three cans of fruit-flavoured lager while watching those Babe TV channels ("Terry has texted and asked us to rub our arses together!"); a third title aimed at slightly younger boys, Sorted, sniffs that boys are embarrassed to read magazines with semi-naked women in front of their mothers and girlfriends, so they're kicking off with Beyonce in a bikini on their front page. That'll be the cultural item instead, then. Of course, what's probably causing sleepless nights at Kerrang and the NME is that these three titles might start nibbling away at the casual purchasers of their magazines.

But NME isn't going down without a fight. Hotter Than Julian, More fucked up than Liam, Deader than Kurt... yes, a bloke who's been dead for twenty five years, ladies and gentlemen - Mr. Sid Vicious. Hey, sure, he was drugged-out fuck-up who murdered his girlfriend, but there's nothing more rock and roll than a spot of domestic violence, is there? To back up the Sid stuff, there's also a Live Fast Die Young pull-out section of "glamorous" corpses - Hendrix, Jones, Curtis, Shakur, Buckley, fat dead guy in a bath, Parsons (Gram, not Nicholas) and, of course, Kurt - and, let's not forget, the rock necrophiliacs are going to be having a field day later this year when we reach a decade from his death. Any time the 'it's cool to be dead' line is trotted out, it's enough to make you queasy - what are we meant to be celebrating here? That Ian Curtis was ill and couldn't take it any more? Are we meant to be high-fiving Kurt's ghost - "you were, like, so totally in pain, dude, way to go!" How about throwing in that Richey Manic cutting his arm poster again? It's perhaps lucky that the news story about Hope of the States broke for next week's issue and not this one.

The big news shot is of Wayne Coyne covered in blood and Jack White ringing in the new year in Chicago - it's stage make-up, right. Jason Stollsteimer, meanwhile, spent Christmas in hospital having work done on his torn retina.

In other news, Franz Ferdinand played a secret gig at the Rough Trade shop in London to a crowd of chin-stroking hipsters (we're just going by the pictures of them here) while the NME doesn't seem at all worried in the RIAA fleecing "file sharers" for "small sums" like five thousand dollars a time, as it cuts and pastes the news release about "the number of people illegally downloading music falling after industry sanctions."

The Sleepy Jackson do the made-up but totally legal CD: You Am I, Boz Scaggs, John Lennon (worse than you think; it's the demo version of Free As A Bird.)

"I apologise if I gloomified your mother's Christmas Day" - Peter Robinson takes on Gary Jules. Nice to see the cap making a return to the top flight of pop music, isn't it?

Are Chikinki "the kinkiest band in Britain", as their Radar headline claims? They've had their picture taken in a sauna, and one of them's called Rupert (so Rupert, Rupert is bare.) Ed, their guitarist, has a cute little pudgy face and a floppy head full of black hair which reminds us of Mopp (as in '... and Smiff'). Oh, they might have songs called Fucking With Our Clothes On ad Wave Your Hands In the Air If You Like To Fuck, but that's just young people, isn't it? They're all obviously as cute as ITV's Saturday Starship, and twice as wholesome.

"Malcolm MCClaren's original plan had been for Sid to sing Je Ne Regrette Rien while walking through Paris' jewish quarter in a swastika t-shirt." Maybe its time someone sat down and produced a popular history of punk that didn't put the holy trinity of Sid, Malc and Johnny (or dead thug, pompous shop-keeper and charmless chancer) at the centre of things. They did manage to knock out some cracking singles, yes; Johnny went on to do some great stuff with PiL. But they weren't situationist geniuses. They were shrewd, but not smart; manipulative but not masterfull. Just because you know how to knock up a platform doesn't mean you've got anything to say, and so much of the Sex Pistol's work, and Mac and Rotten's subsequent stuff, is marked not by a refusal to accept boundaries, nor a desire to question assumptions, but by a total lack of gorm.

The Von Bondies get a two-page spread, but it's all a bit sullied because it's clear that here we're getting a feature about the band with one member who went out with Jack White, and the other who went down at his hands. Even the caption for the photo ("l-r Jack White's ex-squeeze Marcie...") makes it clear that this is what the set-up is. Mark Beaumont acknowledges that Jason's pissed off that he's having to spend his trip to London yakking on about Jack White. Two thirds of the interview is given over to just pointless stirring of the past that the band seem bored by - "is 7 Nation Army about your relationship, Marcie? Is 'Elephant' about you?" - and so instead of hearing about the Von Bondies music, we're off down a pointless side alley of speculating what Jack might have been thinking when he wrote Fell In Love With A Girl. As they always used to say on Crown Court - "objection, your honour - this witness couldn't possibly be expected to know what was going on in the defendant's mind." The interview, incidently, took place before Jack White laid into Jason.

More head-looseness from 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster. Marc, when the band are on TV, fast-forwards to his bit and puts it on pause. Which is presumably the only way to stop the buggers from doing their too-much drug teeth-grindy shakes.

reviews
live
pretty girls make graves - oxford zodiac - "they're cocaine-crazed alligators", 8
the dirtbombs - detroit magic stick - "... meg white's flatmae Ko Zydeco", 7


albums
kelis - tasty - "it never looks, or sounds, cynical... like prince, the pervy tracks are joyful, self-confident, funny", 8
lisa gerrard & patrick cassidy - immortal memory - "cinematic or gradiose; boring or impenetrable", 4
gang of four - brief history of the twentieth century - see, not all punks were rubbish - 6

singles
sotw - lcd soundsystem - yeah - "20 great souls rolled into one"
the fallout trust - EP1 - "a melange of styles"

And finally, jason Lytle from Grandaddy loves the Electric Light Orchestra. But the NME buying guide doesn't include Out of the Blue, which is like writing up Raleigh Bikes without mentioning the Grifter.