GAH: You spend ages worshipping someone as a demi-goddess, and then they turn round and reward you by marrying one of Papa Roach. Mia Tyler, how could you do this to us?

AS IF AIRPORTS WEREN'T BAD ENOUGH AS IT IS: This summer, as well as delays caused by French airtraffic control strikes and the ever-present stench of Securior staff trying to avoid another slip-up like the one their sister company made at Boston that time, there's the Cheeky Girls tour of UK airports to contend with. They're covering Boney M's Hooray, Hooray, It's A Holi-Holi-Day, in case you're wondering. If the've covered Cats UK Luton Airport for the b-side, we might be prepared to cut them some slack.

WE DISAGREE, BUT: We had to link to Anthony Easton's review of Tatu at the MTV Movie awards. Try as we might, we can't see them as revolutionaires; more young conservatives as scripted by Eastenders...

SEARCH FOR SOME STARS: We've got a little sick of the whole Pop Idol Academy Fame thing, and the constant focus on the looks of singers that it brings with it. And the obsession with looks over talent that marks out much of the stuff aimed at charts these days. Not, we should add quickly, because we want out popstars to be ugly - far from it; our problem is the stars just look so rubbish. Blue? Avril Lavigne? These are meant to be turning our legs to jelly? As if. Meanwhile, there are acts like the dreadful Akash who claim to be the most erotic band in the world, but clearly aren't.
So, we're launching the world's first totally shallow search for the sexiest unknown band or singer in the world. It could be you. Just email the evidence to i_am_a_glorious_creature@yahoo.co.uk and we'll consider you for our short list. Remember, the important thing here isn't talent, it's a lot more trivial than that. Of course, on the other hand, we might get bored and drop the whole contest, but we'll give a namecheck and plug to all the entries. Along with a critique. The overall winner will be given enthusiastic support and, I dunno, some sweets or something. Bring it on...

WHERE EGOS DARE: Dave Gahan is getting a bit grumpy about not getting to write many songs for Depeche Mode. He's threatening to leave unless Martin Gore 'changes his ways.' See, this is the trouble you get when a singer goes and does his first solo work - no matter how dire it is, they come away thinking "peice of piss, that - I should be doing all the songs all the time. I'm great me"; blissfully unaware that their management is thinking "right, let's get them back to normal now he's got that vanity project out the way."
Dave believes he's as good a songwriter as Martin. Dave writes things like this:
We laughed so hard it caused some pain
Two strangers standing in the rain
We smoked our cigarettes
(It's kind of wonderful)
Exchanging our regrets
(Strange but beautiful)
While Martin writes things like this:
Here is a plea
From my heart to you
Nobody knows me
As well as you do
You know how hard it is for me
To shake the disease
That takes hold of my tongue
In situations like these
I suppose the choice here would have to be a personal one...

IS THIS WHAT YOU MEAN BY DIMINISHING RETURNS, PROF?: The return of The Osbournes in the US looks set to be a hugely underwhelming non-event, as even the fans of the first two seasons are struggling to see the point in a half-hour dedicated to what Kelly thinks about Christina Aguilera. As David Hinckley observes Let's be honest here: This is a discussion that would empty out an Internet chat room. Like, who cares? But maybe being on TV gives the exchange a kind of subliminal validation, as if it must be interesting because famous people are having it.

ON LIVING IN A CAPITAL OF CULTURE: No Rock was, as we keep banging on about, in Hull rather than Liverpool when our home base was picked to be the 2008 European Capital of Culture, so luckily we missed out on a lot of the mindless triumphalism that goes with this, erm, honour. Apparently within seconds of Tessa Jowells naming da Pool as the CoC, men on stilts and jugglers were unleashed from all corners of the city centre.

At the same time, the culture of the city took a minor blow with the public announcement that The Lomax was going into liquidation. The club, once the steam engine of the Liverpool music scene, had been struggling following a bizarre merger/takeover type deal of the failed Braveheart project. Braveheart had been created by Trevor Burke as some sort of stage school with knobs on, built around the scary Jezebelle act. Jezebelle were a kind of Atomic Kitten style act supposed to represent 'the spirit of Liverpool' (the choice of name - one of the most famous harlots in history - we're sure was never intended as an ironic statement on the women from the city). More than just dim singers, the Jezebelle project cast them as Edutainers; presumably bringing enlightenment through the use of boobtubes. Of course, the whole thing went -ahem - tits up despite the pouring in of large sums of public cash; hence the Lomax-Braveheart link-up. Nobody, it seemed, thought through the dynamics of linking a rock and roll venue with a dance school, a decision on shared branding only a few inches away from bringing together an opium den and a Pittman secretarial college under the same banner. Added to the uncertainty caused by the second relocation of the Lomax - this time to the empty husk of the old Cream venue; and the massive challenge offered by the appearance in the city of the Barfly Club flexing their brand strength - and the place was going to struggle no matter what it did.

"The bid's strength was stressing that there was more to the city than football and the Beatles" - Yorkshire Post report
"It's as if Liverpool won the Champions League, Everton won the double and The Beatles reformed, all on the same day" - Council Leader Mike Storey, quoted in the same report. (Having said that: has nobody explained to him quite how tricky a Beatles reformation might actually be?)

GOING HOME AGAIN: The news that Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary are about to re-activate their Whiskeytown project will come as great relief for all those people who've pretended they liked them all along, as they might actually get a chance to bring their claims into line with reality really going to see them. Adams feels the wheels have come off his solo career and that he needs a bit of good publicity to counter the increasingly boorish and petulant press he's been getting of late (I'm sorry, that should be "wants to hold a reunion while they're still young and vibrant").

THIS CHARMING MAN: Okay, so that might not have been the most original headline for a review of the Morrissey show, but then again 'the importance of being morrissey' was hardly a massive leap of originality on the part of Channel 4, was it?
Tucked away to the end of the a busy Sunday night for the channel - programming getting forced out the way by the force that is Big Brother - the documentary made a fairly good hand of cantering through the Moz life, paying the price for its access in spades of sycophancy. Not that Morrissey gave very much of himself in this ("first TV interview in sixteen years"), but he played ball for long enough to ensure that he didn't get a Heather Mills-style working over. Not from the filmmakers, anyway.
It's not so much that the documentary tried to duck the tricky subjects, just that it more than sugared the pills with a string of curious celeb endorsments - JK Rowling, Will Self, Kathy Burke. The music industry was represented by Bono and Noel Gallagher, which is like getting Colonel Saunders and Ronald McDonald in to pass judgement on Gordon Ramsay.
Bono trotted out the standard new-judgement on Morrissey, that, actually, you know, he's very funny. This is the thing people say when they want to dazzle us with how much deeper their insight is into the man than other people's, and I suspect it has it roots in something Peel said about fifteen years ago. Peel's judgement - that the audience tend to overlook Morrissey - has been twisted over the years into the ridiculous claim made by Bono that "people say Morrissey is miserable, but he's not. He's very funny." Mr. Vox illustrated this claim by telling us he nearly crashed his car when he heard Girlfriend In A Coma for the first time (oh, so close). The 'Actually-Morrissey-is-funny' line is the musical equivalent of the way English teachers do that false laugh when they take you to see a Shakespeare play and it gets to a jokey part: the idea is not that they find the thing humourous, but they want you to think they're clever enough to see that there is a joke there. But saying 'Morrissey is actually a funny guy' is as wrong as suggesting he's a giant gloom-octopus. The man who wrote Suffer The Children, the Headmaster Ritual, Sing Me To Sleep is not a pop version of Spike from Hi-De-Hi.
After all these years, Morrissey finally got round to addressing the taint of racism that's been with him since Madstock. He seemed bemused - "why would I be racist?" he asked, in the manner that an OAP might ask what he'd want with email. Later, he enthused about how much he likes Mexican. It was a failure to engage coupled with overcompensation. The trouble is that those of us who never set out believing those old NME worries after Madstock found his inability to defend himself while the National Front Discos and the Bengali in Platforms started to lay thick around his ankles starting to make them look like they might have a point. Back in the late 80's, a blinking 'why would I be racist?' might have been enough to defuse the situation; but after nearly twenty years it wasn't a very convincing explanation.
To give Noel Gallagher his due, he was almost the only talking head to try and consider the whole race question; but we take this more as an example of how blind Noel can be to the implications of what he's doing. And, frankly, Stephen Patrick would have been better off if his fellow Manc had passed: "They say he never defended himself - why should he? If he was racist, the News of the World would have exposed him, never mind the fucking NME." A curious line of logic, you might think, that makes absolutely no sense. Firstly, the NME never actually said Moz=Nazi, just fretted over why he wouldn't answer their questions on the subject. Second - Noel Gallagher believes a story can't be true because it wasn't covered by the News of the World? Third: why on earth would the News of the World want to investigate the political views of an indie pop star - this was the days before Suede, Pulp, Blur and, alright, Oasis made guitar rock the stuff of front page splashes. Finally, what rabbit hole is Gallagher down if he doesn't believe something because it wasn't in the News of the Screws? "We know for a fact that he isn't racist" affirmed Noel Gallagher. If anyone can explain to me a way that you can prove as a solid fact that somebody isn't racist, please contact us at the usual email address.
To be fair, Noel wasn't the only person to stick up for Morrissey. Michael Bracewell - like TMFTML, but with worse sweaters - also had a theory; the man fits into a parade of British artists who are pilloried for being what they were once celebrated for. In other words, the very cherishing of British (by which we mean English) values starts to look a bit dodgy when the cherishing turns to fetishising. Unfortunately, Bracewell blew this defence by invoking the name of PG Wodehouse. Erm, actually, Michael, Plum was pilloried not for his evoking of the villages of rural Albion, but because of the cosying up to the Nazis during the war. If you're going to weigh in on the side of an expatriate Briton living in America after some dodgy behaviour he never chose to explain, using the model of a Briton who fled to live in America rather than face prosecution over links with the Third Reich isn't perhaps the most sensitive way to go about it.
In effect, we don't think Morrissey is racist, not explicitly, anyway. He's always been obsessed with the lines between belonging and not belonging (ironically, this is what makes him popular with Latinos in the US) and walking those lines is to take an ambiguous route. He was dangerously arrogant in hoping that people would trust his heart to be in the right place.
So now he's in the states - despite (or perhaps because) "he's too english for the Yanks, and too english for most of the english" as Chrissie Hynde put it - and proving that when he sang "I bear more grudges than lonely high court judges" he wasn't using artistic licence. There are grudges from the Bowie tour he flounced off because David - apparently - fixed the handover so that the crowd couldn't say goodbye to Moz properly; grudges from the court case; grudges that still burn inside him. He's also convinced that there's some sort of conspiracy working against him to keep him out of the record stores (this was all made before he signed the deal with Trojan records, of course).
But listening to him perform a new song on a recent tour, a more likely reason for his years without a record deal presents itself: that, really, he's just not much cop any more. It's not the loss of Marr that did for his songs; more the uprooting to the States and living in F Scott Fitzergald's house has cut the ties to the world his lyrics need to keep them alive.
Bitter, twisted and still oblivious, although the crew set out to make a warm glowing portrait of Morrissey, his character kept burning through the vaseline on the lens. But it still can't take the Smiths from us.

QUALITY CONTROL: Metallica explaina way their sudden decision to make downloads available online by saying they've been waiting for something that offered the quality their fans demanded to be on offer. Hmmm. Thousands of their fans seemed to be really delighted by the quality offered through a Napster/MP3 combination, as we recall. Until their heros took them through a legal wringer, of course.

PRESSING ISSUES OF THE DAY: Live, from Usenet: Did David Bowie sleep with Rinko?. Yes you do; Rinko - he was in Beatlesband.

RED HOT AND SIZZLING: Your mother always told you that no good would come of walking about barefoot - well, my mum told me that, anyway. At the time I always wondered what would be the worst that could happen - well, for this lad at a Red Hot Chilli Peppers gig being barefoot on the wrong staircase cost him his life. Ouch. Shoes are our friends.

DOING THE LAMBETH SQUAWK: Lambeth Council are having kittens over the poster campaign for Har Mar Superstar's new single. The council have branded the ads "disgusting", which suggests that the ghost of Mary Whitehouse had found a home at last. Tacky, tawdry, obvious, dull and unerotic, maybe. But disgusting? You've got to be kidding.

AT THE RECORD COMPANY PARTY, ON THEIR HANDS - NOT YET - A DEAD STAR: Or, at least, Luther's emerged from his coma. We're not sure if his record label would agree with Eurweb that this is 'good news' so much, though, as the albums they've released in the US this week smell slightly like they were being planned as memorial titles.

A SMALL STEP, A MAJOR JOURNEY: The venerable (let's face it, any blog which has more than twenty posts counts as venerable) TMFTML has got a new look and, more importantly, a new address. It's gone over to Movable Type, as well. Why would anyone want to leave Blogger? [Checks blank screen]. Oh, yeah.

WE'LL BE LISTENING TO YOU... LISTENING TO US... OH, SOD IT: We're sure it's not Simon Bates' fault, but the nasty way Henry Kelly has been ousted to make way for him at Classic FM's breakfast show leaves a bad taste in the mouth. And we can't quite work out why Classic would want Bates anyway - has there ever been a more annoying broadcaster put in charge of a radio show? (Betting without DLT here, of course).

CARRY ON REGARDLESS...: We know nobody can read the posts, but we're assuming someone will be working on that. Somewhere. We're sure. So we'll plod on, although at the moment we don't have an audience, and we don't know if we're ever going to get anyone to look at us again. In this sense, we're similar to One True Voice, except, faced with that situation, they're about to split up, the bloody windcheaters.

DON'T TELL HIM, PIKE: We're interested in Michael Eavis' promise to complie a list of names of people attending this year's Glastonbury, in order to ensure that people who've missed out this year can get tickets next year.
It's a generous sounding idea, and you can't say fairer than that, can you?
Erm... except, how is this going to work, exactly? If Eavis is merely going to use the names of people who bought tickets this year, then that's easily worked around - supposing Meg bought tickets for her and Mog this year on her credit card, next year Mog can buy them as she'd not be on the list.
And we can't really picture there being much support for taking down all the names of people passing through the gates on their way in - it's already a slow enough process as it is. Yet if people don't have to hand over their identity at the entrance, the chances of a roaming crew with clipboards making it round to see everyone during the three days they're there seem slim; you could provide everyone with a little card in their programme to fill in and send back, but since they'd know that this means next year, no Glastonbury, an awful lot of M. Mouses and G. Bushes would prove to have gone to the Healing Fields this summer.
Even if collection of names was possible - and they'll need addresses too, to be able to tell one John Smith from the next - there's a slightly disturbing question of data protection here. Even without fretting about who, exactly, would hold this list of data and what else they might do with it, can anyone imagine a risk in telling a volunteer you don't know from Adam your name and address at the start of a period of days when you won't be at your home?
Then you've got the people who've been with Glastonbury and have gone every year, pumping thousands of pounds into the festival and its good causes; sticking with it through the good years and the bad, through the beanfields and the bogs. Is Eavis really saying to his strongest supporters that they can fuck off now as there's a guaranteed sell-out?
In fact, when you look at the idea, it becomes clear that this is little more than another prong in the attempt to keep people without tickets away from Somerset, isn't it? Telling people who can't get in in 2003 that they're going to be first served for 2004 is more likely to dissuade them from tramping down to Pilton than a plea to keep the festival special - because if they feel like they're never going to be able to get a ticket, why would they be bothered in preserving some other rich person's playground?

IT WASN'T THE HULL, IT WAS THE UPGRADE: So, we struggle to keep up with stuff as we're stuck in Hull (sorry, if you're from Hull, but... we were stuck there. And you have an ugly ass station.) Only to discover that we've been thwarted by the upgrading at Blogger.
We don't want to whine about a free service, but... bloody hell, were they really trying to prove the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' rule? The archives got fucked. The posts got fucked. The layout got fucked. The last time so many things got fucked in one place at the same time, Angie Bowie was involved. We're still not having much joy with it, and as far as we can see the experience for you, the reader, is unpleasant in a different way according to what platform and browser you're using.

We're trying to do what we can from our end. Let us know if you have any ideas.

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: Live, tonight, from Hull:
Ice, which must be the dimmest, nastiest piece of work ever to be sold on a general newsagents shelf, has got Pink in this month - 'she's lewd, rude and nearly nude' they promise. If you think it's odd that Pink is doing press for a shabby mag like this when she's not actually promoting any records, it's because she isn't actually interviewed inside - it's a short cuttings job and some pictures. Wooo. The magazine itself just feels horrible - we have no problem with magazines that print pictures of sexually alluring people looking sexually alluring; but the way its done here is just dismal. Not brave enough to embrace proper porn, but trying to put some degree of distance between itself and Page Three, Ice tries to make itself edgy by just not showing any human restraint. An article about a serial killer-rapist-kidnapper duo in the US illustrates itself with a picture of one of the killers with one of their victims. Now, admittedly they don't choose a still image from the video of him actually raping her, but knowing the context of the picture (she had already been held for several days, they were attempting to brainwash her into being their sex slave, and - oh yeah - she was a few metres from her tortured to death baby) you wonder why even the most stinking of Beelzebub's demons would think this an appropriate image for a knockabout magazine. Yeah, it might not be a picture of the rape, but the point remains - it might as well be. Avoid at all costs.

The John Harris Britpop book continues to do the rounds, and this time it's the Guardian (Saturday) Review which has handed the book out - and it's Mark Lawson who does the honours. Time was, Mark was our leading pop culture grammarian (oh, yes he bloody was) but these days you start to wonder if he's spending too much time on the telly and the radio to be able to relate to it in isolation. It's a nice review, though, if more interested in the Blair aspects of the book than the Blur ones; Lawson does lose it a little suggesting that Harris would have been better off if Justine had shagged Tony as well as Damon and Brett. Not only would that have completely altered the tone of the book anyway, but she doesn't have to: Tony Blair has more than fucked the lot of us up the ass enough this last couple of years.

Radiohead and Glastonbury get their own editions of NME Originals, but The Smiths are accorded only a supplement to the body of the NME proper. Fair enough, it saves us money - and us Smiths fans, now most of us are on pensions, appreciate any chance to save a few bob; but is it really necessary to make The Greatest Guitar Band Of Them All After [add your own list here] relevant to today's youth by slapping Noel Gallagher on the front? "How the Smiths changed my life" says Noel - presumably the carrying of gladioli made it easier for him to spot the namby-pambies to punch in school? Or maybe - having realised that The Smiths pop songs sum up love, life, misery, rejection and the whole damn thing in three minutes flat, he realised he didn't have to try to do that at all?

AFI are on the cover of the NME - "the world's most worshipped band" claims the coverline, which not only ignores The Pope And The Holy Trio but is a dangerous claim anyway. We shall see.

The Libertines have played "the most intimate gig of all time" to seventy people - which not only ignores every gig in Liverpool between 1987 and 2001, where seventy would have been a full-on-crush, but also the Nirvana gig mentioned a few pages seen by just twenty. Ah well.

Kelly Osbourne explains the dropping from Sony thus: "When Mottola left [sony], I got put on a shelf" - which not only ignores the way her records were released by label after Mottola was released from his contract, but the simple evident fact that nobody wanted to buy them. It's not as if Osbourne didn't get a push greater than Kate Moss trying to give birth to a full-grown Robbie Coltrane, is it? She also claims that people at Sony in London "didn't know till last week that I wasn't signed to them any more." This suggests that Sony is the only office place in London without access to the internet.

British Sea Power do the CD thing - Pavement and Julian Cope but also - oh, my - Tatu.

Chris Lester of Jet is proud, but in all the wrong places -"I have never heard one fucking Aphex Twin record in my life and I don't care if I never do. I'm fucking serious about that." This wallowing in musical ignorance may explain a related phenomenon - we've heard Jet records, but we wouldn't recognise them if asked to pick them out of a line-up. We're serious about that.

Compare and contrast with the try-it-and-see attitude of The Thrills' Daniel Ryan - "I don't know a lot of other bands, but I think we're more obsessed with music than any of them." And you know what? It shows.

So, AFI, who are SXE. The main problem we have with straight edgers is that their entire stance is dictated by what they're not, rather than what they are. Don't drink, don't smoke, what do you do? - and look where that got Alan Ant. Having said which, this is one of the best bits we've come across in the nme for a long while and shows - given the length - their writers still have a spark and a talent. There's absolutely no reason to give a cover to AFI, apart from to try and sneak some sales back from Kerrang, but Dan Martin rises to the lack of challenge wonderfully, asking Davey AFI to defend his lyrics 'we dance in misery' - "What sort of dance goes on in misery?" The tone is a gently amused awareness that some people take this sort of self-pitying guff seriously that manages to entertain without patronising the band to their artfully painted faces. And, as anyone who actually knows misery will tell you, misery doesn't spend hours on its make-up.

Reviews
Albums
Metallica - St Anger (can that be right - we're working from notes and we can't read our writing here) "true masters", 9 - yeah, the masters may be great but we'll wait and download the MP3s off Limewire, thanks
Radiohead - as we predicted, this is just a repeat of the earlier review
Mogwai - Happy songs for Happy People - "often complex", 8

Singles
sotw - the thrills - big sur - "polyphonic spree on prozac"
afi - girls not grey - "you can't help grinning like a loon" (another nail out of their coffin as gloomiest guys, then)

live
homelands - "only Mike Skinner could make a beer-can littered field feel like home"

the back page is an advert for a Radiohead album. We're kind of confused as to why Thom Yorke objects to Radiohead music being used for adverts to sell things, but doesn't mind adverts being used to sell Radiohead music. Is the whole concept of the advertising industry suddenly rendered much, much sweeter when the adverts are bringing money to Thom in an indirect fashion?

And finally: in the classifieds, a plea from the makers of Busted who are looking for Males, aged 16-19 to play in a new band. They're having open auditions, and the band, we imagine, will be as real as Busted themselves. That’s why they're looking for a drummer and bassist. Only, erm, good looks are essential, being able to sing is merely desirable. Oh, and the first whittling down of hopefuls will be done on the basis of personality rather than musical skill. In short: Mark E Smith - no; Andrew Ridgeley - yes. There's an email address, too: newteenact@hotmail.com - if you think you have a future in rock. At least until your balls drop, anyway.

[see note above if the same post appears below...]

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS...: Just what are Ananova trying to tell us in their report on Cheryl from Girls Aloud being sent for trial over the racially agravated assault charges? "She was carried off in a black people carrier..." Hey - why can't we all travel in the same people carrier, regardless of our skin?

NATIONAL MONUMENT DAMAGED: But the Barry Mannilow breaks nose gags write themselves, so we'll let them lie...

SOMETIMES MISSING THE BUS CAN BE BETTER: Leastways, Jim Fairchild of Grandaddy didn't quite miss the bus, but he didn't get hit too badly by it...

MORE BICKLE THAN TRAVIS: Travis have announced a one-off UK gig. Judging by this picture of Fran Healy:

it's presumably because they've lost their Big Issue pitch.

THAT WOULD BE A COHERENT POSITION, THEN, WOULD IT?:
It's clear, then, that if music is free for downloading, the music industry is not viable; all the jobs I just talked about will be lost and the diverse voices of the artists will disappear. The argument I hear a lot, that "music should be free," must then mean that musicians should work for free. Nobody else works for free. Why should musicians? - Lars Ulrich of Metallica, testifying before Congress about the evil cancer of free music downloads

Metallica have made a surprise appearance at the Download Festival.
The band were not part of the published bill, but appeared on the second stage.
Festival-goers are allowed to download free performances by bands appearing at the festival from the internet. - ananova news report

READING BETWEEN THE LINES: When the Australian Daily Telegraph says New style for subdued Avril , we suspect they're trying to hint that she looked like she could care less about Australian fans. But wouldn't that mean she was getting a wee bit arrogant? Surely not.
Someone offered her a thousand australian dollars for the bottle she'd just drunk from - they probably thought they could develop a movie from it.
But to return to the When Popstars Wane topic, there's a nice examination - also from Australia - of Madonna's long slow slide into Rosemary Clooney status. Of course, it would be dangerous to write Madonna off completely - indeed, if anyone could come back from such a slump, it would be the woman who turned it round so spectacularly after the guff that was Sex and Bedtime Stories - but it does look grim for her right now.
And if you needed any proof that madonna is like a bellweather for the music industry - in the same way the RIAA and BPI blame all sort of factors bar one for the drop in sales, this article considers a range of reasons why Madonna is no longer the bestest - Cher's comeback, people feeling manipulated by her, lukewarm reviews - but doesn't mention the surely most significant fact: that the work she's producing now is just a load of ropey old tosh.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY?: See Eminem's Ass is an offer we would turn down at the best of times, but... really...
especially right now.
[Thanks - we think - to rufus for the link]

I WISH I HAD OVARIES: For then I could have Simon Tyer's children. It's the only fitting reward for this:
Say goodbye to absence of cheap rock trinket misery with these Pixies statuette figures :
Click on the group of pictures - they all look slightly demonic, and Kim Deal's likeness could scare birds and small children away. I'll wait for the Husker Du posable
action figurines.

THE VINYL COUNTDOWN?: While we don't shed many tears for the fate of the record labels, the current downturn in the music industry (you might have noticed this - they say it's our fault, we reckon that it's because the great music has dried up) and the shifting of music-selling from shop to screen, and from record shop to supermarket, looks about to claim a large scalp, as Andys records slump into administration. They're trying to save as many of the existing stores as they can.
In the last couple of years, Tower has pulled out of the UK, Our Price has been axed, revamping into some sort of crappy mobile phone store, and Boots have given up record retailing altogether. Now the largest indie chain is in serious trouble. You can almost sympathise with Virgin and HMV's desperate bid to repackage themselves as lifestyle stores rather than record shops.

NEVER MIND THE POP IDOL: You can cruise your way to fame by winning a competition being run by Richard X - he's offering the winner the opportunity to appear as a cardboard cut out in the new X/Kelis video. But be warned: Fame, fame, fatal fame - it can play hideous tricks on your brain.