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Kurt Cobain wrote an angry letter to MTV, complaining about how it strangled creativity. He never sent it.
"Dear Empty TV/ the entity of all Corporate / GODS / We will survive without you/ easily - - the / oldschool is going / DOWN FAST/ my lifes Dedication/ is Now to Do Nothing/ But SLAG something / Kurdt Kobaineee professional Rock musician."With no apparent sense of either irony or shame, it's now turned up in an auction. Rage repackaged for the highest bidder.
Bob Lefsetz has a leaked letter from an annoyed Nas. He's got an album ready to roll, but Island Def Jam don't want to release it.
Annoyed? He's livid:
I won’t even tap dance around in an email, I will get right into it. People connect to the Artist @ the end of the day, they don’t connect with the executives. Honestly, nobody even cares what label puts out a great record, they care about who recorded it. Yet time and time again its the executives who always stand in the way of a creative artist’s dream and aspirations. You don’t help draw the truth from my deepest and most inner soul, you don’t even do a great job @ selling it. The #1 problem with DEF JAM is pretty simple and obvious, the executives think they are the stars. You aren’t…. not even close. As a matter of fact, you wish you were, but it didn’t work out so you took a desk job. To the consumer, I COME FIRST. Stop trying to deprive them! I have a fan base that dies for my music and a RAP label that doesn’t understand RAP. Pretty fucked up situationHe ends his letter with a plea to Def Jam that we should "make money". But the labels don't really know how any more.
The struggling Waterstones book store and the struggling HMV um, shop, have come together to share their annual sales conference.
Why has parent HMV brought them together? Embedded spokespoke Gennaro Castaldo has the official line:
"We want to bring together all elements of the business because there is a strategic underlying remit to demonstrate how the whole business is working together."In other words, as both parts of the company are going down the toilet, it makes sense to gather together rather than splash money out on two conferences.
Manic Street Preachers were among bands to entertain delegates at the eventWho knew that the Manics were doing corporates? Every delegate got a torch, a CurlyWurly, a book of stamps, a free digital watch with denim strap, a vodka miniature, a Bic-style razor and a copy of the Daily Express.
News from the further enBeatlefication of Liverpool. The Neptune Theatre, which has been The Neptune since 1967 as a tribute to the city's seafaring past, is finally getting refitted. But as part of the refittings, it's going to become The Epstein Theatre.
A Beatles reference? How surprising. It's further evidence that the city has long since moved on from the days when it insisted there was more to the place than just the moptops; nowadays - providing it doesn't get in the way of knocking down housing like Ringo's old gaff - it seems that there's little else to Merseyside.
To be fair, Epstein did work for Cranes in the building when the company operated both the theatre and a shop underneath, so there is a link.
But it's not really about honouring Epstein; as Joe Anderson, Liverpool Council Leader, makes clear, it's just about offering an extra stop to shake down unsuspecting tourists:
"For our Beatles industry this development means Liverpool has a new attraction and a new story to tell and for the city we will soon have a new theatre with a world famous name which will hopefully make it a commercially more attractive business to market and operate."The bit about 'the Beatles industry' makes a sad-eyed sort of sense - oh, imagine if Ringo's house hadn't been in the way of lucrative development land - but anyone who believes that calling a building Epstein rather than Neptune is going to make it any easier to operate a theatre is, frankly, deluded.
Dido stuck a NASA picture on the cover of her 2008 record, Safe Trip Home. It features a tiny little astronaut floating in space.
Trouble is, the astronaut, Bruce McCandless (no, I hadn't, either) is suing claiming that the use violates his privacy rights.
Sure, you go floating in space you don't expect to be papped, but... seriously?
cacd-031010991534
As Techdirt observes:
[I]t's difficult to see how much of a claim he has. It's not as if he's identifiable in the image, or that anyone will see it and think: "Hey, I'll buy this album because I know astronaut Bruce McCandless endorsed it." That's ridiculous. Most people will have no idea who the astronaut is, nor will they even care.To be frank, the hardest thing for McCandless to do is to prove that anyone knows who he is before he can start to claim people are trading on his image. Surely this is just a shot of an unnamed guy at work?
PREGNANT Sophie Dahl keeps getting bigger - which is more than can be said for her pint-size hubby Jamie Cullum.Um... yes, Gordon, that's generally what happens during pregnancy.
According to the Billboard charts, The Cast Of Glee are a more successful band than The Beatles:
The "Glee" cast has surpassed the Beatles for the most appearances on the Billboard Hot 100 chart by a non-solo act.The Billboard charts used to measure sales of records. It's not entirely clear what it measures what it thinks it does now.
The cast of the Fox television musical series about a high school glee club has six debuts on the chart this week. That gives it a total of 75 songs on the chart to the Beatles' 71.
Why would Howard Marks be offering sympathy for George Michael all of a sudden?
Speaking at the West End opening of the film in which Rhys Ifans plays him...Oh, yes, that would be it.
That driving a car while drunk thing? 3AM reckons Amelle Berrabah can explain:
The Sugababes star, 26, who faces court after she was caught driving over the limit says: "I didn't know it was possible six hours later. The fact you can still be over the limit several hours later should be better known.""I had no idea stabbing a man several times in the head could kill him. The fact you can stab someone nowhere near their heart and still kill them should be better known."
[Alcohol will] take time to leave your body; you may be unfit to drive in the evening after drinking at lunchtime, or in the morning after drinking the previous eveningSo even if she had managed to never notice that you can still feel drunk hours after drinking, she should have at least heard the news before she took her driving test.
Don't say she didn't warn you...No, 3AM. Our biology teacher warned us when we were about ten years old.
Robbie: I wasn't fat, it's my hormonesJust to be pedantic, if that's true, it doesn't mean you weren't fat, it just means you were fat for different reasons to overeating or undermoving.
But the right medication, and finding love with US actress AYDA FIELD, helped him rediscover his spark. His return was confirmed last October when he starred on The X Factor, singing comeback single Bodies from his album Reality Killed The Video Star.It's not impossible that being in love could shunt your hormones in a positive direction, I suppose. No less likely than Gordon trying to recast last year's album as a return to form. The sort of return to form that requires a desperate swallowing of pride to return to the more successful Take That.
To be fair, Waters doesn't need to explain what he's trying to do, as even the ADL seemed to have understood his stage show before they then pretended not. But Sideline have reported his formal response:
"Contrary to Mr Foxman's assertion, there are no hidden meanings in the order or juxtaposition of these symbols. The point I am trying to make in the song is that the bombardment we are all subject to by conflicting religious, political, and economic ideologies only encourages us to turn against one another, and I mourn the concomitant loss of life. If 'The Wall' show did have a political message it was to seek to illuminate our condition, and find new ways to encourage peace and understanding, particularly in the Middle East."The other charge - that Waters deals with global politics in such a broad-brushed way that it would make a sixth form common room cringe - remains on the record for now.
If you can get past the hanging-it-on-John-Lennon's-birthday part, Wayne Rosso's summation of the problems facing music labels in The Dream Is Over.
It's not piracy, it's their own obstinacy that is going to destroy them:
There will be no new players of significance to enter the business. Investors don’t want to entertain the remotest possibility of funding any start-up that deals with music, no matter how clever and innovative. As one major media venture firm told me a few months ago, they’re tired of writing cheques for big advances to record labels. Not to mention the huge legal fees that start-ups have to spend in order to get licensed, a process that takes at least a year (for no apparent reason, I might add).
There hasn't been a Trembling Blue Stars record since 2005, but shortly, there will be.
Bob Wratten's got the team together again for one last record, turning what had been an ellipsis into a proper full stop. Actually, it's two last records, but they go together.
The album is Fast Trains and Telegraphs Wires has also got Cath Carroll on it.
That's two nights running we've had a story about a new record with Cath Carroll on it.
The ep is Cicely Tonight Volume One. Even though there's never going to be a number two.
You can buy the records now, or listen on Spotify.
[Thanks to @sweepingnation]
Second-wave Kate Nash has perhaps split opinion a bit, but she's just announced that her American tour support is going to be Peggy Sue.
Of course that's exciting. Here's one of those streaming-audio box widgety things with Lover Gone trapped inside it:
A reason to go out. If you're American.
These are the dates:
10/29/2010 Los Angeles The Music Box
10/30/2010 San Francisco Warfield Theatre
11/1/2010 Portland Wonder Ballroom
11/2/2010 Seattle Showbox at the Market
11/3/2010 Vancouver Commodore Ballroom
11/5/2010 Salt Lake City In the Venue
11/6/2010 Denver Ogden Theatre
11/8/2010 Iowa City Englert Theatre
11/9/2010 Chicago Vic Theatre
11/11/2010 Columbus Newport Music Hall
11/12/2010 Detroit Majestic Theatre
11/13/2010 Toronto Phoenix Concert Theatre
11/15/2010 Washington 9:30 Club
11/17/2010 Philadelphia Theatre of Living Arts
11/18/2010 Boston Paradise Rock Club
11/19/2010 New York Terminal 5
11/20/2010 Montclair Wellmont Theatre
It's two uninspiring solo artists detached from their welcome-outstaying bands for the price of one:
Beginning November 10th in Los Angeles, CA, Healy will join The Killers' front man Brandon Flowers for a two-week tour of the United States.Staying in never sounded so good, right?
No surprise about more overpriced Lennon tat emerging - limited edition models of Lennon's Imagine guitar coming from Gibson.
What's interesting, though, is that Gibson have announced that it wasn't their idea:
Gibson Acoustic's director of sales and marketing, Robi Johns, said Yoko Ono asked the company to release a limited number of the model of guitar that her husband played.I don't think I can recall an instance where Yoko's instigation of a tacky cash-in was quite so publicly acknowledged.
Gordon has been listening to - and by "listening to" I mean "reading in New magazine" - Joe McElderry talking about coming out:
He said: "I was nervous. It's not ideal to have to tell the whole nation that you're gay! I thought, 'Oh my god, this is big stuff'.Bless, Joe thought he was telling the entire nation and that it was "big stuff". Honey, only about six or seven people could even remember who you were, and one of those thought you were Susan Boyle's butler.
"But once I realised who I was as a person, I thought, 'Right, I'm just going to be honest'.
"It makes your life easier."
Nobody would deny that radio stations have to change and refresh their schedules from time to time - after all, can you imagine what it would be like if Radio One still had Chris Moyles festering at breakfast? Oh. But you get the point.
What matters, though, is how they set about doing it. Max Tundra's Rotogravure show appears to have been dropped from the Resonance FM schedule without anyone bothering to tell him:
I took great offence at the fact that a radio station Content Manager would send an email informing of plans to alter a long-running radio show, then fail to respond to a perfectly polite reply sent that same day, eschewing any further discussion in favour of dropping the show from the schedule without warning - a whole month before the original date suggested - and failing to let me know that this was happening.Of course, we do only have Max's side of the story.
a glut of ego gymnastics from Max Tundra, the author of "masturbated by a guy for small change" doesn't help eitherWhich would be fine, but Max's beef is with the way it was done. I don't think it's "ego gymnastics" to complain about discovering your show has been replaced by a pre-record a few hours before you're supposed to be going on air.
For the record and for his fans, Mr.Tundra was not dropped nor shoved. Just paused until early next year to make way for some new content.
Crispian Mills - the senior trustfund from Kula Shaker - is releasing a solo single.
The bad news for Crispian is that, far from getting rid of what was bad about Kula Shaker by going solo, he has brought a fairly large chunk of the problem with him.
It's now - what? - ten past nine in the evening, which means it's well past getting giddily excited at the news that today sees not just a new single by The Hit Parade, but Cath Carroll is back with Julian Henry for this one.
It's called I Like Bubblegum and you can buy it now. And you should.
(Really, this message should have been typed out and photocopied instead of blogged.)
There's some not-entirely-believable story about Ortise running out of condoms and having to rush out to get some more this morning. It's one part a chance for Gordon to imagine Ortise having sex to six parts a push for Durex.
Let's hope the JLS condoms aren't as thin as the disguise on this advert.
Oritse said: "I never get embarrassed about using condoms or buying them, no way. It's part of the movement.The management have tried to explain to him that it's not actually necessary if all you've taken back to your room are photos of Kelly Brook in Playboy downloaded off the internet, but Ortise can't be sure where his hand has been.
"I'm not going to get caught out. I'm an avid believer of no glove, no love."
Roger Waters' thirtieth birthday performance of The Wall isn't going down well with everyone. And it's not just people who really wish he'd move on and do something else that are vexed; Sideline reports that the ADL are up in arms:
Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League director says: "It is outrageous that Roger Waters has chosen to use the juxtaposition of a Jewish Star of David with the symbol of dollar signs. While he insists that his intent was to criticize Israel's West Bank security fence, the use of such imagery in a concert setting seems to leave the message open to interpretation, and the meaning could easily be misunderstood as a comment about Jews and money. Of course Waters has every right to express his political views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through his music and stagecraft. However, the images he has chosen, when put together in the same sequence, cross a line into anti-Semitism."It's almost as if Foxman is saying 'we know what he means, but we're going to play the anti-semitism card anyway' there, isn't it?
This advert appeared in the New York Times recently:
@Glastowatch is annoyed about people expressing their frustration:
And so begins the moaningThey link through to a Facebook group which more-or-less grunts its frustration:
glasto ticket fiasco thousands left unhappy people gloating about getting 16 on one person ACCOUNT YET 1000'S TURNED AWAY PREHISTORIC COMPUTER SYSTEM 1 COMPANY TO HANDLE IT..SURELY THIS IS AGAINST WHAT THE TRUE MEANING OF GLASTONBURY IS...JOKE IS NO BETTER THAN TESCO A FILTHY GIANTIs that really "moaning"? Isn't it understandable frustation? Sure, not everyone who wants tickets will get tickets, but is it really necessary to force them to spend hours on a Sunday morning battering a fallen-over computer system in order to let them down? Is it moaning to expect a company selling tickets that cost well over a hundred quid - and who extracts a healthy 'booking' fee - actually works? Does Glastowatch really think you should just shut up and shrug?
Lois was briefly in a band with Rebecca Gates, who would go on to be in The Spinnanes - trading as Cradle Robbers, this is what they sounded like:
I've just come across this, too: a bunch of articles Maffeo wrote for The Stranger in 1999.
[Part of The Lois Maffeo weekend]
Although less of a nightmare than in previous years, it still seems from Twitter that the Glastonbury ticket process is still a rotten, tumbling mess:
@Jack_Dent:
# Wasted a Sunday morning trying to book my lad a Glastonbury ticket. Think he may have just got 1 via a mate. The booking system is shite.@JackHCarter:
@glastofest oh great thanks, the bloody See tickets website is still not working #glastonburysucks 10 minutes ago via web in reply to glastofest
@glastofest errrno, it times out. it's a useless, frustrating system. No worries though, you'll sell all the tickets!! about 3 hours ago via web in reply to glastofest
trying get a glastonbury ticket takes the PISS@newmusicdave:
Sold out! Never even got on the website. That's 2 yrs in a row now. Waste of time #GlastonburyHow many years now have they been selling exclusively online, and they still can't get the system to work properly?
See tickets have indeed let us down today I'm sorry but there will be another sale of cancelled tickets in 2011. Still some left now thoughIf even Michael Eavis, a man who can't see a mudbath without pointing out the rejuvenating properties of Somerset clay, is saying Seetickets isn't up to the job, why are Glastonbury still using them?
Back to Lois working under half of her own name:
This was a 7" on K Records.
[Buy: Lois records]
[Part of The Lois weekend]
A couple of weeks back, the New York Times printed a letter of complaint from the News Of The World's managing editor Bill Akass. Responding to the Times' story about Andy Coulson and his team phonehacking their way through the great and the good, Akass snorted out this paragraph of disgust:
Sources: In the days prior to publication the Standards Editor Phil Corbett wrote to all staff reminding them of the NYT’s ethical guidelines with regards to anonymous sources. We were surprised therefore to see the finished article was based almost entirely on anonymous sources – a “dozen former reporters”- whose credibility, seniority, motives or qualifications we are therefore prevented from challenging. The article also cites anonymous “detectives” and “prosecutors”.So, running stories with only one named source is bad. It's worse than bad, it's unethical.
There was one single named source who claimed direct knowledge of wrongdoing, as opposed to hearsay or supposition. This is pretty thin evidence on which to hang a 6,000 word investigation. I believe that by failing to adhere to their own stringent rules when dealing with the News of the World story, the NYT’s reporters and editors demonstrated clear bias.
Ronan, who is already battling for his marriage to YVONNE, is also struggling to cope as the anniversary of Steo's death on October 10 looms.And on and on runs the quote. From an unnamed source. "[W]hose credibility, seniority, motives or qualifications we are therefore prevented from challenging."
A source said: "The memory of Stephen's death is flooding back to Ronan. They were very close, like brothers, and Ronan has been going through a rocky patch."
This Go Team is a Calvin Johnson side-project (no exclamation mark), which drafted in Lois for vocal work:
[Part of Lois Maffeo weekend]
The most-read stories about Robbie Williams of all time are:
1. Daily Mail calls Williams "portly"
2. Courtney Love has set Williams up with her friend
3. Williams dates a 'humble' barmaid
4. Noemi Baenninger has perfect recall of having sex with Williams
5. Williams played Trivial Pursuit instead of dating Tara Palmer-Tomkinson
6. Random Berliner claims she's framed her Williams sex knickers
7. Williams takes up blogging, briefly
8. Charity proposes bringing together James Brown together with Williams
9. Williams sky-gondola stunt flops
10. Cannibal hopes to eat Williams; is disappointed
These new releases covered the period we were on holiday:
Sia - We Are Born
Download We Are Born
No Age - Everything In Between
Download Everything In Between
The Royalettes - Gonna Take A Miracle
David Sylvian - Sleepwalkers
Download Sleepwalkers
Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
Download Halcyon Digest
Edwyn Collins - Losing Sleep
Download Losing Sleep
OMD - History Of Modern
Download History Of Modern
Robyn - Body Talk Part 2
Download Body Talk Part 2
Manics - Postcards From A Young Man
Download Postcards From A Young Man
Interpol - Interpol
Download Interpol
Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent
Download Absolute Dissent
What do you get if you take Lois, Carrie from Sleater-Kinney and Pete from Marine Research?
Pretty much this:
Another short-lived project, this was the only record from this particular supergroup.
[Part of The Lois Maffeo weekend]
Will the horror of this economic crisis never end? Latest victim of the crunching and austerity is The Liberace Museum in Las Vegas is shutting its doors.
It used to attract half a million visitors a year, but not so many come any more.
Actually, it's not entirely the credit crunch, and more that Liberace was of his time, and fewer people are interested:
“We really started pushing the idea of bling, and Liberace was the first person who was really doing bling,” said Jeffrey P. Koep, the chairman of the Liberace Foundation and dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “He had the big rings. He had the look that you see the kids doing now that’s very popular.”That's the sort of idea a grandmother would come up with - "you wear big rings, don't you, dear? Look, this man had big rings, too" - so it's not surprising it flopped.
Billy Vassiliadis, the head of the advertising agency that represents the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said the loss of the museum “was a shame, especially for us older folks.” But, he said, Las Vegas, like Liberace, has always been about reinventing itself.The sad thing is, he's probably not wide of the mark with that one.
“We have to keep refreshing Las Vegas,” he said. “Thousands of people turn 21 every day. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a Lady Gaga museum in 10 years.”
Backwards in time, now, to a 1992 Lois Maffeo band, Lumihoops. They played once, and released just one track:
This was that single track, Roman Holiday. Not a tribute to the sailor-suit beclad middle-England pop act of almost the same name, thank god.
[Part of The Lois Maffeo weekend]
Do you have photos of people gathered round a piano? The Kilroy teamDarren Hayman wants to hear from you:
Here's what I want from you. I want to make a video comprised of 100s of photos of pianos. I want all of the photos to be sourced or 'found' and rarely staged. I want photos that already exist. The idea is that the piano photos would present a chronolgy, so we start with the oldest photo first onto the most modern. For that reason what I really want is your old family photos and even better photos of your grandparents and earlier.You can find out why, and more on what he's looking for, over on his website.
Another track from that 2008 New York gig:
[Part of the Lois Maffeo weekend]
California girth: Katy Perry's skin-tight silver dress clings in all the wrong placesReally, Daily Mail?
With the material buckling around the waist, the figure-hugging design even gave the impression of a protruding belly.
A US government study has warned that the recorded music industry might be allowing its legacy to crumble into dust, Variety reports:
The 169-page white paper, subtitled "A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age," concludes that nothing less than congressional revision of copyright law will help alleviate the many issues facing overtaxed, underfunded, technologically inadequate institutions involved in preservation work.Masters of bands that labels have concluded they can no longer make money of have been junked - don't even think about what might have happened if instead of destroying them, the labels had allowed artists to take back and do what they would with them. Don't think about what the majors might have consigned to destruction.
The major sectors of showbiz are working to preserve iconic works (Variety, Aug. 2-8) and U.S. music labels have taken steps to ensure preservation of their catalogs, but, crucially, "It is uncertain whether master recordings are being maintained or preserved when there is no prospect for their reissue or for monetary gain from their digital distribution," according to the NRPB study.
"Current programs to systematically preserve (digital) recordings are inadequate," says the NRPB.And one of the biggest threats to preserving recordings? It's copyright law. The study suggests that if people paid attention to copyright law, virtually all attempts to preserve audio recordings would be illegal.
Funding for preservation is "decentralized and inadequate," the study says. And the problem has only grown with the steep music-industry downturn of the last decade: The study notes, for instance, that the Grammy Foundation's preservation awards totaled $441,000 in 2008 and just $150,000 in 2009.
Analog-to-digital archiving is beyond the scope of most institutions. The study takes a dim view of recordable CDs as an archival medium, noting they have "placed preservation programs at great risk."
You have to go more-or-less to the end of this clip about Tea Party events in Georgia, but there you'll see Maureen Tucker, complaining about taxes:
Is it Moe? The Maureen Tucker from the Velvets does live just an hour's drive away in Douglas, so it's her 'local' gathering of confused patriots against government spending on things they don't agree with. What are the chances of two Maureen Tuckers being in the area?
[via Guardian Music]
The tracks where you get to look at a sleeve are great, but let's thrill to the visuals, shall we? This is Lois playing live:
The man is David Carswell; this was Lois' first live performance in ages. 2008 in New York.
[Part of the Lois Maffeo weekend]
Sometimes, we point and snigger at Neil McCormick, the Telegraph's friend of Bono music writer, but he's got a point this morning, listing the churning products of the Lennon Industry:
This is the latest offering from a posthumous, multi-million-dollar Lennon industry, partly fuelled by his widow's sometimes suspect desire to keep the flame burning. It has led to such dubious tributes as a TV commercial for the Citroën DS3, a Mont Blanc fountain pen retailing at $27,000, a limited edition Gibson Imagine guitar ($10,748), alongside the usual array of Lennon-branded mugs, clothing, books, calendars, prints and even an Imagine brand of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.I suspect Neil and I would disagree over the core of his argument. Neil insists this isn't what the man himself would want, or be doing, were he alive today; my suspicion is that Lennon would just be more careful than Yoko at merchandising the idea of the rock ascetic. But the headline?
John Lennon's 70th birthday: these tacky souvenirs and adverts insult his memoryI think we can agree on that.
From Courtney Love the band - Lois and Pat Maley:
[Part of the the Lois Maffeo weekend]
You know what Ne-Yo hates? People who make music just to make money. Gee, those guys are the worst:
"People's reasons for making music have changed. I remember a time when people made music for the sheer joy of it. Nowadays people are just trying to make money and you can hear it. Everything sounds the same: it's shallow, hollow and thin. I take the time."Yeah! You go, Ne-Yo - you wave your angry little fist at people who simply use their profiles as a way to fill their bank balances. They're so vulgar.
A weekend of embedded videos which will continue with sound only, I suspect, as we dip into the career of Lois Maffeo. Lois, as she was often professionally known:
That's her first sort-of solo debut, Press Play And Record, although she'd been making excellent music for years before that came out in 1992. At the start of the 1990s, she was in Courtney Love. The band, of course, the one that makes (her ex-roommate) Courtney Love the person fume and rage about who has the rights to a made-up name.
Before that, she'd arrived in Olympia and become a one-woman radio cult with a show on KAOS; it seems like you couldn't help but be well-connected in Olympia at the time and her cross-collaborations would give Pete Frame cold sweats trying to keep track of.
She writes a mean song. This is going to be a brilliant weekend, I think, even if the 'videos' are just pictures filling the hole in the screen.
Buy
Infinity Plus [download version]
Butterfly Kiss
Bet The Sky
Lois online
K Records artist page
YouTube playlist by GrrlBandGeek (which this weekend's features will be drawing heavily, but not exhaustively, upon)
Lois Maffeo's writing for The Stranger
More across the weekend
Courtney Love - 2nd Most Beautiful Girl In The World
Strumpet live
I Hate The Sun live
Roman Holiday - Lumihoops
Tentacles - The Touch
The Go Team - My Head Hurts
Cradle Robbers - Sotto Voce
It's perhaps appropriate that Robbie Williams is using Bizarre to reach out to Nigel Martin-Smith.
After all, it was there, back when Victoria Newton was in charge - a phrase I'm using in its insulting sense - that The Sun had to run a grovelling apology to Martin-Smith (and make a payout) after giving Williams the space to grind his axe back in 2006. Williams, too, apologised in court.
It does make it all a little strange, then, that Smart quotes Williams saying this:
"All I want to do now is throw my arms around him and give him a hug. I want to hear sorry from him, I want to say I'm sorry."Robbie has already said sorry; in court. And he was saying sorry for making unsubstantiated claims about Martin-Smith. So how come - despite claiming "I don't want to hold any malice towards somebody from my past because that only hurts myself" - Williams is still suggesting Nigel Martin-Smith has something to apologise for?
Ex-fireman Robert Linhart is obsessed to the point of arrest with Madonna:
According to the BBC, retired fireman Robert Linhart was arrested on Tuesday while spray-painting messages on the pavement to the singer asking to meet her.It would be puzzlingly heartwarming were it not for the massive icepick he was carrying with him in the car.
One read: "M, the universe brought us together in 1992 and again this year in Prague. Meet me please."
His lawyer, Cheryl Bader, defended his actions telling the New York Daily News: "There was no threatening conduct. My understanding is it's not a crime to adore Madonna. If it were, the court would be a lot more crowded."Probably not very crowded; like glue-sniffing, there was a lot of it about in the 1980s but most people now view those minor infractions as one of the silly things you do before you grow up, surely?
If you're in London - and chances are you're not, so, sorry - Amelia Fletcher is guest dj tonight at How Does It Feel To Be Loved? Canterbury Crescent, Brixton from 9pm.
Here's something worrying - apparently Razorlight are making a new album:
Johnny [Borrell] told radio station Xfm: "Big bands get too serious about things. You get very self important and rock and roll is not worth taking too seriously."I know we should be polite and say something encouraging like "You, Johnny? Self-important? Oh, never", but... well, yes. Yes, you're right.
"The last album was a breakup album and I'm not breaking up with anybody at the moment, thank God, so this is another party album."Another party album? Just because you don't wear a shirt doesn't make the record a party album, Johnny.
"To me it is going back more to the spirit and the energy of 'Up All Night' or the 'Somewhere Else' kind of Razorlight, which is my favourite period of the band - it's an energetic rock 'n' roll album."I cherish that even when he's telling us how much of a party album he's making, he still sounds serious and self-important.
Curious. Given how rarely JLS string together words into actual sentences, when they talk about Blackberry's proprietary instant messaging system in this morning's Sun they sound like... well, salespeople:
Aston said: "That's the new thing, the PINs. It's just PINs everywhere. Do you remember MSN? Instant messaging? That's what it's like."Yes, and you can deal with Carphones 4 U to get a Blackberry Daddio on an unlimited PIN scheme for just £24-99 a month, I understand" read Squibble from a small piece of paper.
"I always revert to my BlackBerry because that's the only thing I text on. It's just easier and it's an instant message."
Oritse added: "And you know when the person's read the message, which is quite cool."
