Stone: They stoned the Stones, then they came for me

Over in the Rocky Mountain News, Joss Stone wails about how beastly the press is to her:

"They're so mean! They're so angry! . . . In England if you look at other artists that are successful – Robbie Williams, the Rolling Stones, whatever - if you go back in their lives, as soon as they become successful the press gets really nasty. All the while (the artists are) trying to become successful the press builds them up and builds them up so they can break them down. In a way I can deal with it. It's a compliment, it really is."

"As soon as the Rolling Stones became successful, the press got really nasty." Yeah, that bitch William Rees-Mogg, running an editorial in The Times condemning the pointless prosecution of Mick Jagger.

And, while Williams might get some bad press from time to time, the general stance of the UK media towards him is to treat him as some sort of multi-talented musical messiah rather than an over-promoted halfwit, running his press releases as fact and treating his trips to rehab as a worrying time in our nation's life rather than a staging post in the parade of fuck-ups. Good bloody god, when he was in having a holiday in one last time, The Sun was collecting 'get well soon' cards for him - if the idea is that they're just building him up so they can break him down, when do we get to the breaking him down part? I can't wait for it.

Meanwhile, Joss wanders off onto why her third album is called "Introducing Joss Stone":

It is like a re-introduction: 'This is me, hello.' There's nobody else's thing on here. This is what I wanted to do. Amazingly I feel like I've been through schooling. I hated school. . . . I couldn't keep that information in my head because it was boring. . . . Then without me realizing I enrolled in this new school. The first album was my first lesson. My second was my second. And my third is my graduation. I was learning how to make a record. This one I'm going to put my hand out and show you – 'Hi, I'm Joss. This is the person who has been created by these experiences.' And that's it."

So... why isn't it called Reintroducing Joss Stone? Or This Is The Real Joss Stone. And if we understand her not-entirely-thought-through metaphor correctly, her first two albums were like school, which she considered to be "boring" and not worth remembering. Well, we can agree with that.

But if these were sandbox affairs, then why bother releasing them? Could the people who bought them now ask for their money back as the person who made them seems to have disowned them as little more than practice runs?