Spice Girls fans! Rejoice in your wasted lives because it seems like the Spice Girls are coming back! …Again.

Former Spicer Geri Halliwell, famous for such solo hits as ‘Mi Perro Latino’, about a latin dog and the one where she was dead in the video, has claimed that the Spice Girls could be due for another money-spinning reunion.

Actually, that’s totally unfair. While most groups end up reuniting out of a love of crack cocaine and cold hard cash, the Spice Girls appear to be coming out of retirement to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Anyone who is sitting there doubting the girls’ credentials as the biggest royalists of the last 20 years need only cast their minds back to Ginger Spice’s Union Jack dress which showcased not only her strong feelings for the royal family but also her love of crotchless underwear.

Not to mention the fact that Mel B had sex with Prince Andrew. Not to mention it- of course- because it never happened. However, Mel B did manage to let the cat out of the bag about their plans for the Jubilee. The Jenny Craig spokeswoman and Eddie Murphy career ender told the press:

“Well, we do have the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee coming up. Did I really say that?”

Yes, you did. You know you did, you publicity hungry person, you.

Still, this prompted a flurry of excitable activity in the tabloids who began circling around Spice Girls like sharks or Simon Fuller. Ex-Ginger Geri told the Sunday Mirror’s phone hacking department:

“We did get the offer and it is exciting. Obviously we are a band and it’s a collective decision that has to be made as a band. We need to all be in the same place with it and we have to take into account all of our lives. We wouldn’t do it without all five of us. I do feel it’s an incredible honour and privilege. Performing at Buckingham Palace for the Queen – it doesn’t get bigger than that.”

So far, the plans for the Jubilee have not been revealed but it thought that the Queen is looking forward to five former pop stars strutting around, shoving their pelvises in her face. It’ll be like the time she met the Rolling Stones and had it off with Mick Jagger.

If you were asked to sum up the Jackson family, how would you do it? Some people might call them the greatest collection of siblings who ever entered a recording studio. Others might comment on how inferior Janet and LaToya were compared to Tito, Jermaine and Randy.

Most people would say that the entire family were complete fruit loops.

However, we’d like to comment on how the Jackson family manage to pick the worst possible time for any new release. A brand new greatest hits album from Michael followed weeks after heart went all funny and of course, there was the tribute concert that was accidentally scheduled at the same time as the Dr. Conrad Murray trial. Some would say this was done for financial gain.

Cynical, cynical people.

As we all know, ‘Sexy’ Dr.Conrad Murray was convicted for administering all sorts of funky drugs into Michael Jackson. That should be it as far as we’re concerned. The poor sod’s rotting corpse can now get some peace. But not if the Jackson estate and pesky Brian May get their way.

Musical collaborations happen all the time. Most of them are a poor excuse for one of the artists to leech on to someone more successful than themselves and climb the ladder toward popularity again. Nowadays, people don’t do it for the love of the music; instead it’s for soundtracks where, if it the song turns out to be a disaster, everyone will have forgotten about it months later.

It’s safe to say that some collaborations have been safely locked away where nobody will ever get a chance to hear them. Probably because they’re rubbish. One such recording that was made in the eighties – a time that’s renowned for crap music- was between the king of pop Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury.

These days he wouldn’t get a look in. We have Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol for God’s sake.

Nowadays, Queen are fronted by Brian May, a man who is most famous for playing on the roof of the Queen’s house and demonstrating that white people can’t pull off an afro. Speaking about the potential release that ironically didn’t feature his input the first time, he said:

“The Michael Jackson estate are happy for us to go ahead with the music. But it’s not something that we can rush.”

Well that’s good to know isn’t it? A song from 1983 is going to be given a technical modern remix thanks to a bunch of old men providing some guitar work. We’re positive it’s what Michael would have wanted. But why release this now and not when Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury were alive? Surely this stinks of a cash in? According to the floppy haired one, it supposedly isn’t. May said:

“I don’t work on things with the aim to make money or for promotional reasons. I work on things with the view ‘to let’s see how it goes. When it is something we feel is worthwhile then it’s nice if we could get it out there.”

We pray that this release doesn’t get a release. With Michael Jackson and Queen fans not being mentally stable, this single will only spark off the apocalypse and see them kill off anyone who doesn’t appreciate “the musical genius”.

Thankfully, no release date has been set. But when we get news, we’ll let you know so you can gather supplies and lock yourself in an underground bunker.

Remember that.

That might come in handy later. Or every single broadcasted moment of The X Factor for the past week. Well, not quite but it’s better safe than sorry.

Yeah, well we didn’t really want to be ‘that guy’, but The X Factor has been an bit of an absolute odious hodgepodge of horse sputum this week, hasn’t it? First and foremost we were lumbered with the responsibility of knowing that Frankie Cocozza was kicked off the show for breaking “the golden rule of X Factor”, which is something unspecified to do with sex/drugs/the producers realising that Frankie’s incredibly annoying personality traits never progressed to the desired point where an audience would love to hate him, and simply just tapered off to being mildly dicked off about him for a few good minutes instead.

Like an unpleasant bout of German measles, rather than say, CancerAids.

As X Factor producers rightly know, they can do plenty better than that, so off with Frankie, and in with an entirely irritating decision to bring back four of the contestants who they knocked back on the first show instead. That’s Jonjo Kerr, Amelia Lily, James Michael or Two Shoes (No? Us neither).

Ooh, them X Factors don’t half rile us up. WE HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE BREAK THE RULES IN GAMES.

Now, maybe we’ve been reading too much Agatha Christie here, (or maybe we’ve never read an Agatha Christie book ever because that would cut into our often reckless and tawdry lifestyles) but HMM and MMM.  Quite convenient in a way that an X Factor contestant just happened to be a mental stupid idiot and get kicked off the show, and also pretty handy that The X Factor just happened to have four ‘spares’ that they rifled off in Show 1, isn’t it?

Mmm. Pretty interesting. Mmm. They don’t fool us. Mmm. Panorama.

Wait a moment, our allegorical phone is ringing. Hello? Stephen Moffatt? You want us to be in your next series of Sherlock? That’s very nice of you Stephen Moffatt, unfortunately we’re not professional actors and that would be tremendously poor casting, but can we talk about how you ballsed up Doctor Who with gaping, irresponsible plot holes if you like. Hello? STEPHEN? HELLO?

Sorry, all this idle, immature speculation and all you wanted to do was read about the X Factor. Sorry.

The first fifteen minutes of The X Factor were awash with technical difficulties to which the Exasperated ITV1 Apologetic Voiceover Man had to apologise for countless times, as if it genuinely mattered. Nonetheless, he was so god-awful sorry about it and was literally sobbing all over a hastily spliced together XF audition montage of Janet Devlin, The Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919, and you know, the other greatest moments of The X Factor.

This week was Gaga vs Queen week. Which sounds terrible. But we’re only saying that because it does sound genuinely awful. Kelly Rowland totally wore a tuxedo which resulted in us wanting to ram a foreskin up against her furiously, in the sort of affectionate way that the Felix cat does.  Hopefully that message will get passed on.

But before we labour under the misapprehension that Amelia Lily has definitely not already been chosen since the end of the antediluvian era to come back to X Factor, (don’t try and teach your children that, we were using comedy hyperbole) we are shown the good good times of the four new contenders who get to skip 6 weeks into the live finals and it’s no biggy at all.

Unlike in 2007 when it was punishable by death penalty, such as when Diana Vickers took a week off from performing on the X Factor and was nationally ridiculed by the masses for being a massive skiving cheat and was dragged through the streets, tied to the back of a cart.

Or for you more authentic losers out there, take 2001, Pop Idol Series 1, where Rik Waller was turfed off the show for not bothering to turn up for one of the weeks. So in a way, we’ve all matured somewhat – and that is called character building.

So, who are these fab four that we, the public- the powerful, all unanimous, made up of 15 year old girls public- have to pick? Not Amelia Lily, that’s for sure.

AMELIA LILY!

Amelia has an old dad who used to sing like Paul Weller with hair like Paul Weller but strangely enough never made it, so she caked her face full of volcanic ash and Barry M lipliner and went on the telly instead, like any good daughter would who hasn’t partaken in human traficking. Everyone thought she was well good considering she was 900 years old/16 years old.

TWO SHOES!

Two Shoes are like Beyonce but actually pregnant. Also known as: AMAZING. Also, they don’t use suffixes at all, and say things like ‘totz emosh’ which means ‘totally emotional’ in gaelic.

JAMES MICHAEL!

James Michael has a boring first name and last name, but don’t let that make you think he’s boring or anything, when in actual fact we’ll have you know he’s actually gut wrenchingly offensively the worst person we’ve ever seen. Not only does he wear a hat AND is ‘submissive’, with eyes, face, and a perfectly fully working respitory system, but ON TOP OF ALL THAT – he sang the worst cover version of Ticket to Ride since The Darkness did that song ‘One Way Ticket to Hell and Back’, which okay, admittedly was a completely different song, but had the word ticket in, and is The Darkness, so in hindsight…fair enough.

JONJO KERR!

Jesus. Obviously all that palaver went on for a nice round 300 hours, and the show didn’t set off running til around THE FUTURE O’ CLOCK, or something along those lines. We exaggerate.

First up to perform was Kitty Brucknell, who unfortunately has been the product of bullying this week. Now, we don’t want to get into the whole ‘thing’, but basically that absolute slagwhore Trivial-Pursuit-Family-Edition-disgrace-of-a-bitch Misha B has been herself, and like the momentous bitch that she is and STOLEN through sheer force the Lady Gaga song that Kitty kinda wanted to sing this week. Absolutely disgraceful. Not, like, Nu Vibe being voted off the X Factor disgraceful, we mean, like, SARS disgraceful. Like, Steps Reunion Tour Disgraceful. The big leagues. Thankfully, exasperated ITV1 Apologetic Voiceover Man apologises on Misha’s behalf.

Instead, Kitty was pinned to the floor by the X Factor producers and forced at knife point to sing ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen instead. She came dressed for the occasion with the usual large metal clamps they’ve taken to fusing to the sides of her head to keep all the crazy in. But despite all the upset and chaos the week brought, we still thought Kitty was BrianMayBlogPost-mazing. The judges didn’t agree with us, but probably just because we’re immensely talented and they are tragically brain damaged. Kelly gives some pretty constructive criticism about leather horses though, so there is that.

Craig Colton said before the start of his really boring version of Paparazzi.

“I want to be unique and have my own sound.”

Nothing like Gary Barlow to pop on over and introduce some much needed falsetto tutorials into the performance to jazz up  a performance though. “Phew!” as some sort of wacky maverick of pop culture like Daffy Duck or Berlusconi might say.
THANKFULLY, Craig did another song in the E B C# A- chord progression, which really is becoming ‘his thing’.

We love it.

Apparently Craig is straight as well, singing ‘Girl’ instead of ‘Boy is mine’ despite appaz being openly being out. Huh. If only Dannii Minogue was here to point out in a passive-aggressive way. That was the same week it all came out that she was a paedophile too, but we still massively respect her judgement. Craig sang the song fine, but that’s not our issue. Our issue is moreso – Why does Craig sing constantly with candles? Because it’s bath night? But it’s not bath night anymore Craig. It’s the X Factor now, where you have to be straight, and have showers. With women.

Lol. Middle England.

This week, Little Mix gave a shit about The Risk leaving the competition. You know, like it was a massive shock. Like The Houses of Parliament wrote a thing about it and put it on a thing.

Little Mix sang ALL the Lady Gaga songs, but Misha was still the bitch for singing the one Kitty wanted. It’s pretty good actually, you know, for the X Factor. Not for the real world, or anything mind. If we had to pick between Janis Joplin or a polystyrene clad polystyrene shaped woman singing Telephone, we’d obviously, obviously… *mumbles incoherently*

Kelly then said something awesome in a suit, but we don’t listen because she’s wearing a suit. Like a vampire. Vampires are sexy, aren’t they, children? Periods are SEXY. And for more info on becoming women for the first time, Google Vampire Cunt to learn more about puberty and the pressures of growing up.

In a scene akin to when the Elephant Man cried with confusion when the blind woman touched his face, Little Mix were asked if they wanted some sort of musical individuality by Dermott O Leary. They were fine, thanks.

After a quick consultation with Greek Goddess of Awesome Kelly Rowland, it was  Janet Devlin, do you want to take massive steps backwards before we accidentally attempt to make you interesting? Yeah sure, that should be fine. Here’s some hemp. This week, Janet sang  ‘Somebody to Love’ accompanied by John Lewis. That’s a joke about how twee and boring they’ve made another song that doesn’t usually sound like this. Still, to be fair to Janet, and we really want to try and get past our own anxieties here – our honest opinion of the performance is basically that it was boring as shit and we want to kill ourselves. So, there is that. Tulisa says that being one dimensional is great, and that she has to be in the sort of mood to listen to music that is not ballsed up hiphop ie: never. Dermot tries to argue with the judges for not all saying nice things all the time. Thankfully, Exasperated ITV1 Apologetic Man apologises for Janet’s performance.

Contemporary yet vintage at the same time is the sort of thing Marcus Collins likes to do now, apparently. We’re sure you’ve heard all about it. It’s a bit like the future, except the past instead. Marcus sang ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, but with the aforementioned contemporary yet vintage twist we were going on about before. We can almost hear Mark Ronson smashing up his brass instrument collection. Weird how these specific events correlate.

Tulisa still upset that this is not RnB either. Gary informed us that we’re in the presence of a popstar, so we all hush and have a serious think about that. Louis Walsh uses the word ‘charisma’, which means ‘charismatic’, not ‘gay’, just in case the repressed masses in the wake of Craig Colton’s lies were feeling a bit over-sensitive about that one.

SKY TV advert has stolen all of Billy Crystal’s jokes but never mind.

Dermott tells a lie about how the technical difficulties were technical difficulties and then goes on to tell us about how Lady Gaga is on the show tomorrow! HER. We have heard of her off the radio 1. And as Dermott rightfully says, “She’ll probably turn up in a bath or something crazy!” – Because nothing is more crazy than a bath.

Misha said in her VT before singing Lady Gaga’s self penned ballad about the life and tribulations of Kitty Brucknell:

“This song touches a special place in Kitty Brucknell’s heart, so I fucking ripped it off.”

Oh, and she’s doing Manchester proud. Again. Not Why does everyone give a shit about if Misha is from Manchester or not? Do they really think people from Manchester vote for the X Factor? Do they really think people from Manchester have phones?

Louis post-Charlie Kaufman box set said:

“You remind me of Louis Walsh being a racist”

Kelly insincerely crossed her fingers even though everyone on Twitter knows Amelia Lily is through for about the last 40 minutes. “It was literally like having my heart ripped out,” says Amelia. Wow, that would probably be really painful. Especially for a woman of her age. (80 years old.)

Amelia sings the totally unprepared The Show Must Go On WHICH IS PROBABLY AN OBLIQUE META REFERENCE TO THE WORLD OF X FACTOR – but it also might not be. There are a lot of things a bit dodgy about the whole Amelia Lily thing, sure. The main thing being that 2 Shoes  didn’t get to come back and that was proper proper batshit bollocks and RUBBISH too. But we’ll let it slide, because we listened to Patience to Take That once, so consequently have bigger problems. But nonetheless, Amelia Lily was so good at singing, that Vlad Rowling said “Welcome freaking back.” So, now you know all about singing.

THE RESULTS

For the first time in the history of the Tudor dynasty, this review was written before the results were aired. But as if we were going to let a little thing like actual cast iron fact get in the way of talking about The X Factor. Basically, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan play a mother and daughter who don’t particular get on very well, until a magical fortune cookie changed the way they would think about themselves forever, with hilarious capers and important lessons learnt along the way.

And Kitty got voted out.

Probably.

Queen are a terrible band aren’t they? Overblown, pompous, noodly bollocks for people who can’t bring themselves to dance or listen to anything with a trace of funk. They’re so white they’re borderline Aryan.

Still, there’s obviously a huge market of Stock Broker Rock and Queen have hardly struggled throughout their career.

But what is it that people like about them? Well, if you ask Brian May, it’s because they “speak for common people”.

Speaking to the BBC, May said that he felt that the band had endured because…

“We’re not the most technically accomplished, we’re not virtuosos. We speak how we feel and I think we speak for common people. We’ve always been a people’s band. We’re not locked into any time frame, we speak for people’s dreams, hopes and aspirations and I think that endures”.

Now, let’s look at that statement. They speak to the common man. They speak for people’s dreams. They’re a ‘people’s band’.

That’s Brian May there, the star-gazing, elitist, Tory-voting, Royal-loving, clog-wearer who was in a band that thought nothing of playing in apartheid South Africa.

Yeah. Real man-of-the-people Bri’!

Still, we’re wrong to attack your personal lives. You were talking about your band weren’t you, with their real ‘of the people’ lyrics eh?

Scaramouche! Fandango! Galileo! Figaro! Magnifico! Bismillah!

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There’s nothing weirder than finding people who are so obsessed with something that they’re willing to go to any length of internet-based conflict in order to defend their nonsensical beliefs. It is a trait most often seen in fans of Muse, Twilight, INXS, Queen and, quite inexplicably, Larry David. There are few things that hecklerspray writers love more than these people. The ‘whine’ of fans.

And so we come to our weekly perusal of our post, the time that- for us- is the closest we’ll ever come to having sex with Ann Widdicombe. We approach the post bag with a mixture of terror and morbid curiosity with only a modicum of sexual excitement, we reach out our shaking, clammy paws.

Find out what becomes of us over the jump…

Remember to click that HD button…

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We love our readers. From the very bottom of our hearts, we adore them and cherish their opinions on life, the universe and everything. Some of our readers are silent; observing the world of celebrity vicariously through our writers. We love them too, just not quite as much.

Other readers like to get as involved as they possibly can by adding witty add-ons to our pieces using their own inimitable senses of humour. Some others like to defend their favourite bands, actors and artists to the hilt by using the ol’ “if you don’t have anything nice to say…” quip before telling us that we deserve to die and spend eternity in the depths pits of hell for daring to take the piss out of people.

People with no sense of humour, basically. It is these people who we celebrate each week in Readers’ Letters, our weekly trawl through your comments and opinions, filtering the fantastic from the flotsam, the sublime from the shite. This week, we’ve done it as a video! Let Editor Mof guide you after the jump…

Woe is us.

Quick everyone! Raid the cupboard for party poppers and get out your best bunting to decorate the living room. Today sees Freddie Mercury turn sixty five and a day!

However, Freddie is yesterday’s news and has already been forgotten about. But here at hecklerspray, we won’t let a new Google image or Twitter hashtag see his memory simply forgotten.

Just like the whitefro wearing sell-out Brian May, we want to flog the birthday of Freddie Mercury to death. And oh look! Here comes Katy Perry!

That’s right!

Russell Brand’s wife also wanted to make out that she cared about a dead rocker and decided to sing a tribute to the star that definitely doesn’t look like a one take wonder before she went off to have sexy wex with Russelly Wusselly and his long, thin cockywocky.

And here it is.

Out of all the mainstream female performers such as Beyonce, Rihanna and Katy Perry, we find it slightly weird that it wasn’t Lady Gaga paying tribute to the Queen singer whilst dressed as a praying mantis. After all, there’s something about her stage name that suggests she was particularly fond of one of the bands hits. Probably “Don’t Stop Me Now,” seeing she constantly comes up with wacky ways of dressing herself.

The only thing we can thing that links Katy Perry and Freddie Mercury have in common is their supposed bonding in homosexuality. Unless Katy has sculpted her pubic hair to resemble the famous moustache that Freddie spouted. As we all know, Fred was open about his sexual orientation whilst Katy Perry did a whole song about locking lips with other ladies. If Freddie Mercury had released a version with a similar feel, we assume that the lyrics would have gone along the lines of:

“I kissed a boy and I liked it, the taste of his meaty manstick.”

Sadly for Freddie, the bad AIDS got a hold of him, hence the reason he isn’t around with us today. Something tells us that Katy Perry won’t go the whole hog and infect herself with the killer disease to be like her idol. Though some dim-witted Queen fans probably did decide this would be a “cool” thing to do. Kind of like getting a tattoo, but more a ticking time bomb towards death. Still, it beats emulating a Brian May/Anita Dobson haircut as a tribute.

To mark the memory of Freddie Mercury turning sixty five and-a-bit, we might run a special feature tomorrow, but written in pure Spanish, in tribute to his Barcelona record. This might involve us having to learn the language, or reverting to the classic British tradition of communicating with foreigners by SHOUTING AND POINTING AT STUFF.

Meanwhile, Katy Perry will be looking out for when for the birthday of Martin Luther King so she can say he inspired her to have a dream and release bland music.

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For reasons we don’t rightly care about, Queen and Freddie Mercury have been honoured with a Google Doodle. It probably marks the first time Fred avoided a dentist appointment.

Either way, this tribute only serves to remind us of why Queen are such a loathsome group. And there’s a lot… A LOT… to dislike about stupid Queen.

And Queen have been irritating the world, decade after infuriating decade, unwilling to quietly slope away and leave our ears and eyes in peace. Queen: Let us count the ways in which we truly hate you.

1. Their Music

While there’s a couple of bearable Queen singles, for the most part, they created the most bloated, pointlessly overblown stadium pap ever created. You can see the ghost of this waddling rock nonsense in the likes of the also-abject Muse. Onanistic guitar solos topped pompous, cod-operatic pop created by the least likeable men in rock music. Bohemian Rhapsody is only fondly thought of because of Wayne’s World. Killer Queen is only liked because it’s Beatlesy. No-one likes anything else they ever did because it’s poorly executed grandstanding fluff.

Freddie’s solo stuff was miserable too. His duet with Montserrat Caballé are cloying stabs at being taken seriously, while his awful ‘Living On My Own’ and cover of ‘The Great Pretender’ should be flogged in public squares for ear-torture. ‘We Will Rock You’ is to rap, what Peter Andre’s ‘Mysterious Girl’ is to reggae. To quote a friend of hecklerspray, they are indeed, Sparks – for cunts.

2. Queen Fans

Humourless, jumpy and defensive are the blithering twits who follow the ghost of Freddie Mercury. Thousands of sleepy villages and towns celebrate their Queenery by dressing up in faux-bondage gear and fellas drag-up like the ‘I Want To Break Free’ video, while drinking weak lager and trying to dance to Queen’s rhythm-vacuum music. Essentially, they’re worse than the grindingly dedicated Smiths fans.

3. Nevermind Apartheid, Here’s Queen

Remember when South Africa was really racist? Remember that? Black people were rounded up like dogs and shipped off to desperate townships while fat Dutchmen laughed their pink arses to the bank? Remember that? No-one liked that did they? Everyone hated it so much that there was a giganto trade embargo that took place, trying to force the hand of those making the decisions.

Then Queen came along, shrugged their shoulders at a very large and handsome cheque and promptly played a show at Sun City, slap bang in the middle of the horror. Of course, the band hit back at critics by stating that they were playing music for fans and not politicians, and that they didn’t believe that pop-culture and politics need cross swords because, despite evidence to the contrary, they were playing for integrated audiences. Yeah. People in townships could afford the cover price of Queen tickets.

4. The Continual Grave Robbing Of Freddie Mercury

Hey! Freddie’s dead! He’s now a pop-martyr. Of course, the group got their heads together and decided that they should completely flog Mercury’s corpse until their arms got tired. And so, they toured with That Guy from Free, all the while, giving their best Princess Diana Eyes to camera, saying that it’ll never be the same without Freddie, but y’know, we like money more. The fans, of course, bought the whole ‘we want the music to stay alive’ angle, hook, line and sinker.

5. They Objectified Women

Bleurgh. Queen weren’t keen on womenfolk. When they’re not making glib comments about girls’ bottoms, tying mothers down, they were sticking naked women on their covers. Not only that, but in the ‘Jazz’  LP, they thought it would be okay to have a poster that featured a load of naked women riding around on bikes. The dirty gets. You can see it here, just to be horrified of course.

6. Brian May’s Hobbies

Brian May, other than being in Queen and generally plundering Freddie’s cadaver for mortgage payments, is… and this is quite a list… a Tory (despite campaigning for a hunting ban), an astrophysicist, a clog enthusiast, a collector of Victorian stereotography, a contributor to The Sky At Night and plays his guitars with a sixpence. Also, he married Anita Dobson (Angie from Eastenders) because she looked exactly like him.

7. Even John Deacon Hates Them

John Deacon, the bass player and sometime songwriter in Queen, hates Queen. Talking about his chums decision to record with Robbie Williams for a cover of ‘We Are The Champions’, he sneered: “I think they’ve ruined it”. He also chose not to be present when Queen were inducted into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. He also chose not to join in with the collab with Paul Rodgers. A source close to hecklerspray said that Deacon has said “I’m just waiting for Queen: The Lunchbox”.

8. Queen: The Musical

Get that? We live in a world where it is completely acceptable to have a musical based on Queen. Not our monarch, but a back-slapping bunch of divs who peddled some of the worst music ever cut to wax. And so, is a humble account of a band rising to fame? Not a chance. Apparently, the music of Queen saves the world. These guys are more deluded and self-centred than Michael Jackson and R Kelly put together.

9. Ben Elton

Worse still, the musical was written by Ben Elton. BEN ELTON! Queen have made a musical with Ben bloody Elton!

10. This.

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Sacha Baron Cohen is taking a step away from mocking the working classes of various countries in an attempt to ultimately make stupid people look even stupider on the screen (obviously, we’re talking about Ali G and Borat here) in favour of playing Freddie Mercury.

This is the latest in a long line of Let’s Flog The Dead Horse That Is Queen, thanks to the surviving group member’s lack of talent.

Unless, of course, you count Brian May’s penchant for wearing clogs and notoriously having curly hair a ‘talent’.

Brian May, who used to be married to the female version of himself – Angie Watts (real name Angie Watts), told the HARDtalk show:

“We have Sacha Baron Cohen, which will probably be a shock to a lot of people, but he’s been talking with us for a long time.”

The film will focus on the period leading up to Live Aid in 1985 and will begin shooting next year. Presumably then, it’ll miss out all the really fun and interesting things from Freddie’s life, like the decadent parties of the ’70s and his terrible fall to an AIDS related illness.

Mercifully, this won’t be some self-congratulatory Fredfest as May added:

“I think we’ll try and keep ourselves out of it as much as we can.”

May and Queen drummer Roger Taylor are going oversee music featured in the film, which will include songs by the band and by Mercury as a solo performer. Basically then, they’ll be making a CD comp and sending it to someone and saying ‘Include these’.

Graham King, of GK Films, which is co-producing the movie along with Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s production company Tribeca, said Queen was “a music brand all unto itself”.

“Freddie Mercury was an awe-inspiring performer so with Sacha in the starring role, coupled with Peter’s screenplay and the support of Queen, we have the perfect combination to tell the real story behind their success.”

Confusingly, Morgan has previously worked on The Queen. Yeah. The other one. He also worked on Frost/Nixon. One thing that should be interesting about this one is whether Baron Cohen will be sporting the kind of teeth that see people wondering about folks eating apples through tennis rackets.

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Morrissey. He’s an icon to limp wristed introverts who hole themselves up in their bedrooms with shelves full of kitchen sink dramas and books of dreadful self-written mewing poetry about being misunderstood and shit. They’re all very individual of course and don’t all flock to Salford Lad’s Club for yet another stupid photo.

Now, as lame as Mozza is, he’s always good value in interviews when he’s in Queen Bitch mode. Now he’s having a pop at Queen. No, not Freddie Mercury’s corpse or Brian May’s clogs. Rather, he doesn’t like Her Majesty the Queen’s liking of fur hats.

That’d be hats made from cute animals. Just in case you didn’t know where fur came from. Imagine Kissyfur. Now imagine wearing him as a nice snood. Appealing eh?

Anyway, Morrissey has urged the Queen to stop British Army Guards wearing real fur hats.

In a letter to The Times, the singer insisted that the responsibility of ensuring the guards do not wear real bearskin falls to the monarch.

He wrote:

“It is difficult not to look to the Queen herself – after all, they are her guards, and she must surely be aware of the horrific process utilised to supply real bearskins for her guards.

“The mere sight of each bearskin hat must surely jab at the Queen’s heart.”

Presuming she’s got one of course.

Morrissey added:

“Yes, animal rights move different people differently, and there are even those who think that animals simply have no right to be, but there is no sanity in making life difficult on purpose for the Canadian brown bear, especially for guards’ hats that look absurd in the first place, and which can easily be replaced by faux versions (thanks to the visionary Stella McCartney) with no death involved.”

Maybe the Queen will reply with… ‘Fair do’s. We’ll do a trade. You get The Smiths back together to appease those wet shits who follow your every word and I’ll stop my men wearing hats that look like Johnny Marr’s head in the ’80s.’

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The American Idol final is gone. Gone but not forgotten. Following the victory of Kris Whateverhisnamewas, the shock is still palpable.

But don’t think that fallen American Idol loser Adam Lambert won’t have the last laugh. Kris Allen may have won the battle, but Adam Lambert has won the war – Adam Lambert’s going to be the new singer of Queen!

Except he isn’t. Brian May mumbled something about it recently, which means that Adam Lambert will probably end up being the fourth male lead in the pan-Siberian touring version of We Will Rock Rock You in about 15 years’ time. Fact.

Adam Lambert’s stunning American Idol defeat last week has forced America to face up to some serious questions. Questions like ‘Was Kris Allen’s victory a sign of institutionalised homophobia in America?’, ‘Really? It was? Do any of you even know how the music industry works?’ and ‘Does it even matter anyway? It’s not as if we’re ever going to hear another peep from either of them ever again, is it?’

But just because he ended up flaming out of American Idol at the last hurdle, the tremendous – some might say froth-mouthed and utterly terrifying – support that Adam Lambert has gained along his journey can only help his chances of achieving the success he so obviously craves. Especially since one of his supporters is none other than Brian May from Queen.

That’s RIGHT! Brian May LIKES ADAM LAMBERT! And he’s in QUEEN! And Queen are 1) all about annoyingly over-theatrical songs, 2) at their best when fronted by a berserk egomaniac and 3) completely unable to recognise when they should quit. And ADAM LAMBERT IS ALL OF THOSE THINGS! ADAM LAMBERT IS GOING TO BE QUEEN’S NEW SINGER! SQUEEEEE!!!

Except, wait, no. Just because a moron on the internet said that they’d quite like it if Adam Lambert became the new Queen singer, it doesn’t mean that it’s true. In fact, Brian May says he hasn’t even spoken to Adam Lambert about the possibility of it becoming true, as he told Rolling Stone:

“Amongst all that furor, there wasn’t really a quiet moment to talk. But [drummer Roger Taylor] and I are definitely hoping to have a meaningful conversation with him at some point. It’s not like we, as Queen, would rush into coalescing with another singer just like that. It isn’t that easy. But I’d certainly like to work with Adam. That is one amazing instrument he has there.”

So who knows? It might work out. After all, Adam Lambert and Queen share the same flair for grating flamboyance, and Adam’s certainly got the range to sing all of Queen’s greatest hits, like the one about seeing a little silhouetto of a man, or the one about bicycles, or the one about dying of AIDS. So it might work out.

Or, alternatively, maybe Queen realise that without even Paul Rogers to prop up their creaky old nostalgic karaoke machine, the only chance they have of selling concert tickets is to rope in whoever happens to be popular on YouTube at any given moment. And that might work out, too, until Adam Lambert gets sacked after a fortnight so that Susan Boyle can have a go. And then Keyboard Cat. And then, if there’s any justice in the world, this chap.

Which we’d be more than OK with, by the way.

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It’s sad to admit it – but we never really grew out of Lego.

Any excuse to go to Legoland and we are there. Although as only a few of us have kids, we usually have to kidnap them to get in. Of course, we are joking. None of us have kids.

Anyway, to satisfy our sad Lego urges thankfully there are people who have decided to create music videos purely from Lego. Of course, The White Stripes did it, but here are 11 others for your viewing pleasure…

11. Guns N’Roses – Welcome to The Jungle

10. System of a Down – Chop Suey

9. The Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star

8. Rammstein – FeuerFrei

7. Metallica – One

6. Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em – Crank That (Soulja Boy)

5. Michael Jackson – Thriller

4. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

3. Adam Ant – Goody Two Shoes

2. Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

1. Devo – Whip It

Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun… Flash! Pakow! Ahhh!

It’s quite difficult to decide what made up word successfully describes the noise after ‘Flash!’ is cried on the Queen song, but hecklerspray has gone with ‘pakow!’ and forever it will remain that way.

What is less difficult to describe is the news that Flash Gordon, polo playing (or american footballer, depending on how much stock you put in the 80s film) hero of the universe, is to make a return to the big screen. This comes across as particularly strange, following the fact that the recent Flash Gordon TV series was received in the way a crap-covered balloon given to a child with a terminal illness would be received.

Stretched analogies aside, we mean the TV show wasn’t very good. And it still isn’t, actually. But this hasn’t stopped Hollywood in their never-ending quest to rape nostalgia forever, which has frankly become such a stupidly common occurrence that we feel we should give it an official name.

Leave your suggestions below.

After winning the rights to create a movie based on the character, Sony have gone and hired a couple of writers for the remake – Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. Hopefully they got the gig from their names alone, but that we cannot be sure of . But when you throw in the fact that Breck Eisner is apparently directing, then, well – we have a case to make that claim, surely?

Unfortunately we are a bit neutered in the criticism we can offer Matt and Burk beyond their spectacular names, as we cannot find anything they’ve written before. Eisner, on the other hand, directed the should-be-a-war-crime that was ‘Sahara’. Which – let’s be honest here – means it’s likely going to be a big pile of poopy.

While we can’t be sure at this point, it does look like the story being pushed for will retread the ground that has been walked a dozen times before by Flash and his cohorts – Earth under attack, fly to Mongo, fight Ming, win – and this version can’t possibly have a new soundtrack devised by Queen, so what’s the point?

Will the franchise be a ‘re-boot’, akin to that of Batman? Will we see a newly-hardcore Flash Gordon fighting barefist with Ming, before setting off on some parkour-inspired chase sequence? All interlaced with CGI rife with ‘dirty cuts’?

Hecklerspray would go with: yes. That’s almost definitely what’s going to happen.

Because Hollywood has no ideas, remakes everything, forces out pointless sequels and seemingly does it all in exactly the same style – which just so happens to be whichever style is popular at the time. Philistines. Though, to be fair, a method-acted Ming would be something to savour – conquering worlds just to ‘get into character’ and generally dressing like something of a maniacal twit around town.

In fact, that sounds brilliant – make it faster, Sony.

Pakow!

We hereby take back everything negative we've ever said about the Grammys.

Yes, the Grammys are dull, overlong and self-congratulatory, but if the Grammys didn't exist, then Aretha Franklin's demented tantrum over Beyonce calling Tina Turner 'the queen' instead of her wouldn't exist either. And that's just too priceless to live without.

Especially now that Beyonce's dad has gotten in on the act, too – Matthew Knowles has called Aretha Franklin "childish and unprofessional" for her outburst. We're expecting Aretha's "That's childish, unprofessional and super-super morbidly obese to you," retort to come any second now.

When it was announced that Beyonce was to duet with Tina Turner at this year's Grammys, at best you probably expected an under-rehearsed medley of power ballads performed by an elderly out-of-breath woman and a woman hell-bent on swamping everything with all sorts of needless "woooahoahwhooah"ery.

But ha! That's not what you got at all. In fact, what Beyonce and Tina Turner gave us on Sunday night was an under-rehearsed medley of power ballads performed by an elderly out-of-breath woman and a woman hell-bent on swamping everything with all sorts of needless "woooahoahwhooah"ery containing an introduction that made Aretha Franklin flip her shit.

In case you needed reminding, Beyonce introduced Tina Turner as 'the queen.' And this managed to rile Aretha Franklin senseless because she's supposed to be the queen, and Tina Turner can't be the queen as well otherwise there'll be two queens and people will get confused. What if Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin both went to the same party and there was a snack trolley labelled 'for the queen'? Would they have to share? We get the feeling that Aretha Franklin would rather take her own life than share any snacks. Mainly, we think this whole brouhaha is snack-based.

Anyway, Aretha Franklin was so upset by all this that she made a public statement about it. And now it's the turn of Beyonce's father Matthew Knowles to make a stand, and he seems as bewildered about all this as the rest of us:

"Something this ridiculous – it's childish, it's unprofessional. And it's a sad day when egos get bruised because somebody used the word king, queen, prince or princess."

And now Matthew Knowles has followed it up in an interview with CelebTV making his views even clearer:

"I am not taking something this ridiculous to Beyonce. Beyonce referred to Tina Turner as a 'queen.' Not queen of gospel, queen of soul, queen of blues, Queen of England. I consider my wife a queen and sometimes call her that. Does Aretha have a problem with that?"

In fact, Aretha doesn't have a problem. She eats problems for breakfast. She eats a lot of things for breakfast, though, so maybe we shouldn't we shouldn't judge that too harshly on that. 

So now just about the only person not to have spoken out about this kerfuffle is Tina Turner. There could be any number of reasons for this – perhaps she's decided to rise above it, perhaps she's continuing her pattern of not responding to anything that happens to her, or perhaps she's still out of breath from her Grammys performance – but we're not so sure.

We think that Tina Turner is quietly preparing for battle. you see, if Tina Turner is now queen, then it makes sense for Aretha Franklin to upgrade to Super-Queen. And if that happens, Tina will need to think fast and upgrade too, to Ultra Mega Super-Queen. And so it will continue, until the fateful day when Mega Super Hyper Condor GalactaQueen Aretha Franklin and Ultra Ultra Thundersaurus Omegamax Queen Tina Turner wrestle each other in the middle of New York, knocking down buildings and punching heads off statues and whatnot.

Read more:

Beyonce's Dad Weighs in on 'Queen' Flap – Associated Press 

If you saw the Grammys last weekend, you'll have witnessed Beyonce duetting with a panting, apple-faced pensioner wrapped in a scrap of tinfoil who Beyonce claimed was Tina Turner.

And that's got Aretha Franklin thoroughly narked. You see, Beyonce introduced Tina Turner at the Grammys by calling her "the queen." And Aretha Franklin is under the impression that she's actually the queen.

The queen of what, we don't know. Although judging by her performance at the Grammys, our first guess would be that Aretha Franklin is the queen of competition-standard sausage-gobbling.

Although the rightful focus of the Grammys on Sunday was the way that Amy Winehouse managed to sing two songs without falling over, throwing up, smoking any hard drugs or hacking away at any of her bodyparts with a razorblade, other people found different things to concentrate on.

And, although the Grammys duet between Beyonce and Tina Turner wasn't especially pleasant, that's what Aretha Franklin has focused her mind on, anyway. Luckily Aretha Franklin isn't too concerned with the performance itself, or the way that Tina Turner's borderline-obscene silver corset pulled her 68-year-old torso in so tight that she made a noise like a choking baby rather than singing, but the way she was introduced.

You see, Beyonce's spoken-word introduction of Tina Turner mainly involved listing other female singers and saying that none of them are as good as Tina Turner, because Tina Turner is "the queen." And since Aretha Franklin thought that actually she was the queen, she's started getting shitty about it to anyone who'll listen. According to The Associated Press:

When Aretha Franklin is unhappy, she does not mince words. On Tuesday, the longtime Queen of Soul slammed Beyonce Knowles' intro to Tina Turner at Sunday's Grammy Awards, in which Knowles called Turner, not Franklin, "the queen." "I am not sure of whose toes I may have stepped on or whose ego I may have bruised between the Grammy writers and Beyonce," Franklin said in a statement issued by her publicist. "However, I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy."

If it was a cheap shot for controversy, then might we suggest that it isn't actually a particularly good one, since the only person to show even a flicker of anything approaching outrage is Aretha Franklin herself. Everyone else was probably wondering how long it took for Aretha to grow her upper arms to get to the size of a fat man's thighs.

Perhaps the organisers of the Grammys will pay attention to Aretha Franklin's tantrum, though, and in the future only refer to Tina Turner as a duchess or low-ranking marchioness or something. And maybe Aretha Franklin should think of copyrighting this queen thing – we hear several monarch states, a rock group, a scallop and a chess piece are already encroaching on her territory.

But, you know, maybe 'queen' isn't a big enough word to describe Aretha Franklin. Maybe 'planet' or 'galaxy' would be better – after all, we're pretty sure that Aretha Franklin does exert her own gravitational pull now.

Read more:

Franklin Slams Beyonce Grammy Intro – Associated Press