Downloadable: The Manic Street Preachers

Also from RCRDLBL, This Joke Sport Severed. It is, though, a remix by Patrick Wolf, which doesn't feel entirely comfortable - a bit like getting Rolf Harris to add a trademark touch or two to the Seagram Murals. Still, it's free, so make your own mind up.

Patrick Wolf brings on full supporting cast

Imagine a gig featuring Alec Empire and Marc Almond. What possible force could keep any sane person from such an event?

How about the realisation that they're effectively propping up Patrick Wolf's set? Awfully nice of them to help out, but not sure that even their presence makes it worth dragging through the Emo-Mika's performance.

Wolf howls

Sure, this is a week old, but it looks likely that Patrick Wolf won't have calmed down yet. He was onstage, doing his high-end Mika thing, at a Köln pop festival, when somebody switched off the PA earlier than he would have liked.

He had a chuckle, and it was all soon forgotten.

Oh, hang on: no, he didn't:



To be fair, it does look like it started out a little tongue-in-cheek. Started out.

[via Stereogum

I used to support you

Barry S emails us in response to Patrick Wolf's drubbing of Mika to raise a salient point:

um, this wouldn't be the same patrick wolf who supported mika during his
tour, at least at the dublin date i was at, earlier this year, would it?
because he seemed so /nice/ and complimentary at the time.

Funny how you can put up with anything when someone's giving you a leg-up, eh?

Wolf doesn't like Mika much

Patrick Wolf (the indie Mika) doesn't have much time for Mika (the mainstream Patrick Wolf). It's like Esau and Jacob. Wolf blogs:

"Mika is a twat
"and what I meant was

Please lets put an end to

over marketed, expensive heartless

tacky rubbish, autotune, airbrush

should i market myself to look OUTRAGEOUS and kooky or would
it be easier if I sold records by playing safe and serene
and for the family

to save more record sales. Cliff richard. enrique iglesias.
mutton dressed as lamb."

Harsh words, and no the less stinging just because they're delivered by the bloke in the Burberry advert.

GlastOn TV: Cape, Killers, and a dodgy Cold War metaphor

Eventually, the BBC played out Babyshambles in full. With his busted voice, and ladyscarf dangling from his pocket, it was a bit like a 1970s Rod Stewart tribute act. We'd actually turned on to a different screen before Kate Moss turned up.

There was no Carl Barat on stage with Pete, and Pete didn't wander on during the Dirty Pretty Things set, either. It would be foolish to try and set the two performances up in some sort of competition with each other, but that's never stopped us. DPT were West Germany to Babyshamble's pre-unification East; you're always aware that, just as the West never lost the faith that one day Berlin would be restored at the seat of power, so Carl has a look in his eye that reunification might be a possibility, but for now, is reveling in the freedom, while Babysshambles feels like a grimmer place to be, where even the fun comes with a sense of predetermination. There is no negotiation; the party line is the only line.

Seriously: would you rather be bouncing up and down to You Fucking Love It, or hoping your smile looks genuine as Comrade Moss comes on to perform her part on La Belle?

Also, Pete: your penis looks horrible. Please, never go near TV cameras without putting underpants on, ever again. Thank you.

An even bigger fashion mistake was Patrick Wolf, who seemed to have come dressed like a Pinnochio doll from a pound shop.

And we're still not sure if the guy who was hanging round the front of the Get Cape Wear Cape Fly stage in a big red cape was a fan paying homage, a support crew member with a sense of humour, or simply enacting a Get Cape Wear Cape Steal Equipment plan. GCWCF was the highlight of yesterday evening, though - even incoporating a backdrop with a fairtrade message, which is the closest anyone's come to that much-touted "glastonbury radical spirit" we keep hearing so much about.

By contrast, The Killers had some sort of pile of dead antlers to balance their keyboards on. And, of course, they had fireworks at the end. Isn't it about time one of the headline acts could come up with a more interesting idea than just letting off a few small-scale explosions to mark the end of their set?

Iggy Pop's skin: it looks like it's made of the stuff that they used in the 1960s when fake leather technology had yet to advance to a point where it could manage to replicate the flexibility of cowhide.

Patrick: I was crying Wolf

Patrick Wolf's announcement that he was going to retire from live performance this November has sent him scrambling for an explanation to allow him to climb down gracefully. Having failed, he's told Pitchfork that he didn't mean when he posted the message on a public board on the internet for people to read it:

Um, yeah. I really want people to know that I never released a press release about this issue. I wasn't trying to get published by anybody. I was just writing a very close community of fans. Somebody took that and turned it into a big story, and it's gotten out of control. I just want people to know that, first of all, I never said I was quitting music, and second of all, I never did it in a public way.

I wouldn't know what to do if I didn't have music in my life, and this is going to turn into some kind of horrendous Mariah Carey speech, but the music has led me through many adventures and disasters and good times and total lonely times and for me to say I was going to quit music is like saying I'm going to commit suicide. It's the most extreme thing that could happen in my life. That would make me miserable, so I would never say I was quitting music, because I would never know where to start.

Pitchfork: So what did you mean by that message board post?

PW: This year's been strange because The Magic Position is about a relationship that happened a year ago, a very serene and magical time, between me and an artist called Ingrid Z. And I'm having to come and be like a vessel for all these songs, but I'm an honest performer as well. I don't even like to use the word "performance." I don't want to be a traveling businessman or salesman for my work. I want to be a musician that sings and feels and makes people feel, and when something becomes too repetitive, then I feel like I'm not doing my job.

The bad habit that I've had in the last six years since I released my first EP was to not even think that I'm a human being, that I need to sleep or to eat or to go to the toilet or have sex or anything. I just go, "Okay, I'm going on tour for the next year. Goodbye, everyone." And then I say, "Yeah, sure I'll do seven hours of interviews before a show." I do all this, and I enjoy it, but there's a certain time in every musician's life, you've got to realize-- I'm kind of like Britney Spears in a way. I've been doing it as a teenager, so I'm kind of trying to start thinking about being a human so I can start to make my work again. I have to be like the mother and father of my work and say, "It's time to go to bed, Patrick, and it's time not to open your mouth, and it's time to create."

So... erm, that's clearer then: when he posted something on the internet you weren't supposed to read it and what he meant seems to have been "It's a shit business."

That makes it a lot clearer.

Thrown to the wolves?

After a bit of a falling out with his drummer, Patrick Wolf apparently announced he was quitting playing tours, and then withdrew the statement. However, diligent internet monkeys gathered up what is claimed to have been a posting announcing he was quitting:

"I have made a decision, my final concert will be this november, a retrospective with an orchestra in London. I am not sure wether there will be anymore public communications after that, Infact I am pretty sure there will be none. Of course, this has nothing to do with my drummer.. but a creative clock is ticking and I have many many projects to be creating with my time left on this earth. I hope to share my last shows with you this year."

Well, yes, who has time for touring round the world playing songs when the pipes in the loft still need lagging and there's potatoes to be planted?

The drummer sackage, says Wolf, was inevitable:

"[M]y drummer was causing arguments within my road family, taking sedative drugs before an important show in a city i really love, so much so he could not play the music I wrote, the songs that I have survived on in the last six years... because I had to slap him to see if he was even CONSCIOUS on stage.... the fact that the only thing that got any reaction out his corpse happened to be made of metal.. because all of this.. does this make me seem like I was on cocaine, or on some power trip?

There was no other way to check he was alive beyond hitting him with metal sticks, then? What a loss Wolf is to the medical profession. He doesn't stop to wonder if the reason why the drummer fell asleep while Patrick was in full flow might have something, you know, to do with the show itself, you'll note.

"I was pissed off because this was just one more musician or businessman taking my good nature and generosity for a ride... trust me, that moment onstage was the end of a long line of bad behaviour that it would unfair to go into in public. Yes I was drunk, but It was one oclock in the morning after seven hours of interviews. I had been running on about four hours of sleep a night for about two weeks... such is the joy of promoting a record. Anyway, I was having FUN until that moment. So was the rest of my band until we realised my drummer was taking the piss out of all of us and our hard work. I dont work with liars and I dont work with thieves."

Hang about... it was one in the morning and hardly anyone had been getting any sleep? Under these circumstances, the drummer seems to be no more at fault than poor, mute Katya, whose round-the-clock stitching of uninsured dungarees at Underworld resulted in her silent slide down the metal stairwell and death on the Coronation Street cobbles. Wolf is lucky he didn't have to haul a dead drummer out of the prying eyes of health and safety.

Wolf & Winehouse

There are some partnerships that work really well. There are others that just put the fear of god into you. We suspect Patrick Wolf and Amy Winehouse coming together for a slew of US gigs might come from the "I'm Pasquale, He's Walsh" drawer.