Given the ubiquity of her music, it may come as something of a surprise to learn that Florence And The Machine’s collaboration with Dizzee Rascal on You Got The Dirtee Love is her highest-charting single to date. In fact, Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) only got to 12, while the awesome, elemental Drumming Song limped into the charts at 54.
The album, by contrast, has done spectacularly well – selling 515,843 copies in 2009, making it the 18th best-selling record of the year.
Having made a bit of money off the back of that, Florence has decided to redo the video for Dog Days Are Over. According to monumentally brilliant music blog, We Are Pop Slags, Ms Welch was dissatisfied with the low-budget original, which was shot on “a video camera in a forest, with my Dad and Marks & Spencer sandwiches”.
For the sequel, she’s covered herself in medieval geisha paint, hired two dancers from a B52’s zombie cover band, and gone crazy with the powder paints. It is totally unhinged, and utterly superb.
Over the last couple of weeks, a certain breed of internet denizen has gone bonkers for Chat Roulette.
The idea is that the site connects you to a completely random person, anywhere in the world, by webcam. It is fuelled by a “skip” button, that allows you to screen out anyone boring / ugly / naked until you chance across a stranger who doesn’t make you shudder with contempt.
Or, as Jon Stewart put it: “This is an internet site that will very quickly become a repository of 5% curiosity seekers and 95% free floating dongs.”
Here’s a (safe for work) video explainer:
So far, so depressing. But piano genius Merton has used the site to deliver something truly amazing – an impromptu, imrpovised musical, based on the people he meets online. Best video of the week.
Literally not bad Manchester electro outfit Delphic have been in Radio One’s Live Lounge a few times over the last couple of months – but this time they were on Fearne Cotton’s daytime show which meant two things:
1) They had to play their new single and a cover version. 2) Each performance was bookended by Fearne cackling like an educationally subnormal Tickle Me Elmo.
The cover was a gloriously scuzzy version of Cheryl Cole’s 3 Words (Fearne’s verdict: Brilliant) – which you can hear below:
Delphic also played forthcoming-but-also-out-last-year club “anthem” Halcyon (Fearne’s verdict: Brilliant). And here is that track in video form, captured from a separate, but no less good, live lounge session last month:
Bored of sitting through the “acting” in Lady Gaga’s latest opus? If so, here’s a fantastic, five-minute, song-only re-edit of the best video of the year.
Q: Will you get to the end before Universal’s lawyers pull it off the internet forever?
Sometimes, readers, listening to pop music is not good for you. Sometimes, a pop song will reach into the bathtub of your soul, pull out the plug, and let everything glug away. This is one of those songs.
Now, I don’t normally complain about music on this blog, but Professor Green’s witless, moronic “tune” has angered me in a way that is normally the preserve of a gorilla who’s had his favourite banana smushed by a mandrill and gone feral. I am seething, frothing, livid and generally quite a bit upset.
The song was on to a loser from the very beginning, because it samples Need You Tonight – INXS’s signature song from 1987. Actually, “sample” is too generous a term. Professor Green has just flipped the single over to the b-side (ask your dad) and talked over the instrumental.
Then, to make matters worse, he deletes the chorus and gets Darren from EastEnders to sing over the top. And what he sings is so basic and rudimentary, it feels insulting to call it a hook.
The lyrics go: “She’s everything I want, but all that I don’t need” (writers – this is an entirely new and original linguistic juxtaposition, which you could also exploit in your songs to great effect) but they might as well be: “I sing this line quite high, and this one goes down low” for all the effort that’s gone into writing them.
Professor Green – or Stephen Manderson, for that is in fact his name – jumps in for the verses, rapping about being given the run-around by a girl he likes. To be fair, the lyrical conceit of the player being played is quite clever but Stephen undermines the whole thing with his final pay-off: “It’s just a song. In real life, this would never happen to me. I am a pimp.”
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Now, it just so happens putting a rap over the top of INXS’s Need You Tonight is neither a new nor an original idea. A man called DJ McSleazy had a go a couple of years ago, combining the track with Neneh Cherry’s I Got You Under My Skin. It is no exaggeration to say the result is ten bajillion-gazkillion-manillion times better.
Aussie songstrel Sarah Blasko popped in to BBC 6 Music on Monday to plug the UK release of her sublime As Day Follows Night album.
She chatted to Lauren Laverne about how she was influenced by Cyndi Lauper, and why, when every woman in pop has bought a synth, she has invested in a lute and gone back to musical basics. That’s her on the right, playing caveman music on a conch shell. Probably.
Anyway, Blasko played two songs from the new record – All I Want and We Won’t Run. As I mentioned in my review a few weeks back, she is stunning in concert, with a husky other-worldly quality to her voice. Although, as mrsdiscopop has pointed out, she has a tendency to chew her vowels like bubblegum.
As great as the Telephone video is (Beyoncé eats a pasty!) I would have been equally pleased if Lady Gaga had turned up this morning and presented the following as her latest videographic extravaganza.
Just imagine that with Telephone running in the background. Amazing.
In which a 1970s Freddie Mercury clone sings from inside a cage while a mysterious clan play Star Trek chess next to three refugees from Lonnie Gordon’s Happenin’ All Over Again video and the computer that did the CGI for Terminator 2 catches a virus and has to be rebooted.
Before we start, let me just state for the record that I like Glee – How could you not like Saved By The Bell: The Musical? But when everyone around me is hysterically flapping their hands and screaming “best programme everrrr”, I have to disagree. This is why:
1) Episodes follow the same rigid structure every week: Random event puts Glee club in jeopardy; Character quits Glee Club; Glee Club sing song about it; Character reinstated to Glee club; Glee club is no longer in jeopardy; Big song; The End.
2) The show is stuffed full of stock high school TV characters – the jock, the cheerleader, the talented underdog, the gay, the asian – and its never entirely clear whether the writers are poking fun at those stereotypes or indulging in them.
3) Middle-aged, middle class white men should never rap.
4) Glee has no internal logic. Take, for example, Sue – the show’s gloriously sadistic sports coach. After building her up as a politically incorrect, take-no-prisoners villain for eight weeks, they needed a twist for an episode about disability and suddenly revealed Sue’s SURPRISE SISTER with AN UNSPECIFIED MENTAL ILLNESS, which made her incongruously sympathetic to all children with disabilities. Lazy, slapdash writing.
5) That surprise sister with the mental illness? She will never be referred to again. [Update: A few people have written in to say that the sister does indeed come back for one entire episode. A victory for continuity, I'm sure you will agree.]
6) Kevin McHale, who plays wheelchair-bound Artie Abrams, is in fact able-bodied. This doesn’t bother me too much, except there was an entire episode dedicated to the message that “wheelchair users should have the same opportunities as the rest of us”, after which the closing credits revealed McHale had a wheelchair stunt double for the dance routines. Astonishing.
7) The show’s tone is wildly uneven. Every tear-jerking emotional moment is instantly undermined by arbitrary slapstick nonsense or shrieking melodrama. It’s like the producers are so lacking in confidence that they’ve erected a big flashing “irony” sign over your television, just in case you accidentally think you’ve tuned into a screening of If…
8 ) Jane Lynch’s brilliantly acidic delivery is wasted on lines like: “I will not rest until every inch of our fair state is covered in garbage”. Picking a topic and saying the exact opposite of what everyone thinks doesn’t make your character comically subversive, it makes them insane.
9) What does the show have against women? Two characters lie about their pregnancy for material reasons; one is a manipulative, scheming bigot; and another is a borderline schizophrenic with OCD. Even the show’s leading lady, Rachel, is deliberately unsympathetic.
10) Glee jumped on the mashup bandwagon, precisely eight years after the horses bolted, the wheels fell off, the wagon’s contents were eaten by coyotes and its frame was set on fire by a freak lightning storm. Plus, they ruined Halo.
None of this, I hasten to add, will stop me watching (for the time being at least). But you have to hope that a bit more discipline and logic is applied to the second series when it starts in the US next month.
Given the ubiquity of her music, it may come as something of a surprise to learn that Florence And The Machine’s collaboration with Dizzee Rascal on You Got The Dirtee Love is her highest-charting single to date. In fact, Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) only got to 12, while the awesome, elemental Drumming Song limped into the charts at 54.
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