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Not telling your parents is all well and good, but is there a point where you should 'fess up? Puberty? Moving out? Hitting thirty? According to Dead Famous People, you should keep your secrets even when you're dead - in their Postcard From Paradise, they ask:
Listen Mum, would you lock my room?
I wouldn't want you to find...
Anything I wouldn't want you to find...
Here's the song covered by Shinowa:
[Part of TAM commandments weekend]
Fergie has decided to go green. Which, you know, is something to be applauded, although she's, erm, doing it by selling her Hummer on eBay.
Now, admittedly, she's giving the funds raised to a green charity, but for someone with the cash Fergie has at her dispoasl, wouldn't it have made a little more sense to have simply taken the car off the road, rather than sold it on to someone else to despoil the planet with, and helping to promote the brand into the deal?
To be fair, it's not just Blake Fielder-Civil who thinks Amy Winehouse should have won the Mercurys. Radcliffe and Maconie were saying pretty much the same thing, but since it's not entirely clear what it is the award is for (the content of the album? the quality of performance on it? the sound of it alone?) it's hard to see how anything could be officially described as the wrong choice - they could vote solely on the sleeve for all we know. Still, Blake's annoyed:
Hallmark, the US greetings card business, has a small line of cards which run cartoons of famous people with weak gags wound around them. They did one, depicting Paris Hilton as a waitress, telling a customer his plate was hot (no, us neither.)
The trouble is, Paris Hilton doesn't think it's funny - which, to be fair, it isn't - and wants USD100,000 because they "failed to seek her approval".
She hasn't quite got the hang of how satire works, does she?
This one always seemed to sit uneasily with These Animal Men's stance that they were right, from the get-go. We did consider inflicting Bruce Willis 'return of Bruno' era cover of Respect Yourself on you here, as some sort of warning from history, but instead, here's Erasure doing A Little Respect in the Milton Keynes Bowl in 1990, which mainly is worth it because someone posts on the YouTube page, apparently straight-faced, the question "is he gay?"
[Part of TAM Commandments weekend]
Foxy Brown's apparent bet with Pete Doherty to see who could push the law the furthest has come to an abrupt end, with a the judge getting tired of probation violations:
Poor is beautiful. Oh, yes, the dignity of poverty, best enjoyed when you have the means to escape at any moment. There's only one song we could throw in here - especially since The Snapdragon's Dole Boys On Futons isn't on YouTube.
Pulp, doing Common People, at Glastonbury 1995:
And, for good measure, Rory Bremner doing David Cameron doing Jarvis:
[Part of These Animal Men TAM Commandments weekend]
We wonder if, when Andy Kershaw's mum, Eileen, spoke to the Daily Mail she knew that her motherly concern would be embedded in such a spitefully worded piece as turned up in the paper.
Eileen talks like a worried mother:
Amongst things we can safely say the world could do well without is a "more credible" version of the X-Factor. Especially one with Jo Whiley in the "Sharon Osbourne role":
When Peter Powell took over the Saturday morning slot, he pledged no more Junior Choice: he wasn't going to be playing Nellie The Elephant any more. Did this mean that there was no longer anything for the younger listener on Radio One?
Not quite. For Mark Page, who had taken on the early weekend slot, took on the the role of children's entertainer single-handed. His solution? It was to buy in an odd Australian drama about gnomes and, possibly, talking butterflies and... no, we never could quite work out what Bangotcha Junction was about. It sounded like the worst sort of summer holiday kid's TV filler material, and seemed less like a reassurance that Radio One was still a family network and more like a bid to bamboozle any remaining youngsters off the network. To give him his due, Mark Page did stick with the thing all the way through - although, we suspect, nobody would have noticed if he'd skipped a few episodes or just stopped them half way through the story.
It was, however, still the first proper serial drama Radio One ever aired.
And would have remained so, too, had there not been an early-90s attempt to add some drama to the network with adaptations of Batman and Spiderman. These stories were told in an aural approximation of comic-book style: short episodes, lots of sound effects, jumpy-plot-cuts. They're best filed under 'surprising to see it done at all' rather than 'startling success', and while the bitty-episode format made sense, it made for horribly wearing omnibus edition. Still, at least they didn't try to create a British superhero for the purpose - although we'd have liked to have heard the Leopard Of Lime Street being given the stereo treatment.
[Part of Radio One More Time]
Back in 1993, when the New Wave Of New Wave was desperately trying to cope with the weight of being The Coming Thing, These Animal Men issued their Ten Commandments. This weekend, we bring you those Commandments, in full, each illustrated with a video which may support or knock down their suggestion. We'll get to TAM themselves , ooh, somewhere late on Sunday.
The commandments, in case you forgot to laminate them and carry them around with you at all times, are:
1. Get a Catholic education - represented by Teenage Fanclub
2. Poor is beautiful - represented by Pulp
3. Respect is earned - represented by Erasure
4. Never tell your parents - represented by Shinowa
5. Don't be ashamed of your adolescence - represented by Suede
6. If you've got it, flaunt it - represented by Marine Research
7. Love's good, but not as good as wanking - represented by Dubstar
8. Amphetamines are where it's at - represented by These Animal Men
9. Never trust a crusty - represented by Chumbawamba
10. Taboo is a dirty word - represented by Luke Haines
So, number one: Get a Catholic education. Or, rather, get A Catholic Education, Teenage Fanclub's 1990 album. This is Everything Flows from that album, performed live for the much-missed Snub TV:
You remember MC Scat Cat: he was the male vocalist on Paula Abdul's Opposites Attract. She hated cigarettes, he liked to smoke. Just like Johnny Borrell and Kirsten Dunst, it turns out:
Kelly Osbourne - whose only two successes so far have been appearing in her Mum's realioty TV show and with her Dad remaking one of his old records - is insistent that she's not just riding on her parent's coat-tails:
It's true: Avril thinks people who dislike her are lacking in some way:
Jonny Greenwood - no, no, he's out of Radiohead, not the rugby player - has told Paste that the head have finished work on a collection of tracks:
Good news for quasi-indie miserablists: Death Cab For Cutie are heading back into the studio. Pitchfork have pulled a "Spring 2008" release date (or rather, three-month window) out of the air.
They're pouring a lot into this year's VMAs. A lot of money, a lot of planning, a lot of hope. Not much in the way of new ideas, though - indeed, Christian Norman, president of MTV, is excited by the seating plan:
... where 'this' is an mp3 blog. According to Wired's Listening Post, the browser on an iPod Touch isn't set up to allow you to download mp3s via wi-fi.
Although we suspect it'll only be a matter of time before someone hacks it so you can.
Lou Pearlman, the brains behind NSync and the Backstreet Boys, has lost two homes, as bankruptcy and charges on a $20million fraud catch up with him.
According to the Associated Press:
The decision to invite Nas to perform at last night's Virginia Tech showbiz memorial wasn't a universally popular one, what with Nas's track record for making gratuitiously violent songs. However, the adoption of the 'ban Nas' campaign by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly handed Nas an easy way out. Instead of defending his music, he was able to get on the safer ground of attacking O'Reilly instead:
The FYE chain in the US has started pricing CDs at a surprising $19.99.
CDs like Appetite For Destruction, a twenty year-old title which has already done most of its business. Ten quid for an old CD is a lot in Britain, but in America, it's a suicidal price point.
The planned Machine Head's date in Anaheim has been canned after Disney announced new rules covering heavy metal gigs at the House of Blues. Disney has previously banned bands on the basis of their name alone, but this is the first time Disney have allowed tickets to go on sale before changing its mind.
The Proclaimers are promising they'll go on until they're 100.
That's another fifty-five years.
As expected, here's the official denial of the Ronson-furious-with-Winehouse story:
Seriously, we'd really only recommend pressing play here if you are as intrigued and delighted as we are by the idea of a Garbage/Extreme Noise Terror hybrid. These are The Explicits, who come from Jacksonville, Florida, and MySpace:
The nature of music radio made it seem like every day was one long magazine programme; what the Sony Awards used to describe as 'sequence programming' made it easy to flit from a feature to a song to a weather forecast to an interview, which you would have thought would render the need for a separate magazine programme somewhat redundant. Nevertheless, Radio One tried several, most notably Studio B15, which ran on Sundays for a surprising two hours prior to the Top 40.
It was presented by Adrian Love - the son of bandleader Geoff Love - and combined the sorts of things you'd expect to appear in a well-intentioned Radio One pot pourri: bits and pieces of entertainment and non-demanding cultural attractions, the odd competition and bands doing some studio appearances (notably, The Jam).
When the vagaries of scheduling meant that the programme was obliged to air on Christmas Day, they threw open the doors of the studio, inviting any 14 year-old who had the misfortune to have a 25th December birthday to guest present, on account of them going to be 15 on the day. But the genesis of the title was, of course, that was the room the programme was broadcast from: the sort of thing that people in radio and television think is going to be of interest to the audience, but which to the audience looks like lazy thinking - on a par with calling a cat "puss". It's worth noting that this sort of lame titling has also gifted any number of flatly-titled TV pop shows: The Oxford Road Show, two Transmissions and a TX, for example.
Still, even Studio B15 was glittering compared to its replacement, Saturday and Sunday Live. Which was a live programme which went out live, either on... ah, you're ahead of me. Helmed most successfully by Andy Kershaw, the highlight of Sunday Live was when it carried coverage of Hands Across Britain, an initiative which aped Hands Across America both in intent (something to do with drawing attention to the plight of the jobless) and success (failure both to complete a sea-to-sea chain of people holding hands and unemployment remaining no further up the agenda). Since it would have been unusual for there to be live coverage of, say, The People's March For Jobs on the DLT show, the BBC's different treatment of this event must have been down to the presence of Jimmy Savile. Savile had to play the role of participant observer, though, linking hands while trying to describe the event for listeners. An event, which, by its nature, he was unable to see much of, beyond talking of his desire to shatter into a million parts and fly all over the country to look at the people who he believed were holding hands.
Sunday Live was on stronger ground when it concentrated on Icicle Works live sessions.
Eventually, its content was folded into the Stereo Sequence, before evaporating entirely.
[Radio One More Time]
Surrey police have announced that there are to be no charges following the rape allegations made by Amelle Berrabah's sister Samiya:
While we're sure that Bono's pain at the loss of Pavarotti is heartfelt and genuine, his obituary for the Sun is an overwritten parade of cliche, and as cloying as you'd expect:
The first mutterings that Doherty was giving drugs to kittens sounded so much like a tabloid moral panic, we hoped it would turn out to be giving a dog a bad name rather than giving a cat a bad trip.
Today, though, pictures of Doherty with a specially adapted cat crack pipe make it look as if, yes, he really does behave like that. Doubtless he'll try and say "ha! no, it was all an art experiment, like that time I might not actually have been injecting drugs into the girl" or some similar attempt to explain away his behaviour. We doubt the RSPCA will buy that, though.
Having more-or-less predicted the Klaxons' Mercury win (or, at least, having made such a vague 'rule nothing out' prediction beforehand that if anything up to and including Noel Edmonds winning had happened, he'd have sort-of-not-said-it-wouldn't happen), Gennaro Castaldo is now rushing forward with the news that winning awards sells albums:
Radio One is about to embark on a fairly large schedule shake-up, most notable for granting Chris Moyles an extra two and a half hours a week - or, in other words, time enough for him to play two extra records. They're now starting the show at 6.30 in the morning, and while we'd have imagined three hours of Moyles a day was enough for any man, the audience seems to eat it up, so this is presumably a ratings-driven initiative.
The extra half-hour for Moyles is being shaved off the 'early breakfast' show - although now that programme finishes so far before a winter's dawn, it's presumably going to have to change its name. This reduced fiefdom has been granted to Greg James, who's been doing little bits and pieces around the station for a while now. He has, you'll note, perhaps the most local-radio-dj name to have graced Radio One since Mark Page.
That strange arrangement where Zane Lowe's show is opted out of on a Thursday evening in the other nations is ending - now, all of England will be shouted at between session tracks from Albert Hammond Junior four nights a week; the national regions opt-out fandango gets shunted to midnights on Wednesday from where, we imagine, it will quietly disappear sometime after Christmas.
The In New Music We Trust strand is still there, unfortunately. But not part of the brave new world is JK and Joel, whose unloved double-actery is banished not just from early breakfast, but also from the Chart Show.
Before you get too thrilled by the idea of the Top 40 returning to a safe pair of hands, though - or two safe pairs of hands - it's now going to be presented by Fearne and Reggie. We're not sure when Cotton and Yates actually became a double act, but it seems to be fixed now. We're at a lost to the logic of giving the Top 40 slot to a pair who were part of the destruction of Top Of The Pops, mind.
The gap in weekend breakfasts opened by this promotion (they're also going to do a 'requests' show on Saturday afternoons - charts and requests; it's like someone doesn't trust them to pick their own records, isn't it?) is filled by Nihal, which is probably the only good idea in the whole spreadsheet.
Also getting demoted is Vernon Kaye - or, perhaps, "having his Radio One workload reduced in order to free up more time to remake Bullseye". His Sunday morning slot is now going to be taken over by... well, it says Dick and Dom here, but surely that can't be right, can it? Maybe three years ago... but in 2007?
The most horrific detail, though, is left for Sunday nights. Sunday Surgery - the long-running 'don't get the clap, and don't pickle your kidneys' slot is now going to be presented by Kelly Osbourne.
How did that happen? Did Radio One see her pisspoor performance on Project Catwalk and think "we should see if she's as bad presenting live radio as she is at recorded television, where - presumably - they must have reshot some of the pieces, surely?" and then looked around for something she could do? Or did they have a shortlist of likely presenters for the programme, and - after they'd all said 'no' - were reduced to thumbing through the phone directory?
Kelly Osbourne.
[Thanks to James P for the tip]
The Trembling Blue Stars are currently MySpace sharing the b-side from next month's new ep.
We've been having stuttering web problems today - pages loading in three-quarters of the way, and then freezing, leaving us unable to navigate away or swap to a different tab. It took us a while, but then we realised what the common factor to all the broken pages were: they've got that stupid video for Mika's album embedded on the page. It's bad enough having his kipper-headed face thrust into our browser, but for him to then hold us hostage really takes the stupidly-voiced biscuit.
Brighton's Zap Club is no more, having been sold on to Newcastle's Digital. It's reopening this month rebranded Digital to match its new owners, and promising "the biggest indie disco in the world", which seems to miss the point about indie discos.
Admittedly, in the way that most events promoted as indie discos miss the point, but even so.
You've got to love VH1. They're shooting one of those shows that makes Celebrity Love Island look like the Open University, and have put out a casting call:
Drew McConnell is encouraged by the news that Doherty is "in rehab":
Organisers of this weekend's Bestival are warning you to check your ticket closely:
It was only a matter of time before Lily Allen decided to offer the benefit of years of wisdom to Amy Winehouse:
We can barely control our tears as we hear The Edge snuffling at the destruction of U2's old studio:
Radio One, by nature of being the only national pop network, had enormous power to make or break the fortunes of new singles. Since rules frowned on the idea of disc jockey and producer's favour being curried by the payment of large sums of undeclared funds into Swiss bank accounts, record labels had to come up with different ways of flattering the gatekeepers of the nation's taste.
One popular way of doing this was to record a specially re-worded version of the single to function as a jingle for one or more shows. So, for example, Owen Paul reworked
You're my favourite waste of time
as
Gary Davies in the summertime.
So vain were the jocks, these sly marketing parries almost always proved successful, helping keep the parent songs in the public eye... well, ear, and almost certainly squeezing a couple of extra plays here and there. And it wasn't just the usual chancers you'd expect to pull this sort of trick who got involved - even Kate Bush did a special Radio One jingle at one point.
The most played reworked jingle, though, would have been The Trainspotter's High Rise tribute to Mike Read. The original chorus ran
High Rise
High Rise
The neighbours are banging on the wall again
High Rise
High Rise
I want to live on the ground
The 'band' happily reorganised this into
Mike Read
Mike Read
Two seven five, two eight five
Mike Read
Mike Read
National radio one
So pleased was he with this, Mike Read used it not only as his main jingle, he also encouraged listeners to sing it all over the world - every day, someone's claim to have sung the tune in Berlin, or at the top of a mountain, or down a mine, would be rewarded with a mug. Naturally, there was no way of establishing the bona fides of the claims, as people didn't have mobiles, much less video cameras in their pockets, but everything was done on trust back then.
So who were these Trainspotters, whose single-turned-jingle got such exposure?
It was, um, Mike Read.
[Radio One More Time]
Currently, Girls Aloud are doing a series of one-on-one interviews with Victoria Newton.
Today's, with Sarah Harding, is pretty typical:
Luciano Pavarotti has died from pancreatic cancer in Modena. Besides being one of the few opera singers to have had a genuine operatic chart hit, with the Three Tenors' Nessun Dorma (which, in English, means "the theme from World Cup Match Of The Day"), Pavarotti also made a genuine rock record. He recorded Miss Sarajevo as part of the U2-pretending-to-not-be-U2 Eno collaboration Passengers.
In addition, through collaborations with Elton John and Zucchero, he managed to clock up six top forty hits of varying degrees of desperation; the stuttering struggle to get You'll Never Walk Alone higher than 35, however, seemed to remove most of the fun from the projects and - whether the pop-opera crossovers were intended as pension funds or genuine attempts to try and engage with a new audience - they dried up.
Nevertheless, Pavarotti created a niche for himself as "what the rock world thinks of when they think of opera", down in part, we suspect, to looking the part as much as sounding it.
In a slightly bemusing move, Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry and Noel Gallagher are being invited to hosts shows on Radio One to celebrate its 40th birthday. There are going to be a few younger guest presenters: The Arctic Monkeys and, erm, Gwen Stefani, for example, but it does throw up the problems involved in a station resolutely aimed at young people trying to mark four decades - as the everyday business of the station focuses on the music of today, getting a sexagenarian to play songs by Jerry Lee Lewis is, at best, a reminder of what the network has turned its back on to survive. Let's hope the tension between Radio One of the Always Now and this sudden affection for heritage radio doesn't cause a snapping.
We're also puzzled by this:
It's not yet the full-grown crisis that many people are sacrificing goats to encourage, but the poor ticket sales for this year's American Idol tour offer a glimpse of a world that isn't going to always lap up the stuff that Cowell ladles out.
It looks like Warren Bradley has held on to his job, despite the Mathew Street Festival fiasco in Liverpool. He's ordered an internal whitewash inquiry into his council's inability to organise the Festival, and the last-minute late cancellation. Of course, it might not be a whitewash, but considering the amount of damage the late dropping of the event could have done to the local economy, at the very leats an independent investigation might look a little more open.
It looks like authorities have dropped investigations into Britney Spears' parenting skills, although the exact details of what the complaints were and why they've been rejected is a little shrouded in mystery. Probably the strong comeback single helped, though.
Kerrang's Birmingham FM Radio station has won approval from Ofcom to reduce the amount of new music it plays in daytime from a half to a third of its output.
Rather winningly, the station requested the right to play more old music because, its audience gets bored by all the new music it plays. No, really [pdf]:
Although, admittedly, it's a bit like killing off the Yangtze Dolphin and not that difficult, Apple have integrated wi-fi into the new iPod. Only, unlike Zune's Zune-to-Zune function, if you're in a wi-fi Zone, you can use Safari to browse the web, access the iTunes store and... well, you know, do stuff online.
The new iTunes Music Store will also let you create ringtones for your iPhone, if you have one - 99cents extra for a double-use iTunes download, apparently. We're not quite sure why you should have to pay any extra money: if you've bought a song, surely you've bought the song, regardless of how it gets played? It's only a step away from charging 79 cents for a song to listen to when you're happy, but then charging an extra 99 cents if you're going to play it a few years later when you're feeling nostalgic.
Apple porn over on the official website. Did we mention the touchscreen?
Universal Records has announced plans to close Sanctuary Records for all but catalogue work in the UK. Universal intend to concentrate on the management and merchandising side of the business; no word yet on what will happen to the sizeable roster of artists, which includes The Charlatans and, um, Lordi.
Liverpool City Council leader Warrern Bradley is facing a no-confidence motion at tonight's council meeting, following his part in the costly last-minute cancellation of the Mathew Street Festival.
Somewhat surprisingly, Bradley is trying to suggest that his confidence or lack of it to head up the council shouldn't be an issue because there are more important matters to discuss:
Jamie Foxx apparently doesn't like to share his lifts, according to Page Six:
Oh, I can, apparently: Herman Dune is touring this month:
Fri 14 September Dublin, Crawdaddy
Sun 16 Salisbury, End of the Road
Mon 17 Bristol, Thekla
Tue 18 London, ULU
Wed 19 Manchester, Music Box
Future of the Left are preparing for their late September album Curses with a UK tour:
Thursday 6th September - Cardiff Clwb Ifor Bach
Sunday 9th September - Brighton Engine Rooms
Monday 10th September - Exeter Cavern Club
Tuesday 11th September - London Madam Jo Jo's
Friday 14th September - Hull Adelphi Club
Saturday 15th September - Leeds Faversham
Monday 17th September - Glasgow Barfly
Tuesday 18th September - Newcastle Head of Steam
Thursday 20th September - Birmingham Barfly
Friday 21st September - Sheffield Casbah
Saturday 22nd September - Coventry Taylor John's House
Monday 24th September - Newport Le Pub
Tuesday 25th September - London Water Rats
Wednesday 26th September - Oxford Wheatsheaf
After eight years with the company through a range of owners, Stuart Galbraith, hitherto Managing Director of the UK arm of LiveNation, has been bottled off by the company. A terse "breach of contract" has so far been the only public explanation.
The Mail seems to be having trouble making its mind up about about Amy Winehouse at last night's prizegiving:
It seems like days since Victoria Newton published some flattering flammery to suck-up to the Spice Girls, so today she's making up for lost time:
It's the new!
Top 40!
On Radio 1
For the first thirty years or so of Radio One's life, the station was driven by the charts. Not every programme, of course. Even so, the programmes which weren't built on an obsession with what records would go up, which would go down, which wouldn't make the cut, even these were defined as much by their lack of interest in the charts.
It's less marked now, of course, because the chart is less important nationally, and for those that still have an interest, there are many places where you can find the data. But back when the list of best-selling singles had some pull, its importance was such that it would get no less than four reveals.
The computers of the chart compilers - BRMB, then Gallup - used to run much slower, and the lack of computery-based instant data meant that although sales were still closed off at the weekend (Saturday nights, because no shops opened on Sundays selling records), the chart was never ready until Tuesday lunchtimes. They used to telex it across to Radio One - which, young people, was blooding exciting new technology, albeit so old you were getting the news that KajaGooGoo were at number one in the same way that they arrested Crippen - where it would get its big reveal after Newsbeat.
Of course, only office workers, kids who'd smuggled transistors into school and invalids would be aware of the shape of the new chart, so it would get another run-out at teatime. Peter Powell's show, for a very long time, got this honour.
The next day, the Breakfast Show would repeat the information, in only a slightly truncated form: the numbers up, the numbers down; playing the highest new entry, the biggest climber and the number one.
Then, Sunday nights, and the whole thing would be worked through with forensic detail. All forty records, complete with a summary of that week's performance: their progress on the chart measured in the SI unit of sales data, "the big Top 40 place". So you might have gone down ten big Top 40 places, or up seven big Top 40 places. Of course, by Sunday, everyone who was interested - which, in the 1980s, was pretty much everyone under the age of 40 - knew what number one was, but surprise wasn't the point of the programme. This existed in relation to the Tuesday run-down in the way the Classified Football Results related to the Grandstand teleprinter; the definitive against the breaking. Blackburn or Vance or Brookes counting down the "only chart that counts" was always the last word, never the first report, and it was when the shift in technology allowed the Sunday nights to be the reveal that it all started to go wrong. Listening to the charts on Sunday nights was a solitary affair, packing schoolbags or making packed lunches, whereas the Tuesday lunchtime rundown was enjoyed with friends, or colleagues, or the big boy from the fifth year who'd stolen your radio. In a bid to make the charts more of an 'event', Radio One inadvertently helped kill them off.
[Radio One More Time]
Look, that YouTube video where P Diddy appears to be doing a deal in a Ibiza club?
It's cookies he's buying. Clearly. Two boxes, please. That's what he's asking for.
After all:
Virginia Wheeler over at The Sun claims that:
The story today claiming that Sharon Osbourne is 'quitting' The X Factor is a genuine news story, and not more tiresome PR-guff trying to make it look like everyone's talking about the programme.
Madonna's "spokesperson" has denied that her boss has used undue influence:
9pm
BBC Four's continuity promises us that "anything could happen" at the "most controversial music prize in the world". Controversial? Sure, it's not like there's many actually controversial music awards - nobody's ever gone to war over the Junos, for example, but The Source Awards surely are more fractious?
Jo Whiley and Jools Holland are presenting, as bloody ever - can't they find someone, anyone different for this? Dizzee Rascal's always there for no reason, they could get him to do it, surely? Make the trip worth his while.
The View are the first live band - "truly fantastic", says Jo. After their song, Jools has to announce them twice before the audience realises they're supposed to applaud.
9.10
Maps. It's hard to make mainly electronic music seem exciting in a live context, and great though Maps are, it would probably be wearing to sit through much of this at a gig. BBC Four try to perk things up by using an effect to make it look like you're actually watching him on a television. It doesn't help; nor does the low-budget version of the digital dotstream Nine Inch Nails had at Reading, to be honest.
BBC News Online have blown the one surprise of the evening - Amy Winehouse does turn up. Oh, so it's not live, and so, erm, the claim that "anything" could happen is a bit of a fib. If anything surprising, like bombs or evisceration had happened, they could have edited it out.
9.15
Jamie T does Salvador. He looks astonishingly like a young Stuart Adamson this evening; and his vocals are completely swamped in the mix, which means that anyone taking this chance to judge Jools Holland's praise for his wit and wisdom would be out of luck. The audience look a bit bored, but then every act at the Mercury is greeted with something akin to half-stoned indifference.
9.20
Picking up his nomination prize, Jamie T mutters some thank yous.
Ooh! New Young Pony Club!
Tahita's gone for a Davina-esque red dress; Lou has an ill-advised neck decoration that reminds me of Mrs. Macey, the school secretary who always seemed to be wearing a neck brace. Latterly, I've come to suspect she might have had a fetish rather than a neck problem.
The sound is pretty poor for them, which is a pity, but at least they had the wisdom to not do the one from the telephone commercial.
9.25
They're on the 'second stage' so they don't get to shake Jools' hand when they get their prize.
Radio 3's Charles Hazlewood (who's helping judge) and Holby City's Adrian Edmondson are now talking to Jo Whiley.
Hazlewood is telling us what a "massive job" listening to all the records "in theory" was. He looks a bit like Keith Allen tonight - he's always smarter when he's doing stuff about Tchaikovsky. He reckons the Mercury is "more esoteric" than The Brits, which is true, in the same way that having your arm cut off is less painful than having a red-hot poker put in your eye.
9.30
Adrian said New Young Pony Club were "more like a normal band" this evening than a group of children "on vodka".
"Songs are very hard to write" observes Adrian. Luckily, before he can elaborate, The Young Knives are taking the stage with their "misfit anthems" (as Jools explains.)
It's interesting that wearing some cheap-looking suits is enough to constitute a gimmick these days.
More than ever, tonight, The Young Knives prove to be the British Weezer.
9.35
Jools muffs reading out the name of Bat For Lashes' album. They're "wonderful and incredible", but he was clearly reading that.
She's already got her nomination award sat on her keyboard - I wonder if you get to choose if you'll be touching Jools Holland or not?
Being mainly vocal is a big plus, with the dreadful sound mixing not working against BFL.
I wonder if those are real peacock feathers.
9.40
Jools details The Arctic Monkeys' current tour schedule, leading into a bit of film of them holding a prize in Tokyo. They've abandoned doing amusing or interesting acceptance videos, then.
By not being in the room, they've left the choice of track representing them to a BBC Producer. Which is why the last thing the judges will hear from them prior to voting is, erm, Teddy Picker, from Glastonbury, a track whose filler-status was so obvious it's being offered alongside baked beans and cheese in the Spud-U-Like chain.
9.45
Fionn Regan has been called "a modern day Irish troubadour" says Jools. Why not just spit at him, Jools?
It was a character on A Bit of Fry and Laurie who first observed how distressing it is to have the harmonica played badly at oneself. To be fair, judging by how much Fionn is blinking, he's very, very nervous. Perhaps he realised that it's not a good idea to throw hungry critics a line like "be good or be gone" to play with.
He's got FR in blue sticky tape on his guitar, presumably because he's afraid that it might get muddled up with one of Amy Winehouse's guitars backstage. He might also have his name stitched into his underpants. The audience does cheer him, though, slightly lukewarmly. But it's a cheer, nevertheless.
Is Spud-U-Like still going?
Jo is now on the balcony getting the names of The Young Knives wrong. They don't seem to be bothered, though, giving off the air of men who;ve just completed a successful audit.
Natasha is also up there with them: she says the Mercurys are like a giant hamster wheel.
9.50
Apparently, there are still about two dozen Spud-U-Likes around the country, and a couple in Dublin. "There are only 25 calories per ounce in a spudulike potato" they tell us.
Dizzee Rascal is "a unique voice" says Jools - presumably meaning unique in the sense of the "only British black artist they can think of at shortlisting time". His DJ is doing something to the turntable with his mouth, which may or may not be a tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. Dizzee loves it, apparently, when he sees a pretty girl.
9.55
Spud-U-Like's website also boasts that "spudulike potatoes have value as a supplementary source of good quality protein", which is one of the few claims that Dizzee Rascal doesn't make during his track. Maybe in next year's Mercury nominated album, eh?
Amy Winehouse - "we're thrilled that Amy's here" says Jools, as in "surprised". She's wearing a beach towel, so presumably rushed here straight from that Caribbean Drug Getaway. It sounds like she knows she's got to do a shut-'em-up-performance, but doesn't quite make it.
Still, the record industry audience applaud like Jesus has just brought a round for them all. They'll be turning to each other and saying "and they say we don't support our artists..."
10.00
Basquiat Strings. My wife takes one look at the hair and calls a bathroom break.
Since bands like this never win the prize, but are there purely to allow the organisers to pretend they're eclectic, shouldn't they get an extra award alongside the standard nomination trophy? Or at least their cab fare paid. Or something.
Actually, it's like Prince Harry with Charlie Chuck on drums.
10.05
The Klaxons. "Exhilarating" pronounces Jools, sounding more relieved we've finally made it through the shortlist acts. Blimey, an act that sounds halfway decent. Could the mixing desk have advance intelligence of the judge's decision and are attempting to give the winners a secret hand by making them sound better than their peers this evening? Or are they just so relieved that Winehouse didn't vomit into the monitors they're able to concentrate on the affair at hand?
10.10
Briefly, Jools Holland looks like a man who is going to have to hold up a copy of today's paper and read out a list of his captor's demands.
Jo has now been joined by Adrain Edmondson and "friend of Bono" Neil McCormick from the Telegraph (he hasn't yet mentioned if people he doesn't know are still trying to kill him.)
McCormick tells us that Jamie T is "so now" but burbles on instead about how great Winehouse is. He then says before the Mercurys "we hadn't heard about Bat For Lashes before", which might be the case, we guess, if you spend most of your time hanging out with Bono.
Whiley cues up the obligatory package of previous winners, the only time the name "Roni Size" is ever heard on television all year.
10.15
Adrian Edmondson is still there. Now, I loved his adverts for Nat West as much as anyone's sell-out commercial work, but in a room supposedly full of the cream of the UK music industry, can't they find anyone else to share an opinion? Surely Conor McNicholas will be there with his hair washed and a clean shirt?
McCormick is bloody obsessed with Jamie T.
There's a comedy posh bookmaker doing a show of the odds now. He offers a "maybe the Klaxons" but Bat For Lashes leading the betting.
10.20
Jools is going to announce the winner: "only one can be the overall winner tonight" he helpfully reminds us. In case we've not quite got the idea of how a prize for best album might work.
Jools has two envelopes - one with a cheque in, one with the name of the winner in. Nationwide pay the winner by cheque?
Blake Idiot is in the audience.
It's The Klaxons. They are, it's fair to say, more surprised than they are drunk. And they're very drunk indeed. The microphones are unable cope, so they trash the microphones.
Lauren Laverne has now popped up on the balcony. Neil is slightly shocked - "they were always on the outside of who I thought would win" he says, forgetting that, erm, he hadn't mentioned them as possible winners in his earlier interview.
Oh, Lauren's been a judge again. The Klaxons have run onto the balcony - be careful, lads, she's pregnant. Jools has run after them with the cheque - which, if Nationwide used chip and pin technology to make the transfer, could have been avoided.
The Klaxons are being very happy and pleased, as if it's not quite sunk in that this, for them, is going to be the high water mark.
The controversial Penstone Kilembe, who may or may not have accepted an airline ticket from Madonna, has been replaced as the Malawian official due to visit London to assess Madonna and Guy's fitness to appoint a nanny to look after David Banda.
Simon Chisale is now going to do the job, although that comes as news to Penstone:
Who knew that Pete Doherty would swerve out of jail one more time?
This time, he managed to get sentencing pushed back until October 2nd by pledging to enter "voluntary residential rehab".
His lawyer, Sean Curran, claims Doherty is doing well:
Kelly Osbourne was surprised when she saw the publicity material for her stint in Chicago, the home for broken careers. No, she wasn't surprised she'd been cast in a musical, but that they'd airbrushed out her tattoos:
Remember SpiralFrog? It was an iTunes killer that got a few people excited about eighteen months or so back, with its promise of an advertising-supported free-music webservice.
It's still not quite got round to launching, or making any cash, despite having got through twelve million dollars; it's now hoping to pull in another $25million.
Quite where they see these fools hovering, waiting to be separated from their money, isn't clear. Back when they managed to generate a bit of buzz, they might have been able to persuade some people to part with millions; but now, surely, it's time to just drown this box of frogs.
Andy Kershaw has been bailed on charges relating to the breaching of a restraining order; he's due back in court on the 18th September to answer the charges.
According to Victoria Newton, the Sugababes ' revolving door is about to spin again: she reckons they're auditioning a replacement for Amelle.
It appears the other two are less worried about the shabby boyfriend and bad behaviour, it's more a timekeeping thing:
As part of the BBC, Radio One has always struggled to justify its existence - mainly to people who felt that all the network did was play pop music (for some people, a waste of money in its own right) or duplicate the work done by the commercial radio sector (a common complaint even before the ILR network was completed, meaning that everyone had access to a Top 40 station; usually heard from someone who couldn't tell them the difference between John Peel and Johnny Vaughan's musical choices).
Radio One, clearly, needed to prove it was different and valuable in a way to critics who couldn't see that there was a difference between a radio giving a session to the Jesus And Mary Chain and one playing Rick Astley seven times a day. An easy way of doing this, of course, was to promote Social Awareness. Of, you know, things.
My first actual intersection with one of the network's big campaigns was when I sent off for a Which Way Now? pack - a plastic folder, crammed with helpful information on choosing your options wisely, and a colour picture of Peter Powell. It arrived too late to actually help me choose my options, and I suspect had I followed its advice I would have wound up doing Geography in the portakabin classroom with Young Mr Curtis rather than History in the bottom of the C-Block with Mr Nicholls, which would have been rather a mistake.
More useful was the Art-E-Fax campaign on Janice Long's show, which although smaller in scope (not breaking in to programming every five minutes across the day) was much more useful. It was, seriously, the first time anyone had suggested to me that working in what we're now expected to term the "creative industries" was something you could seriously aspire to rather than the sort of pipe dream which would see you "starving in a garret". This was back when there were only just four TV networks, four national radio networks and none of that internet business; schools career teachers tended to rely on "bakery or army" as providing 'career choice'. It was just the sort of encouragement I needed; without it, I suspect by now I would be a very, very rich baker. And miserable.
The more usual social action stuff would be what you'd expect - endless campaigns about the dangers of drugs, and AIDS, and getting AIDS while taking drugs. To be fair to the commercial sector, this sort of accessible advice, delivered by djs and tucked between pop songs, wasn't the sole preserve of Radio 1; ILR stations used to do it a lot, too, and for much the same reasons. Partly a desire to be of genuine assistance to their listeners, but mostly because it made good sense for their survival - a promise of community action was essential to persuading the IBA or the Radio Authority to choose your franchise bid. This might seem a cynical viewpoint, but the way the larger commercial stations dropped their in-house teams working on such material as soon as licence terms were made more fluid in the late 90s would suggest conviction was less motivating than the desire to appear a good corporate citizen.
It's not recorded if Simon Bates saved more people from drug misuse than his programme drove to drink.
[Radio One More Time]
There is a serious message at the heart of the study by Mark Bellis of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University. This is the report which seems to claim being a pop star is bad for your health, and upon the discoveries Bellis hangs a plea for everyone to take more care of our pop stars:
Not, of course, that anyone believed they were, but just to make it clear, Amy Winehouse and Blake Thingy have denied they're Sid and Nancy:
The most surprising thing about the Tuborg Music website is that it's promoting Tuborg. Tuborg, which has been relaunched after - what - two decades off British shelves. Well, we say shelves, it tended to be more in dump bins rather than shelves. Presumably they had to wait until everyone who could remember what it tasted like had died before they could try to market it as a groovy, young person's lager, rather than the stuff you'd see reluctantly purchased by your uncle when he'd left getting the beers in too late for a family get-together.
It's presumably why TuborgMusic.com is excited by the Towers of London - they were a cheap alternative to enjoyment that were briefly available a few years back, until they disappeared from a market that developed more sophisticated tastes.
How heartwarming to hear of plans for Madonna to go on a celebrity-sparkled "pilgrimage" round the holy sites of Kabbalah - the ones in Israel rather than, say, the place where they pump the ordinary water into plastic bottles to help increase the price of it. She's supposedly going with Donna Karan, Demi Moore and Ashton 'Dude, where's my cult' Kutcher.
It's notable that, rather than hire a coach, they've got a private jet - so, presumably, this is a different Madonna from the one who appealed to us to take care of the planet during Live Earth.
Coming next month: a Forward Russia tour designed to get you feeling all over-exicited down there at the prospect of the new album early next year.
Dates:
Hull, The Lamp – October 23
Leicester, Charlotte – 24
Cardiff, Barfly – 25
Exeter, Cavern – 26
Brighton, Barfly – 27
Sheffield, Leadmill – 29
Sunderland, Independent – 30
Dundee, Reading Rooms – 31
York, Fibbers – November 1
Bradford, St Georges Hall - 2
Yes, it's apparently true - Mariah never throws away a letter, however odd:
Estate Agent and celebrity reality TV star John Lydon is currently - oh, lord - judging an online battle of the bands which exists solely to promote some sort of gambling website.
Wired ask him how The Sex Pistols would have done in this sort of competition:
Dave Rowntree has lost out in the fifty-person battle to make the shortlist for Labour candidate for West Derby. Stephen Twigg is the only 'glittery' name taking on Bob Wareing for the safe Labour seat.
We can understand the concerns about people buying third-market tickets for a hitherto-unannounced Led Zep reunion tour, but it's interesting that the most worried man is Harvey Goldsmith:
The Kaiser Chiefs want to have a pop at someone, which means they've been seeking a soft target. Unfortunately, they've chosen Pink.
In particular, Simon Rix has called Dear Mr President 'idiotic':
War. It's an ugly business. And it's not going to help if you imagine Sting and Denis Leary, naked and oiled-up, fighting over who has the least hair. Sting started it:
El DeBarge has been arrested on domestic violence charges; he's being held inside as there were a couple of drugs charges floating about too.
Oddly, DeBarge seems to wind up in legal grief every ten years - doubtless, the next time we'll hear of him will be around 2016.
"Shoelaces with big boobs" is how KT Tunstall thinks of the unhealthy Heat magazine body archetype:
