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.