And if you went to the reunion concert, at some point you more than likely woke up in the trunk of a car next to a spare tire and several bloodied police batons. Had you your senses about you, you’d have noticed there were 193 other unconscious people crammed in there with you – all of them wearing rainbowy shirts.

That’s because local police really cracked down at the show – enough so to confiscate over $1,000,000 in illegal drugs, among other things.

If for some reason you decided to attend the recent Hampton, VA Phish concert dressed like a giant doobie – heaven help you. Not only would your lame, all-day joke be hotter and sweatier than you ever imagined, but you’d have a devil of a time fitting into the typical port-a-johns as well.

Not so funny now, is it? Not with urine on your legs it isn’t! Your experience would get even worse. Imagine it – there you are gaily playing hacky sack with all of your unshaven, dreadlocked, itchy friends – and you’re having the game of your life. The sack’s been passed to you three times and you haven’t even had to apologise to anybody yet – when suddenly you get tackled and dragged off by your big fuzzy yellow boots.

You don’t know where you’re going yet – and you’re scared. The next thing you know you’re getting shaken upside down by three men in blue cop uniforms. Everything falls out of your pockets – including all your weed, your pot, your dope, your grass, your reefer, your herb, your Mary Jane, your Aunt Mary, your gangster, your boom, your ganja, your skunk, your kif, your buds, your nuggets, your blaze, your whacky tobaccy, your hay, your rope, your stinkweed – and worst of all – your pocket picture of the blessed Mother Theresa who watches over you while you sleep.

And you know what happens next – the cops take it all from you. No, really they do. As the Washington Post so delicately explains things:

“Police said Monday they confiscated about $1.2 million in illegal drugs and more than $68,000 in cash from concertgoers. Authorities also arrested 194 Phish fans during the three-night celebration of the band’s return to the stage after a nearly five-year absence. Most of the arrests were for drug possession, use and distribution, police said.”

The cops sure saw them coming, eh? And do you know where that confiscated money will go? Probably to police cruisers or something. And do you know where the drugs will go? Probably also to police cruisers once its been properly sold and what not.

Ah, who are we kidding? That would be completely unethical. Although the local police force couldn’t in good conscience sell drugs to raise patrol car money, they probably could shape some of the moistened cocaine into something fast with wheels.

Now just imagine seeing that flashing in the rear view.

We know – terrifying.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

So, you know, it’s just a shame that Kenny Chesney more or less thinks that all his fans are dicks.

That’s what he’s implied, anyway – yesterday Kenny Chesney won the ACM Entertainer Of The Year award for the fourth straight year running but, because the winner was chosen by fans rather than a faceless group of industry insiders, he’s got all stroppy for it and claimed that it doesn’t count as much any more. Oh Kenny, when will you learn that it’s never smart to criticise your fans, especially when they all own shotguns and are the biological result of institutionalised pan-generational incest.

There was a time when Kenny Chesney was the man who married Renee Zellweger and then split up with her, causing people to – apparently wrongly - assume that he was gay. But not any more. Now everyone knows Kenny Chesney as the most entertaining country singer in the world.

It’s true – meet Kenny Chesney and he won’t hit you with one of those traditional country buzzkills like trying to choke you and kiss you at the same time or shooting you in the face. No, so long as the dictionary definition of the word entertaining is “making the exact same joke about the words ’shift’ and ’shit’ being quite similar nine separate times in the space of one song,” then Kenny Chesney will always be the most entertaining country singer in the world.

Kenny Chesney is on an unbelievable streak of entertainingness, too – he won the ACM Entertainer Of The Year award last year, and he won it the year before that as well. And the year before that. And he won it again at the ACM awards last night, too. That puts him on a equal footing with Garth Brooks and just one shy of the all-time record of five wins, so you’d assume that he’d be thrilled with the result.

Except he really isn’t. For the first time in ACM history. this year’s Entertainer Of The Year award was voted for by the public. You know, the people who actually buy CDs and concert tickets and are probably the best gauge of what’s entertaining and what isn’t. Some people would think that being given a prize by the public is better than being given one by a panel of industry insiders each with their own personal investments and biases, but not Kenny Chesney.

As soon as he won his ACM award last night, Kenny Chesney threw a bit of a tantrum about how he hates the public, especially those who like him enough to go out of his way to vote for him. More or less. Entertainment Weekly reports:

”The entertainer of the year trophy is supposed to represent heart and passion and an amazing amount of sacrifice, commitment, and focus,” Chesney said. “That’s the way Garth [Brooks] won it four times, that’s the way I won it, that’s the way [George] Strait won it, Reba [McEntire], Alabama all those years. That’s what it’s supposed to represent.” Chesney went on to say that the academy turned the award ”into a sweepstakes to see who can push people’s buttons the hardest on the Internet.”

Of course, as galactically stupid of him as it was to suggest that his award was devalued by the public’s involvement, he does have a point. For starters, if this award was mainly voted for by Kenny Chesney fans, then that’s proof enough that none of the voters have any taste whatsoever.

And secondly, Kenny’s right – this sort of vote is just a gimmick, and one that can be easily corrupted by one nominated act exhorting their fans to vote again and again to secure the win.

It’s a good job that Kenny Chesney doesn’t stoop to that level, which is why we’re sure the blurb on the homepage to his website reading…

Kenny Chesney is nominated for his 4th consecutive ACM Entertainer of the Year and we need all of Kenny’s fans to get out and Vote. Below are several tools to share with everyone you know to help spread the word. YOU have the power! VOTE for Kenny Chesney as ACM’s Entertainer of the Year!

…is just a typo. And also that the big ‘Vote for Kenny Chesney’ banner, the two ‘Vote For Kenny Chesney’ graphics that people can embed in their blogs, the gigantic ‘VOTE FOR KENNY CHESNEY AT THE ACM AWARDS’ headline and the four different ‘Vote For Kenny Chesney’ flyers that fans are asked to print out and actually hand to people in the street that all feature heavily at the top of his website are probably the work of bastard hackers or something.

Read more:

Kenny Chesney: Fans Shouldn’t Decide Top ACM Award  - EW

Do you think that Hard-Fi are a truly fucking awful band? Do you? Do you consider Hard-Fi’s raison d'être to be as annoyingly pitiful as the wasps? Are you fed up of Hard-Fi trying to drink your can of Fanta in the middle of the summer after you’ve already batted them away fifteen times? Well, if so, then who do you think you are? Who? Don’t just continue reading this if you haven’t stopped to think who you really are; stop and think about it.

Ready? You’re not real people, are you? You’re fake people, aren’t you? You probably discriminate against the working classes as well, don’t you? And you no doubt go up to innocent bystanding Hard-Fi fans and shout things like “Oi, nobhead! I understand we live in a society and certain moral laws have to be adhered to for us all to get along, but if killing you and your mates was to bring about anarchy of armageddonish proportions, it wouldn’t stop me, so chuck your stupid mp3 player into the sea and take off that fucking t-shirt with a CCTV camera on it – I was already well aware that we were living in a nanny state with out some de-evolved lower class ponce shouting about it!” If that’s you, then shame on you. Shame all over you.

May you find comfort in the fact that without heaven there is no hell; that you will instead be dealt the relatively fantastic eternity of nothingness. Because you make us sick; you make hecklerspray pray that hell was real. You make us kneel down and do a hecklersprayer to God, begging him to leave Hard-Fi and their fans alone, just like their lead singer Richard Archer is probably doing too. Listen to what the class-A tit turnip has to say for himself:

 “We had success because real people heard our music. Working-class musicians are supposed to be idiots who get drunk rather than people who have something to say. Sometimes it’s nice to have that to work against but what annoys me is when I think of our fans. You have to wonder what the people slating our record know about music when they’re essentially slagging off the fans of the band.”

Oh, Richard Archer. You’re quite lovely in a way. You sing songs about working during the week and then getting trashed on the weekend, over and over again in pretty much the same way, and yet you don’t like being judged as a working class person who gets drunk and has nothing to say. Sweet, isn’t it? He’s not even aware that in order to be judged as something other than a drunk idiot with nothing to say, he has to be something other than that.

And like all great drunks, he doesn’t like it when you take the piss out of his mother. You can say what you like about him, but keep his mother out of it. The only thing is Richard Archer seems to think his mother is his fans. At least, that’s the impression you get when he talks about them:

“You can take the piss out of my hair, my clothes – I don’t give a fuck. But take the piss out of the fans and that is out of order.”

Unfortunately he didn’t go on to explain why, so we’re at as much of a loss as you. Guess we’ll have to keep it up: Oi, Hard-Fi fan reading this – you’re a twat!

Richard, dumb as he is, is – do not forget – the leader of the band. Can you imagine what the drummer must be like? Drummer Steve Kemp said:

“I don’t think it comes down to how good your album is now. If you’re not new, you’re boring.”

There are two ways to take that, and they’re all based around what Kempy means by ‘new’. If he means ‘new’ as in ‘a band or musician who have only just been discovered’ he is a moron because, well, lots of old bands and musicians are still quite exciting to a lot of people. If, however, he meant ‘new’ as in ‘constantly inventive’ and that without this constant invention music is just boring, and he’s applying this to his own band, then he is such a supreme imbecile that we want to give him a cuddle and say ‘yes, Kempy, that’s right, but you can’t be mad at people for not liking you if you’re not very good at music, do you see? Do you see?'

Do you see, Hard-Fi?

When asked about their relationship with their record label, Kempy said:

“Our label is behind our music 100%.”

To which Richard Archer chipped in:

“If they did drop us we could go away and do something much better.”

Press record. To me, to you. To me, to you. Stop recording. Release album. Read rubbish reports. Stupid fans buy record anyway and create more funding for process to be repeated. To me, to you, at the ATM machine, going out for the weekend, it’s raining and it’s horrible, I wanna get pissed, maybe stupid fans would like a song about this? They do, they love it, they get bullied, over and over, to me to you, Hard-Fi. Hard to beat.

Read more:

Hard-Fi's Archer hits back at critics – Digital Spy 

The family home of The Carpenters is going to be demolished because the current owner is sick of weird Carpenters fans hanging around all the time, and the fight is on to save the important memorial that one quite dull band used to live in for a while until one of them died.

Will the campaign to save The Carpenters house from demolition be successful? More importantly, can you really bring yourself to be even slightly bothered about whether a sodding house gets knocked down or not?

Some terrible things happen to the houses of dead celebrities. Take Graceland, for example – Elvis fans have literally started to go there to die now, while Johnny Cash's house suffered the biggest indignity of all in 2006 when a Bee Gee bought it. Perhaps it'd be better if all these houses were just demolished.

That seems to be the case at the moment with the old Carpenters house in Downey, south of Los Angeles. Although the house holds special significance for fans of The Carpenters because if featured on the cover of one of their albums and the band recorded there and it's where Karen Carpenter collapsed before she died, the current owner wants to knock it down anyway.

The reason? She's fed up with creepy Carpenters fans coming along and staring through the windows like a bunch of easy listening sods and leaving flowers everywhere. BBC News reports:

Fans of The Carpenters are objecting to plans to have pop duo's former family home knocked down… Jon Konjoyan, fan of the act who had huge success in the 1970s, said: "This house is our version of Graceland." The five-bedroom house was immortalised when it featured on the cover of The Carpenters' 1973 hit album Now & Then. Jessica Parra, whose parents own the house, said at first they allowed fans into their home and gave away items left behind by Richard Carpenter. "But honestly, it became horrible, not only for us but for the neighbourhood," she said, adding that fans "peek in windows and take pictures".

Sort of makes you wonder what they thought they'd be getting into buying a house where a woman who sold 100 million albums died. If they didn't want all this intrusion, perhaps it'd have been wiser to a house belonging to someone who fewer people cared about, like Dane Bowers or Shane Richie or something.

But regardless of that, it'll be interesting to see whether the Carpenters fans will be able to halt the demolishment of their heroes' home. Perhaps if enough of them gang together they'll be able to buy the house and turn it into a theme park-style shine to The Carpenters, that lets fans pay to lie down in the exact spot where Karen Carpenter collapsed, or ride a nauseatingly psychedelic ghost train that helps visitors understand what it was like to be Richard Carpenter when he was off his face of Qualuudes. And, of course, the Karen Carpenter Experience, which mainly involves not eating very much for a while.

Chances are that none of this will happen though because, as Carpenters fans, the protesters are among the puniest and most ineffectual saps ever to walk the earth.

Read more:

Carpenter house faces demolition - BBC 

However, the truth is a little more boring. Instead of, say, soundtracking an avant-garde movie about radio static with a series of dissonant chords played on the back of a kettle, Cliff Richard has instead decided to let his fans choose how much they want to pay for his new album entitled Love… The Album. But it's pretty much entirely irrelevant what hare-brained scheme Cliff Richard has dreamed up to sell his new record, because it rests on the hinges of Cliff Richard fans using the internet to preorder the album, and in our experience most Cliff Richard fans are so technologically backwards that they've only just learnt that DVDs aren't for spreading jam on and trying to eat like shiny Ryvita.

The music industry is changing, and acts need to adapt or die. That's why Madonna has signed her life away for $120 million, it's why Prince gave his album away for free with a newspaper and it's why The Charlatans are giving their album away as a free download, not because there's only about six people left who would have paid for it anyway. Crucially it's also why Radiohead let people choose how much they paid for their latest album In Rainbows, a tactic that will probably be most fondly remembered for the way it inspired Cliff Richard's latest gimmick.

Believe it or not, but Cliff Richard has always been a cutting edge innovator. In the 1950s Cliff Richard more or less brought rock and roll to Britain single-handedly, then in 1981 Cliff Richard invented the trend for twirling around shopping centres on rollerskates with epic mullets while listening to cassette walkmans thanks to his seminal Wired For Sound video. It's also a little known fact that Cliff Richard owned the world's first toaster, although back then technology was such that it was the size of six barns and took three weeks to toast each slice of bread. Plus Cliff Richard invented religion.

So with all of this in mind, it's little wonder that Cliff Richard has seen fit to hop on the music industry revolution and offer his new album to fans for whatever price they like. So long as it's between £3.99 and £7.99 and enough of them do it otherwise he's probably not going to bother. BBC News reports:

Sir Cliff Richard plans to cut the price of his new album if enough fans order it ahead of its download release. The maximum cost of Love…The Album is £7.99, but the singer says it could drop to £3.99 if there is the demand. Sir Cliff said: "We either keep one step ahead of the technology which is changing our industry so radically – or we throw up our hands and quit." But it is not clear how many orders are needed to bring the cost of the album which is due out next month. However all fans will ultimately pay the same price for the record.

Wait a minute, this isn't like Radiohead at all. This is like Cliff Richard offering to drop the price of his album slightly if loads of people preorder it instead of just mooching past it in Asda and thinking it'll do as a Christmas present for their Mum. If this is Cliff Richard's way to ensnare the kids into buying his music, he's going to be sorely disappointed. As it is Cliff Richard's music already scares children, but since his new album is basically Cliff Richard Sings The Hits Of Daniel Bedingfield And Ronan Keating we'd be surprised if children didn't instantly burst into flames and run round the streets clawing at their ears the second they heard it.

Read more:

Cliff Fans 'Control Album Cost' - BBC