TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2009

It's 10th December 2009 and that can only mean one thing: it's time to reveal my top 10 albums of the year! The anticipation for the arrival of James Cameron's $250 million 3-D movie epic 'Avatar' has nothing on this. So here goes...

10. White Lies - To Lose My Life
Quite possibly the hardest working band of the year due to a never-ending tour which started in 1942.. or something. This is a solid, clear-as-crystal pop debut that features a couple of classic tracks. They've received a lot of stick for their 'faux darkness' and, to be fair, their critics kind of have a point. But there is no denying the quality of the songs on show. The drummer has great hair as well.

9. Billy Talent - Billy Talent III
Billy Talent's trio of albums are a bit like the Bourne movies; ultimately the same film re-made 3 times but so engrossing that it doesn't really matter. So 'III' isn't so much a step forward as a step sideways. But the riffs are still massive and the musicianship faultless. It doesn't quite match 'II' (one of the greatest American rock albums of the last decade) but songs such as 'White Sparrows' and 'Saint Veronica' are up there with the best they have ever made and in Ian D'Sa they have one of the greatest guitarists in the world, which always helps.

8. Doves - Kingdom of Rust
Doves are the first of three bands to feature in my list who have been slogging away for years but have only just started to make it big. Kingdown of Rust opens with one of the best songs I have heard all year - 'Jetstream'. Unfortunately the rest of the album doesn't quite live up to it but this is yet another great album from a band seemingly incapable of making a bad song. 'Lost Souls' may arguably be their best work but Doves quality is never inconsistent.

7. Biffy Clyro - Only Revolutions
The second band on the list to have leaped into the mainstream conciousness this year are one of the most exciting and ambitious British rock bands around. Only Revolutions is HUGE. The riffs are HUGE. The production is HUGE. The choruses are BIGGER THAN HUGE. 'The Captain' is a ridiculous sea shanty anthem, 'Many of Horror' is a lighters-in-the-air classic and 'Bubbles' is simply immense. All in all, a fanstastic achievement. Bring on the stadiums.

6. The Mars Volta - Octahedron
The words 'Mars Volta' and 'acoustic pop' might at first seem about as suited to each other as 'Michael Bay' and 'subtle' but 'Octahedron' is pretty much that - an acoustic pop album.. and it is brilliant. Gone are the 15 minute prog rock excursions and in come beautifully arranged proper songs that have choruses and everything. Of course, 'Octahedron' has it's mental moments, but this is The Mars Volta at their most controlled and focused. God knows where they'll go next but I'll definitely be joining them.

5. Paramore - Brand New Eyes
"What the hell is a pop-emo album doing at number 5 you complete arse!?", is what you might be asking yourself. Well, it's not emo actually; it's a proper rock record that has more hooks than a fishing boat and, in Hayley Williams, one of the best pop vocalists in the world right now. Paramore may have started off as a pretty standard American emo band but this album is a huge leap forward in every way. 'Brand New Eyes' is a mature yet catchy-as-hell piece of work from a band who have the combined age of about 12.

4. Arctic Monkeys - Humbug
Arctic Monkey's third album was poorly received by many but the truth is that it is simply another masterpiece from Britain's best band. Alex Turner actually sings this time and the band let the songs speak for themselves. There are more slowies than usual, which shows are more relaxed side to them, and tracks such as 'Crying Lightning', 'Dangerous Animals' and 'Cornerstone' are up there with the best they have ever written. 'Humbug' is dark, moody and a bit of a grower. It's the kind of album that makes other bands wonder why they bother.

3. Brand New - Daisy
Rumour has it that Brand New may be calling at a day soon. If this is true, and I hope it's not, then 'Daisy' is a brutally brilliant and heart-wrenching swansong. The word 'genius' gets thrown around quite a lot, mainly by me, but this really is a work of genius. Every song is phenomenal, every lyric is engrossing and every time I listen to it I feel like the world has just ended (that's a compliment by the way). Brand New are America's most unique and vital alternative rock band, it's just that you don't know it yet. 'Daisy' is nothing short of astonishing. Part of me wants to put it at the top of the list and the only reason I'm not is because it's still not as good as their previous effort, 'The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me', which is one of the best albums ever. Warning: 'Daisy' contains lyrics like "I want to kill and eat the young."

2. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Phoenix are a French indie pop band, obsessed with America and The Strokes and who used to be Air's backing band. In other words: they are a bit odd. This is their fourth album and it is brilliant in every way. Every song is an example of how to create a perfect pop song. They are so intricate yet sound so effortless. I think this is down to the incredible production by Zdar (?) and Phoenix. Every time I listen to it I hear something new creep through the headphones. 'Lisztomania', '1901', 'Rome', 'Lasso'... they're all classics. Not bad for an album which is essentially an essay on German history.

1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
It is quite possible that Karen O is God. If she is then we can all be safe in the knowledge that heaven is FUCKING AWESOME, just like this album. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs just get better and better and better. 'Fever To Tell' was great, 'Show Your Bones' was better, 'It's Blitz!' is perfection. They have discovered keyboards and it appears that Nick Zinner is even better at using these than he is at guitars. Karen O has more personality than the Hollywood Walk of Fame and talent to match. She is a proper pop star. The key to the brilliance of 'It's Blitz!' is that it is a synth-pop album produced, rather brilliantly, by David Sitek that could have ended up sounding robotic and faceless but in fact has more emotional depth than most albums released this year. It is full of songs that you care about. A lot of pop albums don't have that. A classic.

THE SATURDAYS: A CAREER IN MUSIC

The Saturdays released a couple of dull singles in 2009 including a shite cover of I Just Can't Get Enough.

The End.

The Saturdays, yesterday

THE 10 RULES OF THE BIG POP CONCERT

Last Sunday I did what any normal 24 year old man does and turned on the tele to watch Britney Spears live in Las Vegas. Woo! Ok, I didn't choose to. I was flicking through the vast array of channels we can pick up on our freeview box (BBC1, BBC2, BBC4 and... TMF) and that was about the best thing on.

I was so horrified by what I was watching but I couldn't turn it off because I was also completely mesmerised by it. It was like watching what the makers of Mad Max and In The Night Garden would come up with if they collaborated and put on a live show. It was COMPLETELY MENTAL. Bearing in mind it was a concert filmed in 2001, before Britney had any decent songs and before she went all G.I. Jane on our arses, it looked ridiculously expensive and was totally over-blown in every way. It's the kind of thing that makes you think blind and deaf people have it easy. Despite this, I couldn't stop watching and nearly managed it to the end before throwing up everywhere and going to bed to lament the loss of my faith in humanity.


I then began to think of other big pop concerts I had caught glimpses of on the wonderful TMF "music" channel; Rhianna, Girls Aloud, Beyonce, Westlife, Take That, er.. Ronan Keating. From these I have worked out what the 10 rules of the big pop concert are for any wannabee pop stars out there...

1) Choose a stupidly big venue so that no-one can see you...
Make sure you hire a venue that holds at least 300,000,000 people and that the cheapest tickets (for a view from the car park.. in the next town) are sold for at least £250. This is because audiences will pay obscene amounts of money to sit and watch someone faffing about for 2 hours about 3 miles in front of them. WHY?? The stage is often so far away, even from the the front seats, that for the people granted supposedly the best view in the house it must be like watching a flea circus. For people at the back it must be like watching a flea circus watching a fairyfly circus.

2) A 45 minute introduction is essential...
I think old JT might be the current world record holder for the most drawn out 'you're really pushing it now you self-indulgent bellend' intro to a show ever. I think the one for his Madison Square Gardens gig lasted for about 3 days. People died. In your intro it is important to have loads of voice overs in the style of public service announcements coming from the 10 storey high speakers saying things like 'THE GREATEST PERSON EVER TO HAVE LIVED HAS ARRIVED' and 'HISTORY IS ABOUT TO BE MADE' and 'THIS IS GOING TO BE THE GREATEST NIGHT EVER AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU WILL BE SHOT IN THE FACE'. This needs to be accompanied by 4,000 strobe lights (per audience member) to send everyone into an epileptic fit even if they are not epileptic. There also needs to be lots of big fuck-off screens showing a montage of black & white images of important historical events mixed in with photos of the performer/s (because a Justin Timberlake concert is as critical a part of history as the falling of the Berlin Wall).

3) Spend a ton of money on pyrotechnics...
If all else fails, you can always rely on plenty of fire and explosions to win over an audience. The idea is to give each individual audience member the impression they are constantly being beaten over the head with a meat mallet. Start off with some fairly loud and impressive bangs and gradually build up throughout the show so that by the end everything and everyone is on fire and the army have been drawn in as it is thought that terrorists have invaded.

4) Whatever you do, don't sing!
This is vital. If you opt to sing live whilst trying to recite 8,734 dance routines and remembering to breathe then you're going to end up sounding like a over-exerted dog having a heart attack. But you can't let the audience know you are miming. What you need to do is get some soulful female backing singers to actually sing (whilst clicking their fingers and looking REALLY HAPPY for no reason) and also get one of those microphones found in call centres and ensure the sound guy turns it on in between songs so you can talk to the audience. If he doesn't then people will know you haven't been singing and the game will be up!

5) Hire a 20-piece backing band to jazz things up...
...and to turn the Timbaland processed beats and bleeps from your album into individual over-long and possibly improvised space-jazz/frat-funk odysseys. Basically you want James Brown's backing band (and his whip used to punish them if they do the most minute of fuck ups). JT and Beyonce are particularly guilty of allowing their backing bands to go off on one and make everything sound horribly cabaret. Make sure you hire a massive black guy with elastic arms to play drums as well.

6) Get some pointless dancers to back you up...
First of all, an extreme example of how not to use dancers: at one point during Britney Spears Las Vegas show she stood on a raised platform and sung an awful ballad in the style of a drunk Celine Dion. Below her were two dancers who were doing what could only be described as monkey ballet; the worst contemporary dance "routine" ever created by man. Imagine two people, who had just got high back stage, miming hula-hooping and you're halfway there. Asides from the fact that it was terrible, it was also utterly pointless. Did anyone attending the concert pay to see two people wanking around on the floor for 5 minutes while Britney hovers above them like a demented angel? I think not. What you basically want is some very enthusiastic and athletic people to jump around you like maniacs and pretend to touch you in certain places during the "sexy" numbers. No-one will actually give a shit about them but for some reason they have to be there.

7) Bring lots of clothes...
This is for two reasons; keeping the audience interested and hygiene (seriously, prancing around in sweaty leather chaps for 2+ hours, e.g. a Christina Aguileria show, is not good for you). Most importantly though, it's to stop the audience getting bored. Think of the audience as being a small child and you are the adult pulling as many silly faces as possible to keep them entertained. Make sure the outfits are colourful, make you look stupid, reveal a lot of skin, make your tits look massive and are totally impractical. The most bizarre outfit that Britney Spears was wearing included a dress that looked like it was made from MDF and painted by a 5 year old to make it look denim (it was during the B*witched segment where she was doing what looked like some cod Irish dancing and the stage props were small cardboard houses and a car stolen from the set of a Postman Pat play being held at the local primary school. It was truly extraordinary). For men, it is essential that you wear tight leather trousers and vaguely transparent tight white t-shirts that reveal a bit of nipple. Middle-aged women will love you.

8) Lick the audiences arseholes in between songs...
You need to make each and everyone of the audience feel special by saying 'each and everyone of you is special' frequently throughout the show. Point into the distance and say things like 'I can see you up there at the back. You're hot. I love you. Call me' and 'You guys rock. Thank you so much for wasting your money on this shit.' Ok, maybe not the last one.

9) Fly!
Ever since David Copperfield convinced the world he was the second coming by flying inside a glass box in leather pants, pop stars all over have jumped on and, indeed, launched themselves off, the bandwagon. You can't go to a pop concert these days without the performer whizzing past your head on a bit of rope, consequently knocking you and a dozen others out cold and causing themselves severe baby-making problems thanks to the ultra-tight harness round their crotch. The best/worst example of this was when I turned on the tele and saw Ronan Keating doing this very thing at a Wembley Arena gig. It was the stuff of nightmares. I didn't know where to look. I'm surprised he didn't kill anyone or himself. Britney Spears took it a step further by standing on a broken platform (I think it was made to look broken but it might have actually been broken), along with some of her dancers, that was MOVING ACROSS THE CEILING. She then jumped off and floated to the ground assisted by what looked like just a couple of elastic bands! Pure horror. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has nothing on this.

10) THE BIG FINALE...
I mean, really push the boat out for your last song. Your aim is to deafen everyone with explosions and what not so they know they had the greatest night of their life. Scream 'Thank you so much!' 400 times, wave at EVERYONE, bow at least 25 times, make sure the backing band milk the end of the last song for all it's worth, tell the dancers to wave and smile (even though nobody will care), blow the place up, then fly off into the sunset! Job done.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TRAMAR "FLO RIDA" DILLARD

Tramar "Flo Rida" Dillard was born in Derbyshire, England in 1979. It was a long and painful birth for his mother, Margaret, due to Tramar's unusually large shoulders. After removing Tramar's sunglasses, his mother and father, Timothy, could see that they had given birth to a beautiful baby boy.

Tramar excelled at his local primary and secondary schools, achieving 10 A* grades in his GCSEs. In college he studied Business Studies, Economics and History. He got an A in all three subjects.

As Tramar grew into an adult and his shoulders got ever bigger, he decided Britain was restricting him and his intelligence and so, in 1999, decided to move to America and study Law at Harvard University. There he discovered polo shirts that didn't have the the option of putting the collars down. He also met Curtis James Jackson III (50 Cent), who would become his best friend. Curtis was studying 19th Century Politics. They enjoyed discussing their chosen subjects over a pot of tea in the evenings. Curtis would often speak of his jealousy of Tramar's massive shoulders and his inability to understand why he wears sunglasses all the time, even at night. Tramar would later explain that he has wonky eyes.


One evening, after too much tea, Curtis introduced Tramar to rapping. At first bemused, he then began to rather enjoy it and would join in Curtis's songs. But they both preferred studying and saw rapping as being just a silly hobby.


On 24th April 2001, Tramar woke up to find his best friend had disappeared without a trace. The next time him he would see him would be on MTV singing 'In Da Club' where Curtis's rapping had turned into mumbling due to the 9 bullets lodged in his face. Tramar would later adopt this rapping style too.

On 5th June 2004, Tramar was having dinner for one at a posh European restaurant in LA. A record executive from Atlantic Records came up to him to compliment his sunglasses, polo shirt, and big shoulders. He said 'You look like a hip hop star Mr. Dillard.' Tramar smiled politely then tried to start a conversation about the criminal justice system. Next thing he knew he woke up in the back of a limo with a bottle of beer in one hand, a half naked lady in the other and a big fuck off tattoo on his back which read 'Flo Rida', which had clearly done by a drunk and/or blind man. 'What the hell!? They can't even spell it right!' he screamed. Curtis, now 50 Cent, was in the front passenger seat, crying. He tried to explain what had happened to him but Trammar couldn't understand what he was saying, quite literally.

Tramar was driven to a nearby abandoned garage and tied to a chair. The record executive from the restaurant was there. He told Tramar that from now on he shall be known as Flo Rida and that he was going to earn him millions of dollars. He played a song called 'Low' to Flo Rida 500 times (a demo version sung by Lloyd Banks) and then told him this would be his first single. He told Flo that if he ever argued against his instructions then he would do what he did to 50 Cent and shoot him 9 times in the face. Flo sat there crying. It took two bodyguards to lift Flo from his chair due to his really big shoulders. One of them was some guy who called himself T-Pain, who also fears being seen without his sunglasses on. He would appear on 'Low' with Flo.


'Low' was released in early 2008 and went straight to the top of the billboard charts. Just recently, his hilarious piss-take cover of Dead or Alive's 'You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)' has also gone to the top of the charts.


Flo and 50 often meet up to reminisce about the old days. They talk about how they are trapped in a world they don't understand and how odd it is that they make millions by spewing incomprehensible nonsense about money and tits. They try to make sense of how Flo Rida's managers/kidnappers took a classic 80s pop song and turned it into a hip hop song about blowjobs.

Flo still hopes to be a lawyer one day and wishes that his shoulders would stop growing. 50 dreams of being able to speak properly again. They are both waiting for the day that someone will refer to them by their real names.

Tramar 'Flo Rida' Dillard, Los Angeles, January 14th 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7961387.stm

"LOOK AT MY CHUFFING MEDALS DAMMIT!"

Something occured to me this morning as I was watching BBC Breakfast News (the TV programme equivalent of an IKEA coffee table) and eating my Asda's own Ready Brek (better than the real thing)...

The presenters (including the lady with the plastic head) were interviewing some sports people, (I don't know who exactly because just the mention of the word 'sport' sends me into a deep, boring sleep), and the sports people were wearing their sports clothes and showing off their sports medals and talking about their sporting achievements and sporting ambitions and sport sport sport sport sport...

It made me wonder if sports people ever do anything that doesn't involve sport (just realised that if you constantly repeat 'sport' it makes you look like a fish) or wearing sports clothes. Hanging around in sports clothes all the time is the kind of thing that 7 year olds do isn't it? Do they have wardrobes that contain just a rack of 30 Adidas tracksuits?.. 'Hmm.. which one to choose today.. blue with white stripes or... blue... with white... stripes? Shall I wear my gold medal for the 100m Freestyle or my gold medal for the 120m Freestyle or maybe the one for the 134.67m Freestyle? Yes, I'll wear that one.'

You just know that they were the kids that used to go to school discos wearing full Manchester United football kits (including socks up the knees and astro turf trainers). They would run around playing 'It' and slide on their knees and generally be fucking annoying. Other parents would look on in bemusement and bitch about the kids boring parents while their kid dances to Aga Doo wearing a new smart shirt and jeans from Boys Base (he would later turn out to be the guy going on about sports people in blogs).

I can imagine the events this morning between the sports people and their parents before the big BBC interview...


Alarm goes off dead on 04:30 (as it does every day).

Sporty (his actual name) wakes up and does 50 sit ups then eats 5 bananas. He kisses his poster of Linford Christie. He gets out of his Adidas pyjamas (blue with white stripes) and into the shower. He washes with his Adidas shower gel but doesn't sing as he doesn't know what music is.

He gets into his tracksuit then cleans his 43 shiny gold medals (with Adidas Medal Wipe). He puts them all around his neck then does 100 press-ups. He then kisses each medal. And cleans them again.

Mum, "Your breakfast is ready! YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO GET DOWNSTAIRS OR I THROW IT IN THE FUCKING BIN!"

Sporty sets a new record of 9.82 seconds and his Mum gives him another medal. He eats 8 bowls of cereal then goes for a jog around the country. He gets back at 05:30.

Mum, "Now, are you all ready to go and see the nice news people?"

Sporty, "Yes mother, but I'm not sure about the lady with the plastic head."

Mum, "Yeh I know. She's so.. weird looking. Anyway, make sure you talk about all the things you have won."

Sporty, "..and not the things I have lost."

Mum, "NO! DON'T YOU EVER MENTION THAT WORD AGAIN YOU LITTLE TWAT!"

Mum makes Sporty do 100 more press-ups.

Sporty jogs to the BBC and does boring interview.

URGH