right, which one of us is going to apply for the deputy editors' position at the observer music monthly

With Food and Sport they were doing something new (for a national paper, at least), but the music mag market is way more overcrowded.

And, um, No, Jerry, it doesn't. The Food one is quite good though.

They could well have someone in mind internally but just want to trawl around and see if someone better turns up.

I have little interest in judging it as part of The Music Press (cf Bang threads) but as something covering music in depth as party of the mainstream it could be invaluable. On the other hand it could be Later... With Jools Holland in print.

Caspar Llewellyn Smith, currently Associate Editor on the Telegraph Magazine.

Oh, and be OK with people calling him a cunt. I won't work for anyone I can't call a cunt.

But that just results in my paternal grandmother's name. I don't want to get mixed up with a writer of mathematics textbooks!

Yours,
John Gwenllian (Esq.)

Colin Carnegie, I like that, it sounds WELL posh.

Don't be too hard on the double-barreled surname brigade - many of these people are not landed gentry. They are often the children of hippies/feminists, but even more often someone's grandparents decided to go the double-barreled way because of certain middle-class aspirations. Also beware the tendency of the Welsh person to use the middle name professionally; I have a publisher friend like this who used to be plain old Phil Jones and now with the addition of a portentious middle name and a Booker prize seems rather grand indeed.

Mark Sutherland to thread!

It's really odd how my mother - who has ACTIVELY fought against being any kind of racist to compensate for her South African upbringing - just casually makes jokes about the Welsh, and thinks nothing of it. That's how ingrained it is.

I think we've had this discussion on ILE before - the way that British make fun of "gingers" is an extension of this, because red hair is more typical of Celtic people than Anglo-Saxons or Normans. The Celts are not viewed as an "indigenous" people because they are white, but a lot of the treatment is certainly the same.

And the sheep.

Wenches? What do I care for wenches? Show me to your dirty dronerock boys! Aarrrrrrr!!!

The last time we played in Cambridge, there were posters everywhere for a band called The Hammers. Some other kind soul had gone around writing "bum" or "arse" on every poster. "Bumhammer!" became the insult of choice for the rest of the tour.

FITE!

Chocolate, mmmmmmm.

http://www.tias.com/malls/pam/dealers/pamc14ef/pictures/922egfa.jpg

"The Observer has announced that the Observer Music Monthly (OMM) will be its latest magazine, launching later this year.

The magazine, free with the Observer, will have a broad appeal, capturing the excitement, style and celebrity of the music world. It will move beyond the traditional territory of music journalism, offering a unique perspective on the industry.

OMM will be edited by Caspar Llewellyn Smith. He joins The Observer from the Daily Telegraph where he was assistant editor of the Telegaph Magazine since 2002. Prior to that he was the editor of the Saturday Arts & Books section."

Which I guess boils down to: you lot won't like it but it's not aimed at you anyway.

Oh for fucks sake... it's an upmarket Heat, isn't it? Shoot me now.

*Don't be too hard on the double-barreled surname brigade - many of these people are not landed gentry. They are often the children of hippies/feminists, but even more often someone's grandparents decided to go the double-barreled way because of certain middle-class aspirations*

UPPER-middleclass aspirations, thankyou.

Nor was there ever the remotest chance that it would be, as we all knew. So what's the point of all the earnest handwringing that this won't be aimed at a demograph whose raison d'etre is that it's too small to be of interest to "The Observer"?

City Life = Guardian Media Group = Observer

oh and for those of us who still enjoy playing
spot-the-pop-mistake in the guardian every day
(and who doesn't ?) today's
is that apparantly emma *forbes* was one of
the new djs hired along with
chris evans in 1995 when dlt/bates quit.

I'm still a little perplexed by all the hate directed towards this man. I just read a great piece written by him in Mojo, about The Cure...

< /Guardian ad >

i take it this post was ironic?

What do you mean by this, suzy?

Long regarded as cold perfectionists, Kraftwerk have at last discovered their human side, writes Kitty Empire

Sunday August 3, 2003
The Observer

Kraftwerk Tour de France Soundtracks (EMI)
Although their music has always sounded exquisitely streamlined, Kraftwerk's creative history is a potholed affair. Düsseldorf music graduates Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider and their associates weren't the first men to harness machines to the task of tunemaking, but they were the first to create hits exclusively from circuit-boards and electricity in the Seventies.

Not only did they make some of the finest pop music ever in singles like 'The Model' and 'Trans-Europe Express': these wonkish anti-pop stars drafted the very template that unfolded into all modern dance music, from disco through techno.

And then they pretty much stopped releasing records. Hütter, Schneider and their subcontractors (know gnomically as 'drummers') retreated into their mysterious Kling Klang studio in the Eighties and Nineties to wrestle with their own perfectionism and the new digital technology that had crept up on them unawares. In the interim, their music had children: hip hop, house, rave and more (and not forgetting the wayward ones, like Gary Numan and Jean-Michel Jarre).

The release of Tour de France Soundtracks, then, is quite an event. It's the first genuinely new Kraftwerk album since 1986's badly-received Electric Café. (Their most recent album, 1991's The Mix, featured digitised re-workings of Kraftwerk classics; three years ago, there was a single, 'Expo 2000'.)

But although Soundtracks is new, the entire endeavour takes as its starting point Kraftwerk's Tour de France EP of 1983 (the eponymous single is included). The two cover images are identical.

It's typical of Kraftwerk: moving forwards - Kraftwerk have always had a penchant for locomotion, celebrating trains on 'Trans-Europe Express' and motoring on 'Autobahn' - but glancing backwards at both themselves and, now, the peloton of innovators that has arrived in their wake.

At last, it seems that Kraftwerk have finally come to terms with the computer world they helped to create. Soundtracks is - loosely - a techno album, with rhythmic nods to electro and the vaguest echo of robo-funk.

Of course, it still sounds unmistakably, delightfully like Kraftwerk. Limpid synth melodies hang over propulsive beats. Distant French voices intone cycling buzzwords on the album's central suite, 'Tour De France Etape 1-3'. Kraftwerk only ever refer to themselves, though: 'Elektro Kardiogramm' slyly revisits the melody from 'We are the Robots', in what may be evidence of the elusive Kraftwerk sense of humour. It's possibly their most startlingly human composition to date, harnessing heartbeats and breaths into a clinical symphony. The album's outstanding track, 'Vitamin', also focuses its oblique, X-ray electro on nutrients, the fuel of the man-machine.

The cycling theme ('Chrono', Titanium', 'Aero Dynamik' are among the titles) is pivotal. You idly suspect this album would never have been made had it not been for an important deadline: the centenary of the Tour de France this year. Ralf Hütter is a cycling obsessive who used to clock up hundreds of kilometres on two wheels.

In 1982, a cycling accident split open Hütter's skull and stopped the recording of Kraftwerk's original 'Tour de France'-era album (it was to be called Techno Pop) dead in its tracks. More than cars or trains, cycling became the symbol closest to Kraftwerk. In his autobiography, former 'drummer' Wolfgang Flür despairs of Hütter's monomania, arguing that cycling had replaced music as Hütter's raison d'être .

Tour de France Soundtracks suggests that the two now co-exist in effortless harmony. It's a gleaming, fluid album, worthy of the Kraftwerk signature. But it's not perfect - the complex counter-melodies of the original 'Tour de France' (included at the end) are a telling reminder of the band at their peak, 20 years ago. And there's further evidence of Kraftwerk's increasing humanity: because of the band's notorious perfectionism, Soundtracks arrives in the shops after the race has finished.

· To order Soundtracks for £13.99 incl p&p, call the Observer Music Service on 0870 066 7813