February 2012
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The Arctic Monkeys and the joy of the non-album...
The non-album single is always a good sign. It suggests a band in good form and high spirits, a band with the confidence to send a song out into the world without a gang of others to give it cover. The history of the non-album single is studded with gems. I started off thinking about the brilliance of the non-album single with Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields (unquestionably one of the best double-A...
The Think In: an unfinished bit of stuff
We are having a “think in”. Four grown men pooling their collective brainpower in the service of working out how a slightly broken business can get less broken. I am the only one wearing a Keith Richards t-shirt and an Iron Man badge on my lapel. I am not Iron Man or Keith though. I am the Broken Bottle Boy, the worst super hero in human history, powered only by an ego made of spun...
And Jesus came to just The Guardian readers: the...
I purchased a copy of the Sun on Sunday yesterday. I directly contributed to Rupert Murdoch’s army of evil robot assassins. From a tube in his volcano hideout, my €1 dropped into a vast treasure chest where he swims like Scrooge McDuck, cackling to himself while grimly masturbating over pictures of exploded Polly Toynbee heads. I am just another goon in his squad of solid grade-A bastards. I fund...
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The regions: a message from the rest of us to the...
Filming in Liverpool Street Station. The departures board is the most complete list of places I don’t want to go to I’ve ever seen.
— richard bacon (@richardpbacon) February 25, 2012
I grew up in Norfolk. It is the backwoods of Britain. If you want a comparison, look to the South of the United States. It is insular, at times scared of change and outsiders but also built on...
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Chris Brown should come with a ‘cigarette packet...
Cigarettes can give you cancer. We still sell them but print disturbing images of diseased lungs on the packaging. Chris Brown is a terrible role model, utterly awful human being and unrepentant perpetrator of violence. This is a man who posted a TwitPic showing his certificate from a court-mandated course for individuals found guilty of violent attacks. His records are still sold but bare no...
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James Corden on The Brits: horrified by Elvis,...
I have finally listened to James Corden’s backslapping session/it-weren’t-really-me-guv mea culpa on the Brit Awards and AdeleGate. The interview from Richard Bacon’s 5Live show on Wednesday isn’t incredibly illuminating but it does expose new levels of obsequious from Rich and a hefty slice of pomposity from James Corden in his role as the freshly anointed crown prince of British pop...
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If you’re a woman on Skins, you will be punished...
Grace DEAD. Franky RAPED. Mini PREGNANT. Liv better watch out as the Skins writers appear to be on a quest to punish every leading female character in the show for having a good time. Grace’s reward for finding happiness with oddly squeaky clean ‘rocker’ Rich was to be smashed to bits in a Moroccan car crash. That was the series’s first dose of punishment for the ‘girls’ but it wasn’t the...
The full text of my interviews with gypsies and...
After reading @pipogypopotamus powerful open letter to Channel 4 and Channel 4’s response, I thought it might be worth publishing the unedited version of the piece I wrote for the Guardian last year interviewing travellers and gypsies about My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding:
Among Gypsy and Irish Traveller groups, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding has been met with widespread dismay. Facebook groups with...
RE: Channel 4's response to @pipogypopotamus and...
Here’s what Billy Welch, a Roma Gypsy spokesman told me for The Guardian last year:
“I’ve been to quite a few Irish Traveller weddings and I’ve never witnessed grabbing.“
Click here to read the rest of the short piece I wrote on responses to the first series of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (scroll down for it).
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The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was...
I regularly spend time in a room with a man who has fairly offensive opinions, isn’t especially keen on immigrants or gay people and was on the frontline during the Wapping dispute. Because my surname isn’t Brookes, Cameron or Murdoch, I’m not talking about Rupert but my ex-copper granddad who got clocked pretty badly during the Grunwick clashes and was pictured on the front of the Daily Mail...
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Sort of exclusive! The #judasgoat rises: Yahoo is...
“Feel free to forward this entire email to family and close friends. But please do not promote on social networks at this time.”
Oh dear and it was highlighted in yellow and everything. I’m not a close friend of anyone within the Yahoo! New Media Deathstar (in reality, I have about five close friends and that number is subject to change at any time) nor am I related to a Yahoo! I am related to...
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The #judasgoat goes to the supermarket: Tesco,...
This morning on BBC 5Live’s Your Call, basically the coliseum with a phone-in element, Edwina Currie interrogated a woman struggling to feed her family to the point of tears. It’s the poor who are to blame you see with their expensive mobile phones and addiction to Sky TV. It doesn’t matter that the woman told Currie that no she didn’t have a Sky box, didn’t spend money on clothes from catalogues...
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I love you more than the night wires
Late at night I sit up and type you assume I don’t love you as much as the voices on the wires
while you squirrel in the duvet I sit cold in the living room legs capitulating to the freeze
I sit up and type grasping for something from the white that might just save us
Late at night I sit and type you lay quiet thinking I don’t love you as much as the strung together characters
I hang...
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Sean Penn, why don’t you tell my dad the Falklands...
I was just the hint of a glimmer in the eye when my dad shipped off to the Falklands. He was preparing to go on holiday with my mum and found the notice posted on the door of their married quarters. He could have skipped out on the commitment but he did what he was paid to do and immediately went to start stocking up the ship’s medical bay for sailing off to war. As the task force steamed...
The unsolicited email I received this morning. I...
Thank you Graham Smith. Please do call again.
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The Artist was made by artists: there's nothing...
I was contacted by The Evening Standard to write something about The Artist’s Best Original Screenplay win at the Baftas. While they requested 200 words only a single paragraph appeared there on the letters page. Here’s the full thing:
I was almost as speechless as George Valentin, The Artist’s main character, when I read this tweet from the journalist Toby Young:
Can’t quite...
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On Adele and Someone Like You Man’s everlasting...
You’re so vain, you think all the songs are about you. Usually the really cool ones about dudes who wear awesome hats or girls who are so beautiful that men retreat to a hut somewhere to meditate on the breakup before getting over it and becoming bezzie mates with Kanye West.
It’s OK to over-identify with songs though. We all do it. That’s why the Walkman was one of the greatest inventions in...
Anonymous asked: I don't like the way you've written about Noel Fielding. He's a human being. He's worked hard and he deserves to be angry at people who have gone out of there way to make it known that they don't like his work. I'm sure he has no problems with people disliking his show, but to be publicly critical of someone who has merely created something that he is proud of (more...
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Adele is better than The Beatles: the Grammys,...
(Adele as portrayed by a robot mannequin (C) Associated Press)
“Adele now has more Grammys than The Beatles!” exclaimed the Channel 4 News reporter before his voice was silenced by a spade shattering the screen. You might ask why I keep a spade beside the TV and you’d be right to. I believe in being prepared. You never know when an arts correspondent will spout a fact so fundamentally pointless...
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The future of the #judasgoat and journalism: the...
“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labour, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”
- Hunter S Thompson, quoted in the foreword to Fear And Loathing At Rolling Stone
I hear you Brother Thompson, you speak to me from the beyond the grave. I know I’m no Hunter S Thompson. I don’t have the bravery or capacity for ingesting industrial amounts of psychotropic drugs to take on that...
I stole some sweets (a quite short story)
I stole some sweets from the shop this morning. I haven’t done that since I was eleven, watching bigger lads nicking Silk Cut through classic misdirection. Oh Mr Patel. He was one of a few novelties in Norfolk. A man with skin that wasn’t vampire pallor pale. See Attleborough is one of those towns that cling to the slipstream of a city like lost sailors to some wreckage. Nothing much has...
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There’s nothing luxury about Noel Fielding’s...
If you dont like the Boosh or Luxury I am sure there will be some straighter comedy on soon set in a shop or a house x
— Noel Fielding (@noelfielding11) February 1, 2012
Noel Fielding becomes a lot less whimsical when someone irritates him. It’s a swift gear change from talking about space foxes dressed in silver foil suits to straight insults. It seems to occur whenever he reads a less than...
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The revenge of the #judasgoat: move on and...
“I read this article with extreme interest as I work on the business at AOL. I found it rather amusing. It may not be fair that Huffington Post is having an impact on the availability of paid journalism work but then again life isn’t fair. Shit happens: workers in the UK construction trade are undercut by Polish migrants, middle men in the music industry are no longer supported in the digital...
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The Huffington Post is the Judas goat of...
The job market is tough these days but I still wouldn’t apply to slip on the fleecy suit of the Judas goat. The smartest of the dumb herd, the Judas goat is trained to hang out with the rest of the beasts at the slaughterhouse and get them comfortable. When the time comes it leads them onto the killing floor. They stay there and it walks out to dupe another set of startled sheep.
Judas goats...
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In defense of Peaches Geldof aka I think I might...
Stopping my rant now.I know Im not some golden girl nor an angel but I still deserve better than lies & personal press vendettas. Thats all.
— Peaches Geldof (@peaches_g) February 5, 2012
On the 5th of February something distressing happened to me. It shook my worldview to its foundations. I felt queasy and confused. I felt sorry for Peaches Geldof. First I read a tweet from her (reproduced...
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If Facebook had existed when I was a teenager, I...
If Facebook had existed when I was a teenager, I would probably be dead. I was bullied from the beginning of high school until around the start of fifth form (year 11). For me, the Brit-Pop years were about listening to Blur, wanting a swagger like Liam Gallagher had, fancying Justine Frischmann and being spat at and kicked in corridors.
I was verbally abused and physically bruised term after...
The problem with TV critics who don't like TV: a...
In the US, it’s common for journalists to have a statement of ethics* detailing their conflicts of interest. Here’s mine before I get started: I used to be paid to write about TV in a column called Mic Wright’s Remotely Furious. I don’t have it any more and it makes me so bitter I could be ground up and used to make espresso.
I love television and Twitter has only made me love it more. The...
Some delightfully well-thought out filthy thinking...
Honestly, read the whole thing. It’s brillflakes sprinkled on a bowl of win as internet people might say:
eve-barlow:
I think I might fancy M.I.A. a bit now. It’s very confusing. My gay friend growing up once described me as “the most straight person I know”; my type is man-shaped and not much more specific than that. For instance, I went to see Michael Fassbender bang his way about...
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Happy birthday 2000 AD: how Judge Dredd saved my...
2000 AD was seven years old by the time I was born. It was seventeen when I first picked up an issue, scrabbling through boxes of faded old copies in a second hand bookshop. With almost twenty years of stories to draw upon, I devoured the Judge Dredd back catalogue. My favourite epics are still Judge Cal ruling Mega City One with his pet goldfish as deputy and the long arc that began with The...