Gordon in the morning: Amy "back in drugs hell"

As is the usual form for the big entertainment stories these days, Pete Samson (working again with Virginia Wheeler) has filed the Amy Winehouse back in drugs hell story, leaving Gordon to supply a - well, let's be generous and call it a think piece, shall we?

She must get out of London
By GORDON SMART
Bizarre Editor

Seasoned Gordon watchers will note that he's even being inconsistent with his own byline these days - Bizarre editor? Showbiz editor? What's it to be? But the inconsistency doesn't stop there:

MY heart sank on Brits night when I realised Amy Winehouse was back on the gear.

On Brits night? It's funny, we don't remember your page mentioning it at the time. Or, indeed, at any point during the last week.

I got a call during rehearsals to say she was all over the place, struggling to keep it together and clearly back on it.

Ah yes... this would be at the time you were reporting she missed the rehearsal not because she was addled by drugs, but because she was distraught at the thought of Blake swapping her pictures for heroin, wasn't it? When you said

I hope Amy does pay him off and get rid of him once and for all. It sounds like she’s starting to realise she’d be far better sticking with clean-living photographer BLAKE WOOD, aka Blake II.

... and quoted a friend:

“Amy has opened her eyes recently.

“She’s grown close to this other Blake, Blake Wood, and is trying to live a better life."

Strange way of reporting the life of a woman "clearly back on it", don't you think?

Gordon, surprisingly, has suddenly decided that Amy's rheab was little more than a bid to try and keep her career on track:

Amy’s short time in rehab was nothing more than a token effort to clear the path for the Grammys.

She was in and out so quickly she didn’t even manage to kick her addiction to sweets, never mind the Class As.

Ah yes. That's exactly what you said at the time, wasn't it, when you reported her visit to get her visa:

IT’S chest what we all wanted to see – AMY WINEHOUSE looking almost back to her best.

And, indeed, when she went in to rehab, clearly with a management eye on the Grammys - despite there not being enough time to actually come off drugs, Gordon was excited:

Winehouse has cracked it

IT’S not often I have good news about AMY WINEHOUSE – but the troubled singer is slowly starting to win her battle against drug addiction.

The Back To Black star spent her fourth day in rehab yesterday, where she is delighting doctors with her progress.

Gordon blames the label for not doing anything:

Her hotel in London has seen even more illegal antics — without any action from her record label, yet again.

But wasn't it the label and their big book of cuttings which even Gordon admitted persuaded her into rehab in the first place?

It's a good job nobody takes Gordon seriously. You'd be very confused if you relied on him to cover a story.

At least he's on safer ground with breasts. Nobody could accuse Gordon of not knowing what he thinks about breasts:

OK Boobs star shows them off

It's probably best if you stick to that sort of thing, Gordo.

The Sun: 'Winehouse on drugs'

News 24 has just been doing the first look at tomorrow's papers - although they didn't mention it (focusing on the earthquake story instead) the Sun is reporting that Amy Winehouse is back on drugs - "E, coke and dope", we think it said. Nothing on the paper's website as yet, so we've no idea what, if anything, the basis of their story would be.

Keith Richards: Two hours on stage and still has to do a sex

Keith Richards seems to be feeling his age:

For me, doing a Rolling Stones show for two hours a night, that’s enough fuckin’ exercise, you know? Then I’ve got to go to bed with the old lady, bonka bonka. You know?”

No wonder the old boy tries to hide up trees. But "bonka, bonka"? With "the old lady"? What a silver tongued smoothie.

Blackie Lawless blames internet for all world's ills

Remembering when all this round here was fields, Blackie Lawless has been muttering about how everything's rubbish these days. The press doesn't come up to scratch:

"The press has turned so tabloid, so hopelessly obsessed with bullshit."

A man who makes his living singing Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) might, you could argue, find himself in some difficulty complaining that the newspaper industry has dumbed down in the last few years.

Lawless also complains about the internet:

"What people never seem to be able to realize is that there is one, and just one, reason why we'll never see more bands the size of AC/DC or PINK FLOYD. These were bands that were allowed to try and fail, allowed to grow, allowed to go on at their own pace, and evolve without record companies or other stress factors interfering. Do you think AC/DC would have been able to make an album like 'Highway To Hell' if they had not been allowed to do things at their own pace? I don't. Music needs support, bands need support, and stealing an artist's work will never ever be labeled 'support.' Illegal downloading does not support the artists; illegal downloading is one of the biggest reasons why popular music is past its peak. Most new bands are not able to play, they're not able to write decent songs, and will be forgotten before this interview's over; and the reason for this is exactly what I've told you now. They're not given the opportunity to try and fail, and take the time to learn their craft properly, and illegal downloading is a major factor in this."

The only trouble with this theory is that it's wrong. The 90s offered no acts the size of the big names of the 80s, like Madonna or U2. The 80s couldn't compete with the size of acts like the Floyd of the 70s. That deacade, in turn, never got out of the shadow of the Beatles. This isn't because music started to suffer from pre-emptive internet panic but more because more and more bands were able to play more and more outlets, and everything got shared out a little more. It's wrong to say that popular music is past its peak - Americans bought more music last year than they did the year before - it's just harder to command a massive portion of public attention in a very, very competitive market. The internet hasn't helped with that, but it's not because of illegal downloads - it's down to the ever-increasing number of platforms and outlets and places to hear bands.

Lawless has a point that bands aren't able to develop at their own pace any more - but that's got nothing to do with the internet, either, but is down to the record labels demanding success on the first album or dropping the bands on the spot. This tendency was well in place before the music industry started to grapple with online. But if Lawless is telling us that the WASPs of the future will fall to pieces before they get going... well, that doesn't sound so bad, does it?

ITN dilutes brand with Brits coverage

Here's the ITN On coverage of the Brits. If you watch closely, you might spot something odd:



There's surprisingly frequent mentions of Semi Pro, the latest in the long of line similar-feeling Will Ferrell movies about not-very-good sports people. A poster appears in the background of one sequence; the cab the reporter takes has got the logo on the side; and so on.

Thing is, though, the mentions of the movie weren't there when the footage was filmed - it's been dropped in afterwards as a paid advert, as explained in Creative Review.

Now, we know it's only some entertainment story, but does ITN really think its appropriate to be doctoring news footage with paid-for sponsorship? Isn't that a line that should probably not be crossed by a news-gatherer with a reputation to protect? If ITN ever found itself in another libel case like the one with Living Marxism, wouldn't a willingness to manipulate footage in return for cash give it a harder time occupying the moral high ground?

Has Maxim actually heard any album it reviews?

After yesterday's discovery that Maxim had given 2.5 to an album by the Black Crowes, Nas is now saying that his album has also been given the same score despite not being finished yet, either.

Spinner says Nas "chewed out" the magazine, but really he just shrugged:

"I'm finishing the album now, and it will be out April 22," Nas told the New York Post's Page Six. "I'd prefer [a review from] Playboy," Nas said. "That kind of stuff doesn't reach my radar or effect anybody around me. I don't know what a music rating from Maxim is ... I don't know what it even means really."

Should we have a little sympathy for Maxim? It's being caught in the crunch as labels bring the turnaround to get albums into stores faster than ever, to avoid leaks, and the monthly magazines' lead times. The monthly titles are going to have to rethink how they review albums in the future - when albums hit the iTunes store almost as soon as the microphones are switched off, it's getting harder and harder for them to listen to the records to have reviews published for the release dates.

The answer might be to concentrate on longer, more considered pieces which might come two or three weeks after the album has been in the shops, rather than scrabbling to get some made-up number into the pages as soon as possible. It certainly would be lead to less awkward moments.

Dead man signs petition

MusicFirst have drawn up a petition calling for American radio to pay royalties for playing tunes. The old view of radio plays - that they were as good as adverts - has been abandoned in a bid to open up a new revenue stream.

And, you'd have to say, there's a strong argument that US radio should pay a fair price for paying music - after all, if everyone else has to pay, there's no real reason why radio stations shouldn't.

What is odd, though, is the list of signatories to the document [pdf document]. For not only did Amy Winehouse make time during her recent trials to sign up, but who's this, a couple of places under James Blunt?


James Brown? How compelling an argument must be that the dead come back to life to endorse it.

[UPDATE: Music First have been in touch to explain that the James Brown who signed the petition is an oboe player with the English Chamber Orchestra, and not the dead James Brown. Which is fair enough. Being an oboe player doesn't disqualify you from signing a petition as far as we know.]

Winehouse No, No, Norway

Amy Winehouse's appeal against her dope charges in Norway has been put on hold after her lawyer won a postponement:

Ole Kvelstad, successfully filed a petition to postpone the hearing, in Bergen, for the moment.

He argued that Norwegian police had failed to make adequate arrangements for Mr Fielder-Civil to appear.

Mr. Fielder-Civil's appearance, of course, is tricky as he's due in a British court on the day the appeal was originally due.

McCartney - Mills announcement plans announced

The latest round of the McCartney-Mills marriage misery comes to an end on March 17th, when Mr Justice Bennett is expected to deliver his judgement on how much money should be swooshed from one account to the other.

Of course, if Mills objects to the terms (or if McCartney does, come to that) we'll all go round the mulberry bush again up to the court of appeal. If it's not settled then, it's going to be double-or-nothing on a game of Connect4, under some semi-obscure law.

Vampire Weekend pull UK dates

No Vampire action for Glasgow or Manchester, it turns out, according to their MySpace:

“We're very sad to announce that we have to cancel this week's shows in Manchester and Glasgow due to illness. We were very psyched to come, but at least we'll be back in May.

We sincerely apologize to anyone who was planning on seeing us. Hope we can make it up to you in a couple of months.

Please send positive health vibes our way.

Best,
Ezra”

Probably something to do with garlic. It usually is.

Win prizes: Get to be quite near Marti Pellow

A heartbreaking tale from the latest batch of Advertising Standards Authority judgements, about a person who entered the Sheffield Star's Meet Wet Wet Wet competition, and won, only to find:

although she was in the vicinity of the band, she did not meet them.

Understandably, 'be in the vicinity of Wet Wet Wet' hadn't been considered as an attractive offer for the front of the paper, but the paper tried to mount a defence:

Sheffield Newspapers claimed that the chance to "meet" the band, as described in the front-page flash, meant the chance to be in their presence, to encounter them and to come together at the spectacle. They argued that the prize was detailed in the competition copy itself and delivered as described.

Furthermore, they said, the organisers let two of the prize winner's mates in for free and:

They asserted that the winner and her guests were in the presence of the band and that the lead singer blew the winner a kiss.

Come on, how much more of a meeting do you want than having someone mime a kiss from across a room at you?

Understandably, the ASA was having none of this:

We considered readers would understand from the claim "meet ..." that winners would come face to face with the band and would have the opportunity to interact with them in some way, for example by speaking to them or being photographed with them.

Indeed, trying to tell people that being in the same place as someone constitutes having a meeting with them - isn't that what low-level stalkers do?

Madonna sucks

Of course the new Madonna album is going to be called Hard Candy. Of course it is. It's the sort of name that could have been on any Madonna album, from the first, to the last one.

Hard candies: the sort of thing that grandparents offer children thinking it's the sort of thing they'd like.

"Well, Kirstie, the house is right but I was hoping for something more like a safari park than a zoo..."

Michael Jackson's beloved Neverland Ranch could soon be passing into ownership of a grown-up. Jacko owes £12.5million on the place, and unless he coughs up in the next few weeks, he'll become the highest-profile victim of the credit crunch. Lenders will stack his collection of Magazines About Chess outside the gates and start to auction the property.

Kiss: 35 years of pompous

Signs that your band has long since ceased to have any value as a band and is now little more than a money-making machine, number 396: You issue a newsflash to announce the design of your tour logo.

The album is dead

Graeme Thomson, blogging over on The Guardian, provides a eulogy for the album - not in a 'the sky is falling and so are sales' way, but lamenting the loss of how we used to listen to music:

Does anyone still do this when they get a new release: sit down and physically play it over and over again while giving it their sole, undivided attention? Is the sense of breathless anticipation impossible to recreate in the digital age, when we might already have access to a leaked version, or heard a few songs on MySpace or YouTube? Whether we download or buy CDs, most of our music is instantly fed into a vast swirling swamp of existing music. Do you leave a new album to the Darwinian vagaries of the shuffle function? How many spins does it get before you start automatically skipping one of the supposed weaker tracks? Is there room for "the grower" any more?

I'd argue that the digital age makes music more accessible but somehow less tangible. I've always regarded the cover, the artwork, the inner sleeve, even the typeface of a new album as a doorway into new music, a means to get closer to it, further to understand what is being expressed this time around. When there is no physical element to link us to the music, surely some vital little part of the over-arching artistic statement is lost.

I'm not sure the distinction is quite so clear-cut: certainly, by the 1990s any album you'd want to buy, you'd probably have heard a couple of tracks as singles, maybe one or two on Peel and - possibly - seen some other tracks live, so it's not as if it's ever been that you were coming to a whole slew of unheard music, unless you were buying the album on spec.

For me, I still listen to albums all the way through, but then I'm bloody ancient. I only really managed to overcome my distrust of shuffling the order of album tracks randomly last year.

Gordon in the morning: The end of the Spice affair

And this would be the official end of the Spice Girls reunion: The Sun has called an end to the fawning. Even Gordon - who a couple weeks back was still full-on-fawning - has decided he no longer needs to treat the band with kid gloves any more. Indeed, the discovery of a tongue-in-cheek remake of Oleta Adam's Get Here (only with 'fuck' rather than 'get') allows him to reopen the paper's hostilities with Mel B:

I’ve said before that Scary Spice is indistinguishable from her foul-mouthed Bo’ Selecta! character — and those lyrics have those fat fingers all over them.

Charming.

Gordon, it turns out, has always hated the way the Spice Girls are just so rude:

They’d better just hope it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Not that these girls seem to give a XXXX these days.

Their tour tested the definition of a family show.

Yes - like, erm, when you were sat chuckling while they did gags about your cock onstage, you mean, Gordon?

Thank God we can rely on Gordon to keep up standards of family entertainment, panting over Penny Lancaster not wearing a bra and Britney Spears wearing a bra. It's hard to imagine where the Spice Girls get it from, isn't it?

Gerard Way: cartoon villain?

Comic book hero Hart Fisher set Gerard Way on his way to fame and fortune, offering him a start out in the 1990s. Now that Gerard is spreading his wings from badly-drawn music into the comics field, Fisher is getting grumbly. Indeed, he's suggesting that Way ripped him off to create My Chemical Romance. It seems the heart of the beef is that Fisher published a comic by Way on his Boneyard imprint, and feels now Way is writing for Dark Knight, he's not being given his due.

Fisher, it's fair to say, has more than one axe he's taking the opportunity to grind on this one:

I'm not sure if your average comics fan has noticed, but my company's work, and the work of it's creators, has consistently been black listed from the comics price guides. Why don't you go find out how much Garry's first comic is worth. You know, On Raven's Wings #1 (april 1994) and #2 (september 1994) and good luck on finding that shit listed anywhere. Now go looking to see how many Bill the Bull comics are listed, you know, with Duncan Rouleau's first published work (see if that's listed in the guides kids). Go see if John Cassaday's first published work, a Bill the Bull story called "Justin", is listed anywhere in the guides. He worked for several years at Boneyard before he broke, he's been one helluva friend to me over the years, and he lists my work on his site, but you won't find it listed in the guides. How about those Dahmer comics. Any of them listed on there? How about John Lucas's early work for me, you find that listed anywhere? Flickering Flesh anyone?

Fisher is apparently now trawling his own work to find evidence that My Chemical Romance lyrics were a straight rip from him, rather than every other goth band ever.

iTunes moves up to number two

Here's some figures which show why the majors are desperate to try and find someone, anyone, to take on iTunes with a serious proposition: Apple is now the second biggest music retailer in the US, bested only by WalMart, according to NPD Group. And that's without selling any CDs at all.

Equally alarming for the companies which cling to their old business models: 48% of American teenagers didn't buy a single, physical record in 2007.

The good news for musicians, though, is that Americans bought 6% more music last year than they did in 2006.

New Q?

Bauer, currently working through the bits of things it bought with EMAP, is touting round a new look for Q Radio, headed up by Ric Blaxill, late of 6Music and Top of the Pops:

Sources close to the situation are suggesting the relaunch could happen as early as May.

A spokesperson for Bauer said that no firm decision has been made as the “teams are still assessing the demand for a bigger Q Radio”.

Since we're not sure there's much of an actual demand - unless we've missed some sort of public debate - we imagine they're hoping to create a demand. It's part of Blaxill's brief:

to look at a range of new male music propositions including a new version of Q Radio with stronger ties to monthly music magazine Q.

So, a station that plays a lot of U2, then.

Black Crowes dismiss pre-emptive review

Maxim ran an advance review of the Black Crowes new album in the March issue, giving it a ho-hum two-and-a-half:

[T]he reviewer opined that the album—the band's first in seven years—"hasn't left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth."

The only trouble is, there's no way the reviewer could have heard more than the first single released off the record. The Black Crowes are, um, crowing:

"Maxim's actions seem to completely lack journalistic integrity and intentionally mislead their readership," the Crowes' manager Pete Angelus said in a statement. "When confronted with the fact that they never heard the album they are claiming to 'review' in their music section--with a star rating, no less--they attempt to explain that it was an 'educated guess.'

"What's next--Maxim's concert reviews of shows they never attended, book reviews of books never read and film reviews of films never seen?"

Good lord - reviewers not actually sitting through the things they're reviewing. Whatever next?

Maxim, of course, were caught out because giving a Black Crowes album anything more than a single star is going to look very suspect indeed.

Perez Hilton: Starmaker?

Not that the major labels are running out of ideas or anything, but the New York Times reports Warners are seriously considering giving Perez Hilton a vanity label. It's not entirely clear why Mario Lavandeira would want to throw his lot in with Warners - couldn't he just come to a direct deal with the acts to release them online?

Busted?

There's a shock court case over at the High Court, as two former members of the band that became Busted are claiming ten million quid for songs they say they wrote before they were shaken out the band.

Yes: Busted wrote some of their own songs. It's truly shocking.

Ki McPhail and Owen Doyle reckon they co-wrote some of Busted's songs with James Bourne and Matt Willis, before they were ejected from the band and asked to sign away their rights to the tunes.

Tim Penny, representing the pair, said: "The pressure placed on the claimants consisted of repeated advice and threats.

He said they were told "unless they released their claims in relation to the group members' songs and in particular the four songs, they would be sued, Ki McPhail's parents would lose their home and the claimants would never work in the industry again".

We're not quite sure why anyone would have fallen for this, but apparently they did. The case is going to grind on for three weeks.

Don't sing in Brighton

Last year, there was some attention given to Brighton and Hove Licensing's decision to ban venues from hosting events at which hate music was sung - songs which called for the killing of gays, for example.

It turns out that, as some sort of balance, Sussex Police are cracking down on peace music, too. They've arrested a woman for singing a song at a camp in Wild Park protesting against the presence of US weapons corporation EDO MBM in the city of Brighton and Hove.

Madonna is excused

TMZ is reporting - in far, far too much depth - about Madonna's day turning up for jury duty in Beverley Hills. In the end, she was allowed to go without having to hear a case, presumably because anyone who swallows the Kabbalah centre line whole can't be relied upon to spot a fib.

Turns out Ricky Wilson only has marginally more patience than everyone else

If you're bored of Kaiser Chief songs, Ricky, how do you think the rest of us feel? We're not even paid to listen to them.

Wilson doesn't think we know how hard it is for him:

"It gets out of hand for a band when you've made a couple of albums," Wilson told the Daily Record.

"You make an album then you're supposed to go around the world for two years promoting it - boring."

Well, yes. Especially the last lot, we'd imagine.

Different to what?

We're still trying to work out exactly what producer Nate Danja Hills means when he talks about the forthcoming Madonna album:

Madonna’s eleventh studio album has been described as “very different”, by one of its producers.

Speaking about the sound of the record, Hills said: "She wanted up-tempo, dance, club music, and for everything to have a hip-hop underlining."

That's neither different sounding to the last couple of disappointing Madonna albums, nor from most of the sludge churned out by older people hoping to catch the younger audience's ear. So: different to what, exactly?

Pete And The Pilots

When we saw the NME headline yelling about Pete and the Pirates "in plane flight drama", we held our breath and clicked through. Were they on that flight where the co-pilot died? Had they found themselves next to Ian Brown in the air, keeping out a nervous eye in case he threatened to cut off flight attendant's hands again?

Erm, no:

The aeroplane the Reading band had been scheduled to fly back to the UK on after a gig in Italy was grounded due to excessive fog, meaning that the band had to hastily alter their schedule.

After some frantic rescheduling the band managed to get on an alternative flight and walked onstage at the Astoria with only five minutes to spare before their slot would have been pulled.

That's not really 'plane flight drama' - 'band have to reschedule air tickets' more like, surely?

Jay Z: Slave profiteer

It might come as something of a surprise to discover that Jay-Z, rather than being a hip hop moghul as usually styled, turns out to be a profiteer from the African Slave Trade.

Well, that's what this bloke reckons, anyway, "this bloke" being Clive Campbell. Campbell has launched a five billion dollar lawsuit against Barclays Bank, Bruce Ratner and Jay-Z:

In the claim, Mr. Campbell said that Mr. Ratner and Jay-Z worked “in concert” with Barclays, and “profited from the African Slave Trade and continue to profit from these gains, through a conspiracy dating back hundreds of years and continue to date to oppress Black people, enslave them, unlawfully deport them to all corners of the Earth.”

Jay-Z's apparently on the list because he's supported Ratner's project to build a sports arena in Brooklyn - an arena which will be named after Barclays. Which seems somewhat tenuous even by the standards of the case.

We'd imagine Barclays aren't going to be earmarking five billion dollars in case this goes against them.

Oddly, though, according to the New York Observer report, Barclays isn't just sniffing that the case is without merit, but denies that it had anything to do with the slave trade. Interesting. Why, then, did the exterior of Martins Bank in Liverpool have carvings depicting the city of Liverpool being held aloft by African children? Martins now being part of Barclays. Through Martins, Barclays also absorbed Heywood's Bank, which had been founded by a pair of brothers who made their money from the Africa trade routes (and a spot of piracy).
[Thanks to Michael M]

Sting: heals the world, reunites the warring

The Led Zeppelin reunion. You might have thought it was down to the death of the band's mentor Ahmet Ertegun. But, no - it turns out that the desire to pay tribute to a key figure in their career was merely an excuse. Really, they just wanted to copy The Police, reveals Sting:

"I'd like to think we had some influence over that... I would have loved to have been there."

We've checked the historical record, and it's true - no group ever got back together before The Police did so.

Sorry, Pete

The terrible treatment of Australia's indigenous people. Slavery. Apologising for historical wrongs is quite the thing at the moment.

George Martin has just donned the sackcloth, issuing a sort-of apology to Pete Best for his part in Best getting shown the door from The Beatles:

It was Sir George who, just before the band became big, decided to replace the drums on Love Me Do with those of a session musician. “I felt guilty,” he tells a Beatles fansite. “Maybe I was the catalyst that had changed his life.”

'The catalyst that changed his life' is quite a jolly way of putting 'the person responsible for him languishing in obscurity while his replacement became one of the richest, most famous men on the planet.'

Still, Pete had the last laugh - he's still in The Beatles, albeit Pete Best's Beatles, while Ringo Starr is a struggling solo artist.