Robbie sobby, undone by One

Apparently Radio One has taken a bite out of Robbie Williams' arsenal:

"I'm very ambitious," he told BBC Radio 4's Mastertapes programme. "So when Radio 1 goes and is taken away from you, a huge bit of your arsenal goes."

"It's your main oxygen to get your stuff out there."

To be fair, Robbie, you've just released an album of swing covers. It's like sticking out a porn video and wondering why Blue Peter won't invite you on talk about it.

In the BBC News story, though, a much more interesting detail is hanging about:

The station's head of music has also said rock groups Green Day and Muse may have outgrown the station.

"The last Green Day project simply wasn't good enough," George Ergatoudis told trade magazine Music Week.

Muse, meanwhile "are approaching a crossroads" - their last single was the first one not playlisted by Radio 1 in a decade.

"The door remains open to them but we'll have to think carefully about their next album."

Yes, we've now come so far through the Rock & Roll Years that Muse have effectively turned into Cliff Richard.

And Green Day are Status Quo, but that's hardly breaking news.

MTV EMAs shortlist reveals acts prepared to travel to Amsterdam

Oh, MTV's European Music Awards shortlist has been released, revealing who MTV's European PR team think has enough heft to persuade people to watch a music programme on a channel normal dedicated to two reality formats being wrung dry.

If only there was some sort of press release which could, in a pithy phrase, capture a sense of if this is an event which celebrates the new, the challenging and exciting; or merely is the same faces dancing through the same empty struts.

Hang on: what's this?

GREEN DAY RECEIVES THREE MTV EMA NOMINATIONS

Empty struts it is, then.

For the record, here's the dullest list in the world in full:

BEST SONG
Bruno Mars – Locked Out Of Heaven
Daft Punk – Get Lucky (ft. Pharrell Williams)
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – Thrift Shop (ft. Wanz)
Rihanna – Diamonds
Robin Thicke – Blurred Lines (ft. T.I. & Pharrell)

BEST POP
Justin Bieber
Katy Perry
Miley Cyrus
One Direction
Taylor Swift

BEST FEMALE
Katy Perry
Lady Gaga
Miley Cyrus
Selena Gomez
Taylor Swift

BEST MALE
Bruno Mars
Eminem
Jay Z
Justin Bieber
Justin Timberlake

BEST LIVE
Beyoncé
Green Day
Justin Timberlake
Pink
Taylor Swift

BEST NEW
Bastille
Icona Pop
Imagine Dragons
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Rudimental

BEST VIDEO
Justin Timberlake – Mirrors
Lady Gaga – Applause
Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball
Robin Thicke – Blurred Lines (ft. T.I. & Pharrell)
Thirty Seconds To Mars – Up In The Air

BEST ROCK
Black Sabbath
Green Day
Kings Of Leon
Queens Of The Stone Age
The Killers

BEST ALTERNATIVE
Arctic Monkeys
Fall Out Boy
Franz Ferdinand
Paramore
Thirty Seconds To Mars

BEST HIP HOP
Drake
Eminem
Jay Z
Kanye West
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

BEST ELECTRONIC
Afrojack Avicii
Calvin Harris
Daft Punk
Skrillex

BIGGEST FANS
Tokio Hotel
Thirty Seconds To Mars
One Direction
Justin Bieber
Lady Gaga

BEST LOOK
Harry Styles
Justin Timberlake
Lady Gaga
Rihanna
Rita Ora

BEST PUSH
Karmin (October 2012)
Rudimental (November 2012)
Imagine Dragons (January 2013)
A$AP Rocky (February 2013)
Bastille (March 2013)
Austin Mahone (April 2013)
Bridgit Mendler (May 2013)
Tom Odell (June 2013)
Iggy Azalea (July 2013)
Icona Pop (August 2013)
Twenty One Pilots (September 2013)

BEST WORLD STAGE
Alicia Keys – WS Manchester 2012
fun. – WS Rock Am Ring 2013
Garbage - WS Mexico 2012
Green Day – WS Rock Am Ring 2013
Jason Mraz – WS Live In Myanmar 2012
Jessie J – WS Malta 2013
Linkin Park – WS Mexico 2012
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – WS Wireless 2013
No Doubt – WS Frankfurt 2012
Paramore – WS Rock Am Ring 2013
Rita Ora – WS Malta 2013
Robin Thicke – WS Malaysia 2013
Snoop Lion – WS Durban 2013
The Black Keys – WS NY Webster City Hall 2012
The Killers – WS Big Day Out 2013

Alicia Keys. ALICIA KEYS.

One other observation: Isn't it incredible how quickly a list with fun. on sounds dated?

Darkness at 3AM: Billie Joe shows his pants

There's been a lot of stories amongst travellers recently of airlines suddenly imposing dress codes on top of the extra fees and crammed misery they already inflict on their passengers.

And now, suddenly, the fight against low-slung pants on tightly-loaded planes has pulled in a famous name.

Well, semi-famous. The 3AM Girls report Billie Joe-Armstrong has been kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight after refusing to pull his trousers up:

An ABC7 news producer who was on the same flight told the station that a flight attendant approached Armstrong as the plane was getting ready to take off and asked him to hike his trousers higher. The producer, Cindy Qiu, says Armstrong initially responded by asking the attendant if there weren't "better things to do than worry about that?"

But the attendant persisted and told Armstrong he could be ejected for his refusal to comply. When Armstrong insisted he was just trying to get to his seat, he and a travelling companion were taken off the plane.

I'm assuming that the Southwest staff had merely been suspicious why a thirty nine year-old man was dressed up like a fifteen year-old. Who wouldn't be?

Green Day don't want to go to WalMart

You'd have thought - given their target audience tends to be the sort who still go shopping with their parents - Green Day would be determined to do everything they could to make sure their new record, 21st Century Breakdown, would appear on the shelves of WalMart.

It's too their credit, though, that they have refused the edits the store demanded and taken the loss of not having the record in the stores:

[I]n Armstrong's view, "There's nothing dirty about our record."

"They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there," he said. "We just said no. We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something."

There is a wider point, though: WalMart say in their defence that they won't stock Parental Advisory stickered product, and it's up to the bands involved if they want to make a version which avoids the sticker.

You could ask why Green Day choose to rail against WalMart for rejecting stickered content, rather than at the stickering process in the first place.

You might even ask that if you support Tipper Gore types who don't like sweary music, in fact. Because surely WalMart refusing to stock the parental advisory stickers is not just an indication of prissiness on their part, but also that the sticker system doesn't really work. Because if stickering did keep kids from "unacceptable" content, surely WalMart would be just as happy to sell Green Day's album to its customers as they are, for example, to sell them the SAW movies?

Green Day, grey minutes

Thanks to @Electroweb for news of how quickly the Green Day ticket sale turned in to a tout payday:

wow, touts are quick! Green Day tix on GetMeIn 10 mins after sale starts for mere 3 x value... good old Ticketmaster...

Of course, it helps when the official sales outlet are also the official home of touting, doesn't it?

Producerobit: Jerry Finn

Jerry Finn - who has been pronounced dead several times online over the last few weeks - actually passed on Thursday 21st, reports Billboard.

The 39 year-old had worked with most of the figures in the post-Green Day "punk" scene - his big break had been engineering on Dookie - but after a list of credits including AFI and Blink 182, he took on the perhaps surprising role as producer for Morrissey's You Are The Quarry. This year, his last major production work would be for Morrissey again, on Years Of Refusal.

Finn suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in July and was taken off life support earlier this month. There are plans for a memorial fund in his name.

Billie Joe reveals 'real' and 'stagnant' are antonyms

Poor old Green Day - having wrought a world in which every band is a bit like them (by making being a bit like Blink 182 seem, sort of, cool), they're now struggling to find isnpiration for their next record:

“We have a lot of music – something like 45 songs. It’s total chaos, I want to dig into who I am and what I’m feeling at this moment – which is middle aged.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years now. You want to make sure you’re being honest with yourself. I also have to ask myself ‘what’s real out there?’ Right now, it seems stagnant.”

We're not sure that stagnancy and unreality are the same thing, and we're a little lost as to why a stagnant music scene would suddenly make recording music difficult - isn't it better to have something to react against.

How, we wonder, does Armstrong check that the songs he's writing are being honest with him? Does he hire a detective to go through their bins, checking for unexplained restaurant receipts or discarded gifts? Or does he use a lie detector test of some sort?

Fall Out Boy: There really is no rush

The soothing balm contained in the news that Fall Out Ball have written a load of new songs is that they want to wait until they do anything with them, says Patrick Stump:

"I've got a bunch of songs written, but I think I'm going to wait a while before we release it, because I'm still really proud of this record and I want to kind of give it some space."

Presumably, he'll wait until the pride in the current album turns to shame, which could take quite a long time. After all, for most people, the cloying sense of shameful dullness would have started to kick in at the first playback of the record, and since Stump managed to get through apparently unaware that he's produced a record with all the charm of a salmon farm downpipe, who's to say if he'll ever feel it?

There is, though, to be some progression the next time Fall Out Boy record. And not just new sponsors:

"[Billie Joe Armstrong] he didn't want to play four-chord punk rock for the rest of his life. If anybody knows anything about punk rock more than Billie Joe from Green Day, I don't know who it is. So I looked at that and their growth, and I think about how honest that is. They're really just true to what they are, and so that's how we are.

"I think we'll change stylistically, but at the end of the day, that's just something you wear. You're still yourself."

Lessons in being punk from Green Day. It's like picking up a primer for the EU constitution by Richard Littlejohn.

From Pink to Green

If Courtney Love can be believed...

Hold on, we just realised what we said.

She has announced that Linda Perry is going to produce the next Green Day album, something which she puts down to Perry having appeared on Love's next record. Rather than, say, Perry's track record of working on successful, mainstream-idea-of-edge albums in her own right, then.

Remember Darfur; forget Lennon

You could be forgiven for not having noticed yesterday's day of action to show solidarity with the people of Darfur - presumably bands were too busy arguing about how many solar-paneled toilets they get at Live Earth to do anything about it. So credit to Green Day, who have recorded a special track for Darfur victims. It's a cover of Working Class Hero, which wouldn't have been our choice, but it should raise a load of cash when it goes up on iTunes tomorrow.

Save Darfur petition
Oxfam's Darfur appeal page

Gerard does it Billie's way

Uneasy lays the head which wears the Hot Topic hairdye. Poor old Gerald ("Gerard") Way from My Chemical Romance finds it so hard being a role model. So who does he turn to? Billie Joe, apparently. (Wouldn't he be better off with a girlfriend or boyfriend?) Billie Joe understands:

Way admits he finds it difficult being a role model for youngsters, and is grateful to have found a friend in the AMERICAN IDIOT singer - although he doesn't want to trouble the star with all his problems.

He says, "The problem is, there aren't many people I can ask for advice. From time to time I've talked to Billie Joe from Green Day.

"He's the type of guy I can talk to all day, but he's having downtime at the minute so I don't want to bother him."

That sounds to me like he's trying to dump you, Gerald. Perhaps you could ask Robert Smith for Pete Wentz's number?