Hotpants Romance: Back, back, back

Hotpants Romance - who have been on maternity hiatus - are back. They're returning on Valentine's Day at Salford University. (Sorry - that should be 'Salford University: Manchester', shouldn't it?)

This is what we've been missing:

Gordon in the morning: Telling lies

Gordon Smart is shocked today. Shocked. It turns out that people in showbusiness lie:

POP babe ANASTACIA has lied about her age for a decade, she confessed yesterday.

Poor Gordon must be startled. People making things up? It's hard to believe, isn't it?

It turns out that Anastacia is actually sixty-three.

Alright, not really. This making things up malarkey is clearly catching. She shaved four years off her age, which doesn't reflect incredibly well on her, but is hardly the greatest lie of all time. Gordon tries to work up some outrage:

She even kept up the fib when she fell ill with breast cancer at 35, claiming to be 31 — to give hope to other young sufferers.

This seems a little unfair - it's not like if you have breast cancer at 35 it's not cruelly young, is it? And it's a bit unfair to suggest she lied in order to "give hope" to younger cancer sufferers; she was already fibbing when she was diagnosed and, you'd guess, if you've just been told you've got cancer your first priority might not be correcting having shaved a few years off your CV.

Still, 'female entertainer lies a little about her age' is a massive story compared with one of Gordon's other scoops this morning:

ROCK giants REM went on stage hours after cops pulled a man’s body from the river outside their Manchester hotel yesterday.

Goodness - 'something unconnected happens near pop group; gig not cancelled'. It's a wonder Rebekah Wade wasn't breaking out the 75 point type.

Professor Marr

There's a lovely piece in today's education Guardian marking the start of Johnny Marr's role as visiting professor in music and recording at Salford University:

Marr hopes to be involved on all levels - from working with university bands, helping them to analyse and deconstruct their own songs, to giving talks on the processes of forming a band and making records, debunking some of rock's enduring myths. Such as? "The idea that producers are dweebs with no legs who sit and twiddle knobs," he says. "I can show bands how to produce themselves. In the same way, many bands think you can't make it without some fat cat in London or New York to manage you. That's just crap. All you need is someone a bit older than you with a bit of business nous whom you trust. The Beatles and U2 did it that way and so did The Smiths. I got to know this bloke [Joe Moss] who ran the clothes shop next door to the one I was working in and I'm proud to say we've been together ever since."

Perhaps of more interest to the Smithsheads is his reaction on returning to the site of that record sleeve shoot:

"I'd never given it a moment's thought," Marr says, "until they started taking pictures at my university inauguration last year. I looked around, saw the red brick walls and thought, 'this is familiar'."

Marr laughs it off, suggesting the brainfreeze was merely the product of a lifelong desire to forget that photo.

"I just hate it."

Because it's become so iconic and stylised?

"Nah. Because I look so crap in it. It's the one frame I'd put an X against to show that I didn't like it and then someone - who looked exactly the same in every single picture - decided to use it just to piss me off."

"Someone", eh? Wonder who that could possibly be?

The Christmas Number One, 2008, starts here

Oh, god, already the jostling has started for a Christmas number one.

Now, we've a lot of respect for the team at the Salford Lad's Club, and the work they do. But their plan to reunite The Smiths to record a song for fundraising is a little upsetting.

Never mind the problem of getting Morrissey and the rest of the Smiths in the same studio while Joyce is still suing Mozzer, of course. Let's imagine the band are reunited - something of a dream/nightmare scenario for Smiths fans, of course. What will they be recording?

The song of choice is The Associated Youth Clubs of Manchester's very own anthem 'Ending Youth Struggle', which [club treasurer Mike] Scantlebury suggests could be re-written as the 'Trendy Youth Shuffle'.

Trendy youth shuffle? Really? You wait twenty years for a Smiths reunion and they're going to be trotting out a Chicken Shack style 'young folks aren't all glue sniffers' anthem. Could it get any worse?

Erm, yes:

[T]he club hopes to create a Manchester supergroup including The Hollies and Herman's Hermits.

So, the historic prospect of a Smiths reunion, only with Peter Noone sharing vocals with Morrissey. It's like getting The Beatles back together, but with Atomic Kitten doing half the verses.

Mozzer helps the lads

As if to demonstrate that, you know, he's not such a grumpy old man, Morrissey has given twenty grand to Salford Lads' Club. Like the secret millionaire did in The Secret Millionaire, but without hanging about the place pretending not to be a millionaire. The club - which featured on a Smiths record sleeve despite not being Pat Phoenix or someone like that - is currently in the midst of a massive fund-raising drive to repair the fabric of the building.

Cyclists ride for Mozzer's roof

A bunch of Smiths fans have come together to do a sponsored bike ride to help replace the lead stolen from Salford Lad's Club. The one on the inner sleeve of The Queen Is Dead:

Author Phil Gatenby, whose book Panic on the Streets details Smiths landmarks around Manchester, said the theft was bitterly poignant because it had connections with some Smiths' lyrics.

He said: "In the song Vicar in a Tutu there is a line which says: 'I was minding my business lifting some lead off the roof of the Holy Name Church', so it was important that we included this building on the ride."

Presumably the cyclists will also be breaking into the Palace to play piano to the Queen.

The thieves also took the guttering off the listed building, although there isn't actually a Morrissey song about pinching guttering - although, really, it feels as if there should have been.