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It's not fair to call her the hardest working woamn in punk - everyone in punk seems to work three or four times as hard as their equivalents in, say, pop, but Amy Griffin has taken on an extra role.
Shes already working with Raging Teens and Avoid One Thing; now she's also taking on a locum role covering for Dustbuster's Lenny Lashley. Lenny did his hand in a couple of weeks ago; Griffin will juggle shifts until his hand is fixed.
Tracking Glastonbury weekend from the comfort of an iMac and a roof:
Lest We Forget
2004 Coverage from No Rock and beyond
Thursday 23rd June
Hello, young ladies - Daily Telegraph seeks out firmest, youngest, blondest glasto-goers
The Official Sponsorship Moan of the Glastonbury Festival 2005
Ryan Adams pulls out
Friday 24th June
Toilet hiding guys leap out before they're ready
Latest from the Blogs - It's all middle class tents
Heavy rain forces three band axing; overflows eight-hole boots
What it looks like
Dead 60s turn to drink; Eavis still chipper; is this John Peel's work?
Nine Black Alps: A little hoarse?
Doves, Elvis Costello, and a gift for home gloaters
BBC TWO - washed away in the wind and the rain
Glastonbury bloggy round-up
Killers; Babyshambles; Royksopp
Late night round-up: White Stripes, Secret Machines - and Bloc Party claim the world
Saturday 25th June
The Sun does so many shrooms, it comes to believe it's saved the festival
Babyshambles - Doherty does a Bono
Death comes to the festival
Geldof and Eavis - together at last
The first reviews
Holding hands against poverty
Tim Wheeler offers half his kingdom (limited time offer)
The Futureheads: A packet of Bourbons
The Pipettes woz robbed
Keane - sweaty?
Doctor Who, The Proclaimers, Mac The Mouth and Kasabian, taking orders
Headline acts - lights come at the end
Sunday 26th June
Coldplay cover Kylie
UK press largely unbothered by Geldof, Eavis holding hands
Hard-Fi send apologies, note from matron
Police name dead fan
Eavis: I'll not phone U2 any more
Blogs: Joss Stone in her knickers, Chas and Dave, and more
Reviews from Day 2
The third night starts - Brian Wilson and Garbage
BBCi, give us back our red button
PRML SCRM: How to lose friends and downgrade your standing in people's [swastika] eyes
Rufus, Ricky and Brian
Monday 27th June
Round-up of reviews, such as have appeared yet
Teenage watch
The late reviews
Bobby Gillespie - he loves Kylie, actually
Wednesday 29th June
Conor Oberst apologies for Peel jibes
Tuesday 2nd August
The Eavis verdict
Elsewhere...
Glasto blog
ACME Glastonbury blog (Alan got the best deal, sitting in the dry with a nice cup of something while Charlie has been sent to the farm)
Glastonbury from the BBC
Guardian Glasto coverage
NME at Glastonbury
Glastonbury on Technorati
Glasto pictures on Flickr
BBC Glastonbury blog
Guardian Culture Vulture blog goes to Glastonbury
Q Glastonbury blog
Soundgenerator Glasto blog
Robert Price Nokiablogs his way around the fields
Oxfam Glastonbury blog
The continuing, bemusing, run of Posh on the front pages continues - at least this time she's taken that bloody hat off:
It also finds a lot of space - on a morning when the rest of the tabloids are excited by the bloke who convinced people he was a spy and the passing of The Great British Disappointment title from Henman to Murray - to report that Charlotte Church has had a shouty-screamy bust-up with her ex (presumably they don't mean "bust-up" in the strict sense, as he couldn't be an ex if they were able to bust... oh, nobody much cares.) Didn't this happen a few days ago, though?
The Guardian, meanwhile, reports on Glastogoers trying to get a free ride by hiding in portaloos:
They'd have gotten away with it, too - three guys scrambled into the toilets while the delivery van was parked in a service area; unfortunately, they leaped out when the van stopped, only to discover it was just outside the Glasto fence, rather than inside. I believe the phrase is "oh, shit."
Sad news hit our inbox earlier today, telling us of the death of Andy Roberts, multi-instrumentalist with queercore band Linus as well as an active and vital part of the uk underground comic scene.
Sort-of formed in 1989 and 1992, the band started with a fanzine as a first release and played support slots with virtually anyone worth knowing in the lo-fi and riot grrl scenes - from Hole to Bikini Kill, God Is My Vo Pilot to Prolapse and, of course, Huggy Bear. Their first single was the Linus EP - it was always EPs back then - and they quickly followed up with a starring role on Wiiija's Some Hearts Played To Lie compilation ep thingy. 1994's Yougli proves that the band can do more than just four-song spurts of genius, and it's not surprising that Super Gologotha Crucifixion Scene made it to the Evening Session single of the week glory; it's a title that sounds perfect when uttered by Steve Lamacq.
Ten years ago, their label Elemental was bought out by One Little Indian; OLI quickly dumped all Elemental's acts (presumably they were only interested in the coffee table and the office cat); Linus set to writing and writing, building up a massive pile of unreleased material. It was 1998 before any new material would see the light - on Mole In The Ground records and - finally - a year later sees Linus release a second album, Good Listener. A change in the musical atmosphere in the last couple of years had seen the band getting more and more active again - part of a regrouping network of bands thriving outside of the XFM-endorsed semi-alternative mainstream.
Andy's daughter, Sophie, talks about her Dad on her LiveJournal:
For those of you that don't know about what happened, my Dad was a victim of a hit and run. He was at a Homocrime afternoon gig and after he left around 6 o'clock he was hit by a motorcyclist and left. The motorcyclist didn't even stop. The positive side of this is that he was recently at a gig on his way to a rehersal and probably really happy. This couldn't've happened at a more happy time for him, which in a way is very good and in a way very bad.
My Dad is the best man ever. I don't care what everyone else thinks, he just is. My childhood, although sad when I wasn't with him, was the best I could've ever asked for and I am unbelievably greatful for that. I wish I could've known him more and I wish, in the last week and for most of my life, I had called him more and written to him and thanked him every single day. Half of my life is dead.
Andy is one of those very, very rare people in the indieworld who, genuinely, nobody has a bad word for - even when they're out of earshot; and anyone who keeps following their musical dreams for a decade and a half, still thrilled by music and still keen to seek out new bands, new sounds, new gigs despite numerous setbacks and even when fighting the flow of fashion is pretty damn heroic in our book. Our thoughts are with everyone feeling the loss.
If you've watched that toe-curling advert for Microsoft (why do they bother to advertise Windows? It's like a campaign suggesting you use electicity or something - you're virtually a monopoly, dammit) and wondered if anyone in real life really would go "break-up? brilliant, that's going to help with the new album", you might be curious to hear that Katie melua has thrown herself into work following her split with Luke Pritchard - they met at the Brits school; he was in the Kooks. No, us neither. But now she's single, it's work, work, work.
Which is bad news for the rest of us.
As the Live 8 Edinburgh ticket distribution process follows the general trend of going ass-in-the-air, and ticket winners find themselves unable to claim their prize (some confusion between capital and lowercase letters, we're led to believe), tickets for the event have popped up on Ebay, and just as quickly been taken down again.
But why are Ebay doing what Bob has told them? Because, it seems, they've been misled:
On Thursday eBay said Live 8 ticket bids were being removed as soon as they were noticed onsite, a policy it applied to all Live 8 gigs.
"We believe people do have the right to buy and sell items as they choose," an eBay spokesman said. "We made an exception to our policy on the occasion of this unique, charitable concert."
But as Bob has said repeatedly elsewhere, Live 8 isn't a charitable concert - indeed, unless you count the money being given to the Princes Trust to persuade them not to be in Hyde Park on Saturday week, not a penny will find its way to any good cause at all. Bob keeps saying it's not a charity gig - so why are Ebay using the excuse of it being a charity to ban the sale of these tickets?
More to the point, if Geldof was as smart as we're expected to believe, he'd have seized upon the Ebay sales as a positive sales point - "People are so keen to come together and be part of sending this message to the leaders of the world, they're selling their fucking grandmas to buy tickets..." - but instead it's turned into a bit of an awkward mess.
Tom Cruise, the ex-husband of Robbie Williams collaborator Nicole Kidman (okay, it's a little tenuous in connection to pop, but it's just about there) has been talking about how he doesn't care about the rumours and stories in the press:
Asked what he thought about stories about his personal life he said: "I don't really pay attention to it. It does not really bother me. You know what I am saying.
"I do my work l live my life and it's never affected anything before. What do I do? I make my movies and I live my life the best way that I feel that I can. I can't control what people say or do . It is not going to change my life."
Well, good for him. People can suggest he's a tiny gay bloke who's about to enter into a second beard marriage designed to shore up his public image, and such lies roll off him like so much water from a mallard's wings. "It doesn't really bother him."
We presume, then, it must have been a different Tom Cruise who entered into legal action when people suggested he might be gay:
Actor Tom Cruise has won a $10m (£6.23m) case against a gay porn actor who claimed to have had an affair with the film star.
[Lawyer] Ricardo Cestero said Cruise was "very, very pleased with getting this judgment". In his action, Cruise said Slater falsely told a French magazine called Actustar that his gay love affair with Cruise led to the actor's August 2001 divorce from actress Nicole Kidman.
Cruise last acted against gay rumours in 2001, when the 40-year-old actor sued Michael Davis, the Los Angeles publisher of Bold Magazine, for $100m (£62.3m). Davis claimed to have a videotape of Cruise engaged in homosexual acts. The actor dropped the suit later that year after Davis retracted his claim and agreed to a stipulation that Cruise "is not, and never has been, homosexual and has never had a homosexual affair".
Cruise is determined to take legal action for defamation against anyone who spreads false rumours about him, said his lawyer. "He is very concerned and very protective about his personal reputation," [said] Ricardo Cestero. To the extent that if people are writing stories that defame him, he is going to go after them," he said.
Taking a look at the weather forecast and making other plans: Ryan Adams won't be at Glastonbury this Sunday; he's cried off with an ear infection.
It sounds like some sort of late-night 70s sitcom - Britney Spears and six Disney publicists enter her bedroom in the Disneyland Hotel Sleeping Beauty Hotel, only to discover hardcore porn on the TV and Kevin Federline out on the balcony. Quite why he wasn't in the room with porn isn't clear - maybe he's a bit afraid of women without clothes on?
We suspect the payoff to this story is made up by someone somewhere along the line:
Brit babbled, "Boys will be boys" -- then rushed to turn off the flick. After an uncomfortable moment, feisty Brit recovered and got nervous laughs when she hollered out to K-Fed: "Honey, you didn't tell me you'd brought along 'Sleeping Booty'!"
The most disturbing aspect of this is that someone seems to be trying to rebrand Kevin as K-Fed, as if this is going to make him seem more likeable, or go-ahead, or something other than a lottery-winning nightmare.
Michael Jackson's former PR man, Bob Jones, was given the push. Because, of course, it's not like Jackson needs to take care to keep people who saw him close-up sweet, is it? Jones is now promoting a book which rattles about in the darker corners of Neverland.
It turns out Jackson was desperate to buy himself a knighthood:
Jones says, "We spent a fortune trying to communicate with The Queen's people and trying to get them to decide to make him a knight and they weren't interested."
Funny that. It's interesting that Jacko was so keen to become a Knight - usually it's a title given to distant, self-obsessed people with more money than sense. Who haven't been forever tainted because they told a man with a television camera how much they like to have little kids sleeping in their bed and then squealed about being "misrepresented."
But you know what? His supporters probably deserve some sort of gong - if Ellen McCarthur can be a dame for going sailing, this woman must be worth at least an OBE:
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez has been hit down by some sort of abdominal pains, which means that Mars Volta have pulled their remaining dates. That includes the Somerset House show on July 9th.
Holy grief, someone on MTV asked Beyonce what she'd miss most about being in Destiny's Child, and she broke down in tears. (The answer, by the way, is clearly "having people to fire.")
Kelly Rowland jumped in to make some hopefull noises about what the future might hold:
"This is not cool because we're very emotional."
She added: "We call it the end of a chapter, which is still a beautiful thing because there's more chapters to come individually.
"We still haven't had kids yet; we're not married. We're not breaking up. We're growing up."
No, Kelly, you're ceasing to work together. That's pretty much breaking up. We wonder if Beyonce also had her people tell her that "it's not you, it's our client" when she told Kelly it was over?
... although, having said that, a couple of fish with a watch on a chain could outsmart Girls Aloud. But someone has hacked into their website and forced them to close it down the forum. It doesn't appear to have been backed up for quite a while, either:
Its very sad to say that the forum was attacked earlier today so we had to take it offline.
We've restored it from a backup that is a couple of months old. So that is why all those posts are missing.
Apologies for any inconvenience to you all as we know you LOVE the forum.
Blame the idiots that did this.
Thanks.
adminX
Experts have expressed distress at the loss of two months worth of posting to the Girls Aloud forums. "This is terrible, just terrible," said Dan Cruikshank. "It's bad enough the American Army fucking up Babylon, but to lose this vital, irreplaceable resource, covering as it does the period when Cheryl announced her engagement, is an awful blow which I'm sure historians in the future will mark down as the start of a new dark age."
LA poptronic rock trio Autolux are coming to the UK for a mini-tour:
July 4th - Manchester Bierkeller
6th - London Barfly (with the Duke Spirit)
7th - London Sonic Cathedral Club
They're going to be supporting Nine Inch Nails in the US after this, so it might be your last chance to see them before their bodies are violated and their minds filthily, filthily corrupted.
Not too often you can report a venue escaping from a wrecker's ball, so it's pleasing to hear that Camden's Electric Ballroom has been saved. It had been due to get crished to allow the shadowy finance companies currently in charge of the the London Underground to open some shops ("extend the Camden Town tube station"), but even John Prescott - a man who believes that a field is just a cluster home waiting to happen - could see that it was a shit idea:
The tube extension scheme was deemed to have " devastating impact" on the character and appearance of the area, would be "detrimental to the viability and vitality of Camden Town" and would have "unfortunate far-reaching social and economic consequences."
Nick Cave issued the closest thing you can think of to a happy statement:
"The Electric Ballroom is part of the lifeblood of Camden Town, and long may it remain so."
Even then, he has to work in blood somehow, doesn't he?
This year, even the BBC Business News team is suggesting Glastonbury's become a bit of a, well, corporate sell out.
The festivals, um, director of sponsorship denies this, which is a bit like the FA's head of orgy planning denying the place is full of sex:
"We don't have anything like the involvement with sponsors that other festivals have," says Glastonbury's director of sponsorship Robert Richards.
"We've not increased sponsorship levels for the past four years.
"We don't go for overt sponsorship," he adds, adding that arms groups and tobacco companies are all banned, and the sponsors are expected to offer added-value for festival goers.
We're not quite sure how having an "official beer of the Glastonbury festival" - Budweiser, actually - offers "added-value", but we're sure it does, somehow. We do recall, however, that in the past, beer at Glastonbury was provided by the Workers' Beer Company, a socially-organised affair. But, hey, socialism is dead, and Europe is open for business:
"I seriously believe having dealings with commercial companies does benefit Glastonbury," Mr Richards says.
"It's useful. It helps maintain things and allows us to do what we do.
"If we had no contact [with companies] we'd be in a little bubble of good intentions of the caring kind, fixed in aspic."
Yes, without the pouring in of large sums of corporate marketing budget from multinational companies, you might not be able to get a sample of how life could be simpler if we all lived off the land and rejected multinationals (apart from the ones underwriting... oh).
Nobody really expects Glastonbury to be able to resist the lure of market cash - apart from anything, Clear Channel is keen to get its slice of the action- but perhaps it's time for it to drop the pretence to be in any way alternative. It's no longer a radical celebration of arts, bloody mindedness and everything alternative. It's a place for the children of Daily Telegraph readers to find out about a range of Orange Mobile Phone Packages before they disappear on their gap year.
It says a lot about both Glastonbury now and the Daily Telegraph that the broadsheet is the only paper to report the start of people arriving in Pilton; and, of course, that it does so with a large photo of firm young breasts in skimpy tops:
Elsewhere, for the third day running, Posh is on the front pages (yesterday she was on the Star front page but, frankly, we couldn't be arsed). The Mirror is frothing because you could almost, if you look hard, see how if the wind blew and she moved in the wrong way, see her tits:
But the bigger question is why, exactly, she keeps insisting on wearing that godawful £2.50 cowboy hat she can surely only have bought from a souvenier shop on the seafront?
The Sun has the pictures, too, and - oddly, considering Bob's insistence that if you hadn't won the text lottery, you weren't going - tickets to win for Live 8. Provided by Nokia.
How much of a surprise is it that a bloke who often doesn't show up for his own gigs fails to appear for an epoch-defining Vogue photo shoot? Vogue had wanted to reunite Pete Doherty and Carl Barat; Doherty was a no-show.
And, although we think they're wrong, they'd probably not be interested in running pictures of Carl on his own.
There's never going to be a what's left of the Beatles reunion - and that's more or less official: Ringo has said he'll never play with Paul McCartney again:
When asked if the pair would consider joining forces again, he said: "I haven't toured with Paul since '65. We're never going to do it. I go with my band, he goes with his."
Paul McCartney is rumoured to have said "oh boo-hoo-hoo, however will I pay for my Christmas tree now?"
Steve Lamacq has just announced on 6Music that The Loft are getting back together, at least for one gig; possibly more. More when we hear about it...
Lindsay Lohan really could be the next Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey: she disguises a lack of ability at singing by wailing along and pulls pentacular diva strops:
After a screening of the film, which opens Wednesday, Lohan stomped out into the lobby of the El Capitan Theatre huffing, "I'm so (angry)!" Her team of handlers hurried her into a bathroom for a 12-minute cooling down period.
At a block-party carnival after the screening, Lohan was hugged by her mother, Dina, and received compliments from co-star Matt Dillon, before explaining her outburst.
"I was upset when I didn't hear my song (First) during the race scene, where I originally thought it would be," Lohan said while signing autographs. "I was like, 'Whoaaa,' because nobody stays to hear the song in the closing credits.
"So I ran out."
Lindsay, from the reviews we've seen of the Herbie reluanch, nobody's going to be staying to see the opening credits, never mind the closing ones.
Maybe it's being done as a demonstration of just how bad debt can be, but it's looking more and more likely that the costs of staging Live 8 are way going to outstrip available resources - and Geldof is relying loans to underwrite the costs of the effort. He's also scrambling into bed with some very dubious sponsors:
Nokia has signed a £5 million deal to become a global sponsor
Nokia? Global sponsor of a campaign to try and make lives better for everyone in Africa? Is this the same Nokia who makes use of tantalum capacitors, at least a significant portion of which are in turn made using coltan, blamed by the UN for being at the heart of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
Among the most alarming of the report's allegations was that Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian rebels had looted and smuggled thousands of tons of coltan from the Congo into their countries to export to the global market, using the profits to finance their militias. Indeed, the official statistics provided by these countries' governments - which many human-rights observers believe hide large amounts of black-market trading - show that Uganda and Rwanda dramatically increased the export of coltan following their occupation of northeastern Congo. For example, Uganda reported 2.5 tons of coltan exports a year before the conflict broke out in 1997. In 1999, the volume exploded to nearly 70 tons. The pillaging of the Congo's natural resources is exacting a devastating human and economic toll, says Leonard She Okitundu, the Congo's minister for foreign affairs and international cooperation. He told the United Nations Security Council in early May that "a consensus was clearly emerging in the council and in the international community on the links between the shameless looting of Congolese natural wealth and the massacres of the Congolese people." The fighting, he reported, has led to "assassinations of civilians, deportations, torture, rape and deliberate spreading of HIV/AIDS," as well as the displacement of millions of refugees.
It should be pointed out that The U.N. report does not directly blame computer manufacturers and mobile phone makers for the bloody trade, citing instead the companies trading minerals as "the engine of the conflict in the DRC." . And there are other sources of coltan. So, there's no real reason to use looted coltan and fuel the conflict further.
But "so far, high-tech companies have been reluctant to acknowledge they may be using materials originating from Congo rebels. That said, they can do little to prove they do not. "We first heard about this in April and immediately asked our suppliers if they used tantalum from the Congo," said Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia. "All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it."" So, that's alright then - if they say 'no', that'll be good enough. Now, Nokia might not be using any coltan from Congo, but not probing too deeply is, at best, letting other manufacturers who are off the hook way too easily; at worst, allowing the company to enjoy the benefits of murder, pillage and enslavement without it having to weigh on their conscience. It could be argued that if Nokia really wanted to spend five million quid making things better in Africa, it could put some of the cash making absolutely certain that none of its products are made using the blood of the Congolese, rather than underwriting Geldof's mid-life crisis. But then there's a difference between doing something useful and spending a portion of your marketing budget.
Meanwhile, back at Hyde Park, AOL will pay about £3 million as an official sponsor. It will transmit the concerts via broadband and receive a number of corporate hospitality packages to offer guests.
Corporate hospitality? At an event supposedly helping the poorest people in the world lift themselves out of poverty? We guess just because you're concentrating on making poverty history doesn't mean you can't enjoy some Pimms roped off from the unwashed.
So, it's got a little bit lost in the pushing of O2's excellent telephony services and complaining about Ebay, but the whole point of Live 8 is to try and raise awareness about poverty and put effort on the G8 leaders. Now, it's clearly an odd way of going about achieving those aims - Gordon Brown is one of those who would need to be convinced, but he's already bought in, at least partly, to the whole idea and has even been offering advice on who should be on the bill of Live 8; it's hard to see why the other G8 leaders would give a stiffy about the concert in Hyde Park ("We here in Russia love your Annie Lennox - she's changed our mind, that's for sure"); much less any form of Geldof-led crusade on edinburgh when they'll be miles away at Gleneagles and kept safely away from the public anyway
Normally, we do wonder if perhaps our mother raised us as a cynic, but it seems on this one the public is with us - only 16 per cent of respondents to a Youov poll thought the gig and demo would make any difference in any appreciable way; and, besides, they'd rather see some action on climate change instead of, or as well as, relief to Africa.
No wonder Bob's trying to get the Spice Girls back together - it's probably the only success he'll manage. If he can do that.
(Note: You can either read this news story, or wait a couple of years and watch the TV Movie version when it appears mid-afternoon on Living TV2)
Amongst those delighted by the Jackson verdict, of course, was his mother, who otherwise would have had to endure regular visits to chokey and try baking a file in a cake. She's been trilling away about her feelings following the verdict. She's not gloating, of course, she just feels so sorry for the Arvizos:
Katherine Jackson did not know what she would say to Gavin Arvizo and his mother Janet if she met them, she said.
"I feel sorry for them, and from what I hear about their past I feel sorry for their future if they don't change their way," she told NBC's Today show.
We've all learned, and moved on, haven't we? Jacko's learned not have any kids in his bed... or has he?
She added that Jackson would change his friendships with children, no longer allowing them to share his bed.
"I'm sure he's not going to do that now because twice he's been accused of doing something he hadn't done," she said.
Yeah, share your bed with kids and get called a kiddie fiddler once, shame on you. Share your bed twice... how does that go again?
Ma Jackson seems to have come away with a different view of what the trial verdict means for Jackson:
Katherine Jackson told the US TV network she believes her son's name has now been cleared beyond doubt.
"He's been proven not to be a child molester and they know he's not. He's not a child molester, he's not a paedophile, and he doesn't give liquor to children. These kids were bad kids," she said.
Hmmm. He's not actually been proven not be anything - apart from not touching those kids at those time; even some of the jurors came away with the impression that there was something hella fishy going on. If the family Jackson think he's cleared his name, they might be in for a bit of a shock. Only a half-detached person would believe that.
He's not really said who will be suing who, but according to Alex James Blur are now in the throes of legal in-fighting:
"It's a shame really. I thought we might all get together again for Live 8 and try and save the world but no.
"I think my management and my lawyer are both having mental breakdowns. It's mad, it's the hardest thing ever - a combination of new technology and aging rockstars."
Is it just us, or is Alex James starting to look less and less like a pop god and more like David Mitchell playing a creepy uncle?
Can we get an ASBO banning him from buying Werther's Originals?
We're not impressed that Channel 4 is even bothering to put together yet another programme where pranks are played on "celebrities"; and even by the standards of the genre, squirting Tom Cruise with a water pistol disguised as a microphone is a bit dense. Having said that, though, Cruise's complete inability to process what was happening, and then his total over-reaction to a lame stunt which really required little more than a quick "I pity your mother" and a dignified turn about heel was probably the most entertaining thing he's been involved in for a while:
The star struggled to maintain his composure and confronted the man, taking his hand and saying: "Why would you do that ... why would you do that ... why would you do that?"
As the prankster offered a barely audible excuse, Cruise said: "Do you like thinking less of people, is that it?"
After an uncomfortable silence the Channel 4 man went to walk away but Cruise said: "Don't run away."
He told his assailant: "That's incredibly rude. I'm here giving you an interview and you do that ... it's incredibly rude."
Cruise then said forcibly: "You're a jerk ... jerk ... you're a jerk."
Cruise was in town for the premiere of his movie, Yet Another Version Of War of the Worlds. There has been some talk on the internet that the film isn't a genuine movie at all, but is in fact a PR stunt designed to promote his new project, getting married to Katie Holmes, in which Cruise plays the part of a heterosexual bloke.
So, lame gag rescued purely by the pompous over-reaction of the target. (The water pistol team were, of course, thrown into prison - and quite right too; it's unthinkable that any man should squirt into Tom Cruise's face and be allowed to walk away). But could the story get any better?
Enter Sharon Osbourne. She's been got by the same team, with the same gag (this really is a low-rent TV show they're making); only Sharon has decided being hit by a waterpistol is such an assault to her dignity, she's suing. And she's offered Tom Cruise the chance to join her in a kind of irritating class action brought by damp self-publicists.
The only thing worse than not being able to take a joke is to not be able to shrug off a pisspoor joke. Inadvertently, Osbourne and Cruise have turned a gag which would have just made the perpetrators look like childish twonks into a rolling, yelling ongoing situation in which everyone looks bad. The pistol holders have won.
You could have a date with Rachel Stevens, but choose to go down the bar instead. Although, actually, getting barred from everywhere in your home town and finding you can't do your job any more was also a pretty good hint for jocket Martin Cotton. But we imagine it was missing out on Ms Stevens that will be the one that haunts him:
Martin had stopped using cocaine by 2003 but was still drinking too much. The turning point came when Martin pulled out of the date with Rachel Stevens after deciding to go drinking with his friends instead.
Apparently, he won the date on a Chris Moyles competition, which at least answers one mystery. We'd wondered how anyone managed to make it through the Radio One breakfast show for more than ten minutes without seeking out something else, but if a large portion of the audience are still drunk from the night before, thast might well explain it.
Of course, Playlouder run their own ISP with a music-flavour, so their survey into music fans and downloading isn't totally disinterested, but nevertheless, there's some interesting nuggets built into the figures:
82% said they were either unconcerned about being sued for file-sharing or were only slightly concerned and continued to do it anyway.
This does expose one of the major problems with the RIAA/BPI approach of suing some to encourage everybody to behave - they say the legal actions are meant to have an educational effect. Which it does, of course, but the problem isn't that people don't know that filesharing is illegal - it's just they don't care. And as a way of trying to alert people to the plight of poor multinational companies down to their last two or three million profits, it's bloody awful.
This is also quite significant:
Which music download format do you prefer?
MP3: 66%
AAC (iTunes format): 11%
Windows Media Audio: 5%
Other: 2%
No preference: 16%
Maybe the lesson here is that people would happily accept slightly lower quality in return for freedom from being told what they can with the music they've paid for.
In slightly more cheerful news for the people in the comfy reclining leather chairs, the headline on the 2006 Digital Music Survey suggesting they've got the tide of history swimming in their direction:
Around 35% of music consumers now download tracks legally via the Internet and the percentage will soon pass the 40% who have pirated music, according to a new survey released Monday by Entertainment Media Research.
Of course, this doesn't seem to take account of the obvious fact that there's going to be a hell of a lot of overlap between the two groups - we reckon that there isn't a single person with a paid-for download on their hard drive who doesn't also have something or other tucked away that, technically, they shouldn't.
John Enser, senior partner at Olswang, added in a statement: "Clear deterrents to illegal downloading are emerging, with fear of prosecution running high, and close behind is the sense that unauthorized downloading is 'not fair on the artists,' suggesting that the industry's messages, led by the British Phonographic Industry, are being communicated effectively."
Yes... that's right. This is so clearly the case, we're surprised it feels so unlike what our and everyone else's gut feelings about what's actually happening online are.
Following on from the larger Reading capacity, Leeds council has approved an increase in capacity for the Leeds consolation festival. Saturday and Sundays will now see 57,500 people crammed into the site. It's great news for people who sell tickets to festivals, certainly.
We'd recommend noting these words down to compare with the finished product: Mariah Carey, talking about her next two videos:
"We're making two videos," she said. "I actually just got the treatment. We came up with some cool concepts."
What those concepts actually are, Carey wouldn't reveal — because it's "really technical."
"It's a new approach that I would have to let [the director] explain," she said. "It's new territory."
We wonder what the new technical leap forward is. Probably some massive advance in underwired bikini technology.
