I wrote an article for Musosguide (fantastic website, just had a redesign) which you can read here: http://bit.ly/neonmuseart

James Theaker of the Saturday Night Show on NME radio has written an, um, paragraph on, um, our music.  Here it is: http://bit.ly/neontheaker

The whole RATM for Xmas #1 campaign is pointless, useless, inappropriate, hypocritical, misguided, childish and a sad reflection upon our vapid society. That’s why I just bought a copy of Killing In The Name.

So Speech Debelle seems to be doing her level best to ruin her career by putting the blame on poor sales of her debut album squarely on Big Dada‘s shoulders.  With this and her atrocious cover of Pray by Take That getting her booed off the stage at the Take That Singstar launch and now getting more publicity than it deserves puts her in an unenviable position right now.  The BBC news article implies that the upset from the crowd led from the fact that “Debelle chose to rap her way through the 1993 hit single Pray”. Based on this, I decided to watch the video wondering what year it is when a crowd gets raucous based on the vocal stylings of a performer alone. After watching it, I realised the wording was entirely misleading. The crowd aren’t upset because she’s rapping, they’re upset because it’s awful. She half sings, half talks in an awkwardly rhythmically faithful rendition of the original that’s closer to William Shatner than any more obvious frame of reference. Nice one BBC, give the article an unnecessary provocative spin just to boost the readership.

However, this was nothing compared to the childish, needy, bullying James Corden decided to dish out afterwards. If there’s anyone less worthy of people’s praise, it’s James Corden. Faced with a crowd full of people booing, and evidently upset at the treatment of their beloved Take That song (fucking idiots in the first place then), he kicks off with “That was shit”. Wow, brave words big man. “LOL I CAN’T BELIEVE HE HAD THE BALLS TO SAY THAT!”. Debelle did herself no favours agreeing to perform at this event with an obvious disdain for the people the event was being held in aid of, but by the time Corden pulls out his “rapping is easy” stunt, thankfully drowned out beyond the first sentence by the caught-in-the-moment crowd, I have to do everything in my power to want to destroy the monitor in front of me. They’re not cheap you know.

Here’s another example of the shit baiting the crowd, devoid of personality and desperately craving the attention and the approval of others and willing to say anything to achieve it.  I watch as the video camera gets closer to his punchable grin hoping the camera man will lose all resolve and start beating him to unconsciousness poetically with the camera he’s always craved. No matter how many views, it never happens.

I’ll grant you that the first series of Gavin And Stacey was pretty good and well executed, but the second series just tread water and that Christmas special was like watching paint dry. If they wanted to capture the awkward boringness of Christmas without children to distract you, they did it.  It was inevitable there’d be a third series, it’s the only thing he’s done that isn’t a stain on mankind and he’s running out of options.  I watched a few minutes of his humour vacuum sketch show and have no desire to watch Lesbian Vampire Killers where I hear they put more effort into the attention grabbing title than the film itself.

Stop it James, please.

So band feuds are chic again. Never to miss a bandwagon, I’d like to say that Wild Beasts seem to keep forgetting to write any songs. Boff!

What’s the big deal? In this game I made Daley Thompson look really shit at athletics.