No Rock And Roll Fun

WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY DISAPPOINTING QUARTER ROUND EXIT EDITION
slightly later than usual, with this week's excuse being that we've had to swap offices and every time we settled down to snort derision at the nme, someone came in to find out why we weren't carrying bricks down five flights of stairs...

anyway, it's allowed the new statesman to get to us, timely, with a piece on rock festival food by the wonderful Bee Wilson. She's slightly unfair to Glastonbury, since she hadn't been there since Park Life, and when we last went, its catering was actually vastly better - even spicy goat, if you like that sort of thing. But her summation of the food at festivals sums up the problem with the open air rock behemoths, and Glasto especially, pretty well: "The merchandise is promoted as engendering 'community' or multicultural fraternity. The consumer is encouraged to feel that the transaction is less selfish, on both sides, than normal. But it is really about commerce, with all its concomitant lies and disappointments. What the vendors sell you is the 'counter-culture'. What you buy are just commodities."...

so onto the nme (16 page guide to all the festivals) - the prodigy are on the front with - ha, you'll like this - a mocked-up Wild West wanted poster thing going on. Isn't that original? Certainly the first time I've seen a cover like that since, ooh, the nme went glossy, at the very least...

news: queens of the stone age to promote new album with 'lurid' novel (i.e rubbish book, rubbish stunt, rubbish album); there's a report from Michael Jackson's UK trip (he did some mad, mad things); U2 are the world's biggest earning band - $61.9million in 2001. So, Bono, why don't *you* sort out some of the world's debt? Or do you need to buy some more cool shades?; Kenneth Anger is pissed off that Death In Vegas have called their new album Scorpio Rising - lucky for him, probably, that he never came across Pop Will Eat Itself's scally chums who used the name for their band; The Charlatans have been booted from headline slot at Glasto for a mystery band, who are The Stereophonics (commodity band wins out); even if the wedding certificate for Jack and Meg White was genuine, surely the divorce certificate has to be a fake?; Chris Martin wore Ian Mac's coat to record a track for the new album; for the rest, he was apparently happy to wear Travis' clothes. It's unlikely either fitted well...

on bands: The Beatings - interesting not for anything other than being a slight anagram of a Michael Franti band; The Liars - did anyone order more wacky punks? No?...

Raging Sppedhorn are invited to list things they hate. They choose Lostprophets, German discos, Spanish police (because they arrested simply because they got pissed and started smashing up people's cars - fancy); German service stations; Rammstein; Cradle of Filth's backing singers and dancers (because - erm, they trapped one in a portaloo and shook it so she got covered in shit); New York; Girls; their fans and each other...

Nelly. He has a girl's name. Interestingly, the NME ask him about his kids, and he shuts down. He denies they exist, then refuses to talk about them. Strangely touchy, don't you think?...

The Parkinsons shake onto a ten track CD, choosing suicide and the clash and the shangri-las, so that's alright then...

"If that shit is all true that our government knew about that shit, [that Bush knew about September 11th in advance], I've lost faith in what our government represents" - Papa Roach lose faith in George Bush shock. The shock being - what sort of faith did these chumps have in him before? No wonder the bloody US is in such a state, when the smelly unwashed shouty bands have faith in the process...

Here are the old men: Keith Flint has less hair, his face is as wrinkled as Eneglbert Humperdink's penis. What do you do when you get old? It's more than a little sad - the bits of metal are still in his face, they still think we'll be shocked by bums in videos and songs about drugs. The only thing that's moved on is time. The Prodigy haven't, and like that other comeback band of this year, Oasis, you can see the strain of trying to pretend to be 18 is really starting to show. "I'm not excited by drugs any more" complains Keith. So why should we interested in you pretending to be? Why have they bothered to make more Prodigy records? What is it burning, pushing them to create, to form, to fashion? "It's our job" says Liam. You'll find the clockcard machine over there...

the pull out festival special - which is more half arsed and sorry than ever this year, of course, like the festivals themselves, lists 30 things you must do at festivals this year (buy a digital camera; have the ultimate festival phone experience - sponsored by orange, of course; don't jump the fence; don't build big fires - be GOOD. Consume.) Number one is to watch Coldplay. I fear for you, the kids...

albums - cam'ron - come home with me ("imaginative enough to leave the ghetto", 6); kid 6060 - the action packed mentalist... ("a soundtrack of our lives", 7); my ruin - blasphemous girl ("sacrilige and S&M guitars", 7)...

sotw - vitalic - poney ep ("disco bon jovi hedonism"); the oasis stop crying your heart out debacle rates "a lachrymose slure through the Noel book of emotional cliches")...

live: new order in finsbury ("justification for their continued presence"); get up kids in west hollywood ("decided to grow up"); the vines in new york ("about to become extremely important"); apparently the Isle of Wight festival's been and gone, and nobody noticed...

finally, the nme (or at least James Oldham) has got a party line on burning and downloading: "Our stance is... record companies used to say home taping was killing music, and of course it wasn't. The whole issue of downloading music is the same argument with different knobs on." 'Course, we might have been more impressed if you'd not waited to see what it did to your ad sales before coming out with an opinion - 18 months after the Napster wars is a little late to come up with a party line...