Cupid Stunt

If there’s one thing you should never do it’s try to outfunny a comedian. Especially if said comedian is one of the funniest and most sarcastic men on the planet, and you’re, well, Pat Kenny. Here’s Pat getting well and truly flattened by Jimmy Carr on last week’s Late Late show. Then Carr just keeps going as Kenny tries to give away a holiday to Austria, and the poor chap they call just makes it 100 times funnier. This is comedy gold folks!

And on the subject of Pat Kenny, one wonders if Peter Serafinowicz was inspired by the Late Late host when creating the character of ‘Michael-6 the Robot Talk Show Host’. Have a look… the likeliness is uncanny!

The premiership is back in full swing and this for me, and possibly thousands of other people at this side of the world, means it’s back into the old routine of staying up until 6am watching games. It’s over 2 years since I’ve been able to watch a premiership match in the afternoon. For me, a Midday kick off starts at 11pm, and if I want to watch a 4pm kick off that means staying up until 5am… and once the clocks change 7am!

Last night was a relatively tame one for me. An early start today meant that all I could manage was the Liverpool – Man U game, and even though I was neutral in my disdain for both teams in this one I did laugh hysterically at Van Der Sar’s fuck up (still doesn’t beat the classic Barthez v Henry goals) and cheered at Babel’s winner. I couldn’t make it to stay up to see my beloved Arsenal trash Blackburn, and on a normal Sunday morning I’d probably also have been tempted to stay awake to watch ‘who have I signed for?’ Robinho make his Man City debut against fellow cash splashers Chelski.

The real joy at this early stage of the season though is looking at the league table. There’s always a team that seems way out of place in the top four, this week it’s high flying Hull City, and then there’s the joy of seeing Man United in 13th place, and Spurs propping up the table at the bottom. Oh if only it could be that way at the end of the season…

It looks like Oasis are having another crack at the US market and they’re over there at the moment touring about and doing some promo stuff for their new album which is due out soon. Even Noel Gallagher is blogging now! It’s been suggested that the ‘incident’ on stage during their recent Canadian gig in Ontario might have been a marketing stunt to get some media coverage but that is very doubtful.

One very clever piece of marketing however will take place tomorrow morning on the streets of New York City. As I type, the band members are meeting behind closed doors with some of New York’s street musician community. Tomorrow morning, these buskers will take to the streets of New York, take up their usual positions in the subways, parks, and on street corners, and begin belting out some tunes from Oasis’ upcoming album Dig Out Your Soul.

Photo owned by xersti (cc)

Genius!

So it seems State magazine have decided to change track a little bit and become a freesheet. From a start which promised much, it seems a firm enough stranglehold was not gained on the music mag market in Ireland and so the ever more conceited rag that is Hotpress reigns supreme for now.

Unfortunately I have not yet had the privilege of reading a copy of State, the cost of a subscription to New Zealand was just too much for me at present, so my experience of the ‘new music payload’ has until now been restricted to their online incarnation. While the journalism and quality of articles have always been great, I could never get used to the site layout itself. It just didn’t make happy viewing for me. Was the print version the same?

Photo owned by viZZZual.com (cc)

Anyway, State have had their critics recently. Their decision to put Abba on the cover stunk of Hotpiss at it’s worst, and it seemed to some they had abandoned the brief of new Irish focused music journalism and gone for a cover that would simply sell copies. Worth a try, maybe, but it obvously didn’t do the trick.

Yesterdays ‘press release‘ hasn’t done them any favours either. It’s claim that it will ‘become the first Quality National Music Monthly available completely free’ (yes, they used the capitals) attracted the ire of Analogue and I’m sure other publications like Connected and Mongrel will also very rightly feel aggrieved that the press release seems to infer that they, while being free and national, are not ‘quality’. A posting by Phil Udell on the newly revamped State website seems to at least attempt to appease this, Udell writes ‘of course we’re not the first to take this approach (props to our colleagues at Mongrel, Analogue and Connected)’. And speaking of the site revamp, it now looks a lot more pleasing, at least to my eyes.

Lets hope that State can keep up the same level of articles and music journalism (maybe with less of the Abba), and, in Udell’s words, moves onward and upward. I look forward to reading, and maybe they could stick up some PDFs of back issues too.

Incidentally, here in New Zealand, I have the choice of two music magazines. Rip It Up, published every two months, and Real Groovy, published monthly. Both retail at just under $8 (around €4) and are of fantastic quality. Big, solid, colourful and very well designed an written. I don’t see any reason why a publisher in a country like Ireland which would seem to have a richer and more diverse musical culture (not knocking NZ’s, which is pretty decent) can not do the same.