They're Justified, and they're Modern

New news of Mu Mu, according to posters all around London:

2017: What The Fuck Is Going On?

It is almost 23 years since the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu announced a self imposed and self important 23 year moratorium. The reasons for the moratorium have now been lost in time, space, and a rusting shipping container somewhere near Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station.

What is known is:

The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu have zero involvement with any video clips, films, recorded music, documentary productions, biographies, West End musicals or social media chatter relating to the letters K L or F, now or at any other time over the previous 23 years.

Furthermore:

The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu have no interest in anything that seeks to comment on, bounce off, glorify, debunk or resurrect their historical work.

The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu are currently at work in their light industrial unit. This work will not be made public until the 23rd August 2017.

For more information contact the K2 Plant Hire Ltd.

"self-imposed and self-important". Nice touch.

Welcome back. I'm sure there's lawyers on standby in record labels around the nation.

Unfolding magazines: Paste is coming back

It's six years since Paste abandoned its print edition and became web-only.

Next year, though, crowdfunding permitting, it's coming back as a physical product:

With its large 12"-by-12"-inch format, thick paper and rich colors, it'll be unlike any magazine you've seen. We're sparing no expense from production quality to all the best writers, photographers and illustrators. We're bringing back the Paste Sampler, but this time it's a 150-gram colored vinyl album with exclusive tracks recorded at the Paste Studio in New York. We'll be working with our original designer, Jose Reyes, and his award-winning design team Metaleap Creative. And we're eschewing traditional distribution to deliver it directly to you.

(To be fair, a 12x12 magazine with a vinyl record isn't quite like 'any magazine you've seen', as there was that one in the 80s which was exactly like that - was it Debut?)

They've been torn since Bros was cool

Your first instinct on hearing that Bros are reforming for a ten million quid tour is "ten million? Is it buggery going to be a ten million tour."

They've not even got Ken on board, right? (Craig Logan isn't coming back.)

But it's more an indication of how fucked the economy is - there's not going to be much profit in a Bros tour, but with interest rates now so low, they don't have to make much of a profit to make it worthwhile. Or at least a better investment than letting money sit in an account.

And, with the pound having been sunk by the Brexit vote, and much of the tour is in Europe, which ratchets up the relative costs in pounds.

So, the ten million pound comeback isn't suggesting that Bros are more popular than you thought. Just that ten million pounds is less than you'd hope.

Oh, you're back: Ugly Kid Joe

The trouble with the constant now is the sudden reunions of bands which you'd assumed understood that dying of shame was meant to be a once-and-for-all deal. Good god, Ugly Kid Joe have just released a new album. It's 2015, people. 2015. Ugly Kid Joe.

Liam Gallagher and chums

TFI Friday is back for what is, effectively, its reunion gig this week. But will it be good TFI Friday, where you'd get a decent band and something inventive? Or will it be bad TFI Friday, when it had passed the point that it had forgotten it had viewers and approached its tasks with an attitude of 'if we're having fun, then the audience will enjoy us having fun, right?'

Your finger is hovering over the Record button.

But which will it be?

Which will it be, NME?

TFI Friday will return for a one-off live special at 9pm next Friday (June 12), hosted by Chris Evans. A TFI spokesman recently confirmed to The Sun that Gallagher and Daltrey will perform 'My Generation' as part of a supergroup featuring The Lightning Seeds' Ian Broudie and former Oasis drummer (and Ringo Starr's son) Zak Starkey.

Ah. Thanks for the clarification.

Suddenly, Kate Humble living with nomads on BBC2 seems very compelling indeed.

Hello, I'm still Daphne and this is still my friend Celeste

If you think 2015's Glastonbury rock boys over-reacted to Kanye West being on the bill, they seemed the very model of measured restraint compared with the storm of piss hurled at Daphne And Celeste when they appeared at Reading.

Literal piss, in actual bottles. Not just a poorly worded petition. The boys threw piss at them.

Daphne And Celeste weathered that, though. But clearly, they were never going to be a band in it for the long slog. After all, it'd be impossible to imagine how they'd be doing their schtick in 2015, right? When they're grown women. It would be thinkable, but not in any way you could actually make your brain think that thought.

Hang on a moment... what's this?

Hey hey - we're back! Check out "You And I Alone" - our first new song in 15 years (produced by @MaxTundra): http://t.co/17q7alFQOB

— Daphne & Celeste (@Daphne_Celeste) March 29, 2015

Yes, somewhat unexpectedly, there's a new record from Daphne and Celeste.

To be honest, it's a new record from Max Tundra, with them on it, but let's not split hairs.

I make it that you don't really get the value of it being D&C until the 2 minutes 50 point; up until then it's like someone who used to be really good at Pac Man when they were in High School trying to play a computer game for the first time since. They know they can do this, but they're too busy trying to remember why they used to enjoy it, they're not really managing to get to grips with the task in front of them.

I don't think our lives would have been any the worse if this hadn't happened, but I'm sort of mostly pleased it has.

Really, though, I'd like to see them go on at Worthy Farm right before Kanye. Or possibly instead of.

[h/t to @hungryhatter]

Blur are back, back, back (although we didn't realise they'd actually stopped being back)

So, much excitement earlier this week, with Sky News taking up the fact trumpet:

@SkyNews: Blur have announced they are going to reunite for the first time in 12 years

I'd love to share the actual tweet with you, but it has vanished from the world as, with one voice (and I suspect it was the voice of Phil Daniels) Twitter yelled 'they did Glastonbury in 2009, and had a single out in 2012, and it seems like they've never actually stopped working together.

Sure, from the news source which once declared that the entire eastern seaboard of America had been decimated by a terrorist attack, messing up a tweet about Blur is a step forward, but it's a pity that they're so thin-skinned they attempted to rewrite history rather than admit their error, correct it, and move on. An organisation which attempts to wipe out its mistakes isn't one to be trusted.

Still, Blur are having a comeback. Or, rather, Blur are still around. Although they have let themselves go a bit:

The album might be great - but it does come with trigger warning:

Initially conceived in Hong Kong, during downtime following a cancelled show in Japan, the band spent five days laying down ideas.

Now, the band say they've had time for perspective to develop, and look at the tracks with a cold, hard, eye.

Maybe.

But let's just approach this record with the awareness that this is a project born of being bored in a hotel room.

And so it's on a par with this sort of thing:

Back, back, back: Ride

I'm genuinely conflicted about this:

Friday 22 May Barrowland Ballroom Glasgow, UK
Saturday 23 May 2015 Albert Hall Manchester, UK
Sunday 24 May 2015 Roundhouse London, UK
Tuesday 26 May 2015 Paradiso Amsterdam, Holland
Wednesday 27 May 2015 Olympia Paris, France
Friday 29 May 2015 PrimaveraFestival Barcelona, Spain
Tuesday 2 June 2015 DanForth Music Hall Toronto, Canada
Thursday 4 June 2015 Terminal New York, US
Sunday 7 June 2015 Field Day London, UK

Ride were one of the most important bands in my life. One of the most important things in my life. Seeing Chelsea Girl on Snub TV is one of those events where my narrative changed.

But also: late-period, when Andy took over most of the duties. When they were a pre-echo of Hurricane Number One.

They changed my life.

They broke my heart.

Do I want to go back to that?

Back, back, back: Shanice and S Club

Obviously, we can all agree that I Love Your Smile was a lovely piece of pop music. Unless you're young and never heard it. Or have ashes where your heart once was.

But it was a slim career for Shanice, and a somewhat slim base for her to build a comeback attempt on.

You were hardly here in the first place, Shanice. You were hardly here.

This is a worrying sign that the passion for bringing back half-remembered acts from the 90s has reached a point where the supply of unreturned acts is running out.

(As an aside, how awkward was last night's S Club reunion on Children In Need? All the pep of when they were children's TV stars, but the imploring eyes of adults who thought that, by now, they'd have moved beyond this. And making Rochelle from The Saturdays introduce it was just cruel - 'hey, give it ten years, and you'll be back here, too...')

The Shanice comeback is being driven by the Oprah Winfrey Network - a network which knows a thing or two about how 90s powerhouses can slide into obsolescence - and it's going to include awkward moments like this:

In the booth, Shanice begins belting out notes like it was yesterday, showcasing a fiery new sound in the five-octave range she's known for. When the track ends, her producer's reaction says it all.

"Um, could you not be fabulous for like two minutes?" he asks Shanice. "This is too much!"

Could Shanice not be fabulous for two minutes? That's not much of an ask from someone who released one song in 1991 and, since then, has suffered financial hardship and has had to sell her house just to get to the point where the OWN will stick a half-interested camera in her face. I think Shanice's ability to not be fabulous, for periods measured in decades rather than minutes, has pretty much been established by science.

The misfiring reappearance of Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill's trying a comeback, and started in Brixton.

Now, her live performances have sometimes been a bit mixed, but anyone who buys a ticket for Hill in 2014 is pricing in that the event could be erratic-bordering-on-inexplicable, right?

But a late start, angry tweets and poor reviews marred her first sell-out gig at the Brixton Academy in London.

Oh.

The 39-year-old singer, famous for her 1998 album "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", arrived on stage with a five-piece band and three backing singers at 9:58 p.m. on Saturday.

The show, with tickets selling for 55 pounds ($90), had been advertised to start at 9 p.m., with doors opening at 7 p.m.

Okay, so an hour late. That's not a good start, but it's a Saturday night. We're all okay staying up a bit late on a Saturday, right. Especially for a great gig.

It was great, right?

When she arrived, Hill spent 80 minutes performing a combination of re-worked hits from her debut album, the only solo studio album she has made, and delving into pop and rock territory.

Songs from "The Score", another award-winning album Hill recorded as part of the Fugees in 1996, were left largely untouched, along with a number of tracks from her 2002 MTV Unplugged 2.0 album.

Hill also performed covers of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" by Nancy Sinatra, The Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You" and a few Bob Marley classics, including "Soul Rebel", "Jammin'" and "Is This Love".

To me, that sounds okay - if I'm a big enough fan to go and see her, that she does some solo stuff and a few classic seems a good mix.

Yuichi Miyama, a 31-year-old paralegal from London, said on Twitter: "Lauryn Hill is the most disappointing concert I have ever been to. That's heart-breaking."

He explained to Reuters at the concert that he didn't recognize a lot of the songs Hill performed.

"The bottom line is Lauryn Hill is a singer and there are a lot of songs on that album that she sings certain things in such a beautiful way," he said.

Wow. You admire Lauryn Hill as a singer, and yet think that she has chosen to sing things in the wrong way. I can see why you might be disappointed. I can't see why you didn't know this would happen, and didn't choose instead to stay at home and listen to the album. Because the album always sounds like the album, and Lauryn Hill live - when she turns up - never sounds like the album.

Word back up

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

The Flatmates are back

Yes. Those Flatmates. Louder Than War has all the details, but here's what you need to know:

Bristol Exchange Fri Aug 23rd – Tickets

London The Miller Aug 24th – Tickets.

Brighton At The Edge Of The Sea Fest Aug 25th – Tickets.

Nottingham Pop All-Dayer on Sept 14th – Tickets.

These dates will be followed by a short tour in October which will take the band to Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Sheffield.

Here's the only possible response:

Jody Watley returns from wherever

I think the Washington Post might be slightly over-estimating the level of recall here:

Mention Jody Watley to anyone older than 30, and their eyes, almost without exception, light up in recognition. “Jody Watley? She’s still around?”

I'm sure some - perhaps many - people aged about thirty to fifty-odd might get a glimmer of recognition, but the idea that most centenarians will nod and go "yeah, her" seems a stretch.

Still, she's on a comeback. And she's lucky:

The singer recognizes that among her contemporaries from the 1980s, she might have been the lucky one.

“Maybe it was their personalities, or they were battling more demons than I might have had. But it was incredibly sad to me,” she says of the deaths of Jackson and Houston. “I have always tried to just not get caught up in what the industry can pressure you to do or be.”

Yes, that'd be Watley essaying the unfashionable 'it's better to fade away than burn out' philosophy of fame.

The Post might also be over-selling the extent of the comeback, too:

There’s no doubt the singer is plotting a comeback. She is a prodigious tweeter and blogs regularly on her Web site.

If sending a lot of tweets is a sign of reactivating a musical career, then the Big Ben Clock is probably going to be headlining Glastonbury next year.

Although her guest vocals on this might help a bit:

French Horn Rebellion – "Dancing Out" (feat. Jody Watley &Young Empires) from Norton Director on Vimeo.

Gordon in the morning: Blown off by Blue

Over in the TV part of Gordon's empire this morning, news that Blue are overestimating their own importance:

REUNITED boy band Blue have infuriated ITV bosses after agreeing to perform at only FOUR of The Big Reunion’s 12 tour dates this summer.

Lee Ryan, Duncan James, Simon Webbe and Antony Costa will be seen performing live in the final episode of the ITV2 show, airing at 9pm tonight.

But they opted out of the full Live Nation UK tour, which stars Atomic Kitten, B*Witched, 911, 5ive, Liberty X and Honeyz.

Ah, it's like the heady days back at the start of the century, when Blue would often pop up overestimating their significance in the grand scheme of things. Although now they're overestimating their significance in a not-so-grand scheme of things.

Gordon in the morning: Watching David Bowie with Noel Gallagher

Gordon has been reading the NME, and in particular Noel Gallagher talking about the David Bowie comeback:

[T]he HIGH FLYING BIRDS frontman is confused by the video to the legend’s track Where Are We Now?

Confused, you say?

“We’re still talking about that song. The video’s mad – like his f***ing cat directed it.”

That's not actually "confused", is it? It's just Noel saying that it's a bit out there, surely?

However, you can forgive Gordon struggling to make sense of anything Noel says. let's look at that lifted quote in full:

He told NME mag: “It’s great to hear his voice singing something new. The more you hear Where Are We Now? the better it gets.

“We’re still talking about that song. The video’s mad – like his f***ing cat directed it.”

But Noel added: “What it proved to me is that reunions are f***ing s****."

So, it's great to hear Bowie doing new stuff; and the new stuff gets better the more you play t; and it's an exciting talking point. So, er, that proves that reunions are shitty.

Sorry, what?

(Also: can you have a reunion if it's just you?)

The Northern Uproar will rise again

You know what's odder than there being a Northern Uproar reunion?

It's discovering they've been reunited for seven years already. That's over three times the length of their original lifespan.

So, album number four is about to head our way. Leon & Chris tell Louder Than War what it's like:

Leon: it sounds, yeah, ‘heavy feel ‘ that would describe two thirds of it, pretty raw, all of us playing in a room, then there’s a few that we got the acoustics out on for a bit of light and shade

Chris: It feels like a a strong album to us, all killer, no filler, we had 40 songs to go at. So plenty of choice, our producer Chris Hamilton has brought a really fresh sound to it all

I know, for a fact, Lennon and McCartney described the White Album in almost exactly the same terms.

What comeback excited people?

So within a twenty-four hour period, David Bowie, Suede and Jimi Hendrix all came back from the dead with new singles.

Which comebacks excited people? Google Trends, can you help us?



Sorry, Brett. Sorry, the Estate Of The Late Mr Hendrix.

Reopening The House Of Love

I'm not entirely a fan of getting excited simply because a band has told us what the name of a forthcoming album might be, or shown us the cover art. It's like waiting for food in a restaurant but they bring you the plates out first - "see; we will serve it on this".

I'll make an exception, though, and give a mild squeak for the sighting of this:

Bickers. Chadwick. New House Of Love album next year. Squeee.

Shelagh McDonald: You can safely call this a comeback

The Herald has a a great story this morning about a singer who vanished from view so completely, people assumed she was dead:

Only in 2005, after a re-release of her work without her knowledge, did [Shelagh] McDonald make herself known to the world again — a "surreal" experience, after reading about herself as if she were dead.

It had been The Independent which killed her off, although she read of her demise when the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail repeated the story.

She wasn't dead; she'd had a bad trip which destroyed her voice and, after stopping singing, she met Gordon Farquhar. Their lives together took a route far away from music; it was only after Gordon's death that she tried to sing again.

It's working for her; she's doing a session on Tuesday for Alive Radio. Although people have preconceptions about her:

"I think people are expecting me to be a miserable old sod, a tragedy, and I'm supposed to be incredibly mysterious.

You cannot be mysterious if you've lived in a tent for six years, it just can't be done."

I think Jabal might argue with that.

It might look like this is a story which is calling for a a description of "a happy ending", but that would imply that 'not being in the public eye' is, of itself, an unhappy state of affairs. McDonald says she has no regrets about the way her life unfolded.

Rain Parade reuniting

After years of refusing demands for a comeback, The Rain Parade have announced a reunion. But it's in a good cause:

As for benefit show, promoter Chris Chandler says he asked Piucci why he’s reforming the Rain Parade now after years of resisting pleas for a reunion. Piucci’s response: “Our friend [The Windbreaker's Bobby Sutliff] was badly hurt. We were asked to help. Here we come.”

But reunions, once enacted, tend to stick. The band are apparently advertising for a drummer to play some European dates...