WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: They report a riot

Shortly after the tracklist for the War Child album was announced, we did a lazy cut and paste from the BBC News site to slap the list onto No Rock. The Independent, it seems, did pretty much the same thing - although they pasted into the newspaper layout. So it was that, yesterday morning, after the tracks were already up and available for download, Independent readers would have been informed two of the tracks were called 'To Be Confirmed'.

Also in the Saturday paper, Deborah Orr had a pop at Chris Martin and, while we're always up for a bit of goosing Mr. Martin, she doesn't seem to have twigged that his claim X&Y was based on "watching porn" was a heavy-handed joke rather than an actual fact. (To be fair, we didn't bother to watch their Mercury acceptance video close enough to notice that - rather than get some proper truckers to do the video, they wasted time and effort on making themselves up instead - it's not easy to tell when Coldplay are having a laugh). And Orr is bang on the money when she dismisses Martin's lip-quivering at the onslaught of poor reviews - "Martin is vain enough to enjoy his 'modest' image, and perhaps he thinks... he is being sensitive. Actually, it's just arrogant. [...] Maybe in America they prefer less homogenous critics as well as less homogenous music." Well, she has a point until the "maybe in America" bit.

It's been a bit of a queasy week reading The Guardian, as the paper prepares to drop the broadsheet format and go berliner - the first quality newspaper to make a single switch without a mid-way 'dual-format' period since The Sunday Correspondent. (Yes, there was a Sunday Correspondent, even although it sounds like the sort of newspaper title that mid-quality ITV dramas would give to a fictional newspaper.) The shuffling of the paper has meant that it's been virtually impossible to make it through a page this week without hitting someone saying "...this is the last column."

Amongst the losses are the radio diary, which is bittersweet - no more Colin Murray, but also no more Andrew Collins; and the Friday Review. Having said which, the Friday Review is being replaced by a magazine called something like Film and Music, which seems to be exactly the same thing but without a title that gets too easily confused with the Guardian Review, the Saturday books supplement.

For the farewell (Friday) Review, Mick Jagger sat down with Simon Hattenstone to talk about the latest batch of Rolling Stones songs. It's perhaps utterly disappointing, as Hattenstone warns less than two columns into a three page spread: "I'm waiting for great stories, but they don't come. Jagger is a rock & roll diplomat, an anecdote-free zone."

The song which has caused the greatest interest on the new album, the one about Bush that isn't about Bush, Sweet Neocon, isn't mentioned at all; the heat generated in the US over the track doesn't even get alluded to tangentally. But then even when songs are discussed, Sir Mick seems less than keen to talk about them - he's more interested in Hattenstone's waist size compared to his own (Jagger is 28 inches round, if you're planning a pub quiz). Having done everything he can to make the interview as dull as possible, Jagger then complains to his press officer that "it's getting a little Woman's Own."

A little better value is another knight of the realm, Paul McCartney, over in Time. Which is ironic, for while Jagger's interview shows the supposed rebel of rock is little more than the CEO of a well-organised machine, McCartney more or less accepts he's quite dull - "I'm pretty straight, and I don't mind at all that people see me that way" - he seems to be much more interested in making music for music's sake, and quite happy to serve up words unminced. Working with Radiohead producer Nigel Goodrich, for example, wasn't always easy: "There were a few times I thought, I could sack this guy. I've produced more records than he's even looked at in a shop."

Ian Brown used to be in The Stone Roses, you know, and this week, he's on the cover of the NME. "There's more chance of me reforming the Happy Mondays than the Stone Roses" he announces, before launching into a happy run through of his solo career highlights. And, yes, that does mean he starts going on about dolphins used to be monkeys again. And why shouldn't he? It'll only be a matter of time before they have to teach that as a theory in US schools, too.

Leading off the news is that a film of the Libertines doing a guerilla gig in 2003 is going to be part of the Raindance Film festival - it could well yet prove to be a moment like that one of the Pistols playing Manchester, where virtually everyone in the audience went on to be someone you've heard of, and a valuable historical document. Or, on the other hand, it might just be a pilot for a sitcom that never made it to a full length series. Whichever, the movie seems to be less interesting right now than it will be in ten year's time.

The results of the 2005 festival season poll is in. The summer's overall rating for 'the best ever' - 45% - makes it slightly more popular than George Bush. But what's telling is the lack of anything totally outstanding anywhere - the best Festival might have been Glastonbury (25%) or Reading Weekend (24%) or maybe Leeds (14%). Or possibly T (12%). The best band? The Foo Fighters. But only 16% reckon so; Kasabian and The Arcade Fire both poll 13%. Interestingly, the same proportion of people think Live8 and Oasis were the best shows of the season.

A slightly less rosy view of the Festival season rolls up with a belated page covering the violence at the end of Leeds - crowds chanting "I predict a riot" and claims that security were heavy handed. The seriousness of the trouble is marked by Melvin Benn, of Clear Channel's Mean Fiddler Group, sending a pre-emptive letter to the paper admitting there was some bad things happening - or, as he puts it, "hugely disappointing scenes." The "disappointments" include kids losing their eyes as gas canisters exploded in fires (a curious echo of the story told in the swiftly-deleted Reading security guy's post); security guys coming under a shower of missiles; the woman in charge of the cider tent screaming in terror as her stock was ransacked; security being poured in to protect a sponsor tent (yes, make sure the sponsor's tents are protected - were FEMA running security at Reading?). Benn has promised to look into claims that security responded to these "disappointments" with heavy-handed action, but says that he saw no evidence of it himself. He has asked for people who did to get in touch, though.

The Leeds Festival is sponsored by Carling Lager.

Peter Robinson meets up with Tony Mitchell of the Mitchell Brothers and nearly avoids mentioning eastenders at all. But he does, anyway, and gets Mitchell to blurt out that he'd pinch Zoe Slater's arse and go through the back door. It's like Round The Horne never ended, isn't it?

Wonderfully, they invite Ms Dynamite to write about the curse of the Mercury Prize . She says that she didn't even notice there was meant to be a curse attached to winning the thing - which she did, back in 2002, when she was famous. Perhaps the curse works like that overused frog-in-gently-heating-water metaphor; it creeps up on you bit by bit and you don't notice as your feet slowly melt. Or, indeed, until you suddenly wonder how long you've been standing in frog soup.

Art rock? Synths? "Goerring has an H&M charge card" costume fun? It can only be a Visage retrospective. Or, perhaps, radar looking at White Rose Movement. Ironically (obviously ironically, this is bloody art rock) they're named after a Weimar German anti-Nazi group. One of them is called Taxxi.

Despite not actually winning either the band of the summer or the surprise hit of the festival polls, they go ahead and tell The Arcade Fire are the toast of Reading-Leeds. Win wasn't impressed with Pete Doherty: "Baby-sham-balls. The name says it all."

The last guy who did the PR for Jet has given it all up to study catering in Northampton. And sorting out the Northern branch of the Toby carvery in that city would surely give greater benefit to mankind than forcing the Cester brother's faces into yet another magazine. It's like the bloody Oasis Babies, it really is, with a bunch of half-considered soundbites which would be self-aggrandising if they made any sense. For example, they stayed in a villa shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev had stayed in there so they blurt "the fuckin' KGB will be after us now." What does that even mean? Because you went to a place after someone who is no longer the head of state of a nation stayed there, you're going to be pursued by a now-defunct secret police force? I once spent a night in a hotel that Charles II was meant to have slept in - presumably I should ensure my life insurance covers death by cavalier?

reviews
live
black rebel motorcycle club - london garage - "evolved, and better for it" (and, from the photo, Robert has evolved into Xander Harris)
the research - london 93 feet east - "hide bitter, twisted lyrics"
lancaster bombers - hoxton underbelly - "a jagged mess... the anti-bore rock fightback starts here"

albums
dandy warhols - odditorium or warlords of mars - "a tricky beast to love", 6
paul mccartney - chaos and creation in the backyward - "he has come out of his safety zone, but...", 6
simple minds - black & white 050505 - "round them up like pigs; shoot them like dogs", 2

tracks
totw - devendra banhart - i feel just like a child - "he's weird, he has a beard, he needs to be revered"
mew - special - "what might happen if they got their shit together a bit?"
HIM - wings of a butterfly - "reminiscent of Final Countdowners Europe"

And, finally, as Charlotte Church is the victim of the dullest ever attempt to wreck a career with a kiss and tell (to be honest, there's more dirt in The Sunday Times' headline on its profile of her - "A Welcome In My Hillside" - than in it's sister paper, the News of the World's lame expose), we can't help but notice that Max Clifford is having his memoirs serialised. In the Daily Express. If Clifford is such a shit-hot press manipulator, couldn't he have placed his book with something a little less shabby? Like the Brighton and Hove Leader, or somewhere inside the Friday-Ad?

music magazines newspapers guardian berliner mick jagger paul mccartney pete doherty babyshambles charlotte church arcade fire dandy warhols chris martin coldplay rolling stones