Gordon in the morning: Where the mainstream starts

Apparently John Leslie is on the up:

JOHN LESLIE’s trying to take another step back into the mainstream by starring in a video for a new band.

So what is this "mainstream" band, then?

He appears in a promo for VIGO THIEVES’ track Ghosts.

The who?

The Vigo Thieves are a band so far from "the mainstream" that they've had their Wikipedia page deleted due to obscurity.

And where did the band talent-spot Leslies?

The former Blue Peter presenter signed up for a part in the clip after the band’s singer STEVIE JUKES spotted him on daytime TV and thought he’d be perfect for a role.

Is it just me, or is going from daytime TV to a fairly obscure pop video the precise opposite of the moving into the mainstream?

CBGB festival closed as former bassist 'stabs' replacement

While Bloc was falling apart in London, New York's highest-profile festival was also suffering a shutdown of its own. It appears that former member of Cro-Mags Harley Flanagan turned up at the band's set and, it's claimed, stabbed two people.

ABC news has some details:

Around 8:15 on Friday, EMS and police responded to New York City nightclub Webster Hall for a stabbing.

When EMS arrived, they found one of the victims had been slashed, and the other had been bitten.

Sources say that the two injured men were members of the band that was performing on Friday night. Both victims are expected to be okay.

There's been some, uh, creative work done on Flanagan's Wikipedia page, which currently claims he had set fire to a Philadelphia playground - a story about someone else pasted in with a find and replace on the name. It also has a summary of the events of last night, which I'm suspecting might fall short of Wikipedia's demands for accuracy and citation:

On July 6th 2012, he was arrested for stabbing and biting current members of The Stonecutters Social Club backstage at Webster Hall in NYC, protesting their "No Homers" admittance policy,while clearly allowing Homer Glubnick into the fold. He was then taken into custody by the NYPD. While being put into the back of the police officer's car he could be heard screaming, "I was the one who ate the foot off of the Jesus in St. Peter's Cathedral." It is not known whether the foot was recovered. Foot was allegedly from the Age of Quarrel, roughly 300 years before the ascent of Elizabeth I.

Hopefully that's made things clearer.

Tom Dickins takes on SOPA

As part of the internet sort of went dark yesterday ("I can turn something called javascript off to see Wikipedia. What's javescript, thought? I know, I'll check Wikipe... nooooo...") Tom Dickins made his own protest, sending an open letter to remind Congress that the copyright industry doesn't actually speak for everyone who makes things:

This is the economic reality of being a musician in the 21st century. The people who can and want to spend money on your music, will. The people who either can’t or won’t spend the cash will ALSO support you! They will rock up to your gigs, spread the word to their 100 friends and it will ripple outwards and reach unfathomable distances. The possibilities are so much greater now compared to the days when it took being signed to a big label to get you on Video Hits.

To underline the point, he also made his music available for free as well.

Those So Solid Crew members in full

In case you missed it because of the working week, and because of Wikipedia suddenly getting all up in your face about "accuracy", Enemies Of Reason and Profanity Swan both captured the full list of So Solid Crew members that appeared earlier this week.

The illustrated Hello: Saints and sinners

Yes, yes, The Beloved mean they're welcoming you whatever your track record of morality is like. But Saints And Sinners are also a not-quite-glam, not-quite-hard rock band from Canada.



"The band released one album, Saints & Sinners in 1992, but the grunge movement in the early 1990s ruined the bands chance of having a big breakthrough" complains Saints And Sinners' Wikipedia entry, happily overlooking their not being much cop as a greater liability.

[Part of the Illustrated Hello

Madonna: Or, to put it another way...

The bust image of a middle-aged blond woman with deep-blue eyes. Her hair is parted from the middle and falls in waves upto her neck. She is wearing a brown and black printed dress with the front open. A black chain is wound around her neck. She is looking slightly towards the right of the image and smiling.

That's the alt text from the main image on the Madonna Wikipedia. It's very detailed, but... has Madonna fallen so far from popular acclaim that a full description of her stance is going to mean more to people than her name?

How the news was broken

From the revisions page of Wikipedia:

(cur) (prev) 22:49, 25 June 2009 TexasAndroid (talk | contribs) m (119,637 bytes) (Removed category Living people (using HotCat))

One day, being removed from the Living People category will replace a death certificate, won't it?

Meanwhile, Darryl1974 on Twitter pointed out how a "Michael Jackson's died" rumour is an annual staple at Glastonbury raising the possibility that someone was still starting the rumour just as it was coming true.

Wild west wiki: Lil Wayne

Wikipedia. It's a wonderful source of information, isn't it? Imagine you wanted to know something about Lil Wayne, for example. Everything you need to know.

Of course, yesterday evening at 8pm, Lil Wayne's entry was a little more pithy. But it still told you everything you needed to know.

Amusingly, on the Wikipedia Talk Page for Lil Wayne, there's currently fevered debate over if you can trust YouTube - because:

a documentary posted by an anonymous uploader on YouTube can't be treated as a documentary at all. There needs to be credibility and reliablity in the publishing chain, or the source isn't reliable.

That was, erm, Kww who said that.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Darkness at 3AM: Who is the enemy?

This is actually from yesterday's 3AM column, the latest one available online. The Enemy have been planting trees as part of a volunteer initiative - which is admirable. We had our eye caught by Tom Clarke's quote, though:

"Giving up a bit of our time opened our eyes to the difference volunteers can make to ordinary people's lives."

How nice that - despite hitting 41 with their latest single - Clarke can still find some time to help out the ordinary people. It's expected he'll also help the poor folks and the little guys in other initiatives later this year.

Just a side note, though: hats off to whoever added the words "The band have never heard any records by The Jam" to the Enemy's Wikipedia entry. Twice.

Researching Victoria Newton

Talking of the queen of pop gossip, Twangfreak dropped us a line yesterday pointing us in the direction of Victoria's Wikipedia entry.

Amongst the many delights in the revisions is a plea added by IP address 143.252.80.100:

Made request for neutral sources and removed biased ones

Of course, 143.252.80.100 is an IP address which points to News International - you've got to love someone from the Sun's offices pleading with people writing about Victoria Newton to restrict themselves to "neutral sources" and ignoring "biased ones" - how long Bizarre be filled if Newton herself applied those standards?

Reach for the Wikipedia

Ronnie Hazlehurst did not write S Club 7's Reach. Why would you think he did?

It might be because BBC News, The Guardian, The Times, The Stage and Reuters all said he did, in their obituaries of the TV theme king.

But why would they think he did?

Because Wikipedia told them so, and so when the - hurried, harried - journalists came to write their obits for him, they just took the information at face value.

It's easy to be too hard on the writers - loads of people rely on Wikipedia for information every day, and hardly anyone bothers to cross-reference it anywhere else; and it's not only Wikipedia which plays host to bum information tucked into its usually-quite-reliable content. But did nobody stop to think just how unlikely it sounded that Hazlehurst would have contributed a song to S Club 7 - and just the one, mind? Even if it had been true, surely that strange combination of writer and act would have piqued the curiosity enough for a writer to want to dig just a little bit deeper as to the circumstances that brought such a thing into being?

Mind, as Karl T observed when he brought this to our attention:

The great thing about this sorry saga is that, by Wikipedia's rules, Ronnie Hazlehurst really *did* write 'Reach', since it can be cited from numerous sources.

Ronnie Hazlehurst wrote Reach for S Club 7. And Bob Holness played the saxophone on it.

Rage against the clock

There's been some sucking of teeth over behind the scenes at the Wikipedia Rage Against The Machine page; one contributor had suggested that, if you went to the RATM website and set your PCs internal clock to match the zero hour on the two countdown clocks, you would see details of some sort of secret gig:

Can anyone else verify this as well?

no i did this and cleared my cookies and cache and restarted the browser and it still counts down the same way (i.e. still says that theres XX days/hours/mins left). i'm removing the info from the article until someone can back up the claim (and even then it would be considered "Original Research" so... yeah).68.255.229.29 16:56, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

[...]

I can verify that it does indeed change the site. It says "August 24th, Alpine Valley" and that tickets will be on sale at 10am 6/16. I'd be happy to take a screenshot of it and upload it if you'd like. FireC 07:30, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

What's perhaps more interesting is the website at the heart of the excitement - ratm82407.com had its domain registered by LiveNation. Is it possible to Rage effectively against the Machine when a substantial part of that machine is handling your PR work for you?

Missing Tatu?

Alyson CFBgoespop emails us with a link and a question: what's all that about, then?

"That" is a wikipedia page promoting Finding Tatu, a film based on a book based on the band. The plot sounds a little Brookside:

The story is about two girls, Janie Sawyer (an American girl from New York, living in Moscow) and Lana (a Russian native), who become obsessed with t.A.T.u.. They become best friends, with crushes on each other, and attend a t.A.T.u. concert. While in Moscow, Janie develops a drug problem. The girls at some point end up killing one of their mothers. The two eventually end up in jail, and request to stay together for the rest of their imprisonment. As for the two girls who this story is based on, they are still in prison.

This is all, apparently, "based on a true story" and, even more oddly, promises that Sting will be involved with the film somehow.

Mind you, it also said the film would be premiering at Cannes this year - and we've not been able to find a trace of it. Perhaps it's all another one of the thousands of desperate attempts to try and keep the Tatu name spinning cash that never quite seem to come off.

Still, if it really is in the works, what a night out would the twin Eurovision Lordi and Tatu movies be, eh?

Robbie Williams is not a verified source of information

People seeking to discover the truth about Robbie Williams had better steer clear of Wikipedia, as online monkeys have trashed his page. If Wikipedia is all about capturing the wisdom of crowds, it seems the crowds have it in for Williams.

Concerned friend Victoria Newton is on the case:

His entry on Internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia was temporarily defaced, changing the name of his former band Take That to TAKE SMACK.

The joker then added that Robbie should have had his "ass kicked" by Oasis while they were hanging out together.

This makes me suspect it could be the work of an Oasis fan - especially as the GALLAGHER brothers have long had a feud with the Robster.

An Oasis fan, you think? Well done for narrowing it down so expertly, Victoria.

Williams has also told Simon Cowell he was right, which is the last thing you should say to him:

"Simon was quoted as saying: 'Britney and Robbie just need to get their shit together and go spend a few weeks with their mothers.'

"He's usually right about things. He's probably right about that."

Although, to be honest, that sounds sarcastic to us rather than a wholehearted endorsement of the eye-rolling Cowell's position on Williams' mental health.