Word back up

What's this? The Word podcast has sprung back into life, two years after the last emission.

Grim news from SXSW

Horrible news from SXSW in Austin overnight, as a car has ploughed into a crowd waiting outside the Mohawk club.

ABC News is reporting two dead; five critically injured.

It appears the driver was being pursued by police before he drove into queue. KVUE reports:

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said officers initially tried to pull over the driver at a gas station on the Interstate 35 service road. The driver fled the wrong way down Ninth Street, which is a one-way street, and turned onto Red River, hitting pedestrians at a "high rate of speed." Officers say the driver is in custody.

Lily Allen agrees with 'docile pop rubbish' attack

Someone on Twitter said the new Lily Allen work was "docile pop rubbish".

You might expect Allen to object; instead, she agreed:

Lily responded to the claims by agreeing that her label has forced her hand for most of her comeback so far: "What you've heard so far, yes. All I can do is do my best, the labels and the radio stations won't play the better stuff."

She then teased her new album by telling him: "Keep the faith."

Which is charmingly honest, but does raise the question of why she's doing work that's so poor the label will get behind it in the first place.

That's an odd question to be asking, although one that we probably should be asking more often.

Embed and breakfast man: Warpaint

Warpaint do Conan; do Love Is To Die:

All music careers crash off the rails at some point

One Pound Fish man has been indicted for fraud:

A banking court in Lahore has indicted ‘One Pound Fish’ singer Shahid Nazir for fraud. The singer has been summoned by the court on April 9.
The banking court heard the case pertaining to a cheque worth Rs 6 million, signed by Nazir, which bounced. The case had been filed by a private leasing company in Lahore.

At current exchange rates, six million rupees is roughly 36,000 one pound fishes.

Kylie: Young woman had sex shock

The Daily Star is regurgitating already vomit-flecked stuff from The News Of The World ("The Sun On The Sunday") about Kylie.

It's shocking. Prepare to be shocked:

Kylie Minogue's girl-next-door image shattered by sex revelations in explosive new book

There was a period when Kylie was known as SexKylie, so this is the sort of shock right up there with discovering that cheese, for all its tasty solidity, was once milk.

The Star seems aware that this is a yawning chasm in their story, so try to rationalise why this might be a shock:

The pint-sized pop star, who is well-known for her innocent girl-next-door image, is said to have been naughty between the sheets long before her highly-publicised romance with Michael Hutchence, who is said to have "corrupted" her.

The "revelation" is simply that she had sex with someone, so the Star is hoping that 'woman had sex with someone before the boyfriend she met when she was 20' is some sort of surprise. (Apart from anything, surely this is going to generate another Jason Donovan lawsuit?)

It basically all boils down to a tatty book from a tatty little man, Sean Smith, who has got a tattier little man Paolo Marcolin to "tell-all". (It's a 'two teenagers having sex at a party' story - which, a quick search of Google will reveal, is a thing that has never happened anywhere else, at any point before or after.)

And how much weight should we give to Mr Macrolin's testimony?

"We lay on the floor. It was freezing but I had enough alcohol in me not to notice. I was really enjoying myself because Kylie was so nice," Paolo added.

So Marcolin was too drunk to notice it was freezing, and yet he noticed it was freezing.

Sean Smith - who, let's not rush to judge as some sort of grubby smut peddler, perhaps a man with stained trousers and smelly fingers - appears to have some sort of justification for trying to make money and headlines out of a fairly typical thing for a teenager to have done:

"For someone so careful about her private life, Kylie can be astonishingly indiscreet. It is as if, every so often, she gets the devil in her."

Even for a screaming moral vacuum, this is disingenuous. His own tale suggests that this isn't true - let's just look back at Paolo's quote:

"My hands were wandering a bit. Out of the blue, she said, 'Do you want to go somewhere even more private?' Of course I agreed. It sounded great to me.

"She had no idea where she was going but eventually took me to the opposite side of the house. There were a few people catching taxis, so we walked round the corner to be out of sight — or so I thought."
[...]
However, the pair soon realised that they were getting frisky in full view of the other party guests and headed to a small workshop underneath the house where they allegedly began having sex.

So, given that Kylie - without, at this stage, some sort of judging role on Saturday night TV to worry about - twice moved somewhere further out of public view hardly screams of indiscretion. Sean Smith seems to be saying that simply by having someone else present to have sex with Kylie's leaving herself open to having it discussed.

Perhaps Sean hasn't noticed, but it's Paolo who is being indiscreet. It might be a bit much to claim that Kylie had the devil in her, but she certainly seems to have made room for a bit of a Judas.

Fly sprayed: freesheet to close

Sad to hear The Fly, which built the most-read-music-paper quietly off the back of a listings freebie for the Camden Barfly, has closed; mostly a victim of HMV's collapse:

A statement on the magazine’s website read: “After nearly 15 years of pioneering new music journalism, the owners of The Fly are officially closing the magazine as a result of current market conditions surrounding publishing. We offer gratitude and wish well all the staff and contributors that have allowed us to deliver the UK’s longest serving monthly free sheet. To the multitude of artists and musicians that have graced our covers, the advertisers and sponsors who have supported us and our loyal readers, we salute you.”

It added that “ownership of the digital and online brands will now pass to the magazine’s longest-serving member of staff, editor JJ Dunning”, suggesting that the brand may survive online.

Dunning had been tweeting on Friday to see if anyone wanted to help him keep the Fly alive; there's a difficult question about whether a print product is viable without anywhere to distribute it.

(Although... maybe it'd fit well with the Stylist/Shortlist stable, don't you think?)

Bookmarks: Slowdive

Slowdive are back together. And giddy, to judge by the Penny Black Music interview:

We're not all better musicians. Neil and Simon are probably better musicians. Rachel is a better mother. Christian and Nick are just better human beings. Any new record that we create will probably follow the same pattern as the previous ones. Neil will have songs and ideas, and we will work around those. Sometimes Neil's ideas will be fully realised, sometimes they will take some work. We are considering branching out into dubstep, but only for $10. Or a pizza. Or failing that All You Can Eat BBQ Rib Night at the Sizzler.

How does this make any sense?

You can spend £6.99, and get all the songs on Dean Wareham. Fair enough.

Or, you can spend 34p more, and get all the songs, plus, all the songs put onto a small plastic disc, in a package of some sort, all printed and professionally presented; driven from a factory to a storage unit; picked from that unit and put into a box; and then driven to your door.

I'm not sure how that makes any sense.

On a related note: is it just us, or is everyone finding the Amazon site running really flakily over the last couple of weeks? I'm having to stop pages as they hang half-way through their loading cycle just to get the whole thing to load in.

This week just gone

Google-peepers: The ten most surprising 'nude' or 'naked' popular search subjects from the last year:

1. James Blunt
2. Cerys Matthews
3. Miss Kittin
4. Germaine Greer
5. Madonna (really, you need to search?)
6. Simon Hayes
7. "Kid on Nirvana cover now"
8. Swindon music
9. Seth Lakeman ("Fullfrontal")
10. Dolores O'Riordan fake

These were this week's interesting releases:


Blood Red Shoes - Blood Red Shoes

Download Blood Red Shoes



Eagulls - Eagulls

Download Eagulls



Laibach - Spectre

Download Spectre



We Are Scientists - TV En Francais

Download TV En Francais



Nick Waterhouse - Holly

Download Holly