They really aren't like us. Take our friend the dame, the great Mr Bowie. What's the kind of thing he gets up to of an afternoon? Watch Loose Women, do a bit of hoovering? No not him. Nothing so humdrum. He's either:

'living in a silent film portraying Himmler's sacred realm
Of dream reality'

or, he boasts:

'Baby, I've been, breaking glass in your room again
Listen/Don't look at the carpet, I drew something awful on it
See'

Not really the kind of behaviour you want from your housemate is it?

So I wonder, what other kinds of extraordinary activities do we learn rock stars choose to involve themselves in, according to their song lyrics?

Doc on More 4 now about his concert re 9/11 where being a decent chap he wanted to do something to help. Features various rock royalty - could be some amusing moments and good music? Called 'The Love You Make' naturally. Maybe you've seen it. I haven't.

I agree with the oft stated view that after Exile On Main St. the Stones were never quite as special any more. Yet I do believe that at least up to and including Tatoo You much fine music was still recorded. Here's one of those gems, many of which, like this example, flirted successfully with funk and even disco. Of course Tatoo You was mostly made up from earlier post-Exile seventies material that was revisited and re-worked. So it seems fair to say they didn't actually suck in the seventies, though standards did slip at times. The 'clip' below is Slave from Tatoo You - something of a classic I feel. Anyone want to speak up for some more post-Exile Stones high points?

Here's a nomination:

Little Roy does Nirvana's 'Come As You Are'. It's stonkin'

Any other suggestions?

Having just read Mark Ellen's fine piece on rock star wives I thought I would resurrect this post which I deleted, doubting it's merit, but now reckon it's probably OK.

The case against the archetypal rock star:

1. Pretends to be working class but went to public school and was brought up in nice big family home which he keeps quiet about
2. Has tendency to make crass and ill thought out comments on political and religious matters he (for it tends to be a he) knows very little about
3. Has flirted with extreme right wing imagery and ideas
4. Had racist outburst when in depths of alcoholism
5. Allegedly had a few flings with young women who were possibly underage
6. May have indulged in occasional violent abuse of partner of the moment
7. General mistreatment and neglect of the other half
8. Affairs regularly conducted without guilt as considered right and perk of the job
9. Clearly a complete narcissist who is obsessed with maintaining the right look at all times – desperate to keep up with changing styles of attire when probably a bit too old and would be best advised not to bother
10. Quite content to insult fans and rest on laurels of endlessly remastered past classic albums and put out mediocre material after mediocre material whilst raking it in any way he can with tours performing the hits in a uninspiring manner that makes them sound like a pale shadow of their former selves
11. Pathetically desperate to keep up with the musical trend du jour – in same way as for fashion (see 9) when it’s clearly not suited to his kind of music
12. Blatantly rips off other acts, plagiarising their material when stuck for inspiration, but fools himself his genius is solely responsible for all his art
13. So high is his self-regard he thinks he should be able to easily master any number of art forms (art, acting, opera, film making, writing, poetry etc) in addition to making up simple pop ditties, which he has been doing whilst not actually bothering with the tiresome hassle of learning how to read music or play instuments properly. These are of course art forms which only a tiny minority of others have only ever acheived great things in after a lifetime of obesessive devotion to their muse
13. Pathetic refusal to grow up and move on from a completely self centred adolescent approach to life
14. Maintains an affected, contrived and false image of self which is just an act
15. Content to betray, generally treat like shit, and drop, friends, lovers, those he has worked with, supposedly in name of necessary obsession to perfect his art but really because he has acted like a complete arsehole from time to time
16. Expects us to be terribly impressed and interested when he cleans up his act and manages to start behaving semi-decently to those closest to him having finally kicked the booze and drugs. He is currently in his fifties or sixties and wants us to look up to him as legend, icon, and now, all round good egg.

Maybe you can add to this list.

But if we loved their music and were enchanted by their charisma we’ll go along with all this and overlook their worst behaviour, even secretly quite admire much of it, unless we think their records were a bit crap really and rather overrated, in which case we will never tire of raising all the above misdemeanours again and again, the same ones we put to one side for our heroes. In fact if we really don’t rate their art we’ll be quite content to give them a good shoeing over the slightest little moment of misjudgement or largely fabricated apocryphal slur, wouldn't you say?

...it's Thursday, it's 7.30pm, it's TOTP and Sheer Elegance (who they?) are still riding high in the charts. Strangely aged man-boy, love-child of Arthur Scargill, David 'Diddy' Hamilton is presenting, and there seem to be a number of individuals performing who all sport a kind of Cliff Richard look - conservative, token trendy long hair (often receding, not Cliff though) and oversized specs. What a luxuriously coiffured ladies style hair-do Gilbert O'Sullivan is sporting, rivalling that of Eric Carmen the other week, singing a song I don't recall but it's rather fine. Seems he was better than I thought at the time. And there's Brotherhood of Man doing that godawful corny dance routine once more.

Not sure about this idea of showing every show in order - getting the same old stuff again and again. It's not getting a lot better. Then again I used to watch dross week after week on TOTP, hoping in vain for something to get excited about. You forget how crap most of it was in any given year. There was the odd tune - I suppose being starved of decent music on radio and TV generally made me grateful for those few, rare crumbs.

The government has apparently issued a smug alert for the vicinity of The Word Magazine website. This is a serious warning prompted by a high level of superior sentiment being unleashed into the blogosphere over this weekend as a result of an unprecedented set of certain favourable atmospheric conditions. There is a strong to severe risk of those middle-aged fans of the past heroes of rock who are particularly sensitive to outbreaks of smugness becoming insufferably full of themselves and determined to extol the virtues of the supposed golden age of the past over what they see as the horrors and mediocrities of contemporary life and culture at this time. 'Heroes' is currently playing on the radio and I must turn it off before I too succumb to the malaise. Best to go outside and hunt for easter eggs or something.

Forgive me if this seems a daft, pointless, unfunny idea of a thread - it may well be, but it's kind of lodged in my brain and won't go away unless I exorcise it by putting it out there in text, perhaps you know the feeling, and it's not like this is the first music-based idiocy to be unleashed into this seething cauldron of tragic thread watching obsessives.

It's Rock 'n' roll Cluedo. There needs to be a murderer, a location and a weapon, in the time-honoured fashion. So to start off I have:

-Morrissey with a sponge and a rusty spanner in the Queen's bedroom.

-Roger Waters with Eugene's axe in Grantchester Meadows.

-Freddie Mercury with a dynamite and a laser beam in the Opera House.

Feel free to add more or ignore (I'll understand).

I am not really bothered about the Foo Fighters but I love Glen Campbell's take on 'Times Like These'. The original lacks sufficient subtlety to reveal the quality of the song - the band kind of sledgehammer their way through it. The cover makes it seem like a classic that's always been around. Any more covers like this where you are not into the act that did the original but find yourself favourably re-evaluating the song due to the way it's been redone?

I heard this on the radio the other day and thought at first it was KT Tunstall. Then I thought, hey, this is quite something - really a very good record indeed and learnt it was Adele's new single. Not what I expected from the Chasing Pavements hitmaker.

Examples -

That you can google and tweet while being kettled (do what?).

That millions will sit down to watch and enjoy a British TV programme where minor celebrities willingly undergo similarly unpleasant humiliations (being covered in cockroaches, eating animal genitals etc) to those inflicted on contestants on those mad Japanese game shows Clive James used to present clips of, which we laughed at and looked down on in a superior fashion.

That you could carry around a music collection of thousands of tracks in your pocket to listen to in stereo while you are out and about.

That students would be expected to pay university fees of up to £9000 a year.

That you could send a text message on a small portable, wireless communications device (even more sophisticated than the one seen on Star Trek), complete with photos and videos, to someone overseas that they receive instantly.

Would be nice to hear some more like this...

I guess this doesn't happen so much these days - either because youngsters are more blasé, and generally everyone's a bit more relaxed about such things, or, obviously because teenagers have their own personal entertainment centres located elsewhere, but I recall a number of occasions of mortification, embarrassment and even falling out over TV I watched en famille, as it were.

There was the time I asked to watch 'Aquarius', an arts show, when we were at my gran's flat and this featured topless Japanese ladies in a '70s performance happening affair. 'Think we better turn this off dear, it's not really what you wanted to see is it?'. Well I was a bit young to properly appreciate such sauciness, still, I was quite intrigued. Then in a similar vein back at home it was 'Omnibus', I think, where Bryan Ferry's old mentor Richard Hamilton was being shown working on a series of depictions of attractive young women posing with toilet paper in some woods somewhere, bottoms suitably exposed, by way of a sort of pop art parody. There was a lot of this kind of thing in the seventies. Father couldn't tolerate more than a few minutes of this nonsense. I had a bit of curiosity regarding modern art, or perhaps it was something else rather more fundamental attracting my attention.

Then there was a newspaper thrown to the floor in disgust by the old man over Rory Gallagher's unpleasant racket on 'In Concert', one Saturday early evening, and similarly with Ian Dury on 'Rock Goes To College' another time. 'Who's that weirdo?' I was naturally indignant about these terminations after a hard day's graft at my Sainsbury's Saturday job. And no bedroom TV let alone i-player, or Youtube option.

Worst was the dreaded intimate scene in a film or play. It was actually 'Butch Cassidy..' one christmas. Very mild love scene of course, but somehow deeply embarrassing with grandparents present in the room and all of us quiet and attentive.

So I presume we don't get this much now. I am not a parent though but I am aware of what goes on via relatives and friends. Anyone else recall such awkward shared family TV experiences from their past?

Structured around visits to fine dining restaurants, a different location per episode, rather like the design of a sophisticated contemporary novel, avoiding the usual clichés of a comedy series, with highly amusing, improvised, occasionally irritable conversation between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, liberally sprinkled with brilliant competitive impressions; this show got even better this week, I thought, with plenty of chuckles to be had.

I'm with those who liked the first one; it's a refreshing attempt compared to the usual tired approaches seen in a half-hour comedy slot. Not so made up as it goes along as it seems, with subtle nuances and an ongoing, somewhat troubled background (well in Coogan's case at least) of the protagonists' lives to keep up a more reality-grounded thread running through it.

Steve Coogan being Ray Winstone pretending to make Brydon drink his phlegm (actually one of their nine courses from a rather poncey Michelin star style taster menu) was a high point. The contrast with the hysterics of the trailer for 'Miranda' that followed only underlined the subtle quality of what went before, and much of it is very funny. I’m growing to love this series. Hope they can keep up the standard, and not run out of impressions.

Such a sad shame when old friends fall out.

As I am sure you know, unless you live on Venus, Keith's given poor old Mick a bit of a hard time in his new autobiography. Mind you Mick does look a bit of a tit in the video below, as he often tended to do post mid. '70s, fascinating comic character that he is. Then again Keef's whole shtick is a bit of a charade and contrived exaggeration as we know, but a cooler seeming one than Mick's persona, at least since 1972 or thereabouts.

I am currently reading Mark Radcliffe's memoir and he relates the story of an encounter with old rubber lips. He speculates light-heartedly in this chapter on who is the more rock 'n' roll of the Glimmer twins. I had to actually lol! on the bus ride home reading his references to the strange changes in Keef's hair-do and to the odds and ends that attached themselves mysteriously in there from time to time, and particularly where Radcliffe recalls 'his friend' Mark Ellen telling him how one time he interviewed Keith (the more-recent-years slurry old gent incarnation) and observed what appeared to be a small spoon somehow attached to the great man's barnet. So here's to Mick and Keef and their bizzare and amusing soap opera of a relationship that's entertained us over the years. To the odd couple.