THEY'RE GETTING OLD NOW, AREN'T THEY?: It's the 125th anniversary of Blackpool illuminations this year, so they had to work hard to find a celebrity who can remember the first time they were on. Luckily, Geri Halliwell was free that night. No, of course she's not really that old, but she was a good choice - she used to bring lots of pleasure to people in a simple way many years ago, but now does seem like a remnant of a happier time.

Mind you, the lights people should worry - BBC North West Tonight couldn't even scrape up an interview with Geri and had to make do with interviewing, erm, Corinne Drewery out of Swing Out Sister.

THAT MUST HAVE BEEN AN AWFUL CHOICE FOR POSH: Are you going to go out for something to eat or watch David playing football, Victoria? She chose the meal, but she must have flipped coins or something - neither, surely, are things she'd ever do through her own choice.

WE REALLY DO THINK WE'RE LENNON, DON'T WE?: So Robbie William's latest excuse for moving to LA is that he was afraid he was going to be kidnapped. Why, he had no idea there were any tax breaks at all, we're sure. Williams found two bullet holes - supposedly - in the side of his house (someone thinking sooner or later he'd be knobbing Jennifer Ellison, presumably, and getting in target practice?) and so - afraid of kidnap - he went to live in LA. Because there's no chance of a gun-toting crazy getting anywhere near a rock star in America, is there? That would be unheard of.

It's interesting Williams thinks the "bullet holes" are a sign that someone wanted to kidnap him - because firing randomly into a side of a building really is the way that kidnappers would creep up on a potential victim, isn't it? Perhaps shouting "yee-hah" as well?

We're wondering what a kidnapper would have got for Robbie - presumably only EMI would be bothered about ransoming, since he keeps telling us he's all lonely and alone and has nobody. And EMI might reckon that the sales of back catalogue for a star found in three different parts of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal might be better than the likely shifting of new, expensive to produce material...

SPEAK YOUR BRAINS: The NME is looking for people to meet up with them in central London later tonight. Yeah, we think it sounds like that online grooming, too, although they say it's about Glastonbury... yeah, right. We know exactly what those NME writers are like, with their cute tight butts and waggling asses. They're depraved. Say what you like about Danny Kelly, nobody ever wrote slash fiction about him.

NO, REALLY, HOW MUCH DID YOU GET FOR YOUR SOUL?: Fay Weldon was on Breakfast yesterday, so I know for a fact that the bile still rises at the knowledge that she took cash from the arriviste jewellers Bulgari to write a book which featured them and their product in a prominent role - there's nothing wrong with advertising, but let's not try and pretend the hooker is part of a long and loving relationship, eh? You'd think music would at least be above this sort of thing - indeed, in the UK, it would have been self-defeating to take cash for a mention in a song a few years back. The BBC's rules kept any songs off the air if they mentioned a brand name (hence the Kinks drank Cherry, not Coca-, Cola, as we've spoken of before); now, though, the rise of commercial radio seems to have changed the attitudes at Broadcasting House - after all, they played the Fast Food Rockers "McDonalds, McDonalds/Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut" refrain often enough. You'll recall we discussed this a while back in relation to the now-defunct Lucian James chart of brand names. At that time we wondered if there was a spot of product placement going on behind the scenes. It seems there is. For while we can believe that a chap like Busta Rhymes might have written a song praising Courvoisier out of love for the brand, we just can't believe that Angie Stone would have decided to write a song about the obscure mixer drink Remy Red before the Remy Martin company elected to sponsor her summer tour. Again, there's nothing wrong with taking cash for adverts - we're mulling signing up for Google Adwords ourselves - but it should be clear that that is what you're delivering. And people might be a little pissed off at shelling out hard earned cash for what is little more than a sponsor's message - it'd be like paying for spam email.

IT'S A LONG MENDOZA LINE...: Of course, you might feel that a combination of reminding you about 3Hive and a plug for the Mendoza Line is little more than teaching you to suck at eggs with which you're already familiar, but just in case: 3Hive are linking to some Mendoza Line mp3 downloads right now. Celebrate your broadband!

WHY ARTISTS SOMETIMES MIME: Clifford Allen, Tornto resident, got to sing both anthems at something called the Jays-As game at the weekend; and managed to foul up his own anthem, muddling the words of the Canadian song and then discovering that the words on the scoreboard weren't coming up fast enough to help him out his hole.

AT LEAST SHE WASN'T SINGING EYE OF THE BLOODY TIGER AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS: Celebrities really are just teenagers, aren't they? Burning through cash, snogging the wrong people, crashing cars and - like with Beyonce - having the police raid their party because it's too noisy. Boy, are her parents going to be mad when they get home...

BLIMEY - THEY DIDN'T KILL EACH OTHER THEN?: As if the report on this morning's Today that Ian Paisley is about to agree to share power with Sinn Fein wasn't enough, Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler have managed to make an album without seriously injuring one another[XFM: may crash some browsers]. No word yet on when we'll get to hear the stuff, but Brett reckons its everything you might hope from their pedigrees.

WATERS HAVE BROKEN: Depending on how you look at it, it's either just the right time, or completely the wrong time for Roger Waters to be releasing a song called To Kill The Child, but that's what he's done. This, and another song he's making available through his website, are Water's protests against the Iraq War.

SCISSORS CUT: It turns out that < ahref="http://breakingnews.iol.ie/entertainment/story.asp?j=116541538&p=yy654zz44">Kylie is dumping the stuff she's recorded with the scissor sisters - on the grounds that it's too personal. She's afraid that people might listen to the lyrics (like anyone does that with a Kylie song - "what does she mean by la-la-la? What does she mean?) and assume they know all about her relationship with Olivier Martinez, which hithertoo has been a secret known only to her, Olivier, and anyone who reads Heat or OK. We actually hadn't been in any way interested in these songs before - doing a song with Kylie is the band equivalent of rich teenage kids shoplifting; something they all have a go at if they get the chance, because it makes them feel naughty and special, but very rarely leading to any notable sort of record. But now, we really want to know what it could be on these tracks that would lead people to assume that they're about Oliver and Kylie rather than just some random pop words...

CHAKA DOES LULU: One of those things you never expect to find yourself saying: Chaka Khan covers Lulu on her new album. The set is a bunch of old standards - the fall-back of many artists from Bryan Ferry to Rod Stewart who've simply run out of ideas; in the midst of the bunch will be the theme from To Sir With Love, done for the movie by Lulu. I suppose, with Chaka's hefty vocals, we should be relieved she's not plumped for Shout.

THE COST OF TREACHERY: Bad news for Egyptian pop star Shireen Ahmad, who has just been ordered by a court to pay out a million pounds to her former producer Hamdi Ahmad.



Hamdi had discovered and nurtured Shireen, only for her to turn around and work with someone else when she'd reached a level of fame that allowed her to pick and choose. The one million egyptian pounds was to compensate for both the professional and emotional cost of the loss. (In English pounds, it sets the cost at about ninety grand.)

Last year, Shireen was at the centre of a row when she said in an interview that there were some "nice" Israelis, prompting her rival, Shireen Wadji, to fume "any singer who has something good to say about Israel, does not deserve the love or support of their fans and is considered to be a fake."

SOULOBIT: The death has been announced of Billy Davis, American soul legend. Davis co-wrote with Motown's Berry Gordy, producing many of Jackie Wilson's standards, inlcuding Reet Petite. In 1961he moved from Motown to Chess, turning the label into a soul powerhouse: Etta james, Billy Stewart, the Dells. It was from Davis' exit to become music director at an advertising agency thatn the decline of Chess is dated; his production, A&R and management skills had given the label a clear sense of cohesion and direction it never quite regained. Davis continued to work in the music industry until his death.

Billy Davis, 76, died after a long illness, in New York, on the 3rd of Spetember.

WE'D QUITE LIKE TO APOLOGISE: Phil Collins has issued an apology for his rubbish songs, although it's an apology with both tongue in cheek and cheque in bank:

'I'm sorry,'' he says, from his home near Geneva, Switzerland. ''I'm sorry. You know, the amount of people who have grown up hating me, and it's no fault of mine. I wrote the songs. I didn't ask the stations to play them so much. I remember they were advertising a guaranteed Phil Collins-free weekend in Milwaukee. People all over the world are sticking pins in effigies of me because they hate 'Another Day in Paradise' or 'Sussudio.'''

Actually, Phil, it's not your music that makes people hate you, you know.

BATTLECAT FIGHTS DOGG: Some more intellectual property wranglings; this time within the industry, as DJ Battlecat brings legal action against the Snoop Dogg/Warren g/Nate Dogg combo Group 213. Battlecat's beef is that three tracks on the Group 213 album filch a little too much from his own work.

IF ONLY THE NATIONAL MUSIC CENTRE HAD THOUGHT OF THIS: Take one planetarium, a mix tape (made, admittedly by Moby) with radiohead, eno, stereolab and, erm, Fischerspooner, and some lights and stuff, and you get SonicVision, a kind of lie-back and be sucked into the lights and shapes of music installation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It's a little bit like how we imagine it'd feel being Jason Pierce.

GOTHS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN: Of course, people have long suspected that, a quick dye job to qualify apart, the only connection most of the suicide girls have with 'goth' is that's how their parents told them to pronounce the game they play at St Andrews. It seems to have been confirmed now that they've invented a new type of goth to accomodate their needs - Darkwave - or 'cheerful goth', if you will. Nixon Suicide, one of the "girls" who will jiggle their breasts for you, is trilling that goth "is definitely funner [sic] now." Obviously, there's been a gap in the market identified for people who want to dress in black but who aren't in mourning for their lives. And since the punks on Suicidegirls are allowed to miss the point of their chosen genre so spectacularly, why shouldn't the faux-Goths be allowed the same freedoms?

BUSH GETS BOONE: Andre 3000 might have been so horrified at being mistaken for a Republican that he issued a denial, but not all pop stars are recoiling from Bush like a slug at a salt lick - he can still rely on Pat Boone, now a spokesperson for the 60+ Association, as well as readying four new albums. If producing a quartet of albums seems a lot for a man past retirement age, you've got to remember the old of America have got to find the money for the massive hike in Medicare rates being brought in by his hero.

RIAA LAWSUITS FAIL TO OUTPACE SPREAD OF BROADBAND: Yep, some independent figures fresh out from IT Innovations and Concepts: the number of filesharers has jumped by 15 per cent since July 2004, and, as autumn brings early nights and reduce barbecue and ball game time, that's set to rise still further. The RIAA lawsuits aren't doing squat in terms of changing people's behaviour, meaning they're just a really expensive way of making the record companies look bad.

KAY FORCED INTO THE PARKING ZONE: After doing 100mph on the A9, Jay Kay has been banned from driving for six months. You'll recall that his original defence was that, since he wasn't driving a sports car, he had no choice but to speed. He also added, for good measure, that he he holds an advanced driving licence and does "take road safety seriously." We're not sure if he was implying that he's such an excellent driver he should be allowed to drive how he likes, but it cut no leeway with the judge. His solicitor tried to persuade the court not to take away Jay's licence:

"He has a house in Gairloch which is a hideaway from a very busy professional life. An international life. His ability to drive and to get away for respite from time to time, when he can, is very important to him. He deeply regrets having to appear here, but here he is."

Apart from the universal that "please take pity on him, with his jet-set star-studded lifestyle" is a lame thing to lay on a court - "he needs his car to jetset" is hardly on a par with "he needs it to drive his limbless sick child to hospickle" - the fact that Kay had picked up another three penalty points in July didn't help a great deal, either.

THEY CAN'T BRING THEMSELVES TO ADMIT THEY'VE GOT MOYLES ON: Although its 9 am, according to the Radio 1 website Wes is on air until 7pm. Incidently, when did Mr. Butters drop his surname? Is being known as Wes rather than Wes Butters meant to make him seem more "down"? Because, really, as names goes 'Wes' doesn't really have much more of a swagger... we'd go with The Butterman.

WHAT PARENTS WILL BE FIGHTING OVER AT CHRISTMAS: Yes, at long last, it's a Slash doll. We hope it'll work like our smoking monkey which has "real" fags it puffs its way through.

PHOWWWWOOOAR! Sting getting naked... hold on to your hats:



He's taking his shirt off to raise money for the rainforests. Noted environmentalist Sting was, of course, the spokesface for the wood-trimmed Jaguar S-Type, a car which manages to burn through a gallon of petrol every eighteen miles or so. So, that'll be balanced out by a shirt, then?

POWER CUTS: The Daily Mail, of all places, ran a rather gushing profile of Vince Power post-Reading festival, giving him a chance to slap away negative reports about Reading:

"The line-up was awesome. The weather never works to plan. I've seen worse."

We're not sure that any other British festival has had its car park swallowed by a river two days before, but to give credit to the MFers, they dealt with the challenge pretty effectively. The Mail also mentions the way Power came to control Reading in the first place:

Three years later, festival owner Howard Pendleton decided that he could run it himself and Power's services were no longer required. Power eventually bought the festival site after 'running around around like a headless chicken' for the best part of a year.

- which makes it sound like a benign, happy little deal rather than the dubious bit of action it really was. Or "ruthless business". Like the takeover of the Town & Country clubs, come to that:

"It was around the time with the fight over the Town & Country that people started painting me as a megalomaniac with an aggressive tone," [Power] says.

Meanwhile, it's clear that he's not going to give up on Glastonbury without a fight:

"Our contract runs until 2006 and who knows what will happen then. Needless to say, I strongly believe we will still have an involvement."

With the money behind the Mean Fiddler group, and Power's shrewd eye for the main chance, we wouldn't be surprised if they buy up all the houses in the village of Pilton...

IT'S LIKE TRACKING HURRICANE FRANCES: We've been watching the latest "lesbian" Christina Aguilera story building for a few days - what started out as a post-MTV VMA party where a couple of bored poledancers writhed within tabloid distance of Xtina has now become "lesbian kisses" between Christina and Paris Hilton. By teatime, we're expecting a strap-on to be involved.

BLAME SATAN: The Mogwai BBC Sessions album has now been put on hold until after Christmas.

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: despite Royal Mail's best attempts
It's funny, you know - we could have sworn a few months ago that Andy Gilchrist was saying he was going to take personal responsibility for making sure that the mail got through, on time. That the head of the Royal Mail thought that his job might not already require him so to do probably suggests why the British mail system is in such a poorly-addressed state. So it is that we've decided to give up on waiting for the this week's NME to arrive, and struck out to make other arrangements.

But first: Time. Apparently, Glasgow is the new Detroit, according to Time Magazine. All the bands, they mean, not because it's full of terrible drivers. And, knowing American readers might be slightly jaded at being told all over again that there's another crucial British town, like Liverpool or London or - what was the one with the people with the big trousers a few years back, Mudchaser or something - Time explains why this time, it's different. It's different because the bands in Glasgow don't all sound the same. Aaah.

In a frankly confusing two-way debate in Saturday's Guardian, Feargal Sharkey and former Pogue Jem Finer exchanged opinions about music in the age of MP3. The most astonishing part of this was, after Finer raved about ResonanceFM being an example of experimentation in music put to decent ends, Sharkey sniffed "unfortunately, not available outside of London, though." This would be a stupid thing to say for anyone, but considering until Ofcom took over last Christmas, Sharkey was one of the people at the Radio Authority ultimately responsible for the health and regulation of the UK radio industry, his lack of knowledge about one of the leading lights of independent online radio is truly shocking.

The Guardian Friday Review met up (in the form of Alexis Petridis) with Minnie Driver, giving her a chance to make a plea for the serious quality of her music. We can't help but wonder if she really wanted to be judged on being someone other than a Famous Movie Star making a record, she didn't just do it under some other banner than Minnie Driver. Amusingly, the EMI execs who signed her only went to see at her South By Southwest because they were expecting to see an indie band called "Minnie Driver" - which tells you a lot about how much prep work EMI A&R do before going to an event.

Also in the GFR: Howie Gelb of Giant Sand puzzling that, after a label had sniffed his album wasn't commercial, four years later a track from it was being used on a Coke commercial, which is about as commercial as you can get this side of the Aflac duck pimping the Pilsbury Dough boy. And a crushing review of Goldie Lookin' Chain's Greatest Hits, suggesting that at least Kenny Everett's Snot Rap had the saving grace of not really understanding the genre he was parodying.

So, finally, to the NME, which we've taken so long to get hold of, is looking dated - it's got Mozzer and Shaun Ryder on the cover... hang on... that's no Ryder, that's Carl Barat. Blimey. He's looking a bit rough.

ohlookmarilynmansonappearsintheshockingnewvideohesmadetogowithhispointlesscoverversion
ofpersonaljesusohhehasachildimsoshockedicouldpoop

The Music - remember them? - are about to release a new album, which is good news because as old country lore has it 'when a the music release in the schedule you find, the cooper temple clause cannot be far behind'. Anyway, Phil The Music has just realised - no, seriously, in his own words - "people listen to lyrics more than they do the music"; he thinks this is something new and wasn't like that when he was a kid, which is confusing what he was like as a kid with what everyone is like.

Melissa Auf Der Maur does the pretend CD: cat power, mary timony and mozart.

Jon Spencer is the latest challenger daring to take on the might of Peter Robinson and his giant hand. Jon chuckles that he cost of from Stockholm call to talk to Pete will burn up any profits the new album is likely to make.

The Radar band ("must see festival band of 2005") is Nine Black Alps, who, with a talk-up like that, might end up disappearing into nothingness before Christmas. On the other hand, they say they make noise and one of them looks a bit like Mark Gardener, so maybe not.

We're not sure if Eddie Smack actually did follow up the question "do you cry" to Dizzee Rascal by saying "what about when your friend was stabbed to death?", mainly because Rascal doesn't turn around and walk out but gives a measured response.

It seems so long ago now, but let's try and do justice to the Reading/Leeds pullout: It actually gets off to a cracking start, with Mark Beaumont reviewing The Darkness. It was Beaumont whose review of The Darkness a couple of years back is the reason you'll never see The Darkness interviewed in the NME (a questionable piece of nose-face slicing that might have seemed a good idea when Kerrang was selling so well). His verdict now? "the worst headline act I have ever seen at Reading... and I saw The Stone Roses."

Are the Suicide Girls entirely neccesary? Barry Nicolson is pretty sharp in the review - "any trace of the 21st century feminist agenda is suffocated under the weight of a tent full of lairy 17 year old virgins going 'Way-hey' at the first flash of nipple. He also points out that the 'girls' aren't even that pretty. But nearly half the page is taken up with photos illustrating both his points, really. That's more space than The Hives get.

"Even God's crying" is the genius bit of Alex Needham's review of The Streets; there are posters - Green Day and Goldie Lookin' Chain - like 'wacky' or what - and White Stripes and Razorlight. The Stripes, by the way, are "rock and roll's Mount Doom"; Morrissey "the Daddy", the Libertines "sound better musically than they ever have done" (yes, nobody much likes to admit it, but Pete Doherty actually doesn't add much to the act)and TV On The Radio are a "weird entity"

other reviews:
live:
soulwax - kings cross scala - "the kind of perfect synthetic rock music that garbage managed a year ago"
the rakes - brighton - "part of britain's frontline militia"

albums:
kasabian - kasabian - "a siege mentality is alive and well in the badlands of Rutland Water", 7 (actually, we know Rutland Water really well, and apart from pubs that charge a tenner for a ploughman's lunch and only give you one pickled onion, there aren't any badlands)
oasis - definitely maybe DVD - "the British public may wish to disown Digsy's Dinner", 10
julian fane - special forces - "too unobtrusive for its own good", 3
pretty girls makes graves - good health - "the natural alternative to boring, pedestrian boyrock", 9
steve earle - the revolution starts now - "important... easily among his best", 6

singles
sotw - mclusky - she will only bring you happiness - "rock as a gateway into a twisted reality"
johnny panic - burn your youth - "we might just have an indie Busted on our hands"
adem - ringing in my ears - "has glockenspiels and recorders on it"

Tim Wheeler loves Thin Lizzy. The girl.

And, finally, years and years ago the classifieds of the NME and Smash Hits would be full of adverts featuring tiny little images of band t-shirts (padded out with 'humorous' ones of an "I'm With Stupid"/"Reality is an illusion caused by lack of alcohol" nature). And you'd look and wonder who would be stupid enough to part with GBP2-99 for such toss, and then figure that there must be loads of people, for the adverts kept appearing, week after week. Then, suddenly, they stopped, and the nation appeared to have come to its collective senses. Nowadays, though, those adverts have got a generational equivalent: camels attempting to sell ringtones and "top quality colour wallpapers" for your mobile. And you wonder who on earth would pay money for their phone to utter a badly-voiced "You're a plonker, Rodney" instead of ringing. And yet, there must be many, for the adverts appear week after week...

ALL THAT PRESS COVERAGE... IT'S LIKE BEING IN THE ROYAL FAMILY: We chuckled quietly to ourselves as our regular mail-out from Girls Aloud warned us to be prepared for a press onslaught:

The Girls are all over the press in the coming weeks as they gear up for the release of Love Machineí on 13th September. Catch em in:

Company - 8th September
I Love Pop - 15th September

Erm, and that's it. Hardly all over the place, is it?

And yet: they seem to have neglected to mention a rather high-profile appearance: FHM have gone to the trouble of doing this:







It's possibly the sharpest example of attempts to segment the market - using the same band to sell into the young girls who read I Love Pop and the men who love the other sort of pop in FHM. It's a tricky route to walk.

DEFTONES LOVE THE CREATURES OF THE WORLD: Chi Cheng, the bassist of the Deftones, has recorded a PETA-sponsored public service announcement for US radio. The hope is that kids in baggy shorts who would have otherwise turned a blind eye to horses being forced to do high-dives and cats being made to behave in a most un-cat-like way will go the cops now that Chi has asked them to.