...on a piece of Toblerone. I hope you're happy.

For fans of Fischer Z, a track from the new album by John Watts which is spiffing. Fucking muppet indeed.

eat an enormous sherry trifle before doing the voiceover on that?
Or just drink an enormous bottle of sherry?
Either way, it's either the best ever trailer for a magazine, or the worst. I really can't decide.

Very fetching jumper, Ms Mossman, if you don't mind my saying. I would comment on Mr Ellen's crisp blue shirt, but I have a feeling I may have seen it before.

how many takes?

from whoever the distracted smiley bloke on the right is.

Cracking ad for the new edition of The Word. It had everything for our entertainment: live music, a professional voice-over that would have made Patrick Allen proud, and the lovely Kate smiling at the camera daring us to buy the mag for all the goodies inside. What a team.

Please please please do one every month.

And get rid of the mug.

but always good to excel one way or another

respect to mr ellen for withholding his trademark guffaw

his beaming expression had the effect of audience applause -further encouraging you to laugh - and it worked

and yes -the mug has got to go

More of this sort of thing please.

1. Rymans supply nice neat sticky tags to mark pages. But sod them, the use of ripped yellow post-its in this commercial was just pure rock'n'roll. The frayed edges on those post-its to me sum up the ragged untidiness and flawed genius that we often find in this particular genre of popular culture. Indeed, the ugliness of those post-it shreds combined with Kate's fine features say so much about out society today.

2. I'm sure I've heard that soothing guitar riff before too. Hang on let me get out my Nick Drake Collection CD. I'll get back to you in a minute.....

.....nope I was wrong, sorry.

Oozing from every pore. You can use that quote when they turn the life of The Word magazine into a film. Usual royalty rate of course.

Edit: I SPOTTED THE DELIBERATE MISTAKE!! 98th edition??? (record token winner - Ed.)

...and a dark silence pervaded the air of Word Towers as the staff cowered at their desks. For Mr Hepworth was in a foul mood following some sort of news about a Stratford stadium. Glancing up imperiously from his desk he announced "I shall be shirki, I mean working from home this afternoon. Goodday to you" he barked, rising from his desk and donning his gaberdine. Pausing briefly at Fraser's desk, he stared over his pince-nez at the cringing Webmaster. "And I want the puff piece on the site by 2pm, no later! Or else".
He swept down the stairs, a member of the Mixmag marketing department threw herself out of the fire escape door rather than meet his icy glare.
Suddenly the sun came out. As self-important twats hooted into their mobile phones on the streets below, a blackbird alighted on the tree outside and began to sing.
"The puff piece, then" mused Mark.
"I've got an idea" said Fraser, "but we have to go to the pub first"...

It’s like the production values of a 1970s children’s television show have come to Islington. In a minute we’ll journey through the Round Window to see what Gibby Haynes from Butthole Surfers has been getting up to.

I bought the new WORD yesterday and wish to make the following observations/rants:

1. David Quantick’s review of The Bonzo Dog Band is an exceptional piece of writing and really makes me want to lend a fresh ear to a group that I don’t have a great deal of time for.

2. Uncool wretch that I am, I have never heard of Lykke Li, or knowingly listened to a note of her music, although I expect that will change soon. Eamonn Forde’s profile of her is a sound piece of journalism and I enjoyed reading it.

3. Ian McMillan is a lovely man.

4. I suspect that the intention of David Wibberley’s column was to wind people up. By responding, I’m dancing to his tune which, based on the popularist tone of his argument, probably sounds a bit like Grenade by Bruno Mars.

Anyone who thinks (as Wibberley does) that the music industry is artistically in crisis, has cloth ears. Anyone who believes that the financial woes of the industry can be pinned on a handful of stroppy, nonconformist rock groups, wilfully shunning mainstream success, is out of their mind.

Wibberley claims that rock music has become “more inward-looking, elitist and difficult to grasp than ever,” releasing product that is “quite simply below par.”

There’s a kernel of truth in those statements but, in my opinion, he grossly overestimates the effect. It's exactly this kind of thinking that leads to dark talk of conspiracy theories, with Steve Albini and David Pajo as sinister puppet-masters, intent on undermining the major labels by refusing to include soaring west coast harmonies on any of their recordings.

He mentions Arcade Fire as an example of a group that hoovers up critical plaudits but is still little known. This portrait of wilful exclusivity jars with a band whose early shows often ended with them breaking down barriers by marching through their audience while still singing. Last year I watched a televised broadcast of the group’s triumphant headlining set at the Reading Festival. What made the performance so watchable was their rapport with the audience, many of whom were probably not fans; their willingness to communicate and to roll out anthems that had the crowd singing back. The overlying message was ‘Come join with us – we’ll all be one great big band in a field in the Thames Valley! It will be awesome!’ And it was.

Arcade Fire’s recent album - The Suburbs, far from being someone discordantly scraping at a cello and daring you to like it, is full of tunes and articulates recognisable themes of being a teenager and growing up on the margins. One of the tracks was recently used in the teaser trailer to Channel Four’s teen soap Skins. I bought the album in Tesco - that well known emporium of elitism and obscure records by bands that no one has ever heard of. I very much doubt that you could have picked up their first proper album Funeral in a supermarket. Evidently something’s changed. The band are certainly better known than they used to be.

Wibberley notes that last year’s X Factor winner - Matt Cardle had a number one hit with a Biffy Clyro song Many of Horror (renamed When We Coliide) and wonders why the band couldn’t be bothered to make “their original version a number-one recording.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the success of Matt Cardle, in this instance, had something to do with him being the winning contestant of a popular TV talent show, broadcast over many weeks, to a massive audience, on the primetime slot of a major channel, with overspill into other media. With that kind of marketing behind him, nothing short of a well organised internet campaign, the widespread use of a mind-erasing ray gun, or a disturbing revelation into Cardle’s private life would have kept him off the top spot. It didn’t really matter what song he ended up singing, or even which of the finalists got to perform it, because X Factor isn’t solely about music. It’s a narrative that the audience participate in by voting. When the winner claims the number one Christmas single it validates the public’s choice, and represents the end of their journey from talented no-mark, to bona fide popstar. It’s probably also the peak of their career. They will never be this popular again.

Wibberley says very little about the fortunes of Biffy Clyro, probably because doing so would punch a bloody great hole in his argument. The album from which Many of Horror was taken went platinum in the UK. (The band’s previous album went gold). The song itself (one of six singles released off the album) reached number eight in the charts.

Damn those contrary, un-ambitious bastards, undermining the record industry with their number eight single! The boss of Warner Records must have had a face like thunder when he heard of their deliberate shunning of the top seven. No doubt this failure was informed by their conscious decision to turn their backs on popularity by writing a gentle, melodic, rock-infused ballad that rides to a climax on an orchestral swell, and whose lyrics were penned on the obtuse, seldom-explored subject of being in a tempestuous relationship. Why do you make it so hard for us to love you Biffy Clyro? How are the public supposed to trust your accessible rock music when your record only aims for the bronze medal spot in the album charts?

There are a lot of factors contributing to the music industry’s current shaky footing and the diminished popularity of rock music; I mean apart from the usual ancient Norse prophecies. Public tastes go in cycles and are hard to predict (a few years ago the single was on life support. Now downloads are it making relevant again). There are more bands than at any other time and so attention is less-focused on a handful of groups (The world and his dog are in a band - an issue touched upon in the latest edition of WORD which mentions a group called Hatebeak that boasts an African Grey parrot as its lead singer). Music no longer defines teen culture in the way that perhaps it once did; it has to compete with other forms of media. And so on and so forth.

Rock groups do still crossover – Kings Of Leon are massive. Snow Patrol and Coldplay have done very well in recent years. Even members of the aforementioned Biffy Clyro were probably able to give up their day jobs long before X Factor gave them a financial shot in the arm.

If I knew the reasons why the music industry is in the state that it is, and could formulate a plan to remedy the situation, I would have awoken this morning in a 50-bedroom mansion and been dressed by trained golden eagles. The fact is that I don’t, and neither does David Wibberley.

of correcting factoids..

All That Glitters, the history of Glam Rock. One-single wonders Bunk Dogger. What's this then?

There were other singles released by Bunk but I can't be arsed to go up into the attic to prove this. Take my word for it, I'm a nutter.

My subs renewed last month and I was expecting this one through the post (insert Elton baby joke here). But it hasn't arrived yet!

Quandry, to buy and risk a duplicate landing on the mat, or not to buy and risk a broken sequence after four years continuous subs. Hmmm.

Oh and it'll have been said elsewhere no doubt, but the Elton cover puts me in mind of Mad.

on one of these Mark 'n Kate videos was about a year or so ago when the demure Ms Mossman did an impersonation of Ginger Baker in a sort of heavy cockney gangster accent. Tremendous!

thank you very much to the team for putting my Tim Minchin piece in the 'Massive Attacks' section.

is on fire. Its official.

was that Mark got to meet the star of 'Humblewatch'. Lucky sod.

*Sigh*. And I didn't even put her name on my Valentine's Post. Move on, laddie: there's nothing for you here. Duh.

It's a strange beast, Rastafari. In common with most religions it has its roots in a context of displacement, diaspora and poverty. Haile Selassie cut a most unlikely figure as a messiah: the archive film (available on iPlayer on the BBC4 Roots of Reggae thingy) of his arrival in Jamaica in 1966 showed a thoroughly bewildered and probably shit-scared Emperor of Ethiopia peering anxiously over his neatly trimmed goatee while the gathered multitudes at the airport went fucking mental. His goons were probably checking the timetables for the first flight straight out before they'd even landed.

I think Mr Hepworth was wrong about John Barleycorn. I love that album and I love Traffic but it is one of those records - one of many, in fact - that will never sound as good on my CD player as it sounds in my head. In common with many records of the day, what the title song needed was a solid, common sense producer to keep the thing tight and on-track. What we have instead is a beautiful song that degenerates into a bloody mess.

I thought the preamble and interview with Bobby Gillespie worked well, and I hope the scribes at the Mothership will continue to provide us with insights into the workings of artists that some of our number would prefer to leave lying in a ditch somewhere. Screamadelica was, and I think still is, a very important record (as opposed to a Very Important Record: not quite) and one which defined the times it came out of as well as any other lumbered with the same millstone: insert your own CD of choice here. I like Gillespie. He's clearly a lifer, and it's not his fault if he and his band choose to self-destruct rather than make another VIR (sorry, I mean v.i.r.).

In the immortal words of Ronnie Scott (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here but stick with it), "Elton John. Well. I've met some piano players in my time, and he's one of them". Elt may be many things but he gives good quote and much of his stuff as reported was laugh-out-loud funny. I think he's hilarious anyway, and never more so when he's in full-on, 0oh-Get-Her mode. Elt knows his stuff; he's been around for longer than God, he's been around the world at least eight times and has met everybody twice, and is the only person alive who knows an English word that rhymes with 'orange'. Small wonder, therefore, that he can kick into a cocked hat the stupid bloody myth that is 'Keef' armed only with an arched eyebrow and a caustic 'puh-lease!'.

Which brings us to the Cover Disc. I wonder if Elt has heard the first track? He probably doesn't need the money but if he did, he might be asking questions. Funeral For A Friend, indeed.

I think it's my favourite one so far - and, yes, I have been reading since issue 1.