SOMETIMES, YOU MISS THE MUTTERING: For example, I'd managed to go two years without knowing that the Foo Fighters had been distributing what sounds like pretty one-sided material attacking the normal scientific conventional wisdom that HIV and Aids are interconnected. Thanks to Kellie for bringing it to our attention.

Wishfull thinking defined

FINISHED WITH THAT WOMAN CAUSE I COULDN'T HELP HER WITH HER MIND: Or what Melissa Auf Der Maur did next - which was to record an album of Black Sabbath covers. Note-for-note. We're not sure if there's any point to the project for her new band Hand of Doom - or if there needs to be any - but, regardless. There it is. A thing of beauty which may be a joy forever. Or, on the other hand, it could be a lazy attempt to cash-in on the Ozzy boom. Who can say?

In the future, everyone will record an album

For example Steve Burns has. Who he? He was the (US) host of Blues Clues - oddly, like the chap who did the UK remake of the format (and Blue himself, if we're honest) there was something weirdly camp about him. Actually, he's a grown man helping a bloody blue dog solve a pathetic problem, what's not to be Dorothy there? Anyway, he's recorded a record. Like Kelly Osbourne. And 'Handy' Andy off Changing Rooms. And that bloke off Due South.

Shouldn't there be something like a test before people are allowed into a recording studio?

POP PHILOSOPHY: We especially liked Three Chords and the Truth from Tiny Mixtapes, and rather think you should read it. Of course, we realise this means ntk will give us an extra point of blogger death, but we're prepared to risk that.

SING SING - nb:THIS IS NOT A TRAVIS LYRIC: Swizzle-Stick.com are reporting that Sing Sing (still carrying the 'emma from Lush's new project' labels) have washed up on the shores of the US and are about to tour diligently through that nation. This is good news, of course, for people in the US; it's also good news for us, as we'd assumed the whole project had been folded up and packed away.
but clearly it hasn't been

UNIVERSAL PRAISE: Now, let's say something nice about the major labels - let's praise Universal's bravery. Bravery, indeed, because as soon as the tabloids come across their new signings Busted and their soon to be released single What I Go To School For, their press office is going to be beseiged.
For those of you yet to come across it, this track is sung by a bunch of schoolboys, and it details the only reason they go to school - one nubile teacher who, they are convinced, is as deeply in love with them as they are with her. So, when her boyfriend goes "away", they call round at her house, and schoolboy fantasies ensue. The video rams this point home by having the uniform-clad lad leering through her letterbox and receiving spankings from the teacher that we suspect aren't meant to help focus their minds on their Latin homework.
Of course, it's hugely brave of Universal to release this now - because the other option would be that they've been so stupid as to not think through the consequences of releasing a single that encourages kids to call round to their teachers homes following a year which has seen the Amy Gehring case, Soham and the meltdown of the criminal records bureau as they attempt to process background checks on people working with kids; we're assuming they intend to make a heavy-handed and ill-considered satirical point rather than having spectacularly misjudged the mood of the nation.

AT LAST SOMEONE SPEAKS UP FOR THE RIAA: Hey, soundbitten, the last thing we need is for balanced, considered pieces in support of the music industry. This is the internet, pal, and we're kind of like the G-Men in reverse - seeking out legitimate businesses and smashing their stills and scattering their customers. Seriously, though, you make some fair points of a 'hey, the big five are doing their best, let's cut them some slack' nature, but what you say isn't quite as convincing as you'd hoped.
Of Pressplay and Rhpasody prices, you say "First of all, there's the price: Both charge $9.95 a month for the basic service, which may seem reasonable at first, but look at how it works out. If a typical song is 3 minutes long, and you listen to this service two hours a day, that's 1200 songs, or almost a penny a song-listen!" Very droll - and a penny a song sounds like a great deal when you put it like that. But it's a bit silly, isn't it? Why not make a supposition that the person will be listening to the service 24 hours a day on three machines? Wouldn't the price get even lower? And what if they only liked punk, so the average song would be two minutes long (as all great singles should be)? More seriously, you forget that you have to sign up to both services, doubling the price at a stroke - and with a third service looming, you're looking at forking out thirty bucks before you get anywhere. And, remember, this is for a service that basically is competing with radio, not CD sales. It's not a huge sum, certainly, but we're at the stage where they'll be offering tempting rates to establish themselves and force the competition out of business, whereupon they'll be free to whack the price up to anything they choose. They did this with our buses, you know.
Oh, and to even get a chance to try the system, you need to have a credit card, so lets ask all the under 18s to leave the debate right now, shall we? Thank you for creating and sustaining the rock industry for the past fifty years, teenagers, but your parents can take it from here.
"Almost as annoying as the ridiculously high prices of these services is the terrible "selection" of artists they offer. While Rhapsody may have over 190,000 songs to choose from, they're all from artists who are so obscure you won't even find them on MP3.com. Frank Sinatra?" - goes on to list all the great artists you can hear on Rhapsody... "where's the variety? Where's the genuinely established acts? Where's the hot new talent? " Now, this is quite a compelling, seductive suggestion - maybe we should throw away our MP3 software and sign up. All these great acts, waiting for me to hook up with them? Excellent.
Oh, hang on... Due to licensing restrictions, Rhapsody's on-demand music subscription service is available to U.S. residents only. Righto. So even if I do want to pay, I - nor anyone else in the entire fucking world - can actually access the bloody music? Right, well, that's going to stop me downloading stuff - why would I want to have a NERD MP3 on my 'puter when I know that I could be listening to a legitimate version. If I lived in New Jersey.
To truly preview new tracks, you need to burn them to CD. You need to take them with you to the beach. You need to spend some commute-time with them. You need to share them with a thousand friends or so, to see what they think. Buying a CD is like getting married: it can take years of evaluation to really know whether or not you like a song enough to commit to it.
Well, actually - yes, to a certain extent. I'd say that one of the things that has shaped my record buying in the last few years has been the covermount CDs that come with magazines; tracks that didn't catch into my soul on radio play have, subsequently, wormed their way into my affections by dint of being next to something nice on, say, one of the mighty fine Uncut CDs - but, really, of course, you're attempting to argue that the labels are right to only stream the music, rather than to allow the people who've paid for it to choose where and when they want to listen to it. Now, I don't know what your neighbourhood is like, but mine has no broadband access. The whole of the area I live in, from the waterfront, up past the tapas bar, across the park and all the way to the Motorway? There's neither BT nor Cable broadband, and if you ask them when they plan to bring the future to a not unaffluent area, they snort, and say "there's no demand, pal." So, when I am at home, I'm left with a standard dial-up modem. So, unless I want to do nothing but stream music with my computer, I get a load of drops, stutters, rebuffers and the whole deal and - unless I move - there aint no prospect of anything different. Assuming Rhapsody does roll out its service globally, if I can't download tracks to my hard drive in order to play them smoothly, I'm not interested. Further, being young-ish and still in possession of much of my own hair, I like to sometimes venture away from my Mac. I get driven round in a car; I go shopping. I walk into work. Sometimes I go to the toilet, or upstairs. Now, why is it unreasonable of me to expect to be able to make use of the music subscription service I'm paying for to provide me with music for these parts of my life? Apart from anything, most people's PC have nasty little speakers, and it would be better to play the music on the device they've bought for that purpose.
See, your explanations sound reasonable, but let's not forget the labels have been bounced into getting their act together by the existence of downloading - this sort of stuff would have made much more sense if it had been introduced five or six years ago, rather than as a struggle to snap lids back on Pandorean boxes. And if the new services don't start to try and work out why people have taken to MP3 - and its not simply or even mainly because its free, it's more the flexibility, the global reach, and convenience - then there's simply no point in even bothering. Rhapsody and its siblings are currently the equivalent of town criers - alarmed by the rise of newspapers - offering to come and shout the news to you while you're in the cluddgy. Rhapsody lets people listen to music on computers. MP3 uses computers to enable people to listen to music. The distinction is important.
[Thanks to The Minor Fall, The Major Lift for bringing this to our eyes]

BUGGER: The aliens have come, and they have a message for us. They're Levellers fans. (Actually, it's been made for their new video. Crop circles to promote crap singles, then.

LET'S DO SOME MORE RUNE READING, SHALL WE? Has Graham Coxon Left Blur? Ah, yes and no utters the gnomic Fatboy Slim. He isn't on the new album. He wrote none of the songs on the new album. But he hasn't left the band.
So what does that mean? Apart from the whole thing has dragged on so long we're starting to lose interest, we're interpreting it thus: The band went to Morocco without him. He is not involved in the new album. He has not left Blur.
Therefore, Blur must have left him.

FRATERNITY FOR AN ETERNITY: Are we reading this right, or is the BBC Scotlblog really suggesting we should try and knock the Radio One website over? Can't we just punch Chris Moyles instead?

WHY STARS EXPLODE: Taken from the Liverpool Echo's serialisation of the Atomic Kitten "biography" - Kerry ChipShop Katona laying out the things that would have had to change for her to stay in the "band": 'Alright, but I don't want to sit in a Chrysler van any more and I certainly don't want to go to Japan again.'

SWEET?: Trouble over at the Vincent's house, as Gene's daughter files a lawsuit claiming that daddy never gave her nuffink, and now its time for his estate to cough up.

MORE HOUSING CRISES: Oh, Madonna - you've been spending too long hanging about on Popbitch, haven't you? What else could explain your outburst against council housing in London? Don't you realise that public housing is one of the glories of this country - or at least, was? Did you not know how ridiculously posh your Lady of the Manor comments would make you sound? Where do you think the thuggish gangsters your husband makes his dull little movies about actually come from? Where do you suppose the people who make the city what it is come from? (Clue: It's not the penthouses)

DAYPOP BURST: If, like us, you're fond of daypop and its nifty blog-and-news search function, you might be wondering what's happened to it. Well, according to the daypop weblog, Dan Daypop headed out for holiday, and the whole thing crashed, and he didn't know until he tried to log on (presumably from some internet cafe) and can't do a thing until he gets back on the thirteenth. Until then, this site about caterina will, inexplicably dominate the Daypop Top 40 like it was some sort of thing taking the piss out of Bush using lego or something... I wonder if she knows?

CORRIE ZEITGEIST-BY-ACCIDENT: So, clearly, of course, the Duckworth's house has never been a rectory, old or otherwise, and the building where the tallest doctor in soap upped Tracy Shaw's duff is in no way Balmoral. And yet, over in real life Manchester, a building has been given a snizzy sounding name without having any connection with the title it now bears.
That the Hacienda had to close is probably inarguable - no club can be a constant, what with each generation wanting to make its own mark and the tendency of people with drugs to eventually turn any oasis of sanity into a seedy, gun filled moronhole. But you can understand the bitter laughter floating through the city at the news that the horrible, overpriced flats (half a mill for a tenement with better PR, anyone?) being flung up on the site of Fac51 are being given the Hacienda name. Maybe there's a lesson there, that the rallying cry for anyone on the outside will eventually be repackaged as a brand beyond your own means, but it still feels like a hell of a slap - like naming your dogs after someone else's heroes you fed to them.
Dave Haslam brave enough to refuse to live in expensive house on principle [SocietyGuardian] - plans to turn Factory Cat into country get-away strenuously denied

SMART PEOPLE FIGHT BACK: Possibly a hacker who's made a mint out of MP3 (yeah, right) but someone's put up a million bucks to allow Duke University to create a center at its Law School to find a balance on copyright law. Excellent.

COULD CONNIE BE THE NEW JOHN PEEL?: The New York Times went to watch Ludacris recording a rude-word free version of a song for AOL subscribers, and came back reporting that it had seen the future, and is sort of convinced that it works. Basically, AOL creates exclusive content, helps to break bands, makes money by flogging tshirts and stuff; everyone's happy, it seems. Almost.
A lingering question is whether AOL will unfairly favor Warner over other labels. Mr. Conroy says that he will typically try new programs first with Warner because it is easier to get started, but will then open them to its rivals. Yet of the nine acts featured so far this year in AOL's artists of the month program — its most prominent promotional position — four are from Warner labels, double its share of the music market.
"We get more than our fair share of the slots," said Paul Vidich, executive vice president of Warner Music. - without a trace of shame. Now, while you can understand AOL wanting to make good use of the stuff it got in the merger it lied to make, its hardly filling us here full of joy at the prospects for the future if the AOL-tied audience are going to be offered a policy skewed in favour of Warners artists. Even if they let in their other chums from RIAA, the upshot is going to be - as usual - independent artists being squeezed out. And people who don't have it in them to get an ISP that's better than AOL aren't likely to go seeking out music elsewhere, either...

STUFF TO LISTEN TO:
An acoustic bit from Beth Orton on KCRW in Santa Monica. Forty odd minutes of vocal perfection.

WELLER, WELLER UH...: Maybe it's part of getting old, but it just seems former heroes are so keen to demonstrate their feet of clay they're wearing flip flops and pointing going "look! look!"
Now, Paul Weller has long since stopped putting out anything worth listening to - indeed, since the demise of the Style Council it's been awful to hear one of this nation's greatest songwriters emitting what seems to be one long wail of male menopause after another; and the hanging out with the Gallaghers has been disappointing (like watching Jesus fawning round Paul Daniels). But he's gone another notch down with his new anti-war stance.
Talking to BBC News, he's announced that he doesn't intend to take part in any campaign against the forthcoming Iraqi adventures. Which would be fair enough - nobody should be forced to protest against anything - but his reasons are pretty disappointing: But he said he would not get behind any campaign after being "used" by the political group Red Wedge in the mid-1980s.
"It was the biggest mistake ever for me because once you get involved with those people you see how it's all run," he said.
"It's more about their egos and it's not about really making a difference."
Whats this? Weller was "used" by Red Wedge? A curious word for him to select; and even more curious is the way that Weller, who was one of the main spokespeople for Wedge at the time (along with Bragg and Somerville), now comes to speak of his former cause as being ego driven. Maybe the jibes endured by Red Wedge still rankle with him - and even fifteen years on, 'red wedge' still gets thrown about to stop any pop person with aspirations to agitate, educate and organise in their tracks - and maybe his subsequent misadventures, including the very public accusations from a year or two back, have just calcified his soul, but to do nothing because he met some people who were interested in themselves more than a cause sounds like a lame excuse. After Red Wedge, remember, Weller was involved in the no-less ego-fuelled Band and Live Aid, which surely shows that sometimes these things can make a difference, even if they're unlikely to change the world?
Not that Weller is entirely sitting at home hoping the world will go away of its own accord. He has written an anti-war song, and that's where his clay feet get fired, painted and sold as a doorstop. The man who wrote Going Underground is now coming up with this sort of thing: "His song, called A Bullet for Everyone, is included on Weller's new album and is aimed at "Tony Blair and his boyfriends, or Bush and his." The man who once fondled Merton Mick's ear is now using "queer" as the ultimate insult. Cheers, Paul.
That a Bullet For Everyone was written at Noel's house probably says it all.
Maybe it is for the best if you stay away from the rallies, Weller.

MILKING IN THE EVENING: Oasis, we're told, are going to start recording on another album just as soon as they can - not bothering to wait until they've got something to say, or something worth hearing. Churn... churn... churn. I used to hope that they'd split, sooner or later; that Noel would buy into Man City and Liam would start to collect bus conductor's caps; that as their charmlessness faded into memory and the constant feed of meaningless stories and valueless opinions dried up, we might be left alone with a body of work, which we could weigh, and that the excitement and delight with which we greeted the very early stuff like Live Forever might become again the primary thought when we hear the name Oasis, rather than the unedifying sight of Liam and Noel shouting at passing cars and trying to pretend that I Am the Walrus was them all along.
It's not going to happen, is it?
Now, I see the future stretching out for us, as long as it takes a thought to form in Liam's mind; peppered with roughly an album a year, each a little bit less special than the one before; each selling enough to convince the boys that its worth shuffling the same elements again. There's no sense of compulsion to create in the work of Oasis, just a punch-the-clock mentality - "we're a band, therefore we must make a record" - and this shows in the quality of work produced.
The tour coming up also shows a similar machine-like attitude to the act of being Rock Stars. They've stepped down a venue size, but it's the same die-cast routine - credit card hotline, sell-out in as many minutes possible; and always, always - maximise the profits. Bearing in mind that a small tour costs less than a big tour (you've got a smaller stage and don't need as much stuff; fewer people coming means less stewarding; less insurance; less of everything) and that neither the Gallaghers are exactly blown away for a few bob, didn't anyone who scrambled to get tickets stop for just a moment to ask whether £28.50 is anything more than a figure that they've come up with and doubled? Thirty quid for a gig at the Royal Court is bloody outrageous - nobody minds bands making a living, but then there's just out and out greed. If a tout tried to charge face value for this show, they'd be lynched - "how much, mate? thirty? you're having a bleedin' laugh, aitcha?" - the same price as a night at Glastonbury (itself disgustingly overpriced, remember?). And yet the remaining Oasis fans pitch up, slap their cash down, doubtless plan to buy the £45 tshirt too. It's been too easy to suggest that anyone who's made it to 2002 with anything but contempt for the Gallaghers must be a little bit soft underneath their beanie hat, but when they happily line up to hand over such sums to the people they've already made multi-millionaires (Noel reputed to be worth about £23million) and don't even stop to murmur, you have to wonder.

MORE THAN SEW SEW: When I was a very small boy, I used to dread the days when we had needlework. I always felt it to be wrong that I was rubbish at it, especially since being rubbish at football and slightly gurly I should have taken to it like a clown to irritation. But it wasn't to be. Somewhere, at my Dad's house there's still a half finished lobster waiting to be cross-stitched into life. Maybe what I needed was something like sewkits, which provide you, me and everybody with the wherewithall to make a mini-sampler of album covers. Or maybe I just needed to get out more.

CELEB BIOG TWANG: The point at which credibility - already a forgotten term - expires totally from Geri Halliwell's biography. From alt.fan.geri-halliwell via the News Of The World and, probably all the newspapers; Geri tries to convince us that she really was in love with Chris Evans and it wasn't just a desperate, whorish publicity stunt:
"When I was a wannabe, I had a notice board in my kitchen dedicated to people whose footsteps I wanted to follow in. Alongside Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, I also had a picture of Chris."
Know what? We don't believe you.

HAVE WE USED 'ITS ALMOST AS IF THEY WANT THEM TO FAIL' AS A HEADLINE YET?: Yahoo and others are reporting the slow-take-up of 'official' music download services, identifying the lack of compelling catalogues and poor marketing as two reasons why Pressplay and Musicnet haven't exactly seized the music lover by the hand. Add in prices out of line with reality, and you've pretty much got a set-up that looks like it's being thrown about as a future plank to hit web-using music fans with. "We tried to sell you stuff, and you didn't want it" they'll wail.
Not that we'd recommend you sign up to Pressplay merely to spite them.

NEXT TARGET, SAXON: Thanks to Nigel over at the yes no interlude for bringing our attention to this from the Pleather Yourself site - as he says, clearly the fake-leather dominatrix pic must have had some effect...
meanwhile elsewhere on the pleatheryourself site, there's a flash file of stars who wear Pleather - so you're sat there looking at Britney (that redcatsuit turns out to be pleather); jane 'moonlights as a dominatrix' wiedlin, and so on... when, all of a sudden bloody Moby's face looms into view holding a pair of trainers aloft. Someone should sue them, or something...

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: RIOT EDITION
we've already burbled on at length about Boy George, now officially installed at the Sunday Express as some sort of expert on this music the young people listen to, so we'll instead rub our eyes with wonder and ask just what on earth the Independent on Sunday were doing giving their profile slot to Morrissey, a person who they believe the nme no longer feels any emnity towards - well, probably not; but since the current nme views Morrissey in the same way it feels about Werthers Originals, cream teas and the early work of Alan Bennett, it's not really surprising, is it?...

FHM is, in a bold new move for tack, selling its current issue on "Girls next door" - i.e., it's Readers Wives, only for people who've not quite got a relationship yet. In a strange twist, Maxim has got one of Atomic Kitten in their nix; until recently, of course, Atomic Kitten were the girls next door to pop papers' home...

the New Statesman marks the 2000th edition of Top of the Pops by getting a lot of facts about the show completely wrong ("the format has never changed" an impressive attempt to paint out the Tony Dortie years; since most of the writing about the Staggers recently has been Martin Amis-inspired poking about in its Stalinist era, maybe this is just an old habit dying hard) or else treating them unfairly - sure, the Pops did havethe likes of Travis, Saville et all presenting quite late on, but they weren't actually that old back then; besides - they were also presenting on Radio One at the same time; it's not as if the team at TV Centre went out their way to drag 'em in from the Day Centre. And why shouldn't people past their 20's present a programme designed to reflect the taste of the whole country, anyway?...

not that anyone over about 13 buys singles these days, anyway, if the Friday Review is to be believed - in an interesting exercise, Alexis Petredis gave a nine year old twenty pounds and let them loose in HMV. They came back with Nickelback and Puretone. Winningly, they also said Robbie Williams records would only ever be bought "for my mum or something..."

Music Week has had one of those perplexing mini-revamps that magazines sometimes do shortly before full on overhauls. I've never quite seen the point of these - why relocate the coffee table if you're about to start knocking walls down? - however, they find space for the nme's Conor McNicholas (the editor now, you know) to pledge that the paper won't take the dumping of the evening session lying down...

the cover of the nme has the faces of coldplay hanging over a dry, arrid desert. The naughty design department deserves an extra rub of the belly for that one...

never one to over-react, all of page three is given to a picture of a bloke stood in front of some fire with the words "Festival In Flames." It occurs to us that if MF do get to hold one of these next year, they should revive their Phoenix Festival title. In a five-page special, the nme pretty much bury any hope the Mean Fiddler might have of getting a licence next year, parading a range of reports from gig-goers criticising the organisation and stewards, and the police. And some words of support: "If the local residents have a problem with five days of a 365-day year being taken up with noise and mess in their beloved park, why don't they move?" - mmm, yeah, thanks for totally useful input, you moron. But, seriously, there are some huge questions that need to be addressed here - claims of police over-reaction, stewards bottling customers, fears of explosions. Some people put the numbers of rioters at 1,000; others at less than the claimed 500. What's clear is something went wrong at Leeds - perhaps not terribly wrong, or perhaps seriously, seriously wrong. The West Yorkshire police says it's had no complaints about police brutality to theme (some may not find that surprising); Melvin Benn says that the complaints he's heard are "not specific" (a rather selective reading of them, we'd suggest) and describes the events as "surprisingly good natured", which seems breathtakingly arrogant compared to the emails the paper publishes from gig-goers: "people running to get awat... people crying... no help on hand... tear gas thrown at us... a kid no older than 17 bottled by security... like being in a war zone... cops kicking and beating someone... people beaten brutally... police charge down the hill swinging their batons. Lots of different perspectives - almost everyone saying that, aside from the riot, it was a bloody brilliant weekend - but nobody much seeming to know exactly where the truth lies. Amusingly, Ikara Colt weren't allowed to play Leeds because they'd inspired a few fans to clamber on stage at reading the night before. Quite right too, Mean Fiddler. Can't let people get away with that sort of thing...

other news: coldplay "triumph" at London gig; eminem booed at MTV awards; blur split mystery deepens... I'm starting to wonder if they shouldn't have strung the leeds riot out a few pages more; U2 are going to put out a greatest hits album, covering 1990-2000, although oddly it'll also contain a new single, which surely means it'll be 1990-2002, doesn't it? Anyway, it covers the period long after they'd moved from decent music to being the Steve Penk pranksters of pop, so it doesn't really mattter; dave grohl has added his weight to calls to Save Lamacq; Beck has written a song for Winona Ryder - it wasn't meant to be for her, she only said she was taking it out to look at it in the light, and that was half an hour ago; Craig Nicholls isn't nuts, he tells the nme, clutching his arms to his sides, rocking and muttering "Craig is fine... Craig is fine..."; Richard Ashcroft goes through the tracks on his new album one by one - delights such as the troubles of a sharedealer, with his homelife going to pot because he's at the golf club trying to make deals. So, the sort of thing we can all relate to, then; there's also stories about Andrew WK and Kelly Osbourne, but we can forgive them...

on bands: the catheters - the nme reckon they're the best band named after something you shove up your urethra... ever (oh, yeah? what about the banana splits?) and murderdolls - another spin-off from slipknot, they look like Coronation Street's idea of what goths dress like...

Tim Wheeler does ten tracks for a CD - Avalanches, Super Furry Animals, Stiff Little Fingers... we'd like to be on his tour bus, please...

Johnny Davis asks Coldplay "if you weren't in this band, what would you make of Coldplay, reading your interviews? Will replies "I'd probably be very bored." He's not wrong, believe me...

reviews: ash - intergalactic sonic 7"s ("never lost the ability to twist their high velocity passion for pop into a stream of great singles", 9); john squire - time changes everything ("70's bardic rock", 8); Mark Rae - Rae Road ("come on, sun", 7); delta - hard light ("truly great", 6); various - 4scott ("two quid goes to charity; KLF; Charlatans; Badly Drawn Boy - what more could you want?", 7)...

sotw is death in vegas - hands around my throat ("welcome to the dark side"); not kelly osbourne - papa don't preach ("daddy must be so proud"); or mudhoney - sonic infusion ("bangs along like there's no tomorrow")...

live: jj72 in camden ("dark; difficult; at times brilliant"); the kills in new york ("fucked-up and ragged"); pretty girls make graves in glasgow ("disco-trash-hardcore-sleze-rock of the highest order")...

and, erm, that's it, since the heart of angst (sorry, nmemail) has been ripped out to make a news feature, although there are some moans about the trains at reading...

BLUR SPLIT. OR MAYBE NOT. OR MAYBE: The whole have Blur split, or what, thing has gone on again a bit more and longer. Coxon insists talking to the
nme that he's still in the band, but, erm, the band are just doing their own thing at the moment and he doesn't really need to be there; he also didn't know they were going to Morocco to record. Graham, son - if your mates all go off abroad and don't tell you, you might want to spend some time thinking about if they're still your mates.

A LITTLE ARCHIVE SOMETHING: Shirley Manson interviews Pink - from the December 2001 Interview; discussing how she stole Linda Perry's number and talking about doggies.

MORE AWARDS FUN: robertshaw, bsn's man in the know, travels to an awards ceremony we bet you hadn't heard of...
went to my first ever awards ceremony last night and it was an industry one of all things. the musos, apparently. I'd never heard of it but dotmusic has: it's by the musicians, for the musicians (man) and they covered the inside of the hackney ocean in grass for that authentic festival experience. or something.
I was there as a guest of the darkness who were, as every the living embodiment of ROCK, though only for two songs. they were on v. early (half-past eight) so I don't know what a roomful of half-pissed could-bes and have-beens (with a smattering of ares) would've made of them. the actual awards ceremony was presented by your favourite rent-a-presenter and mine, lauren laverne, unably assisted by a pissed johnny vegas (who capped off a marvellous display of incoherent
ranting by vomiting behind the podium).
tony rogers from the charlies won best keyboardist, and was there to collect it, and the charlies won best live band, too, which he also collected, this time with a rant about west bromwich. at least I think it was west bromwich. tim sent a message from la. johnny greenwood won best guitarist (message from la), alan white from oasis best drummer (brother steve from the paul weller band), peter hook best bassist (steaming mad rant about bassists being better than lead guitarists; the award was presented by noel redding from the jimi hendrix experience, too) polly jean best vocal (someone from island)ian brown best single (surprisingly dry and succinct), and damon gough best songwriter (grateful if sceptical; joined on stage by peter hook and mani from the primal scream). I think that was all.
in between and after we had performances from big sur and kid galahad who were both nowt special. oh, and the modfather won some kind of lifetime achievement affair. his drummer picked it up, because paul doesn't do award ceremonies. end of the night saw reef play with noel redding on bass, they did 'hey joe' and 'voodoo chile', both of which were surprisingly good, even though I thought him the lead singer (I knew his name, once) Robert has since contacted us to point out he does know its Gary Stringer should have looked a bit more overawed.

BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS STILL GOING: Court blocks sale of remaining bits of Napster to Bertelsmann (who, since they're getting out of online music distribution anyway must be, like, really, really gutted); company finally unplugs for good; era ends.
More interestingly, it means the millions that BMG has lobbed into the company over the past few years has been pissed up the proverbial wall, which will make them chuckle like a drain as the realisation sinks in that they've paid 1996 prices for Zomba (i.e. well over the odds.)
Who'd be a big label, eh?
Hey, is this rope attached to our ankle? [MediaGuardian] - maybe we should have untied it before we kicked them into the hole...