SURELY THERE'S NOT A PERSON ALIVE:who doesn't hear the phrase "Huey Lewis and the News returns to the concert circuit" as anything other than a blood-curdling threat?

WELL, WE CAN SEE HOW YOU'D BE SCARED TO GO HOME: Or, let's measure the perception gap. George Michael told Tonight With Trevor McDonald that his Walk The Dog video was having him branded an Al Qaeda sympathiser in the US. Really? Because KSBW seemed merely to be concerned that Bush was wearing a thong in the cartoon.

I COLLECT, I REJECT: The never dull world of shit rock 'collectables' brings you Genesis Phonecards

GROUND OASIS: Everyone's least favourite shamblers Oasis are having bother - first up, the union for workers on Australian planes are calling for the Brothers Grunt to be banned from flying across the continent, after their last visit there when their cock of the school antics went down badly. Secondly, Legitimate Manchester Businessmen have been making the band offers of a "can't refuse" nature - supposedly threatening to kidnap Liam if the boys didn't take them on as protection. As if - who the hell would want that whiney twat locked up in their broom closet? And even if they had grabbed him - how bothered would Noel be at losing his own blood Ridgeley?
Oasis rumpus [ITV] - almost as unbelievable as ITV having a news service on its website

TYING TOGETHER SOME THEMES: Talking of (i) three piece girlbands with new members and (ii) pisspoor autobiographies, can you wait for the Atomic Kitten biography, Hopefully titled 'So far so good' (we'd have gone with 'Be kind to us when we're gone'), as someone on Popbitch pointed out, the official blurb is promising that Lil, Natasha and Jenny will "exclusively recall how it all started." Now, since Kerry Katona was bounced out the band halfway through their chart career, Jenny's memory of the start is going to be interested but a quick look at the google cache for the OMD website records clearly that Natasha wasn't around at the start (when the band was still called Automatic Kitten) either. In fact, save yer money - this is how it all began:

More news on Andy McCluskey's new project: The girl band formerly known as The Automatic Kittens have now been rechristened Atomic Kitten. Andy, Stuart and colleague Martin O'Shea were in London last week meeting with various record companies and generating quite a bit of interest. - that was from the 23rd March 1999; Natasha joined in May '99.
The thing is, there probably is a wonderful book to be written about the making of Atomic Kitten, and McCluskey is a rather fine spinner of tales, so the true story has the potential to be a great addition to the rock shelf of your local library. And while there's still a possibility the actual book will have the girls saying "the songs and music and contract were there, we were just bought wonderbras and slotted in there", we're guessing it won't be like that. We'd recommend Ronnie Spector's Be My Baby in its stead.

I'M GOING OUTSIDE...: Can it really be true that in genuine "My dad said he was going for a packet of fags - that was fifteen years ago" style, Siobhan Sugababe's leave taking of the band was merely to announce she was nipping to the loo? Made worse by the way she took her - still unended piss break - the day before a big show in Japan. Obviously, in terms of doing a runner, this is right up there with Stephen Fry's "I think I've left the iron on" departure from Cell Mates, although not quite in Richey Manic's league. Quite wonderful.
Where are you, baby? [BBC] - perhaps the silicon chip inside her head couldn't be switched to 'Overload' any more?

THE GOOD THING ABOUT DYING? THE POSTHUMOUS AWARDS: Hey, getting into the plane with a coked-up pilot might turn out to be a smart career move for Aaliyah after all, judging by the nominations for the Soul Train - ahem - Lady of Soul Awards - certainly the Tragic Death must have helped bark up votes for the frankly disappointing Rock The Boat in the Soul or Rap song of the year category. Aaliyah managed to pull the second-highest number of nominations despite being dead for half the period covered (we can only assume Lisa Left Eye's death wasn't tragic enough) and is only beaten by Ashanti, who can't have hurt her votes by telling der spiegel how much she likes the thought of men "spicing up" their sex lives by looking at pictures of her in her skimpies. That, of course, is 'spicing up' as in 'pumping harder' and 'sex lives' as in 'right hand, pink marigold glove'.

Clearly, Christian Aguilera's real ambition was to be Tiffany

A RADIO PRIMER: We tend to harp on about Clear Channel on these pages a lot, and some of you might wonder why someone sat comfortably in England, gorging his ears on the BBC, gives a shit about this all - or indeed spends as much time worrying about the RIAA rather than the local BPI. Several reasons, not least of which is I know dozens of Americans who deserve better. Then, of course, there's the way America dominates recorded entertainment so much that the fallout from battles in the US invariably settles on the UK. Finally, if I swivel this seat round, I can see Liverpool Empire, which is owned by Clear Channel and one of the company's toes in the water in the UK (they also own Adshel, the bus shelter people) - and with the shake-up in British media that's going to come with the launch of OfCom, it's likely that they'll own more and more swathes of British media.
See, the new regulatory body for British Media is going to replace all the current bodies like the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the Radio Authority. The appointment of Lord Currie to head up the office shows the way the system is going to work in the future. He's an economist with no background in programme making, so it's unlikely that Ofcom will be as quick to adjudicate on small details of content as they will be on issues of ownership. Now, this means that there's a prospect of a lighter touch over what's said and shown on air - a good thing, from an artistic point of view - but that very leniency may prove to be the thing that ruins radio. Economically, see, allowing Clear Channel to take control of the bigger part of commercial radio in any or many cities makes sense, even if culturally it could be a disaster. And what do you think an economist is going to put first?
Anyway, if you want to fret about a future where you start to wish DLT was still around, there's a couple of excellent primers - first, salon.com has collated all its stuff on Clear into a separate section; then, if you're hungry for more, you can mull the implications of the Communications Bill in seven shades of depth at the Guardian site

R U2 UP 4 IT?: Oh, I don't know whether to be scared, or very, very scared - but if you have a strong constitution and can take the thought of U2 fans talking about having sex, that's exactly what's happening here. Now, I've watched enough US teen shows to know there's someone for everyone, and all that, and it's probably a better use of their time than discussing Bono's rubbish sunglasses, but it makes the back of my neck all prickly to think of people sitting around trying to work out if Bono or the Edge would be more put-off their stroke by the sound of the former singing...

FIFTEEN SPIRIT: MTV have added up all the videos they've played in the fifteen years since they first launched in the UK, and are probably somewhat surprised to discover that Smells Like Teen Spirit is tops. The rest of the chart is kind of odd, too - Wonderwall rather than J-Lo? And what the hell is that Soundgarden track doing there? Third most played video of all time? The full line up is
1. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana.
2. Wonderwall - Oasis.
3. Black Hole Sun - Soundgarden.
4. Sabotage - Beastie Boys.
5. Loser - Beck.
6. Buddy Holly - Weezer
7. Ironic - Alanis Morissette.
8. Virtual Insanity - Jamiroquai.
9. Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve.
10. Losing My Religion - REM.
11. No Scrubs - TLC.
12. Are You Gonna Go My Way? - Lenny Kravitz.
13. Don't Speak - No Doubt.
14. The Real Slim Shady - Eminem.
15. Frozen - Madonna.
- all of which goes to show that MTV is - far from being the taste of youth - the preserve entirely of middle-aged men who still think they're hip and people who buy their CDs from those adverts on late night telly. If I'd have been MTV, I'd either have fudged this chart and lied, or else abandoned it altogether. Next time anyone tries to talk about MTV to you, you should look at them and say "the station that played Frozen more often than Beautiful Stranger." Or maybe "the station that played Lenny Kravitz a lot."

A SLIM PAPERBACK: The Sun reckons that Geri Halliwell's second autobiography is being held back in order to avoid going head-to-head with fellow former famous person Mel B's book. We tend to think maybe its been put back until she does something to justify a second volume - "I'm a not very attractive porn model. I'm a not very tuneful singer. I'm a not very loved celebrity" hardly stretched to fill the first volume, did it?

ONE WATER-TRAGEDY BAND REPLACES ANOTHER: In the wake of Neil Primrose's almost cartoon-like dive into the shallow end, the V2002 bill has been rejigged. Chemical Brothers move to main stage to take over Travis' slot, while the gap on the second stage is now going to be completed by the pie-tastic Manic Street Preachers - making a Welsh headline monopoly, as the fantastically dull Stereophonics are doing the top table on the main.
We'd imagine that Manics fans who had cheerfully been ignoring the chance to buy tickets are gnawing their legs off right now.

PRESSPLAY IMPROVES SLIGHTLY: The not-that-impressive Pressplay is introducing a (more expensive, natch) service which will allow people who subscribe to the Sony/Universal service to actually keep music they've paid for. You have to tip your hat to the geniuses at Pressplay who've taken half a year to work out the difference between running a radio station and selling music downloads. But the new service is still shit - every one, five or ten times you download something, you have to cough up extra cash. It ends up looking fiddly, unflowing and greedy. Hey, music executives - here's a hint for you: MAKE IT CHEAP, MAKE IT SIMPLE. Then, you might just have a system that works.
Pressplay sort-of admits problems [BBC] - you mean people might want to hear Sony tracks more than once?

EYES AND VIOLAS: Bright Eyes, led by the prettiest boy Conor Oberst, are planning a September tour with that mainstay of rock-trying-harder, a fifteen piece orchestra. Conor says that he thinks it might be a one-time attempt to capture the sound of the Lifted album in a live context. We just want to see the rider demands.
Rolling Stone has the dates - great for americans

KATE MAIL: The mystery of the stagnant Primals site has been solved - the band have quit primalscream.org for primalscream.net leaving their old home stood as a kind of monument. To get the new site off to a good start, the band have put up a realaudio of Some Velvet Morning, the much-muttered-about Kate Moss collaboration. It's an okay piece - if a little lightweight compared to the other stuff around from the new album, but it makes it clear why Kate hasn't bothered recording anything before. Jesus, if they'd taken her any lower in the mix it would have had to have been marketed as 'Primal Scream almost featuring Kate Moss.'

TWO HUGE BLOKES WITH ODD FACIAL HAIR ARGUING OVER BANANARAMA LYRICS: Now that Sean Hughes has quit Never Mind the Buzzcocks, they're getting Bill Bailey in to take his place. Which isn't a bad piece of casting - you know they'd have fallen for sticking Phil Jupitus on, the way he takes every vacant seat on TV panel games, were it not for him already being on the other team - but we'll reserve judgement until the series returns.
Stand-up comedian joins Buzzcocks quiz [Ananova] - that's the actual headline, which must upset Mark Lamarr and Phil Jupitus somewhat

BUY SOME BOSS: A nifty piece on mediaguardian by Stefano Hatfield looking at the launch of the new Bruce album, which is not so much an album launch as full-blown happening. You take the Boss, you reunite him with the E-Street band; mix in a couple of September 11th (and it didn't take that long to change from The Day That Changed The World into Marketing Opportunity, did it?) and boom, you've got a media juggernaut with more free media than you can shake a stick at. Add to this the news that Springsteen's parent company Sony is hiring people to stand about having conversations about how great its new mobile phone is, and you've probably got a pretty good snapshot of the twenty first century's habit of dressing advertising up as anything but...

ALL APOLOGIES: As you'll have noticed, in the last couple of weeks we've been overhauling the look of the site here, and - as a result of us messing about in stuff we shouldn't be - for some time (we don't know how long) PC users have been having their pages served up with a font the size of Barry White. Hopefully that's all been fixed now, but thanks a plenty to Swall who warned us about this. We owe you a pint.

YOU WEAR IT WELL: Dressy Bessy are in the UK, playing gigs (as you'd expect with a band, I suppose)
August 1st - Oxford - The Zodiac
2nd - Reading - Rising Sun (Happy Robots Festival)
3rd - Liverpool - The Slaughterhouse
4th - London - Water Rats Theatre Track & Field Night
6th - London - The Spitz w/ Beachwood Sparks
7th - BBC Radio 1 John Peel Show
8th - Norwich - The Ferryboat Inn
- then they go to Sweden. You can find more out about them on - yes - their website

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR THE NEW KYLIE - YOU MIGHT GET THE NEW MAGGIE: Grundig have assured the Electoral Commission that they don't own rights to the name MP3, and so the MP3 party has been allowed to register itself as proper political party. Their leader Ruslan Fedorovsky suggests that MP3 users are already his constiuency; the party has simplification at its heart and believes its name will also make it incredibly attractive to young people. It's true, of course, that MP3 is a sexy term at the moment, and so using it for party name is a bit like calling yourself the Party Party. And the concept of broadband throughout the UK is one that it would be churlish to object to. But beyond the glitz, what the MP3 Party actually seems to have is a really nasty Libertarian right-wing programme. Aiming to knock out laws (to rid the body politic of 'complications'), they propose dumping prisoners in Russia and bringing back the death penalty ("especially for murder of children.") Populist, certainly - let's just hope they're never popular...
Official site - gotta love the audiobooksforfree URL

VENUES IN CRISIS: Liverpool's Neptune Theatre is threatened with closure, despite being owned by the same people pushing Liverpool's bid to be European Capital of Culture in 2008 - the city's council. According to the campaign to save the venue - which plays host to everything from gigs to one of the few Easter pantomimes in the country - there's no real reason for the place to close. The only municipal theatre in the city, and a much-admired one at that, hasn't noticeably been performing badly, and even if the Neptune wasn't running at a profit, there are many who'd argue that funding a place where local people can put on a show, or even Ian McNabb can get a gig might not be a better use of public money than pouring thousands into a bid for a year of questionable value. It's possible the Neptune's sin is to be located in the heart of the "creative" quarter of town, and as such worth a lot more if it gets sold off and redeveloped as apartments or a theme bar - certainly, only Wetherspoons could come up with a better use for the space. The killer detail, of course, is the story currently circulating in the city that the local press haven't actually reported the threatened closure of the Neptune because they fear that publicising it would harm Liverpool's chances for 2008. Maybe they'll galvanise themselves into action after the title has been decided.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED: Bush should really think twice about burying all that nuclear waste in Nevada. Because no matter how deep you bury stuff, you'll always find someone with a spade wanting to dig it up. Take, for example, Sonia. In career terms, the chirpy scouse songbird (copyright: every tabloid, ever) is in a shaft three miles under the most bleak, unpopulated corner of the state of Nevada. But that hasn't stopped someone launching a campaign to engineer her comeback.
It's worth looking at the page, though - the photo could be where Andy McCluskey got the idea for Atomic Kitten from...

FOR THOSE ABOUT TO SPAM, THEY SALUTE YOU: Some people love junk mail. Some people cut articles out of free newspapers. Some tape adverts. For this sort of person, and the sort who read our SpamBand rants and goes "Hey, what's his deal?" there's apparently now a Yahoo Group that actually begs members of street teams to do their dark arts. It's called Multimedia-Madness and if it sounds like your sort of thing, can we interest you in some python lard?

UNLOVED?: Apparently, theknowledge.com is toying with the idea of closing up for good. The cab-themed indie/dance site was one of the earliest of its type online, but we must admit it'd been quite a while since we last happened by there. Hope it keeps going; it's currently doing a members survey to find out if it's worth giving the site the kick up the ass it's probably in need of...

THEROUX THROWN OUT: Now, here's a curiosity - Louis Theroux had been planning to do one of his trademark documentaries backstage at the next Here and Now tour. Theroux, who plays the geek in a bid to encourage b-list celebs to drop their guard - like a cross between a python and Bill Gates - had been trying to organise access to the 80's revivalist show, but apparently too many of the acts refused to take part. So far, the BBC and Theroux have been quiet on who wouldn't take part. We find it hard to believe that the Human League would have been frit of a spot of probing - any band willing to play office parties have to have a sense of humour; Kim Wilde and Clare Grogan both work in television now and could probably cope. The Belle Stars would probably leap at any publicity they could get, and Steve Strange has proved quite happy to be open about the troubles in his past. That leaves Five Star - who were always really uppity when people took the piss out them when they were successful; they'd probably not enjoy getting grilled on a 'wanking for coins' reunion tour; and the way David Van Day was made to look a grade a tosser on the recent Bucks Fizz documentary would make the self-important hotdog salesman think twice before opening up to cameras again.
Dead pop stars reanimated [Ananova] - we'd never take the piss out of Five Star

MARR FINALLY RUNS OUT OF PEOPLE TO WORK WITH: and so he's reduced to producing a solo album. Due out in January 2003, rather than pulling a Mike Oldfield and doing the drums and that, he's got Ringo's kid and one of Kula Shaker involved as well - akin to Burger King asking the Garston Village Bakery to provide the bread rolls, isn't it? No title yet, but we'll let you know as soon as we, erm, read about it on another website.
Undercover reports - the Mike Joyce project cannot be far off now, can it?

AWAKE: For those of you who miss Louise Wener but not enough to actually buy the former Sleeper singer's new novel Goodnight Steve McQueen there's a new-ish piece on BBC LDN's site, although it doesn't add a great deal to her self-penned Guardian piece from a few weeks back.

POPBITCH TWANG: Of course, we know that The Good People At Popbitch had only the best intentions with their annorexia special mailout this week - demonstrating how the behaviour of various celebs appears to mimic the way scarily-thin cult of self-starvation websites suggest wannabe bag-of-bones behave in order to get that just-built-railways look. But we're more than a little disquieted at their decision to run huge chunks of "advice" lifted from ana and mia sites. Of course, this information is available on the web, but putting it in the context of a pop gossip mailout is bringing this headfucking stuff to a whole new audience. Worse, by linking it to the likes of Halliwell, Minogue and Beckham you might think you're saying "see - they really are annorexic"; but in effect you're saying "these thin people do this - and they're not unhealthy, are they?" Which might be a bit of a dangerous way to raise a giggle.

THE EMPIRE SPREADS: The Mean Fiddler are continuing their policy of by-passing innovation and just using their big warchest to buy into existing events by taking a stake in the Bizarre Festival in Germany, reports nme.com - this is the first major investment in Europe outside the UK for the organisation. Meanwhile, and almost unnoticed (certainly by us), the group took a step closer to becoming the UK's own Clear Channel by making a first move into Radio Ownership by buying Ritz 1035, London's Country station. We don't expect this will be the last time they feel the joy of cross-promotional media purchasing.