Girls Aloud diss longstanding ILM heart-throb.

The funniest thing is that Petridis is asking Cheryl Tweedy who was, frankly guaranteed to say that, as opposed to asking Brian Higgins who would (probably) have gleefully agreed with everything Marcello had to say. Purely to boost his own reputation if nothing else.

yes, and you need to start working a little harder on the offensive boards, chief....we're not getting nearly enough easy put-backs if we want to contend down the stretch in the playoffs....

Out of the mouths of babes...

Somehow we now need to get Marcello interviewing Brian Higgins and discussing the GQ piece. Anyone have xenomania's contact info?

I'd like to think, though, that he's using it to illustrate the best thing about writing about pop (well, what i think is the best thing anyway): what Cheryl Tweedy thinks about what M Carlin writes doesn't matter, what Brian Higgins thinks about what M Carlin writes doesn't matter. They don't own what Girls Aloud means, their opinion about Girls Aloud is... okay maybe as valid as a consumer's, but certainly not any more. M Carlin, and us lot, aren't involved in the early-stage construction of Girls Aloud, only the later-stage bit where Girls Aloud finally takes shape in our minds - there'd be something awfully hollow and unsatisfying about it if what we individually end up seeing is just what was originally intended. (which I'm why I'm glad Petridis didn't ask Higgins: it would be horrible disappointing if he did agree with Carlin, 'yes that was what i meant all along'.) I mean, this just seems like common sense to me?

also, is this surprising? marcello's shtick has always been b*n w*tsonish in that regard. i'd pay to read about what tweedy thinks about lots of music tho, maybe even more than marcello (simply because i've read less tweedy than marcello) and what she thinks obv. matters, not least becuz it gets to affect what she gets to make and sell by the bucketload, which is more than most of us can claim.

MARCELLO DON'T POST ON THIS THREAD, JUST MAKE THIS HAPPEN

Having said that, viewing Girls Aloud as some kind of high-cultural art-pop project is all very well, but when it leads to them releasing bloody "Models" of all things as a single (I bet it misses the top 10), you wonder if the people that insist on the inclusion of bland-by-comparison but unit-shifting ballads as singles (that ensure that more albums get made with the quasi-avant pop-art on them) don't know more than the rest of us combined.

I love Marcello's diversions and allusions, because pop IS like a web where everything connects and can be contextualised in this way and while I'm not in Marcello's league, that's what I've always tried to do as a writer.

Cheers, Pet!!

Also, what's wrong with 'Models'?

(M.C. was also obliquely referred to in a Sunday Times piece on Rachel Stevens as well if I remember rightly, and sorta dissed in the same way. Fuck these people and their lack of ambition.)

ladies and gentlemen the dream we all dream of

Don't be so silly, Henry. I'd be tempted to say this is a Margaret Hodge/BNP situation but that comparison would be unfortunate.

It makes him a shitty writer, which is what he's being criticised for.

he's not *that* bad. he's not caroline sullivan.

How narrowly does that spiral spin?

Um, EVERYONE on this thread (board?) wants his job cos we all secretly (or not so secretly) really really really wanna be in the cool-boys-Guardian-"journalists-writing-about-journalists"-club?

I'd love to be Guardian's music editor. I'd also hate it, but there you go. What salary's he on, and for what? One lead review a week and three articles a month?

How narrowly does that spiral spin?

Yeah, Maconie's about as funny as a verucca.

I remember that Naked City thing on Channel 4 in the early nineties with Caitlin Moran and Johnny Vaughan. Collins and Maconie had a weekly five-minute "comedy" slot, and every week without fail they died like lice in two Russians' beards.

It doesn't seem to be on their (shit) site. It was some article in the Review bit about Rachel being 'the cool popstar' that said some in the blogosphere were going overboard though, then a bit of parody prose that wz a bit MC MC. Or that's what I remember.

Pause.

This is a classic ILM moment.

OK, carry on.

(ask yer dad)

any idea when that rachel stevens piece ran? i just looked on lexis but can't find anything apart from "how rachel stevens keeps her figure" (muesli, apparently).

Um, EVERYONE on this thread (board?) wants his job cos we all secretly (or not so secretly) really really really wanna be in the cool-boys-Guardian-"journalists-writing-about-journalists"-club?

i would not mind his job but i don't think that is the reason for the hate. some of my best friends are guardian music writers!

Derek Dull partially explained.

I can genuinely say I wouldn't want the job (though I'm sure I'd like the salary): I don't like writing album reviews, and I hate interviewing people. I'd like it to be done by someone good, though, because I read the Guardian most days. (I'd like it if they replaced Adrian Searle, too. But Kevin McCarra is very good.)

Petridis does have a weird 'thing' about bloggers!

i'd get paid to go round the world and watch tennis.

i can think of no lifestyle more amazing. fuck guardian music editorships!

I get the impression that Petridis is a little scared of his audience - his reviews are always very matey, they spend ages setting up weak observational-comedy routines to get the reader onside, there's a tone of "hey, we know none of this stuff actually matters, right?". The Guardian's other key culture writers - Searle, Bradshaw, etc. - are much more forthright and certainly in Searle's case seem to at least have a vision of what ought to be happening on their 'beat' (even if my gut instinct is that he's totally wrong).

he's probably reading this though!

Suddenly, the Milky bar kid ad seems apposite.

It's the unspoken idea that pop is a "below stairs" department and therefore requires only minimal attention, or at best surface-level coverage.

The key thing here is, though I'm not by any means an avid football follower or even know that much about its everyday comings and goings, good and imaginative writing gets me interested, hooked. I don't see how the same process couldn't work with music writing; in other words, if the writer's good enough, they could persuade you to check out something or someone you'd never ever previously considered, or even heard of. See how it works?

The Times (London)

July 2, 2004, Friday

Sharapova's long moment of instant stardom

BYLINE: Simon Barnes, Sports writer of the year

SECTION: Sport; 50

LENGTH: 810 words

THERE are few pleasures in sport that compare to the arrival of a brave new talent. Someone who's got it. Someone who's really got it: talent, temperament, courage, the whole package. And the younger they are, the better it all is. The two-year-old racehorse that wins by a dozen lengths leaving scorch marks in the turf -it's a sight that fills the heart with joy.

This year we have had Andrew Strauss walking into the England cricket team and scoring a century in his first Test-match innings at Lord's, and damn near a second in his second. As one, the nation wagged its head and said: "Bloody hell. I think we've got one here."

And then you may recall Wayne Rooney. If we can wind the tape back beyond the disappointment of England's result against Portugal, we can recall the pure joy of the emergence of Rooney, "the last of the back-street footballers", as David Moyes, his club manager, sumptuously expressed it. He scored four times and thrilled the footballing world with his audacity, his fearlessness, his youth.

Oh brave new world that has such athletes in it! And now we have Maria Sharapova.

Yesterday, aged 17, she promoted herself from one of tennis's traditional, decorative, slow-news-day starlets into a global contender of sudden and startling promise. She took on the great and gallant Lindsay Davenport and won with a scoreline that tells the story in itself: 2-6, 7-6, 6-1.

Sharapova has been slinking about Wimbledon in a gorgeous white frock that looks a little bit too much like a nightie for one to be wholly comfortable about it. She has fielded questions about whether or not she is a real tennis player and has said all the right things: ie, that she is not Anna Kournikova come back to haunt us.

And we have all observed and said "maybe" and "we'll see", and enjoyed the observing: free-running, free-swinging, and in the previous round clear indications that she has the stomach for a fight. Great to see her in a semi-final, we thought, and sat back and waited for Davenport to marmalise her.

The marmalising duly took place.

Serve too big; hitting too heavy, too deep, too consistent; mind stronger; competitive nerve in better training. Thanks, Maria, see you next year in a new frock, we'll look forward to it. That was the first set and the first two games of the second. But then it started to happen. Sharapova made an astonishing effort to pull the score back to 2-1 -and then it rained.

What would have happened had she come out after the break three games down? No one will ever know, but with the rain gone, the Sharapova tennis started to shine. She played with a freedom from care that was utterly Rooney-esque and as Davenport fought back, she played with a wild courage that was equally Rooney-esque. The comparison is quite irresistible; for she is very nearly as pretty as Rooney, too.

It was a long moment of instant stardom. The Centre Court was in love, men and women both, entranced by her long-limbed elegance in play and her daft, gauche, teenaged mannerisms between points. Like a boy with a breaking voice, she seemed to oscillate from 14 to 24 and back again in the space of couple of sentences.

She played the big games and the big points with the most extraordinary appetite.

Big inspired her. She has a love for drama that is almost Tim-like. The more intense the game, the more desperate the situation, the more she likes it. Like Henman she has a penchant for losing first sets; like Henman, she has a very deep and very real love of fighting back.

You could chart the course of the match by means of the science of gruntology. In the first set, Sharapova hardly grunted at all. In the second, she grunted so high that only dogs could hear: thin, high, bat-squeaks of effort and desire, rising in intensity as the match did the same. But by the time we reached the final set, she was grunting deep and full-throated: a victor's grunts, nothing less.

It was the courage of it all that was so memorable, for Davenport is a wonderful competitor who was whacking the ball as crisply as she has ever whacked it. But Sharapova whacked back. She hit every ball with venom, with a glorious zest for the whacking.

She said afterwards that she was never that interested in the abstract notion of improving her game. "I don't want to get better, I want to compete," she said. "I fight and I really want to win." She was in something of a teenage daze: "It's a shock. I don't know how to react. Am I in the final?"

The eloquence was all in the whirling racket and the swirling frock: a dawning realisation of her own excellence, of the unexpected depth of her passion for battle. The bigger the point, the more likely she was to hit the lines. That's not just good tennis. It's the mark of a champion. A privilege, a joy to witness its emergence.

otm - i can think of several music writers who do this off the top of my head. (or - and this is no less important or valid - they write about music which you KNOW you won't like, because it's 'not your thing' or wvs, but which you still enjoy reading)

Well, it's because sporting results loosely count as 'news', there are people that want to find out about them, or may be casually interested. You can show a new Dido video any day of the week.

But god, could you imagine? "50,000 dead in Iranian earthquake, now here's the new video from the Kaiser Chiefs".

I guess thesedays it would just be another 'celebrities' news spot, so I don't hold the same opinion nowadays.

I think the greatest satisfaction I get from doing CoM is when someone emails me, or posts on their blog, that they've gone out and bought something and LOVED it because of what I wrote about it. So obviously I must be doing something right.

(and yes, I have sometimes had thank-yous from the artists in question, or nice emails correcting some of my false assumptions. I've never had a Cheryl Tweedy-type "you're all insane" one but I find her comments, and AP's attitude towards my blog, rather heartening.

Ha. But Sport presumably measured as more popular than even Music based on average attendances per week at the copious amount of venues for events provided being higher for the former than the latter.

What a composer thinks or feels when writing a piece
and
What a performer thinks or feels when performing a piece
and
What a listener thinks or feels when hearing a piece

...are all totally unrelated things. And that's unavoidable, because for all the magical powers we're tempted to try and give it, music (pure music, admittedly ignoring lyrics) in truth has no capacity for the actual transmission of thought or feeling, and any temptation to believe it does have that capacity is really just wooly, wishful thinking. Realistically, any connection between the three mindsets is pure coincidence, and none should ever be expected. So yeah, I'm happy so see people agree on that. But try finding that attitude anywhere else in contemporary music writing!

it's not 'completely' true. i think there's some weird snobbery bound up in this line tbh.

i think they are, or can be, related...depending on certain aspects of the piece of music itself. but i don't think whether they're related, or the manner in which they're related, invalidates any of the perspectives or the music itself. and i agree, it shouldn't be expected or necessary or a particularly important component of the criticism.

i have been going back through loads more simon barnes pieces! his back-to-back ones about venus williams at wimbledon last year are a joy to read. lexis-nexis i love you, simon barnes i love you, venus williams i love you.

It was sometime before her second LP came out and it was being set up to be a mega-hit smash that wz cool and popular.

Petridis is so obv. an ILX lurker.

Was there ever a thread about Tom Cox's reign over the Guardian music pages or was it too long ago? He was Uncut mag alt-country/real music shit of the lowest order. His Tribes of Pop thing in the OMM is AWFUL.

Well, I think you might be right, and that's what worries me a bit...that some of the people saying this are actually just dismissing Tweedy because she's Tweedy, and if you suggested the disconnection of intention and effect in certain other areas of music, they'd rail against it.

(also: proximity to Andrew/Fergie wedding, deliberate or otherwise?)

There are a couple of TC threads:

Tom Cox in The Sunday Times.

Tom Cox - Self Hater?

February 13, 2005, Sunday

She's movin' on up

BYLINE: Dan Cairns

SECTION: Features; Culture; 8

LENGTH: 1557 words

Rachel Stevens is absolutely, 100% going places -and her new album's a real belter, says DAN CAIRNS As Bowie put it, in his 1983 hit Modern Love, "I know when to go out/And when to stay in" -and, in interviews, Rachel Stevens has this down pat. The 26-year-old former S Clubber and latter-day chart-pop princess ekes out her candour with care. Her favourite expressions are "100%" and "absolutely" -affirmative, yes, but also more a means of shutting down a line of inquiry than encouraging its advance. So you learn to watch her eyes, which brim with tears surprisingly often for an old pro who has been schooled in the promotional game since the tender age of 16. And you listen for her pauses: voluminous conversational gaps, heralded by a long, resonant "um", which invariably occur at points where the singer's instinct for discretion comes up against her need to offload, after years of keeping shtoom.

If Stevens is uncomfortable with attempts to pin her down and contextualise her, so, too, are we. Chart pop is currently the genre above all others where real experimentation and risk-taking are occurring, and Kylie is the international exemplar of this trend. But Stevens, to judge by the tracks she has recorded for her new album, is about to give the Australian a serious run for her money, even if, critically, both are destined to go on being damned with faint praise. As Mark Edwards argued in these pages last week, popular music has had to cope not only with the Beatles' musical legacy, but with their revolutionary impact on the whole concept of creativity. Pre-Fab Four, the singers we bought and adored were mostly interpretative artists, working with the best songwriters, arrangers and producers of the day.

We rarely, then, judged a star by the volume of bitter tears they had shed over their lyric sheets. Yet Kylie, Christina and Britney are now merely pop popsies or camp icons, or both. And here's Stevens, who has sung on three of the greatest singles released in the past five years -S Club 7's Don't Stop Movin' and last year's solo efforts, Sweet Dreams My LA Ex and Some Girls -and the world bangs on about her love life, her latest lad-mag cover shoot or her poll- topping appearance in a list of Britain's sexiest women.

She connives in this, undoubtedly. Yet those great, yawning pauses seem to indicate that she balks at it, too.

"I think we ended up conforming to what people's per-ceptions were," she says about the dying days of S Club. "This one was the ditzy one, this one was the singer, this one was the dancer. And to come out of that and be a whole person has been a real challenge for me. I didn't have my say, really, in the group. None of us did."

She was spotted at 16, when, as an impoverished fashion student, she went to the record-company canteen where her brother worked to cadge a meal. Two producers approached the diminutive teen and asked if she could sing. "And I said 'Yes'," she laughs, "'I'm a singer.' And I wasn't. I was never, like, lead in the school plays, I wasn't from a drama-school background, I'd never been in a recording studio."

The band was put together by Simon Fuller, flush with Spice Girls riches and searching for something altogether more malleable. In five years, Stevens and her colleagues sold more than 16m records (so the revelation that they had reportedly each earned a relatively modest £100,000 per year raised a few eyebrows).

Puppet on a shoestring she may have been, but when S Club split up, Stevens chose to sign a solo contract with the same management and label. She took just one week's holiday. And LA Ex, her first solo single, zoomed into the charts at No2. Happy?

"Absolutely, 100%," says Stevens. But does she still think the speed with which she hurled herself from one career opportunity to another was good for her? "No, probably not," she reflects. "Um... no. I think it's more of a control thing, actually. I'm a control freak. I want to be in control of everything I'm doing." She admits she beats herself up all the time, and you can't help but conclude that this is one of the reasons she sticks like a limpet to schedules, for fear of what might happen for lack of them. "S Club was just constant," she says. "I even think, to some extent, I missed out on some social growing as well. I'm 26, and I still find myself in situations where I feel I should know about things. In every part of my life."

Deeper digging reveals a risky blurring of Stevens's professional ambitions and personal development, and how the former sometimes dictate the way she measures the latter. "What makes me frustrated is breaking down those barriers I've put up, to just be myself and totally let go. People expect you just to be nice." Later, she says, almost resignedly: "At the end of the day, I am a performer. I have to go out there and perform. I have a support system. And my life is how my life is."

In six years of performing, Stevens has taken precisely two months off. When the title track on her debut album, Funky Dory, was released as her second single, it flopped. "I was absolutely gutted," she says.

"Like, 'Oh my God.'"

But the cavalry arrived in the shape of the maverick pop producer Richard X and his song Some Girls, which returned Stevens to the Top 5 last summer. If Funky Dory the album was, in hindsight, too rushed a project to be coherent, Stevens and her management seem to be applying the lesson to its successor, which is stuffed with potential hits. Xenomania -responsible for last year's superb Girls Aloud single The Show -is on board, as are the former Mud guitarist Rob Davis (Kylie's Can't Get You Out of My Head), Richard X and writers responsible for hits by the likes of Sugababes, Dido, Madonna and Jamelia. Stevens herself is now lending a hand. The first single, Negotiate with Love, is a bizarre mash-up between Kraftwerk and the theme from Rawhide that will satisfy those who like a tune you can whistle -and those who prefer to take their popular culture surreptitiously, contained within the intellectual inverted commas of irony.

Stevens isn't too sure about the second constituency. When I describe another new track, I Said Never Again -an absolute belter that harks back to the golden glam days of the Sweet and Suzi Quatro -as manipulative and brutal, and say that it made me feel used, she quite rightly pokes fun at my need to deconstruct it. "Did you?" she teases. "What, filthy, dirty?" Then she mocks the notion that her music isn't valid "unless it has been written by me and I play every single note". What, she asks, about "the people that get up at their auntie's wedding and dance to Don't Stop Movin' and have a brilliant time?".

She has a point. Get too hung up on qualitative cultural definitions and we end up unable to see the unimpeachable three-minute pop gems for the angst-ridden, Church of Me indie wailings. Thus, if our foot taps to LA Ex -or, as it surely will, to Never Again and Negotiate with Love -it does so involuntarily, jerked into life by an impulse for quick thrills and unthinking, populist rabble-rousing. Any pleasure it gives us has to be a guilty one. What a mess we're in. "We really are, aren't we?" Stevens laughs.

What also gets lost is the fact that Stevens is, like Kylie, but like, too, many of the leading singers from the period before Lennon and McCartney, a great artist: as in, someone who can "own" a song, project it to the gods and define it thereafter. She doesn't, mercifully, suffer from that dread stage-school habit of note-perfect delivery bled of any but second-hand emotion (what she herself calls "eyes and teeth" singing). She may be taking things too fast -or, rather, not slowly enough -but she has been that way since 16, when, just after her parents divorced, she was swallowed whole by the S Club machine.

"That was really hard," she says, barely audibly. "Why would this happen? We were a very tight family, then all of a sudden, it fell apart. Nobody explains it. And you store it all in your own head, and then it gets really bad." What has happened to those feelings? "Um ... I'm still coming to terms with that, really. I went through a real chunk of my life just saying, 'I'm fine' -everything on the surface was 'fine'. You build up these barricades, and to knock them down is the hardest thing. But nobody else can do that for me. I'm the one who has to."

Again, there's the blurring of personal and professional.

Is she learning when to go out, then, and when to stay in; to express herself more freely and take the occasional week off? "That is something that I know is an issue with me," she whispers. I ask her how she'd hate to see her- self described in five years' time -after, she predicts, many more career "ups and downs" -and what she'd be happy to read.

"I would feel really uncomfortable to be described as Rachel Stevens, nice, sweet, occasionally released a good pop track," she says. And then, pell-mell: "I would like to be described as an artist in my own right and I make great albums and I'm a great performer and people like coming to see me and like to play my music." So, Glastonbury in 2007? No pause this time.

"Absolutely," she says, "100%."

The single Negotiate with Love is released on March 21 on 19/Polydor

(Also, yes, Lex is right, these things can be related, and in fact it's not unusual for them to be, but when they are that is just a happy coincidence, and is nothing to do with any communicative properties within the music itself).

(also, I realise that this argument is all slightly warped by the effets of learned response...to some extent, our ears are taught from an early age that minor keys are sad, fast songs are happier, etc. Which I think is the basic reason these 'coincidental' relationships between intent and effect are so surprisinly common).

xpost to tom.

xps

that's right dad!

(also, I realise that this argument is all slightly warped by the effets of learned response...to some extent, our ears are taught from an early age that minor keys are sad, fast songs are happier, etc. Which I think is the basic reason these 'coincidental' relationships between intent and effect are so surprisinly common).

ding! so, not really surprising!

(sorry)

guiding the music policy of a major national paper

But surely AP does not do this in any way? I presume that the Guardian's music policy is at least as much driven by advertisers, and by cross-media sponsorship deals with radio / tv / festivals etc. Isn't the GMG really into that side of things? It looks from here like one of the least glamorous jobs in existence.

EITHER/OR?

ts interviewing famous musicians vs operating machine tools for nike

My way or the highway! :-)

There's also a reason people pick "One" for wedding first dances and it rather obviously doesn't have anything to do with lyrical content!

I was sure Dan was talking about the Metallica song here.

(sorry)

-- mark grout (mark.grou...), May 18th, 2006.

hahaha brilliant.

Instead you chose other Depeche Mode songs. Oh wait. *runs away*

(also she's the one you can rely on to be mouthy and sweary)

something which to my knowledge CERTAIN WEBSITES have not been!!!

DO YOU SEE???

That wasn't our first dance! And anyway it was the DJ who wanted to play "Master And Servant", not us.

one would expect, what with them being human beings and all!

The racist, the miserable one, and the other three.

indie boys don't have personalities indie boys have the same personality and it is a shit one

being in girls aloud = far more of a dream job than being grau music editor!

Some indie boy broke Lex's heart and he still hasn't gotten over it, methinks.

Neil Hannon's first wedding dance was to "One", he said something along the lines of "it's harsh truth" or something in an interview. Creepy!