The Distractor

It's About To Kick Off...

2008-07-22T18:41:00.002+01:00

...and the broadsheets are busy talking up this year's potential winners. Part of this must be based on the previews, but part of it must be on gut instinct and therefore be of dubious reliability, but still, you assume that these people have some qualifications, know what they are talking about and their opinion may count for something. Or it could simply be a quick way of filling newspaper pages.

So, in no particular order, the Times mention Elizabeth and Raleigh (which judging by those involved just has to be worth a look), Hans Teeuwen (getting a few shouts, this bloke) and Umridge Swain, amongst 47 others; the Telegraph do a mammoth 100 reasons to go, and include Idiots Of Ants (very funny last year, for sure), Dan Antopolski (veteran, could go either way) and the ever-reliable Mark Watson; and the Guardian, always at the forefront with their coverage, again cover Teeuwen, as well as Daniel Kitson (great if a keeps control of his rambling) and John Pinette.

Lots of coverage of the Box Office woes, which as of today seem to finally be sorted; and finally one very good reason to avoid a show like a freeze-dried plague.

It Begins...

2008-06-08T14:08:00.002+01:00

So the programme is out, and speculation as to who this year's big names are going to be has begun in earnest. The usual suspects are present and correct - Mark Watson, Rhod Gilbert, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, Simon Amstell... Tim Minchin's back, after sensibly taking a year off, hopefully to write some decent songs... Otis Lee Crenshaw is always worth a punt...

One of my favourite shows from last year is back - Celebrity late-night quiz show We Need Answers, hosted in a very individual but charming style by Mark Watson, Tim Key and Alex Horne.

As to new names to watch out for, The Guardian blog mentions a few - Louis CK, Dan Nightingale etc. There's also interesting-looking Theatre, and as usual the Traverse is at the forefront.

This Edinburgh Comedy Festival thing is a bit odd, is it not? Is it actually a seperate festival? No, seeing as the venues involved are still selling tickets via the Fringe Box Office. Is it marketing? Yes, probably. All it makes me do is be more determined to visit venues not included in their little club- most notably The Stand.

The Story So Far

2007-08-17T08:37:00.000+01:00

Usually by this stage in the Festival you can get some feeling for possible award nominees, but this year it's difficult to see who is really getting the "buzz" - at least from this distance. By looking at the reviews, all that comes across is wild inconsistency, with several acts getting a slating in one paper, only to be praised to the rafters in another. Plus the lazier reviewers just seem to enjoy giving away the act's best jokes, which does nobody any favours.

Mark Watson seems to be one of the few acts to be universally praised - is the world finally waking up to his talents? Apart from a few lacklustre performaces on Mock The Week he's not really famous yet, but you do get the sense he's about to be. Could this be his year? The same could apply to any number of the "nearly famous" - Michael McIntyre, Adam Hills, Reginald D Hunter, Nina Conti, Lucy Porter - all getting decent notices, all regulars on the panel show circuit, none of them yet famous enough to be excluded from the awards roster.

What of the relative unknowns? Stephen Grant, Nick Doody, Steve Day, Izy Sutie, numerous interchangable angry Australians - all are getting reasonable write-ups, but nothing really leaps out as this year's "must-see". At least, not yet. Traditionally the pace picks up around now, and the If.Comeddie nominations are announced on Wednesday next week, so expect the promoters to really wheel out the big guns in the next few days.

The Fringe Survival Guide part two

2007-08-07T17:49:00.000+01:00

2. Plan Carefully.

To see everything you want is impossible, but with a bit of thought and planning you can see most things on your wish-list. It also helps if you're ever-so-slightly anal.

Some shows will sell out quickly: special offers, well-known comics, acts who did well the previous year. These will often be "known quantities", so should be a fair guarantee of enjoyment. Book up at least one evening of this sort of thing in advance. Then wait until the festival actually starts, read some reviews, sense who the buzz is about - and book up further shows then. Finally, always leave at least one evening unplanned until you get up there - some of the best shows you will see will be following the recommendation of someone you met in a queue.

When planning an evening of shows, take the city's geography into account. Try to book things on the same night at the same venue, if possible. You don't want to be tearing all over the city to get to your next show - you want to be gently supping a beer in the Pleasance Courtyard, acting all cultural and saying things like, "ooh look, it's Richard Herring."

Pace yourself too - leave time to chat, eat, drink and do all the things you would do in normal polite society. Shows will run late - leave at least half an hour between them.

Be democratic. It's best to go in a big group, so you will need to take everybody's views into account. Unless they suggest going to see Jimmy Carr, in which case ignore them by all means.

Vary what you see. You will quickly develop stand-up fatigue - the same jokes will start to appear, and you may even start to speak in the rhythms of the comic. Should this happen, either get someone to hit you (there should be an orderly queue forming amongst your party), or do something else for a bit. If all you like is comedy, see some sketch shows. Otherwise, see a play, see some art, even see some "physical theatre" (at some point every Fringe-goer must see some incomprehensible Polish interpretive dance - no-one will take you seriously otherwise).

And above all, relax. It's not worth getting too stressed about it all. If all else fails, you can just turn up at a venue and see the next thing going. If it's the worst thing you've ever seen, sit in a bar with your group and rant about exactly how shit it was. Some of my fondest Fringe memories are of doing precisely that.

The Fringe Survival Guide part one

2007-08-05T09:40:00.000+01:00

It's Sunday, it's early August and that can only mean one thing: The Edinburgh International Festival opens today. Rejoice! The rest of the country may be headed for the beaches, but the prospect of three weeks of non-stop comedy, theatre and general cultural hi-jinks renders The Distractor so excitable that it borders on the embarrassing. And anyway, the sun hurts our skin.

So, as part of the build-up to actually going up there (at which time things may well go quiet on this page - well, there are other things to do), we present some top tips for making your Festival experience as rewarding as possible. Starting with:

1. Avoid the big names.

It goes against the whole ethos of the festival. Surely it's better to see an eager newcomer with plenty to prove in an intimate dark room, rather than someone coasting to the converted in a cavernous, atmosphere-free enormo-venue? What would you rather tell people - that you paid seven quid to see a star of tomorrow in a sweaty bar, or that you paid thirty-seven quid to see a past-it fat bloke trot out his "ironic" unpleasantries in a castle? Yes Gervais, I'm looking at you.

The thought process goes something like this: "Do I really need to write a whole new show and flog it for the whole three weeks to forty people a night - or can I get away with three shows of recycled old stuff at the EICC?" If their answer is yes, then they've lost all respect for their audience and they have officially lost it. From that point on, you can easily catch them fronting TV panel shows, developing their sitcom or appearing in building society adverts, so don't bother wasting an hour on them at the Fringe. Your time is precious enough.

The Fourth Most Depressingly Influential Record Ever

2006-03-29T23:43:00.000+01:00

4. Bob Dylan- Blowin' In The Wind

"How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?" How many, Bob? Say, about, ooh, six? What's that? The answer is blowing in the wind? Well, thanks for that, Bob. Not at all wasting my time, then.

I've always been suspicious of lyric-heavy music. Music, for me, is about feel first, and if the words make you think well, that's a bonus. Poetry simply set to music feels forced or jarring. And musicians don't seem to be best qualified to tell me about the world - a coke-addled hedonist is more than welcome to cheer me up or bring me down with a well-executed chord change, but get them to try to explain my existence in the universe and they're on pretty rocky ground.

Not that I don't love Bob Dylan. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is a brilliantly surreal string of non-sequiturs, and his later work is wonderfully curmudgeonly - is there a more world-weary chorus than "I used to care, but things have changed"? But "Blowin' In The Wind" was the first in a long line of cod-philosophical yawners, the first link in a chain that ended with Sting singing about blue turtles.

My main problem with this song is that it inspired many, many oh-so-earnest singer-songwriters with lesser talents to have a go. Chris Martin, a would-be philosopher who contributed to Q magazine's recent Dylan tribute issue, sang "Climb up, up in the trees, Every chance you get, is a chance you seize." (Speed Of Sound). Which may apply to monkeys but says nothing to me about my life. Coldplay understudies Embrace are currently boring the arse off the charts with "Nature's Law", which features such platitudes as "you should never fight your feelings, when your very bones believe them... You have to follow nature's law." Yes, I'm sure that will stand up in court.

Alanis Morrisette, Oasis, Pete Doherty, all are guilty of producing lyrics which intend to be profound but in the end signify nothing. And it all started with Bob, and lines like, "how many times must a man look up, before he sees the sky?" Well, that one's easy. Assuming he's outside, just the once.

Stand-Up Misery

2006-03-24T15:50:00.000Z

The Distractor is a keen friend and supporter of The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and this August, as last year, we will be reporting from the festival, recommending what we think are the stand-out shows and warning you of the ones to avoid. So a film all about the festival should be right up our street, shouldn't it?

Annie Griffin's Festival is possibly the most depressing film about comedy ever made. Tackling subjects as varied as post-natal depression, child abuse, suicide, alcoholism, adultery and fisting, it follows various characters performing in and working around the Fringe. Altman-style, they interact, mostly either arguing with or shagging each other.

Two characters come off worst - the attractive, ambitious and fantastically untalented female comic, and a complete arse of a successful comic who just has to be based on Steve Coogan. But in truth, no-one comes off well. Comedians are variously depicted as whiny, self-obsessed, manipulative and generally dysfuctional. Journalists are world-beaten cynics, critics are self-important tossers (one lambasts a comedian for openly "trying to get a laugh"). The only vaguely sympathetic characters are the young drama students: innocent, passionate about their work, and performing the most pretentious bollocks you can imagine.

The talent on display is certainly impressive. Writer and Director Annie Griffin continues to show the mix of subtlety and surrealism she displayed on the fantastic "The Book Group", and the cast is made up of pretty much every up-and-coming young comic actor. It's an engaging story, and it does have some interesting things to say about how comedians, and in particular comedy promoters, have hijacked the festival. It's an accurate, if very glass-half-empty representation of what the festival is like. But it does forget that it is entirely possible to go along to the festival and actually, you know, enjoy yourself.

The Fifth Most Depressingly Influential Record Ever

2006-03-18T11:05:00.000Z

All that is bad about music today is a result of the records we're about to count down - not necessarily the worst records of all time, but those that exerted the most negative influence. The world is a slightly poorer place for each of these. Feel the heckles rise...

5. Starship - Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now
The three components of this particular axis of evil had been around for some time: the "rock ballad" had festered since the days of Stairway To Heaven, had the life sucked out of it by Chicago and been pummelled into submission by Jennifer Rush's "Power Of Love"; the movie tie-in, or the song which tells emotional cripples how to feel during the soppy bits of an action movie, had spawned Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" from Top Gun; and Diane Warren was but a jobbing songwriter penning fun stuff like DeBarge's "Rhythm Of The Night".

But in 1987 these planets became aligned and catastophe followed. What surprised everyone was how much of a success Diane Warren's composition "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" was, given that the movie from which it was taken (Mannequin - tagline: Just because Jonathan's fallen in love with a piece of wood, it doesn't make him a dummy) was shockingly awful, and that Starship were pretty much washed-up hacks. The secret was an unholy synergy: the film advertised the record, the record was an advert for the film, and, like turds polishing one another, both became a success.

So, as usual, the formula was repeated ad infinitum. Diane Warren became a specialist in weepy widescreen schlock (Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing", Leanne Rimes, the whole Celine Dion back catalogue) and, worst of all, inspired countless copycat atrocities (there's one in every single Disney film since). Because it was a doddle to write one.

Really. Here's how. Find a generic, meaningless yet vaguely positive title, preferably using words like "wanna" or "gonna". Start your first verse slowly and relatively quietly - your "artist" is going to want to save something for later. Use a minor key, as your shift into major for the chorus is going to be the bit when the hero pushes his way through the crowd to get to the heroine, so you want full tearjerk potential. Under no circumstances should you include a middle 8 - that's just confusing. Then a brief pause, a descending drum fill (you know, the one Phil Collins extended and made a career out of) and then into the final chorus. The artist loves this bit as it's where they can show off, doing all sorts of vocal gymnastics while leaving the basics of the song to the hired help.

So, to summarise: generic, unchallenging manupulative songs sung to order by people who'd be better off in Blood Brothers. Today, they live on in the likes of Westlife, as well as inside every X Factor auditionee. If and when Jordan and Peter Andre carry out their threat to release "A Whole New World", we will be able to play it to Diane Warren and say, "This is all your fault. Happy now?"

The Point

2006-03-16T10:39:00.000Z

After a brief but necessary period of reflection, I thought it worth re-stating our manifesto. We like to think of Popular Culture as an errant child. Because we believe in the principle of positive reinforcement, we occasionally like to point out the things it does well, and praise it generously for them. But sometimes that isn't enough, and an errant child sometimes needs stronger discipline.

We like to think of ourselves as a Young Offender's Institute for Popular Culture.

So welcome back to the Distractor: a place to think, a place to rant, a place to shelter from the deluge of excrement, a place to celebrate those little beacons of light in the dark, dark night. A place where it is never, ever, Chico Time.

The Ten Coolest Love Songs

2006-02-14T10:44:00.000Z

Look, The Distractor is not completely without sentiment. These are the songs that bring out the inner romantic, that make your heart sing (from an admittedly white, middle-class male point of view), and all without a whiff of cheese or a wave of nausea. Perhaps other readers etc.

Maybe I'm Amazed - Paul McCartney. Lord knows the man's written some cloying shit in his time, but he managed this understated masterpiece just before he lost it forever. The sound of someone who's fallen in love despite themselves.
Wake Up And Make Love With Me - Ian Dury. Ode to early morning shagging, a definite highlight of blissful domesticity. Discrete, too - "What happens next is private... it's also very rude."
All My Little Words - The Magnetic Fields. Or it could just as easily be "Absolutely Cuckoo", or for that matter pretty much any one of the songs off the magnificent 99 Love Songs album.
I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever) - Stevie Wonder. Terrific soul anthem that gains added resonance by being the song played at the end of High Fidelity.
Baby You're My Light - Richard Hawley. Simple statement of fact from the underrated Sheffield crooner.
Good Fortune - PJ Harvey. I can't think of a better tune to conjure up images of walking the streets with your head in the clouds, reeling from the thunderbolt.
It Must Be Love - Madness. Pretty much nails the facts of love - "Soon as I wake up every night, every day, I knw that it's you I need to take my blues away." Although, just imagine how horrible it could be in the hands of, say, Celine Dion.
Don't Falter - Mint Royale featuring Lauren Laverne. A sweet little pop-dance gem, and certainly the best record ever made by a presenter of CD:UK.
You Were Right - Badly Drawn Boy. Touching portrait of a relationship, wherein a feckless, music-obsessed dreamer eulogises his practical, loving wife. I can sympathise with that.
In Pursuit Of Happiness - The Divine Comedy. Freewheeling expression of the pure joy of love - being "totally, quite uncontrollably happy", and pleasingly obscure enough to completely baffle all but two people at my wedding.

The Ten Coolest Break-Up Records

2006-02-08T14:10:00.000Z

To counterbalance next week's saccharine-fest, and in honour of a friend who's just done this, here, in no particular order, are ten songs that help mend broken hearts through the healing powers of great music. Pick the one that best applies to you, or better still, suggest your own.

To The End - Blur. Nicely relates a relationship that has run its course in a reflective, matter-of-fact kind of way ("Been drinking far too much, and neither of us means what we say"), to a soothing, cascading tune. Nice bit of French, too.
Last Goodbye - Jeff Buckley. The definitve heartbreak song. Would make the Welsh Rugby squad's back row weep like little girls. Coldplay have made a career out of trying to live up to this.
Nobody's Fault But My Own - Beck. We're in self-flagellating territory now. A great done-you-wrong, I'm-a-twat lyric set to a mesmerising drone.
I Know It's Over - The Smiths. And while we're wallowing, this song from the kings of miserablism starts with the line "Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head", and goes downhill from there.
Song For The Dumped - Ben Folds Five. None-more-bitter tune from the piano-punk trio. How bitter? The chorus goes "Fuck you too, give me my money back you bitch." Yes, quite bitter.
99 Problems - Jay Z. For "alone-and-fine-about-it" anthems, girls get "Single" by Natasha Bedingfield, blokes get this bit of theraputic mysogyny. Blokes win.
No More Talk - Dubstar. This great little electro-pop band do sweet songs about stalking and pensioner violence, and here they tackle "the serious chat" with typical sensitivity and wit.
Frank Sinatra - In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning. No-one does ballads like Frank, but obviously he isn't the poor sap losing sleep waiting for his girl to call - you are.
I Will Survive - Cake. Brilliantly replaces the original's defiant exuberance with a world-weary, caustic sneer, and then adds some swearing.
Golden Slumbers - The Beatles. Just for the amazing air of finality - the last track on the last Beatles album - and for the last line "And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take." That's that then.

Arctic Monkeys - Don't Believe The Backlash

2006-01-31T11:10:00.000Z

Two things to get clear before we start. One: I'm not usually the type to go all gooey over bands proclaimed to be the Next Big Thing. I really don't see the point of Bloc Party, for example. Show me any number of Test Icicles, Forward Russia or The Kooks, and my reaction is likely to be something like "Yes yes, now run along sonny." That, and "Shouldn't you be in school?"

Two: I think Arctic Monkeys are fantastic. Their album, "Whatever People Think I Am, That's What I'm Not" (Domino) has camped out in my CD player, and snarls furiously at any CD that tries to usurp it. Full of Pop Hooks and fuzz-guitar theatrics, riddled with huge choruses and bags of attitude. It not only boasts wonderful lyrics (is there a better line in recent memory than "His bird thinks they're amazing though so all that's left, is the truth that love's not only blind but deaf"?) but each track is actually about something, a little potted summary of subjects like Love, lust, prostitutes, insincere bands, bouncers and moody girlfriends.

It's not perfect - there are probably one too many breakneck shout-alongs, and occasionally the lyrics are clever-clever rather than clever. But these are minor quibbles, and what's to complain about when they round things off with "A Certain Romance" - rollicking Zeppelin intro falling away to a lilting ska, describing all the things wrong with society and gently railing against them. Witty, exhilarating and yes, romantic, it's the closest the Arctic Monkeys come to genius.

So having established these things, you understand why I worry about this band, for make no mistake there will be a backlash. No band can hope to live up to the hype they're generating at the moment. As an example, last week NME voted this album the fifth best British Album of all time. That's "Of All Time". When the record had been out for three days. The same issue compared them favourably to The Clash, Oasis and The Stone Roses. Plus now that they're a bona fide success, people are likely to feel that they no longer need to be championed, and the easily-bored music fans like us will go off in search of the next Next Big Thing, be it The Young Knives, The Fratellis or whatever.

Arctic Monkeys seem to be brilliant. They're not original - these are old tricks but they're done very very well, and with a fresh twist. They may go on to be legendary, and their debut may come to be regarded as a classic. It's so hard to tell this close to all the hype. Remember how lauded Be Here Now was to begin with? Let's give it time.

In Praise Of Corporate Back-Slapping

2006-01-26T09:46:00.000Z

It's an odd thing, this: at the end of the year, the press (and many blogs like this one) spend ages deciding which music was the best. But it seems that a plaudit isn't worth anything until it's scrawled on the side of a tacky plastic bauble, and so the definitive "best of 2005" is decided at two award shows in February: The Brits and The NME Awards.

The Brit Awards is an industry celebration, rewarding those that have made the industry the most money in the last year. It's not a celebration of new talent, it's more like an AGM. I don't mean this in a derogatory way, I just mean we should take it for what it is, and accept that James Blunt and Katie Melua are just as likely to win as Kaiser Chiefs or Gorillaz. Anyway, it's not like anyone really remembers the winners. In 1998 the Best British Male and Female were that world-beating duo, Finlay Quaye and Shola Ama. Sonique won one in 2001. Go on, try to remember one of her songs. Even perennial underachievers Travis have won three, for Christ's sake.

But the awards are always worth watching just in case something kicks off. You don't need me to remind you of what can happen when rock stars meet free booze on live TV (for an account of the Brits' best disasters, see here). There's also the odd wild card award - like when impossibly fey indie-poppers Belle and Sebastian beat Steps to Best Newcomer, or when Grump-rock obscurities Eels won the international equivalent. It's those instances, when indie cool collides head-on with light entertainment on prime time ITV, that have you cheering at your screens.

The NME awards were initially set up as an alternative to the Brits. The Brats, as they were then known, were literally a one-fingered salute to a record industry that constantly rewarded Robbie Williams and Annie Lennox. These days, however, a look at their nominations reveals little difference between the two. This partly reflects the healthy state of guitar-based rock in today's "scene" (man), as well as the self-conscious "cooling-up" of the Brits. The presence of Babyshambles in the nominations also gives away the fact that these are voted for by the NME readers, and so are subject to fanaticism. Plus, the NME awards will only ever be shown on niche digital channels or at the very most, Channel 4 after midnight. It's difficult to get excited about a specialist music mag celebrating its own.

But if choosing between the two, it really comes down to this: who would you most like to see lose an award - James Blunt or Bloc Party? The Brits may be corporate entertainment, but with a bottle of wine and a few vocal personalities, it's a great evening's viewing.

Will The Insecure Publicity Whore Please Come To The Diary Room?

2006-01-20T14:30:00.000Z

Well, it couldn't last. There was a brief time, just after Christmas, when it seemed our airwaves were unsullied by reality shows. Then Celebrity Big Brother comes along and tramps muddy footprints all over our nice clean media hallway like a big filthy dog.

Chillingly, the makers of Celebrity Big Brother have gradually honed the programme so that the nastier elements are brought to the fore. They looked at the bits that people really remembered - the horribly public breakdown of Vanessa Feltz and Les Dennis - and said, "Now that's what we need more of." So they select a range of public figures as close to the edge as possible. Hence we get Michael Barrymore nervously eyeing the swimming pool, Jodie "damaged goods" Marsh lashing out at anyone within range, desperate attention-cravers like Pete "gorilla suit" Burns, and George Galloway just in time for a truly bizarre mid-life crisis. Put them all in close proximity, add some ritual humiliation and see who becomes the gibbering, whimpering husk first. Psychological cockfighting, that's what it is. Might as well poke them with sticks.

The trouble is, not all of the potential train wrecks on the list are available, so in order to make up the numbers the tabloids are trawled for Z-listers with time on their hands. Used to be one of the less memorable Baywatch Babes? Come on in! Singer in a third-division indie band? Why not! Ex-wife of seventies cop show actor? Where's her number? Actually, the genius bit this year is Chantelle, the non-celebrity. With such non-entities in the house, clearly nobody in there has heard of each other. She has to convince the others she's famous - which is, of course, exactly what all the others will be doing. Brilliant. It's as if the show is satirising itself.

It's compulsive viewing: compulsive in the sense that washing your hands till you bleed is compulsive. Watching it certainly isn't an enjoyable experience, you know you'll regret it, but you just can't help yourself. Because it encompasses all that is deplorable in the human condition, and you just hate yourself for enjoying it. You feel you'll never get clean again.

And you know that ultimately, the world will be a poorer place for it. The ropey second Ordinary Boys album will sell more copies than it deserves to. Chantelle will become an actual star, proving TV eats itself in the end. And as the taste envelope is pushed in pursuit of enthralling a public which is increasingly harder to shock, the stars they choose will get ever more contoroversial. Next year: Gary Glitter?

Oh Alright Then - The Best Music of 2005 (and potentials of 2006)

2006-01-02T16:21:00.000Z

The only point in these end-of-year best-of top ten lists really is to highlight some albums and artists that may have passed you by in the last twelve months. You will already know that albums by Franz Ferdinand, Gorillaz, Hard-Fi and Kaiser Chiefs are great; their precise order of merit is irrelevant. You may even have ventured toward albums by Editors, Elbow and Super Furry Animals from The Distractor's recommendations - and well done you if you did. And finally you could do a lot worse than seek out albums by Jose Gonzalez, Brendan Benson and Hot Hot Heat. There you go, there's ten.

But once the calendar clicks round to new year The Distractor likes to look forward rather than look back, and its hunger for things new and exciting becomes insatiable. So what do we have to look forward to? Well, it's make or break time for the Arctic Monkeys - you worry that they've given themselves too much to live up to. Also worrying is the news that The Streets' new album is to be a treatise on the "realities of the music business" - uh-oh - and that Scissor Sisters are "out to prove that they're no novelty band" - thereby completely missing the point of why people liked them in the first place. Hopefully Snow Patrol will be able to resist the temptation to do an album full of songs like "Run" - they're so much more than mere Coldplay copyists. Also imminent is the return of Radiohead - lord, please don't be shit - and the new Pet Shop Boys album is being talked up by the always readable and usually reliable Popjustice.

And what of the exciting new bands? Who is lined up to be the next medium-sized thing? Well, the good folk at Take Your Medicine are banging on about a couple, and that's usually reason enough to check them out - The Bridge Gang and Bromheads Jacket. Karma Download's tips for 2006 are worth seeing, but the pick of them for me is The Sunshine Underground - like The Music, only with tunes. You already know of The Pipettes - and the sneaking power-pop fan in me can't help but blurt out a love for Orson and The Feeling.

So 2005 - not as bad as all that, and plenty of reasons to be cautiously optimistic for the new year. Hopefully there'll be some musical atrocities too, otherwise we'll have nothing much to write about.

The Worst Single Of 2005

2005-12-31T15:01:00.000Z

Drumroll please.

1. "That's My Goal" by Shayne Ward
There was always a place reserved in this list for the X Factor winner (if it had been unexpectedly ok then Westlife would have occupied the top two spots and by God, deserved them both), but the speed and commitment with which it grasped the crown surprised even me. For "That's My Goal" is an astonishingly terrible record on so many levels. Let's examine a few.

Imagine for a moment that you're Simon Cowell (just to practice, give a big evil laugh and try to smell of sulphur). The X Factor is your own personal money making machine. Quite apart from the revenue generated by those phone lines every week, the programme gradually builds up an audience's emotional investment in your artist. You even get your audience to select which one will sell you the most records - it's like having the world's biggest focus group that pays you for the privilege. Give another big evil laugh.

So there you have your ready-made millions of customers, and when your hapless winner comes to record their single, all you really have to do is avoid putting them off. So the question you need to ask is this: what's the blandest thing on the menu? What's the least offensive song you can come up with?

Well, you need a tune that you think you've heard before. Throw a rock at any Westlife album and you'll hit at least eight suitable songs (actually, just throw a rock at Westlife). So take those, cut them up into small pieces, throw them up in the air and arrange them in any order you like. Add a fairly meaningless yet life-affirming, winning-against-the-odds type lyric ("You know that I need you, And can't breathe without you, Live without you, Be without you etc") and you're away. Don't worry that the phrase "That's My Goal" is more suited to a management training day than a love song - just think of those extra royalties come World Cup time.

Of course, the great record-buying public is much more sophisticated than that, and will happily buy fairly left-field records by unknown artists (even at Christmas - remember Gary Jules and Mad World?). But you didn't get where you are today by not underestimating the proles. You evil, despotic, shameful excuse for a human being. OK, you can stop imagining you're Simon Cowell now.

You do have to feel slightly sorry for poor Shayne, a mere pawn in this debacle. If he has any lasting musical success, it will be in spite of, rather than due to, his reality TV success. Look at the last two reality pop winners - one is now back doing the South London Pub Singer circuit, and the other is now chiefly famous for not being quite as fat as she used to be. Both were launched in similar circumstances. Blandness may sell records in the short term, but it doesn't win respect, coolness or lasting wealth. But of course that doesn't bother Cowell, as he's busy planning next year's treadmill. So be afraid.

By the way, the worst single of 2006 has already been decided. Happy New Year everyone.

The Most Mediocre Songs Of The Year

2005-12-28T12:12:00.000Z

In celebration of the middling...

10. "Since You've Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson
Just sort of passed me by.
9. "The One I Love" by David Gray
Didn't really move me either way.
8. "Breakdown" by Jack Johnson
Yeah, I can take it or leave it.
7. "Getaway" by Texas
They're just sort of there, aren't they?
6. "Dakota" by Stereophonics
Well, it wasn't completely awful.
5. "Have A Nice Day" by Bon Jovi
Ehhhhh.
4. "Tumble and Fall" by Feeder
Perfectly adequate.
3. "Suddenly I See" by KT Tunstall
Pffffff.
2. "No Worries" by Simon Webbe.
Nice enough.
1. "When I'm Gone" by Eminem.
Sorry, I wasn't listening. Did you say something?

The Second Worst Single Of 2005

2005-12-27T17:08:00.000Z

Hope everyone had a good Christmas. Now, back to the bile...

2. "You Raise Me Up" by Westlife
Earlier in the year, for a brief shining moment, it seemed the lovable Irish Stepford Sons were on the decline. Their album of Sinatra covers hadn't done as well as expected, and they had lost the one member who seemed to have any character at all - spade-faced doofus Bryan McFadden. But then everyone remembered that he, like the three other "background artists" in the band, never contributed that much anyway, and so sure enough they returned with no conceivable difference in their sound at all.

And that return was one desperate, last-ditch attempt to claw back their success. Every base had to be covered. Their fanbase had always been mums and nans, entranced by their nice-catholic, non-threatening good looks (a genius move, as such a fanbase would never grow up and get bored of them), and the blander their songs were, the more they sold. So "You Raise Me Up" is a bland, bland song about how great mums and nans are. Brilliant. All they had to do then was make the video a black and white picture montage of people hugging while the boys walk around in slow motion and emote unconvincingly, and bingo, a number one and a funeral staple into the bargain.

A huge, huge disappointment, since it wasn't the failure it should have been, and so proves they have no sell-by-date and will go on churning out sub-Lloyd Webber dirges until the end of time. How depressing is that? And it's a worry proven by their almost equally awful duet with Diana Ross. They are the second most evil force in music today, and it would take something truly breathtakingly terrible to beat them in this chart. Now, what can that be?

The Third Worst Single Of 2005

2005-12-22T12:42:00.000Z

3. "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas
You know how it is. After a hard day in the studio working on your diet-Fugees brand of pop, it's good to go out for a few beers. You get back, someone's left the drum machine running, so you kick back, have a few smokes and piss about with the microphones till everyone falls unconscious. You awake the next morning with an uneasy feeling, hoping to Christ no-one recorded that bollocks you spouted last night. But they did. And they released it as a single.

This is the only explanation I can think of for how "My Humps" came about (as well as, come to think of it, "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani). It has to be true, because the only alternative is that someone walked into the band meeting and said "You know, I've always wanted to do a song about my arse." At least I assume that's what she's singing about - unless she actually has a horrible spinal deformity, in which case I have completely misinterpreted the song and I apologise.

The worst thing is, the song has "hen night staple" written all over it. This is despite it having no discernible tune, and having a message which is the exact opposite of classics like "I Will Survive" or "Independent Women" - man buys expensive stuff for his girl because she has pert buttocks. Is it satire? Possibly - but are those hen-nighters enjoying it because of the satirical content? Or because they can sing, "My lovely lady lumps" at each other and get away with it? Not that there's anything wrong with that as such, but would they do the same to "Big Bottom" by Spinal Tap, which has much the same sentiments, and with a much better tune? Lord, I hope so.

The Fourth Worst Single Of 2005

2005-12-21T13:54:00.000Z

4. "Fuck Forever" by Babyshambles
In compiling a list like this, it's inevitable that personal taste plays a part. It would have been easy to take, say, an hour's worth of Radio 2 programming and present that. Having said that, I have done my best to include the worst of a fairly broad range of genres - bad R'n'B, bad Dance, bad coffee-table snooze-jazz. And when you need some bad Indie, it's hard to think of a better example than "Fuck Forever".

I've covered Pete and his problems before, but to summarise: he's a sad burnt-out junkie waste of talent. "Fuck Forever" is his typically half-arsed and muddled attempt at self-aggrandisement ("So what's the use between death and glory?" - eh?) and protest ("New Labour and Tory... All and the same" - roughly one percent as eloquent as "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"). For someone hailed as a poet, it's shocking: the lines often don't make any sense, giving the impression that he's making it up as he goes along, and his idea of rhyming is just to repeat the same line again. If there is any anger implied by the lyrics it's undercut by his trademark singing voice - as if mid-yawn - and a weedy, ramshackle backing, leaving the song with all the effectiveness of a drunken tramp taking a swing at thin air.

Of course it's possible that this song is actually a gloriously witty self-parody. In which case, fair enough. But it's still a crap song.

The Seventh, Sixth and Fifth Worst Singles Of 2005

2005-12-17T15:15:00.000Z

7. "So Much Love To Give" by The Freeloaders
6. "Star To Fall" by Cabin Crew
5. "Why" by DJ Sammy

Now first of all, there is nothing wrong with disposable pop. There is an argument to be made for discerning a certain genius lurking within the records of Girls Aloud (in a kind of trashy, slags-on-a-hen-night kind of way). But the problem with the three singles listed above is that they are all utterly, utterly devoid of any creative spark whatsoever. All were made by people who have obviously read the KLF's The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way without detecting a hint of irony.

The formula is simple: take a long-forgotten 70s or 80s tune, put a rentakit trance beat under it, remove any confusing things like verses, repeat to fade, and hey presto - a song with a readymade hook already lurking in the back of people's subconscious, so they recognise it when they first hear it, and don't have to bother with all that tedious "growing on you" stuff. Music for people with no attention span. Piece of piss.

Anyone can have a go - indeed, it took a fair bit of research on my part to find out who the people behind these abominations actually were. The Freeloaders win points for having the decency to name themselves for what they are, but lose points for being on a label that seems to specialise in this sort of bollocks (including The Record That Proves There Is No God - namely the Cha Cha Slide by DJ Casper. Don't get me started). Cabin Crew (who wisely choose to be as anonymous as possible) win the prize for most obscure sample - "Waiting For A Star To Fall" by Boy Meets Girl, a record so 80s it appears in the soundtrack of Three Men And A Baby. You can just smell the rolled-up jacket sleeves and mullets.

But the worst offender is DJ Sammy. Laughably, he presents himself as an artist, even though his career is based on parasite-pop like "Why". His website is unintentionally hilarious - his biography begins, "his presence is positive and his vibe is cool". Just fantastic. Everything the man touches he leeches the life out of. He has done it to Bryan Adams, Don Henley and now Annie Lennox. But he does make you appreciate the originals, which in Bryan Adams' case is no mean feat.

These records are uniformly awful, and each are very deserving of a place in our chart (and they are not just an excuse to use up three places quickly because December is rushing by, oh no). But to return to The Manual (a wonderful book, insightful and just dripping with sarcasm, and available in it's entirety online here), there is a note of foreboding:

"People equate a Number One with fame, endless wealth and easy sex - a myth that they want to believe and one that the popular press want to see continued. Along with the soap stars, sporting heroes and selected (however distant) members of the Royal Family, pop stars belong to a glittering world of showbiz parties, at one end of the scale, to illicit liaisons, at the other, where their lives are dragged up, dressed up, made up and ultimately destroyed. The celebrated, of course, are apt to fall into a world of drugs, drink, broken marriages and bankruptcy but even this is given the glamour treatment instead of the squalid misery that it is in reality. "

We can only hope.

The Eighth Worst Single Of 2005

2005-12-13T19:32:00.000Z

8. "Nine Million Bicycles" by Katie Melua
Actually it could just as easily have been something by Norah Jones, Michael Buble or Jamie Cullum, or any other of the interchangeable purveyors of Parkinson-championed snooze-jazz. In fact, that's a misnomer in itself. Any jazz lover will tell you - if you give them half the chance, and I strongly suggest you don't - that jazz is characteristically lively, freewheeling and experimental, whereas this music is the polar opposite. Luckily, with Jamie Cullum, since I'm a medical man I can't concentrate on his music as I'm too busy trying to diagnose which syndrome he's got. So his music hasn't permeated my shell thus far.

But Katie Melua. Pretty, winsome, inoffensive, backed by sinister musical svengali. As manufactured as S Club 7, in other words. And the musical mastermind behind the Melua phenomenon? The one and only Mike Batt, whose previous triumphs include The Wombles, the theme from a Conservative Party Political Broadcast, rabbit slaughter anthem Bright Eyes, and a composition entirely made of silence. And he even nicked that. Looking as he does (a little like an elongated Charlie Drake) you can well understand why he prefers to hide behind a facade of pretty young women and huge furry litter-pickers.

The song itself is based on the premise that the statement "there are nine million bicycles in Beijing" is an undeniable fact, just like the fact that she loves her man. A recent report in the Western Courier suggested there were actually closer to eight million, and that figure was dropping due to more and more people buying cars (find out more about bicycling in Beijing here, a site which will also play you a very nice piece of music, much more pleasant than anything Batt could come up with). So, Katie, it's more of an approximation than a fact, and certainly nothing on which to form the basis of a relationship. Especially when shrouded in a tinkly afterthought of a tune and horrible faux-celtic pipes.

Still, I bet it sounds nice at dinner parties.

The Ninth Worst Single Of 2005

2005-12-12T13:02:00.000Z

Look at the time!

9. "Alex F" by Crazy Frog
An obvious choice maybe, but let's be quite clear about just how evil this record is. Designed purely to sell ringtones - evil - to morons who think the nokia ring isn't quite irritating enough - evil - milking a phenomenon which was already annoying to the point of self-immolation - evil - by pasting said ringtone on top of a jive bunny-style disco reworking of an eighties hit. Evil, evil, evil.

So bad that towards the end of the campaign it was actually marketed as a means of annoying people, the fact it was mainly bought by children did at least bring some belated schadenfreude as the makers had to spend thousands of pounds digitally removing the frog's genitals from the animated video.

So why is it only number nine? Well, two reasons - one, it annoyed Chris Martin, and two, if heard on a train, the sound of the mentally ill amphibian performs two important functions: it marks the phone's owner out as a complete idiot who must be ostracised from society, and it provides a nice eye-rolling moment of bonding between all other commuters. For that reason, it has killed the silly-noise-ringtone industry stone dead, and we must therefore be grateful.

These Bigots Must Be Stopped

2005-12-08T13:53:00.000Z

It has long been a source of some embarrassment that I never got round to seeing "Jerry Springer - The Opera" when it was on at either the National Theatre or in the West End. It got great reviews and won a shedload of awards and I think I was under the impression that it was going to run and run. Its premature closure therefore took me somewhat by surprise and so when BBC2 announced it had filmed the show for broadcast I looked forward to being able to fill in a gap in my cultural knowledge. By the time the day of broadcast arrived, this mild anticipation had been transformed into a pathological, single minded determination that I would be watching this show come what may. The reason for this change was the campaign by a bunch of self appointed moral guardians (for which read right wing religious fuckwits) who used every trick in the book, from e-mail and internet campaigns to death threats against BBC executives, to using hitherto unheard of theories of quantum mathematics to calculate that the 90 minute show contained something like 14 billion obscenities, in order have transmission stopped on the basis of the show's alleged blasphemy. By the time this bunch of cretins had had their evil say, I was going to be watching this show. So was my 62 year old mother, who I am guessing would not have given the show a second glance in the listings were it not for the fact the publicity created by the furore brought it to her attention that watching it would constitute a stand against narrow minded bigotry. Many millions of viewers took the same line, giving BBC2 unheard of Saturday night viewing figures and rather undermining the moral majority claims of the protesters.

Now, Jerry Springer is coarse and contains a considerable amount of swearing and as such will not be to the taste of all. Whether it is actually blasphemous is an entirely separate issue time does not allow me to debate here, although my personal view is that it is not. Nor am I going to debate whether such blasphemy laws are appropriate anymore, although I bear in mind co-writer Stewart Lee's caustic observation that the private prosecution for blasphemy brought against him by these morons was thrown out by the courts "on the ground that it wasn't 1327". No, the reason for blogging this now is that the DVD has just come out and the scum have been masturbating themselves into a righteous frenzy once more. As a result of this, Woolworths and Sainsburys have both declined to stock the title, the latter because it received "10-20" complaints. These leads me to propose two courses of action:

1) I am guessing that most Distractor readers would no more be seen in Woolworths than they would join Christian Voice, but I bet you go to Sainsburys and this has to stop until this ludicrous decision is reversed. I realise Tescos is a bit down market but there has to be a Waitrose somewhere near you and freedom of speech depends on you making the extra effort.

2) Next time McFly release a record, 20 of us need to get on the phone to Sainsburys complaining about the offence it causes us. That's all it takes, apparently. Just think, if we'd known it was that easy we could have prevented Avril Lavigne's entire career.

Finally, if you don't like swearing and the sight of a man claiming to be Jesus in a nappy, your television is equipped with at least 4 other channels and an off button. Please make use of them before you try and inflict your medieval views on the rest of us.

The Tenth Worst Single of 2005

2005-12-04T12:41:00.000Z

There will, naturally, be lists of all that was great about 2005 in due course (mmm, lists). But counting down the dross of the year requires a little more thought and space. All of the forthcoming monstrosities reached the top ten, all invaded our collective consciousness to an unwelcome and inescapable degree, therefore all are more than deserving of our collective bile.

10. "Let There Be Love" by Oasis
Back in 1995, Oasis were gods. Their power, attitude and My-First-Beatles-Chord-Book tunes had Britain entranced. There was a genuine excitement about them - if they could hide a song as fantastic as "acquiesce" away as a b-side, wow, how talented must they be? Then, sadly, they blew it, Oasis have been bloody terrible since about 1996, and the music press and their fans have so, so desperately wanted them to be brilliant again ever since.

So when, this year, Oasis released a record that wasn't a festering pile of toss, it was the comeback of 2005. Critics bandied about words like "rejuvenated" and "artistic rebirth", when they really meant, "thank Christ it's slightly better than the previous one." Actually, there is some artistic progression - they're ripping off people other than The Beatles now. "Mucky Fingers" rips off Dylan. "The Importance Of Being Idle" rips off The Kinks. "Lyla" rips off The Who.

"Let There Be Love" is the exception. It does rip off The Beatles. And it does so in a plodding, lazy, pompous manner. It's "I Am The Walrus" slowed down and dumbed down and made lyrically anodyne, more or less what Oasis have been recycling since 1995 with diminishing returns. Listen in succession to, say, "Wonderwall", "All Around The World", "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" and "Let There Be Love", and you will notice three things. One, it takes an intense feat of concentration to notice where one ends and the next begins. Two, Oasis seem to be gradually nodding off. And three, you will have wasted a good fifteen minutes of your life, and you'll never get it back.

A dull mass of inconsequence from an overwhelmingly average album, "Let There Be Love" sounds like The Beatles do now - half dead. And it's currently Britain's second best selling single. Proud of yourselves, are you?

I seem to have been silent for quite a while

2005-11-28T18:28:00.000Z

A combination of holiday and actually being expected to work of a living has kept me away from these pages for a while, and so I thought I would mark my return by bringing to your attention some things that are good, rather than the usual bile I peddle.

Literary corner: A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry is probably the best novel I've read all year. It tells the story of Southern Irish soldiers who went to fight for the British Army and combines describing how they came to lose the support of their countrymen back home while acquiring the distrust of the Army for which they had gone to fight with brilliantly capturing the game of pure chance that was survival in the trenches. Nominated for the Booker, it is less self-consciously literary than John Banville's Ghosts and tells a better story, and as such should probably have won. Also worthy of a mention from this year's shortlist is Kazio Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a moving consideration of the humanity of children bred for organ farming. Finally, the excellence of Harry Thompson's biography of Peter Cook has long been acknowledged but given the author's recent horribly early demise (as noted in an earlier post) it seems only right to repeat it on these pages. In an interesting parallel with the recent eulogies for George Best, it is amazing how many of the people Thompson quotes could find nothing bad to say about his subject despite a considerable number of instances of ghastly behaviour fuelled by drink and drugs. As with Best, I have yet to decide whether this says more about the fundamental charm of the individual or the naivity of the people swept along in their wake.

Music: Not a huge amount out, and in the interests of being nice we'll gloss over the Take That reunion for the time being, so I shall finally get round to singing the praises of The Pipettes. I've been meaning to do this ever since I saw them support the Go! Team earlier in the year, but now I've even managed to miss celebrating the release of their first single proper, Dirty Mind, which came out a couple of weeks back and is available from Amazon, iTunes and no doubt a good number of other on-line stores. Never mind, now is the time to note their uncanny ear for a catchy tune and a waspish lyric, the wonderful harmonies and (live) the 60's style party dresses and Supremes-eque dance routines. Music guaranteed to put a smile on your face and as a result to be cherished.

TV: An honourable mention in dispatches here for BBC3's Man Stroke Woman. The acting is possibly stronger than the writing (with Spaced's Nick Frost a particular stand out) but the first couple of episodes have made me laugh out loud five or six times, which is five or six times more than the Sketch Show has managed in several series. I particularly like the recurring motif where a group of men hang on the every word of a woman before she mentions her boyfriend, at which point they all immediately leave. Given that the first episode of the new series of Little Britain (and what in God's name has happened there?) unfortunately looks like further proof that all sketch shows have a limited shelf life after which familiarity breeds contempt, it is perhaps only a matter of time before catchphrases such as "you can never just say I look nice" start to jar on the nerves. For the time being however, Man Stroke Woman is fresh and funny and to be enjoyed while that lasts.

For those missing my usual service, I will shortly return to explain why the Madonna single is a complete load of crap.....

'Tis The Season To Be Cheesy

2005-11-27T09:39:00.000Z

Good grief, it's very nearly December. And how do we know this? Because songs are getting progressively slower, schmaltzier and have the distinct whiff of sleighbells about them. Yes, the race for the coveted Christmas Number One spot is about to begin.

What's unique about the Christmas Number One is that just about anyone can have a go. The traditional big guns line up against reality TV chancers desperate to prolong their fifteen minutes, flavours-of-the-month covering previous crimbo classics, X-factor winners getting their one shot at selling records, comedians shoehorning their catchphrases into songs about santa, and the odd wild-card left-field nobody. Musical ability, taste, even fashion take a back seat.

This year is no exception. We have Westlife releasing their usual bucket of sick, this time roping in Diana Ross for wailing-diva novelty value. Robbie and Girls Aloud are peddling their weepiest, cheesiest fluff. Tony Christie clings on with a swing-based cover of Slade's classic "Merry Christmas Everybody". There are even festive efforts from (God help us) Crazy Frog and what-on-earth-are-you-thinking Andrew Flintoff. And this year's long shot is The JCB Song - diverting and amusing on first listen, twee and icky on the second, and Digger-driver-killing-spree-inducing by the third.

So why is it that yuletide hits are so godawful? Is the record-buying-public more adventurous, or just more forgiving? Are they looking for something that will get the family smiling and end the post-turkey conversational cul-de-sac? Or are they just caught up in the pre-festive hype that always accompanies the race for the number one? It's the only time of the year that bookies actually care about the charts, the race is always covered exhaustively in the press, and the excitement is infectious.

So maybe we should just embrace the cheese and, hey, stop taking it all so seriously. Well, that would be easier if these records were as much of a laugh as they used to be. It seems the time of the unironic, fun Christmas record is long gone. Maybe we need today's stars to get into the spirit. Kaiser Chiefs could probably pull it off. The Darkness should do festive singles and nothing else. Pete Doherty could do it - Christmas In Albion, with a video featuring him and Kate roasting spoons on an open fire. Then we'd actually have something to pass down for future flavours of the month to cover. How about it?

The Very Maw Of Hell

2005-11-21T11:45:00.000Z

Normally I'm a fairly upbeat, positive person. But now I have stared into the abyss, I have abandoned all hope and I have embraced despair. Because on Friday Night I saw Peter Andre and Jordan perform "A Whole New World" on Children In Need.

I can't begin to describe to you quite how horrible this was. Being a Disney song, the subject matter was already fairly saccharine, but they managed to bring a whole new level of pain to it. Coming on dressed head to toe in white, looking like they walked in from Wife Swap:The Musical, they began by crooning to each other in a predictable and thoroughly sickly manner. But then the singing became - well - I don't know what it was. If it was emoting it was oddly emotionless. With their eyes screwed up, they each violently squatted with each syllable, as if trying to force out a large pile of poo (which of course is exactly what they were doing). Their I-can-sing-louder-than-you-can screeching gradually became more and more competitive, almost a duet to the death (something that would make The X Factor far more interesting), until it became so overblown it made Mariah Carey look like Kraftwerk.

Yes OK, they're technically decent singers, but that means nothing - they're both technically human beings, but Jordan increasingly resembles one of those killer shop dummies from Doctor Who, and Andre is so lacking in soul there is no way he has a reflection. And yes, it was for charity, but it was so self-obsessed and self-serving that it seemed very out-of-place in an otherwise entertaining and generous evening.

Terrifyingly, things could get worse. Imagine a world where, encouraged by positive reaction, the grusome twosome release this musical dysentery as a Christmas single. Imagine that, and pray for armageddon.

Give to Children In Need

You Pissed It All Up The Wall

2005-11-17T13:45:00.000Z

This week finally saw the release of the Babyshambles album, Down In Albion, the record that Pete Doherty has been promising since he was unceremonially booted out of The Libertines for being a complete liability. It's really not very good. We shouldn't be that surprised though, because if anyone epitomises failed potential, it's Pete Doherty.

When The Libertines' first single appeared, it was like a shot in the arm (and that's the last drug-related similie I will use, I promise). The Jam-like ranting of What A Waster and the Deptford Beach Boys of I Get Along sounded fresh, adrenalised and contained some fantastic lyrical touches (the phrase "two-bob cunt", the word "Div"). Can't Stand Me Now was a great pop song, tackling their recent problems with dignity, wit and a killer tune. Live, they were a visceral experience, and the backstage drama just completed the package.

Babyshambles are like The Libertines drained of blood. Everything about them has a half-arsed, will-this-do quality, from the "minimalist" album packaging to the revolving-door personnel, from the anaemic, sedated delivery to the lottery-like gigs. Pete looks terrible, half asleep, pale, sweaty and impotent. His songs are still stuck in the sub-William Blake Albion fixation he had on the first Libertines album, only now they're set to tuneless meandering dirges. This, kids, is what heroin does to you.

Pete is a junkie in the truly addicted, desperate sense. He asks journalists for money during interviews, he burgles his bandmates, he can't get it together enough to turn up for gigs, he does the bare minimum to survive and buy more heroin. He's alone, surrounded by sycophantic leeches and zealotic fans. There's no-one to tell him "actually Pete, that song may need a bit more work."

Yes, what about those fans? The Libertines worked hard to break down the barriers between band and audience, and Pete has taken this to the extreme - he flatters them by fraternising with them, and they love him all the more for it. And the kids do adore a romantic, doomed hero. They deify him and his lifestyle, and hysterically rail against anyone who dares to criticise him. They are very much part of the problem.

With Carl Barat, Pete Doherty made some wonderful records, and it seems the pair had a Lennon/McCartney-like balancing effect on each other. Now that it's just him and the heroin, his talent has been squandered by drugs, ego and hangers-on. And that's just sad.

Obituaries, Politics and Self-Congratulations

2005-11-10T17:41:00.000Z

A few brief points:

After writing that diatribe about panel games, it became apparent that my timing could have been better, co-inciding as it did with the death of their creator, the great producer Harry Thompson. I suspect he would have shared some of the views expressed though, seeing as how he moved on from all of these projects years ago. He helped create them, made them the successes they were, then left well before they became stale. His last project, Monkey Dust, was easily the most original piece of British TV comedy in recent memory. Remember him for that.

Whatever your views on whether to detain terror suspects for 90 days, when even Michael Howard is saying "Actually that's just a bit too draconian for me" then you have to question the idea. And The Sun calling the Labour rebels "traitors" is just silly - they're just a little uncomfortable about locking people away for three months without any evidence. Not exactly Guy Fawkes, are they? For some very good points on this, from people much more politically aware than The Distractor (who is frankly uncomfortable with the subject and quite keen to get back to slagging off easy media targets), go here. So anyway, how shit are Westlife?

Finally, a bit of autotrumpeting. Good to see Arctic Monkeys getting some success, although the air of hysteria surrounding them in the music press is a little worrying. Of course, The Distractor knew all of this back in July...

Panel Beating

2005-11-08T15:30:00.000Z

A look at Monday night's TV schedules brings a bit of a surprise - apparently someone is still producing new episodes of comedy panel games. Never Mind The Buzzcocks followed by Have I Got News For You followed by They Think It's All Over. Didn't they die a natural death years ago? No, we fought the new comedy wars and it turns out we only managed to take down It's Only TV But I Like It.

These shows were fantastic, cutting edge television in their day. When HIGNFY first appeared in 1990, it was like nothing else. Irreverent, satirical, surreal, hilarious. The three principles were new, up-and-coming stars, and a breath of fresh air on screen. Hislop's rapier cynicism balanced with Merton's lightning silliness perfectly, and Angus Deayton - much maligned these days - could deliver witticisms with charming ease. Phrases like "allegedly" and "withered old tart" became part of the national lexicon (For an exhaustive account, go here).

The show became massively successful, and inevitably spawned imitators. The music version (Never Mind The Buzzcocks) began in 1995, and thanks to some again up-and-coming talent (the brilliant Phill Jupitus) and some inspired ideas (the intros round for one), quickly found it's own following. The sport one (They Think It's All Over) started in 1996 at the height of Lad Culture, and, at least in the early days, had just the right balance of blokey humour and genuine wit.

That was ten years ago. Governments have come and gone, whole careers have burned out, but these shows remain. Why? They're cheap, easy to make and perennially popular. They're so familiar that we're almost compelled to smile in a sinister pavlovian manner. Almost.

HIGNFY soldiers on with the odd flash of brilliance, but is more likely to produce a smirk rather than the belly laugh of the Tub Of Lard glory days. The Guest Presenters Gambit had saved it from being completely smug and predictable, but it's also made it wildly inconsistent. For every Alexander Armstrong there's a Jeremy Clarkson. There is just about life left in it, though, which is more than can be said of it's imitators.

Never Mind The Buzzcocks is only really worth watching to see Mark Lamarr's increasingly desperate attempts to keep it relevant, which mainly consist of him bullying young female pop stars. The format remains unchanged and tired, Phill Jupitus looks bored and Bill Bailey smiles wearily every time Lamarr refers to him as Gandalf. They stare balefully from the screen, as if in some terrible light entertainent groundhog day, doomed to repeat the same jokes each week until the end of time. You can almost see them mouthing "help me".

They Think It's All Over really is pushing it's luck. It's always suffered from the fact that sporting personalities are chronically dull, and couldn't deliver a witticism if it was pre-packaged and handed to them, which it always was. One by one the even-vaguely-funny ones have bailed out, leaving just Rory Mcgrath to recycle knob gag after knob gag. Jonathan Ross surely doesn't need to do this. It's lame, it'll never race again, take it outside and shoot it in the head.

The point is, when these shows started they used new talent, seemed fresh, and so succeeded. The new talent is out there - HIGNFY flickers into life when people like Ross Noble, Marcus Brigstocke and David Mitchell appear. New panel games like Mock The Week and 8 Out Of 10 Cats seem to have the right idea, even if they do labour under the misapprehension that Jimmy Carr is an appealing TV presenter. But still, the world has moved on, and new ideas need nurturing. They're there, they're just stuck on BBC3, BBC4, radio 4 and other cable backwaters. Why show these dinosaurs when there are perfectly good series of The Smoking Room, The Thick Of It and The Mighty Boosh waiting to be shown on BBC2? Why not promote comedy discussion shows like The Last Word or The Late Edition? Only then we can finally consign panel games to comedy pergatory (or UKG2 as it's otherwise known).

What Adverts Really Tell Us

2005-11-02T18:45:00.000Z

Adverts. We happily let them drip their milky goods into our gawking mouths until the programme begins again. But what are they actually saying to us?

The employees of Barclays Bank are hapless doofuses, with enough time on their hands to go inventing evil robots or invisible cards rather than look after our money.
The designers of DFS designer sofas think the most important aspect of their job is design. We know this as four of them tell us this fact successively. Actually one of them does also mention Colour. Which is another aspect of design. Oh, and while we're at it,
No-one ever, ever bought anything because Linda Barker told them to.
Being informed about terrible natural disasters, impending world war and our inevitable death by Bird-flu is made much more palatable if they throw in a free DVD.
The AA is actually a shadowy, sinister organisation whose employees, sorry operatives, walk in slow motion through doorways so we can get slightly cheaper car insurance. In fact, all people who work in insurance seem to have much more exciting lives than we had all assumed.
If I ever buy a Citroen, I will be sorely disappointed if it doesn't turn into a giant robot and do a little dance.
Drinking actimel live yogurt makes you hyperactive, assault random people in parks and completely ignore your children (presumably the son isn't allowed any of Mum's stash).
We absolutely love being insulted by Jamie Oliver. No Jamie, we're not feeding our kids properly. Yes Jamie, we do always buy the same thing at Sainsbury's. He appeared with a black eye recently. Anyone surprised?
Smirnoff's "Triple Distilled" vodka gives you such frequent blackouts that you miss vital parts of conversations, thereby completely misinterpreting the scene you are watching. Wheras,
Drinking WKD just turns you into an annoying tosser.

The Trouble With Robbie

2005-10-28T14:07:00.000+01:00

What exactly is the problem with Robbie Williams? Moreover, what is my problem with him? It's not his music - latest album Intensive Care is even getting decent reviews (well, decent as in, "not the festering pile of toss we all expected"). It's not the live shows - he's a professional, the consumate cabaret artist, surely everyone loves him? No, it runs deeper than that. It's the man himself. My problem with Robbie Williams is Robbie Sodding Williams.

To publicise his eagerly-awaited sixth album, all the major papers' music hacks were invited to a playback. To greet them, there was Robbie, handing out copies of the baffled journos' previous, less than complimentary reviews of his previous opuses. On each review, he had marked passages he didn't agree with in highlighter pen. Misinterpreted lyrics, accusations of singing flat, one by one he remonstrated with those who had come to help him promote himself. As a result, most of those positive reviews came couched in stories of how deeply odd Williams is.

It's hard not to agree. Think how long it must have taken him, the multi-millionaire playboy, sat in his flat the night before, with his pile of old, yellowing newspapers and set of yellow and pink highlighters from Rymans, spitting bile as he underlined the words, "a load of cobblers about a monkey." Shouldn't he be out shagging or something? Playing the jack-the-lad-cheeky-chappie we want to read about in the tabloids?

Being the beloved entertainer so, so desperate to be taken seriously is just one of the boggling contradictions that comprise Robbie Williams. The peculiarly British, can't get arrested in America Stoke-on-Trent boy who lives in an LA mansion. The International Sex Symbol who just wants to settle down. The self-effacing interviewee whose every song lyric concerns his own self. The grinning showman who talks about suicide. The album-shifting "artist" whose idea of pushing the envelope is doing a Sting pastiche ("Tripping" - a venture in to - crack of thunder - white reggae, something even The Clash couldn't pull off with their credibility intact).

Why is he so popular? Well, us Brits love an underdog, and didn't we love it when the gurning fool from Take That eclipsed the pompous, supposedly more talented Gary Barlow? Even the indie kids loved "Let Me Entertain You" and sang along with "Angels" at Glastonbury. There's a lot of goodwill, and something about his pathetic nature inflames the mothering instinct in many women I know. Deep down, there's the sneaking suspicion that he's a paranoid, smug, egotistical, bitter, vain fucked-up media whore freak who got lucky. But then his small but undeniable talent pulls it off, and the underdog triumphs again.

Without the songwriting talents of Guy Chambers, everyone expected Robbie to fall flat on his stupid face. He hasn't. And as a result, now he's going to be absolutely insufferable.

Rear End of the Q

2005-10-24T23:09:00.000+01:00

There was a time when Q represented all that was good in music journalism. Witty, irreverent and with an admirable commitment to non-chart music, it was the magazine of choice for anyone who considered their music tastes a cut above those of the average Top of the Pops viewer. However, for some time now Q has been on the slide into a kind of middle-aged malaise. It has developed a pathological attachment to both the original dinosaurs of rock such as the Rolling Stones and surviving Beatles, and their heirs such as U2 and Coldplay. Recent cover stars have included such up to the minute bands as Led Zeppelin and Nirvana. And Keane. Yesterday's Q Awards, a sort of Brits for those with above average disposable income, merely served to confirm that the magazine has decided to vacate the cutting edge, pop on its slippers and snuggle down under its rug for a spot of easy listening.

First sign of trouble is the list of categories. Of 16 awards, 7 constituted lifetime achievement or long service awards (8 if you include the presentation of the "Q Innovation in Sound Award" to The Prodigy, who were last considered innovative in 1998). Some of these are bafflingly random. Bjork got the Q Inspiration Award; Jimmy Page won the Q Icon Award (not to be confused with the Q Legend award, which went to Joy Division). The Classic Songwriter award went to Nick Cave, who I've nothing against but who everyone seems to have heard of but no one seems to have heard, if you get my drift. The Bee Gees won the lifetime achievement award. No, you read that right the first time. Presented by Charlotte Church. There's never a gun toting maniac when you need one, is there? To be fair, none of these artists are bad; many of them have in their time been great, but I struggle with the mentality that looks at the musical landscape in 2005 and says to itself, "you know who we should be recognising with an award right now? Ray Davies of the Kinks". Even the award of the "Q Birthday Honour" to Michael Eavis shows a narrowness of outlook. Mr Eavis is undoubtedly a good egg but for all the didgeridoos and Amazonian arse flute bands in the Aggravating Twat tent, musically Glastonbury is perhaps the most conservative festival in the country. Don't believe me? Basement Jaxx headlined the main stage this year. Case closed.

All of this wallowing in the past would be of less concern if those categories which dealt with music released since 1986 managed to capture the genuine excitement that surrounds British music, particularly guitar bands, at the moment. But fuck me if the Best Act in the World Today isn't Coldplay. Seriously. Now, Coldplay are a decent band, certainly when compared to, say, McFly, and God knows they are successful but being the biggest doesn't necessarily mean being the best. This is a misapprehension that Oasis have been labouring under for some years. It’s the sheer lack of imagination required to come up with Coldplay as your act of 2005 that takes the breath away. Smash Hits you would have expected it of; Q, well, you would have hoped for better, although given they saw fit to shortlist Oasis in this category perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies.

Ah, Oasis. The Status Quo of our age. A band who have been completely rubbish since The Masterplan came out in 1998. And winners of Best Album 2005. Yes, of all the albums that have come out in the last year, Q reckons Don't Believe the Truth is the best. Better than Bloc Party, Kasabian, Hard-Fi and The Others. Better than Anthony and the Johnsons and Gorillaz. Hell, even better than X&Y. All I can ever think of whenever I hear one of the singles from that album, apart from Paul McCartney should sue, is that they appear to have been rhythmically inspired by the sound of someone falling down some stairs. Awkwardly. It’s true. Listen to Lyla and think to yourself "clunk, clunky clunk, clunk thwack" and you'll be amazed how it fits in with the music. Yet this is the best album of 2005. Given that what's left of Q's readership also voted Oasis as "the People's Choice", further proof that you can fool some of the people all of the time, the magazine can at least be said to be in tune with its customers. However, if you really think this is the best album of the last 12 months, you must hate music. Or you are deaf.

From thereon, despair begins to set in. They did manage to get Hard-Fi, the Kaiser Chiefs and the Magic Numbers on the shortlist for Best New Act, and then picked James Blunt, presumably because what the world needed was another lovelorn singer-songwriter with a guitar and bunch of whiny songs. God bless James for filling that gap. The bottom is finally scraped in the Best Track category, where a shortlist containing James Blunt, U2, Oasis and Coldplay throws up KT Tunstall's "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" as the winner. Is this the best they can do? Can they seriously be suggesting that "You're Beautiful", "Fix You" and "The Importance of Being Idle" are 3 of the best 5 tracks released this year? Well they're bloody not, are they. How can anyone, let alone people supposedly paid to listen to music, come to that conclusion and be allowed to walk the streets without carers? They are not even the best tracks on their respective albums. As for the winner, I listen to an awful lot of music but I simply can't bring to mind what the KT Tunstall track sounds like so I'm guessing it’s not much cop either. In fact, all I know about KT Tunstall is that, despite the critical plaudits she has earned, despite the Mercury prize nomination, despite me spending more money on CDs than most people spend on rent, nothing I have heard of her music makes me want to own her album. And I bought the recent Ordinary Boys album. Unfortunately this banality now seems to make her typical Q fodder.

There are a couple of bright spots, both involving Gorillaz who won Best Producer against a surprisingly strong shortlist containing Goldfrapp and Kanye West (although Coldplay and David Gray also sneaked on) and Best Video. But all in all the shortlists and winners make dispiriting reading. You wonder what the point of the Q Awards, and the magazine, now is. The Brit Awards have always recognised middle of the road drivel, but then the Brits were voted on by pre-teens and record company executives and so you always knew they reflected the views of morons and tossers. Q aspired to higher standards. The old Q would have immediately spotted Gwen Stefani's solo career as the over-hyped, vapid pile of toss that it is and abused her accordingly. The current Q bills her as the new Madonna and nominates her for best video. What’s worse is that unlike, say, the Mercury award, events like this award debacle mean that a Q recommendation no longer encourages me to try something new and once you’ve reached that point there seems little point in buying the magazine. I've been a Q subscriber for many years but in recent times I've read it more in hope than expectation. I fear the time for a parting of the ways has finally come.

Five Fantastic Things

2005-10-23T08:20:00.000+01:00

It's got to the point where the air of cynicism needs clearing. So in the spirit of opening a window, here, again, are five things worth getting just a little excited about.

To Hell With Poverty (Go Home Productions Remix) - Gang Of Four. Great punk-dance-funk belter. It does very little to the original other than add a beat (and, brilliantly, cowbell) preserving the driving, dirty bass and angular, caustic guitar. Proof that this lot were making girls dance long before Franz Ferdinand, who nicked most of their ideas. Get it on "Return The Gift", where it's in good company.
Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. The best bit of satire for years. Following Bush's maxim that creationism should be taught in schools alongside evolution, a man called Bobby Henderson reasoned that lack of evidence was no barrier to a theory - quite the opposite, in fact. So he wrote to the Kansas School Board, asking that his own religion be taught with equal weight - that the world was created by an "invisible, undetectable" Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's all got a bit out of hand now, with hundreds of internet devotees ("Pastafarians") and a whole merchandise industry, but the original letter is well worth reading. Anyone who links global warming directly to the declining numbers of pirates in the world, and produces graphs to prove it, has to be some sort of genius.
More4 (TV channel). Worth celebrating, both in terms of content (The West Wing, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, documentaries like Capturing The Friedmanns and films like Downfall) and attitude (like the advert where Martin Sheen explains how outspoken the channel is, before turing back to his golf and saying, "Now watch this drive"). Also worth a mention: sister channel E4, if only for its repeated use of the word "chuffing".
Love Kraft by Super Furry Animals. The band that disprove the Sickboy Theory of Perpetual Decline (see Trainspotting for details) have produced another exceptional album. It's a languid, hazy, easy-going listen, made distinctive by the odd, Sea Change-like stabs of strings that punctuate the songs. It takes a few listens, and any further singles probably won't trouble the chart, so it may well slide into obscurity, which would be such a waste. The Q magazine review, so out of step with every other, is further proof of that publication's own decline (see below).
Wallace and Gromit in The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. Now I like to think of myself as a serious-minded person, and as such I should be extolling the virtues of serious, adult-themed films such as, say, History Of Violence. But this is just brilliant. An absolute joy from start to finish, full of inspired sight gags, awful puns and incredible animation. I had a big, stupid grin on my face for the whole running time. If you can put up with sitting in a cinema full of kids who repeatedly need the toilet, go, and leave your adult pretensions by the door for ninety minutes.

From The Pages Of My Wife's Heat Magazine

2005-10-21T14:34:00.000+01:00

In case you missed it, here is this week's vacous celebrity non-news chewed over, digested and excreted for you in small chunks. So you can knowledgably participate in those conversations at work.

The ridiculously-named child of ex-least-talented-member-of-already-talent-challenged-girl-group and her toddler-brained, nearing-end-of-career-footballer husband has a fairly common, self-limiting and ultimately harmless childhood illness. Said couple spend his recovery talking to every journalist they can find about their worry.

Struggling, philandering makes-loads-of-movies-every-one-of-which-stinks actor finally splits from his equally-philandering, equally-struggling got-her-clothes-off-in-two-so-so-movies-and-that's-her-whole-career girlfriend. For more details, see exactly the same story in Heat for the last two years.

Blank-faced automatons paid millions to look skinny in silly clothes are blisteringly criticised for being too thin. Published alongside: gushing, don't-they-look-great fashion spreads featuring the exact same corpse-bride people. For more details, see exactly the same story in Heat for the last two years.

Ex-sitcom star and struggling one-note movie actress doesn't like her noticably-much-more-successful ex-husband's new blow-up-doll-faced, suspect-adopter girlfriend. Apparently, this has been known to happen in other relationships, too.

Hog-faced, thick-as-flyover ex-reality tv minger buys jacket and plays netball. Both in the same week!

Bafflingly-still-famous ex-member of breathtakingly-awful girl-band and ex-wife of spade-faced thickest-despite-the-competition member of equally-awful boy-band tries to climb over a small fence, and can't. Actually, that is genuinely amusing.

Slack-jawed pretty-boy one-lucky-kick rugby-player boyfriend of builder-mouthed valley chip-shop soprano gets new haircut.

And finally, the idealogically-suspect barely-plausable relationship of increasingly-insane-cult-member-and-owner-of-Most-Punchable-Grin-1985 actor and you-can-see-it-in-her-eyes-my-god-what-have-I-got-myself-in-to starlet bears so-so-wrong fruit in said starlet's pregnancy. We know this because her belly button is now an "outy". Unlike him.

Unicef Carpet-Bombs Smurfland

2005-10-10T16:44:00.000+01:00

There will be those out there, who, like me, regard Smurfs with an irrational hatred. Nauseatingly cute blue plastic easily choked-upon figureines given away with petrol, whose twee speeded-up voices inexplicably made hit records in the early eighties (accompanied by the rather sinister Father Abraham), and appeared in cartoons where they all lived together in a lovely little Belgian Village, being terribly nice to each other and learning lessons about friendship and understanding.

So you, like me will have experienced a little guilty pleasure at this story. Unicef have resurrected the little blue darlings in cartoon form, depicting them in typical idyllic and happy surroundings - that is, until the bombs start falling. There then follow scenes of graphic carnage as various key Smurfs are horribly maimed, and the film ends with Baby Smurf sobbing, surrounded by the mutilated bodies of his comrades.

It's for a public information film illustrating the horrors war inflicts upon children, and therefore drums up support for Unicef - and there are few causes as noble. But what a bizarre method. It seems likely to produce either nightmare-inducing terror for youngsters, or an uneasy feeling of schadenfreude for those of us mentally scarred by choking on one of the fuckers. What next? Moomins riddled with bullets, adopting Christ-like poses as Barber's Adagio plays in the background?

Maybe it's just me, but I suspect I'm not alone on this one. Watch the film, think of "Dippetty Day", and try not to feel a sense of justice being done. Then begin the long road to redemption with me by Donating To Unicef.

Bush link to God revealed - God fires Agent

2005-10-08T10:58:00.000+01:00

Well, in the words of Oolon Calluphid, that just about wraps it up for God. As if it wasn't bad enough having as his primary representative on earth a former member of the Hitler Youth who in turn heads up a legion of kiddie fiddlers, it now appears that He has been furthering His message through the World's Greatest Living Buffoon™. While not conclusive evidence of the non-existence of God, it does raise some serious questions about His judgment. There are hitherto undiscovered tribes in the Amazonian rainforests who are aware that the invasion of Iraq was an act of right-wing folly, and so you would have thought an omnipotent being would have been ahead of the curve on that one.

Of course, we only have George's word for the fact that the Almighty has been behind his more heinous acts and, let's be frank, George has some form as a bit of a lying c*nt. Equally it could all be a bit of a misunderstanding – if the nationality of his son is anything to go by the Lord is likely to speak with a heavy middle eastern accent and its well known George can have problems understanding foreigners. Perhaps what George heard as “go and end the tyranny in Iraq” was in fact the Lord saying “shove it up your rear end, you twat”. We may never know.

What is clear is that God clearly needs to change his representation. We are only getting George’s side of the story. What God needs is the front page of the News of the World (or, if he can get himself pictured next to Liz Hurley, the Telegraph) headlined “God – Don't Blame Me". On pages 2 to 7 God would explain how initially he felt that George was his soul mate but he came to realise that George only wanted God for sordid four in a pew spiritual intercourse with his friends Condi and Rummy, and that even when they were intimate Bush was only thinking of Saddam. All illustrated with a number of photographs showing God looking winsome and windswept in various shades of knitwear. A follow up story could be run the next week where God could expand on his troubled relationship with his son (“whatever he may say, I never forsook him”) and the fact that while he generally likes the music of Cliff Richard he refuses to take responsibility for Mistletoe and Wine. In short, God needs Max Clifford. Not the most natural of alliances, but frankly far more plausible than God and Georgie Boy.

Elbow - Leaders Of The Free World (V2)

2005-10-06T14:41:00.000+01:00

We all need a good wallow occasionally. And to do this, you need as your soundtrack music that exudes a bruised, dignified hurt, but hints at brighter times to come. No-one does this "music to be miserable to" better than Elbow, and their third album is a veritable masterclass in miserablism.

Getting dumped by Edith Bowman seems to have done Guy Garvey the world of good, as his broken heart bleeds all over this record. It's a classic, yet oddly British break-up album, tackling all the stages in turn. "Station Approach" captures perfectly the need for familiar comforts when things have gone wrong ("I need to be in a town where they know what I'm like and don't mind"). "The Stops" reeks of aching regret. Jealousy and anger are wittliy tackled in "Mexican Standoff", guilt of near infidelity in "An Imagined Affair", and "My Very Best" is almost an introspective, peculiarly northern version of "I Will Survive".

Equal parts quiet, melancholy ballads and rattling, thumping power anthems, the music here is wonderful. There's more than one moment of eyes-closed-arms-spread-wide euphoria as the music slowly builds then finally explodes into life, particularly in "Station Approach" and the single, "Forget Myself". The latter song also provides some of the record's many deft lyrical touches ("Surrounded by steam with his folded arms, he's got that urban genie thing going on"). The title track seems to be a venture into politics, taking on Blair and Bush with typical barbed wit, over a backing that spits with dissatisfaction.

Comforting, uplifting and easily the greatest contribution Edith Bowman will ever make to popular culture, "Leaders Of The Free World" is just about perfect. As Guy sings, "the music always gives me a lift", and this record will do just that.

We Apologise For The Break In Transmission...

2005-10-03T16:05:00.000+01:00

...normal service will be resumed very soon. Basically I've been away for a while (getting married, going on honeymoon, that sort of thing) and will get round to more postings once I'm over the jetlag and can string a proper sentence together. There's a bit of a backlog of albums to rave about and awful things to rant about.

Incidentally, on my travels I was lucky enough to visit San Francisco. Amongst other things I found my favourite record shop in the whole world - Amoeba Music - literally a warehouse full of new and second hand CDs, in amongst the whole Haight-Ashbury experience (tattoo parlours, radical book shops, being offered drugs by middle-class teenagers). And while we're doing the whole travel tips thing, let's also recommend Plouf, a charming, unpretentious bistro which, encouragingly, seemed to be full of locals. That's enough lonely planet.

The Smell Of Five

2005-09-11T21:04:00.000+01:00

If you want to enjoy British TV, there are a few easy-to-follow rules. The BBC generally does Drama and Sport well. Channel 4 can do sitcoms, ITV most definitely cannot. And, most importantly, anything, but anything associated with Five is utter, utter rubbish.

Honestly. Pick a day. Family Affairs, a soap that seems to soak up all actors fired from other soaps. Documentaries about serial killers, sharks and nazis (I know it's a cliche to say it, but they still bloody do it, look in the guides if you don't believe me), "the top ten best helicopters ever", "the speediest motorway in the world", "stories of people pronounced dead by mistake" - I'm really not making this up, all those were shown last week.

Do you think you could watch "five", as it likes to call itself? Well, do you like your films peppered with patronising news bulletins? Can you stand the sight of people like Matthew Wright, Russell Grant or Donal MacIntyre? Do you like the sound of cheap knock-offs of Channel 4's lower-brow shows ("House Doctor", "House Busters", "20 Quickest Ways To Lose Money On Your Property" - Phil and Kirstie really ought to sue)? Do you enjoy the European Football the other channels didn't want, ineptly reported? Do you feels challenged by quiz shows with all questions the level of the £100 question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Of course you don't.

This week, they produced their first attempt at original comedy - Swinging, a show about sex and relationships. And blow me if it wasn't brilliant. Clever scripts, impeccable acting from a talented cast, more laughs than any sketch show in recent memory. No, only joking, it was bloody awful. What was worse, to publicise the thing, they did one of those cheap, easy list shows that channel 4 trots out every week - Greatest TV Comedy Moments. And they couldn't even get that right. Mediocre comedy moments - the Talking Moose from Fawlty Towers (remember that bit? No, me neither), Tommy Cooper telling a bad joke (yes he was brilliant, but he did much much funnier things), Keeping Up Appearances for the love of God. And the talking heads - the neighbour from Gimme Gimme Gimme! Someone who was in I'm Alan Partridge for thirty seconds! Russell Sodding Grant!

ITV produces great shows once in a while. Even Sky One has The Simpsons. Next week, Five shows us "The World's Worst Celebrity Drivers". Doesn't that just scream quality to you? And it's on Every. Single. Day. Look, no-one succeeds making lowest-common-denominator TV. People like being challenged. Five doesn't do well in the ratings (last month it had just six percent of viewers) and it's most popular shows by far are complex, intelligent imported shows like CSI and House. Either the programme makers at Five aren't listening, or they're inept.

Music News Round-Up

2005-09-08T21:14:00.000+01:00

So, Antony And The Johnsons then. Odd choice for the prize, but certainly the act who seemed to be generating the most buzz on the night (remember, the judges see everyone perform at the Mercury Awards show and only then do they retire to consider their verdict, so they're not at all immune to "buzz"). Still, his performance was absolutely spellbinding, and if his win makes people like me take a chance on a what sounds like a pretty left-field album (and the shelves in my local record shop were indeed empty today), then this must be a good thing.

Hear the new Elbow album, Leaders Of The Free World, at NME.com. God, it's good.

Chris Martin is reportedly very upset at the American reviews of X&Y. Bless. They seem to be a far more balanced view than the knee-jerk praise lavished by the British press ("They're great, aren't they? Aren't they? No they are, aren't they?"). Chris, you need to be more thick- skinned. Like your child Apple needs to be when she goes to school.

Isn't the new Franz Ferdinand single great? Just a fun, smart pop song, as if they'd decided that they really ought to be more like the Scissor Sisters. Hope you like their new direction.

Michael Jackson has announced that he has written a song that he wants his fellow superstars to record with him as a charity record for the victims of Hurricaine Katrina. His fellow superstars are so far conspicously not flocking to his side. It's called "From The Bottom Of My Heart", and might as well be called "No, I really Am Sincere, Law-Abiding And Caring, Please Love Me Again".

And Finally, fans of music would do well to listen to The Blagger's Guide, an hilarious yet sincere history of music. Presented by the fantastic David Quantick, it explains happily why Nirvana are so wonderful, what Britpop really meant and why Sting is the most evil person in the world.

Who Deserves The Mercury Music Prize? (part 1)

2005-09-04T16:46:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday evening, the Mercury Music Prize will be handed out to whovever the panel of judges have decided has made the best contribution to British Music this year. And while they have made some horrendous mistakes in the past (M People, for crying out loud), at the very least their shortlist gives some otherwise unknown artists a leg up. Whoever wins on Tuesday, The Distractor, as per usual, thinks it knows better. While we can't report on the likes of Seth Lakeman or Polar Bear, here are some thoughts on a few of the main contenders, in reverse order of preference.

Coldplay's X&Y (Parlophone) feels like the obligatory big name group candidate. Yes it's good, but it's certainly not the masterpiece it was proclaimed by some to be. It starts brilliantly with Square One - brooding, pulsing, slightly odd - and tracks like Talk, Speed of Sound and The Hardest Part are big, widescreen anthems that you come to love despite yourself. But too much of the album descends into wet lettuce territory - you know my thoughts on Fix You, and A Message and not-very-well-hidden track Kingdom Come approach it for nasty, cynical sickliness.

The Magic Numbers (Heavenly) make a wonderful sound, but the album does feel like it's just a place to park their singles. Forever Lost and Love Me Like You are great summery pop songs that actually go somewhere, almost turning into different songs by the end. One or two other tracks approach them, but many are countrified dirges, especially toward the end of the record. Still, the lovely harmonies sparkle in otherwise unremarkable songs, and those whose taste encompasses the twee end of the Country market may find a lot to love.

The Kaiser Chiefs' Employment (B-Unique) I love to bits, mainly because it's Britpop, and I do love my Britpop. Again, the singles are fantastic, and songs like Modern Way are almost as good. Na Na Na Na Naa and Saturday Night are basically Supergrass at their poppiest, no bad thing. But there is the nagging suspicion that a good many of the tracks are a bit ordinary - great on first listen but quickly becoming dull, irritating even. And their attempt at a This Is A Low-style anthem, Caroline Yes, is just laughable. There's nothing wrong with disposable pop, but an album full of it ain't a classic.

Hard-Fi's Stars Of CCTV (Necessary) approaches greatness. It's difficult to fault the first six tracks or so - big, throbbing, celebratory anthems about boredom, victimisation and having nothing to do on a Saturday night in a faceless commuter-belt new town. And they sound fantastic - Hard To Beat in particular has a great Northern Soul vibe, and on Gotta Reason the drums and bass lock into an irresistable pounding groove. It sags a bit in the middle, but Living For The Weekend and the title track end proceedings on a high. A bit like The Jam when they remembered to temper their social comment with great pop.

The Go! Team's Thunder, Lightning, Strike (Memphis Industries) is the one that, in my opinion, should clinch it. I loved it on first listen and still do. It sounds like almost nothing else - a bit Avalanches, a bit Manitoba, but mostly like a big, barking pile-up of groovy samples, girly shouting and thumping beats. Junior Kickstart is one of those I-can't-believe-it-wasn't-massive tracks, all grin-inducing parping horns and clattering drums. Bottle Rocket is just bonkers (and worryingly, the re-recorded version for their major label re-release seems a little tamer - I'd get the original album while you can). And the more reflective Everyone's A VIP To Someone closes the show with, of all things, a banjo. Fiercely original, sure to be huge if enough people hear it, it's The Go! Team who will benefit most from the Prize and attendant publicity.

Then again, the Prize has been as much curse as blessing in the past. Maybe Coldplay should get it after all.

How The Internet Saved Music

2005-09-02T20:59:00.000+01:00

A few short years ago, the music industry was in severe danger of eating itself. The supermarkets started selling music cheaply to the masses. But they could only afford to sell cheaply those CDs they could be certain would sell: those that are already popular. So that's all the masses bought. Commercial radio stations, desperate to appeal to the masses, only played the popular stuff. So that's all the masses heard. And to make things worse, less people bought records in small but well-stocked independent record shops, so they had to close down. It was almost as though you could only get CDs in big shops with a small range. In some small towns, it was very much like that. Only the big names (or those so offensively bland they appealed to the average supermarket shopper) did well.

Now, the music industry seems to be in a much healthier state. Daytime radio sounds more diverse than ever. So what has saved the day? Well, it's partly Radio 1's relatively daring new music policy. It's partly because the success of people like Coldplay opened the doors for Indie music again. But it's mostly down to the internet, and the downloading revolution.

For those of us that love to hear new music, it's incredibly heartening to learn that there is an awful lot of great music out there. Mp3 blogs are a good place to start looking for it. There's nothing like word of mouth, and these sites basically rave about music they've heard and love. Then they post that song so you can download it (strictly for sampling purposes only). I tend to think of these sites as being like magazine cover-mounted CDs. Downloading from them certainly hasn't slowed down my rate of purchasing records (more's the pity), and without them I'd never have heard of, or bought albums by, such delights as The Arcade Fire, Annie, MIA, Clor, Spoon, The Rakes, Imogen Heap or The Shins.

So I would suggest browsing several Mp3 blogs until you find some that suit your taste. They often link to each other, so you can spend all day skipping between them. The Daddy is Fluxblog - not only great for new music, but also for obscure tracks and remixes. Take Your Medicine has a pleasing Indie slant. Teaching The Indie Kids To Dance Again is always an entertaining read. And for advanced users, The Hype Machine aggregates the day's Mp3 postings, and even plays them to you via Windows Media.

And then, once you find you love that track, you can download it from the huge repository of songs that is the legal download site. Sure, there's your itunes and your MyCokeMusic. BigNoiseMusic lets you download and even donates to Oxfam when you do it. KarmaDownload has all the independent music you could ever wish for, and even some unsigned stuff. Alternatively, buy your music on that revolutionary format you can keep forever, the CD. Amazon has a hugely impressive stock of obscurities (they pass the Dukes of Stratospear test). Or better still, search out your local independent music store, and buy it from them. As far as I'm concerned, you still can't beat the feeling you get when you walk out of a record shop with a freshly bought CD in your hot sweaty little hands.

When I was a teenager, my musical epiphany came when I realised that just because a song isn't popular, that doesn't mean it isn't good. It's rare that you love music on first hearing, it needs to grow on you. Some music just hasn't been heard by enough people enough times for them to love it. And some music is special precisely because no-one else has discovered it yet. That music lurks on Mp3 blogs, in the catalogues of download sites, and in the dusty racks of small record shops. Go get it.

The Distractor Fringe Awards 2005 Part 2

2005-08-28T10:05:00.000+01:00

The "Oh Dear, I'm Not Sure They've Got That Right" award

Goes, of course, to the Perrier committee who last night gave the award to Laura Solon. Now, I'm generally pro-Perrier as even if sometimes the winners have been a bit ropey the shortlists as a whole do tend to represent 5 shows that it is worth your time and effort seeing. However, there has been a recent trend for the Perrier to go to increasingly bizarre shows culminating in last year's award to Will Adamsdale for a show that was just, if you'll forgive me, unfunny bollocks. Now, I've not yet seen Laura Solon and so do not want to get ahead of myself - it may be a great show although the reviews have not been so glowing that this is a given. However, I am put on alert by this quote from Nica Burns (the producer, incidently, of Who's The Daddy so I must declare something of an interest given earlier posts) - "How fitting, in the 25th year, that out of the blue a young woman of extraordinary talent should be discovered in an out-of-the -way venue and become the surprise winner and only the second solo woman to win the Perrier". If you get a moment, take a look at the excellent Chortle.co.uk review of the show, where you will discover that Laura Solon is at the Holyrood Tavern (so out of the way Wil Hodgson, last year's best newcomer, is playing there), has a string of writing credits to her name and the show is being supported by a television production company. So not really unknown, not really out of the blue and not really in an out of the way venue but one in the eye for all those critics who (deservedly) have been giving the Perrier a kicking for its under representation of women. Final judgment will be reserved until the London Perrier shows in October but in the meantime....

"The Perrier Committee May Not Be Able To Spot Talent At 20 Paces But We Still Love You" award

This is shared between Jeremy Lion and Rhod Gilbert (Chris Addison having been declared ineligible on the grounds of his win in the Al Murray category). Two shows that just set out to be plain funny and succeeded with knobs on and both highly deserving of their nominations. Rhod Gilbert's description of using his Gran's bladder as a football, before she'd finished with it, and the tragic consequences was probably the finest 5 minutes of comedy I saw all festival.

The Distractor Fringe Awards 2005 Part 1

2005-08-25T20:41:00.000+01:00

With this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival drawing to a close and the Perrier about to be announced, we pre-empt the inevitable disappointments and gross miscarriages of justice by awarding our own gongs - The Distractions, if you will. Here's the first batch:

Most Travelled Accent
Alan Davies in The Odd Couple. This play could also qualify for the "how long can they get away with this" award. The concept of "Comedians in serious plays" certainly brings in the punters, and makes for an enjoyable afternoon, but you never, ever forget you are watching Alan Davies, Bill Bailey and various other comics. It's a wonderfully written play, and would be fun to watch if performed by two stoats and a plastic bag, but you are constantly thinking - "yes they're quite good, considering they're not actors." That, and "where is Alan Davies from, exactly?"

Most Inappropriately Over-used Lines
A hard-fought category, this. The runner-up was "Are there any Americans in? Oooh, they're not as loud as they used to be", and honourable mention must go to the determination of some comedians to find comic mileage in the idea of a failed suicide bomber. But the winner is a line used by many many people to justify an embarrassingly bad joke - "I like it, it's staying in."

Best Comeback
John Sparkes as Frank Hovis in "Filth". The man is a comedy god. Character comedy at its best, he portrays the most disgusting comedian alive, soaked in cheap lager, innately proud of his bodily functions, painfully aware of his limitations as a human being, but full of working-men's-club charm. An ever-escalating succession of pure filth culminates in a joke about lino so hilariously vile that you laugh and wince simultaneously.

The Al Murray Award for Being Robbed Of The Perrier Again
Chris Addison. This is slightly premature, but he's the favourite now, so he hasn't a chance, has he? Either it'll go to something more typically left-field like Laura Solon or there'll be a backlash and a conventional stand-up like Jason Manford ("A young Peter Kay") will get it. Addison's show is well structured, has a great and original theme (the Periodic Table), and has some fantastic one-liners. On the night we saw him he seemed to find himself oddly hilarious and was going at a breakneck pace (speeding, you might say) but the quality of the writing was undeniable.

Best Worst Gag
Won hands down by Boothby Graffoe. At the end of his set, a tall Dutch-looking girl is brought on, to general confusion. She is five foot ten. And from Finland. "Big Finnish" says Graffoe, before wisely legging it.

E's Best Show
Well, I loved Tim Minchin (see below), Frank Hovis and you have to love Boothby Graffoe (even though he hadn't written anything new), but my vote for best show goes to (drumroll) Mark Watson's 50 Years Before Death. A beautifully simple structure - each minute of the show corresponded to a year of his life - meant that Mark could do a range of jokes loosely tied to the ages of man- for instance, he could be disparaging of youngsters during middle age. His lines were excellent (I hate it when reviews reveal the show's best jokes, but what the hell, it's only one line and it's nearly all over, and it's such a good line - the number one thing he wanted to be said at his funeral was "hang on, he's still breathing"). He freewheeled between improvised material and his actual show with ease, and he had such a likable manner you went along with him. When we saw him, he seemed genuinely thrown to discover a ten year-old boy in the audience, but he was able to incorporate him into his show seamlessly. Great, great stuff.

Who's The Daddy (Kings Head, Islington)

2005-08-24T15:45:00.000+01:00

You get the feeling sometimes with political comedy that the perpetrators believe that topicality relieves them of the obligation to be funny. So it proves with Who's the Daddy, a farce based on the recent adulterous shenanigans centred around the Spectator magazine which temporarily halted David Blunkett's political career. It must be a farce because people rush in and out of rooms, often with their trousers round their ankles, although its not actually very funny unless you find the sight of a second rate Boris Johnson impersonator saying "crikey" a lot and referring to everyone as "Rodders" and Kimbers" particularly amusing. The show is the creation of Toby Young and Lloyd Evans, both Spectator employees, with additional contributions from Jeremy Lloyd of Are You Being Served and 'Allo 'Allo fame, who is probably responsible for what few half-way decent jokes there are but who still should have known better. The catty exchanges between Kimberley Quinn and Petronella Wyatt (played by Sara Crowe,a lone beacon of talent) are reasonably entertaining but the rest of it just stinks of a couple of public schoolboys who've been given a certain amount of licence to poke fun at the head beak in the school show. While the central premise may have seemed like a ripping skit for the end of term revue, as a piece of theatre for which they feel able to relieve you of £22.50 to watch in the cramped conditions of the Kings Head it really doesn't cut the mustard. It blunders about trying to take a crack at various issues of the day with all the subtlety and wit of an oil tanker, the "punch lines" sledge hammered in accompanied by inane gurning by the cast. The final denouement, in which Kimberley Quinn's babies are revealed to have Johnson-esque blond hair while Blunkett bursts in dressed as Spiderman, announcing himself as a member of Fathers 4 Justice, was so utterly pointless as to be physically painful.

The main problem, outside the inane writing, is that ultimately so few of the people involved really matter that taking the piss out of them doesn't constitute meaningful satire. Boris Johnson is a never was politician and editor of a magazine with miniscule circulation; Rod Liddle was famous for about 2 minutes when he pointed out that the operative syllable in Countryside Alliance is the first one and promptly lost his job at the BBC, and just who the fuck is Petronella Wyatt and why should any of us care about this clearly vacuous Sloane? The only one of any importance is Blunkett and we all now know that in the context of his career his involvement with Kimberley Quinn is virtually irrelevant. In fact, the only people who think this might be remotely interesting are the employees of the Spectator and that's ultimately what Who's The Daddy is - it's the Spectator Christmas panto, written by a couple of the office amateur jokers, acted by a few of the office exhibitionists and full of jokes that will only raise a smile if you know (really know, not just recognise from TV) the subjects. There have probably been a few of these at your office but I bet you didn't charge strangers £22.50 to come in and watch.

Fortunately this pitiful excuse for a show closes at the weekend and so there should be little opportunity left for you to waste your time and money on it, although I am taking spread bets on how many student productions appear at next year's Edinburgh festival (buy around 5 is my advice). To be fair, I might have been a little easier on the play if I had seen it in a church hall near Bristo Square for a fiver at one in the afternoon. Having to drag myself of an evening to Islington, official Home of the Twat, and deal with the olympically slow bar staff in the Kings Head didn't put me in the best of moods, and that's before I found myself squeezed into a corner next to the air conditioning unit. But if this show was any good it would have made me forget all that rather than make me want to shout profanities out loud. Still, at least I appear to have been right all along in my belief that Toby Young is a complete cunt. If you see him, tell him he owes me £22.50.

Perrier Shortlist 2005

2005-08-24T12:35:00.000+01:00

In the interests of information rather than entertainment (although normal service will be resumed in the way of editorial comment shortly), this year's Perrier Award shortlist is as follows:

Chris Addison - Atomicity

Dutch Elm Conservatoire in 'Conspiracy'

Jason Manford - Urban Legend

Jeremy Lion - What's The Time, Mr Lion

Laura Solon - Kopfrapers Syndrome: One Man and His Incredible Mind

The nominations for Perrier Best Newcomer are:

Charlie Pickering- Betterman

Mark Watson:50 Years Before Death

Rhod Gilbert's 1984

Tim Minchin - Darkside

Toulson and Harvey

Not entirely sure how Mark Watson qualifies as a newcomer seeing as how he was nominated in the same category as far back as 2001 (although his excellent show deserves recognition). My personal choices - Jeremy Lion for the Perrier, Rhod Gilbert for Best Newcomer, although if I were a betting man a fiver on Chris Addison might not go amiss. That said, in recent times the Perrier has been exploring the outer fringes of comedy with Daniel Kitson and Demetri Martin, and fell completely off the edge last year with the utterly unfunny Will Adamsdale, so perhaps we should expect the unexpected. However, for the London based, the Sunday evening shortlist shows in October will be well worth attending.

The Late Night Comedy Show Dilemma

2005-08-23T20:25:00.000+01:00

The late-night all-star comedy shows at the Fringe are a great way of seeing loads of comics in a short space of time. You can happen across someone great that you've never previously heard of. You can see big-name comedians who aren't otherwise doing comedy shows. And you get a unique chance to see comedians off-form, coasting and pissed to the point of incomprehension.

Each of the major venues does a late-night show, involving a compere and three or four other acts. The quality is variable, and by their very nature they're a gamble (which is half the fun). But you can swing the balance slightly by choosing your venue with care.

Political comedy is a difficult beast - get it wrong and it can feel like you've paid ten quid to see some ranting nutter in your local high street. Political Animal (Underbelly) is hosted by John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman, who understand that to make people laugh about politics, you have to include some silliness and surrealism. They gleefully wind each other up throughout the show, which makes them a lot of fun to watch. On the night I saw the show, their acts were variable - Natalie Hayes skillfully combined conventional stand-up with some disturbing facts about IKEA, but Eddy Brimson, ex hunt saboteur and full-time conspiracy theorist, fell into the rant trap and left the audience cold. This is often the problem - you may agree with the sentiments, but you're in the mood for some laughs.

So if this is the case, you may be better off with Best Of The Fest (Assembly Rooms). This usually involves the biggest acts of the festival, and is held in the huge, barn-like Great Hall. Pretty much everyone is hammered, so the acts get huge laughs pretty easily, and tend to do their most crowd-pleasing material. With the right amount of drink inside you, this is a fantastic laugh. Equally, it can feel like a massive let-down - it's all very safe, and sometimes it seems like they're just going through the motions - especially if the act is equally inebriated and amusing themselves rather than the audience, which I have seen happen on several occasions (yes you, Tommy Tiernan, Phil Nichol, Johnny Vegas).

The shows at the Pleasance Dome (BBC Stand-up Show Live, Afterhours) are different. Maybe it's the bearpit-like, proper-comedy-club-like atmosphere, maybe it's the fact that the acts are not as famous and so are a little hungrier, a little less jaded, a little less cynical. The atmosphere is equally raucous, but the comics seem to feed off it, pushing their material that little bit further, rather than take advantage of it. I saw the great Dave Johns (the master of the where-you-from school of comedy) ring-master a bill including Russell Howard and Scott Capuro (brilliantly trying to seduce the straightest bloke in the room), then Alun Cochrane hosting Jason Byrne (mad ranting par excellance), Alex Horne (see below) and the fantastic Boothby Graffoe. Not one duff act.

So my advice would be this - see the late-night shows, but go for the smaller venues to avoid the feeling you've been cheated. And see the political stuff when you're sober enough to appreciate it.

A Pleasant Afternoon's Sketch Comedy

2005-08-18T22:48:00.000+01:00

Sketch comedy is always going to be a little bit hit and miss. Little Britain has its dodgy moments. Even the hallowed Monty Python had a few stinkers in amongst the classics. But I have never seen a show as polarised as The Trap (Pleasance): the misses had me staring, arms folded, face unimpressed; the hits had me bent double, eyes streaming, bladder leaking.

Most of the rummer sketches were in the first half - a comedy song about how comedy songs are crap (always risky), then a lengthy, dull character piece - but as the show went on, my admiration increased exponentially. The idea of a variety show to link the sketches is a good one. The performers (Dan Mersh, Jeremy Limb and Paul Litchfield) were never less than engaging, and often brilliant. And while the mood was over-ridingly silly (nothing wrong with that), it's actually a lot cleverer than it looks - a seemingly terrible double act sketch turns out to be an elaborate set-up for one of the best pieces of writing I have seen this year, and simple things like quizzes and catchphrases become essential parts of later sketches. The show seemed deliberately ramshackle, and is a touch studenty, but you come out of it grinning like a fool.

The Monkey Butlers (Underbelly) are a slightly different proposition. Where The Trap seem about to fall apart, they are always slick and professional. The transitions between sketches are expertly handled, and the pace never seems to flag. The performances are mostly straight, and the actors entirely inhabit their roles, while displaying excellent comic timing. Each of them brings something different to the show - Paddy Lennox, particularly, reminded me of a young Michael Palin. The writing is sharp - one sketch has a football crowd cheer on a couple's argument, and there are clever satires on daytime TV, 24 hour news and The Blair Witch Project. Best of all, the sketches rely on wordplay and character rather than catchphrases. All this is admirable, but apart from one fantastic mobile phone gag, the laughs are mostly chuckles rather than bellies. Again, there's nothing wrong with that.

These shows may approach sketch comedy in contrasting ways, but both are worth seeing. Buy your tickets with confidence.

Moose Season

2005-08-17T00:30:00.000+01:00

Criticising young, new comedians is like shooting dolphins in a barrel - just because it's easy, that doesn't mean it's right. It takes a lot of guts to get up there and face the crowds with nothing but your wits to protect you. And shouldn't we be encouraging these people to nurture and develop their talents into future successes?

No, we shouldn't. Someone obviously encouraged Joe Pasquale, and look where that got us. People fail at stand-up because they haven't got what it takes. I tried, I failed, I dealt with that (so yes, now I just snipe from the cyber-bushes, fair point). And in the case of at least half of the five up-and-coming (actually mediocre-and-staying-there) acts in Amused Moose Comedy's Hot Starlets (Pleasance Dome) last Friday, it's time to take them aside and have a quiet word.

Here's how it happened. The show was compared gamely by Kate Smurthwaite, who successfully whipped the crowd into a frenzy. The first act, Papa CJ from India, rides the wave of goodwill and does very well. His act is funny, but he occasionally veers towards stereotyping himself, and if he can avoid that he will be fine. Then the trouble starts.

The next one is a tall Belgian whose act consists of telling us how much cooler, sexier and better at dancing he is than all of us. That's not how to make people laugh, that's how to start a fight. It's difficult to tell whether he is "in character", pretending to be an insufferable, arrogant Belgian for "comic effect", or if he is simply a twat. Next, someone does a comedy greek accent for what is, basically, frank racism. And finally, a bearded man appears and expertly delivers a monologue into which, tragically, he forgets to insert any jokes. You will notice I do not mention their names. You don't need to know them. They know who they are. They are the ones who need to take themselves somewhere quiet, reflect on their current positions, and maybe give that temping agency a call.

It's worth mentioning that in the middle of all this, commendably turning around a crowd that was being gradually worn down from goodwill to indifference, was Wendy Wason. She came on, charmed everyone, did some well-observed material about motherhood and drinking, then left again. Apparently this was only her second gig. It seemed as if she'd been talking to audiences for years (NB I've since found out she's done quite a bit , won awards, and was even in bloody Coupling. It's her second year of stand-up. Close, then).

Still, two gems in a pool of vomit is a good find, and "new talent" shows are always a gamble. By all means see them, encourage the wheat, but have no mercy on the chaff. They will thank you for it in the long run.

Powerpoint Comedy

2005-08-15T22:14:00.000+01:00

It's all Dave Gorman's fault. It's no longer acceptable for comics to simply tell jokes for an hour. Suddenly, they have to do shows with some sort of point to them, to tell a story or document some wacky quest or other, preferably using powerpoint. Dave Gorman did it brilliantly - his Googlewhack Adventure is the set text for powerpoint comedy, mostly because you really believe he is that obsessional, he really had to complete his quest, and didn't just do it to toss off another Edinburgh show.

And so his fellow comics follow in his wake. Some, like Dan Tetsell's Sins of the Grandfathers (Underbelly), even take the piss out of his style of show. Trouble is, Dan Tetsell then goes on to present what is, unfortunately, a less impressive copy.

Tetsell's grandfather was in the SS, though he never knew him. Through surviving photos and scanty documentary evidence (nicely presented via powerpoint), he proposes to deal with the guilt this undoubtedly engenders, and asks searching questions about the nature of evil. You feel this must have affected him - but it doesn't really come across, because of his arch and distracted delivery (although he does a nice line in self-deprecation). The big questions hang vapidly in the air, while he makes cracks about country music and sitcoms. There isn't really any structure to it either. Worst of all, you feel he really did look into it all just to get a show out of it.

In contrast, Alex Horne's When In Rome (Pleasance) takes the idea of powerpoint comedy and takes it to the next level. It's presented as a kind of a walk-through of an interactive game designed to help you learn latin. Alex Horne enthusiastically lectures while his "assistant", Tim Key, works the computer. The visuals are very impressive, and the attention to detail astonishing - everyone does an exam at the start, and everyone's results are even e-mailed to you the next day. Alex and Tim make an original pair, mining an unlikely comedic seam of hesitant, embarassed mumbling which works very well. Yes, it sags a bit in the middle, and it never pretends to be profound, but the audience are nicely involved and it always feels like it's going somewhere, that there's a structure to it all, holding the gags together.

We also caught Alex Horne as part of the Pleasance's After Hours show, and he was, again, very impressive, so it seems he can do stand-up too. I wouldn't be surprised if he's approached by TV very soon.

Incidentally, when I said the other day that EH1 had gone, I meant the bar, not the postal district. In case anyone was worried about central Edinburgh.

Tim Minchin - Darkside (Gilded Balloon Teviot)

2005-08-12T14:03:00.000+01:00

Billy Connolly started out his illustrious comedy career as a musician, building his act up from the comedic bits he did between songs. Tim Minchin, you feel, would do well to go the other way. Not that he's not funny - he is blessed with a face and demeanour you feel compelled to laugh at before he speaks, Tommy Cooper-style, and his act begins with a perfectly executed bit of slapstick - but his songs are so good that every time he stands up from his piano to address the audience, you just wish he would sit down and give us another song. A comedic Ben Folds, his playing is dazzling, and he has a great instinct for lyrical deftness (case in point - his ode to a blow-up doll twists Cole Porter-ish wordplay to excellent effect).

His stand-up material isn't awful, just a bit ordinary. The usual subjects of debt and therapy are trotted out. His persona, endearingly borderline-psychotic, is infectious and winning. But his songs are what makes him stand out. He has already snagged an award at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and you can see him going further. Watch for him.

Tim Minchin is at the Gilded Ballon Teviot at 22.15

In other news, now I've arrived in Edinburgh I see EH1 has gone. If anyone else knows where to get a decent bacon sarnie now, please let me know.

Edinburgh Festival - David Strassman/Rhod Gilbert (both Pleasance)

2005-08-08T16:29:00.000+01:00

A good few years ago now, David Strassman took the art of ventriloquism from the safe perch occupied by Orville the Duck and turned it into something far darker and dangerous. Rather than a luminous green duck, Strassman's primary sidekick was the psychotic Chuck Wood, a pre-pubescent with an attitude problem and a tendency to urinate on the front row of the audience. Having initially threatened to successfully cross over onto prime time television, Strassman has been off the radar in the UK for a while but a sold out Pleasance One and the reaction to the entrance of Chuck and the infinitely more benign Ted E Bare suggest he is fondly remembered in these parts.

The core of the show remains Chuck's abusive and insolent presence, countered by the deceptively sweet natured Ted, but Strassman has added some additional characters with variable success. A geriatric version of Ted works well, as does a pretend alien called Kevin who gets into people's heads and "drives" them for a hobby. There is a beaver who believes he's a lounge room comic, which is more hit and miss, and a female robot PA, which frankly dies on its arse. Strassman moves slickly between the characters and there is a nice running joke where Chuck temporarily invades the mind of whichever character is on the end of Strassman's arm and departs leaving behind a picture of Strassman engaged in an apparently deviant act. However, amiable though the show is, it never quite bursts into life. Interesting ideas on whether the characters are expressions of Strassman's personality and what that says about him, and them, go undeveloped and the material, a few cracks about George Bush and a joke about the inhabitants of Livingston stolen wholesale from Bill Hicks aside, always seems to err on the side of caution.

It is perhaps a symptom of Strassman's early success that the sight of a ventriloquist's dummy swearing no longer carries with it the same shock factor but the show has the feel of something is designed to play well in the lounges of middle America. At the end, through the use of sophisticated animatronics, Strassman is able to depart the stage leaving the characters to move and converse by themselves. While the technology is impressive, its not used for any great purpose - we marvel at the inventiveness but can't help noticing that what they are saying isn't particularly funny. Strassman is an extremely able performer, and there will be plenty of worse ways to spend an hour in Edinburgh this month, but ultimately I left with a nagging sense of disappointment.

Rhod Gilbert begins by apologising for the fact the show appears under comedy in the programme - this is only because there is no misery section. He wants to tell us about his annus horribilis, 1984, and the misfortunes that befell his family that year and dragged them down from the dizzy heights of Llanbobl Family of the Year 1983. Gilbert proceeds to spin a series of wonderfully surreal tales involving exploding grannies, paint drinking granddads, philandering milkmen and a shop mobility time machine. All of this is delivered with dead pan seriousness underpinned by the naivety of a child unable to understand what was happening around him - who could have sent his mother a Valentine's Day card offering to take her away on his float, and why did young Rhod get a milkman's outfit for his birthday that was many sizes too big? Gilbert has all the comic skills, managing to maintain the facade that he is sharing with us painful memories from his past despite admitting as early as the second minute that he is making it all up, and comfortably dealing with the revelation from one audience member that is own worst year involved the woman he loved running off with a bloke in a wheelchair, which sounded like it could be a show in itself - "so she didn't so much run away as roll away", asks Gilbert in a voice suffused with sadness. He even gets away with giving us 41 minutes notice of perhaps the best one liner you will hear all festival. Best of all though is that the material is consistently, even remorselessly, funny; the 2 minute set piece on the death of his grandmother is worth the admission price alone. On top of all this, he's Welsh. Definitely one to see.

Buy Tickets
David Strassman
Rhod Gilbert

It's Your Polar Bear That Tells Me You've Got a Polar Bear

2005-08-07T13:02:00.000+01:00

Next week, The Distractor decamps to Edinburgh. This is partly for a stag night (mine, if you're interested) but also to sample the delights of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. As you may have surmised from M'learned Colleague's impassioned defence of the Festival last week, we are fans, veterans and Friends of the world's largest arts festival. There really is no better opportunity to see an amazing variety of performances, ranging from experimental theatre to organ recitals, Norwegian Dance Troupes to amateur versions of classic plays.

But what floats our particular boats is comedy. There are plenty of established comedians who are worth seeing up there (although less so this year), but half the fun is taking a random punt on something you've never heard of. You may see tomorrow's Eddie Izzard, you may see absolute rip-your-ears-off shite.

Two examples. Last year, Boothby Graffoe, who has been on the circuit for years and has studiously managed to avoid stardom of any kind, had us blubbing with laughter. His songs are surreal masterpieces (the above title is a line from one, and no, it doesn't make much more sense in context). The man can work an audience impeccably. His sense of timing is incredible. And he's no mean guitar player either. This year, he's at The Stand, and in our eyes he's unmissable.

Two years ago, based on positive reviews, we decided to see a show called "Die" by BrandX/Gawkagogo productions. A show both about and resembling a descent into hell. Their design and props were great, but the show was terrible. Jokes so bad you actually felt their pain as they died, delivered in such a smug way they begged for violence. Two years later, and we are still finding new ways to slag it off. It still gives us entertainment, and thus was worth the pain. While it pains me to give them the oxygen of publicity (or, for that matter, any oxygen at all), BrandX/Gawkagogo are doing another show this year. I see they're re-using the props. In our eyes, they're unseeable.

There are hundreds of venues - my particular favourite is The Pleasance Courtyard, mainly because of its huge mixture of acts both seasoned and unknown, but worth going to for the atmosphere alone. The founder and propriator, the great Christopher Richardson, can often be seen in his Panama hat, hob-nobbing with the punters and performers in the bar. He retires this year, sadly. Respect etc.

There is, of course, more to Edinburgh than the Festival, and I am looking forward immensely to eating breakfast in EH1, drinking coffee in Beanscene, buying CDs at Avalanche Records and drinking in establishments too numerous to mention.

For reasons mentioned at the top of this article, postings may be hazy or scarce next week, but we will endeavour to give you a flavour of it all. Of the festival, I mean. The stag night's none of your business.

Buy Tickets for the Festival

The Back Room - The Editors (Kitchenware Records)

2005-08-06T15:34:00.000+01:00

The indie guitar fightback of recent times has been populated mostly by bands seeking to emulate Coldplay, with varying degrees of dampness of bedsheet. A smaller but significant part has been played a group of bands who appear to have spent a number of years locked in their bedrooms listening to British bands of the post-punk and new romantic eras, emerging intent on partying like its 1984. The better examples of this style - Interpol, The Killers, The Bravery - share with their bed wetting contemporaries a taste for the big chorus and an ear for a decent tune, but lean towards simmering resentment rather than poetic angst. The end result has therefore been albums with considerably more edge than you get from, say, Athlete but with enough drive to make you want to stop staring at your shoes and get up and dance. Interestingly, given how deeply these bands draw on British music, the most successful exponents so far have hailed from the US. Now Birmingham's The Editors have attempted to seize the muse back, and made rather a good fist of it.

As with all these bands, there is fun to be had spotting where various aspects of the sound comes from. All pervading sense of Joy Division? Check. Deep love of the Smiths? Check. Basic familiarity with the Cure, the Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen? Check. A never to be admitted to fondness for their sisters' Duran Duran albums? Check. This is not to accuse the Editors of being unoriginal; the influences are worn lightly enough to prevent this being the work of some New Order tribute band, and anyway at the end of the day you just can't argue with the tunes. From the moment Lights burst into life you are irresistibly drawn along, with any pang of nostalgia for the music of your (or at least my) youth merely an added bonus. The highlights? The aforementioned Lights, and Blood get things off to a raucous start. Someone Says is basically a Joy Division song, but a bloody good one. And the opening 8 bars of Bullets will make you want to put you hands in the air and shout "yes, yes, oh God yes" in a way that Jamie Cullum never will.

In short, a great album which stands comparison both with the best of its type such as Interpol's debut album and the Killers' Hot Fuss, and also with pretty much any other album released so far this year. In many ways, it's the album the Bravery should have made if they hadn't apparently decided that Honest Mistake was such a good tune that they needn't bother coming up with any more. With similar British bands like Apartment up-and-coming, both the Yanks and the bed wetters should look out.

Blunt Weapons

2005-08-03T17:55:00.000+01:00

An irregular column asking: Music - look at the bloody state of it.

So for several weeks now the charts have been dominated by not the latest manufactured teen-pop sensation, but by an unassuming singer-songwriter called James Blunt. You'd have thought this would be a good thing. You'd be wrong, and I'll tell you why.

I don't tend to listen to commercial drive-time radio (I prefer hitting myself repeatedly with a bag of marbles), so I did't get to hear "You're Beautiful" until it had established itself at the top of the charts. And once I had, I could't for the life of me work out what the fuss was about. Neither, initially, could my girlfriend. Until we saw him on CD:Uk. Now, having been number one for three weeks, our James was doing the PR rounds, and the poor chap looked as though he too couldn't work out why he was there. He seemed affable, nicely spoken, very normal, and utterly out of his depth. I have to say, I warmed to him. My girlfriend wanted to buy his record.

Suddenly things became clearer. Now, this woman is very soon to be my wife, so I'm required to respect her opinions (and most of the time, I do). And, to be fair, she had also based her decision on the fact that the album comes with a sticker marked "adult material". But our reactions were quite different. I talked to a few friends, and similar stories emerged. Girls love James Blunt. And that's exactly what his marketing department, god love them, were after. Look at him - sensitive, posh, all heartbroken (the song seems to be about loving someone he can never have, as far as it makes any sense at all), even gets his kit off in the video. He should have called his album "Bet You Wish Your Bloke Was More Like Me" and be done with it.

Each to their own. I mean, I find him insultingly bland, but thousands clearly don't. And that isn't what makes his success a bad thing. These things are: Firstly, he's opened the door for other, rubbish, Heart-FM-groomed saps like that tosser in the stupid hat who sings "Bad Day". And we need him and his ilk like we need another Toploader. Secondly, "You're Beautiful" is now so successful, has got so far out of his control, that it can't be anything but a millstone around the poor chap's neck. And he'll now spend the rest of his career trying to live up to it. Crowds at his concerts will shout for it, and no matter how much he wants them to hear his challenging new material, the baying hoardes won't be happy till they hear "the hit". It happened to David Gray - a decent songwriter hamstrung by one successful song.

So girls, feel free to feel sorry for James. He actually deserves it.

A Ray of Sunshine

2005-07-31T01:01:00.000+01:00

In the interests of balance, and to prove we can "do" positive, here are 10 things that are fantastic. In no particular order...

Stars of CCTV - Hard-fi (album) A veritable pile-up of big, great tunes with choruses you can park a bus on and lyrics about what it's like to be young in today's binge-drinking Britain. Hardly off my stereo.
War Of The Worlds (film) Specifically the twenty-minute sequence where the big nasty tripods first appear and wreak spectacular havoc. The rest of the film has it's faults and is, at worst, an enjoyable nail-gnawing romp, but this one sequence had me staring open-mouthed, awe-struck and praising the lord Spielberg.
The Mighty Boosh (BBC3/BBCi) Wonderfully barking "sitcom" in the loosest sense. The new series has sensibly ditched the dull charachters (Bob Fossil), expanded the great ones (Naboo, Bollo the Gorilla) and upped the surreal factor by a few notches. Watch it on the internet whenever you want - what a fantastic idea.
Fake tales Of San Francisco - Arctic Monkeys (single) Superbly snotty shout-along about going to see a crap band. "Get off the bandwagon, put down the handbook" indeed. Download it from i-tunes (as for how, you're on your own).
The BBC2 Comedy Dog logo (thing). Hilarious linking feature, slightly shooting itself in the foot by being funnier than the programmes it links: The Catherine Tate show, another sketch comedy that saves on having to write new gags by having catchphrases repeated week after week; Absolute Power, very clever, well written but oddly chortle-free; and Extras, which does at least seem to have hit it's stride this week.
Saladfingers (web cartoon). Genuinely disturbing and very, very wrong in an indefinable way. There are now six episodes available for your watching pleasure.
Shooting History by John Snow (book). Not only an enjoyable biography, but one of the most coherent and well-argued explanations I've seen for how the world got into it's current perilous state.
Planet Sound (channel 4 teletext page 351). For years now, one of the best sources for indie-based music news and reviews has been tucked away on archaic old terrestrial teletext. They were the first to champion bands like The Libertines and Kaiser Chiefs, and are almost unfailingly right. Deserving of a wider audience.
Arrested Development (DVD). Notable for being both clever and laugh-out-loud funny, this US sitcom is certainly worth owning in it's entirety. It's the story of a wealthy, crooked and self-centred American family who can't stand each other. Basically what BBC2's recent The Robinsons was trying and failing to be.
Charlie Brooker (critic). The Guide's TV columnist is something of a hero round these parts. The author of Screen Burn, and the man behind the great TV Go Home website, he once spent a few hundred words explaining exactly how a bit of rag on a stick would do a better job of presenting The Generation Game than Jim Davidson. Sir, we salute you.

Idiot Journalist of the Week – Part 1

2005-07-29T12:39:00.000+01:00

I haven’t had time to read anything Richard Littlejohn or Jeremy Clarkson may have written this week, so while their nomination can usually be taken as a given in this category, this week it is two Guardian writers whose use of space in a national newspaper to disseminate views of incredible stupidity earns them a mention.

First up, Sam Wollaston. Sam reviews television for the Guardian and is proof that the paper is right to continue to use Nancy Banks-Smith as its primary reviewer even though she’s clearly 106. Sam’s particular crime was to describe BBC3’s magnificent The Smoking Room as “not funny” and “not particularly well acted”. Well, none out of two ain’t bad, Sam. To be fair, it’s clear from Sam’s photo, with his public schoolboy haircut and M&S almost fashionable stripey shiry, why he wouldn’t get comedy as well judged and understated as The Smoking Room. It isn’t the sort of programme that would give Sam four or five catchphrases he can quote at Jamie, Seb and Daisy down the Slug & Lettuce of an evening so I can see why he doesn’t think it delivers. The rest of his column is pretty good but as far as The Smoking Room goes I operate a zero tolerance policy – you either like it or you’re an idiot.

But Sam is Clive James compared to this week’s winner, Carol Sarler. No, I’ve never heard of her either and I can only assume she was given a whole page in Thursday’s G2 because one of their proper writers was suddenly incapacitated. Anyhow, Carol wins her nomination for her ruminations on the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Noting the number of journalists a paper like the Guardian sends to cover the festival, Carol finds herself puzzled that a national paper should bother so. Why? Because according to Carol, out of 1,100 shows we can expect one to make it to London and two to tour. The rest are “for Edinburgh, of Edinburgh, in Edinburgh and will never be seen anywhere or any time else”. So why, asks poor, deluded Carol, is a reader in Aberystwyth supposed to give a toss?

Christ, and all his blessed disciples, on a bike. Do you realise there is a possibility this fool got paid actual money for coming up with that patronising drivel? It’s difficult to know which bit to deal with first, but let’s have a crack at the statistics. I may be getting ahead of myself given the festival hasn’t started yet but I saw two Edinburgh shows last night in Hammersmith. In total, the Riverside Studios are previewing 22 shows. That’s 21 more than 1, Carol. Come September, the Soho Theatre is showing 8 Edinburgh shows. There will be the usual Perrier Award series in October, which usually showcases a minimum of 6 shows and with any luck the New Ambassadors Theatre will once again be running its post-Edinburgh season which if memory serves from last year had at least 10 shows. So by my conservative calculations, that’s 40 Edinburgh shows in London in the months immediately preceding and following the festival and I’ve only surveyed 4 venues. I don’t know the stats for tours but if Carol can be out by a factor of 40 in relation to London I think we are entitled to treat her prediction of 2 as somewhat unreliable.

Even so, should a reader in Aberystwyth give a toss? It’s miles from Scotland and let’s be honest, the roads aren’t that good. I don’t know how popular the arts are in Aberystwyth – maybe no one does give a toss - but apply Carol’s logic, and a national newspaper would never review anything at all. Why should your Aberystwyth reader read a review of anything being staged outside Aberystwyth or, at a push, Borth? For that matter, why should I in London give a toss about anything in North Wales? What am I thinking of when I read reviews of Glyndebourne, Glastonbury, Hay-on-Wye, Chicester? Stratford is miles from anywhere so the Arts Editor needn’t bother with the RSC as interest in what sort of work they are doing apparently doesn’t extend beyond Malvern. On Carol’s model a national newspaper either has an arts section that changes every 20 miles – which probably works on whatever local advertiser Carol usually works on but I can spot a couple of practical issues, or we can just do away with the arts pages entirely and give Sam more room to miss the point of decent sitcoms. Funny thing is, if your geographically immobile Aberystwyth reader wants to know who is going to be producing those sitcoms in the next couple of years, or who is likely to be a future guest presenter of Have I Got News For You, or just who is going to be worth popping down to see if he ever sees them advertised at the Machynlleth Comedy Cavern, he should probably start by reading a few reviews of the shows doing well at this year’s Edinburgh festival. Then he can tell Carol.

Rotten Tracks From Otherwise Great Albums

2005-07-26T20:30:00.000+01:00

In the first instalment of what may or may not be an occasional series, we present the top two.

1. "Everthing will be alright" by The Killers
I have this theory about albums - people don't actually listen to them. Three or four singles, two or three passable non-album tracks, pile them up in the first half, and boy, you got yourself a classic. How else can this track have escaped people's notice, nestling at the back of a universally loved record? Most of the other tracks: exuberant 80s flavoured pop-rock. This track: Brandon whines the same words again and again over a drum machine set to "snooze". Ever heard them do this at a festival? No, thought not.

2. "Fix You" by Coldplay.
Oh come on, it's awful. Since Coldplay's last album, several young pretenders have made a decent career copying their wuss-rock. So now, for a comeback, what strategy do the lads adopt? They decide to out-drip the lot of them. In a voice that is painfully too high even for him, Chris recites sixth-form poetry that doesn't even fit the lines. "When you try your best but don't sucee-eed, When you get what you want but don't get what you nee-eed." And you just know it's going to soundtrack every documentary and England Sporting Disaster this year.
There is some great stuff on X&Y. Soaring, widescreen, beautiful anthems that sound fantastic coming out of a car stereo. This track makes me want to vomit till I see blood. Coldplay: they used to be bedwetters. Now they've started soiling.

Where to start?

2005-07-26T17:51:00.000+01:00

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all, they say. Without speculating on the precise identity of "they", I think we can safely assume they lived in an earlier, and better, age. In those halcyon days a prerequisite of forging a career as a singer was a basic ability to sing. In order to pursue a career as an actor, one would have been expected to display some aptitude for acting and the only attention a buffoon calling himself "Science" and speaking in nonsensical rhyming couplets could expect would be from stray dogs and the local constabulary.

We unfortunately live in more complex times, and the outpourings we intend to share on this blog have to be read in the context of these times. We want to be nice. I just want you to know that The Producers will make you laugh until you cry, that Elevator by Hot Hot Heat will make you want to leap about your living room and that Saturday by Ian McEwan is a tour de force of micro narrative (a phrase which I have just made up and of which I am unnecessarily proud). I'd just like to enrich and maybe once in a while enlighten. But within our culture lurk darker forces about which we can say nothing nice and part of The Distractor will be driven by the belief that when faced with these massed ranks of the talentless, the banal, the pointless, the ignorant and Paris Hilton, silence is no longer an option. To say nothing because we can't think of something nice is to become complicit in the dumbing down of our society. Through muteness we all become Peter Andre fans.

But why should we react? Live and let live, they also say (if there is one criticism of the world in which they lived, the tendency to communicate in clichés would be it). Because we can't avoid these people. Take my earlier reference to Science. I don't watch Big Brother. I wouldn't be seen dead with a copy of Heat magazine. I barely read tabloid newspapers and I listen to no more than 20 minutes of Radio 1 a day. By rights, the only way a moron of Science-like proportions should blip on my radar is if I am misguided enough to attempt to buy something from Dixons on a Saturday afternoon. Instead, even I am painfully aware of what a colossal twat this bloke is. He and his ilk will be given the oxygen of publicity, and the attendant financial rewards this will bring, denied to so many people with actual talent and ability, who might have been able to use it to bring something of value and worth to our world rather than encouraging me to abandon a lifetime's objection to capital punishment and campaign for the reintroduction of the death penalty for the offence of being a wanker. This state of affairs isn't right and even if we can't change it we can register our dissent.

So welcome to The Distractor. This post, gentle reader, is by way of introduction and explanation, but not apology, for what you might find on these pages in the days, weeks or months before we get bored. We hope you enjoy at least some of it, but if you are a Peter Andre fan, you should probably f*ck off now. You have been warned.

A Review Blog With A Very Broad Brief

2005-07-25T20:56:00.000+01:00

Congratulations. By complete accident, you have stumbled across The Distractor. And not, I suspect, for the last time. Essentially our brief is to look at various aspects of Popular Culture and tell you whether to bother with it or not. This could be something you might buy or watch on TV, or it may be something that the media renders inescapable. As you may have guessed, this last bit is basically an excuse for us to lay into hapless wasters like Kerry Katona. Just to give an example.

The views expressed here may be contradictory (often within the same sentence), inflammatory, ill-informed, or patronising, but are above all designed to be entertaining. To us. Taking them seriously would be missing the point.

We are, as you see, a little unfamiliar with the, how you say, blogosphere, and are not a little technophobic. So bear with us.

We begin to tell you what to think very soon...