RETURNING JAPANESE: remember the 80s is reporting that The Vapours are about to reform, prior to the release of a best-of (which would be, we'd suggest, a single song).

QUESTION IS - WHO DOES THIS REFLECT WORSE ON?: As a poll finds Americans trust Eminem more than Bush, should Bush worry that he's so distrusted? Or should Eminem worry that he's become such a mainstream sweetie?

THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY WANT: Good news - Sally James is back doing regular work, as a presenter on BBC WM (men and some women of a certain age go misty-eyed and/or mutter 'I preferred Philbin, myself'). Bad news - She's being kept off the new gig for a month while she gets her colon untwisted. Jenny Hanley has (probably) been muttering that she's never needed her colon to be unscrewed.

NEW WORKPLACE HAZARD: Enforced karaoke, or 'paintballing, but with 'I Will Always Love You' instead of hard pellets' to beat stress. If that doesn't work, how about sleep deprivation, or letting a jaguar loose in the office?

THEY'LL SAVE A LOT ON THE CLOTHING MATERIALS, THEN: Shrewd decision by Mattel, who are sponsoring Christina Aguilera's tour in the name of Barbie. The main worry is that the plastic bimbo-doll might be outraged at being associated with Christina, of course, but it seems like Mattel is trying to - ahem - slut the doll's image up to compete with the Bratz range: "Mattel is sponsoring this summer's tour of singer Christina Aguilera to promote the six dolls, which come in different heights and sport attire such as tube tops and mini-skirts." The Flavas range is aimed at kids up to the age of ten. We're a little queasy about a marketing department that thinks that Christina Aguilera should be considered an eight-to-ten-year-old's style of popstar. We'd be a bit scared if our imaginary eight year old was aspiring to be Dirrty.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT TO CHECK YOUR EMAIL FREQUENTLY: Ian Rankin finally gets round to sifting through email; is delighted to find an invitation to lunch with REM (along with offers of enlarged penises and rapey preteens). Ah. But three days after the event was due to take place. Dammit, you need to check your email, people.

QUICK, WITH THE TIPP-EX: While Jackson Browne can quite legitmately state that he never slapped Darryl Hannah about - Santa Monica Police investiagted and found the allegations to be baseless - we're a little concerned that he's taking action to stop TV shows even mentioning the allegations were made. So long as it's made perfectly clear that he was cleared, we're not sure why the singer is upset at the mere mention of the event. It's not like it's not already in the public realm, and we'd have thought that a clear rejection of the allegation would be better than just pretending that it never happened. And while we're not saying that it should be brought into any program about John F Kennedy Jr, Darryl or Jackson, forcing TV shows to start deleting accurate parts of stories just because they don't show you in the best light would seem to be part of a dangerous way to behave.

QUICK QUESTION: With the Record Companies seemingly determined to burn off the last few bits of goodwill remaining by just issuing writs against ISPs left, right and centre in the US, something kind of odd seems to be happening. They're taking on Verizon, they're taking on Commcast. They're battling all the major US ISPs. Except one. Indeed, if you search for Verizon on the RIAA website, you find thirty-two pages of explication about their evils. If you search for AOL, however, you find not a peep. Is it that AOL users are all sweet little good citizens, or is it the slightly more unsettling possibility that the RIAA, who receive much of their funding from AOL Time Warner, are happy to turn a blind eye to AOL customer's misdeamenours? Or, even more worryingly, could AOL be using its membership of the RIAA as a way of putting costly pressure on its rivals in the ISP business? Should perhaps someone be exploring the ethics of a private body being allowed to pursue legal vendettas against the commercial rivals of one of its members?

HARP STAYS SHARP TO THE BOTTOM OF THE GLASS: Glass Harp are back, and they're making with the downloads. This is part of a test service over on Blogcritics of a DIY section; so even if you don't think the idea of a band who punk were supposed to have buried in a shallow grave returning is that great, pop over and see what else is going on in the neighbourhood.

MY SWEET BLOODY VALENTINE: Not only are they working together again, but My Bloody Valentine could be about to birth a box set. This probably depends on if Kevin can get out of his front door or not, mind. [We hope that naming Oh Manchester as our source for this won't lead to any sudden disappearances]

MUSIC AWARDS RIGGED? SURELY NOT?: Hong Kong police arrest people suspected to rigging music awards; Brits, Grammy organisers put nervous calls through to lawyers "just to be on the safe side."

THEY NEVER FORGET: Juice FM forced to pull adverts after painfully misjudging Merseyside's attitude to The Sun. Juice had carried adverts for the paper, which is still a pariah title in Liverpool following the coverage of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster back in 1989.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT: Andrew Lloyd Webber's Way Ahead Agency make a thousand quid off the back of the cancellation of the Eden Festival. "We have to cover our staffing costs" they stammer. Of course, if they really want to show they're not cash-sucking scum, they could give their windfall to the charities who are losing out (and have to cover some things a bit more important than staff costs), couldn't they?

LOOK, ONCE MORE: I'M NOT DESPERATE FOR ANY CASH I CAN MAKE, OKAY?: Jackson Five reforms in an E. Nesbitt style bid to restore the family fortunes. It can't be long before Michael Jackson starts to flog lunch dates with himself on the Ebay.

FUN FOR ALL THE GIG-GOING FAMILY: It's Hipster Bingo. Of course, you'd need to include local variations: 'Former member of the La's', say, or 'Tony Wilson'...

LIPS, ANYONE?: Those Flaming Lips autumnal tour dates in full:
Plymouth Pavillion - October 23
Bournemouth International Centre 24
Cardiff International Arena 26
Leicester De Montfort Hall 27
Manchester Apollo 28
Sheffield City Hall 29
Birmingham Academy 31
Brighton Centre November 2
London Hammersmith Apollo 3
Glasgow Academy 8
Edinburgh Usher Hall 9

OFFICIAL: JENNIFER LOPEZ WAS A LESBIAN: Well, not quite. But the character she's playing in Gigli was meant to be. The original plan would have seen J-Lo being a lesbian at the heart of an action movie; now she's having rumpy with Ben Affleck in a romantic comedy. One day, we're going to infiltrate test screenings with hundreds of our stooges and get them to say "we really feel their should have been more accordion on the soundtrack..."

SOMEHOW, IT'S SLIGHTLY MORE ICKY THAN OUR PRISON ANAL RAPE METAPHOR: Clear Channel have snorted that Capital's rejection of a possible merger is like Anne Widdecombe turning down a date with Brad Pitt - which, while showing a nice deft touch with the choice of English and American icons isn't entirely spot-on, we'd suggest. Capital, with it's mainly chart-based formats of one sort and another is not really much like Anne Widdecombe; indeed, it's desperate bid to weld youth crediblity onto an aging roster of faces makes it more like William Hague. And Clear Channel is flattering itself if it really looks in the mirror and sees Brad Pitt. Maybe Mike Tyson might be more the mark?

Roger Parry, biggest cat of all the Clear Channel Fat Cats then puts aside the date-similes to crush Capital with maths, like a giant, um, Calculating-Godzilla creature: "If you do your mathematics, it's obvious why Clear Channel would not be making bids for Capital Radio. Capital's pre-tax profits are about £24m and its current market value is £410m. A company is worth its cash flow, so you'd have to take the tax rate off the £24m - say take a third off, and you've got £16m. You going to buy something for £400m that's producing £16m cash, that's a return of 4%. I'm expected to make a return of 15%. The gap between 4% and 15% is pretty large and only two things could close that gap - either you'd have to assume profits are going to massively go up, or the price would have to go down. Absent either of those two events, I don't think David needs to worry." In other words, Capital is a hideously overpriced beast right now. (We're sure you will have spotted that poo-pooing a merger is a good way to try and talk the price of stocks down).

Parry also says that, if the price was right, Clear Channel would be looking at music or rolling news stations, but not other speech-based radio because the BBC has got that all stitched up. He seems to not really have a very tight grip on the dynamics of the UK commercial radio market, which is pretty much all music-based, save for one brave rolling news operation and TalkSport. (Unless, of course, we're doing him a disservice and he really has been thinking if it's worth trying to take over OneWord, the pixie-sized book station on DAB). Ominously, he also suggests there's an untapped audience for Country Music. Now, there he is kind of right, but only in large enough numbers to sustain with a national analogue frequency - which would mean a hell of a shake-up at Classic FM or Virgin.

In conclusion, reports MediaGuardian, Mr Parry also said he wants to put paid to "myths and legends" about his company and address its image as "big bad" ogre of the industry. "They want to portray us as mindlessly commercial, only interested in selling hamburgers. We absolutely accept the fact we are a commercial broadcaster. Our success is based on maximising advertising revenue. The part [British radio executives] chose not to hear is that we do that by maximising and delighting listeners - if you don't have any listeners you don't have anything to sell." So, erm, that would be be being mindlessly commercial then, Mr. Parry - what you do is maximise listeners by appealing to the Lowest Sustainable Denominator. However much it might delight the audience, you're still flattening down the radio landscape to do it.

SPOT THE QUIMBY: Trouble in Colorado, where the mayor of Denver has managed to blow USD130 000 on a concert at Red Rocks - the third year the "festival" has gone through cash like Tom Baker's Doctor munched jelly babies.

Curiously, the enormous expense has been justified as saying that it was all a good marketing exercise, and the large number of tickets that had to be handed out for free wasn't just a desperate bid to fill the place but, rather, an investment - "a way of exposing Red Rocks to community members who don't typically go to concerts." The point of giving free tickets to people who wouldn't go to gigs is lost slightly on us - it's not as if the line-up (the Isley Brothers, the Gap Band, the Poncho Sanchez Latin Jazz Band and singer Heather Headley) was so stellar as to turn the most anti-musical head; we'd have thought that People Who Don't Pay To Go To Concerts aren't going to suddenly mend their ways because someone gives them free tickets - in fact, surely that's just going to make them even less likely to pay in the future (the way the guest-list mentality takes hold so firmly, and all). And the suggestion that anyone living in Colorado might not be aware of the Red Rocks venue is absurd - like giving people in London free trips on the London Eye so they can discover the Houses of Parliament.

The fees and rider details make great reading, too: Payment for the four musical acts: $155,000.

Limousine service for band members: $9,339.38.

Estimated cost for the bands' hotel rooms: $4,566.52.

Catering costs for bands, backstage staff and production crews: $4,752.25.

Each of the performing groups had specific food requests the city was obligated to fulfill.

The Isley Brothers specified Skippy peanut butter with nuts for lunch. Their contract also called for "real brewed ice tea - no powder mix."

For dinner, the band's contract called for "steak cooked well done, medium and rare; grilled red snapper."

In their dressing rooms, the contract required the city to provide "two bottles of Moet Whitestar Champagne with ice bucket; two bottles of Merlot; one bottle of Louis Jardot Chardonnay; six-pack of Smirnoff Ice."

Such contract "riders" are typical in the concert industry.

"That's not unusual - artists can be very particular," said Rodney Smith, director of programming and event services for the Theatres and Arenas Division. "Having to foot the bill for that stuff is normal."

This sounds to us like someone who doesn't hang out much with pop groups, but has seen a few editions of Behind The Music, trying to sound in the know. How the hell did four acts manage to spend more than two thousand bucks a piece on limos? You could taxi the sods in from Birmingham for less than that. And, seriously, the Isley Brothers should be thankful they've got a paying gig somewhere where they don't have to compete with the waitress taking orders for the Coq Au Vin - any shrewd promoter would have looked at their rider demands and said "you can have one bottle of wine for every top forty you've had in the last fifteen years; and your red snapper and steak will come in small cartons from McDonalds, you cheeky chappies." Only the starstruck, or people booking off the very a-list, give in to all the act's demands. Because what are The Gap Band going to do? Threaten not to show up? Judging from the numbers here, that would probably have helped rather than harmed ticket sales.

But, Mayor Webb - if you're doing next year's planning - can we suggest Tony Hadley.

TALKING OF ANTS: Can anyone explain why the Jubilee DVD would be the sixth most popular title in South Korea?

ADAM'S HAD HIS DAY IN COURT, TOO: Last night was Channel 4's Madness of Prince Charming, an investigation/archive raid into the life of Adam Ant.

First things first: Justine Frischmann, who provided the voice over. She was stunning, having decided to eschew her faux-bow-bells rock-cockney for something nearer her usual voice. Obviously, we've long been a slave to her and Elastica, but, really, we'd be happy to sit at her feet and listen to her reading old Smash Hits features on Adam Ant until twilight falls. In the limited but growing field of indie-goddess turned TV anchor, she is the Sue the Panda to Lauren Laverne's Sweep the Dog.

But the show itself? It's a curiosity. Clearly, without the whole having gone mad element, it's unlikely that Channel Four would have turned over a chunk of precious Prime-Time to Adam Ant (it's unlikely that we'll be seeing 'Toyah - Before She Campaigned Against Asylum Seekers in her Neighbourhood' or 'Tony Hadley: Pop Diplomat to Laundromat Singer' anywhere other than Vh1 in the foreseeable future). Not that The Madness of Prince Charming didn't have some of the elements of the current Ch4 obsessions - there were home decoration tips (a friend told how the young Adam's house was painted all black - "walls, ceiling, carpets, the lot" with three nails, on which hung a comb, a pair of scissors and a toothbrush); and the early tales of the transformation from Stuart Goddard into Adam Ant sounded like a great lost edition of Faking It.

But the early and fame days, though fascinating for anyone who lived through them, were little more than the usual run-through of How Punk Changed Everything, even down to the appearance of Malcolm McClaren turning up to tell us how it was all his idea, the whole lot of it. All the old punks on show have hit the point of middle aged spread - even Paul More-of-Me/Morley, but it was still frightening how much Malcolm McClaren has started to look like a supporting antique dealer from Lovejoy, all carcoated-up, greying temples and laugh lines. He's finally growing into his face; that he also looks like a man you wouldn't have bought a second hand table or dodgy youth movement from now is some sort of poetic justice, we guess.

There was an attempt to lace the rags-to-riches part of the tale with some psychology that, while not cod had something of the fish about it; needing to have an explanation for why it all went wrong the documentary had to stir in some seeds of doubt from the off and so decided that Adam's prodigious output and desire for fame at any price was 'stardom as self-medication'. They might have a point, and if the need to push himself further, and sell more was a flaw, then grievously did he pay for it - he even agreed to do The Canon and Ball Show. Shockingly, he'd been offered a choice between them and Morecambe and Wise; he plumped for C&B because "the ratings were higher." There was also footage of the Ants' appearance on The Children's Royal Variety Performance, now officially The Point Where They Stopped Being Punk. As a sidenote, that show was hosted by Man/Puppet act Rod Hull and Emu and the 'royal' in attendance was Princess Margaret; Rod Hull's own plummet from stardom was the subject of a Channel Four show earlier this month; it's only a few weeks since they 'did' Margaret too.

Adam was given credit for being the first person to use the newspapers to sell their music and image, and although this is becoming such a commonplace that 'X was the first tabloid star' that the show before had been suggesting that Victoria and Albert had been, in effect, the first tabloid stars too, it did give a chance to set the triumphant Dandy Highway cover stories with the more recent, equally prominent coverage of the raging demons. The NME often gets accused of building 'em up to knock 'em down, but clearly nobody does it like the tabloids - they might wait years, but once the boots are on, the boots are in.

The end of the Ants and the decline of the career were skipped through pretty quickly, so as to get to the present. The "reasons" for Adam's mental decline - the loss of fame, the two stalkers, the father turning up and turning out to be a Dirty Old Man (as they still were known before the Internet) - were lined up and run through, and both Marco and Merrick were called on to give examples of the slippery slope that would eventually wind up with him throwing an alternator through a pub window and being sectioned. Interviewed between that sectioning and the later one, Adam isn't so Dandy anymore. Some of the time, he was filmed in what I guess is a TV Researcher's idea of what a mental health ward looks like (he was at pains to dismiss the film-glamour of mental illness - "there's no Jack Nicholson, no sexy middle aged nurse… just the smell of piss and death, and people waiting to die", although this also smacks a little of myth-making of a different kind); for these scenes, he was wearing a too-large bowler hat and his face was round and slightly angelic, as if he was trying out for the part of Fred the Flour Grader. But the sadder scenes were the ones where they shut him in front of a large screen and played him highlights of his career, and excerpts of news footage chronicling the descent into tragedy. For these sequences, he watched with a headscarf (we're guessing he's not taken the loss of his hair as lightly as Brian Molko) through tinted glasses, almost impassively. Even talking about the truly great pop moments he made - Prince Charming, Stand and Deliver - he didn't show any spark, any pride, any emotion linked to them. After explaining about how they'd suffered to knock out the Stand and Deliver video in just one day, his comment seemed to sum up his entire life. Flatly: "it went to number one - that's all that matters." He didn't sound as if he really believed it, more that he hoped that other people would.

MORE COURT STUFF: Former Suede accountant Frank Dixon was up in court yesterday, charged with false accounting and theft. The prosecution claims Dixon took money from the accounts of Suede, Primal Scream Echobelly (although we'd have thought finding any money in Echobelly's account would have been a talent unmatched) and others, totalling a million pounds' worth. Dixon has pleaded not guilty to all thirty four charges. He's due back in court on October 24th, when his lawyers plan to argue the charges be dismissed on some technicality or other.

WHAT'S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? (BESIDES THE RISK OF GETTING CAUGHT IN THE EAST-WEST CROSSFIRE?): Yes, we see Ms Dynamite Pepsi is in the UK shops now - is it just us, or has she gone so cold the cans look chillier than Tizer Ice? - but even more excitingly, the US has Russell Simmon's Def Con 3, the hip hop/pop crossover. Okay, it's not that exciting, but it's better than Jane Asher cakes, surely?

STILL, AT LEAST IT WASN'T JEREMY BEADLE: More on the Great Metallica Spoof, apparently from cnn. The spoofer, Ashley from Unrest, might be thinking of a different Lars Ulrich when he says "I may be reaching here, but I wouldn't put it past Lars to actually approve of the parody because it exposes the Internet for what it is," he said, meaning the kind of place where even legitimate news sites might run with the story without a second thought. Yes, we're sure he'll be suing your skinny ass more in sorrow than in anger. What is kind of shocking is that Ananova didn't actually spot the flaw in the URL they were using to stack up the story: http://www1.scoopthis.com/411/met_uf/stc_met_uf_mtv.htm - maybe if they deep-linked to their actual sources, they'd have had the spoof pointed out to them earlier and saved their reputation a spot of blushing?
[Thanks to Nigel R for what we'll term ' additional research']

Oh, and while we're correcting: The problem drinker points out Conyers and Berman are Congressmen. They introduced the bill in the House of Representatives. (They're the ones who want to send filesharers to prison)

THIS MIGHT BE ALL BOLLOCKS, TOO: Kym Marsh has given advice to One True Voice about how to manage their careers. Yes, we know. See? You don't need to make stuff up. Really, the things that actually happen are so much sweeter.

THERE YOU GO: The disappearance of the Metallica story from Ananova confirms that, yes, it was all a gimmicky stunt. But a well done one. After all, this is a band who sue their own fans, and on a day when a similar act really has said "you can't expect live shows to be any good..." and two senators have calculated one track on a P2P network is equal to two and half grand's worth of thieving, why on earth would you need to bother making things up? We took the story on good faith on the basis that Ananova were running with it. And we're sure its the sort of thing they'd like to do, anyway...

NO, THEY'RE REALLY JUST INSANE, AREN'T THEY?: Hats off to John Conyers and Howard Berman, who've introduced a bill to senate that would send file sharers to prison. Because, you know, you might think you're just sharing some Bon Jovi, but that whole filesharing thing could, apparently, lead to 'government security violations', not to mention be used for swapping kiddie porn and them computer viruses. (It's not clear how sending people who are sharing music rather than pictures of naked preteens or the I Love You virus to the big house would exactly stop these things, but we imagine that it's like dope-to-heroin; today you might be downloading the theme tune to Dr Snuggles; by October you'll be pumping a virus up into the Pentagon). Of course, trying to get anyone to take seriously the idea that making available a copy of Love To Love You Baby is a crime that demands you be banged up is a bit tricky, so the two Democrats have cooked up some maths-fudging to push the figures into the criminal zone. They've decided that a file on your machine is worth USD2,500 - and thus an automatic trip to jail. To arrive at this figure, they've had to believe that each file will be downloaded an average of ten times (which, in our experience, is pushing it a bit) and that each download represents the theft of twenty five buck's worth of material. Each track is worth twenty five dollars? What, are they using data prepared specially by the RIAA and Lars to come up with this crazy figure? Because on that basis, an average album would be retailing at two and a half thousand a piece, wouldn't it? We hope this gets treated with the withering disdain such calculations deserve. Look: A legitmate download comes in at around ninety-nine cents. So, to come up to your figures, you'd have to wait for 2525 downloads to make your money up. Andf shouldn't there be something a little more solid than a vague assumption on the part of two chaps who don't look like they spend much time listening to music.

CREED: DEFENDING THEMSELVES. BUT LAMELY: Creed have started to realise that their pisspoor Chicago show could cost them an awful lot of money, and so have come up with a whole bunch of plausible sounding weasel outs ("come out fighting against their critics"). First, They've tried the 'I wasn't pissed and lying down on the job, I was - uh - making a personal gesture' approach - they admit that "some people might not have got it. They've tried bemusement - "While [Stapp] did say he was "fighting off illness" at the time, he said he watched the concert on tape and doesn't understand the fuss. "We didn't feel like it was an awful show," he said. "That's why it kind of shocked us."

And now, they've got their mummies, sorry, attorneys in to say that, even if it was a crap show, then the scummy customer is just going to have to suck on their titties: "Creed's attorney, Rob McNeely, described the claim as bunk. "Buying a ticket to a concert does not mean buying an entitlement or a guarantee to any caliber or quality of performance," he said. "And it has to be that way because of the nature of the arts." He compared the lawsuit to an Orlando Magic fan suing the team if Tracy McGrady had an off night and scored only 4 points. If judges were to rule that Creed's lackluster performance merited refunds, McNeely argues, it would be a "short trip" to the day when judges preapprove song selections for concerts. The same logic suggests judges shouldn't prohibit Stapp from rolling "around on the floor of the stage in apparent pain or distress" or passing out during the performance, as the lawsuit claims."

Except, of course, the lawyer is using a bad analogy: with sports, part of the attraction is that one team might be having an off-day, and when you buy a ticket to see a game, you're accepting the risk that you might see the team lose. (If it wasn't the case, why would so many Brighton and Hove Albion fans have bothered to renew their season tickets?). But with entertainment, it's more like employing a plumber or a wallpapering person. On a microlevel, if you booked a band to play your wedding, and they turned up and were shit, you'd have every right to assume they'd breached their contract and not pay them. The same applies for a band who you're hiring (as part of bulk deal) with the rest of an audotorium. It's news to us that we're buying tickets for events under some nebulous legal understanding that the band might not stick to their part of the deal - and, if this is the case, shouldn't there be some small print saying 'we might suck' on the tickets?

If our attorney said to us 'Hey, guys, just paying someone doesn't mean they're going to be good at what they do" before he has to go and represent us in court, we'd start to think we'd hired the wrong guy.

NEXT TARGET: SUING ALL OTHER UGLY, BADLY DRESSED MORON BANDS: Metallica really are dicks, aren't they? I mean, really, really fat dicks. Okay, we could see their point over the whole Napster thing - hey, if we were of limited intelligence we might even have agreed with them, and made that \m/ sign thing for them. But now? They're launching a legal action against a band for using the chords E and F. "We're not saying we own those two chords, individually - that would be ridiculous" says Lars, which is, of course true. But no more ridiculous than trying to say you own the two chords in that order, and that anyone who writes a song with them in should credit them and pay fifty percent of the royalties for songs which use them. The target of a band who apparently have become so detached from reality that they probably think they can fly is Unfaith, a Canadian act who deserve all our support, I think.

If it wasn't Metallica, we'd assume stuff like this was just a gimmicky stunt: "Metallica's lawyer, Jill Pietrini, said the band decided to take legal action only after first sending a letter of complaint to Unfaith singer/songwriter, Erik Ashley. "They continue to shamelessly feature the two chords on their website song samples and we just can't have that," she said.


update... so, it did all turn out to be too good to be true [see above] - although makes you wonder who actually does fact-checking for Ananova...

MUFFIN'S IN A COFFEE SHOP: Interesting piece on Brassy, who have had to take time off their day jobs in order to tour Australia. Although Muffin suggests that the internet hasn't helped, the real reason why a band like Brassy haven't really taken off to a point where their music can support them lays more in this sort of thing: "Brassy's 'Play Some D' [reports Undercover] was used in a UK campaign, but they didn't see a cent from it. "Motorola were using it. They used Play Some D for the prime time movies, in and out of ads" she says. "We didn't have any say in the matter. We aren't with the publishing company that put out the first album so they just went ahead and did it. They didn't ask and we didn't get any money." Remember, the battle against downloading is being fought in the name of the artists, and yet time and again the artists seem to end up with No Money At All.

Talking of people making money from Music, Daniel Miller made a few quid when his label was hoovered up by EMI, and continues to helm the now not-quite-indie. Miller is interviewed for today's Guardian Online and while he shudders over the RIAA "victimisation" of individuals, he does parrot the line that "There's no question that [filesharing] is having a negative effect on the record industry" - um, actual, Daniel, there is a very, very large question indeed over whether its effect is negative. It's like an enormous question. It's a question so huge, you have to pack sandwiches and spare water if you wish to traverse it. And any time we see anybody trot out the "it's unquestionably a bad thing", we shall spring to our feet and wave our order papers.