No Rock And Roll Fun

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: Still finding mud from Glastonbury edition
Top of the Pops magazine comes this month with an excellent desk set - tiny little stapler, tiny hole punch, tiny scissors and a tiny roll of sticky tape with pop star faces on. It would be perfect for a studious mouse. There's also a free McFly poster magazine, which is styled as a parody of School of Rock's graphics. They were, of course, a parody of Rolling Stone's graphics, which leaves us looking at a something that feels a little like a cross between an Argos catalogue and Rolling Stone, only with McFly on it. Tom reveals he went to school in a church with only 100 people on the roll, which we calculate means either he's even three times more posh than we thought, or else he had, you know, needs. It's hard to tell the difference between the two quite a lot of the time.

TOTP proper has got Girls Aloud on the cover, looking not a little like the staff from the local Harvester have spent too long standing by the chicken spit. Inside, Natasha Bedingfield wears a moustache to make it easy to remember how to pronounce her name; Kev from V frets that his teeth are rotting away because he's drunk too much pop - don't worry, Kev, your career will be gone long before your teeth, mate; and Dane from D-Side shares his recipe for Tacos - "I've never been obsessed with tacos" he reveals, "but... I have them every now and then."

We can't help but wonder if the people who came up with the Olsen Twins advert strapline - "So little time - so much Mary-Kate and Ashley" - thought about perhaps rewriting it in light of one them being raddled with anorexia.

Duncan from Blue is an Aries. No, of course it matters, dammit - that's the reason why, um, won't share his pillow with anyone. An Aries trait, apparently. Sheesh, and people say there's nothing in astronomy.

Cheryl from Girls Aloud remembers getting herself suspended from school because she had a massive row with a boy on a bus - thank god she learned to control her temper as she grew up; that sort of thing can so easily escalate to the point where you'd beat the crap out of someone in a toilet, say. They also ask Cheryl to review Candice's new single (aparently a "Blonde South African bombshell"). Cheryl's view? "It's nice but nothing new." It must really piss off members of a band like girls aloud who work so hard to ensure constant innovation - they've experimented with three sorts of footwear this month - when someone cookie-cutter comes along.

Plal' Num B from Blazin Squad boasts that "I've never had a girl with fake boobs." And, you know, we bet we know how he can be absolutely certain about that.

There's a bonus free sneak of Dare - we thank that's it, although it could be a free dare of Sneak - with little tastes of such features as "Flirting tips fropm the stars." Charlie Busted advises "Don't be shy about introducing yourself" while Nadine suggests you should let the guy do the chasing. Which doesn't really help very much at all. Luckily, they didn't ask Christina. We guess her flirting tip would be along the lines of "It's so warm in here, do you mind if I take what's left of my clothes off?"; There's also an interview with Jackie Bird, the girl whose mum has done, erm, bird twice because of her truancy. If nothing else, she proves beyond any doubt what missing your education does to your brain: "Mum had to go to court because me and my older sister kept missing school... they sentenced Mum to 60 days in prison. I felt guilty... after a while, I started skipping school again. But I never thought that would mean Mum would have to go back to prison. I was wrong." Uh... yeah. Just fancy that, eh?

Back in TOTP proper, and Javine's offering advice to people who find themselves growing up without their Dad around, which is her big trauma. Except, having got through a couple of columns of tragedy, she shrugs and admits that, you know, she was kind of happy that her Dad didn't live at home. So, um, that's alright then.

Finally from TOTP, James Busted doesn't like Dog Poo, mouldy milk or tight trousers. We're reading the last one as a phobia about penises. But enough of this, let us return to grown up music magazines.

Like the NME. Only - what's this on NME/O2 Music Guide? "The princess of skater pop gets ready to party!" Wowser! It's Avril Lavigne. Talk about the perils of your marketing tie-up; O2 are pushing Avril harder than a farmer with kidney stones, and so they're having to take her seriously. She seems to think that the 100,000 people going to Party in the Park are her fans, somewhat confusingly; she also says that "people have the wrong idea about" Marilyn Manson - which does surprise us - if we're 100% wrong about him, that would make him genuinely a talented Goth with an agenda designed to unsettle and shake up rather than a sharp businessman with a bowl of white face paint and an eye of the disaffected 16 year old make-up. Let's leave this and head for the proper paper.

It's the "Glastonbury Aftermath" issue, or "last of the summer wine", if you will; in fact, here's Rock's own Compo, Liam Gallagher, peering out the front page.

The Big Picture seems to have been abandoned - instead we just hit the news, with Razorlight having a well-earned gloat over their top ten album; there's coverage of the dumping of Pete from the Libertines, and the rather depressing news that Kurt Cobains guitar is going to be part of some sort of exhibition - it might be intended to celebrate the Reading Festival, but it still reeks of the Hard Rock Cafe from where we're standing.

The apparently now annual post-Glasot poll results are in. 44% of those attending were festival virgins, 37% spent most of their time in their tent when they weren't watching bands (hey, get that special festival vibe); 6% claim to have drunk more than ten pints every day. Curiously, 9% claim to have been a victim of a burglary and 3% of a mugging. 57% of festival shags were with people known to the shagger before the festival; 5% did it in the toilets.

Peter Robinson takes on DJ Shadow. Thom Yorke apparently laughed at him and James Lavelle . Blimey, wouldn't you get a complex if your behaviour was so odd it made Thom Yorke burst out in giggles?

Radar band are from Canada. They're called Death From Above and they're looking to come and play a gig in your living room - yes, yours. You have to explain why and send it in, and the best argument for having them come round (or, looking at them, more likely the weakest argument for keeping them away) gets the gig.

Dan Martin considers the plight of Oasis after their show, and poses the questions "are they in trouble? Have they run out of steam?" His conclusion is that they're in danger of becoming irrelevant. Which is almost true - really, though, they've been irrelevant for years. They've enjoyed a good four or five year run longer than even their kindest friends would say they deserve mainly because they've not really been replaced - like a badly beaten-up N-Reg Metro, they've been kept going because nobody's been able to replace them; nobody has offered to fill up the space they occupied doing stupid, dumb, rocky things. Now, though, there's The Libertines and Jack White and others doing stupid rock things, and making better records while doing it. More and more, it's looking like its time to trundle 'em off to the breakers yard.

Noel has written a letter to the paper, as well - we're guessing on current form he would also have insisted on delivering it and opening the envelope. He tries to explain away the dumping of the album as something they were always intending to do anyway (yeah? then why do two songs from it live at Glastonbury?) and then claims there was no 'separate dressing room'. Because the closeness of los bros gallagher can be seen in his pay-off: "Liam and his friends did [watch McCartney from the stage], me and my friends preferred the shared experience of the masses to the priviliged position of the few." So, absolutely no evidence of lip-curling contempt for Liam there, then.

Nathan from Snow Patrol reckons women love the band because they're boys admitting they're wrong. And apparently they're big favourites of Thierry Henry. They also seem to think they're the England team's favourite band, but the interviews a few weeks back suggest that they really don't have that good taste.

Amongst a second set of Glasotnbury posters is a pin-up of Michael and Emily Eavis. If this ever sees the right side of any wall, ever, I shall eat my poster pull-out. [Terms and conditions apply].

Paddy Scissor Sisters original plan was rather Manics-esque: get to the peak, and then quit. "but... for the first time in my life I have some semblance of a future."

reviews
live
streets - irving plaza, new york - "noe of Skinner's legitimate genius tranlsates well tonight"
the concretes - temple kings college london - "a little bit of restraint goes a long way"

albums
the futureheads - the futureheads - "finally, British bands are exorcising the ghost of Britpop", 8
dios - dios - "too much past, not enough present", 6
campag velocet - it's beyond our control - "don't count them out yet", 8

singles
sotw - radio 4 - party crashers - "their party's started"
morrissey - first of the gang to die - "winningly weepsome"

And, finally, Sam Herlihy from Hope of the States loves Wilco.