Music

Apparently, the most recognised instrument in modern day music is the guitar. Anyone can pick it up and have a strum, though most people produce better sounds then the ones we belt out. But never mind, we aren’t overly jealous and we’re quite content with our homemade tambourine.

Some people also say that the human voice is something that can make or break a song; depending on how well the vocal sounds, it can add that little bit extra to the track. Once again, singing is not ranked highly on our list of talents - but when the karaoke bug bites, just watch hecklerspray go.

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There are three medical levels of depression - level one is where you listen to Joy Division, level two is where you emotionally identify with Joy Division and level three…

Level three comes when you get so weirdly enamoured with Joy Division that you suddenly decide that you have to own the gravestone of someone who was actually in Joy Division. Which someone did earlier this week.

Police are on the lookout for the thief who stole the gravestone of singer Ian Curtis from a cemetery in Cheshire on Monday night. Nobody knows exactly why anyone bothered to go to the effort of nicking Ian Curtis' gravestone, but police believe it's either the work of an obsessive Joy Division fan who wanted to be closer to his hero, or someone who needed to prop a window open or something. It has been quite hot lately, after all.

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There are plenty of reasons to hate Take That - from the way you can't go more than three minutes on any commercial radio station without hearing that bloody Shine song to Gary Barlow's stupid face.

But the biggest reason of all is because Take That reformed, giving billions of other ancient teenypop bands the idea to reunite, often with eye-cripplingly shocking results. But not all ancient teenypop bands - for example, tinpot twin-based growl-heavy 1980s boyband Bros have clung onto their morals and refused to reunite.

What's that? Bros have decided to reunite as well? That's great - back in the day Bros had a large, highly dedicated fanbase, so we're sure that they'll go crazy for the reunion just as soon as someone shouts news about it into their ear-trumpet. We're implying that they're all old.

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Country music is scientifically proven to turn people into violent, woman-beating drunks - or is it just that only violent wife-beating drunks like country music?

Maybe we'll never know for sure, but let's forget the history for a moment and just laugh at the fat, allegedly woman-beating rednecks who go to country music concerts. Like the fat, allegedly woman-beating redneck who country star Tim McGraw hauled up onstage and ejected from a show in Washington on Tuesday night.

Best of all, there's video footage of the incident. An obnoxious fat cowboy who's too fat to be lifted off the ground by three other obnoxious cowboys? Sounds perfect, doesn't it? It's not - the video's got a country music soundtrack. Bleugh.

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Kanye West's stock in trade is furious, barely-legible indignation about people not realising that he's the greatest human in history, but he's outdone himself this time.

Not so long ago Kanye West performed a set at the Bonnaroo music festival that didn't go so well, possibly because he kept his crowd waiting for eight hours before finally dragging himself onstage at about 4:30am. And since Kanye West is a sage so wise that he rivals all of history's greatest thinkers, he's taken to the internet to construct a well-considered explanation for the mix up.

Just kidding - Kanye West's gone batshit! Properly, 94-exclamation-marks-in-a-row batshit. All-capital batshit. Confused, badly-formed batshit that doesn't make any sense. Hecklerspray commenter batshit. We're scared.

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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 poo-filled portaloos.

Here it comes again, the daddy of the UK festival and the creation of one mad farmer that has spawned hundreds of crap clones - Glastonbury. Known to typically piss it down whenever it's held, this doesn’t stop thousands of people gathering in fields fill of cowshit to enjoy music from all over the world.

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Pop is short for popular, everyone knows that. But just because it’s popular, does it necessarily make it good? In the case of most things, no, not at all. Music is very opinioned and people are influenced very easily and miss out on the good stuff unless it’s slapped in their faces.

Take the Mint Royale song/remix Singing In The Ring when it was originally released, no-one gave a shiny shit about it. But since George Sampson did a dance to it on “Britain’s Got A Bit Of Talent Which Simon Cowell Will Then Exploit” the whole country went nuts to the song and got it number one.

Hecklerspray just wants to get good stuff to you before its mass marketed to death. Take interview storming Chris Martin, we know they have a new record out but every time we switch on the TV his band are there either advertising it or promoting iTunes. All we know about this week’s band Strangebusyworld is that it’s one bloke just doing something he enjoys and trying to reach out to people.

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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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Coldplay, like you didn’t already know, have an album coming out soon entitled Look Mummy I’m Just Like Bono! Wheeee! Or something.

And, from what we’ve heard, the new Coldplay album is a lot like the old Coldplay album - it’s all inoffensively big-sounding and the lyrics don’t make much sense and it’ll work decently enough as a soundtrack to those bi-monthly trips to Habitat with the kids. But one thing it isn’t is sexy.

Never fear, though, because Coldplay have already found a solution - they’ve apparently recorded a duet with Kylie. It would have been on their new album, too, except that Chris Martin says it’s “just too sexy”. Hecklerspray accepts no liability for the almost-guaranteed permanent loss of libido caused by reading that last sentence.

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It’s our lucky day - previously when we’ve watched fights between midgets and wonky-eyed wimps we’ve needed a credit card and a Bangkok hotel room with cable TV.

But not any more because Prince and Radiohead are at loggerheads - the kind of loggerheads that will either end in legal action or a hot hot dwarf-on-perpetual-student erotic gangbang.

It’s all over YouTube footage of Prince performing Radiohead’s Creep at a festival, you see. Prince being Prince, he’s had all videos removed from the internet; but Radiohead being Radiohead, they want the videos unblocked because they wrote the song. Who’ll win? It’s unclear, but it had better not end up with the gangbang scenario, because that’s going to result in one ugly unwanted baby.

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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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Alex James - the Hugh Grant-haired, bass-playing, cheese-making lovey of Brit Pop superstars Blur (the pretty one who pursed his lips in every video) - has re-sparked rumours of Blur reuniting.

True, this is perhaps the 27th time he personally has sparked the rumours of Blur reuniting.

And, true, it’ll almost certainly be as fruitless as the rest of them. But still, anything to make people realise the Kaiser Chiefs are nothing but an insulting pretender to their throne is worth commenting on.

It’s been five years since they released Think Tank; a kind of ‘half-good, half-wanky’ take on modern culture (a feeling encapsulated perfectly by the usage of a Banksy painting on the front cover – the King of ‘half-good, half-wanky’). Since then the Blur boys have all taken their own unique paths.

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