Saturday, May 03, 2014

Eurovision 2014: Brotherhood of Man choose Selsey over Copenhagen

As part of this year's Eurovision Song Contest, there's some sort of massive revival event taking place in Copenhagen on the night of the finals. Brotherhood Of Man were invited, but the money's better for them to play a holiday camp in Selsey ("they've chosen to play a date in Sussex instead".)

Adrian Douthwaite, head of entertainment at the park, said: “It’s a real coup for Bunn Leisure to boast two of the biggest Eurovision bands of all time on the big party night – there’s no better place than here to enjoy it.

“It’s so exciting that Brotherhood of Man has decided to be at Bunn Leisure, especially on the night of the actual final itself.”
Yes, because there's only one place Eurovision fans will be on the night of the Eurovision Song Contest finals, isn't there?

(Hint: I suspect not at Bunn Leisure.)

Bucks Fizz are playing the same event, which suggests they might not even have been asked to Copenhagen.


Tony Hadley abandons Coffee Club for brewer's arms

Tony Hadley's invented a whole new beer, although the photo from the Gazette & Herald makes it look like he's been made to do it as some sort of punishment:

Naturally, the headline writers have an opportunity to shoehorn in some references to Spandau Ballet's back catalogue:
Tony Hadley’s new golden ale sure to be a true hit
I don't think they quite got that to work, did they?

Hadley explains his ale:
He said: "I love it when you're sat outside of the pub on a summers evening and you've got a beautiful golden ale that just goes down so easily.

“That's the kind of drink we want to make; a brilliant, brilliant summer ale."
Not one of those difficult to drink beers that defy gravity, or are shaped like pianos. This one will be liquid and flow downwards through the throat. "I bet if Duran Duran made a beer, it'd be an awkward beer that had seen too many French films or something. And yeah, it might still be able to be served in one of the really big pubs, but that's because it's just content to churn out the old hits and doesn't have any integrity, right?" he mumbled, before pulling another pint, downing it in one and carrying on.
"Every now and again people are going to want something different so we are trying to give everyone a little bit more flavour.

"When you make a beer you want it to be the best tasting beer you can imagine. I think it is going to be fantastic."
"... you know, like that time we re-recorded all of our best songs for a new studio album. That was to give people some flavour. It wasn't trying to squeeze the last beer out of an old pipe or nothing. It wasn't like that at all. It was fantastic."

By the way, if you're thinking "well, at least Hadley didn't do the cheesey thing of calling his golden beer something like, say, Hadley's Gold"; he couldn't. He'd done that with a previous brewing adventure. ("Moving north" in that story appears to be a code for "closing down").


Everywhere PR is in chains

This is Chains, who are pretty good (it's Ben out of Ben and Jason, and Kate who once supported James Blunt but don't hold that against her):

However, they really need to sack their PR company, which has sent out a press release with, perhaps, the most ungainly line in it ever written:

Ben's ears met Kate's larynx across a crowded recording studio in October 2006.
Really? How many redraftings did that line survive?

In other PR news, was delighted this morning to find an email addressed to someone else with a lot of detail about what this PR would do for this other person, followed by another - five hours later - asking me to ignore the earlier email because they'd intended to send out a totally different one.

The PR company in question? Effective Immediately. Although taking five hours to notice you've sent the wrong email to the wrong person suggests they're neither particularly effective, nor especially immediate.


Lee Ryan: The man who pisses in the cells

Lee Ryan, trying to find some sort of reason for driving while drunk, refusing to give a sample, swearing at police and pissing in a cell, decided to use the defence that he was upset because he got a lot of online abuse after going on Celebrity Big Brother.

Because that sort of behaviour is the way to stop people on Twitter calling you a low-wattage cockgriddle.

Ryan explained pissing on the floor because he didn't know there was a toilet in the police station, although he appears to have been so drunk he might have had more credibility if he claimed he thought there was a toilet in the cell.

His Twitter feed has vanished overnight, but he still has some defenders on there:


Actually, I hadn't thought of that one. That's pretty funny, SoapyHannah.


Friday, May 02, 2014

Bloom fades

Self-proclaimed niche-streaming service, Bloom FM, has closed after their backer, TNT, suddenly yanked funding.

The service is looking for a buyer; it reckons it has a week to save itself.


The return of Alanis

Oh, sure, The Trip To Italy might have helped Alanis' Jagged Little Pill back into the album chart.

But let's not overlook the other cultural event which threw attention back on that album...

Who really controls the hit parade - Rob Brydon or Victoria Coren Mitchell? I think we all know the answer.


Wednesday, April 30, 2014

MTV launches stalker-friendly app

It's not an actual stalker app, of course. It purports to show your places where someone you know might be "so you can avoid them". Which is, like, totally the opposite of what a stalker would do. Except for the 'gathering information about a person's movements' bit.

The Things I've Done To Impress Women blog goes into more detail, and even took the time to ask MTV's PR company, Insider, about why they'd launch such a terrible thing. (Although given this is a privacy worry, I might have redacted the PR guy's direct phone numbers from the screengrab.)

Insider seem okay with it - all the information is in the public domain, so that's alright then. When Jon from TTIDTIW points out that it's the aggregation which is creepy, Insider's response is that he should "blog about it, then".

All publicity, of course, being good publicity.

Seriously, MTV: When did you start being quite so creepy? Is the terrible TV show you're showing really worth attaching your name to this sort of thing?


Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Heavy Metal Thunder

Quite rightly, the identity of the child accused of the horrible murder at a Leeds school yesterday isn't being made public. Not that that has stopped the Daily Mail trawling up enough information to take breaching the spirit of the law up to the very boundary of breaching the letter of it.

And it's here that we see the resurrection of one of the tabloid press favourite tropes: It was heavy metal's fault:

On his Facebook page, along with the Grim Reaper drawing and links to British heavy metal bands Enter Shakari and Bring Me The Horizon, he had posted a picture of himself dressed in black with long hair.
Links? To Enter Shikari? Wearing black with long hair? Clearly, we're dealing with the devil's music here.

It's obviously metal's fault, right?

Except the Mail doesn't even seem certain he is a metalhead:
Another ex-pupil said the 15-year-old often went into school carrying Jack Daniels and beer and that he was a ‘goth’ who drew circles on the floor, claiming to worship the devil.
In subsequent coverage, we're expecting the Mail to also discover he was bobbysoxer, a mod AND a rocker, and a hepcat of dubious renown.

Still, goths and metalheads are at least united by the long hair thing, right? That's something the Mail can cling to.
But neighbours [...] said he had recently cut his hair very short.
Oddly, the Mail neglects to seize on this detail, misunderstand it and over-inflate it into somehow lumping him into the violent cult of skinheaded thugs.

I can understand the Mail's problem here - there's a question 'how could this happen? who could do this?' hanging over everyone's heads this morning, and there are no answers. For a paper which lacks morals and ethics, and apparently believes the world functions on a level of the simplicity of a Fred Basset cartoon, looking at a couple of things the boy liked and deciding they're somehow relevant is the obvious thing to do. It's probably because Viscount Rothermere and Paul Dacre listen to a lot of Wagner.


Sunday, April 27, 2014

Damon Albarn not quite the troll he's been presented as

It sounds like a fairly obvious attempt at annoying former Blur fans when seen through the headline prism:

Even the BBC were pushing this line, as that was the line being pulled for the front of the BBC site yesterday.

But... it's not quite what he said, is it? He was jumped at the end of a Newsnight interview and asked the question; first he dismissed it as "not a very grown up question" for the programme (he clearly hasn't seen Newsnight much recently) before answering.
Yes, he did say that Oasis were better. But then, as the film ended...
... he explained that he was saying this in the context of "communicating who they were". Which is actually a pretty clear dig at Oasis' one-dimensional nature rather than a capitulation that the shoddy plod of Be Here Now was of higher cultural value than, say, 13.

Note to the BBC: next time, you should try stipulating what you'd like to know what Oasis might have been better at.


This week just gone

Five years ago today, these were the popular stories:

1. The NME's confused Beth Ditto naked cover
2. MP3 download: Eric's Trip
3. Man makes altered version of Beyonce singing to prove some sort of point
4. Guy Ritchie moves in next door
5. Fall videos off of YouTube
6. The Music Magazine closes
7. NME Awards shortlist
8. HMV announce plans to open cinemas
9. BBC warn 'no digital radio switchover in our lifetimes'
10. Sarkozy throws money at MGMT until they believe he's sorry

Look, it was Easter. Obviously not much came out:


Fear Of Men - Loom


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Beverley Martin - The Phoenix And The Turtle


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