It’s christmas. Woopdeedoo and loop de loop and all that. Yes, that’s right, since you all asked so fucking nicely, we didn’t bother to do a video this week as it’s the festive season and is therefore all about building up your hopes in order to dash them.

In fact, we’re so set on driving you all to distraction that we’re going to have Christmas specials every week now because that’s exactly what christmas is all about. Incessant disappointment until you eat so much chocolate and drink so much cheap sherry that you may as well check into Dignitas on Boxing Day.

Still, euthanasia aside, it’s always best to start the Christmas period as early as possible because that’s where you make the most money and since all of you dribbling gits out there in internet land believe that the Christmas period can only officially begin when the Coca Cola advert has tugged its way around your heartstrings, we decided to start as soon as they do.

Really early.

Christmas adverts take a few very set, very distinct and very dull paths. They either play to your sentimental side like Coca Cola or John Lewis, they play it for laughs like DFS (no, they really are) or they traipse out some washed-up celebrities in order to point at them and shout, “LOOK! THESE CELEBRITIES ENJOY CHRISTMAS AND THAT MEANS IT’S OKAY FOR YOU TO HAVE A NICE TIME AS WELL!”

That is unless you’re a child, in which case the advertising is still shouting at you but it’s more likely to be saying, “YOU WILL FORCE YOUR USELESS PEON PARENTS TO BANKRUPT THEMSELVES BUYING THIS TOY THAT YOU WILL PLAY WITH A MAXIMUM OF FIVE TIMES BEFORE IT BREAKS AND IS FORGOTTEN ABOUT IN A BOX! THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS! BUY OUR PRODUCTS!” It’s a tough lesson but it’s one that children should learn from an early age.

Some adverts actually go out of their way to combine all these elements into 30 second mini-dramas with a narrative and a heart and real, genuine drama. Step forward, Very.co.uk.

Drama. It opens with a Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone duel close-up. The forlorn strings of a guitar warble out in the distance. The slightly odd sight of two television presenters going up against the Il Duce of Christmas himself is completely offset by the sudden sense of tension…

…oh, what’s that hyper-irritating version of ‘Anything You Can Do…’ doing there?

In an effort to explain the sudden appearance of this jaunty brainworm, spokesmorons and celebrity bum-chums Holly & Fearne are quickly shown beating Santa at his own game of counter-intuitive housebreaking. Where Santa seems to fail is that he can’t just wander through someone’s front door at 8 in the evening.

Why?

He’s not bloody famous, that’s why.

Besides Fearne thinking she can ‘bring back’ a hairstyle that looks like a ploughed field, they’re showing him up by interacting with a family. It’s cosy, it’s sentimental. That’s where TV presenters and Santa Claus differ you see, Santa Claus isn’t a self-praising narcissist. If they really wanted to do Santa’s job better than him then they could do worse than to disappear from existence in a puff of smoke, becoming a lie that parents tell their kids so that they don’t grow up to be self-involved twat baskets.

Look at that family mocking santa claus. “He’s not even real!” they mockingly cry as the poor old bastard tries to stuff a wooden train under their smart-price christmas tree. Holly and Fearne look on with derision. Humour. Sick, sick humour. How can he ever hope to gain the thanks of millions of children all over the world with his paltry offerings of wooden toys, handmade with love and affection by tiny little people than Ricky Gervais thinks are hilarious? None of these things are a Nintendo 3DS (CHILDREN! YOU WANT A 3DS!)

Dirty tactics! That’s what it is. Holding back the poor, decrepit old man who just wants to finish his annual paper route without being held back by two tarts with a glorified catalogue. Sure they might have more presents than ol’ Sanity Clause himself but do they have the magical powers to skoot round the earth delivering presents like they’ve just inhaled a kilo of amphetamines and broken the face of Bernard’s watch?

Of course they don’t. They’re bloody TV presenters! TV presenters can just smile and read from an autocue. They can’t even drive that van. They had to get the cameraman to move slightly to the left because Fearne Cotton just sat staring at the pedals like a brain-damaged horse. There’s no magic there.

So what’s the outcome? Have the spokesmorons actually managed to upset the balance of Christmas forever? Will the festive season ever be the same again? Does their defeat of Santa mean that Fearne Cotton & Holly Willoughby will become an ethereal, fictional presence that children make macaroni images of in primary schools?

FIND OUT IN PART TWO!

Zane Lowe is an unbearably smug son of a turd and if you disagree with that statement then you’ll probably disagree with most of this article. Ever since the days when he was sitting on a badly green-screened couch, chumming up to the Foo Fighters, Lowe has maintained the air of a man whose every musical opinion is based not on a love of music, but on a love of his own opinions on music.

The Smug-Meister-General of BBC Radio 1′s musical output has a long-running tradition of forcing his opinions down the throats of his listeners by choosing a series of “Masterpiece” albums to play, in their entirety, during his show. Thankfully this only happens once a year.

However, things are different this time.

If Zane Lowe thinks that he can force his idea of what makes a musical classic down our throats then we’re going to do the same thing to our readers, hopefully making you realise that this kind of behaviour isn’t okay. We might strap you all down and force the sounds of The Sugababes’ classic “Hole In The Head” into you, or we might just leave a link and some impassioned words from our writers.

We’ll see how we feel.

For those of you who still care about what the people who employ Chris Moyles think, the Radio 1 press person wrote these words to accompany the email:

Each show will include interviews with the artists and others involved in the making of the album, giving a fascinating insight into the stories behind the songs. Zane also takes a look at how each album since its release has influenced other artists with contributors including Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Blink 182 and Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner.

Chris Martin?! BLINK 182?! ALEX TURNER?! Why, Radio 1, with these leviathans of popular music, you are truly spoiling us but what does the Git-In-Chief have to say about his little collection?

“It gets harder every year to pick them, but this year’s four albums each hold a special place in the record collections of many, whilst at the at the same time influencing on many of today’s most successful and brilliant artists.”

It gets harder because you’re trying so hard to look like you know music Zane. The identity of the albums that Lowe has chosen (by committee) isn’t a secret but we genuinely couldn’t care less what they are so you’ll have to look elsewhere for them. Sorry chumps.

Anyway, taking a leaf out of Lowe’s Big Book of Self-Importance, we’ve come up with a list of our ‘masterpiece’ albums. No committee, no real thought. Everybody in the hecklerspray bedsit got the chance to pick one. It’s only fair.

Dare – The Human League

Mof Gimmers: Synthpop was always a ludicrous (gloriously so) genre, which showcased a retrofuturism hatched up in bedsits and motorway cafes by young men with dreadful haircuts and worse clothes. Then, Phil Oakey & Co. realised that they were sitting on something that was plain futuristic and went about making one of the finest, weirdest pop albums ever made. While ‘Don’t You Want Me’ is standard wedding fodder, it’s still a bona fide masterpiece. Backed by the catchier-than-mumps ‘Love Action’, the fierce ‘Sound Of The Crowd’ and the thunderous ‘Do Or Die’, ‘Dare’ is just about the most perfect pop-art LP ever made.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Check Your Head – Beastie Boys

Si Sharp: ‘Paul’s Boutique’ may have seen them at their lyrical peak, but 1992′s Check Your Head is the grooviest hip-hop album of all time.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Lungs – Florence & The Machine

Joanna Bolouri: Original, beautiful, quirky and downright genius. An album that could bring back longing and joy to an otherwise dead heart.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Beat Me – Electric Eel Shock

Kris Silver: An album that perfectly sums up this band of Japanese outsiders, fusing pop, punk, metal and comedy to make a collection of riotous, yet still catchy, and often funny songs about everything from politics to fishing.

Listen to it on Spotify.

We Are The Pipettes – The Pipettes

Robin Darke: Failing to invigorate the market with a reinvention of the traditional 60s girl group, this album breathes a modern interpretation into a staple of Motown history; catchy, feminism-infused and highly underrated. Get them before they turn eurodance and shi…oh.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Mr Beast – Mogwai

Michael Park: Mogwai have been producing exceptional album after exceptional album right back to 1997′s ‘Young Team’ but this attempt from 2006 is one of their most accessible. Rolling crescendoes and haunting lulls, what’s not to like?

Listen to it on Spotify.

Actually – The Pet Shop Boys

Sophie Hall: It’s the one with ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ on it – a song which would upgrade ‘Disappointing second Hear’say Album’ to ‘Best contribution to sound in the universe’ in a mere moment.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Hootenanny – The Replacements

Lauren Mullineaux: It might not be their finest album, but it captures a band on the brink of unappreciated greatness and showed the self-deprecating maturity of Westerberg’s lyrics.  Besides the man is a genius.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Second Toughest In The Infants – Underworld

Matthew Laidlow: Comprising multiple styles from lounge to drum & bass, progressive electro to full-on acid, Second Toughest In The Infants is an album that sounds as fresh today as when it first came out, especially when coupled with the rambling, confusing lyrics of Karl Hyde.

Listen to it on Spotify.

Get them all on one, big Spotify playlist so that you can impress people at parties.

So there you have it, readers. Nine classic albums from the furthest reaches of musical taste (and decency), all delivered to you without the need for a three hour retrospective starring Chris Martin and Alex Turner.

You might not like all of the albums on our list but do feel free to tell us your ‘masterpiece’ albums in the comments. Or slag off Zane Lowe. It’s really up to you.

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THE BIG DOG IS IN THE HOUSE! 6 words that, when you hear them on the radio, let you know that it’s time to change the station, because the whitest man in history, Tim Westwood, is about to start broadcasting.

It’s fairly safe to say we all hate Westwood, after all what is there to love about a man who looks like a geography teacher painfully trying to hard to appear ‘street’ to keep his pupils interested?

But none of us seem to hate Westwood quite as much as Mark Bulcock.

Mr. Bulcock is currently in court for sending a series of threatening texts to the 53 year old DJ. A man Bulcock claims he, “admires.”

We can’t really blame Bulcock for sending abusive texts to Westwood, if any of us were forced to listen to a man over half a century old telling us how ‘fly’ that latest ‘snoop joint’ was then we’d probably just start sending torrents of abuse to him too.

However, this isn’t exactly the worst thing Westwood has had to put up with in his life. There was the time he got shot and the time he had to host Pimp My Ride UK, both of which were equally painful. Admittedly though, the latter was only painful to everyone else besides Westwood.

Whilst the Big Dog continues to occupy the house it doesn’t appear as if he’ll be dominating the court (the actual court, not the basketball court) with his mad lyrical skillz anytime soon. However, Bulcock will be back in the courthouse next month to be sentenced.

With Bulcock safely under lock and key we can all rest assured that Tim Westwood will live to offend our ears another day.

It’d be nice if, just once, the big dog would actually just stay in the house.

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The great Reading Festival ticket rush is right around the corner, which is causing people of no discernible music taste to wet themselves with glee while the rest of us look on in astonishment that this festival manages to sell out year after year.

The Reading and Leeds festivals are one of those bizarre anomalies that perplex music fans the world over. How can a company put on a festival with weaker line-ups, higher ticket prices and more problems than we’re legally allowed to mention and yet continue to draw a huge demand for tickets?

The answer is obvious. Hipsters.

For many of our hipster brethren, Monday will go like this:

Wake up at about 10 and eat an ironic breakfast before donning a checked shirt, some skinny jeans, some bright Nike high tops and one of those Mongolian hat things like that Dappy fella from N-Dubz wears. Grab the lomo camera you picked up in Urban Outfitters, sling it in your unisex courier bag then grab your fixie bike with the unfathomably short handlebars and cycle dangerously towards your Shoreditch based media hub.

After several hours of posing, listening to some obscure band none of us will have heard of, blogging, not eating and drinking a lot of black coffee, head back home and anxiously wait for that magic moment when Reading tickets finally go on sale.

Your stomach is in knots, you HAVE to be there, not because of any of the bands that are on the line-up. Hell, they won’t have even announced the headliners before tickets sell out. No, you have to be seen there, it’s the place to be, the place that will ensure everyone looks at your instagram page and follows you on twitter, giving your pathetic existence some shallow sense of meaning.

Then comes the rush. The clock hits 0 and all hell breaks loose. The ticket sites crash almost instantaneously and you scramble through forums looking for the magical backdoor links that take you straight to the ticket purchase page. But what’s this?

All the forums have hidden the links behind password protected private forums. OH NO!

Looks like you’ll be resigned to sucking someone off behind Netto because they maybe, possibly, might be related to the neighbour of someone who used to be married to that bloke that works in Festival Republics PR department.

The rest of your night will be spent seething as those social networks you spend all day looking at (even though they’re like so totally mainstream and you only have an account because you were into it before everyone else) fills up with statuses from your friends and fellow bedroom DJs/Artists/Photographers/Social Media Experts (delete as appropriate) about how they managed to get tickets and it’ll be so totally LULZ.

Welcome to the death of music. Reading Festival is thy name.

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What’s the first thing you should do when you play a concert, other than plug stuff in and check your flies?

That’s right, you work out which town you’re playing. The fastest way to alienate any crowd is to go onstage, mistakenly blurt out a greeting meant for another town located more than 250 miles away and get booed by the crowd because you’re obviously a dick.

Perhaps someone should have pointed this out to Usher before his performance at the Radio 1 Big Weekend festival in Maidstone, where he bounded out onstage and bellowed “Hello Manchester!” to a chorus of boos. Usher should be thankful he got away that lightly. This was Maidstone, after all – he’s lucky a pregnant 12-year-old didn’t stab him in the eye with a sawn-off bottle of Bacardi Breezer.

The Radio 1 Big Weekend in Mote Park, Maidstone has now been and gone, and it was apparently a big success – organisers are claiming that it holds the record for Europe’s largest free-ticked event that’s only free because nobody in their right minds would ever actually pay to see The Kooks or Newton Faulkner in a festival hosted in part by Jo Whiley unless they were either idiots or being forced to by a jittery man with a gun.

But ‘success’ is a funny term to define. That’s something that Usher knows only too well, because he never seems to be able to do anything with an absolute degree of success. When he was in Chicago, for example, Usher proved that even current popstars have the mental and physical endurance to perform live musical theatre night after night. At least until he got a bit of a sore throat and had to go home early.

Then there was his wedding to Tameka Foster. How did Usher celebrate the happiest day of his life? By cancelling it at the last minute, that’s how. And let’s not forget the birth of his first child, which Usher decided to mark by naming the baby Usher – a move of such soul-destroying egotism that we wouldn’t be surprised if Usher was actually a little bit disappointed that his wife hadn’t just given birth to a full-length gore-covered mirror.

So with this in mind, nobody should have really expected Usher’s set at Radio 1′s Big Weekend to go perfectly. Which is good, because it didn’t. Aside constant references to songs that weren’t written a week ago as ‘old classics’ as if he was referring to early Georgian antique bureaus when in reality they were mainly a bunch of identical R&B songs, Usher made the teensy mistake of forgetting where he was actually playing, as BBC News reports:

R&B star Usher left Kent festival goers unimpressed after shouting out “hello Manchester” to the packed crowd. The singer was opening Radio 1′s Big Weekend festival in Maidstone, Kent, when the blunder happened, prompting some audience members to boo.

To be fair, mixing up Maidstone and Manchester is an easy mistake to make – they’re only about 250 miles apart – plus they both begin with the letter M, so in retrospect it’s just as well that Usher didn’t yell “hello Melbourne” or “hello Marzipan.” But if he’d have paid some attention, Usher would have been able to tell the difference.

You see, a night out in Maidstone usually involves being bottled by a gang of lairy blokes outside Argos, while a night out in Manchester usually involves being shot by a gang of lairy blokes outside Argos. The difference is huge.

Read more:

Usher makes gaffe at Radio 1 gig - BBC

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

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

We begin with the first big festival-type affair of the year, this weekend’s Radio 1’s Big Weekend down in Kent. This particular bash doesn’t have a fixed location, but over the years it has proved to be a popular event for all who can get a ticket.

Now listening to Radio 1 may not be to everyone’s taste. Listening to Chris Moyles‘ self-indulgent rants and enduring the apparent queen of radio Jo Whiley may slightly grate on some people. However, Radio 1 is part of the BBC and in return for the Beeb wasting license fee money on stupid flashy graphics for the news, they do occasionally give the public something back. It comes in the form of free music for gig goers.

What makes the festival such a success is that it gives people the chance to see high-flying bands of the moment who normally wouldn’t get the chance. In previous years, Radio 1 has been to Sunderland, Preston and now it’s the turn of Maidstone.

Instead of the people of these towns and cities having to travel for live music, it comes to them. However, the popularity of this concept always knackers things up. 500,000 applied for tickets this year. We don’t think that 500,000 live in Maidstone, though. More than likely people have applied from all over the UK in the hope they are selected in order to make a quick buck on ebay.

As per usual, this festival doesn’t take too many daring risks on who is playing. Most of the acts currently have albums out or are playlisted on the station. No chance of any Ethiopian jazz on the bill. But before we get too cynical, there is a new stage this year showcasing unsigned talent from the local area. So for anyone daring, there could be something new and exciting for them.

Held over two days, the free gig does offer a spectacular line up, and if have got your hand on a ticket, we have selected some of the bands to see and those to miss.

Saturday – Go go go!

Madonna – Watching a pensioner crawl and roll around on stage whilst trying to remain sexy and dignified is a test that will make either vomit or laugh endlessly. Though the vomiting could be brought on by the ropey £5 uncooked burgers you bought earlier in the day.

The Ting Tings – Should be interesting to see how they perform live. Their current single is as good as the first and a big crowd should be there to see how they tackle a live outing

Saturday – Avoid like the plague

Paramore – Sounds just like Avril Lavigne when she was in her grungy and pissed off with the world period. But this time it’s labelled as a band’s sound and not one of a solo artist.

The Hoosiers – You’re not kooky, new or cutting edge. Instead you look like wankers as you prance around like twats.

Sunday – Go go go!

Goldfrapp – Cooler then an ice lolly, Alison Goldfrapp pioneers a cool blend of ambiance and electronica. The electronic sound that granny Madonna rips off.

Gallows – They will tear you a new arse hole. No prisoners are taken.

Sunday – Avoid like the plague

Pendulem live/DJ set - For fuck’s sake, you’re already doing a live set on the same day with your drum and bass which is wooden and bland. So why bother doing a rubbish DJ set when someone else could take the slots? Give us London Elektricity instead!

Basshunter – To recreate the sound of Basshunter, smash your head off a wall. Or we’ll do it for you if we find out you have a copy of their kebab shop anthem.

BBC Radio 1 has made the decision to censor the word 'faggot' from Kirsty MacColl and Shane McGowan's yuletide anthem Fairytale Of New York.

Inevitably, various groups are up in arms at this display of censorship, calling it political correctness gone mad and everything else you'd probably expect it to. However, the real outrage isn't that Radio 1 has censored the word 'faggot' from Fairytale Of New York, or that it's even playing a song that originally contained the word 'faggot' – no, the real outrage is that Radio 1 is playing a song that's about three times older than its average listener in the first place.

BBC Radio 1’s decision to silence the word 'faggot' from Fairytale Of New York was criticised by Kirsty MacColl's mother on Radio 5 Live this morning, on the grounds that the song is about two characters speaking in a dialect true to themselves. She said:

"These are a couple of characters. Today we have a lot of a gratuitous vulgarity and whatever from people all over which I think is quite unnecessary. These are characters and they speak like that."

Radio 1 released a statement defending the decision:

“Radio 1 are playing an edited version of the Fairytale of New York that does not include the world 'faggot' as this is a word that members of our audience would find offensive."

The song was first released in 1987, and is now as synonymous with Christmas time as mince pies, intense family feuds and merry old St. Nick himself. A spokesperson for McGowan’s band The Pogues commented:

"It strikes me as very odd and I'm sure the band will be very amused."

Whatever the reason for the ban, though, censoring the song's 'faggot' line seems to us like a pretty futile attempt on Radio 1’s part because everyone knows what the missing word is anyway. The silence at the end of "You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy…” makes the word stand out stronger in its absence, like when the wedding reception DJ turns down the volume after "It’s fun to stay at the…” everyone knows to scream out "YMCA!”

And even if they don't know the censored word, the only two words that rhyme with 'maggot' are 'faggot' and 'cagot' and we don't think Kirsty MacColl would ever dream of calling Shane McGowan a member of the race inhabiting the valleys of the Pyrenees who until 1793 were political and social outcasts for supposedly being remnants of the Visigoths.

What's our view on the matter? We don't have one. We're waiting for the remixed duet between Isaiah Washington and Jerry Lewis to come out. 

Read more:

BBC bans lyrics in song – Mirror