If you’ve ever liked a popular band such as B*Witched, S Club Juniors or Shed 7 then you’ll have realised that the press quickly stops running stories on them when they split up.
The same rule of thumb however doesn’t apply if you happened to enjoy the titillating musical delights of The Beatles, though.
Liverpool’s finest export have been delighting music lovers for generations. Their songs about peace, love and the results of multiple drug binges helped them to keep a presence in the public eye. During their career, The Beatles didn’t do much to piss anyone off, apart from the time John Lennon claimed that his band were “more popular than Jesus” in 1966. For 42 years, The Vatican has never forgiven the Beatle for what he said. But in a swift change of heart, they’ve decided to kiss and make up. Not literally of course, kissing the corpse of a dead man would be sick and wrong.
Since The Beatles split up, the four members have been doing their own respective thing. Paul McCartney continued to knock out record after record, tour around the world, get threatened by terrorists and marry a peg-legged vegan who he eventually managed to shake off. Ringo Starr on the other hand evolved into moody old bastard who would shout at the people who supported him and make crap records about Liverpool which made everyone cry.
George Harrison never really had any crazy moments during his solo career – though if today’s society is anything to go by, we expect a salmon farmer to come forward and claim that George Harrison signed him the deeds to his entire assets after a night on the drugs in the old days.
It was John Lennon who gave one of the most memorable quotes during the legacy of The Beatles. During an interview with the London Evening Standard newspaper in 1966, he said:
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
Now if Lennon had actually said The Beatles were bigger then Jesus, he could have technically been right. Remember, Jesus had been kicking around the planet a few thousand years before the band had been born. In terms of physical height, we’re pretty confident that Jesus would have been quite a small chap. Thanks to something called evolution, John Lennon would have surely been taller than him. Even if it was by a few inches.
Because the Vatican Church been keeping up with the latest events in pop culture, they’ve finally decided that John Lennon was having a bit of a joke. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano which normally reports on hot topics involving The Pope has issued a statement about the incident. Remember, John Lennon was killed in 1980 – perhaps it was a slow news at L’Osservatore Romano regarding The Pope. Or he fell off the toilet and injured himself and they didn’t want to make The Pope look like a stupid twat. Anyway, the newspaper issued a statement saying that Lennon was:
“Showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had grown up in the age of Elvis Presley and rock and roll and had enjoyed unexpected success.”
Of course, it all makes sense now! He was a mischievous rascal from Liverpool who was easily influenced by a cheeseburger-munching American, so all is forgiven. We have to blame Elvis instead for corrupting the mind of an innocent youth. All because the Vatican says so.
With the hatchet buried between the two, we can only hope that Jim Davidson gives every ethnic minority a cuddle to make up for being an obnoxious old bastard to them and that Bono will finally realise no-one cares about him, his music or his plans to single handily save Africa.
Well we can imagine can’t we?
gir says
I think this shows that the Catholic Church is finally accepting the timeliness that is coming with the information age. After all, since John Lennon died in 1980, it has only taken the pontiff 28 years to forgive him for his (admittedly heretical) statement.
This is an amazing improvement over the last retraction with this kind of high profile, that of the repudiation of the Inquisition’s trial of Galileo from 1992, a scant 359 years after the fact.
Of course, never ones to expose themselves to criticism, never mind any moral statute of limitations, the Church found that the Inquisition “acted in good faith”. It’s this kind of forward-thinking and openness to fallibility that characterizes the modern Catholic Church.
Julian Mentat says
>> “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink.”
Forty years later, a Christian President sent his troops to attack Muslims and declared it a Crusade. So Christianity didn’t disappear at all. Hurray!
Maurice Colgan says
“Showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had grown up in the age of Elvis Presley and rock and roll and had enjoyed unexpected success.”
With Elvis Presley’s Christmas Duets in the current music charts, the “the age of Elvis Presley” continues still, in 2008!
gir says
“With Elvis Presley’s Christmas Duets in the current music charts,”
Joining such luminaries of the music industry as Various Artists, with their hit record “The Essential NOW That’s What I Call Christmas”.
We understand, you really got it hard up for Elvis, Maurice. Now please shut up.
euclid says
Ah shit, they let him back at the keyboard again. This is a three inch putt…
Hey Maurice, here are ten facts I bet you didn’t know about Elvis:
1) when he was 13 he drowned a bag of kittens
2) he was a speed addict before it was fashionable
3) he liked to secretly wear women’s clothes
4) his dead twin brother was believed to be the talented one
5) he had a Costa Rican housemaid whose son was named Jesus
6) he was a tireless (and tiresome) bigot
7) his left arm was 1.8 cm shorter than his right
8) he always kept a ‘lucky’ talisman with him that was fashioned from a dried body part (human)
9) he believed that all snakes could talk, and was thus terrified of them
10) exotic fruits made him panic and were banned from his presence
Maurice Colgan says
Why should I shut up when I’m involved in a Fascinating Elvis story concerning the owner of Elvis’s first ever 1953 recording, “My Happiness”. Just click on my name for the photos and story.
My great admiration for the great composer Ludwig Van Beethoven is demonstrated on the same link.
Philistines!
mst3kster says
Elvis is Maurice’s Viagra.
Maurice Colgan says
I’m a very young 66 :-) Married aged 17 in 1959 I was always in front of the possee………still am, Kiddies!
Do you guys not read any books? Comic humour is not sophisticated enough for me. :-)
euclid says
Maurice, you are damaged goods. Invoking sophistication,
you riddle your post with a 12 year old’s emoticons and
inexplicably correlate this obscene combination to reading habits.
I take it your posts are meant then as Tragic humour?
Good news, MC, you’re half-way there.
Shit for brains says
love number eight 8)!!
gir says
Comics page humor is too sophisticated for you Maurice. I don’t know why you continue to insist that you have a sense of humor, it is all too evident that yours was always vestigial.
No one gives a shit how you feel about Elvis. Like you, he is a relic; a useless, artistically irrelevant dinosaur whose major claim to fame was shocking the South with his palsied convulsions. He was a fucking cultural tourist, distilling the artistry of Negro Blues and R&B into publicly palatable white bread that was as artless as his films. Elvis wasn’t an artist, he was the first fucking American Idol. He was a boy band all by himself, a talented voice with illusions of grandeur. When I think of artists, I don’t think of guys who ask to meet Richard Nixon and give him a gun; hypocritical drug-addicted DEA agents are similarly dismissed. That you would attempt to canonize him along with Beethoven is laughable. And your idiotic vanity blog is equally ridiculous.
You’ve attached your ego to a fucking fraud. No one comments on your blog because they’re tired of your zealotry and bored of your insanity. The only people who will talk to you are the people you annoy with your Elvis cock sucking. Any story you have to tell is guaranteed to be non-fascinating, simply because it is you telling it. The tedium that you project is infuriating in its boringness.
It’s perplexing that you would ask whether we have read any books, since all you talk about is fucking Elvis. I’m sure the minutiae found in the millions of Elvis biographies available from his various white trash acquaintances is interesting to someone with your pathology, but some of us occasionally think about other things, things that aren’t fat fucks dead these 30 years.
And, finally, let me make it clear that I am not joking. I really and truly hate you. Do not pretend to yourself “Oh, ho, those hecklerspray chaps, what a bunch of kidders,” NO. You have wasted your life on a fat junkie, and I for one will be glad when you are relieved of it, you worthless fuck.
Maurice Colgan says
gir,An infantile rant. Thanks for taking so much time. I really appreciate your interest in my well-being.
The mention of Elvis attracts attention to hecklerspray. Enjoy it!
As for hate, not an emotion I care for, are you a Nazi?
The Press prints my Elvis stories regularly.. “News of the World” did last Sunday. it has 10 million readers, how many read your words???
Bye Bye.
Joke Police says
Maurice, I bow to your trolling talents. Some of these people haven’t commented on anything for months.
Maurice Colgan says
Thanks Joke Police,
gir hasn’t a clue. He really should read more adult books. Dostoevsky and Richard Dawkins are mind broadening.
I tend to bring the best out of people……….eventually.
Stabby McGee says
Holy shit, it’s the second coming.
Shooty* says
Heh, I was wondering where gir and Euclid had gone. They’re here! Yay!
C J Davies says
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps
gir says
Truly, your name-dropping talents are second to none. Look, I’ll mention some existentialist philosophers and maybe namecheck Shostakovich; I’m worldly now.
Nazi? Is that the limit of your vision? Because I hate you I automatically hate Jews? Or what? Fine, then; I subscribe to the Nietzchean concept of the ubermensch, and its necessary foil, the colgan: the laughingstock; the painful embarrassment to man.
News of the World; is that the same as the Weekly World News? Well, whatever; it’s good that your talents are getting airtime in a rag for people who can’t read.
Or are you counting letters to the editor among your published works? Because that would just be too hilarious for words.
gir says
HAHAHAH Jesus fucking Christ check out this steaming pile (line breaks added by me, all other errors left intact)
There’s a place in Mississippi,
That will never be the same,
Because of, a shy young boy,
With a very curious name.
His mother bought his first guitar,
In main Street, Hardware Co.,
And who could see,what would be,
And how this boy would grow.
The little house where he was born,
On the old Saltillo Road,
Stands not far from city streets,
Where the dreaming youngster strode.
His story now is legend,
All the world knows Tupelo,
Because of Elvis Presley,
Who set the world aglow.
Maurice Colgan.
————————
Your poetry sucks.
Maurice Colgan says
gir, you are a silly…and pretentious person.
My little Elvis stories have appeared in dozens of newspapers, broadsheets and tabloids, on TV, and numerous radio shows, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nietzche entertained me for awhile in the early 1960s. (Where were you then?) “Twighlight of the Idols” was interesting. But I outgrew the mad German decades ago.
Beethoven’s 7th symphony the magnificent 7th (the fourth movement based on an Irish tune) is one Wagner called the “Apotheosis of the Dance”, try jigging to that!
Have a nice day.
Joke Police says
Yeah gir, why weren’t you born in the 1960s? Loser.
Stabby McGee says
“Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps”
That’s Heritage-esque prose meaning that most of your heroes do appear on stamps, isn’t it?
gir says
HAHAHA the dude linking a performing monkey like Elvis to a classical composer is calling me pretentious, I love it.
And yet no one knows who you are, or cares, because your obsession is absolutely unique in that it makes you even MORE boring. At least Mark Bellinghaus is entertainingly psychotic. You, on the other hand, are a mashed potato sandwich with mayo on white bread.
Odd that you would choose “Twilight of the Idols”, subtitled “How to Philosophize with a Hammer”, since everything is an Elvis-shaped nail to you. In any case, I doubt that you even read it. Your furious masturbation to the career of an overrated redneck vocal savant can’t leave you with the kind of time you would need to look up All Those Big Words.
And shut up about Beethoven’s 7th. Repeating over and over that it is based on an Irish tune does not make it true you tin-eared faggot. One could just as easily (and probably with better justification than the word of an obsessive Irish idiot) point out Russian and Eastern European influences.
gir says
FIGHT THE POWER
euclid says
Maurice, News of the World? Really?
I had you pegged as a page 3 girl,
or a portion thereof.
Why do you waste your life defending things
in no need of defense? Why not choose something
original, overlooked, or obscure instead of
popular cultural icons? You might as well be defending
the Great Pyramids. This is the beauty of it Maurice:
Elvis and Beethoven really NEED you, for without your praise
they would mean nothing. I’m sure they are absolutely delighted
to have earned your respect. Cretin.
Joke Police says
Did someone say Bellinghaus? Is this Hecklerspray bingo?
gir says
“Yeah gir, why weren’t you born in the 1960s? Loser.”
For that I guess I have no answer. Woe is me for I am undone.
Maurice Colgan says
Can you very LITTLE fish please get off the hook?
Of course the bait is so good you keep coming back, already!
It’s hilarious witnessing your feeble attempts to impress each other.
Search Beethoven and Colgan on google and see what you may learn. By the way Hecklerspray is now on page five of Elvis news on google.
High time for me to find more fools to play with.
See ya!
euclid says
Oh no! We are but little fish to the Great Whale Colgan,
the Emperor of Elvis and Baron von Beethoven.
Mere minnows we, winnowing away these hours of ours
while Our Intrepid Hero defends the Last Great Bastions
of the Thoroughly Obvious. We are but bait before the
Last Great Grouper Maurice. Yeah we fairly tremble in awe
of his majesty, might, wit, and lexical dexterity.
You bet.
Why would I search anything about you Maurice?
You are a trite, annoying, pain in the ass who
has dedicated a significant portion of his life to
defending the obvious. You are a one man circle jerk.
euclid says
“It is rain, I tell you, rain! And it is wet!” -Maurice Colgan
gir says
You keep saying it but you never go away.
No one cares about your stupid little crusade to mention how the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 7th is influenced by Irish dance on EVERY SINGLE FUCKING BLOG IN CREATION that allows comments from any retard with an internet connection and too much time on his hands. You’re an idiot.
Maurice Colgan says
AND euclid, took valuable time to respond……… again!
My bait is the best bait. I’m a great PUPIL-baiter!
Tchaikosky’s violin Concerto is beautiful.
Mozart’s 21st piano Concerto is sublime.
Kate Bush is a lovely and very intelligent singer.
Her song in the Irish language on youtube is well worth a listen.
A cousin, SEAN KENNY author of, “The Hungry Earth” etc, lives in LA.
Be nice!
Matthew Laidlow says
And I thought Christians/John Lennon nut jobs would be crying in the corner…
euclid says
Maurice, my time is not valuable, obviously.
And this incessant, tedious effort to portray others
as pupils and thereby ascribe to yourself an
unwarranted position of authority and respect
is an ineffective childish rhetorical ploy.
I am not your child, your pupil, your student,
your heir, your likeness, or your fan.
You are a monotonous, pompous ass;
your generic opinions are worthless;
what you are, Maurice, is a dart board
too stupid to realize what the game is.
gir says
Yes, Maurice, you are the master baiter.
Sarah says
master baiter…plus 5 points.
mst3kster says
“…You are a monotonous, pompous ass;
your generic opinions are worthless;
what you are, Maurice, is a dart board
too stupid to realize what the game is.”
Maurice is also a legend in his own mind.
Maurice Colgan says
Sarah, Sarah is the name of my eldest grandaughter.. she is 28 years old, a wife and mother.
our youngest granchildren 10 year old twins Rebecca and Rachel are members of a famous Orchestra Choir.
Apparently they are far brighter than the opposition here.
I wish I could stop boasting in public. I really should, but at my age, why would I want to curtail my best quality?
Do your parents know you are on the Internet?
Goodnight! I’ve been on this computer since before dawn.
Stabby McGee says
“what you are, Maurice, is a dart board
too stupid to realize what the game is”
Glee.
Maurice Colgan says
Hi Stabby, you are easily amused. :-)
You are not paying attention. I’m the guy with the fishing line. The minnows are lining up to bite.
Nevertheless, I’m busy with the Press today so I leave you with this profound thought……… oops! I dropped it.
That’s old age for you.
Now where was I?
Oh yes, Dear Hot Press Editor……….
Stabby McGee says
Hot Press, eh? And you talk about minnows?
You’re either a mighty fine troll or the most dillusional gasbag on the entire planet. Help me decide which one. I’m sure you can find it in your busy schedule while waiting for a call back from the toilet paper press.
gir says
hahaha too mean, huh?
Stuart Heritage says
So much so that I think I actually went blind for a couple seconds reading it, gir.
gir says
Well then I guess we’re even for that picture of your beard.
Maurice Colgan says
The glossy UK “Record Collector” magazine is also interested in the Ed Leek and Elvis 1953 record story, as a feature.
Got to go and write some scintillating prose now.
gir’s M/B was oh so obvious, Mr Magoo could easily see it coming. So much for the level of wit here! It’s low guys.. far too low!
You all need a vacation in Beautiful Ireland where we are Lords of Laughter.
euclid says
Oh dear God, he came back for more…
This is kind of like kicking a retarded puppy,
the only significant distinction being
that a retarded puppy doesn’t deserve it,
while Maurice, in his idiotic self service,
deserves every ardent boot.
I pray to the alligator gods
that in my dotage I am not thus compelled,
fashioning myself into a magnet of abuse
in a palsied effort to forestall the cloying grey
loneliness that would mistake venom for
vital friendship and my shit for the queen’s jewels.
Maurice Colgan says
Euclid, What abuse? You are mere amateurs.
Try and remember my age. (It’s hard enough for me to remember it)
Elvis’s Christmas Duets CD is climbing the music charts.
Sarah says
Why does he keep telling us how old he is? The fact that he’ll be dead and forgotten in 20 years isn’t something I would brag about. Here’s a perfect example of why old people shouldn’t be allowed to drive or use the internet.
Sarah says
Amateurs at what? Being old and senile? Why are you bragging about the fact that you’ll be dead and forgotten in ten or so years? This is why elderly people shouldn’t be allowed to drive or use the internet.
Sarah says
Oops, sent that first one from my celly, then the second from my laptop. I’m not even old and I forget things. I can only imagine how hard it must it be…
euclid says
Congratulations Maurice, you are without question
the most boring sociopath in Ireland (no small achievement).
Your age is immaterial, your opinions worthless.
That you cannot fathom my disdain for you is no fault of mine.
I have been abundantly clear.
[response: denial, belittling remark, Elvis cite –
there Maurice, I saved you the trouble,
you pathetic little man.]
Maurice Colgan says
Disdain? Euclid.
Yet you cannot refrain from responding to a ‘sociopath’!
Your compulsive disorder is duly noted by all discerning readers here.
In a battle of wits with an Irishman (Even an old bog-trotter)please try and remember you need higher calibre ammo. Sadly lacking here.
In fact you guys are downright boring.
John Lennon (A huge Elvis Presley fan) was a great songwriter, we have all his recordings including his Irish Rebel songs banned by the BBC.
Noted for my generosity I leave you to provide the last words.
I’ll not be back on this thread. A Promise!