No Rock And Roll Fun

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: The NME reinvents itself. Again.
Belly-warmer and occasional Brian Molko collaborator Asia Argento simmers off the front of the current Dazed & Confused; apparently she told one critic who'd been bitchy to her that she wanted to stab him, which made him fall in love with her.

D&C also reveals that The Subways' Billy Lunn used to be the best breastroke man in the UK. Swimming, that is.

Plus, Thurston Moore remembers his first meeting with Kim Gordon: he was scared to kiss her, but really wanted to.

It's interesting that Tim Jonze has chosen these pages to predict the demise of the current London rock scene: simply everybody's doing crack, and he reckons that the same way scouse pop in the 80s collapsed under the weight of too many smack problems, London 04 could be going to hell in a pipe. Jonze also points out the bitter twist of a scene supposedly about community and warm, cuddly leftish ideals choosing the drug that's smashing the heart out of working class communities across the country. (Let's hope nobody in Liverpool reads the remarks about scouse pop, though, otherwise Tim'll be forced to make a pilgrimage a la Boris to the North West. Has anyone else spotted that the Liverpool reaction to the Spectator piece is, erm, exactly the sort of whiney stereotypical over-reaction you'd have expected?)

It's Observer Music Monthly week, and can you guess what the chart is? Number one - 911 Is A Joke by Duran Duran; Atomic Kitten's The Tide Is High at 8 and Strawberry Fields Forver is down at 9. Yep, it's worst cover versions, but any such list which doesn't include this:



is no comprehensive round-up of bad cover versions.

Liza Tarbuck - god, yes, and if you wouldn't, you probably need viagra or something - goes to see the record doctor. For some reason - we can only assume it's animus against the whole family - she's prescribed Swing Out Sister, which is the sort of thing that would get you struck off in the NHS.

We're delighted to report there's several pictures of Robbie Williams, and he looks like a smug, UHT preserved self-licking tossboot in every single one of them. It's made better by his commentary on the pictures - he calls Wayne Rooney "the George Best of our generation", which is interesting not only because its so, so wrong - where is the style and panache? - but because Williams clearly hasn't noticed that he's from the generation before Rooney's.

Band Aid was twenty years ago, you know. Oh, you did? Oh, you're already heartily sick of the anniversary? And the way that the Live Aid celebrations have kicked in almost a year before the 20th anniversary proper? You don't want to hear Francis Rossi telling how he and Rick were "the drug centre" during the recording of Do They Know Its Christmas? Even although there's something a little disturbing that the people singing to raise cash for starving Ethiopians were simulatneously consuming - in Rossi's words - "shitloads of coke" at a time when the bulk of coke in Europe came from Columbian and Chilean sources, and as such was propping up General Pinochet's murderous regime?

Emma Warren has selected Black Wire as the Flash-Forward band. One of the looks like the young Martin Gore - back before he turned up in leather, that is.

The OMM has an extract of Alexis Kiedis' autobiography, and if we might extract an extract: "My priority that fall was to get into a good junior school. I was supposed to enrol in Bancroft, but when we went to check it out, we saw that the building was in a shady neoghbourhood." We expect the stuff about property prices and neighbourhood watch is being kept back for the book proper.

OMM gives a handy heads-up about Claire Teal: she's being groomed and promoted by "proper journalist" Michael Parkinson. That one fact saves you a lot of time in forming a judgement, doesn't it?

Clearly, after the level of guests she's been lumbered with on The Orange Telephone Company Company Programme, Lauren Laverne must have jumped at the chance of a talk with someone who has answers - Paul Heaton. In the course of their chat, Heaton reels off the old address of Smiths Crisps (121 Kings Road, Reading, Berkshire, if you're interested.) Can you honestly say any of McFly would be able to remember the Walkers HQ location in twenty years?

Kings of Leon are on the front of the NME; it's like a shot from Extreme Makeovers, albeit one where the production team have decided to abandon the programme halfway through. Matt Lucas appears to have joined them, dressed up as Kim deal. We're guessing the extreme makeover thing is a nod to the redesign of the paper - Conor McNicholas introduces this revamp (we think it's number seven in the last three years, or something like that) as being in response to public demand: apparently people wanted "more letters", which is a bit of a surprise. The best news is the poster pull-out has gone, making the NME the first magazine to survive the curse of the glossy pull-out section, normally something that comes up towards the last six months of a magazine's existence.

The Big Picture has survived, despite its sometimes wobbly status; there has been a tendency to choose better pictures recently, though, and this time round its a collection of images from the Johnny & Joey ramone tribute nights. There's also coverage of Franz ferdinand's kids matinee special and an interview with Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler: Brett says he feels "reborn"; Bernie says it reminds him of back in 1991 when nobody cared what he and Brett were doing. Yes, 2004 is a lot like that, Bernard.

The BPI's gorgeous, pouting Matt Phillips is slipped into a skintight tshirt to react to the NME poll on the BPI's decision to issue legal actions left, right and centre. Comparing the current poll results with the last time they asked the questions, back in March, is interesting: people are slightly more bolshy about downloading - 92% think it will carry on regardless compared with March's 89%; 77% will continue to download (73% before). Indeed, the only thing that's surprising is that only 70% are angry about the BPI action; before it started, 75% were pissed off. Not that GP Matt is pleased to hear that nobody thinks it's going to make a difference and hardly anyone supports the BPI's moves - "law enforcement is rarely popular" he sniffs, which is just rubbish. Do people really tut loudly when the police catch a rapist? Have small groups taken to trying to get up petitions to stop the cops hassling the guys who steal old people's life savings?

It's a good week for the NME to be relaunching an opinion column: Julian Marshall lands some tight punches - not least pointing out that being lectured on being evil by Pete Waterman is a little unfair. There's also an opinion offered by Kele Okereke from Bloc Party who suggests we should all start our own bands. Handily, you can win Justin Hawkin's guitar on the next page, which will not only let you make music, but stop him making it, too. (Unless he has another guitar, we guess).

Unchanged by all the furniture shifting is Peter Robinson Versus... it's Segre from Ksabian this week; Serge thinks watching V dancing on Top of the Pops is like doing LSD. Only if you're having a very bad trip.

Kings of Leon bemoan that they never had the chance to play normal gigs - where the audience consists of "seven drunk guys in Denver who couldn't give two shits." Instead they wound up having to fend off Kate Moss and Liv Tyler. Yeah, that must suck.

The Zutons are still going; their response to a question about the war is to string some Phil Collins album titles together. They do suggest that Kerry looks like Deputy Dawg, although that's wrong as well; he's surely much more of a Huckleberry Hound.

Radar band (just a single page now) are Maximo Park - the wee Franz Ferdinands are starting to arrive, it turns out. They want people to come and release their pent-up sexual frustration at their shows; which sounds like a good idea until you have to mop up the floor when they've gone home.

reviews
live - all expanded! all new!
ordinary boys - edinburgh - liquid rooms - "here to pick up the pieces"
the boyfriends - london metro - "better than buses"
mortiis on tour (from their diary) "I'm not a big fan of the English breakfast"
bloc party - camden lock 17 - "the band of next year, no contest"

albums
elliott smith - from a basement on the hill - "saddled forever with a stereotype he abhorred: a doomed, tragic hero", 9
the eighties matchbox b-line disaster - "Black Francis-cum-Mortis", 8
the cramps - how to make a monster - "bad music for people who love good music", 7
placebo - once more with feeling - "cross dressing controversialists who've never done anything shocking", 4

and so here's the revamps big idea - Tracks. Singles is still there, hanging on as a sidebar but that's enough, and they're still supplied by one writer. It's just enough for those of us who can't quite remove our stove pipe hats for long enough to accept the death of the single; however much we accept that moving from reviewing lumps of music on plastic heading to shops to catching songs as soon as they appear on the horizon makes sense, a pop magazine without some sort of singles review would feel like it was lacking something. We're not sure how the idea of giving the same number of words to every track is going to work out, though: is there really as much to say about the new Snow Patrol (pianful poignancy) as the new Graham Coxon (time has not withered)? And, with no more sotw, the totw is The Strokes, Clampdown (live), a download from warchildmusic.com. The Strokes as the pick? So, that's what a brave new world looks like, eh?

The gig guide has doubled in size, which is something that should have happened ages ago. And Peter Robinson is in charge of the new Thrills, which is actually more like that bit they used to do in Select and is pretty amusing, and called Backstage. But mr. Robinson now controls the bantery pieces in the back of OMM and NME - isn't there meant to be a Government Department Inquiry triggered at this point?

All in all, then, the NME has done a bit of a u-turn and developed a lot of bottom. It feels like a much more substantial proposition than it did seven days ago, and seems to have finally started the comeback from shrinking down. We've lost the posters and gained extra editorial - that's got to be a good sign.