Panic! At the venue

Panic At The Disco had to cut short their Atlanta gig last night, when the venue's floor started to collapse. 11Alive have the story:

According to reports from people who were called to pick others up there, "the floor cracked."


The concert was stopped and concert promoters asked everyone to quickly leave the venue. The evacuation was orderly, and no injuries were reported.

Afterward, Panic at the Disco lead singer Brendon Urie tweeted, "Damn. That was crazy. Glad everyone's ok, even though it still sucks we can't play. We'll see your beautiful faces in the summer."

Meanwhile, someone snitty got quickly to the Tabernacle's Wikipedia page:

During the Panic! At the Disco concert after the second song the building was evacuated due to possible cracking in the floor. People who hailed mostly from the outer boroughs expressed dismay that such a terrible thing could have happened to them, meaning they were slightly discomfited, and expressed no remorse for damaging the structure of a 116 year old building. Many Atlantans offered to drive them back to their far flung homes for free just to remove their potential threat to downtown buildings.

Coyne calls Beck a dick; Beck's kind of a dick about it

Beck and The Flaming Lips went out on tour together, and Beck thought they were having a good time. But then... well, then things turned sour:

The 'Loser' singer hired The Flaming Lips to support him on tour in 2002 but frontman Wayne Coye criticised him after the gigs, describing him as a ''d**k'', which led Beck to believe he wasn't liked in the industry.

He said: ''I really don't know [why he said that]. I was very surprised, because I have a videotape of the last night where they were saying, 'I love you, this tour has changed our lives, you're a brother', so it really messed my head up. I went around for a year thinking people hated me.''

For a year. Based on one word in one interview from one man.

The tour, by the way, happened in 2002.

He then continues to pick away at it:

He added in an interview with MOJO Magazine: ''Wayne probably sensed I'm the kind of guy who cares what people think, that I don't come off as some asshole rock-star type.

''What he didn't know was that I was really sick during the tour, I had some condition and I barely had the strength to pick up a guitar.

''So after the shows, I had to go to my bunk and sleep. One show, I got food poisoning so I delayed it half an hour, which he probably thought was theatrical. But we had a good time! I was hoping afterwards that we'd do a record together.''

You know what, Beck? It's probably this sort of churning over something which happened a spaniel's lifetime ago that made Coyne think you were a dick in the first place.

Coming tomorrow: Beck on why that third-grade teacher who said he was disruptive had failed to take account of the weather conditions on the day.

Embed and breakfast man: Aggi Doom

Now is precisely the wrong time to be discovering Aggi Doom, as they played their last gig a couple of weeks back.

Put your arms around a memory:
The Loving Kind single
Aggi Doom on Soundcloud

In 2012, Scottish Fiction asked "if it were all to end tomorrow, what would you say has been your greatest achievement?":

It's great to us that we're actually able to play together and make songs because you always want to play music with your best pals but it rarely works quite so fluidly and happily as this has, famous last words. Putting out the single with Soft Power is obviously a major achievement for us, they're such good people.

Rajars: Grimshaw climbs

The latest audience figures, out this morning, show that Nick Grimshaw's Radio One breakfast audience is growing, and closing the gap with the position he inherited. MediaGuardian:

The 29-year-old added 709,000 listeners for a total average weekly audience of 6.3 million during the final quarter of last year, a 12.6% rise over the previous period, according to the latest official Rajar figures published on Thursday.

However, Grimshaw is still below the average weekly audience for his first three months on the Radio 1 breakfast show and 400,000 listeners off Moyles's last quarterly audience figure of 6.7 million.

"Congratulations, buddy, although you're still getting fewer listeners than the guy who had to leave Radio One because his audience was distorting the figures and profile for the station as a whole. If you can close that gap, we can start having a pop at you for clearly being too mainstream and pulling an audience outside the target for the network."

Curiously, Grimshaw's growth isn't at the expense of his nearest rival - Chris Evans also added half a million listeners.

6Music is within a nudge of two million listeners across the week, which isn't bad for a station which Mark Thompson wanted to have humanely destroyed.

(They never drag him to Parliament to ask about that, do they? Surely 'writing off the costs involved in establishing a radio station and building its audience' would have been just as expensive as the Digital Media Initiative? Wasn't the original decision, and the need to reverse it, an equally terrible set of events?)

It turns out being drooled over by Robin Thickie is a career move

So, you thought being in Robin Thickie's Not Raping Can Be So Confusing video would be a dead end for Emily Ratajkowski. Well, how wrong you were.

As a direct result of her part in Blurred Lines, Emily can now move on from being perved over with a new job, erm, posing for Sports Illustrated annual swimwear edition. I suppose at least she gets to wear some clothes this time.

By the way, there's apparently some people who think that Thicke's video didn't promote appalling attitudes towards women. Here's the opening words from Pedestrian's article about Emily:

Living Venus Emily Ratajkowski, who is credited as the #1 Boner Catalyst of 2013 for her emphatic performance in Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" video...

It's not just that, rather than a person, she's been described as something that stirs an erection, but they've even got the science wrong. A catalyst doesn't make something happen, it just speeds up the rate of a reaction.

Mind you, if they think about people in that way, maybe the people over at Pedestrian do find their erections going off faster than they'd hope.

Who lost the Superbowl?

It wasn't Denver.

Even before the Super Bowl show, Bruno Mars was a highly successful young performer – he wouldn’t have been invited otherwise. Though the typical football fan might not have been aware of Mars before the half time show, he’s had a pretty good thing going for a few years now. But, however big he was before, the Super Bowl is bound to make him bigger – especially given the great performance he gave.

We all lost the Superbowl.

On the other hand...

It's possible that ContactMusic might not have been on top of its game when it wrote this.

Bono almost notices his positon

Bono was talking to Zane Lowe:

Bono has suggested that U2 are "on the verge of irrelevance".

He's right, but what he doesn't realise is which side of the verge he's on. To reach irrelevance would be a comeback.

By the way: Zane Lowe? Really? Isn't 'U2 release another album' more a Simon Mayo type of offering?

Pete Seeger: The local angle

Toledo's local paper, The Blade, knows what its readers are interested in:

PETE SEEGER, 1919-2014

Folk singer, activist dead at 94, played in Toledo

Three times, the article notes. Playing Toledo three times is more than enough achievement for any man, right?

Miley Cyrus has a request: 'Don't look at my arse'

I think this is an attempt at a rebooty from Miley:

Singer wants audience to focus on her singing not her rear

It's true, Miley Cyrus is much more than just a desperate 'look at me' twerker.

She sometimes sticks her tongues out, too.

Actually, she's just worried she can't waggle her butt and chew gum sing at the same time:

"When it's such a visual show, I'm not going to get up there and dance because I've got to sing live," Cyrus said in an interview Thursday night. "So it's like to have things that people can watch other than me ... not about me trying to keep up with choreography."

Here's the thing, Miley. Most singers tend to entertain the audience with singing. If you're worrying 'what on earth will people watch while I'm doing the singing', you're probably in the wrong business.

Taylor Swift experiences invasion

Last night was the first night of Taylor Swift's Red tour in the UK.

It was all spoiled though, when a shambling idiot appeared on stage.

And as if Ed Sheeran coming on to do an duet wasn't bad enough there was a stage invasion by someone from the audience.

(Thank you. You may now choose from 'Seinfeldian slap bass riff' or the traditional 'boom-tish drum effect'.)

The stage invader handed Swift a note - believed to read "we love you, but in god's name don't inflict any more Ed Sheeran on us, please" - before being removed by security.

Someone in the crowd took a photo of it, and luckily Kevin Cummins didn't turn up to make them delete the picture:

Taylor Swift Fan On Stage To Give Note - http://t.co/WHtYN837Qd pic.twitter.com/GLlhHqZD3h

— OCEANUP (@OCEANUP) February 2, 2014

Kevin Cummins attempts to turn back the tide

Talking on 6Music, Kevin Cummins has said that people shouldn't take photos at gigs.

Oddly, Cummins is paid to take photos at gigs (and does it incredibly well), but I'm sure this isn't like the bloke who runs the food hatch suggesting you should never have your tea before going to the gig. Not at all.

The comments on the 6Music Facebook page fall, broadly, into three camps - people who don't see the harm in people taking a few photos of an event they've paid a lot to go to, to remember it by.

People who think that somehow not taking photos means that their experience is superior to that of those who do - because they're, like, living in the moment, maaaan. As if a quick glance at the back of a camera is akin to stuffing your fingers in your ears, leaving the building, and never coming back.

Third, there's a group of commenters - who are right - who say that it's probably more important to tell people not to go to gigs and stand in the audience yakkity-yakkkitying all the way through the set.

One things unites all three sets of people, though: the visceral hatred of the 21st century outcast, the person who videos the whole gig using an iPad.

Twittergem: The Anchoress

There's going to be an Anchoress video shoot. How would one prepare for that, Catherine AD?

Video prep morning. Or as I like to call it: staring at pictures of Shirley Manson from @garbage day. pic.twitter.com/ZqpzNePoaG

— CatherineAnneDavies (@CatherineAD) February 2, 2014

Yes, that'd work.

This week just gone

What people read the most for January:

1. Alfie Boe humiliates people who forget to switch their phone off
2. MTV asks why rock gigs are becoming less "vaginally-challenged". No, really.
3. Listen: Dregs
4. Alex James pop plan
5. Miley Cyrus might have led us to ratings on pop videos
6. Ricky Wilson also found the Kaiser Chiefs dull
7. Image: HMV closing
8. Listen: Slum Of Legs
9. Brits 2014 shortlist
10. Listen: Chvrches

The interesting releases of this week:


Peggy Sue - Choir Of Echoes

Download Choir Of Echoes



Dum Dum Girls - Too True

Download Too True



The New Mendicants - Into The Lime

Download Into The Lime



The Hidden Cameras - Age

Download Age