You, You Tube and the music: Seth Lakeman

To celebrate Seth Lakeman's victory at the BBC Radio 2 folk awards, some Seth from the YouTube:

The White Hare, live on Sharon Osbourne's ITV show. A working definition of pearls before swine.
Live at Bunkfest
Lady of The Sea, live on GMTV
Lady of The Sea, less unexpectedly live on Channel 4's Transmission
Take No Rogues, live at the 2006 Cambridge Fok Festival
A smidgen of an Exeter HMV performance - from a videophone, which makes everything look like it's beaming live from Beirut

Nice MySpace you've got here: The Berg Sans Nipple

Introducing a new, occasional feature (i.e we'll do it once and forget about it) exploring a semi-random MySpace band page)

The Band: The Berg Sans Nipple

At: http://www.myspace.com/thebergsansnipple

Downloadable tunes? Nope

They say: Tropical / Melodramatic Popular Song / Roots Music

They sound like: Music to skip to in space elevators

They look like: Mathematicians going on A Place In The Sun

How many friends? 2138, including Ghostface Killah, Grizzly Bear and Maggie Horn

Have they reskinned? Nope, it's the standard MySpace skin

Do they blog? A little, but it's mostly of the buy/try sort

Best comment: so i randomly heard your record when it was randomly put on at the record store, and i wasn't even listening to it. i had headphones on. the music got softer, and i noticed the keyboards. i took off my headphones and couldn't stop listening. i listened to two songs and said, "i think i'm gonna buy this!" so i did. and so far, it's my cd of the year. everyone i've introduced to your music has liked it a lot. cheers!

Do we learn anything? "Once rumored to have been Siamese twins separated at birth (according to them, their relationship is really much closer to that of Ghost Dog and the ice cream vendor), the reality is only more mundane at first glance."

Do you really want to add The Berg Sans Nipple as a friend? If you like computery tunes, yes

Please say it'll be a one-way trip

The thought of McFly being blasted into space is one to cheer the sould on a cold winter's morning, although the apparent plans to bring them back as well takes the edge off slightly.

They're supposedly going to do something linked to Richard Branson's supposed holiday-in=space company.

Even if the technology exists, and Branson's underwriters let him go ahead, this won't be until 2009 at the earliest, so it's quite a leap of faith to assume that McFly will still be a going concern by then. It's always dodgy planning to put musicians on spaceflights too far ahead of time - NASA had a terrible time explaining to Eddie Fisher why he lost his seat on the manned trips to the moon - but even if Branson was blasting idiots off into space tomorrow, would the very rich really want to be entertained by a band aimed at nine year-old girls?

Still, at least in space, nobody can hear you scream "they're a bit like a poor man's Busted, aren't they?"

More quality journalism from The Sun

The front of this morning's Sun online screeches out a warning:

iPods could land you in court

MUSIC fans may face a FINE if they're caught crossing the road while listening to their iPods

Surely, you wonder, the paper isn't trying to pass off a four day-old news story about a plan in New York to outlaw any sort of audio distraction while crossing the road as a new story about the UK, are they?

That's exactly what Ian Hepburn - "crime writer" - is trying to do:

iPOD fans face being hauled into court and FINED if they are caught crossing the road while listening to their favourite tracks.

Britain could be set to follow New York, where safety-conscious senator Carl Kruger is tabling a bill to outlaw so-called “distracted walking”.

Hepburn doesn't bother to point out the law targets bluetooth headsets, other mp3 players, Walkmans and crossing the road singing "la la la" with your hands over your ears. But far more interesting anyway, of course, is his real discovery that "Britain could be set" to follow New York.

(Not, of course, that New York has actually done anything yet.)

So, what has Kruger discovered? Oddly, nothing at all - he talks to ROSPA, who don't ask for fines but just suggest you turn your players down while crossing the road. And Labour MP Stephen Pound is given a chance to comment, but far from suggesting that the government is poised to follow the lead of New York, he makes it clear its not likely to happen:

“British people can walk, talk and look at the same time.”

(Actually, Stephen, it's more the walking, looking and listening that's at issue here.)

So, there's no indication of anyone even thinking of suggesting we consider introducing such a ban in the UK. Admittedly, Kruger isn't lying - Britain could be set to follow New York's lead, in exactly the same way that Mariah Carey could try to study law at Harvard, or I could try and declare myself King of Bavaria.

Stop searching for the African Soul Rebels

You'll find them - "them" in this case being Femi Kuti, Akli D and Ba Cissoko - on tour at the following places:

Feb 14 - Leicester - De Montfort Hall
15 - London - Barbican Centre
16 - Liverpool - Philharmonic Hall
18 - Edinburgh - Usher Hall
19 - Manchester - Bridgewater Hall
20 - Gateshead - The Sage
21 - Northampton - Royal & Derngate
22 - Warwick - Arts Centre
23 - Poole - The Lighthouse
24 - Basingstoke - The Anvil
26 - Brighton - Dome
27 - Bristol - Colston Hall

Akli D and Ba Cissoko's sets from Liverpool will turn up later on the Andy Kershaw programme, which - in a spot of Peelesque downgrading - shifts from its usual Sunday night slot to a new home of 11.15 on Monday evenings on BBC Radio 3. We presume that it does a lot of its business on listen again, and so the actual TX doesn't matter much, but it's still a shame to see one of the most consistently interesting programmes on British radio shoved back another hour into the dark.

EMI shrinks a little

The merger of the Virgin and Capitol imprints at EMI has already yielded cost savings: eleven promotional staff and the entire Capitol sales team have been canned.

When management is this poor, all it takes is for Robbie Williams to release a duff album, and all of a sudden families are an income down.

EMI to fund anti-RIAA defense case

A further setback for the music industry's plans to sue everyone: it's just got a lot more expensive. A court has directed Capitol Records to pick up a portion of the costs Debbie Foster incurred proving their attempts to sue her for "illegal" file-sharing. It's the first time the RIAA has been forced to pay costs when one of their shaky cases has been pulled down; the precedent of both the defeat and the costs award might make them think again.

But then again, the RIAA have never done the sensible thing, have they?

Can someone spare Heather Mills a tanner?

Heather Mills insisted just before Christmas that if she was a gold digger, she'd have lots of money. And besides, she had lots of money of her own.

We didn't quite understand the logic. But if she thinks the fact she's not rich proves, in some way, that she's not after Paul's money, she's copper-bottoming the proof: the Evening Standard reckons that Mills has driven herself into debt with the divorce battle.

Or rather, that Mills believes McCartney has deliberately drawn-out the legal battle in order to wear down Heather's resources so that she'll have to accept a lower settlement as she won't be able to afford to carry on fighting. Although the Standard then says that because Paul has drawn out the legal battle, it means Heather is needing to seek more money because she needs to pay more legal bills.

The sense it's all being made up hangs over it all.

Noel on a roll

You know, a while back, Noel Gallagher's tiresome attempts to sound controversial were so dull, like a local radio DJ trying to spark some debate amongst a late-night phone-in audience, we used to find our attention drifted so much we found ourselves imagining what naughty lemurs might get up to, instead of paying full heed to what he had to say. Luckily, we think we've beaten that tendency.

Just in time, as Noel has something to say:

Speaking about bands who focus on political issues rather than playing their back catalogues, Gallagher singled about U2's focus on charities.

He said: "Play 'One', shut the fuck up about Africa."

Gallagher also hit out against Radiohead. He said: "Thom Yorke sat a piano singing, 'This is fucked up' for half-an-hour. We all know that Mr Yorke.

"Who wants to sing the news? No matter how much you sit there twiddling, going, 'We're all doomed,' at the end of the day people will always want to hear you play 'Creep'. Get over it."

Yes... much more interesting and worthwile to sing a song about how much you like doing cocaine, Noel, you're quite... lemurs... sorry... yes, Noel... and Bono. Yes... singling out his... um...