HOLIDAY WEEKEND ENTERTAINMENT: Except if you're not in America. The web is a confusing place. Maybe we should standardize bank holidays worldwide?

Anyway, if you're bored, and fancy one of those Excel-based lyric quizzes which has a slightly more indie-feel to it than the usual ones (i.e. guaranteed No Yazz And The Plastic Population) No Rock would like to issue you a tiny challenge:

Click here to download the questions [Requires Excel 97 or later, or compatable spreadsheet program]

Feel free to share it around if you like. We reckon if you make it above fifty percent, you're going to have to come to dinner with us some time.

ADDICTION: We were raving earlier in the week about just how good the new Janes Addiction stuff is; oddly, we've been sent a copy of the artwork for the new album which shows, I think, how much they need you to buy the new album because, well, they're a wee bit gaunt...



There's also a whole heap of Lollapoolaza dates coming up, too - tonight they're in Indianapolis, we see...

They'll be coming to Colorado - Greenwood Village - on August 13th...

IF YOU'RE IN THAT THERE LONDON: TheHotBedFellows, the djing ofshoot of exRental, is splitting into two next Friday [July 11th]. Sean's going to be doing the honours either side of the Human League gig at Ocean, while Lucy will be performing duties for the snaregirl night at the slightly less glorious Enterprise pub in Camden. Four live bands, too.

We realise if, like us, you're not in London, this information isn't much use, and we might as well tell you how much Aldi is charging for baked beans.

SOULOBIT: Barry White, the - ahem - walrus of soul, has died. He's been looking for a new kidney for quite some time, but it looks like time just ran out for him.

The lovers of the world are on their own from now.

THEY GET THE LYRICS WRONG, BUT...: The greatest of the best news about the Ride BBC sessions album is that it includes their cover of the Pale Saints' she rides the waves. This has me feeling so happy, I'd probably buy Robbie Williams a cup of tea right now.

WAS IT WORTH IT?: So, the first week sales of nuLizPhair with added pop!, and how has she done? All that spit, all that polish, and she sold 4,000 fewer than whitechocolatespaceegg did in its debut week. Now tmftml suggests that set against the context of falling record sales, that's not that bad, but really - oh, it is. This album came into town riding on an elephant's back, shouting "I'm here"; it's been crafted and designed to appeal to a much broader demographic, and yet she's failed to even match the sales an album launched with much less hoopla and aimed at a tiny segment of the Great American Public. We know that some Phairophiles have been holding off buying the album until they know if its any good or not, but the suggestion that now they can download it, play it through and aren't exactly beating a path to Tower crying "Liz, we're sorry we doubted you" bodes ill for future sales.

In a record company meeting, three suited men look at a sales graph. After a long time, one of them speaks:
"Okay, we suggest the leather chaps and bikini-top for the next video. But I'm not going to tell her."

And NYLPM wasn't impressed with hot white cum much, either

FIDDLE, FIDDLE, FIDDLE: "Hey, why don't we let them make three copies from CD to computer, but not for filesharing?" ponders BMG. Or, hey, how about taking the millions you're pissing up against the wall footling about trying to stop us using the music we've paid for in any way we see fit, and investing it in some decent bands whose CDs might be worth trumping down to the shops to buy? Might that not be a better way to keep your company profitable?

ABBA REVIVAL: Duran, The Stooges... now Abba reunite for one song only. Oh, go on, do a proper tour. If only to give people who march to Mama Mia and Bjorn Again events the equivalent of proper coffee after years of subsisting on coffee-and-chicory instant.

TATU'S MOST VITAL MEMBER SERIOUSLY INJURED: Because where would Tatu be without their PR?. Beata Ardeeva - who once said her job was to make sure that news about the duo were 'as interesting as possible' (but I'm sure she tried her hardest anyway) - has been in a coma in Turkey since a carcrash earlier this week.

ONE COMES BACK... ONE GOES OUT: It's not merely that The Stooges have reunited, but the surprise that there's anything left of them to get back together. Can you imagine the odds you'd have got on that in the 1980s?

Meanwhile, the reunified Inspiral Carpets are going to split up again. Shockingly, the Manchester Evening News coverage of this bombshell was illustrated with a photo of Noel Gallagher ("former roadie") rather than one of the band.

GREAT VENUES OF OUR TIME: The Morville Hotel in Rhyl booked singer Heidi McGeough to play on Christmas Day. Then they found out that she had a guide dog, muttered something about - oh, yes - a guest having an "allergy" and pulled the booking. She, unsurprisingly, took 'em to a tribunal and won her case.

Oh, but it doesn't end there. Phil O'Dwyer, the managing director of the hotel, has said that he's going to appeal and sue Heidi for, um, something. One of the reasons the hotel lost the case was because, erm, they didn't offer any defence. Talking to the Daily Post, he said ""We didn't know about the legal case." And, with the next breath says "We had letters threatening us with this and that but we took no notice." Righto, then. There's your grounds for appeal right there, then. What sort of court finds against a person simply because they couldn't be arsed to read their mail? Are we living in Italy or something?

KYLIE MINOGUE CHANGES HER CLOTHES: Kylie's stylist has announced that she's abandoning the sex kitten look for something more gallic inspired because airbrushing the cellulite out of pictures of her in hot pants was getting to be a five-person job ("its time for something sophisticated.")

THE CASE CRUMBLES BEYOND DUST: You know which artist has joined the group moaning about how they don't want customers to pick and choose the tracks they want because it ruins their 'artistic vision'? Kid Rock. Kid Rock. Yeah, it'd be a shame if someone, like, dude, perverted his... whatever... vision.

Seriously, we should take Kid's worry that people buying only the tracks that were listenable would render his entire back catalogue worthless - erm, unappreciated. Here's the Kid himself describing his music, to show us just how important every single word, chord and even every pause is: "Music today is in a big fog. A haze if you will. No one’s sure where it’s going, but I like that I’ve got the best set of fog lights out there." You wouldn't want to switch off some fog lights, would you?

MAN! I FEEL LIKE A CANUCK: We're guessing it might have been a small field, but we're still surprised Shania Twain carried off the sexiest Canadian title. And even more surprised that she and Bryan Adams were picked as the sexiest vegetarians alive title from PETA. Bryan Adams? BRYAN ADAMS?

BACK FROM THE DUMPER - POSSIBLY ONLY TO VISIT: "This isn't some revival band, these guys had very successful records in the 1990s" brazens Roger Taylor, talking about the Duran revival. Yeah, like... um... all those songs... like... [coughs].

Of course, when any band reunites, it's hardest on the old fans who've moved on and wanted to keep their memories intact and perfect. But instead of having the Duran of Polaroid-coffee-table-books, perfect cheekbones and the sunlight glistening off the tight leather pouch of Simon LeBon, we've got the comeback kids - Nick Rhodes claiming he's taking hairstyling pointers from David Beckham (akin to Charlie George announcing he's going to learn how to play football by watching Damon Albarn in a soccer six) and the horrific discovery that John Taylor had a part in a Flintstones movie. The second one.

Sometimes, it's best to just let them get on with fannying about with yachts, isn't it?

ERM... COMING SOON: If you've thought that what the UK lacked was an S&M fetish radio station, you're about to have that need filled. We're not sure what the playlist is - a lot of Ultra Vivid Scene, we'd imagine - but we're just wondering how all that PVC is going to be stopped from screeching and squealing over the top of the programming.

VAST AND LOVELY: We actually and genuinely can't thank Ade Rixon (who lives online at www.big-bubbles.fluff.org) for the following:

VAST are offering a rough mix of songs from their next album in MP3 format for $2.99 (via Paypal) at payloadz.com. They were dropped by Elektra last year and appear to be making a fair stab at going it alone. Minor irony: who said that their first album was "one of the best debut albums in a long, long time"? Why, that'll be Lars Ulrich of Metallica. Wonder if he'll be downloading the latest one?

POST-DEBATE POST: Couple of perspectives on the Great British Music Debate have arrived during the day. First, Ian Pointer (of snapperishproductions.com) writes:

I listened to the debate last night, and you'll be happy to know that both Knight's hazy-eyed revisionism and the Tomcraft singles sales were both rebutted by the panel.
Also interesting: the bloke from EMI seemed to cast doubt on Robbie's £80m contract, saying that it was nowhere near that much...

That in itself is interesting - almost as if EMI are slowly starting to cool on Williams. At the time of the deal, they seemed happy enough to allow the idea of him being an eighty million pound man be reported - presumably figuring that it was all good publicity. Now they're taking baby steps away and trying to stress that there was never that much on the table. I wonder why...

Next up, Ade Rixon - who's also brought us that thing up there about VAST - coughs politely at the showcase line-up:

Re. A Heated Debate: Peppercorn isn't even a new act. Her album was released as "Free Love" back in 2001 (check Amazon). Her record company appears to be trying to relaunch her (by self-titling and re-releasing the same album), following a deafening lack of interest the first time round. I don't blame them for trying again; it's acoustic pop-rock with a sassy R'n'B attitude, exactly the sort of thing that normally sells fine and gets plenty of airplay on Radio 2. Perhaps it got lost in the glut of similar acts (Norah, Vanessa, Natalie, etc). Not my bag at all, but my wife loves it.

Which is, perhaps, another reason why the record companies are so happy in the New Labour environment - Tony is quite fond of re-launching old policies dressed up as if they were new, isn't he? It's the plague of the age...

THAT DEBATE: There's a smattering of coverage at mediaguardian of last night's Radio 2 debate - they focus on Paul Weller moaning on about how he wouldn't be where he is today if the record companies had been like they are now, then, or something. Now, there's a great topic for debate: would you gladly throw away Eton Rifles and Long Hot Summer if it meant that there was no Wild Wood or Stanley Road? You might also want to ponder for a moment the extent to which record companies are tying up their resources in making Not Very Good Albums by people like Weller purely so they can keep 'em sweet and hold on to the more lucrative back catalogue rights. (What did Macca get for the last album? Too bloody much.)

And while we feel sympathy for Beverley Knight's position, we're not convinced: She told the Radio 2 audience that records topping the charts were mediocre efforts masterminded by marketing men. Back in the day the chances were that, unless it was a novelty record, it was a really good song. It's hard to sit at home and watch bands you know have been put together by a TV show. It's mediocrity dressed up as greatness."
Because, of course, marketing never played a part in the past - those stories you might have heard about people buying Rod Stewart records, taking the free addidas tshirt and leaving the vinyl on the counter weren't about marketing, it was purely on the merits of the tshirt. We're hoping that people took the opportunity to shout down the historical revisionism in the statement as well. Some of the songs that have been given to the manufactured bands are pretty good, even if woefully delivered - Pure and Simple, Whole Again, for example. Likewise, whatever you think about Christina, there's no more artifice there than there was the first version of Sheena Easton, say, or Kim Wilde. And while we all remember the peaks of the 1970's, to suggest the ones that weren't so great were all 'novelty' is to cherrypick the chart listings - Mull of Kintyre? David Soul's career? The later Cliff Richard stuff?

Meanwhile, the Guardian laments "In May, dance act Tomcraft sold just 36,000 copies to go straight to No 1. It is a far cry from the singles' 70s heyday, when records would often sell more than a million copies to hit the top of the charts after working their way up over a period of weeks."
Again, this is slightly hazy nostalgia. Between 1992 and 2002, thirty-two singles achieved official status as selling a million copies. Between 1972 and 1982, only 16 managed it. [Source: awardmill] So, yeah, the singles market is a bit of a mess, but it's not in the worst condition its ever been, despite the best attempts of the record industry and the chart rules committee to bugger it up.

SECOND PRIZE: TWO DAYS IN THE STUDIO: There's an interesting sounding (by which we mean the track itself seems to be interesting, not that the actual track when played sounds interesting, although it might well) free download of new Echoboy stuff online at the moment; be warned, though - downloading it will enter you into a competition to win a day in the studio with echoboy, thererby condemning you to sit in a small, windowless block watching the same thing happening over and over and over, with the extra chance of being blamed as a negative presence if it's all going badly. Being invited to "come down the studio" is a clear indication that while your co-operation is needed, it's not actually required so instead of meeting you in a place where interaction might be required, you're going to go down to their place of work and hang around them when they're going to be too busy to speak to you. Bear this in mind, by the way, groupies...

AN OVERHEATED DEBATE: Blogcritics imitates the Church of England, ripping itself to shreds over homosexuality. A disturbing number of participants in the debate seem to have a 'they can't help it, poor dears' attitude, and we're still not sure what Eric Olsen is trying to say: "I, unlike you, do not equate attitudes toward homosexuality with attitudes toward race. I believe it is in society's interest to be "totally neutral" regarding race, I believe it is in society's interest to be legally neutral regarding homosexuality but to maintain a general preference for monogomous heterosexuality - it already has this, no need to do anything to further encourage monogomous heterosexuality. We still need to do more to discourage unequal legal treatment and to discourage discrimination against individuals." Maybe they should drop the 'A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, and technology - updated continuously' strapline and replace it with 'Not that there's anything wrong with it, like, it'd just be better for everyone if they didn't do it, wouldn't it?'

A HEATED DEBATE: We actually managed to not hear much of the Radio 2 Great Music Debate, though it's available on the listen again feature of the Radio 2 site. There's also a pretty nifty microsite featuring the main contributors and their main arguments, plus a message board where, of course, the debate can filter out into a bunch of ill-considered ranting by people without any knowledge of the subject of which they speak ("continue long after the show is over with contributions from A&R people pretending to be ordinary people").

If going into the debate you had any doubts that the music industry was in trouble, you only had to look at the artists put forward by the Majors for the showcase event (hey, this really was like a little In The City of the air, wasn't it, except without Tony Wilson or the free copies of music week):

CLARKESVILLE Melodic pop-rock with a hint of electronica.
EMMA HOLLAND She's written songs for Moby and makes her debut soon, strongly influenced by Annie Lennox and George Michael.
PEPPERCORN A female singer songwriter described as a 'kick ass blend of folk rock and seamless pop melodies.'
ROB REYNOLDS He's described as having gritty emotion and solid soul, and he's getting ready to release his latest album
SPEEDWAY: 'Specialising in lasting melodies and rousing lyrics,' this Glasgow band are out for U2's stadium crown.'

Do any of those descriptions make you want to rush down to the record shop? This might be being unfair on the acts - I can't help but feel that maybe Speedway have no interest in U2's stadium crown, but have been told they really should be trying to do that; and I can guarantee you that had they been signed three years ago they would have been billed as "bigger than Texas"; likewise, I'm sure there's more to emma Holland than her label have lumbered her with, but dropping the words "Moby" and "Lennox" into a microbio is only one step away from running black and yellow tape round her records, swamping the area in men in full-cover white body suits and gasmarks, and opening fire on everyone who approaches.

THERE ARE MORE USERS ON THE LINE: Who knew that closing off one download service would just drive people elsewhere? asks the Guardian, rhetorically of course. It wouldn't be as wrong as to provide links to the next generation of filesharing services, but hey, a list of names and google a click away is pretty tempting, yeah?

Meanwhile, looking at the pending courtcases, the paper quotes a record industry executive as saying: "The message up to now has been, 'No, no, no, no, no - be good kids, don't do it,' and everybody laughs at us, saying, 'What are you going to do, sue me? Are you going to risk the bad press?' I think we're at a moment where maybe we need really bad press" . So they're actively seeking opprobrium.

Is there a way to fight back? Maybe there is. They want to scare music users, so maybe we should all act scared. Perhaps we should all set up template files in our email programs, and whenever we're about to play a track on our computer, we should email the record label, copying it to the RIAA, asking 'Is it okay to play this track?' We'd suggest wording along the lines of:

"Hello. I'm about to use my computer to play [track] by [band]. Bearing in mind how you're now taking people to court for copyright violations, I just thought I'd check that was alright with you?"

A few hundred thousand of those everyday might cool their ardour a little.

Meanerwhile, if you're worried about gettign caught using Kazaa, there's some hints on how not to get caught on metafilter. then there's some other alternatives. Then it starts to talk about Linux, which is where we gently make our excuses and leave.

But, hey kids: (And we mean this seriously) If you like music, go out (or to Amazon) and buy some music. Seriously. CDs are nice things to have, and you can make trousers out of them.

HEY, WE'RE IMPORTANT, DONTCHAKNOW?: Seriously, there's a zeitgeisty-touching piece in Exclaim (Canada's music authority, no less) about how vain, silly and (perhaps) essential music blogs are becoming. At the same time, Online Guardian is jibbering about the attempts to overhaul the US political process. They're dreaming of the first blogging US President; really, we'd just be happy with one who could string a sentence together in any medium.

ELSEWHERE IN OZZYLAND: Jack Osbourne also has the famous kid blues. Explaining why he checked himself into rehab he says "I took myself out of the picture for a second and I looked around at every single person in the room - at who they were, how old they were and what they had going on in their lives. A lot of them were near 30, unemployed, living off their parents. There were heroin addicts - there were the world's biggest couch potatoes. I don't want to be like that. I don't want my life to be controlled by a drug." Interesting that he looked at these people hooked on drugs and sponging off their parents well into their fourth decade, and decided he didn't want the drugs part of the deal. But you'll note he booked himself into rehab, and didn't at the same time book himself into his own place.

STELLA STREAK: Stella McCartney is sick of being asked about her father, and worries that people might hate her because she's MaccaWaccaLaccaDooDacca's kid. No, Stella, you don't need to fret about that, although we do admit that we can't touch Linda's Burgers anymore because you're her daughter.

POP DOT COM PAPERS: NME.com breaks an amazing story this morning - Kelly Osbourne is going to try her hand at acting. If anything, this confirms that not even the new media bods at the place read their own papers - as we mentioned on pop papers, the nme itself had a story about her acting ambitions back in May, so it's not entirely unexpected. She's going to appear in a movie called Malice In Sunderland, a contemporary retelling of the Alice In Wonderland story. You'll note the subtle play on words in the title, which gives us really, really high hopes that the script will be right up there with them Doritos adverts.

POP PAPERS PLUS PLUS: And so, what's this we're hearing about the editor of the NME going down on his knees in front of Justin Darkness at Glastonbury? No, not in a Bowie-Ronson way; apparently he wanted to apologise for the damage done. Hmmm. Justin's reaction is not recorded.

POP PAPERS PLUS: It appears that Mel from the Daily Star left the NME almost as soon as she arrived, and this may or may not be connected to her not really having much love of music (if you recall the tales the Peel used to tell in the dark days of Radio One about certain djs not even owning record players, you'd be in the right ballpark, we're lead to believe). The job is wide open again - good news for if the Mirror's 3AM girls ever fall out with each other, there.

Meanwhile: the nme obviously thinks its readers are a bit lame. Last week, there were flyposters for the magazine with the strapline "all the sex, drugs and rock and roll you need" - the r&r might have been, indeed, knee-deep, but apparently all the drugs a nme reader needs is an odd-tasting guarana bar and all the sex? TWO condoms.

Although that might be overstating their sexual appetites - the nme.com Glastonbury survey (we told it we'd climbed over the fence - teehee) asks 'when did you have sex?' and instead of checkboxes allowing multiple occasions to be recorded, has radio buttons implying they expect if any noodling or furtling went on, it was on one occasion and one occasion only.

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: With free poster of some tents from very high up

"Actually" The Thrills tell the Guardian Friday Review "we don't understand the whole misery thing. Morrissey is pretty funny." Once again, with the orthodox unorthodoxy on the Moz.

In Punk Planet Jello Biafra interviews Greg Palast - the scourge of capitalists meets, um, the scourge of the rest of the Dead Kennedys. Palast suggests that Gore wasn't really bothered about the election result, as long as it was one of them, which seems to be a bit of an odd pronouncement. Even if the political gap between Gore and Bush isn't that great, if we accept that the main attraction of the White House is the power to rig the economy in your favour, why would any man not mind if even if his closest friend bested him in the battle for that?

Elsewhere, Everett True meets Wire. Intrestingly, he tells a tale about how Wire thought that taking adverts in Careless Talk Cost Lives would guarantee good coverage. Almost as if that's how it usually works...

Drugs... the Guardian [Saturday] Review - which we now see can be subscribed to as a stand-alone publication - takes a look at a book on the US E scene, which is ultimately depressing; unlike in the UK, where rave drugs had a good period of time to grow their own plastic gangsters, in the US it was Proper Goodfellas from the off. The prism through which all of this is viewed is the sad tale of Michael Alig, as you might expect.

More drugs... the New Statesman's green special reports on the environmental cost of drugs, which is high in terms of the land given over to the secret production of cocaine, the production processes and the latter day agent orange type sprays used in the US's war on drugs. Tom Burke's solution is to just say no, of course, but it just looks like one more argument in favour of decriminalisation to us.

Yet more drugs... today's Daily Mail splashes on a 'shock report' on the Cannabis Timebomb. Apparently all that temporary monging is going to make us all permanently monged at some unspecified point in the future. We shall see. Or, perhaps, won't quite see, but just giggle inanely.

Meat Loaf claims that Sony deliberately under-reported his album sales, diddling him out of eight million quid in the process. He warns Guardian Jobs and Money readers "If you sign with a record label, be prepared - you won't get all your money." These are the people who lecture you on your bad evilness of Kazaaaing...

What on earth would possess Q to give its cover over to a topless Robbie Williams? Is it really so desperate to go after the more readers? As reported elsewhere, Robbie moans that we don't give him enough support and that he's going to give up casual sex. One way to get people going out at nights again, I guess.

"More coverage for less" trills the NME front page, perhaps remembering its shyster antics last year when they stuck the cover price up for the Glasto report edition. There's also space made for Thom Yorke on the cover, too. Interestingly, there's an acting news editor listed - does anyone know what's happened to the Daily Star Bitch (that was her strapline, we're sure she's very nice).

50 Cent is coming back to the UK; he really liked it here when he played with Eminem. He only had to do a ten minute set and got paid in full, so why wouldn't he love?

Ateaseweb, the greatest of the radiohead fan sites, has managed to save itself from the threat of closure over the lyrics on its pages, but now faces closure because of crippling bandwidth demand. They're looking for a white knight.

80s Matchbox B Line Disaster called in some topless wrestlers and midgets for a live date - not the most inspired way of attempting to draw attention away from lack of ideas.

Interesting but false headlines: 'UK File sharers face lawsuits' says the nme. Except, the news report underneath merely says the BPI can't rule out copying the RIAA. Which is 'we're not going to, but we're not going to say we're not going to.' The BPI hasn't copied very many of it's American cousin's actions, so why would it start with this risky avenue?

"Aids is the biggest weapon of mass destruction I can think of" says Fran Healy, which, while we know what he means isn't quite true - the point about Aids being its not mass, but picks its targets off one by one - at least has its anger in the right place. Maybe he could write a song about it, instead of pisspoor lovey stuff?

'Leeds safer than ever' promises another headline - which isn't saying very much considering the last couple of events, is it? They're also going to have a supermarket on site, which, without any local competition, will presumably have an interesting pricing policy.

Eminem's security was better than the Royal Family's - which isn't saying much, considering how lax royal protection is. On the other hand, it shows Eminem up for the wuss that he is. And not in a cute wuss way, either.

New trend watch: Punk Rock Aerobics. I see.

Lise Marie Presley does the CD thing - Radiohead, two Jeff Buckley and Rage Against the What, I Can't Read My PR's Writing here.

He's shaken off being associated with Minty, and he wears a kind of sackcloth, but there's something still cute about folkie-electro Patrick Wolf.

What does it take to get a two page spread in NME these days? Releasing 11 albums never cracked it for Holly Golightly, but being friends with Jack White did. Just in time for her 'up' album: 'Heartbreak is everywhere. I've done a lot of stuff that made my friends cry, so this is me doing a pop record. I only talk about killing somebody once.'

According to the Bandits piece "in 2001 the Liverpool indie circuit was an amorphous tangle of skunkhead schoolmates signing deals like the premiership on crystal meth." We'll have to check our notebooks, but we're pretty sure it wasn't. Anyway, they do get to grips with why The Bandits managed to break the moribund mould of merseymope: unlike everyone else, when Lee Mavers tried to make Gary join yet another resurrected Las, he said no. And actually made his own myth instead of sitting in a basement waiting for Lee to have his ear-accupunture and letting time gather dust.

reviews
albums
the coral - magic and medicine - "often their wackiness obscures the band's real gifts", 8
dot - dot - "three aesthetes playing clever music for kicks", 5
beyonce - dangerously in love - "frustratingly inconsistent",5
matt elliot - the mess we made - "magnifique", 8
cosmic rough riders - too close to see far - "toning down their faux-Beatles cod mysticism", 7
the darkness - the darkness - "heavy metal karaoke", 7

singles
sotw - beyonce featuring jay z - crazy in love - "single of the century"
madonna - hollywood - "preachy hypocrites? give us a break"

live
young heart attack - camden barfly - "on the verge of kicking off one almighty party"

front cover of crowd? check. picture of drunk guy? check. people in bad hats? check. pointless poster of festival site from the sky? check. yes, its the glasotnbury review, which attempts to be comprehensive but is slightly hobbled by the need to give each act some sort of award. So we have:

most inspirational band - REM
most incongrous act - audio bullies
god vibes - primal scream
feelgood band - the thrills ("made for festivals" apparently)
best outfit - goldfrapp
cleanest shoes - sugababes
you get the drift.

And, finally: welcome a new nme feature: "Look, it's Avril not using her body to sell records." What a cracking idea.