The illustrated Hello: Barry Humphries

Creator of Les Patterson, Dame Edna and Barry McKenzie, Humphries also invented Australian experimental music - creating "Wubbo" in the 1950s as something between a dadaist prank and a full-on jest while a member of the Melbourne Dada Group.

There is a grim black mark on his record, though. In the guise of Dame Edna, he managed to get himself involved - briefly - in this:



Yes, he turned up in the Bee Gees' Sergeant Pepper movie.

[Part of the Illustrated Hello]

What is the NME's target market these days?

I only ask because... well... their sponsored advertising suggests they might not be quite aimed at the youngest audience any more:

Gordon in the morning: When friends fall out

Oh no, it must be Gordon's nightmare:

THE battle lines have been drawn between JLS and N-DUBZ.

The rival bands are competing for the same roles in a major new BBC drama.

Really? Who knew the BBC were working on a docudrama about the Outhere Brothers. That's surely it, isn't it?

Gordon always knew this day would come:

I was wondering when they would clash.

It was only a matter of time. It might have been Celebrity Gladiators. It could have been Come Dine With Me. But instead: it's here. On the streets of a major BBC drama.

What drama, actually?

The drama follows the lives of kids living on the fictional Rockindale and Brookdale housing estates in Hackney, east London.

Sounds a bit like a southern version of The Street to me.

In the sense that it will have people pretending to be other people saying words that have been written down, yes, Gordon, it sounds exactly the same.

Brookdale, eh? Rodney Bennett, where do they come up with these names.

It turns out the role that JLS and N-Dubz are scrapping for is only a cameo in one episode. Who is in the lead, I wonder. Does Gordon have an insider who can give us a hint?

N-Dubz have got the edge now. They are more gritty and more street.

I suppose so, yes. In the same way that out of Sooty and Sweep or Pinky and Perky, one of those pairs is going to be slightly more convincingly like the animal they're based on.

Mini liveblog: DEBill debate on Today

Geoff Taylor of the BPI has just been on Today talking about the Digitial Economy Bill. It's impossible to tell if he really is an idiot, or just happy to try and take people for a ride.

Amongst his strange claims were that it didn't matter that there wasn't enough time for proper debate in parliament as "there had already been a lot of debate in the media" and that it didn't matter the elected chamber would look at the legislation properly as the Lords already had, and that that was where most revisions to legislation took place. (He didn't mention that was where a BPI patsy had dumped some of his trades group's own words into the legislation.)

Taylor also claimed that all the parties supported the bill being jumped into law through wash-up - when it was pointed out to him that the Liberal Democrats didn't, he stuttered that they supported the general principle, as if that was the same thing.

When David Babbs from 38 Degrees raised the question of the risk of public web services being hit by the law - clearly talking about internet cafes and services like coffee shops with wifi - Taylor dealt with this point by ignoring it completely and talking about "technical measures" which "householders" could use to "secure their connection" - again, it's unclear if he really didn't understand the difference between 'protecting a home network against someone sitting outside in a car downloading files through an unlocked connection' and 'a public wi-fi service that would be useless if it had to be locked down to stop people accessing it', or if he was deliberately confusing the two. Neither option is particularly edifying.

In the topping of his call to trust the idea of legislation being chucked together as MPs pack their bags, though, was his reassurance that we don't need to worry about customers being targeted unfairly, as Ofcom would be drawing up the rules and overseeing how they work.

That's alright then. It's not like the man likely to be the next Prime Minister has effectively announced that the Tories intend to junk Ofcom and build a new, light-touch regulator. Apart from perhaps being told that nothing bad would happen without Stephen Byers saying it was alright, I can't think of a less reassuring piece of reassurance.

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: He's got a red hot twelve inches

How many times now have we seen reporters suddenly "discovering" that vinyl sales rising again? There's another piece in the Times doing pretty much that this morning. Naturally, HMV's apostle of Lazarus formats Gennaro Castaldo is waiting by a phone to sort-of explain this:

Gennaro Castaldo, of HMV, said: “It’s pretty much a niche product compared with CDs and downloads, but a reasonably healthy one that you can see carrying on into the future. It’s seen off cassettes and you get the feeling it will also be around after CDs as well, mainly because it has an emotional appeal.”

I've read about two dozen pieces like this over the last few years, and nobody - not even Gennaro - seems to have thought that the real reason vinyl sales have started to grow, slowly, over the last couple of years has been the spread of digitising turntables simply making it easier to play and capture vinyl after a decade or so where anyone trying to buy a record player would have looked like Griff Rhys-Jones in that Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch.

The illustrated Hello: Brian Hayes

Brian Hayes is the man who was edged out of Radio 2 to make way for the return of Terry Wogan, when Wogan returned from TV. Oddly, they didn't invite him to pick up where he left off when Wogan quit again last year.

His phone-in show was quite popular with Snipe fanzine - his no-nonsense "well, you obviously haven't thought through your point, so I'm going to cut you off" approach was unusual back in the 1980s, in a world yet to have been touched by the joy of Talk Radio UK and James Whale being given a show.

There's not much Brian Hayes stuff around the internet - but, had Hayes not been busy keeping the seat at Radio 2 warm, Wogan would never have been free to run around the TV doing Historic Interviews like this, with Ken out of Bros:



And, likewise, without Hayes softening up British ears, James Whale would never have got to take his radio show to late-night TV, and we would have been denied this meeting with Wayne Hussey:



[Part of The Illustrated Hello]

Bob Dylan discovers forbidden city in Beijing

The Chinese authorities have decided that they don't want Bob Dylan playing Beijing. Or, for that matter, Shanghai. His China tour is thus off.

Apparently the Chinese government heard he'd let his music be used in ads for the Co-Op, and concluded that sounded a little too much like socialism for them to be comfortable with him turning up.

Whatever the actual reason, Dylan has scythed off a whole slew of other dates:

The verdict scuppers Dylan's plans to play his first dates in mainland China. The singer, who plays around 100 concerts a year on his Never Ending Tour, had hoped to extend a multi-city Japanese leg with concerts in Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. All these would now be called off, Wu told the newspaper.

"With Beijing and China ruled out, it was not possible for him just to play concerts in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan," he said. "The chance to play in China was the main attraction for him. When that fell through everything else was called off."

I'm not sure that quite makes sense - "yeah, I really fancied playing Beijing so somehow organised a date in Seoul to make it happen"? It's not like Dylan's putting on a U2 style epic, and surely once the stuff has made it to Japan you might as well take it to Korea? Wouldn't the dates in China have been the more expensive part of the jaunt, given that there's less rock and roll infrastructure there - wouldn't axing those two dates make the others more lucrative?

And besides: allowing the Chinese government to effectively deny the people of Hong Kong and South Korea a gig they'd like to see? Is Dylan really sure he wants to play along with that?

How is EMI's panic going?

EMI's suicide-to-save-self plan to give its American records business away to a rival, in return for enough cash to stop the bank taking it over isn't going well. Variety reports that Universal didn't offer the sort of cash EMI needs, and a sniff from Sony failed to turn into any formal talks.

Which is probably just as well, saving them the horror of this conversation:

Guy Hands: Here, Mr Bank Manager, here's the latest part of the loan payback
Bank manager: Thank you. How did you fund this?
Guy Hands: Well, I sold off the rights to the entire US catalogue business for five years
Bank manager: Right. Um... you know that business was part of the figures we used when we decided if we'd let you have a loan to buy EMI, don't you?
Guy Hands: Uh... I guess?
Bank manager: And the income from the US catalogue business was part of how we expected you to be able to pay back the loan?
Guy Hands: I... um, I suppose...
Bank manager: And now you don't have that income.
Guy Hands: Oh! But... um...
Bank manager: So it's unlikely you'll be able to pay the loan back next time.
Guy Hands: Well... uh, now you put it like that...
Bank manager: I think you're a bad risk. I'll get Mrs Lewinsky from credit to start calling in the balance on your loan. Good day, Mr. Hand.
Guy Hands: But... I got a kidney! I could sell a kidney...

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: The Doors

In the Guardian, Ben Myers suggests The Doors don't get the respect they deserve:

I think I like them for the same reason most others hate them: Morrison's pretentious poetry, his messiah complex and the underlying belief that rock music could actually change society. And because it annoys people. Even Oliver Stone's accidentally comical biopic or the fact that loads of backpacking Eurotrash students seem to like them, too, is not enough to put me off. It's their music I keep returning to. It's just so baroque and velvety. So dramatic. You can keep the later drunken bluesy stuff, but I'll never tire of the swaggering call-to-arms of Five to One or the anxiety-inducing Not to Touch to the Earth.

Myers has a point, sort-of, if you ignore the suspicion that had Morro lived, he'd not have had much more to offer in the way of inventiveness, and that - far from being forgotten and underrated, every few years there's a fresh bout of Morro-cultism, and for the last forty years that poster of him with his shirt off has sold pretty well at Fresher's Fairs. Far from being underrated, The Doors are probably the only band who get probably just about the amount of respect they deserve.

Gordon in the morning: N-Dubz spraying for Easter

Normally, yobbish louts firing paint pellets at innocent bystanders would be the sort of thing The Sun would rail against - broken Britain, don't you know? - but what do you when it's one of Gordon's chums doing the shooting?

The result is a slightly strained report into N-Dubz firing on their own fans. Not a word suggesting that it's a bloody dangerous thing to do, or that people who aren't earning money for old rope might be less than thrilled that their gig-going outfits have been destroyed by rich kids with paints "having a laugh". Gordon restricts himself to just the facts:

Northumbria Police said: "Police were called to a coach at the back of the O2 Academy following a complaint that pellets were being fired.

"The two people involved had been firing plastic guns at each other which discharged a 6mm-sized pellet.

"They were very apologetic and handed the toy guns over voluntarily.

"No complaint of injury has been made.

"No arrests were made. Advice was given to the parties involved."

You'd have to wonder at the sort of twits who fire paint at their own fans. Most bands at least try to disguise the contempt they feel for the people who pay their wages.

The illustrated Hello: Mork And Mindy

Aah... Saturday morning TV:



For reasons that I don't think were ever completely explained, Mork and Mindy sold their house in Boulder to Larry and Balki from Perfect Strangers.

Mindy would have been Pam Dawber, who didn't have the most glittering post-Mindy careers. To be honest, the way the ratings for Mork & Mindy tanked after the first series, she didn't have the most glittering Mindy career, come to that. Here she is touring in Oklahoma:

Robin Williams did have a bit more success. There was that one where he dressed up as a woman. No, not Tootsie, his was the other one. And the one where he was a teacher. And even now...



... even now he can turn up on TV being a bit insufferable.

[Buy: Mork And Mindy series one]
(Don't buy season four, where they get married and chased by other aliens... it's a 'please don't cancel us' nightmare. Actually, it doesn't seem to have even been released.)

[Part of the Illustrated Hello]

The illustrated Hello: Kim Mazelle

In-jokes ahoy - Kim Mazelle was providing backing vocals on Hello, so strictly speaking they could have just waved hello instead of singing it.

Mazelle has had a solo career which wouldn't shame anybody, but really her strength has been adding depth and atmosphere to other people's work, either as named collaborator, or small-print lurking back-up person. You just hope getting a mention in the lyrics doesn't mean ten quid off the fee.

She even managed to bring a splash of magic to Doctor Robert's post-Blow Monkeys attempts at a solo career:



Mazelle provided the heavy lifting for Soul II Soul on Missing You:



And here she is when she's over at her own farm, feeding her own chickens:



Mazelle turns up - misspelled - in Blitzed, Steve Strange's autobiography:

The singer Kim Mayzelle was so out of it one night she went into my office and had a pee on my chair. It was a strange time.

[Buy Kim Mazelle's The Pleasure's All Mine]

[Part of The illustrated Hello]

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Bikini Kill

Highly recommended: Andy Folk's piece for the Bikini Kill blog on being white, a boy, and loving BK:

My invasion of privacy is somewhat disgusting to me now. Instead of acknowledging Jackie as a real, albeit absent, person, I though of her as 90s archetype like Jane Lane or Angela Chase, retired along with the decade. Still, I would not tell Kat that I was reading her sister’s diary, or that I had turned her into a folk hero in my mind. She had done what hundreds of misfit teens like me constantly dreamed, but such a thing was unthinkable now. We were post-Columbine, post-9/11, it was an age of zero tolerance where being sad or angry meant being accused of plotting a school-shooting. So instead of replicating her actions I replicated her style. I bought the Huggybear split at Generation records, and wore the shirt to the local hardcore and emocore shows. But the shirt was huge on me, and the kids at the show that actually knew Bikini Kill seemed confused, even startled, that a chubby 15 year-old would be wearing a Bikini Kill shirt. At one show an older girl from a lower-Westchester band even asked me why I was wearing it. “I just like Bikini Kill, I guess.” I didn’t understand the question.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Juliana Hatfield

Juliana Hatfield takes to the Huffington Post to call for help with stray dogs in Puerto Rico:

Strays are referred to as "satos" in Puerto Rico. "Sato" is a derogatory term for "street dog" and usually refers to mutts. Purebred dogs are generally more highly valued on the island. Many islanders treat the satos as a nuisance, as pests, vermin to be kicked away. Satos are routinely abused -- poisoned, shot, beaten, cut by knives, burned by acid or hot oil or boiling water, deliberately hit by cars -- or simply neglected, left to fend for themselves. And, on their own, they breed; strays are born to strays and the problem literally grows.

Jedward: Maybe it's time to let it go

Look, I know when your future holds little more promise than the chance to discover what it's like being turned down for panto, you'd grab at any straw, but remaking the Shake N Vac advert? Jedward, you never had dignity, and you had little goodwill left to squander, but all this is doing is making it a couple of weeks longer until you have to go for your first Back To Work interview.

The illustrated Hello: Salman Rushdie

When he was the subject of a fatwa, this nation rallied round Salman Rushdie. Protection on a daily basis; official denunciations of the threats to his life; condemnation of the idiots burning his books.

And how did Rushdie show his thanks?

By collaborating with U2, that's bloody how.

Let's get this over with, then:



You'd have thought that Rushdie would have steered clear of U2, after he was a victim of Bono's tiresome attempt to cross crappy Halloween costumes with Noel Edmond's funny phone calls:



Sadly, the entire internet seems to have offered no place for Jasper Carrott's Rushdie parody of the JR Hartley advert during the fatwa, which was actually not quite as funny as Carrott's observation afterwards: "you know, it was really difficult to find a Salman Rushdie lookalike for some reason..."

[Part of the Ilustrated Hello]

The illustrated Hello: William Tell

A long-dead Swiss legend, best-remembered for being slightly better at shooting things off people's heads than William Burroughs turned out to be. To be honest, he doesn't really seem to have done much more than the shooting-the-apple thing. Sure, he was doing it as part of a complicated act of defiance against the Austrian colonialist who were occupying his part of the country, but it's hardly a full-on Robin Hood, is it?

Nevertheless, he got a whole opera out of it, and it's probably thanks to the cracking overture Rossini came up with that Tell managed to land a couple of TV series:



William Tell is also a singer songwriter in the sludgy mid-everything American market. He plays in a band called - in a desperate attempt to sound ironic - Something Corporate, but also does solo stuff, too.



He really is called William Tell, though, which is a surprise. And he's not even named after the apple bloke; he's named after his Dad.

[Part of the illustrated Hello]

Woot-ton: An exclusive Lee Ryan exclusive

However does Dan Wootton do it? He's only gone and managed to land an exclusive interview with Lee Ryan. I'll bet old Larry King is tearing strips off his researchers for having missed that one:

He's a top guy because, unlike many stars, he says exactly what he thinks - even if it means hitting out at a legend like GEORGE MICHAEL (most singers wouldn't dare). Lee said: "I actually had a song from George Michael called Medicine Man. He took it off me at the last minute. Thanks George, you wanker!"

It's not really being brave if you're not really capable of understanding the consequences of your actions, is it?

And, frankly, "George Michael thought that giving me one of his weaker songs would be a waste" isn't that great a claim, if you stop to think about it.

It's like a newsagents putting up a poster bragging "Cadburys wouldn't even let us sell their mis-shapes."

Still, there is some good news:

Lee also revealed the Blue reunion is on hold. "There were some issues with the label," he said.

Yes, there must have been. What with the world slapping a label on the plans that read "desperate, pointless and unwanted".

The illustrated Hello: Willy Wonka

Willy Wonka. The famous, fabulous, fictional factory owner who made a special invitation for a lucky few to come inside his sugar walls...



No, no, Sheena Easton, not now.

Wonka was created by Dahl, brought to life by Gene Wilder, and then destroyed by Johnny Depp in a pointless remake (Kind of the Nestle buyout version, I'd guess). Wilder got to sing in the 1970s version, in this clip which represents, I think, the first-ever appearance of Roy Kinnear on No Rock:



One of the winners of the golden tickets allowing a trip round Wonka's factory was Veruca Salt. A spoiled brat who got everything she demanded (and, you'd have to suggest, more than a little cribbed from the mighty Violet Elizabeth Bott) - what better name could you pick for your indie guitar band?



By law, that had to be played on every edition of The Evening Session, that did.

[Buy: Resolver - Veruca Salt
Manthology - Gay For Johnny Depp]

[Part of The illustrated Hello]

This week just gone

Looking for Jesus on No Rock - top Jesus-mentioning Google searches:

1. Jesus And Mary Chain at Coachella (& variants thereof)
2. Madonna Jesus
3. Jesus Mesquia
4. Mung Bean Jesus
5. Jesus Of Cool rapidshare.com
6. Jesus And Mary Chain blogspot
7. Jesus And Mary Chain reunion
8. Jesus in a box
9. Jesus Lizard
10. Teenage Jesus And The Jerks - Shut Up And Bleed

A special mention to 'how do you spell Christmas', though.

These releases were interesting:


Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be

Download I Will Be


To Rococo Rot - Speculation

Download Speculation


Shakespear's Sister - It's A Trip

Download It's A Trip


Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Wonder Show Of The World

Download Silent City


Wedding Present - Live 1988

Download Live 1988


Bonobo - Black Sands

Download Black Sands


Sly Stone - Listen To The Voices

Download Anthology

Cruel headlines: Peter Andre

ContactMusic with a headline that's all punchline:

Peter Andre Planning Picture Book

The rest writes itself.

The illustrated Hello: Little Nell

Little Nell, those of you who had to Dickens at school will remember, was a character in The Old Curiosity Shop. There is another Little Nell, though. Little Nell Campbell.

Her Dad wrote a column about family life in the Sydney Daily Telegraph and dubbed her Little Nell in that, a nickname which would stick with her through her adult life as an actress and singer. She was in the Rocky Horror Picture Show - which as far as I can tell is a device men use to wear skirts and stockings in public without having to ask themselves questions about why they enjoy doing so - but also released a series of records of her own.

This is I Wanna Be A Beauty Queen, which appeared on the opening titles of a documentary about the 1978 Alternative Miss World:



[Part of the illustrated Hello]

If it wasn't for Bob Geldof, people would still be living in poverty

More4 is showing a documentary on Monday which includes a segment that takes a hard look at celebrity anti-poverty campaigns:

The film that appears to have angered Geldof is Starsuckers, a polemic against media and celebrity that will be broadcast on More 4 on Tuesday. A section of the documentary makes a string of allegations about singer-turned-campaigner.

They include the suggestion money raised from the 1985 Live Aid concerts to tackle famine in Ethiopia was mis-spent, leading to deaths, and criticism that the successor concerts two decades later, Live 8, overshadowed a mass movement of campaigners in the Make Poverty History coalition.

Now, you know how much Bob Geldof likes being challenged on his views."Fair point" he chuckled, "but we do our best..."

Did he buggery. Oh, no, it's all angry letters and complaints to Ofcom:

In the letter, seen by the Guardian, Geldof claimed to have had significant influence over world leaders, including Tony Blair, in the run-up to the 2005 G8 summit, and contrasted the achievements of his Live 8 campaign with the global coalition of anti-poverty campaigners, which he characterised as "a bit lame" and almost entirely ineffectual.

If it is true that Geldof had enormous influence over world leaders in 2005, you'd have to ask why. At the time of Live Aid, arguably Geldof could claim he had some sort of mandate to speak for everyone. By 2005, though, there were quite enough media industry millionaires pumping their unelected viewpoints into the ears of world leaders; having another one isn't the unquestionable good thing that Geldof seems to think. Surely he wasn't claiming Make Poverty History as his mandate?

Still: if Geldof does want to take the credit for Gleneagles, maybe we should let him?

Then Geldof turns to how GRATE it is to have FAMOUS PEOPLES involved with campaigns:

Claiming that "all that the combined lobbying might of the total NGO community" failed to ignite public opinion over global poverty, Geldof drew attention to the powerful impact of the Live 8 concerts, which were televised simultaneously to audiences around the world. "They are the vast billions watching," he said. "Brought together around the electric hearth of the TV or computer screen by the Pied Pipers of Rock 'n Roll."

Nobody would deny that putting Coldplay and U2 on the television gets lots of people to watch. But that's putting on a show, it's not actually making poverty history, is it Bob? That's the difficult bit.

I haven't seen the programme myself - obviously, it's not been on yet - but from the sypnosis, part of it's contention seems to be that it's incredibly easy to get lots of people looking at celebrities, but much more difficult to actually turn those crowds from passive lookers into agents of change. Simply going "we got lots of people to watch TV" actually supports the arguments, not destroys them.

And holymotherofallthatisholy, did you really think what a knob you'd look like saying "brought together around the electric hearth of the TV or computer screen by the Pied Pipers of Rock 'n Roll"?

His stupid boat stunt - you'll recall Geldof calling for a second Dunkirk, with people paddling from the continent to Scotland - turns out not have been a toe-curling embarrassment, but instead a stunt:

Fearing that Make Poverty History, a global coalition of development agencies, was failing to galvanise public opinion, he said he embarked on a publicity drive. It included "pretending" that millions of activists were headed to Edinburgh from the continent to "re-enact a sort of Dunkirk", he said.

There's two problems here. First is that MPH wasn't "failing to galvanise" anything - it was doing really well, until it suddenly found its focus shifted away to a lot of fluff about if it was going to lead not to a new deal for the developing world, but whether Status Quo would open a London pop concert.

More importantly, Geldof didn't "pretend" there was a flotilla - he called for it. It just didn't show up. The Age was just one of the papers which carried his original calls:

Speaking at a boatyard, Geldof appealed for English boat owners and even rowers to sail across the Channel for "Sail 8" and pick up thousands of European protesters trying to get to Edinburgh for the demonstration on the opening day of the summit on July 6.

Geldof alluded to events during World War II in 1940 when hundreds of thousands of troops were rescued from the German advance in France by a fleet of privately owned craft sailing across the Channel.

"What we are asking people to do is not re-create D-Day but re-create Dunkirk, which is one of the great national legends of our country where normal people got in their boats to rescue our soldiers, 380,000 of them, who were surrounded and came back to fight another day," Geldof said.

It would be the biggest collection of little boats seen since Dunkirk, he said. "This time we are asking that people take to their boats in their thousands and pick up the people of France for a friendlier invasion. It will be beautiful and amazing . . . I think if you have a little rowing boat that would get across, then jump in it and get as far as you can."

If he had been "pretending" they were coming, that would have been dubious enough - sure, there is much bluff-calling at international summits, but using your poker face to claim that dozens of pedalos and sunbeds are about to arrive on the beach seems to be designed to do nothing other than make yourself and the cause you're fighting for look ridiculous.

Geldof, though, appears to believe that he's so much better than the masses he claims to have been mobilising:

He contrasted the success of the Live 8 initiative with the efforts of anti-poverty demonstrators who "were never mentioned" at the summit, where they wielded "not a single shred of influence".

"The G8 has become a pointless ritual where the marchers and the wankers dressed as clowns (wow! Radical) get to throw stones at cops miles from the decision makers, who can't even hear them, and the cops get to crack some heads," he said, adding that he suspected other campaigners knew that his methods were simply more effective. "I can do rock n roll, they can do marching."

It's true. Dressing up as a clown and standing half a mile from a hotel might do bugger all. Is getting Pete Doherty to sing a duet with Elton John in a totally different country really a better strategy, Bob?

The illustrated Hello: Little Richard

I guess the oddest thing about Little Richard announcing his plans to retire this year is the discovering that he's not yet 70. I suppose because it feels like he's been around forever, if you'd asked me when I didn't have Google to hand I'd have put him at at least half a decade over that.

Little Richard, then. You don't need me to tell you about him, do you?

He's kept himself busy recently - he even had a job helping the former President get his message across:



[From The Daily Show, of course.]

But this is him doing what he does best - no, not losing members of his backing band to James Brown:



[Part of the Illustrated Hello]

Gordon in the morning: Fails mainly on the plain

Gordon passes a large chunk of his space over to the awfully-named Eliza Doolittle this morning, mainly because her management team have sent over a photo of her in shorts.

NEW face ELIZA DOOLITTLE certainly is one Fair Lady.

Well, to be fair, at least Gordon's gone for a gentle joke and is flattering his readers by assuming they'd be familiar with... oh, hang on:

The singer-songwriter - named after the lead character of hit musical and film My Fair Lady - is all set to release debut single Skinny Genes on April 12.

Gordon, if you have to explain the joke you just made quite so clunkingly in the next paragraph, you might want to think about coming up with something a bit more in tune with your key audience:

With LILY ALLEN-style lyrics and a love for very short shorts, she's definitely one to watch.

That'll do it.

So how did "Eliza" come up with her kerrr-azzzzy name?

Eliza says: "I love my real surname but it isn't very pop-starry. So I became Eliza Doolittle and now everyone calls me it."

Righto. That really explains it.

Still, nice to see someone getting massive record company investment despite not having any industry connections, isn't it?

Her dad is theatre director JOHN CAIRD and her mum Tony Award-winning actress FRANCES RUFFELLE.

Oh.

The illustrated Hello: Tommy Cannon, Bobby Ball

In the last couple of years, Cannon and Ball have started to get the sort of relocation in the nation's affections that - simply by not dying - stars sometimes do as those who were kids when they were famous get old enough to book television and radio programmes.

And although they might be popping up on Sport Relief and not-too-bad on Simon Mayo's Radio 4 comedy quiz, it's worth remembering that their double glazing advert is closer to the true spirit of what they were like.

Very much of the second string of double acts - somewhere between Little And Large and Lennie and Jerry in the pecking order - their awfulness was pretty much summed up in their first LWT programme, where an early sketch required the knowledge that Rock On Tommy was Bobby Ball's catchphrase for the punchline to work. Maybe at the end of the series. Maybe in the middle. But first programme?

Still, they were popular enough for a while, and even managed somehow to get a film made. The Boys In Blue, which was effectively a remake of a Will Hay movie about the police. Wisely, they updated the plot to the present day. Somewhat foolishly, they forgot to add in any jokes.

Somehow, The Boys In Blue managed to generate a spin-off ITV sit-com. But just as substandard policemen tend to drift into the private security business, a police comedy that didn't quite make the grade got reinvented as a sit com about security guards.

However, while The Boys In Blue is a footnote in C&B's career (a staging post on the route to losing all their money and getting born again), it also marks the point where they tried to launch a career making comedy records too. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Cannon And Ball - the single:



They should have just got Tommy to sing a song, and have Bobby in the background going 'rat-ta-tat-ta-tat'. That got them through most of their Saturday night shows.

[Part of the Illustrated Hello]

Downloadable: Hot Chip & Bonnie Prince Billy

Yes, it's a bit like that Sherry that Harveys made for making mixed drinks with - it doesn't feel like it should work.

The difference is that Hot Chip and Bonnie Prince Billy does work, unlike the mixing sherry which even the guys under the bridge wouldn't touch.

RCRD LBL are offering Billy-doing-vocals for Chip I Feel Bonnie. Enjoy, but don't put lemonade in your sherry.

Bearded Festival: Face the facts

Last year's Bearded Festival was the one that got hit by a tornado. Which means, what with lightning never striking twice and everything, that it's probably going to be the safest festival of all this year.

If you need more encouragement, Dreadzone are playing. So are Banco De Gaia. And, in increasing order of "oh... are they still going, then", so are The Wonder Stuff, Dodgy, New Model Army and The Cheeky Girls.

There's also going to be a world record attempt for the most false beards in one place at a time - i think the current record is held by the backstage area at the last Smash Hits Poll Winners Party.

It's 14th-16th May, in Hulland Ward near Derby. No screens playing international football at all - guaranteed.

The illustrated Hello: Saints and sinners

Yes, yes, The Beloved mean they're welcoming you whatever your track record of morality is like. But Saints And Sinners are also a not-quite-glam, not-quite-hard rock band from Canada.



"The band released one album, Saints & Sinners in 1992, but the grunge movement in the early 1990s ruined the bands chance of having a big breakthrough" complains Saints And Sinners' Wikipedia entry, happily overlooking their not being much cop as a greater liability.

[Part of the Illustrated Hello

The illustrated Hello: Peter and Paul

Oh. The first one is a bit of a challenge. Peter and Paul.

The general assumption is these are the Saints of the same name - how apt for today.



You could throw in a Mary and then you'd get this:



Saint Peter was the first Pope - and probably the only one who didn't preside over a Catholic Church that was full of financial and sexual irregularities; Saint Paul was a large city in Minnesota, birthplace of Charles Schultz - who crops up later on in the song via one of his more famous creations. And, across the river in the twin city, there's this chap:



And, erm, they're all saints, aren't they?



Hmm. Two names in and I'm already stretching it a little.

[Part of The illustrated Hello]