Veruca Salt weekend: Shutterbug

Continuing our weekend with Chicago's finest - this is Shutterbug, from Saturday Night Live On The Sunset Strip:



[Part of Veruca Salt weekend]

The aftertaste of Britpop

There was a large piece in this week's Guardian Films & Music section which looked at the Britpop second-string comebacks. It included this gloss on Kula Shaker's downfall:

Kula Shaker's Crispian Mills found the sudden, overwhelming success particularly miserable. "I think 98% of artists at the top of their game are suicidal, or lonely and depressed, or killing themselves with drugs," Mills says. "Look at Liam and Noel, trashing their marriages and fighting all the time." He believes that the huge media interest turned everyone, including himself, into "pantomime characters" - with his band's role being "psychedelic posh twats". Mills' own career was torn apart by his interest in Indian mysticism. In 1997, he told an interviewer about his dream of "great big flaming swastikas" onstage. He wanted to reclaim what was originally a Hindu peace symbol, but the Independent accused him of dabbling in Nazism. Stunned, Mills apologised. These days, he is less bashful about the episode: "Anyone who has independent thought is going to have a rite of passage".

This isn't quite as it was - nobody thought that Mills was a Nazi; the point was that he was someone who was so stupid he didn't realise that getting excited about having swastikas on stage would cause offense; a man who - like Lydon's mob before him - didn't have the capacity to understand that symbols used in the pursuit of a great wrong can't be re-assigned fluffy new meanings.

Still, it's interesting that Mills is attempting to rewrite his part in history - suggesting he was mauled for "independent thought" rather than stupidity, and that he was turned into a pantomime character rather than gleefully clambering into the back-end of a horse's costume all by himself.

Independent thought. From a man who flogged his songs to more than one car advert and beer advert.

In your Dad's suits you hide

Presumably, Marks and Spencer will be delighted by the new Take That men's suits campaign anyway, as at least they're unlikely to sound like the loved Nazis in the same way Bryan Ferry, the previous incumbent of the Autograph range, did.

However, their throats must have tightened a little when Rankin delivered his shots - the band don't actually look like they own the clothes they're modeling. Indeed, the general effect is of a bunch of dossers who have been visited by a jilted wife, as she distributes the clothes of her errant husband around the neighbourhood. It's less Autograph, more identity fraud.

Violent end?

According to OnMilwaukee.com, The Violent Femmes are currently playing their final slew of dates before calling it a day, driven apart by lawsuits and Wendys advertising:

Reports of turmoil within the group have been common through the years, but things may have reached a peak with Ritchie's lawsuit, which contends that the bassist is entitled to half of the band's past and future royalties.

"This action is the unfortunate culmination of an ongoing intra-band dispute between Ritchie and Gano over Gano's misappropriation and misadministration of Ritchie's interests in the jointly owned songs and assets of the band," the lawsuit said.

Ritchie has also publicly said he was offended by Gano's decision to sell licensing rights to "Blister in the Sun" to Wendy's.

The band, though, aren't saying anything:

In a telephone interview with OnMilwaukee.com Wednesday afternoon, drummer Victor DeLorenzo declined an opportunity to elaborate.

"I would neither confirm nor deny the rumor," said DeLorenzo, who offered to clarify any questions in the near future.

Ritchie added that the rumors are "premature."

"People have predicted the demise of the Femmes many times over the years. I've even had calls from journalists asking me to eulogize the other members upon reports of their deaths. Still everyone is alive and still playing," said Ritchie in an e-mail message. "We have not made any kind of decision about the future."

It's not exactly the most ringing denial that the band is winding down, though.

Record companies are great at digital

If you're an artist, and putting your faith in an RIAA company to protect your interests in the digital world, you might want to think again.

The IFPI, the international RIAA client organisation, can't even look after its own domain names. Somehow, it's managed to lose ifpi.com to The Pirate Bay.

Sure, it's a cheap stunt on the Pirate Bay's part, but if we were making our living from playing music, we'd start to be wondering if these people understand the internet well enough to be our best representatives as everything shifts digitalwards.

Chantelle "forgot" she wasn't the marrying kind

Chantelle off of Big Brother - who, surely with divorce must be nearing the end of her celebrity life cycle - has been explaining to the Daily Mail that she got confused when she married Preston:

"I don't know why I did it now. I just got caught up in the whole thing. He asked me to marry him and I went: 'Yes!' I'd forgotten that I didn't ever want to get married. I didn't want to have children. Now I've reminded myself of that again. I can be a bit indecisive, me."

The tragedy, of course, is that the whole wrong marriage could have been avoided had Chantelle put a post-it on the fridge with a reminder that she didn't want to get married; next to the one about needing more milk and not forgetting her mum's birthday.

Chantelle worries that people might think she's not very bright:

"Do you think I'm stupid?" she asks. "Maybe I am, but I don't think I am. I just don't see why you need to know what capital goes with what country. Why would you need to know that?

"Or politics. Boring. Who cares? Does it make me stupid if I don't want to have opinions about that? Does it?"

Um, yes, actually, Chantelle, and also dangerously disassociated from the realities of the world.

The Mail is equally worried:

Who knows? Who cares? Well, quite a lot of people actually. Thanks to our celebrity-obsessed age, everything Chantelle does, says and thinks is documented, and served up for our entertainment.

The Mail's fretting over this celebrity obsession might have been a little more convincing had it not come in the middle of a full-length interview with Houghton, of course.

Every million helps

The Spice Girls are pocketing "a million quid each" (we imagine there's some journalistic hyperbole invested in that figure) for advertising soulless storeborg chain Tesco:

A source said: "Tesco is one of the tour sponsors and has been desperate to get them in an advert. They will be sending themselves up, in the tradition of the old Jane Horrocks ads, and viewers should find it funny."

"Should find it funny" is a bit of an odd phrasing, isn't it? Like "might be idly amused", it doesn't exactly speak of much confidence in their abilities.

Mind you, the Jane Horrocks ads weren't famous people "sending themsleves up", as they were all playing characters, weren't they?

Still, viewers should find it funny. Especially those scraping together enough to get a cart full of Value Brand groceries. They'll be gurgling with delight at helping Beckham bank a few more thousand quid.

Veruca Salt weekend: Number One Blind

Continuing our trawl through Veruca Salt's back catalogue, this is the promo clip for 1994's Number One Blind:



[Part of Veruca Salt Weekend]

Tanita Tikaram fights the fags

We've not heard much from Tanita Tikaram for a while; it turns out she's been busy fighting plans for a local pub to allow smokers to stand outside her house:

“People drinking in the pub already spill over into St George’s Terrace, leaving empty glasses, food and cigarette butts, using the garden as a urinal and as they drink more alcohol becoming louder and more raucous.

“I don’t see the sense in extending an already undesirable situation.”

Geronimo Inns, who run the Queens in Regent's Park Road, insisted that unless they were given a more lenient licence, things would remain bad:

Geronimo, which has run the pub for 10 years, warned that it would be harder to control customers without the extended licence.

In a letter to the New Journal, commercial director Ed Turner said: “The customers would be moved further along, and The Queens would not be able to manage potential disturbances.”

He told the panel: “There’s been a lot of changes and problems for the industry on the back of the change in smoking laws.

“It’s been very difficult, it’s been a big learning curve for us and our customers.”

We'd suggest that if you're having that much trouble "controlling" your customers, what you need is not to have a more lenient licence, but perhaps have no licence at all. And while, obviously, the ban on smoking has caused difficulties, what sort of clientèle are you attracting if "not pissing in Tanita Tikaram's garden" is a behaviour which has to be learned?