------------------- INDIE BANDS! GOT THE HORN? I HAVE! ------------------- It's lubricated, and has a great big bell at the end. You won't believe the difference a little puff can make. Mark 'Dr Horns' Ronson | ------------------- LOST: ADDRESS BOOK ------------------- It's black leather, and... Oh yeah RIGHT! Like TIMBALAND calls people HIMSELF. PEOPLE CALL ME, BABY! Ha ha ha ha! |
So, still harbouring the idea that Amerie is just a bargain-basement Beyonce with a voice like a helium hamster? Still dismissing her as a post-'Crazy In Love' one idea wonder? Still not-really-bothering to pay attention to what she is up to? BIG. MISTAKE.
THE TOP 5...
| Click on song titles for ChartBlog review and media. | |||||
| Ìý | 1 | BEYONCE & SHAKIRA | 'BEAUTIFUL LIAR' |
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| Ìý | 2 | JUST-TIMBER-TARDO | 'GIVE IT TO ME' |
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| Ìý | 3 | AVRIL LAVIGNE | 'GIRLFRIEND' |
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| Ìý | 4 | NE-YO | 'BECAUSE OF YOU' | |
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| Ìý | 5 | MARK RONSON ft. DANIEL MERRIWEATHER | 'STOP ME' |
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| The entire Top 40 is right here... | |||||
Yes, that's right. That's Andy, the drummer from Razorlight, applying lip-salve, while wearing shades. This is just one of the amazing things which happened when we sent ChartBlog's roving reporter Amy V off with a sheaf of your maddest questions...to be honest, a lot of you just didn't bother sending ANY questions in, so the mad ones were the only questions we had.
Luckily Andy has a well-earned reputation for being lovely (which we also talked about), and took the whole thing in his stride, as you will see if you read on...
Being a McFly fan is great. Fact. But there are some downsides: Having to explain to rocksnobs the difference between McFly and Westlife (don't start, rocksnobs, there are LOADS), the "Pah, they are rubbish/smell/don't write their own songs" line, even though the middle one is probably true...and of course the little gem "all their songs sound the same".
When I first read that Shiny Toy Guns were developing a special feature of their website where you could download some of their best synth noises to use in creating your own songs, it seemed a great thing to talk to the band about. I mean you don't hear of Oasis offering guitar chord advice, or Scooch letting you have a go on their hostess outfits when they're not using them, do you?
Sadly, I had forgotten the cardinal rule of ChartBlog interviews. NEVER ask a band how they make the music they make...
OK, so it's not fair that a good deal of the SongSpoilers we've put up have either been aimed at the Scissor Sisters or Razorllght. Clearly there are a lot of songs around which sound just like other songs from yester-ages-ago, and there's that saying "talent borrows, genius steals", too, which kind of proves seeking inspiration in songs you already know is an artistically valid thing to do. But hopefully you'll forgive just one more little Scissors comparison, if only because it shows a really interesting double-standard in the way people tend to view 'manufactured' pop acts and 'proper' rock artists.
No matter who you are, no matter how cocky, isolated or depressed you may be, everyone has, at some point, to examine their impact on the world. The central question we all have to think about is 'how would the world be different if I had never been born?'.
(That's different from 'you'll all miss me when I'm gone', by the way, I'm not encouraging ANYONE to linger on THAT dark thought for too long. Even you moody teen types.)
Anyway, seeing as Ne-Yo has this song called 'Because Of You', it seemed a good moment to ring him and ask him to name the things which only exist because of him. See?
OK, if the band can re-release the song, I can re-release the review. Here it is...it's like February all over again!
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In flower-growing circles, there's a thing called 'cross-pollination', where you take the man-pollen out of one type of flower and use it to fertilise the lady area of a different type of flower to see what interesting new blooms can be created (pure FILTH, if you ask me). You check with your biology teacher if this all sounds made-up...
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The awful truth about popular music, particularly music which is devoted to dark emotions (ie not lust or happiness or general excitement), is that the audience needs to feel empathy with the person who is emoting. Their words need to resonate with you, and for that to happen, you have to want to listen to what they are saying. And for THAT to happen, you have to want to keep looking at them.
As any good parent will tell you, the hardest thing to try and explain to young children - who are more self-centred than Mariah Carey eating Mariah Carey-shaped fairy-cakes at Mariah Carey's birthday party - is that it is nice to share your belongings with your brothers and sisters. They understand that it is nice to be given things, they understand that their siblings can help themselves to anything they have already thrown away, but to offer something you have and want in exchange for something someone else has? Well, that's a big leap of faith, innit?
THE TOP 5...
| Click on song titles for ChartBlog review and media. | |||||
| Ìý | 1 | BEYONCE & SHAKIRA | 'BEAUTIFUL LIAR' |
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| Ìý | 2 | ARCTIC MONKEYS | 'BRIANSTORM'' |
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| Ìý | 3 | JUST-TIMBER-TARDO | 'GIVE IT TO ME' |
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| Ìý | 4 | AVRIL LAVIGNE | 'GIRLFRIEND' | |
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| Ìý | 5 | MARK RONSON ft. DANIEL MERRIWEATHER | 'STOP ME' |
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| The entire Top 40 is right here... | |||||
I want to give Amy Winehouse a hug - there, I've said it. It might seem a little unorthodox, given that she doesn't look the most tactile or approachable of pop stars. She's no or anything, not that I'm planning for this to turn into the Famewhores Weekly: Popstars With Whom I've Had Actual Bodily Contact edition [Steve! Let it go! - Fraser]. But let's look at the evidence - 'Rehab' chronicled her longterm friendship with The Bottle, 'You Know I'm No Good' saw her address her self-perceived inability to commit and growing sense of inadequacy, and now this: a song so relentlessly depressed that even Tori Amos might feel compelled to poke it in the ribs and whisper "cheer up, eh? It can't be THAT bad." So yes, I think Amy is in desperate need of a hug from someone, and if no one else wants to volunteer, I'll put myself out there.
Hey, what's this? Signs of fresh growth on the previously barren outcrop of mental landscape from which Snow Patrol previously got all their ideas? Has someone been out there spraying every available patch of dry brain-soil with some mental fertiliser?
And while questions are being asked, is this what happens when you have to write a song specially for a film? Does the director take a listen and go "Hey! You've just written 'Chasing Bloody Cars' again AGAIN! Do something different or I'm gonna get the Kaiser Chiefs to do it!"
Having shocked and charmed the world in equal measure with Part 1 of our McFly interview (it's here, if you missed it), it's time to unveil Part 2. And as with the first half, there's a lot of information to take in in one go, some of it quite disturbing...
Anyone who has seen the film Madagascar will know that there is something unmistakably brilliant about dance music with a ragga twist (that bit with all those meercats singing 'I Like To Move It' is AMAZING). It's like the sexiest music you can make which young children can have plenty of innocent fun with too. And by sexy, I don't mean smoochy, that's totally different.
There's something of a snake-eating-its-own-tail thing going on here. See these happy fellas? Well, if you've not seen the CITV show Bel's Boys, you won't know that they are a brand new band (and a brand new brand, come to that) called, well, Bel's Boys, and that they appear as a band called Bel's Boys in the TV show called Bel's Boys. This is called 'multiplatform branding' and is the sort of thing advertising executives give each other expensive cars for doing. But this is hardly new, so let's move on...
Ponty's favourite sons don't half get a lot of flak for using grunty old rock guitars to make their pop music with. Which seems unfair, seeing as Girls Aloud are always bunging some tasty fret-spank or other into their tunes. I think the 'Prophets controversy is that way around, anyway. I mean, who could object to rock songs having a nice tune? Apart from ones by Slayer, obv. God, imagine if Slayer songs had tunes, like proper tunes you could whistle...that would be CREEPY...
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Ever heard the expression 'tiny things please tiny minds'? Well, proof has finally arrived in the ChartBlog corporate HQ that we have just about the smallest brains this side of...hey, how do you spell amoeba anyway?
What other reason could there be for the incredible delight you can take in taking the name of a band or artist, and then changing the words a bit so it sounds rude, stupid...er, well basically either rude or stupid (did I mention this is for people with tiny minds? I did? Good, good).
The Roman writer Tacitus, in 'Agricola' (all about how good the general of the same name was at conquering Ancient Britain), described the Scots as a fearsome and barbarous people, given to 'songs, shouts and dischordant cries' and generally lairing about, probably painted blue. Of course, back then that sort of thing was totally normal and Tacitus was just a great big culturally imperialist meanie with an unhealthy interest in writing about his stepdad, if we're honest so we could ignore all that business since clearly no country could produce Belle and Sebastian with that sort of racket going on the background.
Lots of people are running this story, and I think some of them are deliberately failing to spot the MASSIVE SARCASM in Britney's voice...
Britney Spears: "I really am pregnant. I saw these magazines, and they said I was pregnant, and, like, it's so true. Like, America, believe everything you read because, like, you're smart and I'm stupid."
So, in case you're a tabloid journo...I DON'T THINK THIS MEANS SHE REALLY IS PREGNANT, OK?
More news below...
Ah, so many great tracks are hitting the charts these days. And it's because of this you have to do something really different to catch everyone's ear. We're all getting harder to please in our chart cocoon of Avril Lavigne, Fall Out Boy, Kaiser Chiefs...all feeding us new and exciting things to get our teeth into.
Hey, remember how we asked you for loads and loads of interview questions we could take to McFly, and remember how we were gonna take them to McFly and ask as many as we could get away with and then come back and make a big feature out of it? Yeah?
Well guess what? We did it and we're back. And it was great.
Having gone all-out for attention with 'Grace Kelly' - a song which veers from salt-in-a-paper-cut irritating to total pop joy depending on how many times you hear it in a 24-hour period - Mika's people are clearly concerned about demanding too much from his new audience too soon. You could reasonably have expected a single release for 'Lollipop' - the second best song on the album - or 'Big Girl, You Are Beautiful'. But these are songs which have the power to appall and delight in equal measure. What Mika needs now is a song which won't drive hordes of people to conclude that they've had enough of his genetically-modified confections, are are now feeling a bit sick.
THE TOP 5...
| Click on song titles for ChartBlog review and media. | |||||
| Ìý | 1 | JUST-TIMBER-TARDO | 'GIVE IT TO ME' |
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| Ìý | 2 | MARK RONSON ft. DANIEL MERRIWEATHER | 'STOP ME' |
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| Ìý | 3 | AVRIL LAVIGNE | 'GIRLFRIEND' | |
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| Ìý | 5 | THE PROCLAIMERS ft BRIAN PIPKIN & ANDY PIPKIN | 'I'M GONNA BE (500 MILES)' | |
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| Ìý | 5 | BEYONCE & SHAKIRA | 'BEAUTIFUL LIAR' |
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| The entire Top 40 is right here... | |||||
Oh now that's a WHOLE lot nicer. None of that silly alpha-male nonsense like 'Smack That' or 'I Wanna Love You' where you can't really hear the music over the sound of the grunting in Akon's head. Grunting which probably goes something like this: "Akon see pretty lady, Akon HAVE pretty lady, make nudey, make boom-boom all over Akon sexy-man house. Akon snoozy."
Isn't it funny what a difference a couple of years can make? When Chester Bennington and the rest of the Linkin Parkies last roamed the earth in their full pomp, Green Day were all washed up, My Chemical Romance were an up-and-coming band with a substance-addled lead singer, and Charlie Simpson was still in Busted. Now EVERYTHING is different...
You have to feel a bit sorry for Fall Out Boy's musical powerhouse Patrick Stump sometimes. He's the guy who crafts the tunes, sings the tunes (he's not Little Britain's Dennis Waterman in a cap, is he?) and stands front and centre whenever the band plays live. By rights he should have all the attention, but no, pretty-boy Pete Wentz has nabbed it. Grr.
I know! What if we had a public holiday in his honour! AND! What if we just gave him St Patrick's Day? After all, the man is so generous with the limelight he's practically a saint...it's ALL SO SIMPLE!
Hmm...I wonder how he will react when he finds out...
A while ago, we asked Sophie Ellis Bextor to name three songs she really likes, and she did exactly that. We did this to try and gain some valuable insight into the personality and tastes of The Famous. But did it work? You be the judge.
Sophie: I do like the Mika 'Grace Kelly' song, I like the Kaiser Chiefs' 'Ruby', and I heard for the first time the Arcade Fire's new single, and I like that too.
ChartBlog: What do you do to 'Grace Kelly'? A lot of people do aerobics to it, apparently...
Sophie: The last time I heard it, I played it at home, and Sonny and I bounced on the bed. He was dressed in his pyjamas, and they've got stripy legs and they've got 'I Love Chad' written on the front of them. It's really sweet.
And there we have it.
Sophie Ellis Bextor's new single 'Me And My Imagination' is available for download on May 7th, and in the shops a week later.
I don't know if any of you have reached this conclusion on your own, and if you have, please don't roll your eyes and go "well, DUH!" too much... But there's a fundamental law we should all be aware of. It's about reading about music, listening to it and enjoying it, and it is this: NEVER trust music journalists.
I like Matt Willis as a person. Not liking Matt Willis as a person is, I think, probably a bit below 'wanting to lawnmower your neighbour's rabbit' but higher than 'having a highly organised underwear drawer' on the psycho scale. He's charismatic, he's not exactly ugly, he's interesting and he seems to be happy to royally mock himself. Which means he can quite barefacedly contribute a cover song to a Mr Bean soundtrack without a reaction more disturbed than smiling maternally and thinking 'Aw, he's great really'.
Ringtones...why are they so rubbish, eh? I mean you would think in this day and age that technology would have advanced far enough that you could get your phone to sound like your favourite song with the minimum of trouble, right?
WRONG! You either have to record your favourite bit of the song yourself using that built-in microphone - in which case you get a lot of hiss and crackle and it sounds like someone listening to their iPod at the bottom of a deep well - or learn how to edit songs down using technology (geeky!) or buy the 'synthesised' polyphonic version, which is always sort of...well it's a bit...I mean you can tell they try hard but...OH MY GOD THE POLYPHONIC RINGTONES ARE SO BAAAAD.
There's long been a tradition in guitar bands that it's somehow OK to poke musical fun at people who have jobs (the Kinks did it, sort of, and the Specials did, and the Jam and the Clash...even Placebo did...). Apparently it's satirical and dead clever to brag about how clever you are to live an alternative lifestyle, while poking fun at all the poor saps who have to go to work every day, like the mindless corporate drones they are. God, it's like they don't even realise all they have to do is be in a band, right, and then they won't have to get up early, or do ANYTHING they don't want to do...
Here's a little quiz. See these people above? Recognise all of them? That's right, Take That are on the left, and the lady on the right? Well that's Kate Walsh, but not the Kate Walsh from that TV show Grey's Anatomy, no. This is a different Kate Walsh, a singy one.
Anyway, can you guess which of these acts has the most popular album for download (according to iTunes)? What's that you say? Take That? WRONG! It's Kate. And seeing as we've already explained how to top the singles charts (it was here, if you missed it), we've gone off to examine how she achieved this feat without having to 'generate a high media profile' and stuff like that.
It happened like this...
Being a friendly kind of blog, from time to time we get emails in from record companies who wish to let us know that they have a band or singer who is thinking of releasing a new song, and would we like to hear about it? And of course this is always exactly the kind of thing a blog devoted to musical excitement is going to be pleased to receive.
Having said that, a lot of these exciting and brand new songs tend to not sound terribly different to songs which you already know very well. This is because there are far more songs than there are original ideas. And far more singers than there are distinctive voices. That's the way it is with music.
Reviewing a Tasha B'dingfield song ought to be easier than usual, right? I mean, we all know how she does it. She throws some chords together - generally the combination D-E-F. It's who she is, it's what she does, and she likes to lay it down for us. (Of course, that's when she's able to focus her attention, and she's not feeling too ADD.) So perhaps we could use that innate knowledge of Natasha's songwriting psyche to intelligently deconstruct the very essence of her latest work?
THE TOP 5...
| Click on song titles for ChartBlog review and media. | |||||
| Ìý | 1 | PROCLAIMERS ft. B POTTER & A PIPKIN | 'I'M GONNA BE (500 MILES)' |
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| Ìý | 2 | AVRIL LAVIGNE | 'GIRLFRIEND' |
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| Ìý | 3 | GWEN STEFANI ft. AKON | 'THE SWEET ESCAPE' | |
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| Ìý | 5 | THE FRAY | 'HOW TO SAVE A LIFE' | |
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| Ìý | 5 | ALEX GAUDINO ft. CRYSTAL WATERS | 'DESTINATION CALABRIA' |
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| The entire Top 40 is right here... | |||||
Why...could it be? Is it that summer's on the way already? The strident perk of this song seems to think so, as it goes down rather smoothly with the handful of nice sunny days we've had lately. This is the kind of song I'm expecting to hear pouring out of everyone's windows while they pose and doze in the sun. Well, the kind of song I hope to hear, anyway.
Let's play a game. Think about the music you like the best, and then try and come up with the adjectives (describing words - like tall, sticky, furry) which best describe how that music makes you feel. What sort of words have you got? I bet 'happy' is in there. And 'brave' or 'capable' or 'calm'. And probably 'excited' and 'hyper', all the words that mean you can't sit still while listening...
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I can't help thinking a trick has been missed in putting together these two and not trying to have some fun with their names. I mean, what kind of name for an act is 'Beyonce & Shakira'? A boring one, that's what. Surely 'BeSha' would be better, or 'Shabey Onkira'? C'mon, 'Shabey Onkira' would be amazing! Or 'Beki Shayora', or 'CeSha Yon BeKira'? No? Just me then...
Look everyone, it's Gareth Gates, remember him? Well basically he's back, he's all grown up and now he's a MAN. A few people are quite excited about this, there's even been some minor hype going on and EVERYTHING. But is it justified, or has absence been doing that 'heart grows fonder' thing again?
When it comes to being a fan of people who's fortune it is to make music for a living, some people just don't seem to know where to draw the line between being really really into a band/singer, and being ridiculously psychotic about that self-same band/singer.
And what's worse, there are even people who actively CHOOSE to be ridiculously psychotic, and wear their ridiculousness and psychotic-itude like a badge of honour or something. These people are to be avoided at ALL COSTS.*
OK, here's the full story. A couple of weeks ago, we ran a review of the - frankly amazing - new single from Maximo Park (it's here, if you missed it), and pointed out that it's quite a piece of work.
This prompted Beth, from the - also frankly amazing - ´óÏó´«Ã½ Slink site to ring in, just to say that she SO agrees with the review, and to rave about how brilliant the band's second album is.
Before we get into the song proper, can I just say I like how the video to this begins like it was an advert for perfume. I like it because those perfume ads where everyone whispers (because what they have to say is a bit too daft to be heard at any real volume) always make me smile. It's like the manufacturers are trying to limit the appeal of their product to pretentious, over-serious art-bores. No wonder Lynx sells as well as it does.
These days, if you wanna make your mark in the rock landscape, you really need to put the hours in. On the one hand you've got Muse filling their arena-rock with what sounds like actual recorded footage of an exploding nuclear warhead in the heart of a dead star (and that's just their ballads), and on the other, you've got Enter Shikari, Gallows and the Automatic trying to bite your ear off while they're screaming into it. Very distracting tactics, you see. Poor Ash are going to really have to work to get everyone's attention...
As you all know, the ChartBlog is not prone to making hysterical gestures or over-reacting for supposedly comic affect. And if it was, Team ChartBlog would deserve to be BURNED at THE STAKE, FOR ALL TIME, right?
But something has happened recently. And it's pretty big. Not big like 'change all the posters on your wall' big. Not big like 'throw away all of your CDs' big. No, this is big like 'take down all of the colours, and replace them with black and grey' big. One of our divas is missing, and there are fears that she may never be fully back in action.
Anger a Smiths fan with a poor cover version...and you probably won't know anything about it. But rest assured that your name is MUD in various bedrooms across the country, not to mention the hearts of a considerable portion of the Guardian's readership.
A risky strategy, some might say. Only someone very, very special will get away with bastardising the Work of Morrissey. Leading us to this - not so much the bastardisation as the Gnarls Barkleyfication of one of my very favourite songs.
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THE TOP 5...
| Click on song titles for ChartBlog review and media. | |||||
| Ìý | 1 | PROCLAIMERS ft. B POTTER & A PIPKIN | 'I'M GONNA BE (500 MILES)' |
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| Ìý | 2 | AVRIL LAVIGNE | 'GIRLFRIEND' |
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| Ìý | 3 | GWEN STEFANI ft. AKON | 'THE SWEET ESCAPE' | |
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| Ìý | 4 | ALEX GAUDINO ft. CRYSTAL WATERS | 'DESTINATION CALABRIA' |
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| Ìý | 5 | THE FRAY | 'HOW TO SAVE A LIFE' | |
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| The entire Top 40 is right here... | |||||
After a couple of weeks where the No.1 position changed almost as often as the View change their pants, it's back to business as usual. Settle back and enjoy another long run at the top for Peter Kay's Comedy Song Rehabilitation Programme. Not that the Proclaimers song is a comedy song, you understand...
But that's not the most interesting thing that happened on the Radio 1 Chart Show this week, no. The MOST interesting thing that happened on the Radio 1 Chart Show this week was that Scott Mills, who is standing in for JK and Joel, is going to get his nails done, on the advice of Fergie 'Fergie Ferg' Fergieson. That's right...
OK, being slightly above the age at which leaving out key letters in words is THE BEST FUN EVER, or RILLY EXPRESSIVE, ACTUALLY, it's taken a couple of goes to really get what Fall Out Boy are trying to say with the title of this song. 'Thinks Far, Thou Murmurs? 'Thunks Fry The Mammories'?
But I've got it now. It's a heartfelt plea on behalf of everyone who didn't suffer debilitating mumps, rubella, or measles in childhood, right? Which is just a way of paying tribute to all those hard-working GPs who administer the three-way MMR vaccine, despite an increasingly hostile media agenda and all the scare stories about possible harmful side effects.
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