This week just gone

The last week on No Rock and Roll Fun.

The ten most-fascinating stories according to what's been read:
1. Lily Allen changes her trousers
2. R Kelly's "under-age" sex video will appear in court
3. RIP: Tony Thompson
4. Diana Memorial Concert
5. Unveiled and proud: the naked Britney Spears statue
6. Live Earth concerts
7. Beth Ditto gets naked
8. KT Tunstall's sexuality dissected
9. Nick Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo try to block sex pics. Might have been easier to close the curtains
10. Talinda Bentley's Chester Bennington stalker hobby gets her in trouble

Also this week: T in the Park got off to a muddy start; Matt Groening revealed a bad review of Oingo Boingo nearly cost the Simpsons its theme tune; Lily Allen to quit sometime before 2022; David Cameron rolled over for the BPI; the Department of Culture, Media and Sport heard evidence on ticket touting and Africa asked Bono to stop.

You can read the whole week on one page;
or skim the week before in one post

Five years ago, we upset Rockbitch by suggesting their rock-shock-by numbers was dull - they posted a response on their website suggesting we 'didn't get it'; 1Xtra stopped using the Urban tag; the Essential Festival cancelled, blaming the gays for having mushed up the venue the weekend before; James Shaffer of Korn tried to explain that when he said Hitler had gone to heaven, he didn't mean Nazis were good; a letter to the NME said stewards had kept people on the site due to "riots" outside the fence; the pension funds expressed doubts about the running of EMI; Neal Pearson, drummer with Travis, broke his back in a swimming-pool accident; the Oasis Finsbury Park gigs were soured by the boorish crowd while Noel Gallagher insisted George Michael's political opinions were invalid because he'd "lied" about his sexuality for so long; Michael Jackson suggested Sony Records' Tony Mottola was a bigot


Datarock's Datarock Datarock - data? Rock!


Stripey tights and twisted knives: Dresden Dolls live in London DVD


Not quite the event they once were: Chemical Brothers release We Are The Night


Happy Mondays explore self-parody as an alternative to a pension scheme


A "collectors edition" of Eat To The Beat (i.e. 'buy it again, please')


The Crimea's "give it away" approach to the album replaced by a less-thrilling "sell it for money" approach


We love the way Amazon list "starring Tom Baker" as if his contribution to the Five Doctors was more than a massive strop and only appear as a photo


If this story of a mentally ill man kept in enforced childhood by a domineering mother had subtitles rather than a laughtrack, it'd be hailed a lost classic. Sorry.


In Status Quo and The Kangaroo, Jon Holmes destroys rock mythology, one apocryphal tale at a time


Simon Reynolds' deft overview of the on-off romance of white indie-boy rock and black street sounds