SIX MUSIC FOR ANY PEOPLE: Let's hope this time they stick with it, but the BBC are on the point of launching a music station that sounds like it could have been one of those ideal stations you used to draw up on the back of your school exercise books during dull moments. BBC 6 Music - though restricted to DAB, net and Sky - has a lip-smacking prospect taking it beyond the archive-hugging station that the working titled Network Y had threatened. Instead, while promising to make use of the BBC's music archive (and about time too, of course) the station is going to function a bit like the old Night-time Radio One meets GLR meets the old Radio 5 - indeed, most of the presenters come from those three stations (Liz Kershaw, Janice Long, Long's holiday fill-in Tom Robinson, Sean Hughes, Phil Jupitus) and the promises of performance speak of a station that will still be down the shops each Monday to rummage through the new releases, as well as emerging from the attic carrying long-forgotten Hendrix recordings.
Of course, we could quibble - clearly, Danny Baker should be doing the breakfast show, and it would have been nice perhaps to have a daytime rerun of the previous evening's Peel programme, for example - but the plans seem to offer something coherent (unlike the old Radio 5) and seem to have been a labour of love. We can't be certain until it's launched, of course, but this could be the closest we've yet got to the sounds in our heads being let out into the air.
Coming soon... - Also features Collins and Maconie. Let's hope they get together and recreate the Hit Parade...

RICHEY: OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF...: So it's seven years to the day that Richey "disappeared", puzzling the sharpest minds of Avon & Somerset Police - "His car was parked by a famous suicide spot. He was badly depressed. He had an obsession with artists who killed themselves. He was a self-abuser. No money has been withdrawn from any of his accounts since. And there has been no sign of him since. Nope, can't imagine what's happened there." Of course, it's a tragedy of enormous proportions - personally, for his family and friends; artistically for anyone who's watched the Manics become bloated pillows forced over the faces of all that their youthful selves stood for. Of course, some people grow up, grow old, slower, more willing to compromise, and while behaviour that looks essential when you can still taste your teen years on your breath can start to become stale when you're halfway to getting subsidised bus journeys, it's a pity the Manics didn't take a cue from New Order and at least repackage themselves when they watered the contents down. It's not just a day to remember seven years without a bright, inspired young man; it's a day to feel sad that even Somerset and Avon could discover the bloated corpse of Manicdom.
BBC News retrospective on Richey, who could have officially died today -There's a really, really cute picture of him here...
of course, Manics fans have got far more important things to worry about - faking their own deaths, to even consider Richey. It's also interesting to
note that the front page of the official manics.co.uk on the seventh anniversary is choosing to headline Nicky Wire's contribution to a book about football rather than a memorial note. Wasn't football one of those things that the manics was in opposition to?

PICTURES OF SHINY NEW CARS SELL RECORDS: Chumbawamba agree to allow GM to use one of their tracks in a TV campaign, and give their share of the booty to anti-GM campaigns. See, they only let them use the track so they could sell some albums, and, of course, if they give the cash to a small campaigning group, it's karma-neutral, right?
Wrong. Because the Pontiac spot will be riddled through the American media for ages, while the $70,000 the Chumbs have given will fund - what? a small ad in the back of the new internationalist, a couple of banners for a protest outside Ellesmere Port, and maybe a small website. That'll balance it out.
Besides, when did selling records suddenly become so motivated to flog CDs? Back during the Band Aid era, they released the splentically titled Pictures of starving babies sell records. Perhaps true, but at least Bob didn't sign a deal to let Do They Know Its Christmas promote the very drought he was campaigning against. It all smacks of how lazy and indeed arrogant the band have come - as with the Brits a few years back, when they hoped a pisspoor dousing of John Prescott would stop people noticing they'd been paid hard cash to dance like buffons for his entertainment just ten minutes earlier.
Chumbwamba will sing for food - Next planning a 'have your cake, eat your cake' campaign for Mr. Kipling

AS IF NOTHING REALLY MATTERS: The March of the SleeperblokeZombies continues, as Catatonia without Cerys continue to pile up songs and promise to carry on, carry on. While you wish them luck, and acknowledge that they were always a great band musically as well as vocally, you can't help feel that this is on a par with the Duchovny less X Files - something sorely missing indeed.
This could be a case for Scully and that other bloke - Cerys, of course, has sung with Tom Jones

THREE LIONS ON MY CARDIGAN: Blimey, I'd thought the Cardigans had split up or gone into some sort of suspended solo-project hell, but The Sun seem convinced they're going to do the England World Cup song this year. On the grounds that Sven Goran is Swedish, and so are they. And Abba aren't going any more.
And the Sun couldn't probably think of any other Swedish bands...
It'll be a cover of my favourite game, of course... - "has sung with Tom Jones" - for shame, Nina...

BYE, BYE: Mariah Carey dropped. Really, this time. It seems that what EMI must have objected to when the stories that she'd been given $25m to piss off out the offices and not deliver any more bikini clad drivel appeared was that they undervalued the amount that they really, really wanted to see the back of her by $3m
BBC reports - now, lets try to find celine dion...

NEVER MIND THE BUZZGOTHS: One of Fields of the Neff was on the line-up on Never Mind... last night, although they looked more like a trip to a Clint Eastwood lookalike convention, and, naturally, it's got all the cybergoths slightly over-excited, as Slashgoth shows.

SIMPLY YEARS AHEAD: An unlikely opponent of the new CDs that you can't play on PCs ("copy protected", as the labels would have it) has emerged in the form of Philips. The Dutch company that invented the format, and still jeaously guards the rules, wants companies who use the copy protection to mark their products with a Poison symbol, and to refrain from using the "Compact Disc" logo. Seems they're upset that the crappy quality of the secure CDs is in danger of undermining trust in the format, and they want it made clear that a CD which won't spin and sing in a CD tray ain't no CD at all. Meanwhile, further opposition to the blocking of copies from CDs is being mounted under 'fair use' rules - because, of course, the giant padlock doesn't only stop pirates from pirating, but people who've paid money for a CD converting it to MP3, say, for their own use. The case is even dodgier for record companies in those countries where they successfully lobied for a surcharge on blank recordable media to reward them for copies made.
Register reports - but has anyone merely tried taping the Natalie Imbroogywoogy track, and ripping the MP3 from that?

... and apparently after her first book come sout Lousie Wener is planning on writing a second about a big chart-rigging scandal. Aha, that'd be how Sleeper records kept getting as high as number 34...

George Harrisson replaces Aaliyah at number one, first time that one corpse has unseated another at the top of the singles chart. Quick, someone put a disco beat on Ernie and rush relase it... go on...

Dido forced out of Best Female Newcomer category at Brits. Unclear which word she was disqualified on.

BBC RADIO RESHUFFLE: The BBC launch Five Live Plus in March. What's that got to do with music? Not much, except that in its wake will come Network X and Network Y, two new music stations. X will be an urban station (as in Artie's phrase from Larry Sanders, "Lenny Kravitz is only half urban"), while Y will be an archive station. This raises a major question: namely, where's the BBC going to put Evening Session type music in the future? Assuming Radio One continues to be mainly chart and pop led (I know they say they support new music first, but anything that's not mainstream gets shunted further and further into the schedules - its no coincidence that Peel is now back in the slot he occupied during the days of the Bierling regime, and Kershaw's been shoved so far down he's popped out onto Radio 3), and 2 is aimed at the swathe of people between "slippers are quite comfortable" and "did he have a favourite suit, madam?", there doesn't seem to be an outlet for guitarry, rocky, type music. This would be curious anyway, but with the massive interest (be it ever so slack jawed) in loud, shouting, back to front baseball cap tunes, it seems to be missing out a whole subsection of youthage. Unless the idea is to more or less banish R&B and garage from most of Radio 1's output, but that hardly seems a wise move either artistically or politically - not many So Solid Crew fans with three hundred quid DAB machines yet, I'd guess...

JACKDAW TAKES SOME LOOKING AFTER: Cerys' new song-from-kids-TV-show is up online, at the Radio One Session In Wales site, in both local and British languages. Quite long for a theme for what we'd assumed was going to be a Paddington-length piece, its bright and jolly and a million times better for the lack of Tom Jones on it.
English version
Welsh version

TAKE HIVE: The Hives currently leading the Amazon hour-by-hour chart, which sort-of-suggests that this year is getting off to a start a bit like the last one ended - 2002 some sort of perhaps-rock year, then. Elsewhere, a reviewer of Dido's No Angel reports the music "bewilderded" them. "Perfect for revising to" enthuses the chap from Cardiff - and who could fail to be proud that their music makes the ideal backdrop for forcing the map of the periodic table into your cranial gaps?

YOU THINK WE'RE OUT-OF-DATE?: NME currently offering tickets to last year's cancelled Catatonia gig. Meanwhile, Cerys has returned to live performance, singing for a BBC Wales Max Boyce St David's Day special. I know that Welsh artists get pissed off with sly leek-pun headlines, but is it any wonder that they get that sort of thing when they do things like this?

2001: THE YEAR IN ONE POST

From slightly scrappy starts, we grew like this:

07 January 2001


14 January 2001



21 January 2001


28 January 2001


04 February 2001


11 February 2001


18 February 2001



04 March 2001


18 March 2001


25 March 2001


22 April 2001


29 April 2001



06 May 2001


20 May 2001


03 June 2001


10 June 2001


17 June 2001



01 July 2001


08 July 2001


15 July 2001


02 September 2001


14 October 2001



21 October 2001


28 October 2001


04 November 2001


11 November 2001


25 November 2001



09 December 2001


16 December 2001


30 December 2001



And, yes, we've fixed this...

SXSW LINE UP: Chicks on Speed, Beulah, Clinic, all going to be doing the 2002 Souht by SouthWest festival - following on from a year when the Blake Babies reformed. Makes the Glasto line-up look tame, doesn't it?

ILL WIND: Amazon's hot music chart reporting that Big Country's entered the most requested albums chart - albeit at number 99. Checking on the 'customers who bought' links, and ignoring other Adamson-related stuff (nothing by the Skids, mind you) throws up that Adamsonites also enjoy history at both ends of the brow, with Sharpe and Schama both being checked through alongside the CD. And the Shrek DVD.
Meanwhile, checking out what people who bought the obviously stocking-orientated Robbie Williams "I slaughter sinatra" Swing When You're Winning CD doesn't surprise. They are as awful as you'd expect. Robbie jostles for sack space with Gabrielle, Sting and S-Club7; while the literature that will be flicked on Christmas day runs the gamut of Grisham to the William's biog, Delia to Oliver. Happy days.

FURTHER LAZY BSN CUT AND PASTE:
Fran Healy announces to the world that he wants to impregnate his girlfriend. "Maybe we could have talked about this first" she muses. They're getting married because "it's traditional", apparently.

Dave Matthews, Sheryl Crow, Train all to play the Winter Olympics. "We didn't want anything that seemed to be more exciting than long distance ski-ing" explain organisers.

Scott Weiland admits "I'm wife-beating scum"

Korn announce new album and this time "it's recorded using higher sampling rate", apparently

Breeders comeback latest

Concert for Choice line-up apparently hit by the existence of more attractive Sepven related charidees - this year, it's Bruce Hornsby and Ani DiFranco

Hats off to Merseymart for overstatement. They report the 2002 summer pops is going to be the "greatest ever." Considering in the past couple of years they've had Dylan, Elton and Chuck Berry, then, surely, there must be huge acts coming next year? "Supertramp are already booked" breathes the local freesheet...

Melanie Blatt used fake bottom for mobile phone advert

And finally, Guardian Media Monkey reports: "Monkey imagined that relationships between style mags and their feature-fodder should be based on Patsy 'n' Edina style schmoozing and an all-round warm glow of mutual happiness. So imagine our surprise at a terse editor's letter in the January edition of the Face, which accuses the UK's newest garage phenomenon, So Solid Crew, of bigotry and theft. "In October, So Solid Crew - on one level, the brightest stars to emerge this year - turned out for their Face cover shoot," writes editor Johnny Davis. "They started their interview by asking the journalist if he was gay" andfinished, he claimed, by disappearing with £4,000 worth of ski jackets and trainers. Phew. Anything else you'd like to get off your chest, Johnny?"

ANOTHER LAZY CUT AND PASTE FROM BOTHSIDESNOW:
Bowie divorces Virgin; tells Iman: "The bank's with me, my manager's with me - I'm going it alone."

In the wake of Stuart Adamson, BBC News mulls over other stars who disappeared. Don't you think 'Marvin Gaye - The Ostend years' would make a great movie? The Manics continued "albeit in a more stable fashion" after Richey's disappearance. That'd be the lower centre of gravity, of course...

Meanwhile, a strangely moving piece from the ever reliable friend of a friend of Stuart Adamson...

(Small) stadium tribute planned to Adamson, although manager admits "it's not what he would have wanted"...

Another Scots popstar found: Marti Pellow resurfaces in Beckindale...

...while Lemmy having trouble coming to terms with George Harrison's death.
"The last one to hit me like this was Sid Vicious" he tells Kerrang. It's not that all the deaths in between wouldn't have upset him, just he was too pissed then to notice.

.. and Kurt's mum is disgusted with Nirvana's attempts to sue Courtney...

Collaborations we could happily have done without: Ryan Adams and... him out of Starsailor

Coldplay announce next album "inspired by September 11th." Chris Martin says the new songs "tell people not to be afraid." Of course you shouldn't be afraid - because even if you do die in the name of some peversion of a fundamentalist creed, there'll always be some bunch of ideaed-out twats who'll seize your tragedy to fill their artistic void...

Bloke jailed for crashing Missy Elliot's car. Presumably for his own protection.

PUT YOUR BRITS AWAY: Britney in trouble with her new movie, apparently, as test audiences find Crossroads too "raunchy", leading to reshoots of certain scenes. Where are they testing these things? Amish Country?
Dotmusic reports - and provides a link to a story headlined "Britney gives relief", which may be worth checking out in light of this news. And that, in turn, links to "Britney goes into action"...

BLOW-UP: In a way, you could almost feel sorry for The Coup, who would have remained a fairly obscure hip hop band were it not for the accident of history that saw their Party Music album have an image of them blowing up the World Trade Centre slated for release in September. Suddenly, they find themselves having to try and explain away a dumbcool exploding image with some sort of coherent political stance. For its review of 2001, the NME gives them the chance. They speak to Boots, and apparently he's suing a British newspaper for claiming he has links with Muslim fundamentalists. Well, yes, that's fair enough But just listen to the flip-flop of a half-eaten thought that passes for the politics of the Coup: "We do support violent revolution but the point is here is that there has always been a difference between a revolution by the people, which takes hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to do, and a terrorist act, which is completely different. If you look at the writings of Lenin and Mao, they're always against terrorist acts." [NB: this is wrong, anyway - see Lenin's words and Mao's , for example] This comes after Boots has condemned the bombing of Kabul. But hang about... if terrorism is okay when it's got the support of large numbers of people, then shouldn't the US bombing of Afghanistan be okay, then? Or Israeli attacks on... come back...

WK A PLANT: MORE EVIDENCE: In this weeks surprisingly good NME stars-pose-questions for Macca piece, party-loving Trojan Horse Andrew WK chooses to ask Paul if "raising a family" was his greatest achievement. (For comparison, Marilyn Manson asks how Paul felt about Chuckie Manson's love of Helter Skelter, and Britney asks about having a young family while being hugely famous and busy). bsn says: Don't be surprised when WK runs for Senate in a decade... for the right.
By the way, the NME has changed all its pages, so the links up to this point don't work anymore. Cheers, NME.

DURST THOU DARE QUESTION ME? The sad story of the person who died at the Big Day Out continues to rumble on, with the inquest in Australia throwing up some interesting questions. Apparently the Bizkit are upset that the press keeps choosing to play up the band's alleged contribution to the problem rather than their worrying about security beforehand. This is interesting, since if Durst and his bandmates had been so worried about the arrangements made for their fan's safety before the gig, when the situation got nasty why did they then decide to encourage the crowd to abuse the bouncers who were trying to help? (The inquest has heard that volunteer front of house staff were punched, kicked and roundly attacked as they struggled to rescue people from the crush at the front, egged on by the balding thirtysomething youth icon.) Can anyone answer the band's question as to why the press may be a little more interested in what the band while one of their fans was having the life crushed out of her, rather than what they said before the show. (A parallel would be if someone said "The brakes look dodgy on this car" and thought that would let them off if they then drove it into a bus queue). Also, and I should stress that I've not been able to see the original text of the statement (strangely missing from their website), but I understand that before the gig it was security and not safety that was exercising them - in other words, not how safe the fans would be, but how safe they would be.
It's also telling that the band appear to have not bothered to even mention the claims made at the inquest that Fred's announcement that he'd gone to see the fan as she lay in hospital was, erm, actually a lie.

Fred Durst to visit Ground Zero to get "inspiration" - no comment needed

THAT'LL BE WHY SHE'S ONLY GOT PLASTIC TITS RATHER THAN THE REAL THING: According to the World Press Review on Today this morning, USA Today have ripped into Brit this morning because (I'm paraphrasing here) she's trying to sound all sexy and experienced, but in fact, she comes across like she's not really sure what she's doing.
Hmmm.
I can't help but wonder if that's by design rather than accident, as a way of trying to keep the schoolie innocent air while simultaneously being sexualised. Keeping her just a step away from having a *threatening* sexuality...
And, of course, there's that song called "I'm not a girl; not yet a woman."

LAZY CUT AND PASTE DIRECT FROM BSN:
Peel - John Peel tells the story about weeping on the motorway when Peter "Hello, mates" Powell played Teenage Kicks. Again. And its still great.

Rossiter - Martin Rossiter does the 'home entertainment' column. It's all refined good taste, you know...

Cashback - Johnny Cash back in hospital. (Even if you don't care, follow the link and look under the "news" heading on the right of the page - "Johnny Cash shakes it all about" next, then?)

Life on earth - Westlife defend Lee "elephants are dying" Ryan's comments about the attack on New York. "He says The Sun took him out of context." A small prize for anyone who can explain a context in which "Who gives a fuck about New York when elephants are dying" wouldn't be crass and stupid. A further prize to anyone who can explain how the Sun were able to take him out of context in a live webchat. Westlife say they hope the situation in Afghanistan gets back to normal as soon as possible - so, that would be a repressive regime supplying heroin through the Russian mafia while its own people starve, refusing to allow people to have televisions, a complete lack of rights for women at all, and a debilitating civil war, then? Mind you, its not all bad, as at least the Taliban ban on music would spare the Afghanis the new Westlife album.

SHARE UPDATE: People who count such things are saying that half as many people are swapping music files online compared with this time last year, although that doesn't throw any light on whether the numbers of actual files are falling or not. The inheritor services to Napster don't have as many users, which would imply fewer tracks zinging back and forth, but it's possible that now the sharers have receeded to the most hardcore of users, so files per head could have increased. Whatever, the record companies told us that their business was being affected by file-swapping, so a massive fall in file-swapping must mean their business is improving, right?
EMI lose another executive - apparently not, then...

SPLIT UPDATE: Tim Booth is going to quit James after this tour; Neil Hannon is going solo. Can you say "Midlife crisis"?

PARRYS, TEXAS: So, Sharleen from Texas is putting music on hold to concentrate on developing an acting career, is she? Well, who could turn down the chance to act opposite Ed Furlong? And since he's worked with the absurd Arnie, its not like she's going to be the worst person to share a screen with him, is it? Apparently, she was offered the part Nicole Kidman played in Moulin Rouge, which would have at least made that single with Ewan Mcgregor a bit more bearable, and a lot more Scottish.
Singer to play detective, reports bbc - interestingly classified neither as a "film" or "music" story, but simply "showbiz"