This isn't news, Matt Bellamy

Matt Bellamy has revealed that a big influence on the new Muse album is U2. Whoever would have thought?

Frontman Matt Bellamy told Classic Rock magazine: ''We toured with U2 last year in South America. And there's definitely a little bit of influence come on to this album, a little bit of [1991 album] 'Achtung Baby' here and there.''

Muse have been pushing stadium-shaped vacant bombast for years; surely the U2 influence has always been obvious?

Gordon in the morning: Man to spend Christmas with partner's family

Yes, that's the big splash on Bizarre today, that Matt Bellamy will spend Christmas with Kate Hudson and her family.

You might think that Gordon would struggle to make this typical Yuletide plan into anything beyond a nib, but Gordon has got it covered.

Let's also hope [Matt's] mum doesn't take along any proof of his circumcision when he was a lad.

I'm sorry...what?

Yes, Gordon has decided - hilariously - that it's going to be just like Meet The Fockers. No, Kate Hudson wasn't in that movie, nor were Goldie Hawn or Kurt Russell, her mum and stepdad. In fact, the only link seems to be that that's a film about someone meeting somebody's family, and that's what Matt's doing so... it's bound to be identical, right?

MUSE rocker MATT BELLAMY could soon end up nicknamed Gaylord Focker if his Christmas get-together fails to go to plan.

It's a slim conceit, but you might just be able to get away with one reference, however shoe-horned in.

Matt may decline the water volleyball as he doesn't want to give Kate a shiner.

Like in the film. Do you see?

As long as Matt doesn't kill the cat or get caught raiding Goldie's undercrackers drawer, it should be happy families.

Like in the film. Do you see?

Of course, Gordon's not so gauche as to assume that simply listing the plot of a film and adding 'let's hope that doesn't happen, eh, reader?' isn't enough to carry an entire piece, so he turns to wondering how Bellamy's in-laws - who may or may not be going along together too, depending on which paragraph you're on (at one point, the families are all "shacking up together", at another, there's talk of "splitting the US trip between [Matt's parents]") - will get on with Hudson's:

Kurt is a huge music fan and Matt's dad used to be a guitar player in Sixties group THE TORNADOS so there's already common ground.

Oh, yes. That's practically being brothers, isn't it?

"I was once in a band"
"That's such a crazy coincidence, I've just bought a CD. From a shop. That's got a band on it."

Perhaps it's best to stick to wedging in references to barely-connected comedy films as possible events that you hope don't occur during the holidays.

Let's hope Kate Hudson doesn't put a flute up her pussy, eh, readers?

Gordon in the morning: Supermassiveblackhole

Sean Hamilton from Gordon's team files a story about Matt Bellamy dating Kate Hudson. So far, so meh.

But the headline?

It Muse Be Love

In what way, in what world, does 'muse' sound a bit like 'must'? Apart from the 'm' at the very start?

Bloody hell, you shouldn't have to explain to The Sun how puns are supposed to work.

Matt Bellamy wants us revolting

Muse aren't just there for filling the "best live band" slot at the NME Awards, you know.
Oh, no: they want to lead us onto the barricades:

He said: "I've got a home in the centre of London which is right near all the embassies and I notice protests on a regular basis.

"During the G-20 protests, the UK got closer to really making a dramatic change, a non-violent revolution.

"I think the UK needs one and I hope it hasn't died down. Hopefully, we can flame it up again."

The outspoken rocker has also railed against the political system in the UK branding it one of the "weakest democracies" in the developed world.

Matt, 31, added: "You can hear the general feeling that we've been let down again by big institutions which are supposed to be in positions of trust.

"Politicians, obviously, and bankers. The UK is quite behind the curve compared to America and most of Europe. We have one of the weakest democracies. I'm sure it could all be sorted out in a way which that's fairer for everyone."

Yes! Revolution!

You know what else we could do, Matt? We could all go out and make films about injustice and struggle and democracy and share them online. We can show each other the non-violent protests as they spread, encouraging and building dissent.

Although... under the ideas you outlined to Lily Allen, in order to protect a few mulitnational corporations, you'd be forced to pay through the nose to upload or download such materials, which introduces a pay barrier people to gain access to information and so would exclude the very people who have the most to protest about from being part of the debate.

Although... under the ideas you outlined to Lily Allen, ISPs will be having to keep track of what you share online, and so if there was a central backlash, there'd be plenty of records allowing the government to track down anyone who had been taking part in the protests.

Frankly, Matt, while it's nice to see you selling your album as if it's a call to the barricades, I wouldn't follow a revolution led by a man who describes citizens being excluded from the internet as a "perceived civil liberties" issue. You can push for fairness and equality and freedom. You can campaign for "legislation" to allow private companies to "tax" EMI. You can't really do both.

Lily and Matt talk rights

Although Lily Allen is mostly wrong on copyright, it's with a degree of respect that I wave my hands at her latest blog yelling "no! no! no!" At least she's debating, sort-of, something, with her call for people to pay more for music.

On MySpace. A site whose popularity was first, largely, built on sheaf after sheaf of unlicensed music. Perhaps Lily doesn't see her use of MySpace, and delivery of traffic there, as a reward for past behaviour, but it does smack of someone using a platform built from profits of crime to launch a clean-up campaign.

So, what does Lily have to say in her follow up?

I've had a lot of responses back since my previous blog posting here. The long and short of it is, even before this economic downturn Piracy has been affecting all areas of entertainment, except maybe theatre. CD sales, Film DVD sales, book sales , TV DVD sales, everything.

Everything except theatre, eh?

Cinema's up, too:

Cinema admissions for June stood at 12.5m, an increase of 5.6% yr on yr.

• The average weekly admissions figure for June were 2.91m an increase of a 5.4% on average weeks in June 2008.


• Q2 admissions have reached 42.1m (up 22.5%) and the highest Q2 since 2004.

Book sales down? Are you sure, Lily? It's not quite so clear:

August 12, 2009, New York, NY: Book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of June increased by 21.5 percent at $942.6 million and were up by 1.8 percent for the year.

And so on. But we're cherry-picking data here, admitedly.

Now, if people go on consuming at the rate they are and do not pay for what they are consuming, not only will the artists within all these industries be without jobs and unable to express themselves but the behind the scenes people too.

This is convoluted. If people do stop consuming without paying, you still won't be any better off.

And there's no direct link between people being able to express themselves and people buying corporate products:

- Hey, Romeo, will you sing me a love song?
- Nah, Juliet, as people have stopped buying CDs from Barnes and Noble, rendering me somehow incapable of writing and singing a song for you

Thats literally millions of jobs . .

Is it? The UK government last year put the number of people employed in the creative sector at 2 million. A third of these were in software and computer games development, and there's also visual arts, ballet dancers, the staff of the BBC and architects amongst others helping the headcount. All in all, if filesharing had the power to totally wipe out the film and music industries (and it doesn't), you'd be talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, not "literally millions." Not to be taken lightly, but not quite the same.

I know that a lot of you want to know that you're not being overcharged for a product and you want to know that your hard earned cash is going to the right places, alot of work has to be done in order for this to happen.

The market price for individual, basic mp3s is almost zero. Any move the government makes is merely going to artificially inflate the price. Or, in other words, overcharging for a product.

I think that paying 14.99 for an album is ridiculous, I'm with you on that, and that wont happen again, but piracy is not the answer.

"That won't happen again" because... why, exactly, Lily? It happened in the first place because the music industry were able to exploit a limited supply of product and - for each record individually - a monopoly of supply.

You're campaigning tirelessly to see the conditions under which albums rose to fifteen quid be replicated online by the use of copyright barriers. How can you say that it won't happen again?

It's hard enough to get a job at the moment.

Lily Allen spent the last three weeks trying to get something - anything - down at Tesco, and even her experience... oh, sorry, she's just guessing, isn't she?

People are being laid off in all areas and the record companies are no exception.

Yes. Do you suppose piracy might be affecting banks and replacement window companies as well, or do you think this might be some broader economic point totally unrelated to how many people have bookmarked the Pirate Bay?

My own label EMI laid off thousands last year. I don't care so much about the high-ups (and by the way they're always the last to go - what a surprise) but the people who are going out are the young ones, the life blood basically.

EMI are in a mess because they were leveraged out by a private equity company who piled on debt without having much of a clue how to run a record company. That didn't happen because someone copied a CD off their mate.

Oh - and quite a few executives at EMI have lost their jobs over the last couple of years, too.

They're the ones that go first, , I've seen it. And the same is happening in TV and film. Why do you think you are just getting Terminator 6 and Harry Potter 7 instead of exciting new voices? Because the young voices are not there anymore.

Film sequels were only invented in 2004, after the last fresh idea was sucked out of a branch of the Odeon by a chap with a camcorder. This, Lily, is just piffle and I think in your heart you know that pointing to the conclusion of a movie franchise that was launched as a franchise to somehow suggest that young people don't make movies any more is just crazy. Did directors and producers used to be treated Logans Run style back in the 1970s?

Do you care about that, or do you just want to watch and listen to the products of the last generation?

This isn't a coherent argument at all - if you fileshare, there won't be any The XX? But people do fileshare, and there's still a constant parade of young people in tight jeans parading out of from wherever they come. Many of them disappear again quickly - but twas ever thus. Hardly anyone makes any money from music, and hardly anyone ever has.

Or do you want a voice that is heard and can make a difference? What I do know is we have to invest in this sector of our country guys, we are great film makers,we have incredible writers and authors, historically the best music makers, we cant throw it all away.

Here's a question: how many tracks and books have gone unwritten because of piracy against the number unwritten because the major media corporations refusing to invest, or pulling the blanket after a failure by a new name to reach an arbitrary level of sales?

The internet is the most amazing thing, but it should be OUR thing, and ironically piracy is just playing into the hands of the corporations.

Because EMI isn't, apparently, a corporation?

What these artists and creators do, they do for the love of it,

so... erm... they'll carry on doing it even in the unlikely scenario of the money disappearing altogether?

I know its hard because money is scarce but we have to inject money back into these areas. It's not fair to steal peoples material,I know it's art and it has no physical value but even Shakespeare had shares in The Globe Theatre.

Yes. He underwrote his creativity - because there was little money in actually acting - by taking a stake in a different part of the industry.

People will lose their jobs, you'll be watching X-factor, Simon Cowell will be getting richer, radio stations will be churning out old back catalogues from people your dad or even your grandads age(vera lynn is No 1 this week) and the taxpayer will have to subsidize yet more unemployment.

The suggestion that the X Factor is a reaction to filesharing, and not the same labels whose case Allen is pressing now colluding in a cheaper way of knocking out records, is just ridiculous. And for Allen to be pleading for EMI while knocking Vera Lynn at the top of the charts is just hypocritical. In fact, MySpace points out how much:

Please, please, please go and see a film in the cinema instead of buying it in Tesco's car-park , buy a c.d. or album off itunes if you really like it, and god help us, keep buying books . If we do this, i really think we can make a difference. Anyone band, writer, author, musician, actress please feel free to contact me on this matter if you feel it is important

It's actually not that silly a thing to say - if you like culture, buy some culture. But this is so far from "if you share files, you must be punished" as to be laughable.

Allen also runs a response to her earlier post from Matt Bellamy. His stance is even more disappointing, as you'd hope he had a better grasp on things:

My current opinion is that file sharing is now the norm. This cannot be changed without an attack on perceived civil liberties which will never go down well.

"Perceived" civil liberties, Matt? The word "perceived" here being used in the sense of "actual, but difficult for me, so I'll pretend they're not there."

The problem is that the ISPs making the extreme profits (due to millions of broadband subscriptions) are not being taxed by the copyright owners correctly and this is a legislation issue.

I'm sorry? Is this really written by Matt Bellamy or a thirteen year-old at the Brits school? Copyright owners do not tax. Governments tax. You might raise a royalty - but clearly, this is being done "correctly", otherwise it wouldn't be a legislation issue, it'd be one of litigation.

Radio stations and TV stations etc have to pay the copyright owners (both recording and publishing) a fee for using material they do not own. ISPs should have to pay in the same way with a collection agency like PRS doing the monitoring and calculations based on encoded (but freely downloaded) data.

But ISPs are not broadcasters. What you're proposing is akin to the transmission companies being forced to pay for the material that others are using their network to share. Which is clearly nuts.

Broadband makes the internet essentially the new broadcaster. This is the point which is being missed.

It's not "being missed", Matt, it's just plain wrong. The internet is a distribution network. It makes lots of people with servers potentially akin to broadcasters, but an ADSL line is no more a broadcaster than the M1 is a motor vehicle.

Also, usage should have a value. Someone who just checks email uses minimal bandwidth, but someone who downloads 1 gig per day uses way more, but at the moment they pay the same.

Unless they're using, say, dial-up at a penny per minute, or mobile. Or on one of those deals where the amount of data is tiered. But broadly, two people on the same deal will pay the same, regardless of use. This is a pretty good measure, actually, as it encourages use of the internet and people buying music and films and apps.

It is clear which user is hitting the creative industries and it is clear which user is not, so for this reason, usage should also be priced accordingly.

Again, Matt, you're talking absolute twaddle. You might use a lot of bandwidth because you're mailing video you've taken of your kid to his grandma. You might use a lot of bandwidth because you're a Spotify premium user and streaming legal, paid-for music all through the day. You might be one of those struggling creative people Allen was talking about, using the net to share music you've written with journalists and other artists. You could be watching iPlayer. You might just be Stephen Fry using Twitter. To extrapolate that someone using a lot of bandwidth must be doing because they're using unlicensed material is such a fundamentally flawed assumption as to render your entire argument pointless.

The end result will be a taxed, monitored ISP based on usage which will ensure both the freedom of the consumer and the rights of the artists - the loser will be the ISP who will probably have to increase subscription costs to compensate, but the user will have the freedom to choose between checking a few emails (which will cost far less than a current monthly subscription) and downloading tons of music and film (which will cost probably a bit more than current subscription, but not that much more).

But the infrastructure of broadband is pretty expensive - it's unlikely any ISP would be able to afford to run an account which was for "just checking email", except at a loss. And if all I'm doing is downloading iTunes tracks which I've paid for, and mp3s being sent to me PR people, why should I be forced to pay a levy on my connectivity to go to music businesses?

And, come to that: why should it be only musicians who get money from any such levy? Shouldn't anyone who shares any content on the internet get a slice? What makes Matt Bellamy more deserving of money made from snooping on people's communications than, say, a journalist whose article gets circulated away from his paper's website?

We should set up a meeting with Lord Mandelson as he is on this issue at the moment, I'm sure he would meet us for breakfast!

I bet he bloody would, Matt. Enough said.

Gordon in the morning: The clanging of the paywall

The idea, you'll recall, is for people to start paying for The Sun's insights and scoops. Just as soon as they've worked out how.

Meanwhile, the only way to ensure that people pay for tabloid stuff is to keep it in the newspaper. And by "ensure people pay", I mean "force people to borrow a copy off the bloke work".

So a couple of weeks back, the News Of The World didn't put its famous photo of Michael Jackson's death bed online, instead instructing people to pop out and buy a copy of the paper.

Clearly, team Sun has been waiting for a similar massive scoop that would persuade the ublic to switch off their computers and troop down to the newsagents, to stand reading the paper in the shop.

Today, they have something:

Yes, there seems to be some certainty at Wapping that people will pay good, hard cash for Gordon's view of what the future might hold for Oasis. You won't find that online.

(Except for when Gordon published his view of what the future might hold for Oasis yesterday.)

I can see that the paper might believe that there's money to be made out of making it harder to get to the celebrity scoops, but do they really think that Smart's speculations are so acute and valued that people will go out of their way to read them?

Elsewhere - and for free - Gordon has a "isn't Matt Bellamy nuts?" piece:

The frontman researched conspiracy theories for new album The Resistance - and then started believing them.

He ended up thinking the UK could run out of food within a fortnight so went into survivalist mode.

Matt drove to his local food store and bought all 50 tins of beans. Then he went to a DIY store to get an axe.

The rocker said: "I read somewhere a seven-day blockade and the UK would run out of oil.

"Another seven days and we'd run out of food. That's why I bought the beans. The axe would chop firewood."

The obvious questions - where did he see a fourteen-day blockade coming from, where was he going to be getting the firewood from and wouldn't it have been better to have bought firewood, how long does he think he would last with fifty tins of beans, and is it really wise to have an open fire if you're diet is consisting entirely of the musical fruit - are ignored, as Gordon shares his insight into such behaviour:

It all sounds wacky races to me.

Just to reiterate that point, there's a crosshead:

Wacky

Now, you might be wondering why this scintillating insight is being given away free. But it turns out that the whole piece is based on something Smart read in Q. You could pick up a copy when you're in the shops reading Gordon's piece.

That's great, Matt Belamy, but you could just do 'good' instead

Are Muse shifting from being challenging to, well, just becoming show offs?:

The trio also revealed that the album could feature the "hardest song" frontman Matt Bellamy has ever written.

"There is a new song in three parts, more of a symphony than a song, which I have been working on sporadically for many years," said the singer, answering another question. "As a large percentage of the composition is orchestral, I have never wanted to collaborate with a string arranger as they may make it 'theirs'. So I have been arranging the orchestral elements myself, which is taking a long time. It should hopefully make the next album as the final three tracks."

To play the track live, concluded Bellamy, he will have to clone himself a minimum of six times - and he intends to do that for himself, too, as these Korean cloning labs always want to mix in a bit of their own DNA.

Muse become the anti-Elbow

At the end of the week when Guy Garvey moaned and moaned and moaned about how people won't buy all the tracks off an album if you let them pick and choose, Muse have decided to more or less give albums the chop and give the people what they want. Matt Bellamy explains:

"I don't think we're going to approach the next album like we're making an album," Bellamy revealed. "I like the idea of releasing a series of songs, every month or every couple of months - just putting songs out there.

"Almost like making the single a more prominent format, and then every few years doing a best of from that period and that would be the album. So in other words, throw out songs every couple of months and see how people like them."

Here come the saviours - they've got electric guitars in their hearts

We're not entirely sure that, well-meaning though Al Gore is, holding a massive series of gigs to try and save us from climate change is quite the best way to go about it. Still, nobody wanted to shout down his enthusiasm and so we're now looking at Live Earth on July 7th.

Muse might be on board, but they're at least aware of the inherent contradiction:

Frontman Matt revealed there might be a scheduling problem for the band, which could determine whether they take part or not:

"There's an issue. We've got a gig that same day in Ireland, so we need to work out if we can make it or not, that's basically what it depends on."

The band laughed off suggestions of 'doing a Phil Collins' and chartering a jet or helicopter to ensure they can take part:

"Private jets for climate change?! Not sure about that! That seems a bit on the edge to me. That's actually the issue to be honest, so we need to think about it."

If they really wanted to do something for climate change, they'd hold thousands of microgigs, just round the corner, that you could walk to, instead of seven or eight monster gigs that people will cumulatively travel millions of miles to get to. And we can't wait to see what sponsors get on board to pretend to care - what price "save the world - drink Coke"?