2014: that was the year that wasn't (part two)

As promised, here's part two of my look back at people who really got my goat in 2014. 

You'll note that this list, when added to the ones in yesterday's post, only adds up to nine. Well, I never said it was a top 10, did I?

Anyway, you're wasting precious reading time, so dig in...

U2

“The musical equivalent of someone pissing through your letterbox” was my view in an earlier blog on Bono and co’s ‘generous’ decision to violate every iTunes user’s account with their latest offering.

That’s 500 MILLION PEOPLE waking up one morning to find a steaming great turd in their online music library.

Had it been anyone else (and I really mean ANYONE else) then we might have been quietly pleased with this unexpected freebie – and if not, we would have rolled our eyes, shrugged and deleted it. No harm done, eh?

Somehow, the moment Lord Bono and his band of creatively bankrupt cronies get involved, it all becomes some sort of sick stunt whereby we’re all supposed to feel grateful that they’ve deemed us worthy to receive their precious music for nothing.

Turns out it was so unpopular that Apple had to hastily release a tool allowing any sane person to delete this musical atrocity without further ado.

What’s even more puzzling, however, is that the album in question, Songs of Innocence, was then released properly and people actually went out and bought it – y’know, handed over money and everything.

This planet, eh?

Ed Sheeran

Aside from the fact he looks like he should be excitedly spending his birthday money in Games Workshop (Maccy D’s on the way home if he behaves), Sheeran is responsible for music so offensively bland that you begin to question whether or not those ears you were blessed with are actually a punishment for something you did in a past life.

Now this clump of ginger pubic hair stuck to a guitar has apparently reinvented himself as some sort of sixth-form Justin Timberlake, trying to be all sexy and stuff, despite having all the appeal of a discarded kebab slowly congealing on a wall.

He’s bloody everywhere too. The Top 40 seems to be riddled with his outpourings and he’s even released a calendar, complete with a front cover photo showing Sheeran looking like his mother’s just walked in on him without knocking.

And it’s all your fault: you keep buying his music so he keeps on making more. 

TOWIE/Made In Chelsea/Geordie Shore (and anything else of that ilk)

I tried watching TOWIE once and ended up changing the channel out of boredom and frustration. 

Boredom at the flat, monotone delivery of the show’s dead-eyed ‘stars’ and frustration that anyone thought this was a good idea in the first place.

For those unfamiliar with these so-called ‘reality drama’ or ‘scripted reality’ programmes (and I envy you, frankly), they basically follow this formula: group of spoilt, egotistical wankers attend parties, have tempestuous relationships with each other and then sit around discussing their empty lives in deadpan voices that are devoid of any emotion, any SOUL, whatsoever. Seriously, they have all the dramatic delivery of a six-year-old in a nativity play (and most likely the reading age, too).

This is then packaged as being ‘real life’ on the basis that the producers have ‘engineered’ a few scenarios to make things a little more ‘interesting’. Sometimes, cast members are written out of this so-called ‘reality’ show, which presumably means the producers have somehow banned them from ever seeing their friends again.

For me, these programmes are the epitome of a society which celebrates stupidity. Take Joey Essex, for example. He probably forgets to pull his trousers down before sitting on the toilet and yet he’s been given his own TV show and has even released his own compilation album, presumably because the suits in the board room know there are enough dullards out there who will buy it purely for his varnished face starring vacantly from the cover like a sad monkey.

The idiots are winning.

Nigel Farage

Okay, he’s an easy target, but he’s also a worthy target. I’ve got nothing against a politician trying to market himself as a ‘man of the people’, pint in hand, smouldering nub end nestled between his slimy fingers.

What I do have a problem with, however, is when that politician is leader of a party whose members seem to be in competition to see who can come out with the most bigoted, ill-informed (and most likely racist or homophobic) statement possible and he just shrugs it off as banter.

Most recently, the Muppet-mouthed fuckwit went on LBC Radio to defend disgraced former UKIP member Kerry Smith’s use of the word ‘chinky’ on the grounds that many people use this word when deciding to order a Chinese takeaway. What next? Defending the P-word because we’ve all lived near a convenience store run by people of Asian origin?

This is the man who fancies himself as the saviour of the United Kingdom. Saving us from what exactly? Tolerance? Culture-enriching diversity? Basic human rights?

It speaks volumes that UKIP members are now being against having a Twitter account, just in case they decide to get all Prince Philip on anyone who appears to be a bit ‘different’. Farage himself recently appeared to suggest that immigrants were to blame for congestion on the M4 which delayed his arrival at a ‘meet the leader’ event. I can only assume that he used the time sitting in traffic to go from car to car, conducting a survey of everyone’s country of origin, before making such a well thought-out comment.

Barely a day goes by where a UKIP member doesn’t say something which belongs in a children’s book from the 1940s and Farage will continue to sit there grinning like a moron because he knows there’s a good chance people will actually vote for his party of former Tories as a protest against people who are still Tories.

I’ll leave you with the words of comedian Stewart Lee: “A lot of people are saying they’re going to vote UKIP as a protest vote, which I sort of understand, but when we were young, as a protest vote you’d vote for someone nice who might not get in, like the Greens, or some funny, silly, amusing party like the Monster Raving Loony Party, or the Liberal Democrats. But people have been voting for UKIP as a protest vote, and they’re nasty and they might get in. I mean, what kind of protest is that? That’s like shitting your hotel bed as a protest against bad service, then realising you’ve now got to sleep in a shitted bed.”

2014: that was the year that wasn't (part one)

I realise I come across as a happy-go-lucky kind of person without a care in the world, but there are still a few people on this here planet capable of getting right on my tits.

Anyway, it's always better out than in, as they say, so in the first of two articles I thought I'd vent some steam over famous people who have no concept of my existence but have still managed to wind me up in some way.

Coldplay

Let no one say that Chris Martin isn’t consistent. Six albums in and every line he utters still sounds like a feeble apology for disappointing sex, while the other three (the ones who AREN’T Chris Martin) sit there like the three members of U2 who aren’t Bono – smug in the knowledge that however ridiculous their frontman looks and sounds, they’ll still be raking it in.

It wasn’t just his music that irritated this year either – the announcement of Martin’s split from Gwyneth Paltrow (I don’t know which one of them should be more relieved, frankly) could only have been more pretentious had they arranged for doves to deliver hand-written parchments to every household in the world.

The group’s seventh album, A Head Full Of Dreams, with its title presumably chosen from a competition open only to infant school pupils, is due for release next year. Martin’s once again dragging out the whole ‘this album might be our last’ bollocks which he’s been peddling since at least the second album.

We can only hope he’s telling the truth this time, although I won’t be holding my breath – life isn’t that kind.

Incidentally, this year also gave us the greatest review of a Coldplay album you’ll ever read. Seriously. Read it here.

Paris Hilton

This year, professional oxygen thief Paris Hilton was named ‘Female DJ of the Year’ by French youth station NRJ. Okay, it’s not exactly a Grammy and in the grand scheme of things it probably won’t have any significant impact on the course of human progress, but it does beg the question: has Paris Hilton EARNED any sort of award for her ‘DJing’?

As anyone who has seen videos of Hilton in action (no, not THOSE videos) will tell you, she does a lot of dancing, pointing and pretending to fiddle with stuff, but very little in the way of actual DJing (some videos show a ‘helper’ who hides behind the decks and does all the technical stuff that Hilton doesn’t need to do because she’s too busy dancing, pointing and pretending to fiddle with stuff). The downside of recent advancements in DJ technology is that you can pretty much get your equipment to do all the work for you – stick Hilton behind a pair of 1210s with a stack of vinyl and we’ll see how well she fares then.

Paris Hilton is a DJ only because she has seen someone do it, decided she wants to have a go and her people have made it happen. She hasn’t worked to get where she is today. Where most DJs spend years finding their sound, hunting down rare tracks and generally paying their dues to whatever scene they aspire to be part of, Hilton has simply snapped her fingers and become a DJ, just because she’s used to getting her own way. In fact, everything she has ever achieved in life has been purely down to the fact she was excreted from a rich woman’s nether regions nearly 34 years ago, rather than because she’s actually any good at anything.

To be named ‘Female DJ of the Year’ is also an insult to every female DJ who has had to strive for recognition in what has traditionally been seen as a male-dominated industry where a woman behind the decks is, unfortunately, still treated as some sort of novelty (for example, the words ‘female DJ’ might appear in brackets after their name on a flyer – you wouldn’t list a DJ’s skin colour or sexuality in the same way, would you?).

Memo to Hilton’s ‘people’: you can put an end to this. This is your time to shine. The world is depending on you.

Alex Turner

If I’m honest, there’s always been a whiff of the emperor’s new clothes about Arctic Monkeys. I don’t dislike them, as such, but I’ve just never found them worthy of all the hype that seems to have surrounded them throughout their career.

However, it’s not the band themselves that have particularly irritated me this year, it’s that bequiffed twat of a frontman, Alex Turner. He wasn't quite so bad in the early days when he generally didn’t have very much to say, but more recently the fame and success seem to have gone to his Brylcreemed little head, to the point where he appears to have adopted the voice of an Elvis impersonator for his between-song gig banter. He doesn’t look like a rock star: he looks like someone PRETENDING to be a rock star.

The glistening cherry on the cake, however, was his excruciating acceptance speech at this year’s Brit Awards, in which he adopted the expression of a teenage boy about to tell his giggling mates about how he’d lost his virginity at last night’s party, before launching into a frankly bizarre lecture about rock ‘n’ roll and how it will never die.

He even talked about rock ‘n’ roll being ready to “smash through the glass ceiling”, as if white-dominated guitar music had somehow spent the last half- century being brutally oppressed by the music industry.

This tax-dodging ‘man of the people’ then finished his little routine by telling organisers to “invoice me for the microphone if you wanna” before dropping said microphone on the floor in the style of a petulant child who’s just been ordered to tidy his room.

Rather predictably, the increasingly irrelevant NME creamed its pants and stuck Turner in all his quifftastic glory on its front page, hailing him as the leader of some new rock ‘n’ roll revolution – a cover which will probably go down as one of the most embarrassing in the magazine’s once respectable history.

Shush now, Alex - grown-ups are talking. 

Tom Odell

For that abomination of a song used on the John Lewis advert, above all else. The fact it’s a cover is irrelevant – the end result is still the musical equivalent of waking up on a cold winter’s morning to find yourself covered in someone else’s vomit.

Odell’s strained – nay, strangulated – voice can’t seem to decide whether it’s trying to yawn or let out a desperate yet futile cry for someone, ANYONE to put it out of its misery. This is doubtless what Odell himself fancies as deep and meaningful – the mark of a REAL musician trying to convey REAL feelings and yet still managing to sound like an X-Factor contestant refused a place in the final because “the standard is particularly high this year and you just haven’t got what it takes”.

Like Ed Sheeran, I struggle to see the appeal of Odell. Unlike Sheeran, I don’t know anyone who actually likes Odell’s music. That said, there’s undoubtedly a budding musician sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, guitar in hand, telling their largely indifferent audience that they need Tom Odell’s album in their lives.

That’s a brave move in a room full of people brandishing boiling hot drinks, isn’t it?

Katie Hopkins

I’m loathe to give this hateful excuse for a human being any more publicity than I have to, but it’s impossible to write about people who have irritated me this year without including her.

I can’t even be bothered to repeat anything she’s said (Google her if you’re that desperate), but I will say this: someone, somewhere, at some point has wronged her (possibly in a fairly trivial way) and she has retaliated by embarking on some sort of ideological mission to vomit venom at everything in her line of vision. This extends to banning her own offspring from mixing with other children based on their names, in case they should tarnish her little darlings’ delicate minds and, presumably, their prospects of marrying somebody rich, gullible and on the verge of a heart attack.

I’ll also say this: she looks like someone skinned a horse and then applied lipstick and a Miss Piggy wig. Just banter, Katie.

From the archives: Consciously uncoupling myself from Coldplay

As traumatic experiences go, this has got to rank up there with mislaying your house keys or losing your mum in the supermarket. There’s a high likelihood that I could be scarred for life.  I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m not going to insult your intelligence by dressing it up: I found a Coldplay single in my record collection. Yep. There it was, nestled between Cold Water Flat and Collapsed Lung (Google ‘em both), just waiting to be found at an opportune moment.

I took some consolation from two facts: firstly, it came free with an issue of NME back in 2008, so I didn’t pay for it as such and, secondly, I’ve never actually listened to it. I must have removed it from the cover of said magazine all those years ago, filed it away (alphabetically, of course) and forgotten about it.

Unearthing it after six apparently Coldplay-free years brought up a lot of feelings – guilt, anger, shame, disappointment. How had I let my guard down so spectacularly? How could I look people in the eye again? How could I even step out of the house in the morning?

Thankfully, the solution came to me quicker than you can say ‘conscious uncoupling’.

What follows is a handy step-by-step guide to purging unwanted pests of the Chris Martin variety:

1. Remove the offending record from your collection. Gaze upon it briefly to ensure it is indeed a Coldplay record and not something worth keeping. I checked Discogs to ensure that it wasn’t valuable and therefore worth selling. Thankfully, it was only worth £1.79 (less than I paid for the magazine, I think) so I could proceed with my original plan.

2. Take a bowl – ideally one that the record is too big to fit inside. You may gaze upon the bowl too if you wish but a bowl’s a bowl, so don’t waste valuable purgin’ time.

3. Place the Coldplay record on top of the bowl in the sink and boil the kettle. Once boiled, pour the contents of the kettle onto the record.

4. Bearing in mind boiling water and human fingers don’t really mix, use your fingers (or another suitable appendage/implement) to push what should now be a very soft record into the bowl, so that it bunches up (alternatively, you could push another similar-sized bowl down on top of it to make, um, another bowl, but I didn’t think of this until afterwards).

5. Hey presto! You’ve made a nifty piece of modern art, which already serves more purpose in this fetid existence than anything Chris Martin has ever emitted from his self-righteous face hole.

6. Take comfort in the fact that there is now one less playable Coldplay record in the world. That’s one less person suffering. You’ve done something amazing today. This also works with anything by Bastille, by the way.

It’s taken a lot of courage to share this, but I don’t want others going through similar experiences to think they are suffering alone. I’m in your corner. 

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on June 5, 2014.

From the archives: People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.

It’s a cold December evening, somewhere between Christmas and New Year, and we’ve returned to the pub we frequented as teenagers, only now we’re actual grown-ups in our 30s.

We’re playing darts. Nothing too serious, but we’re all agreed that getting the arrows to stick in the right numbers still counts for something. Talk turns to music and, specifically, our bafflement at the continuing success of Emeli Sande, despite the fact that her recorded output is about as exciting as regrouting a shower.

“Music for people who don’t like music,” says one of my friends to nods and general murmurs of approval.

“Coffee table music,” I add, to yet more approval, “like Dido.”

I’m feeling over-confident now. This is it. I’m going to hit the ball right out of the park with my next comment. This will define the evening. Here I go.

“And Coldplay!”

Pause. Silence. The rest of the group turn to face me with a collective look that says one thing: I’ve gone too far this time.

“Ah, Coldplay are okay,” says one, and then with the tone of someone trying to deter a school bully from beating up a smaller kid: “Leave them alone.”

Another chips in: “Coldplay have done at least five or six amazing songs.”

I can’t believe my ears. I’ve misheard them. I MUST HAVE MISHEARD THEM.

“But, but… Coldplay?!” – that’s all I can muster. I’m not going to win this one. But it gets me thinking: why, exactly, do I detest Chris Martin and the three other blokes who aren’t Chris Martin so much?

Is it because their songs always sound half-finished, promising something they never deliver? Is it because I’d gain more musical fulfilment from watching an old grey coat for an hour? Is it because of Yellow, where Chris describes things being ‘all yellow’ in the manner of an eight-year-old reading a prayer in school assembly, or that mind-numbingly boring accompanying video where he – get this – walks along a freezing beach for a few minutes (if ever a video accurately represented a song)? Is it the band’s name, which sounds like the sort of word you’d come up with to cheat at Scrabble? Is it the fact that no one would have given a shit about Coldplay had they emerged at the height of Britpop and that their early success was probably really only down to good timing? What about the way Chris used to write slogans on his hands and wrap tape around his fingers like some sort of apologetic messiah? Or do they just make music for people who don’t like… oh, hang on.

I don’t think I can pinpoint a single reason. It’s probably all of those and probably none of them too. If there’s one thing I can be sure of, however, it’s that I definitely hated Coldplay before it was fashionable to do so, regardless of whether or not I had a valid reason.

Maybe one day I’ll work out exactly why I don’t like them, or perhaps I’ll eventually lose my mind and admit that, yeah, they’re okay. Shoot me.

Until then, my friends and I are going to have to agree to disagree. 

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on January 6, 2014.

At the (wrong) speed of sound: John Peel remembered

For a man who was part of Radio 1’s original line-up back in 1967, it’s hard to imagine where John Peel would fit in at the station today, with its “woo-yeah!” dayglo mentality and presenters who sound like they've been promised McDonald’s on the way home if they behave at the supermarket.

Whereas most of today’s Radio 1 hosts seem to have landed their jobs because programmers thought they were ‘pretty good’ on T4 and various kids’ shows, Peel earned his place as a national institution through his encyclopedic musical knowledge and undying passion for sniffing out and sharing new sounds.

Rather than whoop and shout like today’s presenters (seriously, listening to Gemma Cairney is every bit as unpleasant as standing in a freshly laid dog turd whilst barefoot), Peel was relatively reserved, but still had plenty to say (even if it was a long-winded anecdote about how he was once given a demo tape encased in goat’s cheese by a Bulgarian acid skiffle band, or something).

First and foremost, Peel understood that it was all about the music – he wasn't averse to scrapping the planned schedule to play an album in its entirety just because he liked it and thought we should too. He wasn’t concerned with what was ‘cool’ or what other DJs were playing. He championed hip hop at a time when black music was still viewed with considerable suspicion by the higher echelons at a painfully white, rock-orientated Radio 1 (he was also one of the first people to bring grime to a mainstream audience) and was also an enthusiastic supporter of happy hardcore – the only DJ to give it any real airtime outside of the pirate stations (Kiss FM aside), a move which would inspire the hardcore track ‘John Peel Is Not Enough’ by CLSM in 2003.

The sheer range of music played during one show was astounding. In the space of 20 minutes, you might hear jingle-jangle indie-pop, hypnotic West African rhythms, industrial strength gabba and the spoken-word eccentricity of Ivor Cutler, interspersed with Peel’s inimitable bashful charm. There’s a good chance at least one of those records would have been played at the wrong speed too.

This diversity is what appealed to me. It’s no exaggeration to say that I probably owe about half of my record collection to Mr Peel. While I can’t pretend to like everything he played, he was certainly a major influence on my musical upbringing. I liked the element of the unknown that came with his shows: you never knew what was coming next but there was a good chance it would be something you’d still be listening to in 10, 20, even 30 years’ time, compared to the throwaway landfill pop pushed by the daytime presenters.

Towards the end, it seemed like Radio 1 didn’t really know what to do with Peel. He himself felt increasingly marginalised, as his show was pushed further back to some ungodly hour.

I like to think that, were he still with us today, he would have ended up with a weekday evening or weekend afternoon slot on 6 Music, leaving Radio 1 to the hyperactive children’s TV presenters and candyfloss EDM.

It’s interesting to note that after he died, it took THREE different presenters – Rob Da Bank, Huw Stephens and Ras Kwame – to fill the slot he vacated. And not ONE of them came anywhere close to carrying on his legacy. And how could they?

Ten years on and there’s still a vast, Peel-shaped void in the airwaves. 

Times fly: an appreciation of Orbital

My first memory of Orbital is the sight of two 20-somethings standing awkwardly behind piles of synthesizers and mixers set up on two fold-out tables of the kind normally found in car boot sales or community halls.

The location is the Top of the Pops studio. Paul and Phil Hartnoll are dressed like they’ve come straight from doing community service and the trademark torch glasses have yet to make an appearance. Nothing’s plugged in, of course – like every other act on the show at the time, they’ve been forced to mime by the producers. Not entirely sure what to do, the brothers make little effort to mime, instead pretending to push buttons at infrequent intervals while a studio full of teenagers claps and whoops as if being made to do so at gunpoint. Orbital look embarrassed.

To their right, a woman in a baggy silver jacket gyrates like she’s been hooked up to the mains. She’s at least getting into the spirit of things, even if she’s been hired by Top of the Pops to add to the ‘performance’. She dances like she’s just jumped on stage and is enjoying her moment before security drag her away.

It’s March 1990 and, if anything, the Hartnoll brothers have been caught off guard. ‘Chime’, a track which by their own admission was knocked up in a hurry on their dad’s old tape recorder before they headed out to the pub, has unexpectedly hit the top 20 and its makers have become reluctant pop stars, thrust into the world of Top of the Pops, Smash Hits and Bruno Brookes.

With its haunting, stabbing string refrain (reminiscent of ‘Strings of Life’) and choppy rhythm, ‘Chime’ immediately stood out from other chart entries at the time. It eventually found its way onto side four (I say that because I had the double cassette version) of Now That’s What I Call Music 17, sandwiched neatly between Adamski’s ‘Killer’ and coffee table house also-rans Tongue N Cheek’s ‘Tomorrow’. Needless to say, side four got worn to shreds by my 10-year-old self.

Anyway, I’m not going to give you a potted history of Orbital – you’ve got Google for that. Put those fingers to good use.

What I will say, however, is that, for me, Orbital were unique. Like Aphex Twin, they’d pretty much become their own otherworldly genre. Were they techno? Were they breaks? Were they trance? They were none of those things and yet all of them at once. They defied categorisation, just carrying on with their own thing with little or no regard for what their peers were doing.

They built up a fiercely loyal live following (their 1994 Glastonbury performance remains a career-defining moment), assisted by a dazzling array of lights and visuals, and not forgetting the torch specs, of course.  I was fortunate enough to catch the brothers Hartnoll live on one and a half occasions. I say ‘half’ because the first time was at the Sonar festival in Barcelona in 2009 where we stepped into the aircraft-hanger sized arena halfway through their set (to the opening lines of ‘Satan’, no less) thanks to an irate taxi driver who somehow misheard “Sonar, please” for “take us to a beach 10 miles away even though it’s midnight and therefore pitch black”.

The second time was at the O2 Academy in Birmingham as part of the ‘Wonky’ tour, towards the end of 2012. The crowd was largely men in their late 30s and early 40s (many of whom I imagine also remember that early Top of the Pops appearance) but the atmosphere was pure electricity.  The mind-warping visuals were present and correct, as were the cheeky samples laid playfully over the top of various classics (my particular favourite being The Carpenters’ ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ over the main synth riff on ‘Are We Here?’, complete with the lyrics projected onto a screen). It was not only the LOUDEST gig I have ever been to, but probably one of the best by several million light years.

Whether I’ll ever get to enjoy the Orbital live experience again remains to be seen – they’ve split up before, after all, so there’s still a glimmer of hope that this parting of ways isn’t permanent. And if it is, then they’ve left behind a truly outstanding musical legacy (albeit one which will go completely over the heads of the Guetta crowd).

Thanks for the music, guys. Be sure to visit our planet again soon.

Ten things I did instead of watching X-Factor

1. Watched a bit of ‘World War II In Colour’ on Channel 5.

2. Pondered the very meaning of our existence. No answers yet, but I’ll let you know.

3. Scratched my arse.

4. Made a mental shopping list for tomorrow’s trip to the supermarket.

5. Wandered into the bathroom to see if I needed to add toilet paper to that list. Answer: I’m okay for now, but I may need to replenish my stocks next weekend.

6. Put a carrier bag away in the carrier bag cupboard in the kitchen. Tidiness is a virtue, even when you’re busy trying to swim against the mainstream.

7. Caught a fly with my hand as it flew into the periphery of my vision. My left hand too, making it all the more impressive.

8. Made dinner.

9. Ate dinner.

10. Wondered whether anyone had ever named their child Ebola.

Time well spent.

Man who did very little to do even less

The entertainment world has been left reeling by the news that the man who did the least in Take That will now do even less.

Best known for standing at the end of a row of men, Jason Orange’s departure from the best-selling boy band came as something of a shock to millions who genuinely hadn’t realised he still existed.

Once famed for being able to spin on his head in the group’s videos in the early 90s, the subsequent years have seen Orange’s usefulness to the band gradually diminish to the point where many simply assumed that Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald had brought onstage a coat stand.

“I thought someone had just hung up a spare jacket next to Gary,” said one such fan. “I honestly had no idea there was an actual living man in there.”

“I thought he’d gone ages ago,” said another. “I swear I bought a Big Issue from him outside Manchester Piccadilly Station last week. The cheeky sod even asked if he could keep the magazine and just have the money as it was his last one, but I wasn’t having any of it.”

It’s not yet clear how Orange plans to use his spare time, but it’s thought that sitting on benches in town centres and laughing at pigeons could figure prominently in future projects.

When approached for a comment, he gave little away, mumbling enigmatically: “You wouldn't happen to have any spare change for a cup of tea, would you?”

The ego has landed

Everyone likes free music, right? I mean, if they didn’t, then why would people bang on about illegal downloads killing the record industry? Yeah, everyone loves a freebie.

Except, it would seem, when that freebie in question is the new U2 album and people are effectively forced to own it, whether they like it or not.

To recap, 500 million iTunes users woke up one morning to find ‘Songs of Innocence’ lingering in their computers, phones and other devices, like a cat turd that’s been festering in the litter tray during a long, sweaty night.

Thoughtful gesture by a band so stupidly rich that they can genuinely afford not to earn any more money? Apparently not.

The thing is, if it was pretty much any other band (and I don’t think that’s too great an exaggeration) then people would either be pretty pleased with this unexpected aural generosity or quietly ignore/delete it with a knowing smile: oh, those guys!

But this is U2. And U2 are fronted by leather-clad uber-twat Bono, a man so self-absorbed that he probably has a life-size sex doll of himself flown out by private jet while on tour.

As soon as Mr Bono Sir enters the equation, there’s suddenly this assumption that 500 million people are going to be grateful that His Royal Highness has deemed them worthy of his band’s latest output. Perhaps people will flock to the streets in a sort of confused euphoria, hugging each other and asking excitedly what this means for the future of mankind. Maybe they’ll erect statues or compose operas in his honour. In 30 years’ time, will people talk in hushed tones about where they were when they first realised they’d been gifted a U2 album?

In reality, it seems that many of those 500 million people took great exception to someone placing files on to their computers without their knowledge or permission. The fact it was a U2 album just served to rub salt into the wound: the musical equivalent of someone pissing through your letterbox. 

Yeah, cheers Bono.

Don’t get me wrong, U2 have produced some fine songs in their time, but let’s be honest, they’ve been artistically bankrupt and culturally redundant for the best part of the last 20 years, haven’t they?

Curiosity got the better of me when they headlined Glastonbury in 2011. It was telling that they barely played anything released after 1994 and, as performances go, it was about as phoned-in as you could get. There was no soul, no emotion, no real connection with the audience – even the extended platform which Sir Bono presumably had built so that he could, y’know, go out and mingle among his subjects went largely unused because the egotistical prick didn’t want to shrink his leather suit in the rain. An a cappella version of ‘Jerusalem’ was just embarrassing, like a drunken elderly relative breaking into song during a funeral, while the frankly bizarre (and most probably pre-recorded) ‘live satellite link-up’ with an astronaut on a space station just felt contrived (a 21^st century update on Bono’s habit of telephoning the likes of Bill Clinton and Salman Rushdie during the band’s 90s gigs?).

What’s perhaps most amusing about this whole sorry iTunes debacle is that Apple quickly released a tool enabling users to delete the offending music. The digital equivalent of a gift receipt, if you like.

So, has it been a complete disaster from a PR point of view? Well, on the one hand, U2 have just spammed 500 million people. On the other hand, if the aim was to get people talking about the band again then it’s worked, even if the words being used are bitter, angry and possibly a little violent.

If ‘Songs of Innocence’ (even the title is pretentious) had been given to me in a physical format, then I might have got some use out of it – for example, I could have melted a record into a fruit bowl, or used the reflective qualities of a CD to signal to people on opposite hillsides.

But, alas, it’s digital, so there’s only one useful thing I can do: delete, delete, DELETE.