Amputee time: First amongst others

Once again, a piece on Viktoria Modesta describes her as

Viktoria Modesta: the world’s first amputee pop star

It's still not right, though.

And not just because it might be a little early to describe Modesta as a popstar.

A letter in the current Private Eye reminds us of Victor Moulton, drummer with the Barbarians, who had lost a hand to an accident with explosives.

Ella Fitzgerald had her knees amputated below the knee in 1993, although this was pretty much after she had stopped performing in public. Sarah Bernhardt, arguably the prototype popstar, had a leg amputated after an onstage accident and carried on performing.

Over in New York, Isle is building a career which is just as solid as Viktoria's.

Tony Iommi carried on in Black Sabbath despite having lost part of his finger.

Now, you could argue all these cases are edge, or obscure, or not-quite-pop-star enough, or maybe even not amputee enough.

But... what about Rick Allen? Continued drumming for Def Leppard after losing an arm in a car crash, drumming his way onto Hysteria and selling over 20 million records.

It's great that Viktoria is doing well, and the support for her is to be welcomed. And, yes, although she might not be the first, pulling together a list of amputee pop stars shows that she's still amongst the first, nearly 100 years after Sarah Bernhardt. But if one of her main messages is about visibility, probably doesn't help to write the other pioneers out of history.

Def Leppard clone themselves

Def Leppard have got the hump with Universal taking the lions' share - or, rather, the Leppard's share - of their royalties, and have recorded 'forgeries' of their old stuff:

The band's frontman Joe Elliott said to Billboard that the disagreement has led to the band deciding to phase out their recordings for Universal and replace them with a whole new collection of their songs, which they're calling 'forgeries'. "We'll just replace our back catalogue with brand new, exact same versions of what we did," he said.

There's a glorious philosophical conundrum here - are these now new originals? Are the cover versions? Could the 2012 studio version of Pour Some Sugar On Me be considered merely a later take from the original suspended 1987 session?

This is a different class of re-recording from, say, Kate Bush's director's cuts reworking of earlier albums, as the Lep (as they must never, ever be called) are trying to recreate the songs exactly as they were; it's closer to those soundalike albums ("sings the hits of") which unsuspecting parents would buy children to make Christmas mornings so disappointing in the 1970s.

It's not quite the unique event you might think; certainly, back in 1981 Flux Of Pink Indians launched their own Spiderleg Records with a cloned version of the '1970s Were Made In Hong Kong' ep they'd made for Stortbeat Records as The Epileptics a couple of years earlier. That was over a royalty dispute, too.

[Thanks to @jamesthegill for the tip]

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Def Leppard

A shower of glorious love to David Hepworth and The Word for pointing the world in the direction of the New York Times wedding section. Always a haven for the unexpected - it should be subtitled "if I'm compromising, at least I'm going to do it as publicly and expensively as possible" - this week, they recorded the nuptials of Def Leppard's Phil Collen and Helen Simmons:

Ms. Simmons, too, felt a spark. “But emotionally, there were a lot of other things going on with us,” she said.

The other things included a wife from whom he was separated, a girlfriend from whom he wasn’t, and Ms. Simmons’s boyfriend.

Two days later, he asked her for seven minutes of her time.

Not 5 or 10? “I knew I needed more than 5 and I figured 10 would be too long,” Mr. Collen said matter-of-factly.

There's a lot of that sort of thing.

Kerrang Awards: You've all done very well

Last night, at a venue that clearly couldn't be too fussy about dress code, the Kerrang Awards 2008 were given out.

So, who won what?

Best International Newcomer: Black Tide
Best British Newcomer: Slaves To Gravity

The future is looking rubbish, then.

Kerrang Icon Award: Trivium

Icon? Icon?

Best Video: Coheed And Cambria - Feathers

This is, perhaps, the most obscure collection of awards handed out this year. This is what happens when your readership retreats to its hardcore...

Best Single: 30 Seconds To Mars - The Kill

... well, up until a point

Best Album: Avenged Sevenfold - Avenged Sevenfold

They picked up this award from Cristina Scabbia, which is a bit like asking Michael Phelps to give out a ten metres swimming certificate.

Best Live Band: Machine Head

Enter Shikari won this last year. Much good it did them.

Classic Songwriter: Def Leppard

Ah, yes: "I suppose a rock's out the question". It's not a Kerrang award they should be getting, surely that sort of songwriter deserves the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square?

Spirit Of Independence: Dillinger Escape Plan

We have no idea what this award is meant to be rewarding them for. Is it that they paid for their own tickets?

Best British Band: Bullet For My Valentine

You can tell they're classy, as Jo Whiley voiceovers their ads.

Best International Band: 30 Seconds To Mars

That'll show EMI...

Hall of Fame: Rage Against The Machine

Happily being inducted into an award promoted by an international media conglomerate...

Inspiration: Metallica

Well, yes: they certainly inspired the RIAA a hell of a lot...

The clash of metals

This, then, would be two bald men fighting over a comb, were it not for one of the men being Bret Michaels: A spat has broken out between Posion and Def Leppard over which band is realer or something.

Joe Elliott started it by suggesting that Def Leppard had more "substance" to their music, and that Poison just coasted by on their image.

We've heard Pour Some Sugar On Me and seen pictures of Poison. Neither the substance of one nor the style of the other would detain people writing cultural histories of mankind for very long, we'd suggest, but Michaels wasn't taking such a slight on the chin. Pausing only to wash his hair, he embarked on an interview with a radio programme, and talked at some length. Some great length. The first he heard of the scurrilous claims were at a backstage press conference at Sweden Rocks:

All of a sudden, one guy goes, 'We have a video of Joe Elliott last night saying that MÖTLEY CRÜE and POISON and all these bands have no talent, they can't play.' Now, let me just put this on the record: I'm a DEF LEPPARD fan. Not 'kind of a fan' — like, I own the CDs; I own the albums. We used to do the song 'Wasted', if that gives you any indication. I used to play 'On Through The Night' with like… The song 'Wasted' was one of our favorite songs…. I'm a DEF LEPPARD fan. Old-school, new-school — it doesn't matter. Gone to see their shows, liked the guys. Joe Elliott, I don't really know, but he seems like a decent guy, whatever. I get in there and the guy says it to me. I say, 'You're lying. I don't think Joe would say that.' He's like, 'No, I've got it on video.' Which they had on video — him [Joe] stating this.

Goodness. First Kate Moss, then Max Moseley, now Joe Elliott. Is nobody safe from the secret videoing?

Bret started out by trying to be conciliatory, but then he changed his mind (and, yes, he is giving a stream-of-consciousness interview about a press conference he once gave, like a footballer talking through a goal):

And then it hits me that, listen, I've been nothing but cool. And I go, 'Well, this is coming from a guy who lip-synched on 'Dancing With The Stars'.' I go, 'This guy lip-synched…' Mutt Lange writes their… you know, does their albums… I'm not dissing them, I'm just saying…

Remember, snorting 'they mime on mainstream dancing programmes and someone else writes their songs' is not, in any way, to be considered a 'dissing'.

In other words, I was like, 'Look, give me and Joe a guitar each and a pen and a piece of paper, stick us in a room for an hour [and see who'll come out] with a couple of songs. But I don't wanna fight Joe.

I suspect that they'd probably both come out with a couple of songs, as everything these bands have done for the last decade or so has the taint of having been knocked up in thirty minutes as some sort of dare.

Bret, though, isn't dissing anybody. Oh no:

Isn't he secure enough in his success or where he's at… If someone said, 'Hey, what do you think about MÖTLEY?' Even though we've had words — MÖTLEY and us, or supposedly, whatever — I'm like, 'Hey, I like MÖTLEY's music. I'm a fan. They have good rock songs.' I just feel uncomfortable in my skin.'"

I love that he can't quite remember if he has had a falling-out with the Crue or not, or if people just said he has, or, indeed, "whatever".

The radio programme asked a direct question: did Rikki Rocket challenge Joe Elliott to a fight? Bret gave an equally direct response:

"That I didn't see. What I thought was going on was that they were like… What the joke was from a lot of fans was, like, 'Don't trip over a water backstage at a DEF LEPPARD concert, you might unplug the stereo.' And I said, 'With our band, we don't ever use…' There's nothing. That's what blows everyone's minds. You go to a lot of 'concerts,' and you can trip over anything we've got, we play everything. In other words, the keyboard player… We have one guy extra to sing some of the parts, but that's it. There's no… You can put us in a club… Like we did it in New York. We went and played for, I believe it was WPLJ, and they stuck us in this club and played, and it was one of the best nights we'd had, 'cause you can put us there or in the stadium or an arena, and it's gonna sound the same; there's no fear. And that's what some of the joke… I think Rikki's challenge was the same as mine. If this is gonna become a songwriting duel, Rikki goes, 'Do you bring Mutt Lange, or do you bring the band?'"

- Did he say he'd fight him?
- We might have had someone sing some extra vocals live once
That's that cleared up, then.

I imagine this falling-out will continue for the next ten years, by which time it will be a full three decades since anyone outside the bands gave a toss about what either thought.

Joe Elliott feels for the young people

Joe Elliott reckons the kids get a tough break these days, what with the way the industry is:

"Contracts nowadays, record labels, what's left of 'em, are trying to actually get parts of a band's merchandise when they tour. It's like, how dare you! It's two separate things! You know, I just can't see Roger Waters willingly giving up 20 percent of his T-shirts. Luckily we aren't in that kind of bag. I just feel bad for the new bands. I mean, there's the odd artist that can sell records these days. But most people, if they don't have a second record make profit, they don't make a third record."

Yes. Of course, it doesn't help that a lot of the room for bright young things is clogged up with relics that even Car Booty would find hard to discover any value in, like, ooh, Def Leppard, say.