2013-05-21T17:35:53-04:00 Matt Glass http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=matt-glass Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Matt Glass Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3062198 2013-04-12T19:00:00-04:00 2013-04-12T15:52:47-04:00

Matt Glass http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-glass/
"Sure!" We thought. "A reading! We're both journalists and we can read to an acceptable standard. How hard can this be?" 

Long, dark nights ensued, during which we both pored over the writings of Hunter S Thompson and back copies of Viz for a page, a paragraph, even a quote that adequately portrayed our relationship, our love or just a vague and meaningful sense of mutual attraction. 

With our literary reserves failing us, we turned instead to the internet - a worldwide highway of information. How could this possibly fail us? 

And that's where the realisation struck that wedding readings are undoubtedly the most heinous of all ceremonial speeches. No witty irony, no jokes, not even a personal nod-and-a wink to the married couple. Just an unapologetic slurry of schmaltzy cliches that wade knee-deep through a syrup of every single balk-inducing stereotype the English language has ever been able to muster.

Let me share with you a quick snippet of a lip-quiveringly long suggestion that comes near the top of Google's results for 'alternative wedding readings': 

"I love you
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.
I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.
I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart"

I love you for putting your hand into my heaped-up heart? Is this really a wedding speech or a last, blood-splattered entry from Annie Chapman's diary as Jack The Ripper skipped off into the Whitechapel darkness with her internal organs draped over his shoulder? 

Perhaps that's a little too alternative, Google. Reel it in a bit, yeah? Let's try again. 

"You and I
Have so much love
It burns like a fire
In which we bake a lump of clay
Moulded into a figure of you
And a figure of me
Then we take both of them
And break them into pieces
And mix the pieces with water
And mould again a figure of you
And a figure of me
I am in your clay 
You are in my clay
In life we share a single quilt 
In death we share one coffin."

Wait a minute... how did things descend from a late night, triple-X episode of Morph until we suddenly find ourselves promising to squeeze into a single coffin when we both pop our clogs - presumably simultaneously - as the weight of our clay-filled love becomes too much for a human couple to endure? 

Is there a bleaker wedding day thought than slowly rotting together in a single coffin? We're living in times of austerity, but we all know that spending too much time together can be bad for even the strongest of relationships and chucking maggots into the mix only serves to heighten the tension. 

Weddings are a time of happiness and honesty, so let's be really honest here: If your fiancee woke one morning and, over breakfast, uttered either one of the above poems to you, there'd be no more suitable course of action than to hurl a throat-full of vomit into her cornflake packet before closing the lid and hoping the contents cause her the kind of daily discomfort you'll feel every time you remember the whole, ugly affair. 

On our one special day, couples who struggle to whisper "I love you" in a public setting turn to strangers from the internet to express their undying love on our behalf, chiseling away at the British Stiff Upper Lip by reciting poems or recruiting a snotty two-year-old to wear a bow-tie and sing Ave Maria in front of an assembled mob of family and friends. 

Of course, it's all in the name of tradition. It's what we do on wedding days. While the best man is raiding his memory bank for the most embarrassing moments of a groom's lifetime, the bride and groom are also desperately searching for the kind of words that will make hearts melt with their tenderness. 

But it seems "I love you" isn't enough these days. Instead we have to find 'creative' ways to convey  our feelings, and if melting our bodies until they merge into a horrific and presumably transgender Frankenstein's monster of watery clay isn't up our alley, we find ourselves desperately typing 'love' into our iTunes library and jotting down the lyrics of any song that might represent the tale of two intertwined hearts.
 
Of course, the best outcome is that you rope a family member in to nervously recite the lyrics like a sniveling William Shatner, while your guests intensely study their shoes and pray for forgiveness. 

The worst, as a good friend of mine found out to his detriment, is learning afterwards that the wistfully romantic ballad you chose to symbolise the rest of your life together, was actually a song recounting the warm, comforting embrace of heroin. 

Believe me, after 10 minutes of trying to choose a wedding reading, heroin seems a tempting option. I might even use my wedding band as a tourniquet.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1085705 2011-11-10T18:00:00-05:00 2012-01-10T05:12:01-05:00

Matt Glass http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-glass/
His name was Hunter Stockton Thompson, and this week sees the release of a long-awaited film that could - and should - set the record straight about a man whose biggest success to date has also cast a shadow over his work as a terrifyingly brilliant wordsmith, journalist and social commentator.

Let's get this out of the way early: I love Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. The film is a near perfect romp through reckless rebellion; a shrine to hell-raising in its purest form. It's hedonism personified. Johnny Depp, too, is sublime as the book's lovably wayward main character: Raoul Duke.

But that's where the problem with the great man's legacy lies. Ask most people who Depp portrays in the 1998 movie and the instant response is almost unanimous: Hunter S. Thompson. But that's simply not true. While there are some inescapable similarities between Thompson and his alter-ego, the great man struggled for the rest of his days to escape the image that his life was an early version of The Hangover, lived with care-free abandon and guzzling drugs like...well, like Raoul Duke.

Of course, wherever Hunter went, drugs and carnage did inevitably follow. He was, after all, the man who wrote that "life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming 'Woah! What a ride!'"

And skidding broadside into everywhere he went was something of a speciality. Johnny Depp tells how the first time he met Hunter, he waited in a Colorado bar until a sea of people began to part, only for a hulking man in a cowboy hat to come stumbling through shouting "get back, you animals" while clutching a cattle prod.

But Hunter's true skill was his ability to turn the mundanity of a journalist's life into the most exciting, thrilling ride. He was an exceptional social commentator and traveled America aboard the president's plane during elections (before, in true Hunter style, causing a scene and being thrown off to travel with the 'pigs' on a following aircraft). He was blunt, abrupt, scathing and rude - all the things that too many journalists today are forced to pussyfoot around in order to ensure their next big exclusive.

Fear And Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 saw Thompson's hatred for Richard Nixon boil over into unprecedentedly vicious - but, of course, beautifully written - vitriol.

"Nixon has never been one of my favourite people anyway," he wrote. "For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad."

Don't hold back, Hunter. But he had more: "He was absolutely humourless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democrat but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine."

In Rolling Stone in September '73, he went even further, asking "how much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark."

The image that Fear & Loathing inadvertently created around Hunter - that he was a chancer who skuttled through life ignoring his bills and popping pills - couldn't actually be further from the truth. This was a man who cared so deeply about the bigger things in life that it drove him to the edge of insanity and, in equal measures, into the arms of some monumentally exciting drug-binges.

He was a thrill-seeker, sure, but also the kind of man who had seething anger running deep in his veins - about everything from the state of his country to the profession into which he'd fallen.

"The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing", said Thompson, "is that it was fun to write, and that's rare - for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking - which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

"Nothing is fun when you have to do it - over and over, again and again - or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a king-hell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls."

But for Hunter, the work kept coming in and he traveled the world writing for various sports magazines, Rolling Stone, Pageant and a host of newspapers - including a stint in Puerto Rico which formed the basis of The Rum Diary. But throughout it all, he maintained a stoic hatred for the professional world in which he'd found his feet.

"Journalism is not a profession or a trade," he wrote. "It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

And he was brave, too - not just for pushing the limits of the human body with alcohol and narcotic consumption - but for going face-to-face with fear and refusing to back down.

In '66, a young Thompson embedded himself into the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang and rode with them as they raped and beat not only their enemies, but also their own.

"They rode with a fine unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom," he wrote. But as he delved further into their ways, and uncovered the beating of women within the ranks of the Angels, he himself was beaten and left for dead by the gang he'd joined.

"My face looked like it had been jammed into the spokes of a speeding Harley, and the only thing keeping me awake was the spastic pain of a broken rib. It had been a bad trip... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer.

"On my way back to San Fransisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror! Exterminate all the brutes!'"

But far from hiding out of the way of his thuggish assailants, Hunter went on to appear face-to-face with the man who beat him up, live on American TV.

It was during the late '60s that Hunter came to find his true passion and something that would shape the rest of his work - the death of the American dream. Having lived through the swinging '60s and sampled all they had to offer, Hunter saw the America he loved melting away into the USA we see today, and it lit the fire in his stomach - he got angry, and the public loved him for it.

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts."

And it culminated in the release of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, and in particular a passage that Hunter himself recognised as the finest moment of his career - albeit one hidden among the bolshy bravado of a drug-fueled Las Vegas romp - as he wistfully looked across the Nevada desert, hankering after the good old days of the early '60s.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West; and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Hunter had those eyes - he had eyes that could light a spark in the darkest room and make it seem beautiful. But ultimately he was a man troubled by his surroundings, a man who couldn't fathom what America was doing - to itself and to the rest of the world. And that's a side of him that Hollywood has so far been unwilling to show. The man who loved, worried and cared doesn't sit well with the Raoul Duke we've grown to love.

He wasn't afraid of death, either. In fact, he embraced his inevitable passing with gusto. In an interview just days before he departed, he told a reporter: "My concept of death for a long time was to come down that mountain road at 120mph and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that... and there I'd be, sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whiskey next to me and a case of dynamite in the trunk, honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and fall down into that mess of steel mills.

"It'd be a tremendous goddamn explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt."

But on that day in February, as the final games of the US football season played out, it all got too much for him. Wheelchair-bound, disgusted with the outcome of the 2004 elections and facing the prospect of months without his beloved sport to watch, he decided now was the time to go - not on a mountain road or as a human bomb, but with a shotgun, in his writing shed.

His suicide note was as uncompromising as his life had been:

"No more games. No more bombs. No more walking. No more fun. No more swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No fun - for anybody. 67. You are getting greedy. Act your old age. Relax - this won't hurt."

Over the top of his note, he'd scrawled in thick, black ink: "Football Season Over."

So if you're heading to the cinema this weekend to catch The Rum Diary, and hoping for two hours of Raoul Duke cavorting and snorting his way across Puerto Rico, I sincerely hope you're disappointed. For while The Rum Diary might also take on the form of another alter ego - in this case, Paul Kemp - it's a book that offers so much more of the real Hunter, the man behind the drug-guzzling facade.

Having spent this long gushing over Hunter's work, it seems churlish of me to try and sum him up in my own words. So, it seems fitting to steal one of his own descriptions - written about the mysterious 'attorney', but scarily fitting for the author himself:

"There he goes, one of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production.

"Too weird to live, and too rare to die." ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.973273 2011-09-21T19:00:00-04:00 2011-11-21T05:12:02-05:00

Matt Glass http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-glass/
Downstairs, Juliette Lewis is bounding around to a room full of pogoing blondes while my three bandmates watch from the side of stage. They're pissed with me because they think I'm hungover from last night's party in Gothenburg. What they don't realise is that I'm in the early stages of a particularly violent bout of gastroenteritis and I'll spend the rest of the tour drumming beside a sick-bucket, freezing my tits off and tactically scouring every room we enter to ensure my route to the nearest toilet is unobstructed.

To make matters worse, while we soundchecked downstairs some hours earlier, Juliette's guitarist decided his bowel movements were too grotesque even for their temporary dressing room and took it upon himself to introduce himself to our toilet - the very one I'm now sat in. We returned to the safe-haven of our personal back-stage room to find it filled with fetid arse fumes that boasted the density of mustard gas and sent us reeling back into the corridor.

The fact that he would now become universally known as 'Turdy Todd' behind his back for the rest of the tour was of little comfort to me, as I sat there absorbing the contents of Turdy's last six dinners in a faeces sauna.

I'm feeling sorry for myself. But not as sorry as for the poor bastards who'll have to spend the next week sharing rooms, beds and vans with the liquid-expelling carcass I've become.

This is the reality of life on tour for an 'up-and-coming' band. One we're not normally too keen to divulge.

We've all had the dream - trekking across Europe aboard a ten-berth sleeper bus, stocked to the ceiling with free booze and free drugs, leaving just enough room for the free women that inevitably follow rock bands across the globe.

Our dream was halfway there - a barely developed embryo of a rock star lifestyle, still waiting to form its fingers and thrust them into a devil-salute.

Having started a band, Action Plan, in the mundane surroundings of Chelmsford, Essex, we'd worked our way up the grimy ladder of toilet venues around the UK and now we'd been invited to support Juliette & The Licks on dates in Paris, Luxembourg, Gothenburg, Malmo and Stockholm before joining up with her again in the UK.

We'd had our slice of luck to get here. Our singer, Niall, had heard Juliette was in the process of booking a tour and sent her an envelope with our demo inside. On the front he'd scribbled 'We're going to be the next Pixies' in permanent marker.

This, we later found out, was the reason she picked ours off the pile and gave us the first spin on the CD player. That it turned out to be astoundingly wide-of-the-mark was neither here nor there. This was our moment. A proper tour.

Though that's not exactly how it felt after two hours of hapless tessellation at the back of our bassist's Ford Fiesta, trying to fit an entire tour's worth of equipment into the creaking boot of the world's smallest, least rock 'n' roll car. The Starship, this was not.

And in place of a professional driver with years of experience in transporting bands across the continent, we had rock's answer to Rainman in bassist Chris; a man who still can't find the Barfly in Camden despite the fact we've played there eight times and he lives 40 minutes outside of London. So much so that he still parked outside Niall's old house every time he drove to London, for two years after the band split up, despite the fact Niall had since moved three times.

Old habits die hard in that lad, and that's not a good thing when it's his job to deliver you to a bunch of venues he's never even heard of, in countries he's never visited before.

But there's always Paris, the city of love, to reignite our lust for the world of touring. And after seven hours in the pretzel position behind a beer-stained amp, with only the faint smell of someone else's body odour and the itchy crumbs of Dover services' Monster Munch for company, it had a fair bit of work to do.

And what better welcome than the venue manager, flinging open the door and announcing 'We've made a mistake with the tickets.' Fuck.

They'd spelt our name wrong, for a start. France would now know us as Action Rain - a moniker somehow sightly worse than the one we'd chosen for ourselves and sounding like a theme tune from a Top Gun movie - but perhaps slightly more worrying was the fact that they'd also written that doors open at 8pm, instead of 7:30.

No big deal, you might think. Until a glance at the running order for the evening confirmed that we'd take to the stage at 7:45. To a venue that, as far as the rest of Paris is concerned, is still closed for a further 15 minutes.

Of course, there are upsides to living the life of a touring band - even one that plays before doors open and has to pull up to shows in a car specially designed for Essex boy-racers. One of which is the provision of a rider. Free booze, and effectively (though many won't admit it), the primary reason most young people decide to quit their school jazz band and spend their evenings in a rat-infested, mouldy rehearsal room instead.

And boy, do the Europeans like a rider. In England, ALL requests are automatically printed off and used as emergency toilet paper by promoters who simply provide a warm crate of the cheapest beer available in the local Lidl instead. So much so, that when we were first asked for a rider, we didn't have a clue what to ask for. So we did what any self-respecting rock 'n' roll band would do: We phoned our manager and asked him to nick one of his other band's riders, and change the name at the top to ours. Job done.

For the next two years, every venue in the UK gave us a crate of beer and, if we were lucky, some crisps.

But all that changed when we landed on European soil. Here, we were shown to sumptuous backstage dressing rooms (they had a chair in them and didn't smell of piss), where fridges were full to the brim with.... organic yoghurts, low fat hummus and water.

After three days of disappointingly healthy riders and late-night trips to kebab shops, we phoned our manager to see why anybody would see it fit to hand four pasty, 20-something-year-old band members a spread more suited to a Women's Institute tea-party.

A quick three-minute conversation and all was revealed. "That rider we borrowed a few years ago," explained our singer, "was from a fucking hippie vegan band." And there began the sudden realisation that for two whole years, the entire UK toilet circuit consisted of promoters and fellow bands who thought we were tree-hugging hippie pricks.

To be fair, 'pricks' wasn't always an entirely incorrect description of us on tour, with the amount of vodka consumed, coupled with a Thatcher-esque lack of sleep. Yep, it's fair to say we had a fair few scuffles, though mostly among ourselves.

And on this tour, things were no different. After a particularly drunken show in Luxembourg, I had a blazing row with the singer about his refusal to help clear up the equipment. He thought I was being drunk and mouthy. I thought he was being a typical egotistical frontman. I was right. And, perhaps, there was a modicum of truth in his beliefs as well (there you HAPPY NOW, Niall?)
But that didn't stop our argument spilling out into the street where we both walked side by side, with me having (finally) convinced him to take a handle of the drum breakables case, our spare hands both clutching guitars.

And there we went, drunkenly struggling up Luxembourg's biggest hill, dripping with sweat and snarling insults at each other, both unable to free up a hand to land a killer punch, and not willing to drop a case for fear of being labeled the lazy shit of the band.

By the top of the hill we were both too out of breath to even complete the endless round of 'you're a c***', 'no actually mate, YOU'RE the c***', so we packed the Fiesta in silence while glaring at each other over a pile of beer-covered amps and pilfered organic yoghurts.

But perhaps the saving grace, when looking back on our relatively brief stint as a touring band, was that we managed to get out in one piece. We're still mates, we all moved on without an irrational hatred for the music industry, and some of us even managed to form other bands.
But I've seen first hand what a life of excess can do to a person. After all, I've been on tour with Juliette Lewis. And as our first European tour came to an end at Newcastle's Student Union, she gave us the perfect insight into why our constant failure to ever become a headline act could easily be deemed a success on our part.

As the distortion of two abandoned guitars screeched through the venue's PA, we slinked offstage to enjoy our last night of the tour. Inside our dressing room, we pulled open the fridge to retrieve our brand new rider (two vodka, one coke...) and each found a corner in which to catch our breath.

A knock at the door broke the post gig slump. Niall kicked it open and standing in the doorway was Juliette Lewis.

Finally, recognition! Some kind words from the woman herself - the Hollywood actress we'd watched years earlier as she shot to fame in Natural Born Killers. We fell silent, waiting to hear what she thought.

"You guys are good!"

There it was. We'd made it. We were there.

But then a quizzical look fell upon her face. She was confused.

"Have you ever played in Europe before?"

An awkward pause. We look to the floor while she stares, blankly into middle distance. Finally, Niall clears his throat and moves to speak.

"Um... yeah. With you... Last week."

We all stare at the floor again. I pour a vodka and cry a little inside.

"No," she mutters, finally breaking her silence as she edges nervously back into the corridor. "I meant Germany."
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.949415 2011-09-05T19:00:00-04:00 2011-11-05T05:12:03-04:00

Matt Glass http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-glass/
Last month, Pulp brought down the curtain at Brixton Academy, the last of their much feted comeback shows after a frantic series of summer appearances. Their 'secret' Glastonbury set saw what felt like most of the festival migrating to the tiny, hill-top Park Stage to catch what would surely be our last chance to experience the Sheffield Britpop legends in the flesh. So much so that even the world's most famous groupie, Kate Moss, was refused entry as there wasn't room for even the waifiest of women in the muddy pit of nostalgia.

Of course, Pulp was just the last in a long line of bands who put their differences behind them, shelved solo careers and made a glorious return to the big stages. Glastonbury was also the scene for perhaps the most anticipated comeback of recent times, when the members of Blur stopped making cheese, electronic music and whining noises for long enough to indulge us with a headline slot spanning the career of one of the finest pop bands of our era.

While it's Britpop aficionados who've had the lion's share of comeback joy over the past few years, I sampled my own slice of rose-tinted excitement with the opportunity to witness Black Francis and his merry band of Pixies taking to the stage on their first tour for 11 years.
And let's not forget the teenage popstrels who flooded in their thousands to witness Robbie Williams' encore as a boyband crooner with Take That.

Perhaps the most satisfying thing about the myriad of recent comeback shows hasn't been the wizened old hacks like me, desperate for a return to the glory days when music was music and 'X-Factor' was a term used to describe people with...well... some indescribable talent. No, it was the fact that those crowds - whether they were at Reading Festival, Brixton Academy or the shiny new seats of Wembley Stadium - were packed full of kids who couldn't have been more than a filthy thought in their father's minds the first time around.

These were kids who'd taken the time to discover music that, by rights, wasn't theirs. It wasn't made for people of their generation. These bands weren't products of MySpace or Facebook groups, and they weren't plastered all over Spotify as the 'next big thing'. But somehow, these bands of an increasingly bygone era had touched people they never imagined would exist when they entered the studio to lay their musical thoughts down onto CD or, in some cases, tape.
But what will we leave behind as our legacy? Who will our children flock to a muddy field to witness - perhaps for one last time?

Sure, there was The Libertines, who went and came back so quickly Pete Doherty had barely woken up from his last heroin rider. They created the same kind of stir as Axl Rose, who might have made sure the anticipation had plenty of time to fester, but the end result was an album so preposterously shit it managed to draw attention away from the fact that the only remaining members of Guns n Roses were Axl himself, and the bandana he'd steadfastly refused to take off since 1985.

Perhaps there are a few bands who instantly flag themselves up as modern-day contenders for a great comeback in ten years' time - bands who showed such incredible potential before imploding as they neared their peak. Some of whom, like The Strokes, haven't even split up yet, but their performance at Reading reeked of a band who've lost the passion, the fight, the desire to be truly great. Julian Casablancas had his moment as the coolest, most desirable man in rock, but now seems like a pastiche of the modern day frontman. Is he still cool? Fuck yes. Good-looking? Painfully so. But the spark that once made The Strokes the most exciting band on the planet has long since faded to leave behind a band seemingly going through the motions. Surely it can't be long before even Albert Hammond Jr's solo career starts to seem a more appealing prospect than strumming along with a band of musical mercenaries.

Kings of Leon, too, are a band whose ascent to the heady heights of rock 'n' roll superstardom is already starting to wedge open the cracks that have been present since the early days; Family feuds, easy drugs and enough whisky to drown George Best have clearly taken their toll on the Followhill clan.

Arctic Monkeys are certainly carving themselves a deserved reputation as a band who'll soundtrack a whole new generation of music fans, but they seem to have the aura of a band who'll keep churning out albums well into their elder years. Great news for us, of course, but terrible news for anybody hoping for that romantic comeback tour.

But as the filthy claws of X-Factor force our music industry to become a breeding ground for millionaire pub karaoke singers, who else will our kids really want to bring back?
Will there be a sell-out N-Dubz tour in 2030? Will we be staring with wide-eyed wonder as Will.I.Am finally rejoins the Black Eyed Peas at Glastonbury 2025?

Perhaps - just perhaps - we're spending so long looking to the past that we're forgetting to safeguard what's happening here and now. And while pubs and music venues dwindle and die before our very eyes, we're on our sofas on a Saturday night Tweeting how a chubby transvestite from Aberdeen could be the new Amy Winehouse.

Perhaps we need to be looking a little higher than the waist of Simon Cowell's trousers and the depths to which Louis Walsh will stoop to make a cheap buck, in order to find the bands that could - and should - be the measure of the talent our country can produce.

We don't need a return of Britpop, however great it was to live through those halcyon days. What we really need is to remember that proper music is still being created in every corner of the British Isles - just like it has been for as long as any of us have been alive.

So let's let bygones be bygones, eh? And start championing the bands we'd want to see in the future, rather than those we're still clinging onto from the past. ]]>