The Telegraph is terrible

David Hepworth has written a lovely clatter through Barry Manilow's career for the Telegraph, which is well worth a read.

The only problem is the headline the paper has stuck on the story:

Marrying a man isn't the most curious thing Barry Manilow has ever done

You're spot on, Daily Telegraph. Marrying the person he loves isn't the most curious thing a person has done. There's nothing curious or unusual about people of the same genders getting married.

Mercury falling

That Freddie Mercury film? The one with Sacha Baron Cohen/hold on no it's Ben Whishaw as Fred?
Starting to look increasingly like it's never going to happen. The Telegraph's Mandrake column brings the news:

So when will Whishaw actually set about the business of rocking us? “Actually, I don’t know what’s happening, it seems to be on the back-burner,” the Paddington star now admits in an interview with Time Out London. “It was going, then there were problems getting the script working.”

I'm taking this to mean the studio are going "he's being gay on too many pages", but it could simply be they're asking if Brian May wouldn't mind if his character became a wisecracking CGI badger. (I suspect Brian May wouldn't mind.)

Lorde: Telegraph readers share their views

After Helmer and the Mail, let's go for the trifecta and see what Telegraph readers make of Lorde's views on the music industry.

Some context; the article quotes Lorde talking about the Faustian pact she's made:

She said she was becoming used to being a public commodity, adding "the fact that I'm getting used to it frightens me".

"There is a difference between attn from fans, which I love, and the constant, often lecherous gaze that I'm subjected to in this industry," she tweeted.

"I know that success comes with a price tag. it just sucks when you see that in your tiny home country where you previously felt safe."

A fairly balanced expression of a horrible situation, right?

Not once the Telegraph readers have got to it:

Steve Moxon • 2 hours ago
She should be so lucky. An ordinary-looker like her goes for stardom to up her chances of getting a 'lecherous gaze' from a high-status guy.
There's never any limit to female hypocrisy.

Yes, that's right. Women who fail to live up to Steve Moxon's high standards of sexual attractiveness would only want to become popstars so a "high status guy" would perve at them.

Andy mx • 3 hours ago
she's not even attractive..... talk about being up your own backside

Why would you even have an opinion on this unless Andy mx found you attractive?

Someone tries to support Lorde:

susieq2u • 5 hours ago
the lecherous gaze she's subjected to in the industry is real and it's from creepy aging pedophiles who are dying to convince her to disrobe... She was the only fully dressed female performer at the Grammys. And her performance was stunning. Hope this kid can stay strong and true to herself.

... and immediately becomes a target:

Steve Moxon susieq2u • an hour ago
This is the definition of paedophilia where the age of the girl is any age younger than yours, then?
Paedophilia is the exclusive sexual interest in pre-pubescents. 'Lorde' [sic] is SEVENTEEN. That's SIX TO SEVEN YEARS POST-PUBERTY.

It's not clear if Steve really doesn't understand the way younger women are presented as even younger than they are in parts of mainstream culture, or - more worryingly - that he believes that paedophilia ceases to be in any way disturbing providing the child has reached puberty. Or if he just gets out a kick of pretending he doesn't understand.

Won't someone think of the children?

Thomas • 5 hours ago
No one asked you to release music to the public, you retard so stfu and think of the starving Africans while you're getting millions for singing a boring song. ARSEHOLE!

Oh. Not quite the children I was thinking of. But, er, yes, how dare you express an opinion about your life when your job doesn't directly feed starving children. (Thomas, perhaps, thinks that every time he calls someone a retard on the Daily Telegraph site, someone gives a child in South Sudan a cup of grain.)

And on and on it rolls:

Rideintothesun • 14 hours ago −
You can't have your cake and eat if comes to mind here love. Post Cobain, it appears to have become a requirement that every aspiring 'alternative' star must, at periodic points of their privileged existence, issue asinine whines about the evils of fame......it wouldn't surprise me in the least if this was some sort of contractual obligation. Perhaps she could console herself with the fact that, up until this point, I hadn't heard of her.

Rideintothesun hadn't heard of Lorde until now, but having just discovered her he's managed to decide that she's in some way like Kurt Cobain, working in a vague 'alternative' music style, and decided that her complaint must be completely without basis and probably part of a marketing drive. Just in the few seconds it took to read a very short Telegraph article. Imagine what he'd be able to get out of something more substantial, like three minutes watching one of Lorde's songs.

I know, I know. You shouldn't read the comments on anything, much less papers owned by reclusive twins who live in a castle in the sea. But sometimes you have to dip in, if only to remind yourself that maybe an asteroid striking Earth wouldn't be all bad.

Charles Moore remembers the olden days

Miley's having trouble moving on from something that happened over a week ago, but that's nothing compared to Charles Moore.

Moore still hasn't moved on from that time Russell Brand phoned up Andrew Sachs. The Telegraph's Mandrake column is happy to listen:

Brand thus displayed a peculiar lack of self-awareness when he alluded to Nazi persecution at the GQ [Men of the Year] event, given what Sachs’s own forbears had endured.

Moore drily noted that what Brand and Ross had later subjected Sachs to in their “disgusting” call also amounted to persecution. “I am not convinced that Mr Brand was ever really sorry at all for what he did,” Moore tells me.

Yes, incidentally: that is a grown-up, well-educated man who is idly comparing an ill-judged piece of childishness with the acts of the Nazis. That's surely the proof that will earn Mike Godwin the Nobel.

Headline news

Talking of the death of Reg Presley, hats off to the Telegraph for writing a standfirst which really does offer greater illumination than the headline it sits underneath:

Neil McCormick files Observer piece for The Telegraph

Neil McCormick, friend of Bono, has given Telegraph readers a crash course in Kraftwerk.

Some readers got an uncanny sense of deja-vu. Didn't McCormick's piece, "Kraftwerk: the most influential group in pop history?" have more than a passing similarity to Jude Roger's "Why Kraftwerk are still the world's most influential band" that appeared a few days earlier in The Observer.

When challenged about this on Twitter by @theboylightning, McCormick invented a new irregular verb:

It's called sampling. It's the modern way. (I'll give you 2 sentences out of 1200 words on exactly the same story)

I sample, you lift, he/she plagiarises.

McCormick put his hands up to lifting a line from Rogers about a Melody Maker review. By this point, Jude had joined the conversation and pointed out that a big chunk of her research had turned up in his bit:

The huddling together of facts about Afrika Bambaataa, Uranium and The Model also rang a few bells. Ding dong.

McCormick claimed you can't write a Kraftwerk article without throwing those bits in. Which might be true, but it's the way they're folded in. Here's Jude in The Observer:

Afrika Bambaataa fused the melody of Trans-Europe Express and the rhythm of 1981's Numbers to create Planet Rock, one of hip-hop's pioneering tracks. Trailblazing electro group Cybotron used a loop from 1977's Hall of Mirrors; its founder, Juan Atkins, would create techno, and from there came modern dance culture.

Back in Britain, New Order would sample Uranium on Blue Monday, while synth-pop inspired by albums such as 1978's The Man-Machine would set the decade's pop mood. Kraftwerk would even get a No 1 single, The Model, in February 1982, four years after its first release. It was if the world was finally catching up with them.

And here's Neil's scamper through the history:

Afrika Bambaataa’s groundbreaking 1982 hip-hop dance smash Planet Rock was built around Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express. The same year, Kraftwerk’s The Model hit No1 in Britain, four years after its first release. In 1983, New Order sampled Kraftwerk for their breakthrough dance rock hit Blue Monday. By the end of the Eighties, a whole new dance scene was emerging.

It could be coincidence, but it doesn't half read like a precis.

McCormick then offered an even more bizarre defence:

I figured, who actually reads both the Guardian & The Telegraph (apart from me obviously)

I'm sure Neil didn't mean to make that sound like "I didn't think I'd get caught", (and interesting that he doesn't appear to know what paper the article was originally in) but it does sound a bit like that. In much the same way his Telegraph piece sounds a bit like Jude Rogers in The Observer.

Doll not aimed at kids is unsuitable for kids, claims professor

Bless the poor Daily Telegraph, which struggles enough coping with the modern world outside its own door but now has to try and run stories about matters American as well.

It's copied a fuss about nothing over the "rock chick Barbie" from American news sources:

But parents and commentators across America have criticised the image it portrays to children. Professor Joel Bakan, the author of 'Childhood Under Siege', described it as a "cynical exercise".

"This is a calculated attempt to play on young girls' natural desire to appear older," said Prof Bakan. "This is something to be resisted."

It tosses Mattel's explanation away at the end of the story:

In a statement, Mattel suggested that the doll had been intended more "for the adult doll collector". It said: "Barbie has sported an endless array of styles."

It's not "suggesting", it's saying. The rock Barbie doll sells at fifty bucks, which is the pricing for the collector range, not the children's toy range which is priced much lower. But if you know that, you know that this story isn't about aberrant Barbies dragging kids to Satanic rock concerts, and is actually about Joel Bakan using a lazily-researched target to try and flog his book.

Sony Distribution fire not actually part of the riots

Shortly after the Sony Warehouse went up in flames, I said it seemed unlike the other riot-related incidents, being away from the High Streets and a well-defended space.

This morning, the Telegraph reports that, indeed, it wasn't a rioter target; rather, a professional raid making using of the riots as a distraction:

[E]vidence has now emerged suggesting that the well-guarded Sony DADC distribution centre was deliberately targeted by a professional gang, in a carefully planned raid, using the riots as a distraction.

Sources in the security industry disclosed that intruders first arrived wielding specialist cutting equipment and spent up to two hours dismantling a high security fence before breaking in.

It is claimed that they then summoned a fleet of vans and drove inside the premises, which are set back from the main focus of rioting in the area, before beginning to load up stock.

According to one source, security guards on site were effectively overwhelmed and unable to fend
off the intruders, knowing that police were already stretched as anarchy gripped the capital.
After loading up with stolen goods, the robbers are then said to have invited other gangs in to continue the looting in an attempt to cover their tracks.

Now, that sounds much more plausible than the idea of marauding kids making a detour onto an industrial estate.

Glastonbury 2011: Quick morning press round-up

There was a strange moment yesterday, following the discovery of Christopher Shale's body in the Glastonbury toilets, that showbiz reporters were forced into covering a political story. So we tended to hear about how close he was to the Wayne Rooney caravan when he died, rather than his links to the Prime Minister.

Now the papers have had a chance to catch up. But if showbiz reporters had taken on strange roles yesterday, they weren't alone. The Daily Mail reports that Michael Eavis had appointed himself coroner:

At a news conference, Mr Eavis said: ‘I’m told it was a suicide situation in the early hours of the morning … It is a personal situation, but it looks like suicide.’

To be honest, even if Shale had taken his own life - perhaps especially if Shale had taken his own life - was it really appropriate for Eavis to be giving pronouncements on how he came to die?

Back with the music, over in The Sun, Gordon struggles to think of something to say about Laura Marling:

LAURA MARLING brought a welcome touch of normality to Worthy Farm.

With so many questionably-dressed people - both on stages and in the fields - it was refreshing to see somebody wearing their usual clobber.

Apparently so "refreshing" it demanded a sneering headline:

Laura Marling’s boring Laudrobe

Now, there's a load of Glastonbury coverage on The Sun's website, but I've yet to discover any of the bloke bands who turned up in work shirts and jeans be called "boring" for failing to have worn a lion costume. Funny that.

To give Rachel at 3AM in the Mirror her due, she did attempt to review the music. A bit:

During my bum breaks, I caught Jamie Woon's set and it was fantastic. I've heard a lot about this chap, but haven't listened to his stuff before. Sitting in the middle of a field with a pounding head and cider was the perfect way to be introduced to Jamie's chilled but strong, powerful tunes.

I spent a while sitting outside the dance tent and enjoyed watching the sweaty ravers from a purely visual perspective with my Vimto lolly (three pounds! Three. Pounds).

Hang on, she's already starting to file her expense claims.

Neil McCormick in the Telegraph isn't the sort to fall back on writing about ice lollies. He's noticed that - hey - there's something funny about a big US star being on a dairy farm:

Beyonce brought the sunshine to Glastonbury. Somehow the very idea of the urban pop queen strutting her stuff in mud-spattered wellies and pac-a-mac seems wrong, illustrating the disparity between her glamorous image and the down and dirty dairy farm festivities.

Hey - did you know Neil knows Bono? Out of U2?

Removed from the comfort zone of their usual sci-fi staging, U2 were forced to rely on road warrior skills, and proved consummate crowd-pleasers whose greatest strengths lie with heart and art, not space-age showbiz. At the end of the set, Bono pulled an Irish and a Union flag from the crowd to drape over amplifiers but that was about as political as it got, if you discount the limp balloon of a tax protest.

Hmm. I know he's your big chum, Neil, but it wasn't a "limp balloon" until security thugs went in and started to push the protestors about.

Interesting, by the way, that there were other political banners which didn't have security sicced on them - for example, the Don't Buy The Sun flag held aloft in front of the Pyramid stage - which does make it look even more like Glastonbury was just closing down anti-Bono protest.

Alexis Petridis, for the Guardian, saw the set of the other controversial act from this year's line-up:

Whether or not you agree with Michael Eavis's assessment that it was a "mistake" to book the Wombles for Glastonbury, it's hard not to feel at least a little impressed by them before they even play a note of music. On its final day, Glastonbury is being blasted by pitiless sun: it's a brave person who chooses to take to the stage dressed in a giant furry costume. Equally it's hard not to be a little puzzled by their decision to open their set with their best-known hit, Remember You're A Womble: when it finishes, alas, quite a lot of their audience chose to Womble off elsewhere.

Over at NME.com, freed from the deadlines and constraints of a print edition, the Glastonbury blog is the first place to turn for the latest from the field, right? Oh, Rebecca Shiller has filed. What did she make of Beyonce?

Last night, Coldplay headlined Glastonbury for the first time since 2005.

Oh. It turns out nobody has posted anything since lunchtime on Sunday, and that was about bloody Coldplay.

To be fair, there are a couple of news posts from later in the day, but 'Beyonce played' and 'Paul Simon played' hardly feels like you're getting much in the way of special insight.

Mind you, the coverage by sponsors Q makes NME seem like Reuters. A couple of news items - most recent is "here are the highlights that you might like to see today" - and a lazy Twitter box which seems to have relied on the GlastonburyFestivals.co.uk website to do all the work - and that's it. Was that worth the sponsorship money?

[Part of Glastonbury full coverage]

Glastonbuy 2011: Press round-up

The miserable weather made it hard for press photographers to find much to celebrate on site yesterday, so Gordon Smart in The Sun is reduced to running a blurry photo of Professor Green with a cardboard cup of beer:

The rapper - who is headlining the East Dance Tent tonight - intends to make the most of every minute at the festival.

He does, eh?

"But if it rains, I'm just going to stay in the Winnebago, drink rum, play cards and watch it all on TV."

Ah, yes. The classic festival experience of sitting in a caravan playing canasta.

Still, the Winnebago will at least help with time on site, right?

He said: "I've got on it on Thursday, then off Friday, then on it Saturday and on it again on Sunday."

Oh. So he's making the most of every moment, except Friday. Also, that suggests that although Gordon posted this today, and claimed he'd had the conversation with Green yesterday, he couldn't possibly have done. Is the photo really worth smudging the chronology?

The Mail has a tiresome report from "a middle-aged, middle-class mother". Yes, it runs through every bloody Glasto cliche you can think of:

The final tipping point? My wellington boot has literally been sucked off my foot by sticky mud, leaving me in my socks and up to my ankles in gelatinous brown goo.

Julie Lawrence is the Mail's woman crying "in the Portaloos" (did the Mail's legal team not get the regular missive from Portakabin insisting that their trademark not be used as a generic?).

It turns out she's not even a Glastonbury virgin:

Back then, still in my 20s, during the infamous mud bath of 1997, I laughed and trudged along with the best of them. Forget the mud and yucky toilets — sprirituality and music was what it was really all about, wasn’t it?

But now - why, she thinks she must have been as mad as Melanie Philips to enjoy it at all:

I want to shout: ‘Come on, ladies, what are we doing here in our dotage? This is NOT FUN!’ My back is protesting and every ounce of my being is screaming for a sit-down, a nice cup of tea and slice of fruit cake. What do these other middle-class mums have that I do not? Have I grown old before my time?

What do the other people there have that you don't? How about 'a genuine reason for being there other than filing an article that could have been knocked together in a Costa Coffee on Temple Meads station', Julie.

In the Mail tomorrow: Someone who doesn't really like tennis goes to Wimbledon and whines about how it's full of tennis.

The Express, meanwhile, builds its coverage around the cultural highlight of the day:

WAYNE Rooney and his wife Coleen waded into the mud of Glastonbury yesterday in wellies.

Hats off to the inept Express web operation, by the way, which still isn't convinced the U2 gig will happen:

Last night U2 were due to play a long-awaited headline gig at the event, attended by 170,000 revellers.

But, obviously, we won't find out if that happened until the Sunday Express goes to print.

In another part of the Richard Desmond empire - the only-slightly-porny part - the Daily Star is also fixated on Wayne and Colleen, but puts its sister title to shame by doing some Actual Journalism about their arrival:

A guard said: “Wayne seemed in good spirits even though he and Coleen had already got soaked.”

See? It's not a real story unless you talk to an eyewitness.

The Mirror seems to be struggling to make sense of it all:

IT seems Chipmunk’s dietary requirements at Glastonbury were no problem at all. After bringing the house down opening The Other Stage, he tweeted: “GLASTO was HAAAAM!!!!”

And cheese, I hope.

Sarah Tetteh got a byline for that.

The Telegraph had a secret weapon for the U2 set. Their man, Neil McCormick, knows Bono. Yes, he seldom mentions it, so it might be a bit of a surprise to discover that. But this once, he was prepared to use his connections:

Backstage insight from Neil McCormick:

Twitter: Nice to watch Bono signalling & encouraging band from behind the stage. They've got a sneaky keyboard player round back too.

Twitter: Road crew, gtr techs all on their toes for this one, problem solving, shouting at one another. Looks seamless out front. #U2 #glasto

It's not entirely clear how Neil could have been delivering "backstage insight" while also able to explain how it looked from the front.

I'll return to the Telegraph's coverage in a separate post, by the way.

The Guardian wryly reports a flop in the fields:

Mobile phone company, and Glastonbury music partner, Orange, had a cunning ruse to get punters interested in its wares. It sent a 6ft 8in "appy man" to Glastonbury to roam around the site. Festival-goers were challenged to find this man, with the prize potentially being tickets to the side of the Pyramid stage. Clues as to appy man's location were to be posted "on the official Glasto App and via Twitter", Orange wrote.

Alas, the punters the Guardian spoke to were unaware of appy man's existence, let alone whereabouts. This reporter did find appy man, mostly because his PR man was loudly alerting passersby to his presence.

A quick look at the @appy_man twitter feed revealed 500 people had signed up for clues as to his location – or 0.25% of expected Glastonbury attendees.

The idea that people have better things to do at Glastonbury is heartwarming.

Although the presence of a mobile phone company as "music partner" really does look odd given all those claims about Glastonbury isn't sponsored...

Glastonbury 2011: Quick morning press round-up

The Mail has heartbreaking news:

Glaston-buried: Fans drown in sea of mud and the music hasn't even started yet

Hang about, though - nobody has yet drowned. Which is lucky. It turns out the Mail headline should have been 'photos of pretty young women in wellingtons'.

Unusually for the the Telegraph, it has ignored the chance to print pictures of teenage girls and gone instead with a muddy bloke:

Some visitors were doing their best to have fun in Britain's biggest mudbath - and teenage reveller Tom Wilder ensured the cheers started early at Glastonbury.

The 17-year-old's giant puddle slide was becoming the festival's first cult hit with a day to spare before the main acts take to the Pyramid Stage.

Well, I suppose it's better than Bono.

The Times is unreachable.

[Part of Glastonbury 2011 full coverage]

Telegraph confuses itself about The Beatles

The headline is clear:

Beatles dominate iTunes on first day of downloads

The article by Anita Singh is equally clear:

However, predictions that the band's back catalogue would swamp the top 10 proved wide of the mark. Despite the hype, the most downloaded tune, Hey Jude, peaked at number 28. Only three others made it into the top 50: Twist and Shout, Here Comes The Sun and Let It Be.

Both very clear. Both saying totally different things.

The Daily Telegraph: a refined newspaper

Was it really necessary, Daily Telegraph, to accompany the report of Stuart Cable's inquest with a boxout of 'other rock stars who choked on their own vomit'?

And was it really appropriate to start that boxout with a giggling reference to how it was parodied in Spinal Tap? An inquest into the death of a real person who, clearly, was loved by a lot of people, isn't really the place to start laughing 'hee-hee, it's just like that funny movie', is it?

Neil McCormick is actually sort-of right

Sometimes, we point and snigger at Neil McCormick, the Telegraph's friend of Bono music writer, but he's got a point this morning, listing the churning products of the Lennon Industry:

This is the latest offering from a posthumous, multi-million-dollar Lennon industry, partly fuelled by his widow's sometimes suspect desire to keep the flame burning. It has led to such dubious tributes as a TV commercial for the Citroën DS3, a Mont Blanc fountain pen retailing at $27,000, a limited edition Gibson Imagine guitar ($10,748), alongside the usual array of Lennon-branded mugs, clothing, books, calendars, prints and even an Imagine brand of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

I suspect Neil and I would disagree over the core of his argument. Neil insists this isn't what the man himself would want, or be doing, were he alive today; my suspicion is that Lennon would just be more careful than Yoko at merchandising the idea of the rock ascetic. But the headline?

John Lennon's 70th birthday: these tacky souvenirs and adverts insult his memory

I think we can agree on that.

Andy Kershaw's dog sparks council tax enquiry

It's not often you see the phrase "Radio 3 DJ" written down but it turns up in a Telegraph headline reporting that a new Liberal Democrat/Conservative MP is being investigated by her local council after Andy Kershaw turned out to be registered to vote at her address:

Tessa Munt, the MP for Wells claimed a single resident’s discount on her council tax, telling her local council she lived alone in her constituency home.

However, the electoral register shows that Mrs Munt is one of three people registered to vote at the Somerset address.

Ms Munt's explanation is that she looked after Andy Kershaw's dog, and he used her house to register to vote as he had no permanent UK home - that's within the rules, of course. There's also a doctor who used her address in the same way:

The MP said she was co-operating with the council on the issue: “I fully support Sedgemoor doing this check and it’s right that they follow up any cases where the two don’t match up.”

The council declined to comment on Mrs Munt’s case, saying only that it was reviewing more than 700 “irregularities” in its council tax register that were revealed by its cross-check of the electoral roll.

An MP under suspicion of financial misdeeds and a BBC connection - if they could have found a way to work in a photo of blonde twins collection A-Level results, it would have been the perfect Telegraph story.

Milo Yiannopoulos: Give mp3s away for nothing

You wouldn't normally expect the Telegraph to be talking up ideas involving loosening of property rights, but we do live in strange times. Milo Yiannopoulos, Telegraph tech blogger, has considered the staggering figures that the US music industry has burned through $16million to reclaim $391,000 pursuing unlicensed music through the courts. And comes to a conclusion:

So if we accept that file-sharing is unstoppable, and that attempts to curb it might leave us with something even worse, wouldn’t the logical consequence would be to make MP3s free, and freely shareable? Yeah, I know. But take a deep breath and think about it for a second. And yes, I do realise I'm not remotely the first person to come up with this. But I'm perhaps the latest person to be won over to it.

Giving MP3s away would require that record labels basically give up on studio recordings as a revenue channel. On the face of it, it sounds heretical and preposterous. I mean, they’re record companies because they make records, right?

Physical product, streaming services, live sales - these are the areas where Yiannopoulos sees those who want to make money from music actually doing so. To be fair, I think Apple and Amazon have shown that there is money to be made selling mp3s, too - although what they sell is ease of discovery (and, I guess, if they added virtual storage too, so you'd no longer lose your collection if you computer got taken off you by the police, they'd have an even more compelling product).

But the general point - you can't stop people copying and pasting, accept that it's part of the landscape - is a tune that long-term readers of No Rock won't be surprised to hear has me nodding along.

Today, even The Telegraph gets it. How many more years will be lost before the RIAA catches up?

[Thanks to Michael M]

Back For Good Enough: Robbie Williams moves back in with Dad

I think it's fair to say that the reunionised Take That had reached a bit of a natural end, with the first bubbling of creativity from getting back together having long since flattened out, so the inevitable lumbering back in of Robbie Williams has come too late to spoil anything too much. 'Williams rejoins Cameron-endorsing Marks And Spencer models' is less of a shame than the 'Williams stamps over the fizzle' if he'd been back in in 2005 or 2006.

Still, the camera-hogging, gurning, 'look! I'm a character' of Robbie towards the end of the BBC News video is a hint of the mismatch between the two sides now. It's like the two little pigs running into the brick house and behaving like they were the expert housebuilders all along.

Still, nobody's really that bothered about whether it's a good idea or not. For the Mirror, it's a chance to feel vindicated:

The move confirms the Mirror’s exclusive story in a March 2009 ­interview with Robbie that the band were getting back together.

Daily Mirror, everyone's been saying 'sooner or later, Williams will turn up with a stupid grin on his face' since Take That first got back as one. I'm not sure that 'just sixteen months after we said it was happening, it happened' is quite the claim you think it is.

obbie said last night: “I get ­embarrassingly excited when the five of us are in a room. It feels like coming home.”

Yes, it's exactly like coming home. But there's no shame in that, Robbie - a surprising number of men in their thirties move back in with their parents after their careers go south.

The Mirror offers a verdict on the hooking-up, with their in-house Take That fan Beth Neil taking on the paper's music critic Gavin Martin. (Gavin Martin's the Mirror's music critic now? Really?)

Beth goes first:

I just hope Robbie doesn’t try to steal the limelight and overshadow the other four, who have grafted non-stop to become the nation’s biggest man band.

Oh, come on, Beth - what are the chances of that?

Still, I'm sure Gavin's got some sort of musical insight to share:

[E]xpect plenty of sold-out gigs, making it an astute move commercially for all five.

Is it, though, Gavin? Take That as foursome could sell out gigs at the largest venues in the country, so all they're really doing is splitting the take five ways instead of four. That looks like a crappy move, surely?

Over at The Sun, Gordon Smart is delighted:

[T]hank the lord for some good news after such a bleak few weeks of murder and misery dominating the headlines.

Oh, yes. I've totally forgotten we've got a bumbling Tory at the Treasury and the Prime Minister believes some people are just innately evil with the news that a band have brought back their worst member.

This reunion is HUGE. It doesn't get any bigger.

Scientists are currently attempting to calculate if this reunion that doesn't come any bigger is larger or smaller than the bigness of a Masterchef final.

Reunions don't come any bigger? Wouldn't Paul and Ringo getting out the mop-top wigs one last time trump it?

Hang about, though, Gordon's about to blow:

The tour will break records on pre-sales, as will the album. Then there'll be the sponsorship, the TV rights, a DVD, merchandising, royalties and publishing.

To say nothing of the acres and acres and acres of coverage churned out by the tabloids, eh, Gordo?

If you thought the boys were rich now, next Christmas is going to see them served up with a whole new level of wealth.

Is it just me, or is a reunion where the reaction is 'this is going to make a lot of money' rather than 'we're going to hear some great music' one which, fundamentally, is more in the interests of record labels and promoters than fans?

The only problem I can see is Robbie's crippling stage fright and his hatred of being on the road.

You don't think that the fifteen years of animosity and his inability to work as part of a team might be a bigger problem?

The Mail calls the reWilliamsing 'Take Two', although surely it's Take Four - the band, band without Williams, band reunited without Williams, Band reunited with Williams? Despite assigning two writers to the story, though, the Mail doesn't show very much interest in the band coming back together - mainly because there's no picture of a woman in a bikini they can run alongside it.

Kim Dawson provides 'analysis' for the Daily Star. She's already started the countdown clock. The countdown to the end:

Another split will only break the hearts of women round the country still reeling from Mark’s infidelity.

Nobody seems to have told Dawson that (a) the reunion is only a fixed-time deal so there will be a natural end and (b) there are precisely no women - apart maybe from Owen's wife - who are reeling from his infidelity. And even if there were: eh? What the hell does that mean?

The Daily Express more or less ignores the story entirely, although it does take care to take the sting out of the response to its short cut-and-paste brief:

Have your say is unavailable for this story

God, yes, you wouldn't want anyone saying anything nasty about Williams and Barlow hugging, would you?

The Telegraph inadvertently gets to the problem of the story. To justify the excitement, there's a desperate desire to present this as an unlikely surprise:

Bandmate Owen said: "Getting the five of us to be in a room together, although always a dream, never actually seemed like becoming a reality.

"Now the reality of the five of us making a record together feels like a dream. It's been an absolute delight spending time with Rob again. But I'm still a better footballer," he joked.

... but the entire world has just been waiting for this moment, and for the last two or three years it's been an inevitable 'when' rather than an 'if':

Despite Williams ridiculing Barlow during his early solo shows, the pair began to bury the hatchet in recent years and their friendship was renewed.

Williams said last year: "You carry around all this resentment and bitterness for such a long time."

[...]

Williams had already revealed he was working with Barlow. Last month he announced the pair were to release a duet Shame which will feature on his greatest hits collection.

Still, the Telegraph does focus in on some people who won't be celebrating:

The new album will be released on Take That's label Polydor, rather than Williams's company, EMI.

Ah, the cost of trying to drag their nosediving big name out the dumper is having to let Polydor get the most cake.

The Times - well, who knows or cares what The Times says these days?

Really, though, at times like this you need to turn to an expert. What have you got for us, Popjustice?

SOMEONE GET LULU ON THE PHONE.

Now, that would be a reunion which didn't come any bigger.

6Music: Telegraph claims survival plans exist

There's three possibilities that might explain the Telegraph's story that 6Music will become Radio 2 Extra and, thus, be saved in some form.

One: It's a mixture of guesswork and wishful thinking, based partly on suggestions that have been floating about the internet.

Two: Their unnamed 'corporation insiders' are on the money, and a face-saving compromise is on the cards.

Three - And this one is the conspiracy theory: The BBC are trying to plant the idea that 6 will remain in some sort of form, in order to relax a lot of the crowds baying for Mark Thompson's blood. If it can quieten down the protests, it'll be so much easier to put the pillow over the network's face.

Let's hope it's number two - but until you see listings for 2Extra in the Radio Times, don't let your guard down.

Staus Quo: Establishment chaps

It's not actually news that Status Quo are ardent royalists and tend to fawn when they stand down wind from anything from a Duchess upwards. But seldom has Francis Rossi been quite so explicit about it:

Rossi, dressed in a dark pinstriped suit, said: ''This is the most exceptional moment of our careers. There's no two ways about it.

''Live Aid was contrastingly very different and important and there was a great euphoric feeling on the day but nothing can make you forget this.

''It's part of the establishment which is everything that's been around us since we were little and it's something to aspire to.

''Whether you're a royalist or not you cannot take away what the Queen and the Royal Family do for us.''

... before knuckling his forelock and walking backwards in a half-crouch.

I suppose it's true. Even if you're not a royalist, you can't escape the millions wasted on keeping one family in total luxury and undermining the whole principle of democracy by having government carried on in the name of the monarch instead of the people. I expect that's what Rossi meant.

There's something a little odd in the Telegraph's piece:

Status Quo launched the first Prince's Trust concert in 1982 and three years later they opened the original Live Aid concert with Rockin' All Over The World.

The original Live Aid concert? How many have there been since, then?

Newsround 1: Liam Gallagher's on fire

Take a close look at this picture. What is it of? Yes, yes, someone doing a tourist-friendly fire routine. That much is clear.

But look closer. Do you see anything else?

No.

That's not what the Telegraph sees, though:

A fire-eater has mastered the art of blowing out balls of flame in the shape Liam Gallagher's head.

You might have thought the Telegraph would have been kept busy what with the thaw, the looming election and the earthquake, but no: it seems their need for news is so great that no morsel of something that doesn't quite stand up will be turned away.

John Brigden, 50, a lorry driver from Alcester, Warwickshire, who photographed the spectacle, said: "I was just watching the procession and clicking away taking photographs.

And then when I looked at it later, I was a little bit spooked looking at it initially. With the long hair and things, it bears a hell of resemblance to Liam - I couldn't believe it."

Isn't Tom Jones the pop star with the bright orange, funny-shaped face?

If the Telegraph is interested, I saw an estate agent who looked a bit like Gail off Corrie on one of the property programmes earlier today. The front page should be held.