The World Cup is one week away. One week! I’m so excited about the World Cup that I’m beyond the joyful constant-vibration stage and well into the much darker, more worrying “buy any associated merchandise within grabbing distance” phase.

The best thing about the World Cup – after the football itself – is the crud that surrounds it.

Crud like this tie-in dirge-song, which, astonishingly, is Serbia’s official World Cup anthem. Or maybe more grouchy, neurotic and home-spun crud like this surprisingly risible effort by Mark E. Smith from The Fall. This kind of hit-and-hope tosh clings magnetically to …

All music recycles the past – it has to in order to generate new ideas, just like any other art form. But it’s safe to say that, within the realms of guitar music at least, this retrospective thievery has become the ends and not the means.

‘So what?’, you might say. But when bands steal ideas, attitudes or sounds from the past and fail to add their own splash of colour to the mix, then we’re all being short-changed, and the bands become, essentially, tribute acts.

And if I want tribute act, I’ll brave the onslaught of weak puns …

Expectations: quashed. Norms: avoided. Head: scratched. Not Squares use cowbells, ‘dirty synths’, tight double-speed drums and disco basslines, and yet the band is not instantly hateful and their songs are not the kind of generic ADHT nonsense found on mobile phone adverts. So what gives?

Call me a naive, old cynic, but what drives me up the wall is when a two-bit band scrabble aboard the most fleeting of bandwagons, whelp out a truly woeful, turgid two-bit song and make a success of themselves, all because they were bright/stupid enough to harmonise with the two-bit musical flavour du jour.…

Everyone has a song that, when heard, will whip them up and away to a moment in their past. Mine is the title track of Spiritualized‘s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, and only the opening space-shuttle bleeps are needed for an involuntarily reliving of heady art college days – the tacky plastic smell of cheap acrylic paint, the groping of strange art concepts and stranger art students.

Now Ladies And Gentlemen… has just been re-released, with the obligatory extra discs of new material, in an exciting black variation of the original’s pill-popping packaging. For once, the …

When I was in France, while the Tour de France was snaking its sweaty, wild-eyed way through the countryside, my tent was pitched high on a hill, which in turn was overlooked by Mont Ventoux. It’s a huge, imposing lump of a mountain, undulating, steep and bereft of trees and other life near the summit. The penultimate stage of the Tour finished on the top of it, where presumably the riders fell straight off their bikes into a huge heap of cramping limbs and destroyed will.

In the next tent was a crazy Norwegian. Most Norwegians are slightly crazy, in …

I watched 20 minutes of The Da Vinci Code movie. The book was stupefyingly bad and guess what – a clunker of a book became a clunker of a movie, too. It seems commendably perverse when you consider how many good books are butchered into poor movies.

Anyway, I watched it all the same, knowing I’d hate it. Experiencing something in the knowledge that it will be unpleasant in order to see just how bad it is must be a trait unique to humans. It would certainly explain Phil Collins’ career.

I didn’t think I’d like Today’s New Band, …

Innovators in pop are very rare. And when there is, a familiar pattern emerges: Proponent of new sound gets minor fame through aforementioned newness of sounds. Others quickly pick up new technique/style, and due to further innovation become even more famous. Then everyone else follows suit, and charts are flooded with dreary watered-down nonsense. Bad times. Such is the self-consuming nature of pop.

Like everything in pop music, the laptop ‘n’ traditional guitar-band combo is nothing new. But it was once. Today’s New Band, Apple Eyes, have grasped this idea and, with sticky fingers and mucky palms, squeezed a new …

Having seen Oliver Stone’s JFK for the first time, here are my considered observations:

1. After three hours of a movie, both my buttocks go numb
2. Back and to the left back and to the left back and to the left ZOMG BLACK OPS!!1!!!1!!
3. If any film was destined to be identified as a ‘dizzying tour de force’ by lazy journalists and film students everywhere, this was it.

It’s hard not to be entirely in thrall with such a brilliant assembly-job like JFK. It pulls so many different strands together with such intelligence and coherence, it doesn’t really matter if the …

If you ever want a reminder of the power of pocket money and a taste of its indiscriminate, bewildering influence on all our lives, just take a look at the pop charts. There is always, without exception, a heavily promoted, quasi-’urban’ pop band that makes teenage girls weak at the knees, teenage boys boisterous, and the rest of us stunned at the stupidity of humanity.

Check out R&B/Hip-Hop/Mentalist act N-Dubz. Once you get past the sheer awfulness of their name, brace yourself for the utter lunacy involved in their being – a whirlwind of ‘street’ posturing, ridiculous hats and …

NB: Since publishing this post, Julian and I have conversed via email. Julian’s actually a good guy whose frustration with the music industry’s reluctance to give bands time to develop got the better of him, and I was just the person he vented his spleen to on the spur of the moment.

I don’t blame him for his frustration – I share it – so happily, him and I have the same basic ideas and views on music, and all is well. However, the core points of the post remain important, so I’m keeping it up, though with this …