Interviews

Lots of things spring to mind when you think of the word 'lame'. Badminton. Questionnaires about compatibility in girly magazines. Badminton. Five US. Badminton. The recorded output of Crowded House. Badminton.

Until now there has never really been a list of all the lame things in the world, but Maxim magazine has put an end to that with Maxim's 50 Lamest Things Of All Time. It's like one of those awful Best-Dressed lists you see in magazines, only about things that suck beyond all comprehension. From Neck Pillows to Dreamcatchers, from Fauxhawks to Jim Belushi, Maxim's 50 Lamest Things Of All Time covers them all. We're not going to go through the entirety of Maxim's 50 Lamest Things Of All Time, but there's a link at the bottom of this article you can click on. First, though, you must suffer through an interview - and cack-handed job-scoring attempt - between hecklerspray and Maxim.com Senior Editor Cory Jones.

What is the lamest thing in the world of all time? A quick survey in our office reveals it to be 'badminton'. Were we even warm?

Badminton was actually 51 on our list. So you were close. But we rated "mandals" as the lamest thing of all time. It's the Speedo of footwear. No one needs to see another man's feet. And the kicker: wearing them with socks is somehow worse. 

What criteria did you use to judge one entry's lameness against another. For instance, why are 'white collar bikers' less lame than 'tail on the puck'?

The main criteria we used was basically just a gut reaction. But some of them worked out mathematically. Adults on scooters are equal parts lame and equal parts pathetic. But when Fox added a cheesy electronic tail to the puck, that was 100% lame. If you're too blind or stupid to follow a hockey puck around your TV screen, you shouldn't be watching sports at all. 

Number 39 on your list is 'comedy sketches on hip-hop albums' - a worthy addition. What's the lamest hip-hop skit of all time?

Biggie's skit on Ready To Die where he's having sex is by far the lamest. Not only does it go on forever, but who wants to hear a big fat guy get laid for three minutes? (Put your hand down Dom Deluise.) 

Why hasn't hecklerspray been in Maxim yet? The very fact that we haven't came second in our small office lameness survey, you know.

You will be in our next issue, I promise.* 

*This is not a promise.

Now you may see Maxim's 50 Lamest Things Of All Time

Over the last eight years, Austin indie noiseniks …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead have consistently released some of the most gut-punchingly heavy indie these ears have ever heard, and they show no sign of letting up.

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead's last album World's Apart was picked by one hecklerspray scribe as being the best CD of 2005, and the band's new album So Divided has already been described as "the finest piece of rock n' roll you're likely to hear from the cradle to the grave."By us. And how did …And You Will Know us By The Trail Of Dead choose to reciprocate all this feeling for them? By sending band member Conrad Keely over to answer some questions about the potential danger of flying albinos, that's how…

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You know - despite spending a good deal of our time either looking up weird websites or thinking of new ways to insult Mariah Carey - we're a literary bunch here at hecklerspray.

That - book-readin' and stuff - is how we discovered the frankly brilliant Koren Zailckas, whose memoir Smashed is one of the most eye-opening, honest and exceptionally well-written things we've clapped our eyes on in many a month.

We caught up with Koren to chat about alcohol abuse, flag-burning, the rubbishness of Jonathan Franzen, Finding Forrester, Johnny Cash and all the fun stuff in between. And you know what? We've only gone and put it online for the whole bloody world (well, about 60,000ish of you per day) to read.

That's how nice we are.

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On Friday nights on Channel Four, between the portion of Big Brother where you spit with hatred at whatever poor spaz is getting evicted and the portion of Big Brother where you wonder what you were getting so worked up about, is Law Of The Playground.

Law Of The Playground is a unique TV show, in that it allows you to know exactly what that tit from Popworld was like at school and lets you hear a woman who we think was on a programme that was shown on Sunday lunchtimes talking about getting fingered as a child.

But before Law Of The Playground was a talking heads TV show, it was a website - and book - that was so funny it made us cry piss. And the evil genius behind the Law Of The Playground website and book is Log, who is also famous for Disappointment.com, writing about videogames, almost throwing a sausage at David Blaine once and getting ballache if he's about to do a number two with bits of chilli in it. We caught up with Log for a bit of a natter.

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As you may have noticed from browsing around hecklerspray, we quite like The Go! Team. Actually we like the Go! Team a lot, and when we heard that they were playing at Newcastle’s finest free festival – the Orange Evolution - we all decided it would be another brilliant opportunity to pick their brains a little bit more.

We visited The Go! Team to ask main man Ian Parton and front lady Ninja about Rainbow characters, The A Team, tea, oh and a few questions about their music too.

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Here at hecklerspray we sure do love The Go! Team. We love The Go! Team so much that we lost a lot of money when Thunder, Lightning, Strike didn't win the Mercury Music Prize, and we also love The Go! Team so much that we just can't stop bloody well interviewing them.

And this is where you come in. We interviewed The Go! Team last August, and now we're going to interview The Go! Team again. The problem is, we used up all our decent Go! Team related questions back then and we need you to basically think up a bunch of questions we can ask them instead. Look, all we want is for you to do our job for us, OK?

So here's your chance - what do you want to know from The Go! Team? Where did they get their crazy name? Did they sample the theme-tune from Ironside in one of their songs, or are we hearing things? Is Ninja single? Leave your Go! Team questions as comments below, and we'll probably use them for our big Go! Team interview in the next few weeks. Unless they're crap even if they're crap.

For all the bad press that McDonalds has got over the last couple of years, we can happily thank them for bringing The Lovers to a wider audience.

The advert featured a wonderful little ditty called La Le by The Lovers - Fred de Fred and Marion Benoist. A couple of French Sheffield dwellers and friends of Jarvis Cocker, The Lovers make music that's part Gainsbourg sultriness, part Yorkshire electro and entirely wonderful. The Lovers are so pop that they'd make your granny dance and so sleazy that hotels are redesigning rooms in their honour as we speak.

We caught up with The Lovers to talk booze, Bardot and vegetables… Read the rest of this entry »

It's rare for us to get excited about anything much here, so when Oh No! Oh My! blindsided us with their magical tunes, we staggered about for a few minutes before falling over in a dribbling heap.

The recently self-released Oh No! Oh My! album is one of those rare treasures - a collection of pop songs so heart-burstingly pretty that you end up torn between wanting to keep it your special secret and wanting to yammer on to the whole world about it until everyone likes it as much as you do.

In Walk In The Park, Oh No! Oh My! have crafted one of the most perfect summer pop songs we think we've ever heard, a song which is already soundtracking every single TV commercial in a number of parallel universes. And Oh No! Oh My! are unsigned, a fact that keeps us awake at night.

We caught up with Oh No! Oh My! to discuss pirates, zombies and loving girls that don't love you… Read the rest of this entry »

Hecklerspray doesn't dish out hype all that often. Yet every pattern has a deviation. There are always exceptions, folks.

Bear that point in mind as we introduce you to Stewart Lee - writer, comedian and co-mastermind behind the infamous Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Especially when we tell you that the man is the best comedian we have heard or seen since Bill Hicks.

hecklerspray caught up with Mr. Lee to ask him a couple of questions. He very nicely agreed to answer them. And here are the results… Read the rest of this entry »

In case you didn’t know, we’re quite fond of Joy Zipper here at hecklerspray.

Comprising of dynamic duo Vinny Cafiso and Tabitha Tindale, the Zip (as we hope they will never be called) have been garnering critical acclaim from numerous quarters. Word magazine referred to their work as a "psychedelic delight", while the NME heralded them as the "sugar-rush Pixies".

In other words, they’re something special.

Check out their oeuvre if you don’t believe us – Joy Zipper, 2004 masterwork American Whip and superb brand new release The Heartlight Set.

hecklerspray caught up with Tabitha, who took a moment out from crafting slices of atmospheric pop wonderment to answer a few questions…

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