Bad career move no.64

just to prove i'm not obsessed with music - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/aston_villa/7386252.stm.

what the bloody balls do you think you're doing, Patrik? how on earth was this ever going to be a wise move? too many footballers make unnecessary statements these days, and it only serves to make them all seem like petty, stupid, idiotic little dickheads. for proof, see anything Jens Lehmann has ever done.

first thing tomorrow, i'm phoning Kerrang! to tell them all our bands would be better off signed to major labels. sheeeeesh...

Fruitless endeavours no.136

http://www.nme.com/news/coldplay/36222
in their latest attempt to get anyone from outside the M25 to give a monkey's nut about the magazine, the NME are repeating the overwhelming success they had when doing a similar thing with The White Stripes a while back.

can't help thinking that although this is a brilliant move for Coldplay to get new music out and create a bit of a stir, all it'll succeed in doing for the NME is to bump up their sales figures dramatically for one week, before all the people who wouldn't usually buy the mag go back to reading Q. your average Coldplay fan isn't into day-glo colours and The Latest Hot Fad Band Around For 11 Minutes, and that's just kinda how it is.

good luck to all involved though. we need a thriving indie bible in this country - i'm just not sure if this is the right way to achieve it.

Bill Clinton gets Punk'd (Hilary's campaign WISHES...)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7365845.stm

nice to see Bill take time out from watching his insane megalomanic-in-matrimony fail at pollytix long enough to appreciate the little guy.

however patronising it might seem to say something like

"While I am proud of my contribution in bringing about the Agreement, I know that no government policy can truly succeed without the grassroots efforts of the people those policies would effect."

it's still good to see that the once most powerful man on the planet is recognising the efforts of others, even if it is just another excuse to shoehorn John Peel and that bloody Undertones song into a news story on the BBC site. shame old punk is fucking gobshite, really.

next week, George Bush Snr thanks a school dinner lady in Wales, causing this file photo to be used:


and subsequently allowing Steve Lamacq a rapturous leap back into the limelight for 30 seconds in order to tell 'that' story. hurrah!

I swear we're gonna need a union soon...

so the band i'm in, Flash! Flash Flash! Photography, had our first ever 'band meeting' last night. despite not being enough like one of Murray's meetings in Flight Of The Conchords, it was a successful venture. we're going on tour in late May / early June, and it had become an incredibly cluttered state of affairs trying to keep everyone up to date with the things that two of us were organising and relaying to the others via email strains where we just wanna take the piss out of each other. plus, and i'm guessing there's nothing particularly special about this, we're the kind of guys who go:

WOULDN'T IT BE MEGA AWESOME IF WE TOOK A SMOKE MACHINE AND TROOP OF NINJAS ON TOUR WITH US!!!???

and, y'know, there had to come a time where we had to sit down and work out the feasibility of things like this*. and so, the regular patrons and staff of The Angel pub, just off trendy London town's famous Denmark Street, were last night treated to the sight of five fully grown men (combined age 135, average maturity 15) with agendas and Alpine Lager discussing how we'd make Flash! On! Tour! work.

now, i'm not going to prattle on about what was decided, but it did make me think about the inner-workings of bands. we're not a full time band, and, the occasional Lostprophets support slot aside, we're not making any attempts to Make It And Get Famous, meaning that this tour and its logistics, given that we all work five days a week, is a pretty big deal for us. there's decisions on how we travel, what gear we need, where the ruddy hell we're playing and how much we can reasonably lose on each date before what started off as a normal hobby fork-out ends up leading to bankruptcy. suddenly you realise, this isn't a band going on tour, and nor is it a Sum Of Its Parts situation - it's five people's lives, and what one person thinks is perfectly reasonable might rub someone else completely up the wrong way.

for us, from the start, the premise for this band was to just have a laugh and get drunk with our mates whilst playing some songs. which is cool, but when you're planning a tour, or planning recording, or whatever, you soon find out that having that collective decision making mentality will always make everything five times more complicated. oh how glorious it must be to be in Weezer. you get a call from Rivers:

"yeah, i've written the new album. learn it. we're going on tour in a few weeks. you will be available."

but in real life, we're all well aware that it works nothing like that. and, to be honest, despite it being relatively pain free, it shouldn't work like that. the personality traits and lifestyles that go into creating your material should also be prevalent in the inner workings of your band. at the very least, having the freedom within a band to say you disagree with a decision says more to me that you're all in it for the right reasons than any amount of punk rock posturing about togetherness, especially when 60% of the members are beyond gutted that you've ended up with a t shirt design done by the GCSE art student little brother of your ego-maniac singer (hi!, by the way).

whilst i realise none of what i've just said is in anyway groundbreaking or anything other than the completely fucking obvious, it's simply nice, on a personal level, to recognise that i'm part of something that, regardless of its size, is still working in a democratic manner. and it's just as rewarding to feel that i'm going to be spending an awful lot of time in a few weeks with four other twentysomethings that i'm comfortable voicing the opinion

"i am NOT having anything to do with fucking ska"

with, and who i'd expect something equally blunt from in return.

Democracy rulez, ok.




*for anyone wondering, we could probably afford the smoke machine, but the ninjas were fucking ridiculous money. stealthy wankers.

Cynicism that knows no bounds...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/music/newsid_7360000/7360670.stm

great. well done. you've sold a bajillion albums, toured all over the world, and what, watched one Al Gore documentary and now you're the saviours of the planet? give it a fucking rest lads. are you paying back all the carbon footprint that's been trodden all around the globe in your name before it became Hot Topic 2007/2008? or are you actually just rinsing the latest bandwagon in another self-righteous attempt to appeal to short-sighted wannabe liberals? get knotted.

i'd love to be proved wrong and be given a run down on how 'green' Radiohead have been through the course of their career, and i'd happily apologise out loud for it. but as far as i'm aware, the band have only got to where they are (music being put firmly aside here in favour of objectivity) through being heavily funded by major labels and leaving a trail of carbon around the globe comparable to any other band of their size. whether it's planes, trains, automobiles or simply the manufacturing of bucketloads of promo CDs for Paranoid Android - it all adds up.

so, basically, screw them, and screw their trailblazing DOWNLOAD OUR ALBUM bullshit (try that if you've not been reaping major label efforts for over a decade) and screw their sudden interest in the environment. plant some trees or be green on the quiet or something, but just give it a bleedin' rest.