Any takers?

Gonna be huge i think.

Their (official?) Facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7692217731
has a new song on it called New Moon (very SONG-ish as you'd expect) available as a free legitimate download while some little tease has posted THIS picture:

http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/62993_10150272548420413_6...

What can it all mean?

Either way it's great to once again hear John Campbell's now traditional 'spoken word' bit at the end of this new track...

who's heard it? bloody brilliant isn't it?! Christmas come that bit earlier if you're a fan.

dunno what's more baffling though; these unreleased tracks not leaking years back or Marr and Mozza not putting a proper box set out sooner that had them all on, like they were supposed to be doing. either way it's amazing to have them out at last.

(i know it's illegal and all, so we shan't be passing links to it hither and thither obviously.)

Hi is there a way of doing this? I recall it being mooted a while back. I mean if say i don't want to pay for a whole back issue, but still wanted to read Simon Price's piece on 'posh rock' from the last issue or what have you, can this be done? Thanks.

Every track from disc 1 of The Essential Billy Joel, played simultaneously. By WONDER-TONIC.COM

It's crackers the internet innit?

According to a tweet from none other than Bill 'Merseybeat' Harry, Mark is um.. taking his time on this 3 volume biography. First reports suggested a triple set with intervals of maybe 2 or 3 years and that was in 2005! Anyroad here's the tweet:

Bill Harry twitter.com/merseybeatcouk
Henry Epstein phoned me. He has been in contact with Mark Lewisohn, helping with Mark's book. Mark is up to Hamburg. 3:16 PM Aug 24th via web

"Up to Hamburg" !

I would love to know if this film could possibly be as bad as it's meant to be! Even Bill Cosby (at the time the highest paid actor in the USA) went on tv to say how much he hated it and that folk shouldn't bother paying their 7 dollars!

Has anyone here seen this or sat through/walked out on any other bad vanity projects, crappy sequels and suchlike?

There's a new book about Disco and it's impact in America by Aice Echols
just about to come out and i'm wondering if anyone has read any of the other disco set texts that have come out these last 10 years or so. Anyone care to recommend any? Or indeed any clubbing books.
http://www.rorotoko.com/index.php/article/alice_echols_book_interview_ho...

http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/features/paul-really-is-dead-say...

Seems like there might be some mileage left in this thing after all these years!

http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1257872_frank_sidebot...

What say you?

There's only one soundtrack for this heatwave, and it's this album from last year. For the uninitiated it's a kind of modern singer-songwriter pop sound (produced by Paul Epworth) with Brazilian tropicalia flavours. I think there's a hint of 'Head On The Door' era Cure or maybe even the The's 'Soul Mining' in there somewhere. I'm on the verge of almost stopping folk in the street to tell them how great this album is. Bloody short too, with nary a track over 4 minutes long. Whole thing over and done in 37 brisk minutes.

spotify:album:4t9J383odWe8KhhffUjzQ6

La Roux is doing a quite brilliant stripped-down version of
Under My Thumb on her current UK tour and you can make of that in itself what you will but here's the thing. She doesn't change the the 'girl' line to 'boy' nor the 'she's to 'he's.

I like that a lot and it seems to be the way with things, cover version-wise since some time late in the last decade. My admiration for Alex Turner sky-rocketed when, before a Glastonbury Main Stage crowd that numbered in the hundreds of thousands at the Arctic Monkeys' peak back in 2007, he pointedly kept the all the lines as they were written, in a cover of Dimaonds Are Forever, so that you had things like "Unlike men, the diamonds linger/ Men are mere mortals who are not worth going to your grave for" intact. It just seemed like a fun, cool thing to do.

Now when i were a lad (in the 1980s and 90s) that never happened. Certainly Oasis and their ilk would never have done a cover where Liam sings about men for example, and all the hit covers of the day switched the genders around when required so it fitted the traditional heterosexual set-up accordingly.

Today it seems, if you cover the song you keep the lyrics as they are, but i wonder why there's been a sudden change? I think it's much more fun that way any case! The most extreme example of it i can think of is Amy Winehouse's cover of Valerie, clearly written by a man about a woman he's obsessed with, but now it's coming from a female point of view.

Can we think of any hit covers from the 70's/80s/90s that did the same? What do we make of all of this?

Looking forward to this! Anyone else? This Is Uncool is still easily in my Top 5 music books of all time list.

http://garrymulholland.com/books/coming-soon-popcorn-fifty-years-of-rock...

http://www.blur.co.uk/

If you can imagine Modern Life Is Rubbish era London-centric vocals and wordsmithery but with fancy and clever late period 97 Coxonian guitar thrown in at the end you're halfway there. Bloody brilliant it is!