P45 FOR TRYING TO ENFORCE BEDTIME: According to nme.com, the Libertines have given their tour manager the push because he was "too strict:" and tried to keep the band in some sort of one piece while they ripped through the country leaving a trail of spew, groupies, spunk, blood, cash, beer, sniffing, spitting, gizzards, lizards, petrol, polyvinylchloride and so on in their wake. The question is, though, if the band were out shagging, spending and shouting, how strict could the guy have been in the first place?

SLAUGHTERING THE SACRED ABERDEEN ANGUS: Never let it be said we can't take a joke. And we were happily diverted by Bad Scottish Pop , a collection of perceived national shame; whereby certains bands from what English people are obliged to whimsically refer to as "north of the border" are outed as doing for Scots culture what the Angus Steak House chain did for the image of the nation's cuisine. But then... they had to have a pop at Clare Grogan, didn't they?

MORE FROM THE WORLD OF CONTENT: BBC Breakfast was reporting today that Blockbuster aren't offering Oceans Eleven on DVD for rental, because the price that AOL Time Warner was demanding for it left them unable to make a profit on the deal. Oddly, the spokesperson from AOL said that the decision to rack up the price for rental copies was due to "customer demand" and, somehow, by pricing the DVD out of the rental market this was extending "customer choice." Indeed, it was up to customers to decide "what to do with their disposable income." I wish I was making this up, really I do. So, again, we're looking at a situation where the Recording Industry are shooting off their own feet again. Because if you've got four quid and want to see Ocean's Eleven, and you can't get it from Blockbuster, doesn't this make the bloke down in accounts who gets the knock-off videos from the Car Boot seem a lot more attractive?

IT'S ALL FOR YOU: It's nice of Jim Moir to thank the tabloids, and to suggest that their supportive stories was better than "a motorway's worth of poster advertising", but before Yelland and Morgan start to circulate the praise, they may want to sit down and think exactly what that would amount to, since, erm, there's no poster advertising allowed by the side of motorways.
Nevertheless, we're currently enjoying the Radio 2 TV campaign, based on the "treat it like a friend" slogan. It shows people doing exactly that - so a nonplussed Stuart Maconie is instructed to wait in line for tickets while someone nips off for popcorn, Terry Wogan gets asked to refill a window cleaner's bucket, and so on. We'd like to volunteer for a slot where someone gets drunk and makes an awkward fumble towards Jeremy Vine for when he joins.

LETS BE AVENUE: West Yorkshire Police have stuck up online mugshots of twenty four men they want to talk to in relation to the Leeds Festival meltdown back in August. One of them appears to be about ten years old; another looks a bit like The Actor Kevin Eldon...

BROOKSIDE STORY: To mark the slippage of Brookside, and because we're not sure anyone will notice when it finally goes, we offer: ten great rock-related Brookside events:
1. "You're Morrissey"
"Yes, I know"
As part of the ill-fated soap bubble South, Tracy Corkhill finds herself in the reception area of Capital Radio, next to the Smiths front man. The dialogue runs to the two lines above. South was a part of ITV For Schools English Programme, and because Thames TV forgot to remind Channel 4, its supposed evening repeat never materialised, meaning Mozzer's soap debut played to Brookie's smallest ever audience (well, up until about 1999, anyway)

2. The kidnapping of Paula Yates
Our uber-heroine Karen Grant is due to interview Paula Yates for a student magazine. Damon tags along. The whole gang get kidnapped by students indulging in some sort of rag week prank. (Compare with the kidnapping of that other tragic blonde Bet Lynch, also as a rag week stunt.)

3. Fran's Band
"You take it/ you change it/ what are you really after?"
Pat 'the Pillock' Hancock winds up in his girlfriend's band, which seems to have no name other than Fran's band. At first the band are offered a contract to tour somewhere vaguely overseas, but it turns out that the management company are only interested in Pat and the odd Sinead O'Connor a-like who hates him. But, since opportunity has knocked, they don't turn down the opportunity.

4. The Pies
Mike Dixon's band appears on the same John Moores University Student's Union bill as the legendary scouse act The Pies (known mainly for their painting of every flat surface on Merseyside). Unfortunately, his singer has taken so much Bad Drugs, she decides to strip off instead. This is better than listening to Mike's Band.

5. The Lomax toilets and roof
Liverpool music people chuckled to see Lomax owner Michael Hindley in a small cameo role as a bouncer in his own club the night the Luke Musgrove/Nikki Shadwick rape storyline came to a poorly conceived end - not that anyone cared by then, they just wanted it over. The episode made much use of the gents in the Lomax (the second of three sites for the club) and the roof of the same venue - the gents was especially unrecognisable since nobody came in during the long heart-to-heart between Nikki and Luke, and the floor wasn't a mixture of piss, blood and sweat

6. From Cantrill Farm to Manor Park
In so many ways, The Farm are Brookside's house band. Not only is Brookie script-hammerer Roy Boulter a former memeber of Hooton and the Blown-Its, but The Farm also made guest appearances in the series in a complicated plot involving Growler Rogers, and Harry Cross both appeared in the video for one of their tracks and then popped up in a deck chair while they played it on the Word. Later on, The Nolans would make a guest appearance, minus the one of the Nolans who was playing one of the characters in the series. See? They had a spat with Carole Smilie.

7. Lindsey on Stars In Their Own Minds
During Phil Redmond's apparent love affair with the character of Lyndsey Corkhill, we were asked to believe many things - that the Thai authorities check people aren't smuggling heroin into their country; that she was a femme fatale; that she could rise to be a gangster queen, run a nightclub and be a loving mother. But perhaps the hardest thing to accept was that any national television station would encourage her to dress up in a Cher-through dress and belt out the Shoop-Shoop song on prime time. Although the fake stars in their eyes style plot did offer the ever-reliable Ted Robbins a cameo platform, it also meant we got to see Lyndey's arse. Not nice.

8. Free George Jackson
When tired firebobby George Jackson drew a map on the back of a napkin which was later used in planning a robbery, it landed him inside. Of course, the real guilt lay with Tommy Mcardle, but who would listen? In a development which would shape the way soap opera court cases would be handled in future, Mersey TV launched a national campaign to free George from his jail hell - and part of it was a single. Free George Jackson by the Blazing Saddles didn't trouble the charts, and the campaign was abandoned when they guy playing George objected to his picture being slapped all over the country and quit the show.

9. Soap Aid
During the Geldof-inspired fad for raising money for charity which spawned such delights as Dance Aid and the heavy metal Hear N Aid, soap got involved too. Mersey TV's first non-Brookside contribution to British television was Soap Aid, which was, um, soap stars (mainly from Brookside, who at least had Paul Usher in their ranks; he often would take long breaks from the show in order to tour with his band Blue Angel) singing.

10. The Correct Use of Soap
It's hard to recall that in the 1970's, the thought of simultaneously being young and watching soap opera was almost impossible to hold without your brain coughing up a hairball. Brookside changed all that, drafting in a bunch of teenage characters who actually behaved in a way that young people do. Or rather, did. This was a bold experiment which resulted in the soap getting praised by the nme's special 'Correct Use of Soap' edition and as a centrepiece in ZigZag's TV special. It also led to every soap in the country packing their screens with spotty herberts.

SUNSHINE BECOMES EYES: Sex and sunshine has moved home and re-invented itself as close your eyes. Obviously, you already know this. But just in case you didn't...

TEMPTING FATE - IT'S SO DELICIOUS: Great news - the people in charge of the Brits have announced that next year's awards will be shown 'as live' - obviously they're feeling confident that the days of Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood are totally behind them. What could possibly go wrong, especially since by then Every Single Popstar in the World will be TV stars masquerading as proper musicians?
More interestingly, they're dropping the Best Video award for "Best Urban Act" (or, to give it its full title 'we really ought to do something to ensure at least one black musician wins a prize on the night') and the Newcomer prizes are being renamed Breakthrough Artist Awards, which means that they can give it to acts who've been ignored for years who suddenly have a hit. In case something like Baby Bird ever happens again.

... THE OTHER ONE COULDN'T REACH: What with Columbus Day in the States and all, you might have missed out on an interview The Strokes gave to a local paper in Ottawa.

REUNIONS WE NEVER ASKED FOR: Toad the Wet Sprocket react to almost imperceptable public demand - or at least, no actual petitions against band reforming...

NO TREES WERE BROKEN OR TWISTED IN MAKING THIS WEBSITE: Pleasingly, this not-often-subtle but frqeuntly amusing satire page, Random Thoughts on the Manic Street Preachers, comes third in a google search on the band's name.

I COLLECT, I REJECT: It's a welcome return for our look at various items of rock tat, with Stuart from Belle & Sebastian's Arthur Daley-esque used car sale. He's put his Mark 1 Granada up on ebay in aid of Friends of the Earth (we might point out the irony in flogging an old car in aid of an environmental charity, but that would be churlish. Interestingly, Stuart doesn't seem to think that a Car from Rock History is enough, and lobs in five years worth of guest list as well. Bidding stands at £970, which if we could be arsed to do a David Dickinson impression would be "cheap as chips."
Finders fee: Rae

A RARE ILLUSTRATION: Madonna caught a split-second before falling backwards down the dumper:

Can the part in EastEnders be that far away now?

S THE END: Sorry to hear that Ray Conniff's died. The bandleader had an odd death - the 85 year old fell over and banged his head; his last live performance was at Liza Minnelli's three-ring-wedding.

LISTEN EVERYBODY, WE'VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY, YEAH: It's a delight on an otherwise ugly Monday to discover that Cherry Red are reviving the El label, and reactivating the entire back catalogue, which means, as well the King of Luxembourg, we're welcoming back Bad Dream Fancy Dress. Essentially doing what Shampoo would do later, but to much sweeter effect - and without the post-fame support of the Japanese market, they were ace and it was the failure of the rest of the nation to acknowledge this that first led us to take up the armed struggle.

THE REVOLUTION MAY BE TELEVISED AFTER ALL: Since nothing ever happens on the British Total Request Live, MTV's marathon afternoon reworking of Pebble Mill at One, we were surprised to hear that something worth watching happened on the American version. As chartattack reports, in scenes unprecedented since Nicholas Witchell had to sit on lesbians during the Six O'Clock News a few years back, student protestors marched onto the MTV set and started loudly protesting against the forthcoming war.
What makes the whole story even more delicious is that our old mucker Fred Durst was on the show. And how did Mr. My Way or the Highway react to a spot of genuinely rebellious youth? He sneered, "shot dirty looks" and heckled. So, we can surmise from this that Mr. Durst supports what Uncle George Bush tells him, and is keen to kick butt in the Middle East, and that - more importantly - when he tells kids to not take shit, don't actually expect him to support you if you take action other than buying a remix album and tshirt.

GOOGLE DROP-OFFS: The number of people searching for 'Holly Vallance short skirt', 'Holly Vallance naked' and so on - surely it's more of a challenge to find "Holly Vallance wearing clothes"? More disturbingly - 'advertise Jamirouquai sticker'?

MY BRIEF WILL DION: In one of the oddest legal fights since, ooh, last week, Muse are suing Celine Dion for pinching their name for her upcoming tour. The Canadian one is intending to brand her Las Vegas schmalzamooze Muse - presumably in the hope people will misread the poster and pay in the mistaken belief they're going to see 'Celine Dion - Mute'. Muse's point is that they still believe they're going to break America, and they believe that Americans might get confused between Dion's winter-of-career night in Vegas and a bunch of spiky haired nuGoths from Devon. Now, while we can see it as a refreshing change that one of "our" bands is finally getting the chance to kick some butt back after years of band names losing out to pisspoor US suits (Suede beaten by a cabaret singer; Verve by a jazz label; Charlatans by a nearly defunct 60's act; And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead by a puppet theatre in Idaho), we really wish that Muse had decided either to turn the other cheek and demonstrate that, really, nobody gets these sort of things muddled up, or at least take the fairly generous GBP32,000 payoff from Dion's people and make the best of it.
Because, firstly, its not as if calling a band Muse is the most original of moves, anyway - it's like the battles between the seventy-three acts called Revolver, which boils down to the question 'who ran out of inspiration first?' - and, more importantly: It's Celine Dion. For some reason, incredibly popular. And, we'd imagine, her fans are more likely to stumble into a Muse gig by mistake than Muses' are to wind up in the Las Vegas Enormodome by accident.
A separate action, in which the makers of My Little Pony accuse Dion of the unauthorised use of Pinky Pony's face, remains unsettled.

I WONDER WHERE GRAHAM IS?: NME.com, in its reading of the latest instalment of Alex James' online diary seems to have somewhat missed the point. Alex does, as their headline says, speculate that he might call Graham, but whereas the mighty 'me seems to think this is some sort of rapprochment, the original piece actually comes across more as a nose-thumbing. Alex spends a few dozen lines enthusing over the wonders and joys of Saharan Africa, and then geos "I wonder where Graham is? Camden." If Mr. James is brandishing an olive branch, it's only because it's the only thing to hand to beat his erstwhile colleague with. He also says the new album sounds like Blur and Fatboy Slim, which makes us feel a bit queasy (we're thinking Song 2, but with beats) and exactly what the point of the decamping to Morocco was in the first place. Camden might be a nicer place to be.

COUGH GETS WORSE: Apparently Rufus Wainwright is tucked up in bed, with a big stack of Beanos and a large bottle of Lucozade. He's got a serious bronichial infection which means no touring for him this month.
But remember, Rufie - if you're well enough to watch Des and Mel, you're well enough to go in for the afternoon.

WOMEN IN ROCK: We keep tripping over the concept of "Women In... [insert genre of choice here]. We've said before that we don't think that a question about the influence of gender on the way people react to a female rapper, dj, guitarist or manager is an invalid approach, to use it as the basis of an article, a gig, or a movement seems to be a little bit self-defeating and backward-looking. So, with that in mind, welcome the RollingStone Women In Rock edition.
No, that's not from the seventies, the current RS is treating Women as an amorphous grouping, and attempting to form some sort of scene based on the simultaneous possession of vaginas by Britney, Sharon Osbourne, the Dixie-Chicks and Stevie Nicks. And some others.
Now, doing a Woman-powered issue isn't a bad idea - although "idea" is perhaps over-endowing the concept with inventiveness; it's the music mag equivalent of a special Festive Food number of Martha Stewart Living. It's the "... In Rock" bit which rankles, and sets you up for the inevitable tone of the writing:"These artists think for themselves, calling their own shots, and the audience has responded." Well done, little ladies! How astonishing that you think as well as play the piano.
I don't have the screaming font embedded but: it's 2002, for pity's sake - don't you think that "Women have brains" is slightly stale news?
Of course, the whole issue is an example of the new, lad-tastic Rolling Stone trying to have its urinal cake and eat it - while the copy may bang on about "resisting defintions and restrictions", the cover bangs off over Britney and Shakira...

BROUGHT TO BOOK: Why is it, if anyone else started a book club, encouraging fans to swap books at their gigs, we'd welcome it with delight and chuckling, and yet when Moby does it, we want to rip the fuckers head off and stick it in his silly little box? Why does everything he do wind us up the wrong way?

CHRISTINA ON A BIKE: So, here's the return of Christina Aguilera, telling how she's had a 'breakdown' and is happier not being "a virginal sweetheart". Um, we may have missed something here, but we never really thought you were, were you? Wasn't the deal that Britney was the girl who wouldn't, and you were the one who wouldn't stop? All those songs about rubbing and so on? Ananova says that the video for Dirrty is an abrupt change of image, because she's wearing a "bikini top." Yes, that would be in total contrast to the not-at-all-slutty look in the Moulin Rouge video, then.

I CAN HEAR YOU MOVE: Now, we have to say we're confused about this story. Ian Brown's decided to sell his holiday home in Wales for GBP150,000; and the locals have dressed up as monkeys to protest outside. So, after years of taking action against English in-comers buying up houses in Wales and barely spending any time there (hence Not the Nine O'Clock New's 'come home to a real fire - buy a cottage in Wales' spoof), they're now protesting against English out-goers.
The monkey protesters say that the price of the house is treble the average price of property in the area and "practically guarantees" the house will be sold to someone from elsewhere. Fair enough, but we're assuming that Brown's holiday home is going to be slightly more swish than the average house in the area, and so he's probably only looking for market rate - and he can't be blamed for the stupidity of property prices right now. And surely by selling the house there's slightly more chance of someone from the area being able to live there than when it's the occasional stepping off point for a distant rock star?
Anyway, we have to say: if we went to look at a house on the market and there were monkey-men outside, we'd be prepared to offer an extra GBP10,000 on top.

PRESUMABLY THE IDEA IS TO GIVE US A LITTLE MORE TIME TO BUY TICKETS?: Fischerspooner postpone their UK tour, says nme.com.

HE'S JUST A SUPERSTAR. HE DOESN'T FEEL IT: Michael Jackson used to beat chimps, apparently. Of course, Jackson is so mad nowadays that anyone can say anything they like about him and it would sound plausible - "Michael Jackson believes parsnips confer prestige when worn on the lapel"; "Michael Jackon bought Pee Wee Herman's suits, and makes his cleaning lady wear them and masturbate in a giant theatre set he's had built in the middle of Tuvalu" - try it, it's fun - but are we really going to take the word of a man who married LaToya?

AND WE'RE MEANT TO BE INTERESTED BECAUSE?: Terence Trent D'Arby - crazy name, crazy guy, even crazier name

WHILE WE'RE IN OUR HOME CITY: Liverpool may be reeling from the news that Brookside is being downgraded to a daytime slot, presumably to allow the contract with Channel 4 to drip away until it runs out next year, but it will doubtless be taking a measure of pride in the news that Virgin Radio have decided it is the top music city in the UK. Now, I hold no great love of Manchester (may be time to take down the Commonwealth Games tat now, love, it's finished) but I'm not sure the placing of it beneath Liverpool is entirely fair. If you strip out the Beatles - oh, and please, lets do - you'd have to be overly biased to come down on one side or the other, surely?
Further succour for Scouseland comes from the Classic FM poll for which city deserves to be European City of Culture in 2008. Despite being up against fairly stiff and deserving competition from Newcastle-Sunderland and Bristol, Classic FM chooses to offer its readers a snap poll featuring just Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and Canterbury to choose from. Maybe Iain-Duncan Smith should get his pollsters to adopt this approach - "If there was an election tomorrow, would you vote for Conservative, SDLP or Co-Op?"

STRAIGHT UP: What the hell is going on at Garlands these days? We're not referring to the still-mysterious squirting of barbecue gel through the air conditioning and related fire, but the direction the promotion for the club seems to be taking.
First up, the supposedly gay night used a poster campaign depicting a woman dressed as a schoolie being caned by a male teacher. Now, their posters have the face of Scouse Gonk Lennon all over them. Is this what the queer dance place is reduced? So desperate to get punters into their new home (the arthritic State in Dale Street) that sub-paedo titilation and hoary rock icons are the order of the day?
Its bad enough when the airport feels the need of Lennon to prop it up, but when your biggest disco is relying on Yoko's bitch, you know you're in a city that's got currency problems.

GREAT MILLS: We really feel we should bring this to your attention:
"> Thats right, today is the new Chris Mills record will be unleashed on the American public! I would greatly appreciate it if you could all make your way down to your local record retailer in a calm, orderly fashion and lay your hard earned cash down for "The Silver Line".
Its the first record on my new Powerless Pop Recorders label, and I'm really excited for all of you to hear it! When he asks so nicely, how can you say no?