The crud, the bland and the fallen Madonna

As weird as it sounds, there’s something ever so slightly reassuring about the Brit Awards being shit.

They’re consistent – you know where you stand with the Brits. You go in expecting to be disappointed by the overwhelming blandness of such a relentlessly corporate affair and those expectations are always met. And anyway, we’d only have to find something else to complain about if this changed.

Last year, I made a point of not watching the Brits (explaining why here), but for 2015’s awards I decided to bite the bullet and subject myself to just over two hours of musical diarrhoea, vomit-inducing sycophancy and veteran pop singers hitting the floor at considerable speed, recording my thoughts in the process.

Don’t say you weren’t warned…

8pm – proceedings kick off with a frankly bizarre but mercifully brief ‘dance’ routine involving a banquet which feels like it’s on the verge of erupting into the kind of party where car keys are pulled from bowls. Nothing quite says ‘the best of British music’ like dour-faced celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, does it? And that’s probably why he was chosen to put an end to this utterly pointless routine by lifting the lid on a giant silver serving plate to reveal our cheeky, chirpy hosts for this evening’s ‘merriment’… yup, Ant and Dec. Hey, at least it’s not James Corden again.

8.05pm – if Taylor Swift’s opening performance excels at anything, it’s being lacklustre. She looks and sounds like she’s there because she has to be. ‘Blank Space’? I’ll say.

8.09pm – Dec warns us that Kanye West is in the building. I think it’s going to be one of those nights where I’d happily see him ruin anyone’s acceptance speech. Fingers crossed for Sheeran or Smith, eh?

8.11pm – first painfully predictable award of the night goes to Ed Sheeran for Best British Male Solo Artist. Presented by Orlando Bloom and Rita Ora (looking like a deflated Brigitte Nielsen), Sheeran steps up to receive something resembling an ornament from your grandma’s downstairs toilet. Kanye nowhere to be seen, but the night is young.

8.20pm - “Are you having a great time? I know I am," says Jimmy Page without so much as a hint of enthusiasm in his voice as he prepares to present the award for Best British Group to Royal Blood. The Twittersphere is awash with furious One Direction fans who, like, totally, literally, cannot BELIEVE an award has gone to someone they’ve never heard of.

8.23pm – we’re ‘treated’ to a live performance by whimpering robot Sam Smith. Maybe I’m missing something here, but how can someone marketed as a supposed soul singer make music that is so devoid of any actual soul? Mute button.

8.36pm – Excruciating effort at ‘humour’ between Lewis Hamilton and Ellie Goulding (admittedly neither are renowned for their razor-sharp wit and comic timing, but still…) as they shuffle on stage looking like the happy couple at a second-rate footballer’s wedding to present the Best International Female toilet decoration to Taylor Swift, who promptly dedicates it to tea and all things British.

8.40pm – Royal Blood perform live, presumably fuelled by the bitter, stinging tears of livid One Directioners. I like to think that future Royal Blood riders will include, nay, DEMAND barrels of the stuff.

8.51pm – Simon Cowell’s mouth botox doesn’t appear to have worn off yet. Either that or he’s just pissed. Either way, tonight he looks less like a music impresario and more like an inebriated English teacher sitting out a dance at the school prom.

8.56pm – a busker seems to have wandered on stage while no one’s looking. Oh, wait – it’s Ed Sheeran, comin’ on like a Games Workshop Justin Timberlake. At one point, he looks like he’s actually trying to put his guitar out of its misery. I wish I was that guitar.

9.11pm – “Everyone has to get up on their feet and welcome my husband, Kanye West!” shouts professional oxygen thief Kim Kardashian before His Lordship takes to the stage with what appears to be the entire population of a small town (I assume for protection in case Beck decides to crash the party) for a performance which TV bosses keep muting, despite it being shown after the watershed. Is this the most pointless television performance ever? To be fair, I’d probably still be asking that question even if it wasn’t being muted.

9.16pm – for some inexplicable reason, Zac Efron in drag comes on to present the award for Best International Male Solo Artist. Oh no, wait, it’s Cara Delevingne. Winner Pharrell Williams can’t be arsed to turn up so he sends a video in which he says “Best International Solo Artist? I don’t know…” – which, funnily enough, is exactly what I was thinking.

9.26pm – Ant and Dec do the sort of ‘comedy’ routine they’d have done when they still did kids’ TV and which even the Chuckle Brothers would now dismiss as ‘dated’. I’m rapidly starting to lose interest and a live performance by Take That (now just a three-piece following Jason Orange’s departure to focus on… oh, fuck knows) fails to reverse the situation. I’ve forgotten the song already and they haven’t finished performing it yet.

9.40pm – identikit busker-done-good George Ezra tries to liven up a predictably dull performance by giving full-blown hipsters jobs in his backing band. As charitable as that may be, the whole thing just feels flat and lifeless. He’s performed ‘Budapest’ so many times that even he sounds bored of it now.

9.50pm – award number two (in every sense) for Sam Smith as he wins British Breakthrough Act. Just to rub salt into the wound, someone’s seen fit to ask Fearne Cotton to present the award. Kanye, where are you? Bring the flamethrower.

9.56pm – “British music is the best, isn’t it?” yelps an over-excited Ant. Indeed. Maybe we should have an awards ceremony recognising the best of British music. I can’t think of anything more exciting.

9.58pm – Wand Erection finally win an award for Best British Video and they haven’t even turned up to collect it. An increasingly dishevelled looking Cowell accepts it in their place. To be fair, he’s the only one who’s actually had any input into their career to date so he may as well have their award too. I still want to smash my face into the nearest wall, however.

10.06pm – Russell Crowe presents what we are promised is the final award of the night, for Best British Album. It’s fucking Ed Sheeran again. Crowe shakes his hand like a headteacher congratulating his star pupil on winning the school science prize. Sheeran ponders flogging his award because “it’s a Tracey Emin, innit?” You might get some money for that guitar too. Just a thought.

10.11pm – it’s a sad indictment on the Brits that the most interesting thing about the whole sorry affair is Madonna falling off the stage with a not inconsiderable thump, inadvertently creating what will no doubt be the defining moment of this year’s awards. To be fair, she dusts herself off and carries on but as comebacks go… ouch.

Cooking with Gaz

Gaz Coombes – live @ The Glee Club, Birmingham, 09/02/15

Applause, then darkness.

“Hello Birmingham… I can’t see shit!”

As opening lines go, it’s certainly unusual, but occasional technical gremlins aside (the stage is accidentally plunged into darkness as the band comes on stage), Coombes seems perfectly at home in such an intimate venue, particularly when you consider that, in a previous life, he regularly played to tens of thousands of people at festivals around the world.

Touring in support of second solo album Matador, Coombes is quoted as saying that he just wanted to make a record he was into – and tonight it shows. Whereas Supergrass were seen as an integral part of the mid-90s Britpop explosion, Coombes is now at that enviable point in his career where he doesn’t have to be part of any ‘scene’. It’s an old cliché, but he really is making music for himself and if the rest of us like it then it’s a bonus – and, as it turns out, a lot of us DO like it. A LOT.

He still knows his way around a tune, of course. Matador’s strength lies in the way its songs manage to permeate your consciousness. When he plays album highlight 20/20 tonight, it feels like a song we’ve known all our lives, even though many of us (myself included) only heard it for the first time little more than a month ago.

“You’re one of the politest crowds I’ve ever played to,” he observes. And he’s right.  Tonight’s crowd may be somewhat reserved but it’s more through quiet reverence than lack of enthusiasm. It’s THAT kind of gig – the one which those who were there will still talk about in hushed tones in years to come.

Songs from Matador, such as The English Ruse, Detroit, Needle’s Eye and Seven Walls, sit comfortably among material from 2012 debut Here Come The Bombs, showcasing Coombes’ knack for writing epic, widescreen tunes incorporating stark electronica and even elements of Krautrock (the motorik beat and one-note repetition are evident here a few times) with compelling results.

Set closer Break The Silence (from the first album) becomes an extended glam rock disco stomper which gives Coombes an opportunity to introduce us to a backing band who have clearly enjoyed every second of tonight’s performance as much as their frontman. It’s only at this point that I realise Loz Colbert from Ride is the drummer.

He doesn’t play any Supergrass songs, of course – and he doesn’t need to. His solo material more than speaks for itself.  

Where dreams go to die

So it seems perpetually self-satisfied music mogul Simon Cowell’s ill-considered idea for a ‘DJ X-Factor’ is finally set to see the cruel light of day, albeit via an online platform bafflingly offered by Yahoo (cheers, guys).

While it’s not yet clear exactly what format this atrocity will take, the flat-topped twat’s track record should be enough to tell you that it’ll be about as appealing as waking up to find Jedward lying either side of you with knowing smiles on their otherwise vacant faces.

How will it work? To my mind, it takes at least 30 minutes, if not an hour, to get a feel for what a DJ is like, maybe even longer. It’s about building a mood, a feeling, a journey (clichéd, I know) – how will that be condensed into three minutes in front of an audience of over-excitable adolescents and tearfully proud nans? And DJs who CAN cram it all into three minutes – otherwise known as turntablists – already have their own talent show in the form of the infinitely more credible DMC World DJ Championships.

How will contestants be judged? Mixing ability? Track selection? How easily they can make that excruciating heart shape with their hands? Whether they have some ridiculous gimmick like throwing cake at people who’ve paid to see them? Will someone with the skills of Carl Cox or Sasha find themselves rejected with a withering: “You’re not quite right for this show – I mean, what are you going to do when it’s Abba Week?”

The advancement of technology has effectively meant that anyone can download the latest top 10 tracks from music sites such as Beatport and mix them together using the ‘sync’ button (which basically does all the work for you). Great, but where’s the creativity, the imagination? Will someone with real technical ability and a genuine understanding of the music they’re playing lose out to someone who simply plays the chart-toppers and puts on more of a show behind the decks?

What does Cowell imagine ‘clubland’ is like these days? Will extra points be awarded for demonstrating your prowess on the microphone by giving a shout out to the hen party down at the front or spitting out lyrics such as “remember, folks, it’s half price WKDs at the bar until midnight”?

Will Cowell complain that drum and bass is “too fast”? Will he put two different DJs together purely because “you look good and I think girls will really like you”? Will there be a judges’ house stage where plucky hopefuls are forced to fiddle around with expensive electrical equipment precariously close to a swimming pool while the show’s equivalent of Cheryl Cole (or whatever she’s calling herself these days) fights back tears as she stares into the distance while managing to look bored, confused and angry at the same time?

And on the subject of judges, who would they be? Fatboy Slim literally told Cowell to “fuck off” when he was approached to become a judge on the show in 2013. Could any DJ worth their salt lower themselves to this level and then expect to be taken seriously? Or will Cowell call on the services of so-called ‘superstar’ DJs such as David Guetta and Paris Hilton, who, ironically, are probably better known for NOT actually mixing.

The bottom line is that a DJ competition will not make good television. Turntablism aside, DJing is not a visual art – it’s about listening and dancing to what’s being played. Good DJs work best in their natural environment – the club, the rave, the festival, the squat party – where they can feed off the crowd in order to shape and develop their set. No amount of fancy studio lighting, overpaid celebrity guests, theme weeks or heart-wrenching sob stories (“my dead grandad always wanted me to be the next Pete Tong!”) can ever replicate this.

People: this is evil and must be stopped, or, at the very least, ignored. Cowell is a parasite who loves nothing more than to feast on the shattered dreams and bitter, stinging tears of the young, impressionable and foolish.

You’ve already encouraged him by continuing to watch X-Factor – don’t make the same mistake again. How will we explain this shame to our grandchildren?

We’re better than this.

From the archives: Welcome to the Chemical age

Originally published in the Coalville Times newspaper in early 2002

When I was a trainee reporter at the Coalville Times, a weekly newspaper based in Coalville, Leicestershire, back in the early noughties, my colleagues and I came up with the idea of writing a series of classic album reviews - in short, a rather self-indulgent opportunity to wax lyrical about one of our favourite records.

I'm not entirely sure why I opted for Exit Planet Dust (with hindsight, I probably would have gone for something like Endtroducing) but I guess it was a pivotal album (even if it isn't the Chemical Brothers' best) and, besides, my colleagues chose records like Daft Punk's Discovery (good, but it had only been released a year earlier so hardly qualified as a classic) and Notorious BIG's Life After Death (I've honestly never rated Biggie as a rapper) so I suppose I was just trying to be different.

Anyway, below is a scan of the original review as it appeared in the paper - I no longer have the original draft (I wrote it at work) and I can't quite summon up the will to type it out manually (although I may do if enough people complain that they can't read it).

Click on the image to enlarge

From the archives: In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on January 14, 2014

If you’re at a loose end on 19^th February and you’re not busy sewing your eyelids shut or filling your ears with molten glue then you might find yourself basking in the festival of mediocrity that is the Brit Awards.

Music is one of Britain’s biggest exports, so the Brits must be a celebration of everything that’s truly great about British music, right? Oh, hell no.

In truth, the Brits have always trodden that fine line between terrible and appalling. Remember how Annie Lennox used to dominate the awards in the early 90s after releasing a solo album which sounded like the ramblings of someone who wanders through shopping precincts shouting at pigeons? How about the fact that glorified redcoat Robbie Williams holds the record for the most Brit awards (12, in case you wondered)? Coldplay? Yup. Mumford & Sons? You betcha. Cutting edge stuff, like I said.

So, it’s 2014 and things aren’t faring much better. Let’s look at some of the artists ‘leading’ the nominations, shall we?

Firstly, Bastille, nominated for four (four!) awards. BASTILLE. The name alone sounds like some overly pretentious ‘boutique’ bakery which sells tiny artisan loaves to hipsters. The reality is far, far worse. It’s hard to believe anyone would deliberately start a band which sounds so contrived, so unadventurous and yet that’s exactly what appears to have happened. It’s like they were put together with the sole purpose of fronting an advert for Topshop. They probably know people with names like Hugo. The music itself sounds like The Hoosiers, Scouting For Girls and that twat who sang ‘JCB Song’ have got together for a jam at their local Costa Coffee open mic night. The singer (I can’t even conjure up the will to look up his name) pronounces things in the most horrible, affected way – “if you clewse your eyes” and “rhythm is a darncer” (hell, even people who say ‘darncer’ in everyday speech still sing it as ‘dancer’) – that makes you want to hunt him down and see to it that he never sings again. That literally tens of thousands of ‘consumers’ are lapping up this drivel by the bucketload is a sad indictment on society and a shame we will have to bear for generations to come.

Next up: Tom Odell. Yeah, because that’s what the world needs right now, isn’t it? A frickin’ Starsailor revival. And worst of all, you’re ensuring that he gets to make a living out of peddling his painfully bland output by buying into this bullshit. This means he’ll probably make a second album. Just think about that for a moment.

Then there’s Katy Perry. I imagine she likes to see herself as a cross between Betty Page and Dita Von Teese in terms of image, but in reality comes across more like forgotten 90s pop ‘star’ Lolly. The fact she’s effectively just re-releasing the same song each time doesn’t really help, either. As with Lady Gaga, everything just feels so forced, so false. All style, no substance.

Jessie J, then. I caught a few minutes of her set at Glastonbury in 2011. The most interesting thing about it was the fact she had to sit down to sing due to a broken leg. Her vocals were dreadful, her songs lacked variety and the whole experience felt like watching your mum trying to be ‘street’. I was embarrassed for us both. It saddens me that she’s been nominated for British Female Solo Artist.

This pitiful line-up is symptomatic of what’s really wrong with the Brits. While the whole thing has always been so ridiculously corporate and the results so tediously predictable (with the possible exception of the time Belle & Sebastian pipped Steps to the post for Best British Newcomer in 1999), there always used to be a sense of danger. Whether it was Jarvis Cocker pretending to waft a fart at Michael Jackson (I still firmly believe he’s owed a knighthood), The KLF firing blanks from a machine gun at a bewildered audience after performing a death metal version of ‘3am Eternal’ with grindcore metal band Extreme Noise Terror, the endless squabbles between Oasis and everything else in existence, or, erm, Danbert Nobacon (stay with me here) from Chumbawamba tipping a bucket of ice water over John Prescott, you could pretty much guarantee that something was going to happen that wasn’t in the script. Something to ruffle the suits and give ITV bosses a collective coronary.

Okay, there was that time when Adele flipped the bird at no one in particular when her 39^th acceptance speech of the night was cut short in 2012, but when you consider that this was to make way for Blur then you can only conclude that she fully deserved to be denied the right to inflict her foghorn voice on everyone for another second. But other than that, the most controversial incident these days is more likely to involve someone dropping a microphone or suffering an autocue malfunction. Rock and, indeed, roll.

Worse still, James Corden, who appears to be allergic to turning down work, is presenting the awards for the THIRD CONSECUTIVE YEAR. I’ve yet to meet anyone who can fully explain his appeal. He is neither funny nor entertaining and always looks a little too pleased with himself. I don’t know who’s responsible for this bewildering decision, but they deserve to be hurt. Badly.

Sure, there are a few redeeming features. The supremely talented John Grant is nominated for Best International Male, for example, but you and I both know he’s not going to win and, anyway, it’s too little, too late.

You go ahead and watch if you like. I’ll be in the kitchen, licking a cheese-grater.

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.