Ten years old today

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel was released a decade ago today.

Stereogum celebrates the anniversary; newcomers might prefer Wikipedia's guide to the record. Last FM offers a stream of the album; and it's been the subject of one of the 33 and a third books.

[Thanks to Peter D for the timely reminder]

Fatboy goes down to the sea again

Norman Cook is going to have another one of his Brighton Beach parties. Two, in fact, on September 26th and 27th; like the New Years Eve event, it's going to be all ticket.

Travis pain

Travis are accident-prone, aren't they? At a gig in Cambridge last week, Andy Dunlop fell off the stage and crocked his ankle. A trip to hospital showed no break, allowing shows to go on as planned. So nobody comes out of it well.

Why are you all staring?

It's a hard life being Frances Bean Cobain, it really is:

“These people are fascinated by me, but I haven't done anything.

"If you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents.

“I get it, I really do, but at the same time it's creepy. People need to wait until I've done something valid with my life."

It's quite cute she's so sweet to her Mom, pretending there are such things as "big Hole fans". Of course, her protestations that 'little ole me ain't done anything' would be a bit more convincing if she wasn't talking to Harpers Bazaar while doing a fashion shoot for them. Shouldn't she have told Harpers that she's not done anything worthy of a big spread in a glossy magazine?

Microsoft discover Valentines Day not a movable feast

What a lovely idea it must have been: a special edition Valentine's Day Zune. Trouble is, Microsoft have managed to screw up the plans and now some people aren't going to have the music players in time for the most romantic day of the year.

Okay, that's a little unfair. Valentine's day isn't especially romantic in the first place, because if you need to be pushed by Hallmark to tell someone you love them, you might have a romance deficiency.

Still, Redmond have offered to give purchasers of the late Zunes their money back; and, if you do manage to forget the 14th, you can always tell your fuming beloved that you'd ordered a Microsoft Zune and it's Steve Ballmer's fault you've turned up empty-handed.

Assuming, of course, your date won't be more annoyed you'd have tried to palm them off with a Zune in the first place.

"You were the music - I was just in a band"

Whitesnake and Trapeze guitarist Mel Galley has been given a grim prognosis for his cancer. He's issued a statement - or, rather, sent a letter to his fans:

"Well, as some of you may already have read in the press or seen/heard on other websites, the verdict from the doctors following a full MRI scan is that my condition is terminal. Rather than sit around feeling sorry for myself, I intend to make the most of the time I have left with my family and friends. I am blessed with a fantastic wife and two sons who I am very proud of. For now am just aiming to make my 60th birthday in March.

"I have enjoyed a great life, travelled the world having some amazing experiences, met all sorts of people and played with some of the best musicians there are.

"Back in the late '60s when I first started playing in local bands I never imagined how far I would go and the shows I would play. I seemed to tour non-stop with Glenn and Dave in TRAPEZE in the early 70s. We supported THE KINKS and THE MOODY BLUES while still very young men, had people like John Bonham come on and do encores with us, and the likes of ZZ TOP as our support act. We loved to play live and the fans seemed to love us, especially in the Southern States of the USA — HELLO TEXAS!

"Playing on the same bill as THE EAGLES and THE ROLLING STONES, with MONTROSE opening, in front of 100,000 fans in Dallas in 1975 and headlining the 1983 Monsters of Rock festival while in WHITESNAKE are two shows that I will treasure. There have been so many highlights that it's impossible to name them all.

"Glenn still occasionally throws in a TRAPEZE song during his shows and they sound as fresh as if written yesterday. That tells me how good they are. The fact that he has always had one of the most amazing voices you have ever heard helps too! God bless you, Glenn.

"Due to my arm injury, my time in WHITESNAKE sadly only resulted in one album. Playing with those guys was a buzz and both line-ups I was involved in contained tremendous musicians. I'm sure John Sykes and I could have written some great songs together. It was so nice to meet him again recently over 20 years later and to see him still playing the same Gibson as back then.

"Over the last 12 months, since the launch of my page and the TRAPEZE page, I have regained my love for playing and taken real pleasure from reading the comments and messages you have all left. I have heard from people I had lost touch with years ago. It has been fantastic and I thank you all. I honestly didn't realise the amount of people out there who still remember or have discovered my music. I just wish I could have had the chance to play the shows I had planned for this year.

"Thank you all so much for your love and support over the years.

"You are the music — I was just in a band!"

Sandi Thom reveals marketing plan B

Since the "internet superstar" angle is a busted flush now, how on earth can Sandi Thom flog her second album?

Hey! How about naked pictures in a magazine? That'll work, right?

Richards, Jagger tut at Amy Winehouse

You'd imagine if anyone had sympathy for Amy Winehouse, it'd be the Rolling Stones.

Not so:

"She should get her act together," the former junkie said during a round-table interview at the Berlin International Film Festival on Friday to promote Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary "Shine a Light."

The often-addled rocker paused, then added: "Apart from that, I have got nothing to say to the bitch."

'Pull yourself together'. That's a constructive approach, Keith. Mind you, what would you expect from someone who calls a woman a "bitch" for no reason.

Jagger, meanwhile, tried to make it seem like they were a little less hypocritical by suggesting that back in their day, drugs were new and unknown:

"When we were experimenting with drugs, little was known about the effects," Jagger said.

Cocaine was banned in the United States in 1914. Heroin addiction was being studied seriously in New York in the 1950s and the problem was well known enough in the UK in the 1960s for a survey of addicts receiving treatment to be the subject of what would become a thirty-year study. For a time in the 1950s, it seemed that all movies included some sort of reference to pot, potheads, and the risks. Reefer Madness came out in 1935. And Jagger is trying to say that nobody knew anything about the effects of drugs in the mid 1960s?

"In our time there were no rehab centers like today. Anyway, I did not know about them."

So, the information was there, but you chose to ignore it. Isn't that exactly the same recklessness you're accusing Winehouse of?

Bloggers own the music industry's ass. Or at least the love handles.

Well, maybe not, but a study conducted by New York University's Stern Business School, Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales, reports that albums which build a number of blog mentions during the time around their release do better than you might otherwise expect:

Our findings are as follows: (a) the volume of blog posts about an album is positively correlated with future sales, (b) greater increases in an artist’s Myspace friends week over week have a weaker correlation to higher future sales, (c) traditional factors are still relevant – albums released by major labels and albums with a number of reviews from mainstream sources like Rolling Stone also tended to have higher future sales.

We're not entirely sure this should be unexpected, as it's effectively saying 'if people are talking about your product, it must be good for sales' - a truism advertising men from the days of the front of the twentieth century would understand. But given that major labels struggle with internet related affairs, it might help that they can refer to a study which shows them this.

What's missing, at least from the abstract, is any word on if the tenor of blogs has any effect - can a cold shoulder from the blog world freeze sales? Yet?

Showbiz Zoe still believes television

After a year or so of television turning out to have LIED and LIED and LIED again, it's nice to know that someone still believes everything she sees on television.

Zoe. Out of Showbiz with Zoe in the Sunday Mirror. She saw Lily Allen interview Cuba Gooding Jr and reports:

Looks as if Lily Allen is pulling out all the stops to get over her recent heartbreak. The singer, who split from boyfriend Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers last week, flirted outrageously with Jerry Maguire star Cuba Gooding Jr when she interviewed him for her new TV show.

If no one's told you already, Lily, it's down to me to break the bad news - he's a married man.

Or... you know, maybe it's just that Lily was using a giggly, flirty style of interviewing that she's doing because she's making a television programme.

After all, it's not like Parkinson is a cantankerous old git in real life, is it? Okay, that's a bad example. But you know what I mean.

Mojave 3 Weekend: Breaking The Ice

No mention of where this was recorded:



[Part of the Mojave 3 weekend]

Mills: Now it's up to £80million

With the Saturday papers having chased up each other's bids on the cost of the McCartney-Mills divorce as high as £55 million, the Sundays had nowhere to go but up. The News of the World now reckons she's looking for £80 million; but, at the back of the room, the Sunday Mirror has upped the ante to suggest Mills is going for £200 million.

Both papers, though, are still convinced she's not going to get anything at all: the Smirror claims that McCartney is going to submit documents showing he made a loss during his marriage - which, surely, has to be some form of creative accounting:

Paul has showed his company MPL Communications made an overall loss of nearly £2million between 2002 and 2006 - when they were living together as man and wife.

Bearing in mind Paul generates something like thirty squillion pounds a second (estimates put his earnings from interest at about two million quid a minute) - how would you actually be going backwards under those circumstances?

The News of the World has more earthy reasons for believing that Mills will get zilch, running claims that she was had two men on the go while she was dating McCartney. "Handsome film editor" Tim Steel has somehow forgotten to mention their "marathon sex sessions" while she was seeing Paul. Up until this point. The pair lived together in 1997, a shocking five years before Mills and McCartney married, and it ended bitterly.

Perhaps, though, the most outrageous thing about the story is the News Of The World's headline:

Rumpy Stumpy

It's hard to see how anyone could justify that - regardless of if you hate Heather or not, calling an amputee "Stumpy" is just unacceptable.

Meanwhile, the News of the World provides a fresh link through to its coverage of Heather's porn work - presumably to remind people they're calling her 'Mucca' because of her porn past, don't you know? - although, oddly, they don't seem to have bothered linking through to those stories they ran claiming she was a high-price prostitute. I wonder why?

This week just gone

The week on No Rock & Roll Fun:

The ten most-read stories:

1. R Kelly sex video - still popular with Googlers, then
2. Daily Mail shocked to discover Jools Holland show is taped
3. Google searchers hope to find pictures of Lily Allen naked
4. McFly prance about naked
5. Beth Ditto removes clothes for some reason
6. Tom Petty at the Superbowl
7. Avril Lavigne is so hard, she smokes tabs
8. Grateful Dead turn out for Obama
9. Another Chinese Democracy release date announced
10. Mojo names 50 'best' indie records of all time

Some things released these week:


Helen Love - It's My Club & I'll Play What I Want To


The Duke Spirit - Neptune


Robots In Disguise - We're In The Music Biz


The Evangelicals - The Evening Descends


Hot Chip - Made In The Dark


School Of Language - Sea From The Shore


Los Salvadores - Attack Of The Clones


Various - Disco Not Disco: Post Punk, Electro and Leftfield Disco Classics 1974-1986 Shriekback, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Quando Quango...


American Music Club - The Golden Age


Rivers Cuomo - The Home Recordings... Not, we'd suggest, a 'start here' collection


Cass McCombs - Dropping The Writ


Laura Marling - Songbox slightly over-fussy special edition with bits and pieces

Camden Market is on fire

BBC news is reporting that Camden Market is on fire, with eight engines in attendance.

[UPDATE: 9.40pm - BBC News 24 now reporting 20 engines; spreading to another building; London Ambulance say no injuries]

Godspeed, then...

Bad news - Godspeed You, Black Emperor have split up. Drowned In Sound reports this is due to the same-old, same-old reasons of 'existential freakout':

“The last American tour that Godspeed did was in the run up to the current war in Iraq. For what Godspeed did, it was very difficult for us to work out a way for us to communicate directly with the audience about what was going on. We would talk to people after the shows, or we could make announcements from the stage but so much what Godspeed was, was one-way communication.

“And I had an existential freak-out about that. That those tactics aren’t valid anymore.

“People didn’t need a rock band pointing in the direction of [how the world was at that point]. Maybe what they needed is some clumsy words, a presentation that was a little more human.

“On a personal level I now find [Godspeed You! Black Emperor] to be inappropriate [to do]. There’s a complicated back story. I reached a point whereby I was no longer willing to contribute to the steering of the ship; it was like, ‘Okay now, someone else point the direction, I love all of you, but I need to ride shotgun for a while’.

“I think that bands do have a short shelf life… they should be able to ply their trade ‘til they no longer want to.”

GYBE did manage fourteen years of shelf life, although they haven't actually done anything since 2003.

The little girls understand Pete and Chester

Oh, how it must irk Pete Wentz and Chester Bennington and their grown-up banda, to find themselves being lauded by their actual target market: the Nickelodeon's kids choice awards. Yes, culturally, they're on a par with Alvin And The Chipmunks and Hannah Montana.

The nominees in full:

Movie: Alvin and the Chipmunks,Are We Done Yet?,The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End,The Transformers.
Male Movie Star: Ice Cube, Johnny Depp, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Eddie Murphy.
Animated Movie: Shrek The Third,Bee Movie,Ratatouille,The Simpsons Movie.
Female Movie Star: Jessica Alba, Drew Barrymore, Kirsten Dunst, Keira Knightley.
Voice From an Animated Movie: Cameron Diaz, Mike Meyers, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld.
Song: Beautiful Girls (Sean Kingston), Big Girls Don't Cry (Fergie), Don't Matter, (Akon), Girlfriend (Avril Lavigne.)
Male Singer: Bow Wow, Chris Brown, Soulja Boy, Justin Timberlake.
Music Group: Boys Like Girls, Fall Out Boy, Jonas Brothers, Linkin Park.
Female Singer: Beyonce, Fergie, Miley Cyrus, Alicia Keys.
TV Show: Drake & Josh,Hannah Montana,iCarly,The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.
Reality Show: America's Next Top Model,American Idol,Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?,Deal or no Deal.
Television Actress: Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana ), Emma Roberts (Unfabulous ), Jamie Lynn Spears (Zoey 101 ), Raven-Symone (That's So Raven ).
Television Actor: Drake Bell (Drake & Josh ), Josh Peck (Drake & Josh ), Dylan Sprouse (The Suite Life of Zack and Cody ), Cole Sprouse (The Suite Life of Zack and Cody ).
Cartoon: Avatar: The Last Airbender,Ed, Edd and Eddy,The Simpsons,SpongeBob SquarePants.
Male Athlete: Tony Hawk, Shaquille O'Neal, Alex Rodriguez, Tiger Woods.
Female Athlete: Cheryl Ford, Danica Patrick, Serena Williams, Venus Williams.
Video Game: Dance Dance Revolution,Guitar Hero,High School Musical: Sing It!, Madden NFL '08.
Book: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume One: The Long Way Home,Diary of a Wimpy Kid,Harry Potter series,How to Eat Fried Worms.

Timbaland isn't a People people

At part of the slushing celebrating the Grammys, People magazine has sponsored a party for people, with Timbaland as the main draw.

It all went a little sour - alright, a lot sour - when one of his enormous entourage wasn't allowed in. Mr Land shared his frustration with the audience, honking off from the stage:

"Next time I have one of my homeboys in line, let that (expletive) in!" Timbaland shouted as the event winded down after 2 a.m. Saturday, adding that he was a "peoples person."

"I don't like to see my people turned around for some (expletive) magazine ... (expletive) y'all!"

Timbaland is such an old grump, the person who tried to smooth things over by telling journalists that the boss wasn't angry with the sponsors, just some organisational glitches, only did so off the record. When you clean-up crew is afraid of you, you need some serious time out.

Mojave 3 Weekend: Bluebird Of Happiness

This is live in Vancouver, on the 24th September 2006:



[Part of Mojave 3 weekend]

It's not just Amy having problems with deciding if she should go

As I Lay Dying have, as you'll be aware, been invited to the Grammys. They've been nominated for "best metal performance" and were quite excited. At first. Then Tim Lambesis started to think about the deal, at first in a "who are these guys to dictate taste" way, and then with slightly more serious worries. He's written about them online, as has guitarist Nick Hipa.

Hipa has decided he's going to go, and come to terms with what the Grammys are:

I don't think its right to demonize the Grammy society. They're not telling us what is and isn't good music, I think they're casting votes on who is doing what they do well... or maybe standing out the most... Now obviously they all don't know much about metal because I can't think of a single awesome thing KING DIAMOND or SLAYER did THIS year.

Tim, though, has more worries than just the question of who makes up the jury:

So, a few weeks go by with me battling this question in my head when I find out that as a nominated 'guest of honor,' I am not able to have even my wife come with me unless I pay $600 for her seat. I know that someone has to help pay for the ceremony, but even a nominated artist trying to bring his better half!? This is when I first started thinking the Grammys might not be for me. Later, I also learn that our label, management and parents can't go unless they pay $300 for seats that are nowhere near where we sit. Basically, all the people that deserve to enjoy this 'special' moment along with the band are unable to do so. Our record label has always been the one at the forefront of great business and marketing decisions that help bring the band to a new level of notoriety. Likewise, our managers have helped to steer us in the right direction ever since we started working with them a few years back. Then there's our lawyer, booking agent, and countless others I could name that have played significant roles in getting us to this point. And, going to the very beginning, my parents deserve so much credit for helping me pursue my dream when no one else could see it. Now, not only is some out of touch elite committee telling us what they think good music should be, but then they try to make the artists they nominate pay a ridiculous amount for the event that we can't even enjoy with all the people that really made this possible.

Now, this payday off artists is quite fascinating. Six nominees in 109 categories, even if you assume that, say, each nominee is up for three prizes, that gives a rough-and-ready potential number of 'honoured guests' of about 200... although, of course, most prizes have more than one name attached to them - but let's say that, averaging out the quartets, sextets, orchestras, producers and engineers that comes to, shall we say, six hundred people up for prizes in total? And if they each want to bring a spouse, partner, sexual intimate or stalker, that's over a third of a million dollars potentially to be made there. Before the three hundred quid a head extra guests.

Now, AILD's Nick thinks this might not be quite as outrageous as it seems:

In trying to figure out WHY they would charge us to bring people, I came up with a plausible explanation: I started thinking it would be flat-out wrong if they charged any nominee to go to the ceremony. And if they didn't charge any nominee's supporters (family, friends, managers, agents, etc.) then how would they be able to pay for the ceremony itself? The production, the venues, the performances, and the presenters, that's got to be a lot of money. If everyone I wanted to get in got in for free, and so did everyone else who got nominated, then who pays for it? It is this thinking that made me give up on being bitter about them charging us.

Hmm. Well, you might think, the large sum of cash being pocketed for the television rights might cover the cost of hiring a venue and providing some food?

And then there's a large list of sponors who are pumping money into the awards - People, GM, Delta, USA Today, Verizon, Westwood One, Hilton, Nokia, Delta. Couldn't their payments go towards paying the costs of the event?

Membership of the Academy, by the way, costs about $100 - couldn't that huge slush fund be dipped into to allow people to take their Mums to the awards?

And even if the event was going to have to be paid for out of attendees' pockets, three hundred dollars a head? You could have a pretty good time for three hundred dollars a head, don't you think?.

But making it even more galling that friends and family of the Grammy nominees are looked to for a quick payday is if you remember the point of the awards, as explained by Recording Academy President and CEO Neil Portnow when he was trying to persuade the writer's guild to not force the event off the air:

This year, more than ever, Grammy Week and the milestone of a 50th Grammy Awards, along with the 50th Anniversary of the founding of The Recording Academy, are a centerpiece and beacon of hope, optimism, and represent literally multi-millions of dollars in sales, promotion, and marketing.

The event is a marketing tool for the music industry - and, effectively, they've found a way of charging the people without whom there would be no commercial to take part in the advertising.

If anyone should be paying the costs of the people who turn up - creating the atmosphere at the Grammys (such as it is) and giving the sponsors something to sponsor, and the audience something to watch, shouldn't it be coming out of the marketing coffers of the RIAA?

Mojave 3 Weekend: In Love With A View

This is recorded live at the Pressure Point, Brighton - probably best to steer clear if you're a hifi stickler.



[Part of the Mojave 3 Weekend]

What would Beth Ditto be doing?

The Guardian is continuing to keep faith with the What would Beth Ditto do column. This week, the person calling for help was gay:

Even if I am gay, I'm not normal gay. For starters, I don't like Kylie or macho men. What should I do?

Now, the obvious answer - how can you be living in 21st century Britain and think that the love of Kylie is mandatory for homosexuality? - is passed over; Beth does offer the obvious response:

There is no one way to be gay.

But in attempting to stretch out that screamingly obvious for two columns she wobbles into some lazy stereotyping of her own.

The reason the rainbow was chosen as our universal symbol wasn't because of its cute, bright, colourful, quirky, "gay" image. Rather, those stripes represent all humans, and the arch of the rainbow encompassing the Earth offers a comforting reminder that we come in all styles and colours - buzzcuts, long hair, lispy, butch, flaming.

Actually, the colours on the rainbow flag don't represent "all humans", Beth - the original design had them stand for sexuality; life; healing; sunlight; nature; magic; serenity and spirit, while more modern iterations of the flag have dropped (ironically) the sexuality and the magic. The 'rainbow'-ness, far from having arching meaning, actually was just a neater description of the flag than "multicoloured stripey flag". It's not, of course, the first time that Ditto has started from where she is and attempted to reverse out a convincing meaning, and - ultimately - symbols mean what you want them to.

But it's not just that Beth is twisting history, she's also going to have a quick tweak of science to make her point, too:

Rainbows hang over the Earth encompassing it with warmth and, no matter what, no human can take the rainbow from the sky. It sounds cheeseball, but that's why we adopted it.

Eh? Rainbows don't hang over the earth, do they? And they certainly don't encompass it. Or give warmth to anything. And while it's true that no person can take a rainbow out the sky, the nature of a rainbow - shimmering, impossible to touch, unobtainable, barely there and rarely seen. If you want to make too much of the rainbow symbolism, it starts to look a bit of a weak idea.

But the real problem is this line:

It doesn't make you less gay if you aren't effeminate.

Because, presumably, most gay men are effeminate, then Beth? Why would someone who is supposedly pro-queer even frame a sentence that implies a link between effeminacy and homosexuality?

Imagine if that sentence was recast with one of the other stereotypical slurs gay and bi people have thrown at them - "it doesn't make you any less gay if you aren't promiscuous", for example.

In attempting to licence the right for gay people to not be constrained by stereotypes, Ditto has implicitly reinforced the stereotyping.

Of course, she's well meaning, and this is probably lazy writing rather than meaningful cussedness, but it underlines the problems of inviting a person to offer advice to those in pain or fear based on their performances as house band on The Friday Night Project: you need to be careful and think through what you're saying. Ditto as agony aunt is like getting Desperate Dan in to look after your preschool class: however well meant their actions, their very enthusiasm is going to generate more problems than they can solve.

Heather Mills and Paul McCartney come to an agreement

Good news. The McCartney-Mills divorce is reported to have been settled. Erm, again. But this time, the papers are at least agreed that rancour will be set aside.

More or less agreed: there's some £45million difference in the size of the settlements between the the Mail and the Mirror.

The Mail predicts Paul will cut a cheque for £55million; the Mirror suggests that Heather will have £10million to play with.

And The Sun? Gordon reports that McCartney hasn't been thinking about the divorce as he's been seeing Rosanna Arquette. Again.

We wouldn't believe a word of any of this until you've read it in the London Gazette.

The Sun finds a Maddie-Britney link

Why, it's like a sign of the universe collapsing in on itself - with a little bit of squeezing, The Sun has found a story which combines last year's obsession, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann with the current fixation on Britney Spears' mental health. The paper trumpets:

Maddie resort 'perv' snaps Brit

Although the facts are somewhat looser: the photographer, Christian Ridout - who has been working as Dexter Troy - was only very tangentially connected to the McCann case, having been accused of grooming a much older child in the same resort two years beforehand; and he has been working as a paparazzo but not following Britney as obsessive as some people.

Oddly, The Sun neglects to mention that Troy has been selling his pictures through the Splash agency - perhaps they're worried that, as customers of that agency, they'd be somehow implicating themselves in the McCann story (Wade buys Maddie resort perv company photos, perhaps?)

Embed and breakfast man: Mojave 3 Weekend

The weekend before last, we focused on Ride; this weekend, it's the generation that followed. The nucleus of Mojave 3 toured with Ride when they were still part of Slowdive; the change to Mojave 3 signalled a subtle change in the music as the ethereal of Slowdive gave way to a more visceral beauty. Moving from Oasis-era Creation to 4AD, you'd have expected it to be the other way round.

This, then, is the video for Love Songs On The Radio:



More videos over the weekend
In Love With A View - live in Brighton
Bluebird of Happiness - live in Vancouver
Breaking The Ice - uncredited live performance

You can buy Mojave 3 stuff, you know:
1993's Spoon and Rafter
2000's Excuses For Travelers
2006's Puzzles Like You
Rachel Goswell solo - Waves Are Universal
Neal Halstead solo - Sleeping On Roads
Slowdive - Just For A Day

America "changes mind"; Amy decides not to go after all

It's surely quite unusual for the US to reverse a high-profile visa decision, but it's done so in the case of Amy Winehouse - perhaps the Home Office offered a two-for-one deal with the Abu Hamza? Maybe the US authorities discovered a fact about Winehouse that had somehow been forgotten at the original visa application? Or perhaps, simply, there's two systems of law operating - one for most of us; another for the super-rich in the entertainment industry who fund political careers.

Still, the change of heart has come too late - Amy's still intending to do the Grammys by satellite. Presumably because if she left now, she'd be getting in with very little time to rehearse.

Neil Young: Music has lost its strength

Neil Young has muttered gloomily about how the once world-changing power of music has gone. Not like in his day, of course:

"I think that the time when music could change the world is past," he told reporters. "I think it would be very naive to think that in this day and age."

Young added: "I think the world today is a different place, and that it's time for science and physics and spirituality to make a difference in this world and to try to save the planet."

Young's generation, of course, were able to stop the Vietnam War using music in just sixteen years; while in the 1980s strict injunctions from musicians for Margaret Thatcher to "stand down" saw her quit Downing Street just some eleven years after she entered it. Meanwhile, the world-changing power of music was bringing about the end of Aparthied. "We would have ended it a lot earlier" confirmed FW DeKlerk, "but when our policymakers went to the Virgin Megastore, they'd been buying Queen records instead of stuff by the Specials..."

Billie Joe attempts to hold back tide

Billie Joe Armstrong has, rather sweetly, tried to stop people filming Pinhead Gunpowder gigs and putting them on YouTube. Well, it doesn't hurt to ask, does it?:

"YouTube can't own everything. There's also something called memories."

We're not sure that it actually wipes memories out of people's brains if things appear on YouTube - does it work like that?

We know, of course, that Billie Joe begged for fans to put their cameras away, thanks to the large number of people who filmed him saying this.

Scott Weiland covers Amy Winehouse

Putting the kibosh on the Velvet Revolver Australian tour, and more disturbingly threatening a round of "I'm clean now" media appearances in the Summer, Scott Weiland has gone into rehab.

American Idol - an EPCOT for our time

As if Florida doesn't already have enough tatty theme parks sucking in people who don't really care where they go, providing they don't have to come across anything approaching a real world, comes the announcement that Disney is going to add an American Idol attraction.

It's believed there will be a ride which replicates the American Idol experience - first, you queue up for ages and ages; then you'll be strapped in and shouted at by a man in ridiculous trousers; there's a juddering white-knuckle journey to follow which ends up with you being deposited in the dumper feeling a bit deflated and slightly disappointed. While the man in the ridiculous trousers pockets a large sum of money.

There are no stories left to tell, surely?

A press release arrives, announcing the imminent publication of a book which is rather grandly trailing itself as "Amy Winehouse's first biography" - assuming, of course, you drop your standards to describe the book as a proper biography. While simultaneously discounting Nick Johnstone's Amy Amy Amy from last year.

It's an endeavour which has the slight taint of a disappointment they can't subtitle it 'the full story of her life' - indeed, the press blurb reprints the words of the Daily Telegraph about the man who assembled the book:

“Author Chas Newkey-Burden is unashamedly delighted by every new twist in Amy Winehouse's life.”

Clearly, John Blake Publishing views that as praise rather than a judgement.

And who is Mr. Newkey-Burden?

Chas Newkey-Burden is the author of Paris Hilton: Life On The Edge and Great E-mail Disasters. His next book - Not In My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy - was co-written with Julie Burchill and is published in April.

Ah. A man who is playing the Tony Parsons role in the current version of the Burchill pantomime, and a Boswell to Paris Hilton as well as to Winehouse. One wonders how he finds the time.

Oh: could it be Google?