All-consuming fire: New Model Army studio

A Christmas Eve fire in a Bradford furniture shop has caused serious problems for New Model Army: their studio was right above and... well, it didn't come out of it well:



People have been rallying round, and Justin Sullivan sounds optimistic, although not unaware of the size of the task of rebuilding:

We have really been amazed by the response and the generosity of the offers of assistance we have received. Of course we are all upset about what has happened especially the loss of irreplaceable musical instruments and three or four months of recording work but we are insured and hope that at least our financial losses will be covered. In the end though, nobody was hurt and what was lost is just material. The band is about People and Spirit and without doubt this has never been stronger. There may perhaps be a bit of a delay in our activities but otherwise everything will continue as before.

Go-Betweens Weekend: Cattle And Cane

There would have been more Go-Betweens yesterday, except Sumesh came through the window with a poisoned cut in his tail, and so instead of noodling about in the YouTube archive, the morning was spent trying to get a reluctant cat into a box and up to the vets.

Anyway, he's better, and so where we were we?

Ah, yes. 1983, in Club Manhattan, Bradford. Cattle And Cane:



There is, so far as I can tell, no Club Bradford in Manhattan.

[Part of The Go-Betweens weekend]

S Club 7 comeback starts, ends in disaster

Did you know S Club 7 are back? Well, not quite back: it's only three of them and they're just hobbling round doing "a medley of their hits" for drunken students.

Amongst the line-up is Jo O'Meara who either came across as a bully during her spell on Celebrity Big Brother, or else was the victim of cruel editing, depending on if you have a sense of judgement or not.

Drunken students. Faded stars desperately dancing for coins. A person who somehow thought she was the victim when she was outed as being happy to sit around yukking while a person got battered by racist bullying. It's a set-up for disaster, isn't it?

Yes, so it turns out: Jo got hit by a bottle and wound up with a two-inch gash in her head, the set at Tokyo in Bradford was cut short. Even shorter, actually:

Bradley, 27, yelled at the 900-strong crowd: “It takes just one idiot to ruin everybody’s night.

“If you are going to throw a glass, throw it at me...you had to spoil it.”

Police are, according to The Sun, "investigating" to see if the attack was connected to O'Meara's Celebrity Big Brother appearance, although it's not clear why: after all, it's as unacceptable to throw stuff at people as Jo's behaviour on the TV show was. Even if the person who lobbed the bottle did it because they were angry about her part in the goading of Shilpa Shetty it doesn't excuse it, does it?

It's far more likely that the problem is down to a disjunction between what the band think they were doing - playing old hits to fans - and what they actually were doing, which was playing a set at a boozy student night with free entry. It's hard to understand why the club would have booked a turn who have been hovering between target and joke-butt for years, let all-comers in, and then give them drinks in glass containers.