Music News

30 Seconds to Mars and their glorious leader Jared Leto had better check the back of their sofas for loose change.

They may have to resort to begging, borrowing or even stealing to get through this one - being sued by Virgin Records for $30 million isn’t the kind of thing you can get by simply by using the cash you carry in your wallet. Maybe they could sell their instruments and equipment - though this would of course mean they can no longer play as a band…

So in other words, it would be win-win.

But why such a huge amount? Well, according to Virgin, Jared Leto and 30 Seconds to Mars were contracted to provide three albums, but didn’t. Apparently this is worth that much money to the company, so they’ve gone and sued that movie star from the band to get what they think is rightfully theirs.

$30 million though? Crikey.

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Avril Lavigne has been called many things - ‘an irritating little twit’, ‘a moody, half-arsed performer’ and even (cruelest of the cruel) ‘married to that fat-faced one from Sum 41′.

What she seemingly has never been called though, is ‘too sexy’. Until now. Ahead of an upcoming tour around Asia, the youth wing of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party have raised issue with the Canadian poplet with the dead eyes. For being too sexy.

The world can be a very odd place. Now, we understand it may be a more conservative way of life over there, but calling Avril Lavigne ‘too sexy’ is akin to calling Brooke Hogan a ‘purveyor of finely thought out political commentary’ - it just doesn’t fit. How, exactly, is looking really bored on stage considered sexy, even in a culture where sexuality is somewhat repressed, or hidden away?

Answers on a postcard.

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Usher really must have thought he had it all going for him.

He had a multi multi multi million selling album, a wife (eventually, a few times), a child with his name and some hats. Things were looking rosy for the dancing pop prat.

Then he brought out a new album, ‘Here I Stand’, and - compared to his last one, ‘Confessions’, at least - it flopped something rotten. While still selling just under a million copies to date, this is considered a failure by both Usher and, more likely, his record label.

So what’s the solution when you’re known around the world, popular, good looking and - apparently - talented?

Why - sack your management and go running to your mum. Obviously. Which is exactly what Raymond has gone and done, re-employing the mother he sacked just over a year ago as a part of his throwing his toys out of the pram reaction to not selling enough records.

Aww, bless him.

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Kiss did a song once with the lyrics, “I wanna rock n roll all night and party every day”. As old withering men, we feel that partying on down with Zimmer frames and emptying their overflowing piss bags doesn’t count as fun.

Just like The Rolling Stones, Kiss are one of those bands who seem to have been around for ever and won’t disappear. Their records are slowly becoming heirloom for millions of families around the world as this dinosaur band’s early recordings are passed down from grandmother to great granddaughter.

In the very beginning of Kiss’s existence, technology wasn’t much of a thing. The wheel had just been discovered and recording techniques were slowly being developed. Fast-forward a few million years and crazy Gene Simmons faces a problem for his band of nutty rockers. Blasted technology has bypassed the band and made it easy for followers of the archaic group to get a Kiss song for free.

This has angered chief Kiss man Gene Simmons wants to club anyone who has down this and stopped him from receiving his royalty payments of two sticks to rub together to generate heat for his homely cave.

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PR stunts are wonderful things. Well, that’s a lie - they tend to be pretty rubbish in the most part, and aside from the odd grandiose piece of artistic wondery they tend to highlight how awful the world of marketing and PR is.

Just ask Ashanti, whose marketing team decided it would be a good idea to encourage ultraviolence, if not murder, with fans of the R&B ’star’.

It’s a bold move, that’s for sure, but we can’t help but think it’s one that should have had a little more thought put into it before being unleashed on the world.

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Being Metallica must be great - you get to be in a metal band for 20-odd years, you get lots of money, you get to tour the world many times over and you get legions of devoted fans.

Oh, and you get to be complete and total prannocks about seemingly everything involving the internet, yet still somehow manage to maintain the credibility that would clearly be destroyed if you were any other musical act in the world. Things, they are strange.

For this time Metallica have decided that allowing people they have invited to listen to their new music to review it would be something of a cardinal sin. Possibly on a par with the holocaust, but we’re still waiting for a quote on that one.

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It’s that time of the year again when music lovers gather in a field to celebrate the thing they love: live music.

There are all sorts of festivals to cater for all sorts of musical tastes in all four corners of the world. The main ones kick off at this time of year and hecklerspray is here to tell you all you need to know about each festival, who the essential people are to see and which act to avoid so you can queue up for the overflowing shit-filled portaloos.

As the sun sneaks out from behind one of his many clouds, the hot weather looks like it may arrive for one of the festivals that kick starts them all. Download is the chance for 75,000 people to gather together and rock out to leather clad men drenched in tattoos and piercings. Sounds like a bit ropey if you ask us.

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The early to mid-90s were an excellent time for that whole ‘rap’ thing.

Yes there was still the glamourising of violence, the drugs, the objectification of women and the explicit language - but at least it didn’t involve 50 Cent or P Diddy, or whatever in God’s name he’s called now.

It was a safer time when white kids in the suburbs could dream of their gangsta heritage without fearing for how much ‘bling’ they were wearing, a time when people could look forward to a Tupac release that wasn’t posthumous and one when Mr Warren G had released ‘Regulate‘.

You know the song. Everyone does. It was on the soundtrack to ‘Above the Rim‘, which wasn’t as good as ‘White Men Can’t Jump‘. It had Bernie Mac in it, so it really was never going to compete with the might of Wesley and Woody.

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The Sun has reported that official NME hero and tortured genius significantly lacking in genius and overcompensating in torturing, Peter Doherty, is running out of money and is in the process of assembling “a crack team of crimebusters to sniff out where (it) has gone”.

First of all, who knew The Sun could be so bloody, bloody funny? Crack team! Sniff! Brilliant.

Daniel Kitson, Tony Law, Stewart Lee, John Hegley and Doug Stanhope combined couldn’t hope to come up with a single joke as original or brilliant.

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Amy Winehouse’s husband, or Blake Fielder-Civil as he’s also known, has changed his plea from not guilty to guilty.

Fielder Civil, 26, has admitted on June 20, 2006, he did indeed assault James King.

Obviously, it isn’t the James King who does those movie reviews for Radio 1 that we’re referring to as, in the eyes of any judge, assaulting him would be no crime at all.

The James King we speak of is the landlord of Macbeth’s pub in London, and Fielder-Civil has also pleaded guilty to conspiring to pervert the cause of justice by offering James King money in return for him dropping the allegations as well as leaving the country.

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Bobby Brown’s son Brandon Brown has revealed he was once seduced by Lindsay Lohan in a bathroom.

It’s a typical (Bobby Brown-like) boy meets (Lindsay Lohan-like) girl story: They meet at a party. They both think ‘ooh, he/she’s fit’. Boy goes to the toilet for a piss. Girl, perhaps aroused by the potential to orgasm while simultaneously inhaling men’s stale urine, follows him in. They have sex. They are now primed to have their first conversation:

Lindsay: Pass us some tissue. Cheers. So, what’s your name and what do you do?

Brandon: My name’s Brandon. My official job title is ’son’. And you?

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Ricky Wilson, AKA King of the Dicks, has declared that his band, Kaiser Chiefs, are ‘the band that most music fans would see as their (Oasis’) successor’.

Now, this makes him a prick for a number of reasons:

1) It’s obviously bull-shit.

2) Who does he mean when he says ‘most music fans’? Have you ever met anyone who isn’t a fan of music? Everyone who ever existed is a fan of music and hecklerspray knows a few of them: not one has ever claimed Kaiser Chiefs are the successors of Oasis. Only Ricky.

3) He’s obviously only doing it in the vain hope that Noel will retaliate, on the off-chance it could turn into a war like the Blur/Oasis feud of old, like he tried to start with the Arctic Monkeys, which of course failed spectacularly, what with Kaiser Chiefs not being fit to lick either of their comparatively Messianic assholes.

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