dear Michael Eavis

What the hell have you got to look so happy about? Yes, your arms are disproportionately long, and you are showing too much leg for a senior citizen, but you have also put a dent in my wallet to the tune of £185 for the privilege of camping out in your back garden. You have basically stolen my purse and replaced two weeks rent with a small crumpled picture of Bono.

How do I feel about this? No, wait, how do YOU feel about this?



I see. It's like that, is it? You've had your fun now Eavis. Those shorts make me think you're the kind of guy who's up for a laugh. This U2 and Muse thing is a joke, right? RIGHT? A bad joke, which, as bad jokes go, is up there with the one about the nun and the cucumber.

You better be getting your iPhone out of your khaki shorts and tweeting @EmilyEavis YESdavidbowiemickjagzconfirmedgonnabdashityoCANTWAITluvdad right about now, because if you don't, Eavis, you're going to be in trouble.

You better confirm someone better than Bodger and Badger in the next 24 hours or, in the immortal words of Sue Sylvester, 'I will go to the animal shelter and get you a kitty cat. I will let you fall in love with that kitty cat, and then on some dark cold night, I will steal away into your home and punch you in the face.'

Yours sincerely,

Annabel Wigoder

eardrums

For GLASSWERK, right here

Veronica Falls - Found Love In A Graveyard

As songs about graveyards go, this latest single from London-based four piece Veronica Falls ain’t a patch on 60s novelty grave-robbing hit I Want My Baby Back (sample lyric: ‘ohh baby, I diii-iig you so much‘) but hey, perhaps that’s because it landed on my radar too late for Valentine’s Day. Less a paean to necrophilia than the kind of minor-key ditty they’d like you to think they bashed out in ten minutes in cardigans beneath a ripped Pastels poster, singer Roxanne bemoans a Wuthering Heights-esque doomed romance (with a ghost, and you don‘t need to be Oprah to tell her that one wasn‘t gonna work out) over this season’s Crystal-Vivian-Girls-on-Stilts fuzzy lo-fi and the kind of off-key harmonies that would have AutoTune addict Simon Cowell turning in his, erm, bed. So what’s the skinny? Catchy boy-girl goth-pop but a tuning fork in the post might not go amiss.



So So Modern - Dendrons

Calling your band So So Modern is really just asking for trouble, especially when your latest single slots neatly into place between a Test Icicles 7” and a Rapture CD from the mid-Noughties. Either New Zealand hasn’t caught up with us Brits yet, or they’re so up to the minute that three-minute post-rock-punk-funk-rockaaAARRRRGGH tracks are the future of music and I might as well just go and flush my head down the toilet. Dendrons sounds like the Young Knives unwillingly getting their teeth drilled, and will no doubt appeal to anyone who spends their Friday nights snorting Haribo, wearing baseball caps at a jaunty angle, or having MySpace parties. Here’s a fact, fact fans: the band wear white hoods on stage, which is, like, so modern.

I’m not 100% sure how to feel about this

It’s Robbie Williams. In a romper suit. On a plane. Why? Good question. In an age where all celebs worth their salt need to ‘give something back’ (or put it away) to avoid looking like, erm, billionaire Macca, who built his kids a hamster cage for Christmas, or guitar-slinger Sheryl Crow, who limits toilet paper consumption to ‘one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required’, good old Robbie spent a recent flight from London to LA dressed in a Primark romper to ‘thank his fans’.

Look at his expression. Is that the face of an international popstar larking about at 3000 feet above sea level? Nope. It’s the face of an old man with a bad back who’s been zipped into a giant sock against his will. And look at the woman in the background. She isn’t bothered. NO-ONE on this plane is bothered. Look at them. They see this shit ALL THE TIME. His romper could be bumless and they still wouldn’t care.

‘What better way to celebrate a lifetime achievement award than in an £8 Primark all-in-one?’ he Tweeted. ‘Come on!’

Despite this worrying lack of imagination, it’s the maths I’ve got a problem with. With the Robster’s post-Take That output weighing in at an frightening thirty-six singles, eight studio albums, eight stadium tours, two compilations and probably a keyring or two, his average fan will have spent approximately £400 on Robbie-related tat over the last two decades. Now, given that each of his albums sell, oh, a couple of million copies a go, that’s quite a few fans he’s thanking with that polyester piece of crap.

‘Hey guys! See this microscopic speck of dust on the smallest piece of thread somewhere around the crotch area? This one’s for YOU!’

prison: a non-prophet organisation

Despite the fact that newcomer Tahar Rahim looks suspiciously like ex-England goalie David Seaman in a dodgy tracksuit, this trilingual lock-‘em-up offering from French director Jacques Audiard came up trumps at Cannes thanks to a killer soundtrack, Oscar-worthy central performances, and a convoluted plot more macho than Mr. T doing bicep curls in a bath of raw steak.

Beardy Corsican mobster César (Niels Arestrup) takes volatile Arab kid Malik El Djebena under his wing, only to **SPOILER ALERT** teach him the dubious lesson that accepting a blowjob in jail is a surefire way to check out early. Though Malik ain’t the sharpest tool in the book – note to self: ten kilos of hash should be left OUTSIDE the supermarket – his gift for languages enables him to absorb Cesar’s underworld savvy, set up a competing drug cartel from Prison HQ, and… oh, you can guess the rest.

The old David vs. Goliath setup is a formula more tried and tested than Cow & Gate baby milk, and though it’s more a question of ‘how’ rather than ‘when’, Malik’s eventual revenge on bullying César is a masterclass in restraint – and all the more effective for it. Factor in a festival-friendly dose of freakiness in the form of a Arab ghost with a penchant for setting his fingers on fire, an educational flick through the '100 most inventive ways to top your cellmates' manual, and it’s one in the eye for a recent spate of disappointing gangster movies that included Vincent Cassel’s Mesrine failing to live up to its promise, and Michael Mann snorefest Public Enemies failing to do anything whatsoever.

Right, I’m off to wedge a razor into my gums.

adam's hands

So it turns out I owe Tony Cook @ ABC Tales one for picking ADAM'S HANDS as his (almost) story of 2009.

It's a story I wrote last spring about a kid called Adam, white gloves, stigmata and a mermaid tattoo.

click here to read it

must... stop... writing... celebrity...blogs...

Poor old Calvin Harris. Not only is he three times the height of a normal human being (and a Scot to boot - joke. JOKE!) but his misguided attempt at staging a protest during the X Factor finals fell flatter than a flat pancake being flattened by a block of flats in Salar de Uyuni on the Altiplano of southwestern Bolivia, which - according to my Google toolbar - is the flattest place on Earth.

Let me explain. Before last Saturday’s shock Jedward exit *SOB* Calvin was forcibly ejected from Simon Cowell’s primetime cash cow for jumping onstage during the duo’s performance with – der der DERRRR!! - a pineapple on his head. Yes, a pineapple. On his head.

CaHa later apologised on Twitter for what the Telegraph called his ‘pineapple stunt’. Now I beg your pudding but putting a pineapple on one’s head does not qualify as a ‘stunt’. It barely qualifies as a fruit salad. Let’s see what the stuntmeister himself had to say about it: “I was thrown off x factor for jumping onstage with a pineapple on my head. At the end of the day, I had a pineapple on my head. Sorry if I caused anyone embarrassment. P.S I love Jedward.”

As celebrity apologies go, it’s not up there with Kanye’s ‘Taylor!!!! Boooyaawww!!!! You are very talented!!!!! I’m not crazy y’all, I’m just real!!!!! Sorry for that!!! Much Respect!!!!’ but perhaps either Jed or Ward can console themselves with the fact they were warned in advance. Calvin’s one-man pineapple campaign began in the early hours of the morning, when he posted a photo of the offending item on the X Factor site and tagged it with the word ‘important’. One can only speculate the effect this cryptic posting had on his fans, but I think it’s fair to assume that global sales of pineapple stayed exactly the same.

Next month: Calvin gatecrashes the Oscars with a kiwi in his ear. P.S. I love Jedward.

POP P.i.X

Article no. 1: the Sugababes. How I hate seeing that word in print. Who the hell spells ‘sugar’ like that anyway? Does one partake of suga in one’s tea? NO! One does not. But the production line that brought us multi-talente… only joking, multi-pierced Mutya Buena (most recently spotted touching a shepherd’s pie through the wall on Shooting Stars) and the one who had her ginger-in-a-girl-band crown well and truly nicked by Nicola from Girls Aloud, has now given the line-up’s only original member the boot. A jam tart to anyone who knows which one that is.

Now for a sentence you won’t read every day. With the aid of a Maths GCSE and an online calculator, I think I’ve unearthed some kind of Faustian pact. The average lifespan of a Sugababe *shudder* is now a truly pathetic 6.66 years and, da da DAAAAA!!!! 666 is the number of the devil! woooOOOOOooo! Perhaps this goes some way to explain the reason that a girl band (insert Kanye) wid da the most moronic moniker of ALL TIME are still going strong after ELEVEN – read it and weep – years. That’s eleven, in case you hadn’t heard me the first time. Eleven years, or - to link two entirely unrelated news snippets in a style the News of the World would be proud of - one-third of Stephen Gately’s life.

I don’t need to tell you that this month’s pop column was brought to you through mounds of Kleenex - and no, not that sort of Kleenex. I’m mourning not only the end of the original Sugababes line-up, but the untimely demise of my favourite member of Boyzone. I cried when he came out - and looking back I’m mildly embarrassed, not by the tears but by the total malfunction of my 13-year-old gaydar. Somebody really needs to get that fixed. Anyway I’m into Take That now, soz.

And talking of men with dubious sexual orientation, I’ll bring this column to an end with the results of this month’s MikaWatch. I haven’t seen him yet. God knows I’ve tried. Mika? Je t'adore. Call me.