No Rock And Roll Fun

DOME ALONE: There were so many great plans about what was going to happen to the millennium dome after its "purpose" came to an end (older readers will recall the Dome was built to celebrate the fact that all those chequebooks which had the '19' preprinted in the date box had become obsolete). It was going to be at the heart of some housing estate, or provide a permanent home for some sort of exhibition, or it might possibly have been turned upside down and filled with Nacho cheese. Instead, it's fate has been decided: Paul McCartney is going to use it as a rehearsal room. Like all band rehearsal rooms, it will be fitted out with a damp patch and a two bar electric fire (only one bar working). But what a come down for a great national institution, once seeming to sum up all the hopes and dreams of the entire country; now, slugging it over to Greenwich to rehearse for a tour on the site of an old gasworks.

Actually, we still think the whole dome thing was little more than a fall-back position - they gathered all the 'great and the good' of the UK there at midnight on 01/01/00; couldn't have really been designed as a 'fort' to protect the famous and rich in case the millennium bug had fucked up civilisation, could it? [Hurrah! Y2K paranoia, only four years late! Coming tomorrow: Could the rise of Hitler spell trouble for Austria?]