Gordon in the morning: The victimless crime

There are victimless crimes. There are even crimes which create more people who are better off than they would otherwise have been.

The theft of Will I Am's penisesque sports car has given us all a breathing space, it turns out:

Now it turns out a number of rough demos were stored in the motor, and the sneaky thieves have started releasing them on the internet.

Will's so determined to give fans a polished, finished product - he's postponed the album's release for a month to give him time to write new songs.

The Voice judge took to Twitter yesterday to vent his frustration and announce the delay.

In a series of posts, he wrote: "I'm trying to finish #willpower... & now because of all the leaks I have push (sic) the album back to make new songs...

"When songs are incomplete and your valuables were stolen and people leak your unfinished material... I have a right to vent.

"My car was stolen & my bag with my hard drive & music was in it... my car was found, but my bag wasn't & now they're leaking songs."

Will I Am got his car back, and we've got a breathing space without having another slew of Am songs dumped onto us. If they find the people responsible, they'll be getting five pounds from the parish box, surely?

Seriously: it must be frustrating for the Big I Am to have lost his work, although it's a bit bemusing why, if these are only rough sketches of the songs he feels he has to junk the whole lot and start all over again. It's not like when you buy a song you might not have heard another version of it before - perhaps live, or as a session track.

What makes it odder still is that apparently the car was stolen outside a listening party for the finished album a month or so ago.

So if the worry is that the demo versions might trump the finished versions, why not just get the apparently-ready-to-go album straight out there?

The other strange question is what sort of chump thinks 'I'm going to play my album to execs and friends tonight, so I should probably dig out the rough demos and leave them lying around in my car when I do that'?

A cynic might wonder if the listening party was a bit of a flop, the tracks failed to be embraced, and the missing car gave a chance to construct an elaborate story to cover junking the disappointing first attempt and Will being sent back to the studio to see if he couldn't do better.

Nah. That would never happen, would it?