What’s your favourite rock n’ roll fantasy? Is it that you’re married to Cher? It would go some way to explaining why you keep creeping into her bedroom, at least.

Perhaps it’s that Kurt Cobain is still alive? That’s cool, but it does mean we would probably have been denied Foo Fighters, who have had more hits and are therefore almost certainly better than Nirvana.

What? Your favourite rock n’ roll fantasy involves noodling on a guitar in a windowless studio with a sweaty old man for hours at a time? Then you might want to get your Mojo-loving arse along to Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camp.

Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camp is the musical equivalent of signing up for a ride into space with Richard Branson. Like Virgin Galactic it’s for people who have so much money scattered around their abodes they’re on the verge of using £50 notes as bogroll, but in the case of Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camp it’s for overgrown adolescent “axe”-wielders rather than overgrown adolescent science geeks.

For around $10,000, punters can sign up to a “camp” at which they can “jam” with superstar rockers, make their own recordings at Abbey Road and perform at legendary venues such as Liverpool’s Cavern Club.

The word “camp” suggests accommodation comes in the shape of an Argos-tented forest clearing in which you have to share a bedroll with Eric Clapton, but in fact you’re expected to sort out your own lodgings on top of the cost of the rock n’ roll funtimes.

One thing’s for sure – the upcoming session of Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camp will allow ageing men to jam with some very famous and equally old rock stars. Meat Loaf, Jon Anderson of Yes and Ace Frehley of Kiss have all signed up, meaning men who forwent multimillionaire rock star lifestyles for multimillionaire banker/lawyer lifestyles will be able to compare crow’s feet and discuss haemorrhoid treatments up close and personal with their heroes.

And in case you’re thinking this is just a way of fleecing mid-midlife crisis victims who desperately want to return to a time before they got married, divorced, married and divorced again, you should know that the website promises 10+ hours of jamming a day.

Now, to some people that might suggest the “fantasy” in the package’s title should be replaced with the word “boot”; but there are souls out there – corpulent souls, mainly – who love nothing more than resting a Fender on their paunch and widdling away for hours on end. It’s less exhausting than masturbating these days you see, which comes with those wearisome Viagra-induced highs and lows, and the end result might be a really cool “track” as opposed to a soiled towel.

The London leg of Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camp takes place in May 2010, with prices starting at $1,799 for “The Groupie Package”: all the evening activities of the full $10,000 package, but with “transportation to and from cool London sites during the day to make sure your spouse in (sic) enjoying the city”.

Hard to turn down really, the option to label your boring old spouse a groupie for a few days. It doesn’t necessarily mean she’s going to do that thing you’ve spent 25 years attempting to get her to try, though.

If the London jaunt is too far away, Hollywood has Rock N’ Roll Fantasy Camps in November 2009 and February 2010 – just be aware that your new rock star pals only remain alive by living purely on wheatgrass juice, so you might not want to get your hopes up on the rock n’ roll debauchery front.

This was a guest blog by Stuart Waterman of My Chemical Toilet. Him good. It good.

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So, it’s over. Amy Winehouse and Blake Incarcerated Fielder-Civil have been granted a divorce, meaning, hopefully, Amy now has enough gruesome, emotionally tortured experiences to turn into material for a cracking new album.

However, that naughty Blake Fielder-Civil is apparently claiming that since his utter swinefulness was what inspired Amy Winehouse’s huge album Back To Black in the first place, he should be due a few pounds. Six million of them, if you believe “reports”.

You see, Back To Black was written and recorded after Amy and Blake’s first split, which occured because Blake had cheated on Amy with his ex-girlfriend. So what Blake’s saying, basically, is that the album wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for his decision to throw his cock up up another woman.

I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping that Blake’s slightly cheeky claim is successful. Why, I’ve lost count of the number of girlfriends I’ve had who, following my long and dedicated campaigns of mental torture, have eventually upped, left and used the horrifying experience to propel them on to professional success.

I believe one of my exes is an area manager now, enjoying such benefits as a company car and a pretty sweet dental plan.

I utterly refuse to believe that she would have reached such giddy heights without leaving me. Were we still together she would almost certainly be a perma-weeping, self-esteemless doormat with little to no get-up-and-go. It was the life of misery she saw stretching out before her that motivated her to go to that job conference, and I feel I should at least be due a loan of the company car at a time that is mutually convenient, and/or the odd free scale and polish. But will she listen to reason?

So if Blake Fielder-Civil is successful in his attempt to get a tasty settlement from Amy Winehouse, I’m probably not the only utter git who will be keen to rifle through his stalking box and get back in touch with a few affluent erstwhile other halves.

The chap from Alanis Morrisette‘s You Oughta Know must be due a pretty penny by now – judging by the rage he managed to elicit from Alanis it sounded like he was a complete tool. Where are his dollars, huh? Sure, he got his ding-dong sucked in a “theatre”, but that’s no match for cold, hard royalties. Royalties he clearly deserves.

Yes, it’s going to be raining cash on adulterers, psychological bullies and manipulative sociopaths all over the world if Blake Fielder-Civil has his way. Not such good news for Amy and her fans, however – if her next Grammy-winning album details her and Blake’s divorce, she’ll end up owing him a few more million quid.

This was a guest blog by the frankly stupendous Stuart Waterman off of that My Chemical Toilet.

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Sean Paul – who, by law, you have to refer to as “Shanna Pall” if speaking aloud – is apparently the best-selling Jamaican music act in history.

This means he has outsold student poster staple Bob Marley, chubby bleating man-boy Sean Kingston and renowned murder-advocating homophobes Elephant Man, Beenie Man and Buju Banton. No mean feat, Shanna.

This year Sean Paul releases his fourth album, Imperial Blaze, which, sadly, is not a concept album about burning down the Death Star. Last week he flew to Blighty to do a bit of press ahead of the album’s release, and among the gems to arise from the trip were an admission that he would like to watch giraffes bumming and then show said bummage to a young Oriental ghost.

In an entertaining tete-a-tete with Pocket TV’s Matt Edmonson, Sean Paul grilled some of his meat on a barbecue while answering questions. After a frankly appalling spot of freestyling, Shanna got down to the business of being grilled himself, the first poser being: “If you could watch any breed of animal copulate, what would you go for?”

Sean Paul gave the question due consideration before answering:

“Giraffes… It’s a funny thing to think about, giraffe sex. And then maybe I would get into giraffe porn. Probably sell it, sell giraffe porn throughout the Earth. Because not everywhere in the world has giraffes, and I think it would really sell, like… maybe in Japan.”

When then asked what he would do if he found his house was haunted by “a scary Japanese child”, Sean was in little doubt as to the sequence of events that would ensue:

“I would first introduce the child to soya bean milk. Then, after that, you kinda break in the giraffe porn. Like, slowly but surely.”

Whatever you may think about Sean Paul’s apparent fascination with the sex lives of giraffes – and we all have our own peccadilloes, so let’s not judge – you have to admit that his willingness to own up to it makes for entertaining viewing, as you’ll see if you watch the video below.

Also, this incident serves to clarify the meaning behind his smash hit song Gimme The Light. While some have suggested the song has drug connotations – a ‘light’ being another way to refer to a ‘lighter’, which can be used to ‘light’ a ‘joint’ of ‘weed’, i.e. set it to ‘burning’, before ‘inhaling’ the ‘intoxicating’ ‘fumes’  – clearly the tune’s lyrics were referring to a torch. A torch which Shanna uses to illuminate the darkness beneath his duvet, where he spends, presumably, hours lingering over giraffe pornography.

Similarly, it now becomes clear that Get Busy was all about giraffes rutting. It seems so obvious now.

One has to wonder whether those who have purchased Sean Paul’s records would have been quite so keen to part with their cash if they knew that the proceeds were going towards feeding the artist’s apparently chronic, unquenchable thirst for images of hot, dusty, grunting giraffe copulation. Still, if it wasn’t that it would be something else. It’s always something with these pop stars, isn’t it?

Should you be in any doubt as to the veracity of the above quotations, behold:

This was a guest blog by Stuart Waterman from the marvellous My Chemical Toilet, which is very good.

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A lot of people seem to hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor. And why wouldn’t they? There’s so much to loathe.

There are all those hit records which, alongside a faultless sense of style and strikingly glamorous looks, have quietly made her one of the country’s finest pop stars. There’s that – oh my God – that voice, which, while it may not have the greatest range, has a classy, chocolatey poshness which makes Galaxy bars appear as upmarket as cherry-flavoured Panda Pops by comparison.

With that much going for her it’s not surprising that people hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor. But it is quite surprising to hear her admit that she sometimes Googles the term ‘I hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor’ as a way of finding out how beastly those horrid internet people are about her.
On a website such as this, which has been known to poke fun at the odd celebrity, you might expect to find a cynical article which uses the key term “I hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor” repeatedly to get to the top of search engine rankings and thereby eventually catch the attention of the lady herself.

Then I suppose you’d expect the writer, in anticipation of piquing Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s interest, to write an article full of really nice things about her – including, for instance, a mention of the fact that she doesn’t seem to have aged in ten years, despite now being a mother of two.

You’d probably imagine the writer might go to all that trouble as a roundabout way of drawing Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s attention and then attempting to drum into her pristine, beautiful little head the fact that she should never, ever have married that guy from The Feeling.

That’s pretty cynical thinking, even for hecklerspray’s readership.

By the way, did anyone else hear the rumour that The Feeling once wrote an unreleased song called I Hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor? Shocking stuff!

Anyway, Sophie let slip her masochistic tendency to Google the term ‘I hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor’ in a recent interview with the News Of The World, during which she was promoting her marvellous new single Heartbreak Make Me A Dancer (released June 22nd). This article isn’t a music review per se, but we’re not giving away any secrets when we remark that it is definitely the best pop song of 2009 and deserves to be number one for the entire summer (and most of autumn).

Yes, it’s probable that the term ‘I hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor’ isn’t going anywhere, and indeed is only likely to increase in popularity due to its imminent appearance on every jealous pop star’s blog/Twitter as they enviously eye Sophie’s talent, beauty and success.

Why, if Lily Allen doesn’t drunkenly tap out a post entitled “I hate Sophie Ellis-Bextor” on her MySpace within the month, we’ll commit murder on a dancefloor. A dancefloor where members of The Feeling tend to congregate.

Who wrote this? Why it was Stuart Waterman from the Very Good Website My Chemical Toilet. So thank him, not us.

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Jimi Hendrix’s death has long been one of the few rock demises to lack a well-publicised conspiracy theory.

Over the years his death has been overshadowed by tinfoil-hatted conspiracies attached to the deaths of the likes of Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and Jim Morrison of The Doors.

Indeed the popular perception of Hendrix’s demise seems to be that when he accidentally inhaled his own toxic vomit and passed away in 1970 at the age of 27, everyone just kind of murmered “woah, that’s heavy”, dropped a quaalude, and then continued tie-dyeing their kaftans.

But there have always been disagreements about how Jimi Hendrix popped his psychedelic clogs, and now an ex-roadie of his – who just happens to have a book to pimp – is claiming that the guitar genius had pills n’booze shoved down his gullet by his own bloody manager

James “Tappy” Wright writes in his startlingly-titled tome Rock Roadie that Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffrey, once confessed to having offed the star. The motivation? He stood to collect $2 million in insurance if Jimi died.

Michael Jeffrey himself died in a plane crash in 1973, meaning his alleged confession is now over 35 years old, but that does not apparently diminish the author’s ability to quote him:

I was in London the night of Jimi’s death and together with some old friends … we went round to Monika’s hotel room, got a handful of pills and stuffed them into his mouth … then poured a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe.

A few bottles? Down his windpipe? Yeah, that’d do it.

Impressive powers of recall from James “Tappy” Wright, then. One can’t help wondering, however, if the credibility of his claim may be harmed somewhat by the fact that he’s kept it to himself for over a quarter of a century, wheeling it out only as his book prepares to hit the shelves.

And let’s not forget this guy was a roadie, and his book’s about being a roadie – it’s probably fair to imagine that the remainder of the pages revolve around:

a) lugging amps

b) lugging instruments

c) lugging staging and lighting rigs

d) lugging the back of his jeans up to hide his arse cleavage

Oh, I’m sure there’s at least one story about taking advantage of a young Foxy Lady who hoped she’d get close to Jimi Hendrix if she flashed the hairy old guy with the tool belt. But the chances of Tappy coming up with an autobiography as interesting or entertainingly depraved as the many rock biographies that have gone before him must surely be slim.

The sequel, however, could be an altogether more fascinating read, telling the story of an ageing accessory to Jimi Hendrix’s murder as he lumbers across the globe attempting to escape the clutches of the police.

This was a guest blog by Stuart Waterman from the wonderful My Chemical Toilet. It’s wonderful.

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It’s a well-known fact that the internet’s main job is to serve up photos of naked celebrities.

And if we were to conduct performance evaluations for the internet, during which we might judge how well it is doing its job, last week we would have given it a golden badge full of golden stars, a magic rain-banishing medal, and an edible framed certificate made from delicious chocolate. Why? Because, finally, the internet has delivered the JPEG Holy Grail: naked Rihanna.

That you were even able to navigate to this web page is frankly astounding given the load under which dear old uncle internet must currently be labouring.

Because Rihanna’s nudey pics weren’t the only R&B wrist fodder to smash onto the titwires last week – the decidedly less famous Cassie also found her pierced bits and bobs zinging around the web.

Cassie had a sizeable hit last year with a song called Me & U, but don’t feel bad if you don’t remember it. The video was the best part about it really, as it showed the not unattractive singer writhing on a table, having a spot of trouble keeping her legs together and dousing herself with a bottle of sexy, sexy water.

Cassie actually stole a march on Rihanna, with her boobingtons – shown in a set of self-snapped phone pics – apparently being stolen from her computer and flopped out online last Wednesday.  She didn’t sound too happy about it, but something in her response approached “meh” levels of shrugginess, leading to conspiracies that the exposure of her metal-festooned bangers was merely a publicity stunt designed to remind people she still exists. She has a new album out soon, you see.

Cassie said:

“At the end of the day breasts are breasts, mine weren’t the first you’ve seen and they won’t be the last… people need to grow up. Let’s move on.”

Is that maturity?  Naïveté? Or merely Cassie’s way of saying: “You think that’s exciting? Wait until Friday, when you will encounter a photograph of me lying naked on a bed with my legs apart, all but inviting you to examine my vagina’s labial intricacies.”

On Friday a photograph of Cassie emerged in which she is snapped lying naked on a bed with her legs apart, all but inviting you to examine her vagina’s labial intricacies. At the time of writing there’s no sign of Cassie tutting in a “vaginas are vaginas, move on please children” manner, but let’s assume she at least rolled her eyes heavenwards momentarily.

So to Rihanna, who possibly saw Cassie getting a lot of the internet’s hairy palmers’ attention and decided to blast her nipples out of the spotlight with her own kinky camerawork. The photos in which her breasticles and flesh cavern are visible don’t actually show her face, which points to a possible stitch up – but since these snaps are placed in a set which does feature photos of Rihanna’s face, let’s not tell ourselves that we haven’t seen Rihanna naked. That would be a horrible thing to do.

Inevitably rumours have surfaced that Chris Brown leaked the Rihanna photos, which would make sense since he’d probably like there to be photographic evidence online showing that there were days in their relationship when Rihanna wasn’t a bitten, bloody, bruised mess.

The sequence in which all this R&B mammary gold was mined is unclear, and has led to the perception in some quarters of the whole episode as a tit for twat battle between the shady, fanny-fixated camps behind each singer. Could Cassie’s more explicit photo, in which is spread like soft Clover on hot toast, have been a direct response to Rihanna’s blurry T&A shots? If this is the case, we can consider our lucky old selves to be entering a whole new era of celebrity oneupwomanship.

I mean there was that period a few years back when it seemed you couldn’t open a browser without seeing the nether lips of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears – but these weren’t self-snapped mimsy exposés . While the main benefit of the proliferation of mobile telecommunications devices has been the ease with which we can share information, it shouldn’t be overlooked that these gadgets also enable nubile young popstars to engage in online tit-offs for our entertainment.

I for one welcome the day when, for example, Cheryl Cole forgoes saying something mean about Lily Allen and instead just whips out her hooters and starts clicking. This would lead to an appropriately topless response from Lily, and so on until each lady’s Twitter feed is just a constant river of ever more profane images preceded by the appropriate “@”.

It sounds unlikely, but you’d given up on seeing Rihanna nude, hadn’t you?

This was a guest blog by Stuart Waterman from My Chemical Toilet, and it’s really ruddy good.

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LOL! I just had the most hilarious dream. In it, a bunch of classic Johnny Cash songs got highly unnecessary remixes and rejigs from the likes of Snoop Dogg, Midnight Juggernauts and Pete Rock. LOL!

And it was all overseen by Johnny Cash’s own son, too! LOL! I tell ya, in my dream I laughed so darn hard that I urinated all over myself. In my dream.

And yet… Why are my legs so warm, wet and itchy? Oh, it’s because the whole project is trufax and the sheer laziness of it has infected me and my ability to control my urethral sphincter.
Johnny Cash Remixed is apparently the brainfart of the Man In Black’s own son, John Carter Cash, but the blame can’t be laid solely at his face; Beyonce‘s dadda Matthew Knowles is involved, and Snoop Dogg is credited as a ‘co-executive producer’.

Snoop appears on the album’s version of Walk The Line, and you’ll be underjoyed to hear he adds the following, highly predictable contributions to the track’s opening seconds:

“What it do, what it do… Big Snoop Dogg… Johnny Cash… remix…”

Nice of him to clear up which version we’re listening to. Also, nice of him to give himself top billing. Richly deserved.

If you’re concerned that’s the only gem in the Snoop/Cash mash, however, fret not – there’s also the near-inevitable:

“JC and me, Dee Oh Double G…”

Elsewhere on the aberration you’ll find the appropriately named Count Da Money Remix of Big River, and Alabama 3 cannily hopping on the bandwagon of another rebel entity with which they’re somewhat unworthy of being associated (see also: The Sopranos).

The best tracks are probably those like the aforementioned Big River and the Pete Rock rejig of Folsom Prison Blues, both of which add modern beatiness to the originals and little else.

At this point I’d like to highlight that I’m not one of those bores who believes in musical sacred cows. If an artist can cover/remix something and make it interesting, good luck to them.

Johnny Cash managed that himself of course, his quivering timbre providing stark interpretations of Nine Inch Nails‘ Hurt and Depeche Mode‘s Personal Jesus amongst others on his 2002 album American IV: The Man Comes Around.

Johnny Cash Remixed, you can be assured, will not be remembered as fondly as that record. Its lazy remixes will sound dated within a year, and it’s difficult to figure out to whom it will appeal.

At least JXL’s Elvis remix, A Little Less Conversation, was big-beat lunacy. The people behind Johnny Cash Remixed could have garnered some bewildered, possibly ironic goodwill if they’d really gone to town and, I dunno, commissioned a dubstep overhaul of Ring Of Fire. And anyone who’s heard Hervé’s Ghetto Bass album knows that, given half a chance, he could crack A Boy Named Sue open and electrify its musty old innards into some kind of dancefloor shitstorm. In a good way.

Of course the chances are “JC” is chuckling from beyond the grave at the sheer brazen hucksterism of the project as it is. But a nice racket is only a nice racket if it makes money, and it’s frankly hard to see who’s going to buy Johnny Cash Remixed. It’s apparently released on June 15th, in case you have too much money lying around.

This was a guest blog by Stuart Waterman from the frankly rather good My Chemical Toilet.

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How many Billy Bob Thornton films can you name, off the top of your head? You might reel off Sling Blade, Bad Santa, Armageddon, Pushing Tin, Monster’s Ball, A Simple Plan.

Now, how many Billy Bob Thornton albums can you name, whether as a solo artist or as a member of his country-pop band The Boxmasters?

Not so easy, right? Nevertheless, as his breathtakingly petulant recent performance on Canada’s CBC Radio One illustrates, when Billy Bob Thornton is promoting his little-heard of band he’d rather you pretend you’ve never seen any of his blockbuster movies. Even the Oscar-nominated ones where he bangs Halle Berry or plays a mumbling, mentally-deficient, murdering mentalist.
With The Boxmasters having been picked as support for Willie Nelson‘s Canadian tour, the band were invited into CBC Radio One’s studios to appear on a show called Q, hosted by Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi’s introduction to his chinwag with the band included a reference to Billy Bob Thornton’s other, very well-known career as an actor, and that’s when the trouble started.

Billy Bob was so enraged by the host’s reference to that job he’s really quite famous for doing that he spent the next ten minutes or so acting like a teenager at a dinner table being forced to answer questions about his homework. In front of his new girlfriend. To whom his mother is showing photos of him naked in the bath as a toddler.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied when asked how long the band had been going, necessitating one of his clearly mortified bandmates to verbalise the tricky answer of “about two years.”

Billy Bob then proceeded to answer a question about his musical influences with a rambling non sequitur of a response about a magazine he read as a boy called Famous Monsters Of Filmland. If he wasn’t speaking in his normal tone of voice you could swear he was doing an impression of his character from Sling Blade. It’s actually quite funny if you can somehow ignore a) the suffocating tension in the studio, and b) the sound of Billy Bob’s bandmates chewing their knuckles to the bone as they witness their singer do his best to destroy their careers.

Have you ever been in a relationship – whether romantic or otherwise, at home or at work – from which you desperately wanted to escape, but you didn’t have the balls or the wherewithal to make the break? And instead, you made every conversation an assault course of passive-aggression, answered every question with an arse-clenchingly obtuse response, and intentionally misunderstood every innocent enquiry?

No, me neither. But if you had, you might recognise Billy Bob Thornton’s performance as a veritable masterclass in the art of sullen, obstructive pissyism.

When it became apparent why Billy Bob Thornton was unhappy with Jian Ghomeshi, and Ghomeshi stuttered reasonably that he was just attempting to give the interview ‘context’, the ridiculously-bearded diva explained that producers on the show had been ‘instructed’ not to make reference to his film career, and that these ‘instructions’ should have been passed on. Oh, and he also insulted Candian concertgoers, describing them as being like “mashed potatoes with no gravy, you know what I’m sayin’?” Oh, and then he refused to get up and sing with his band, leaving them to do an instrumental version of the song they’d agreed to perform.

Of course what Billy Bob Thornton fails to have grasped is that without his Hollywood stardom the radio station – and indeed Willie Nelson – probably wouldn’t give a hootenanny about his band. And if they did, the non-film star lead singer certainly wouldn’t be allowed to waltz into an interview and ‘instruct’ producers not to mention his other job as a car mechanic, or a Superdrug checkout girl, or a bull semen collector.

Since this episode – which makes Joaquin Phoenix’s recent Letterman performance look like an exercise in graceful eloquence – The Boxmasters have dropped out of the remainder of their Canadian dates, with the Canadian press giving predictably lukewarm reviews to those shows that did transpire.

The entire thirteen minute ‘interview’ is available to view below. You’ll want to make sure your hands are free, as you will almost certainly be watching the majority of it through your fingers.

You know who wrote this? Stuart Waterman from My Chemical Toilet. This information is vital.

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