tfieLEECH
Sucking the blood of popular entertainment
I As Mark Thomas' recent Dispatches documentary showed. there's nothing you can't buy wrth the internet and a mobile phone. Stun batons. thumbcufls. pretty much any baggage mislaid from a CIA flight Out of PrestWick. Everything. in fact. except T in the Park or Carling Weekend tickets. Set the phone to redial and your interweb to broadband lightspeed. but scalpers will still have snaffled and flogged every one on eBay hours before you begin to contemplate chewrng your credit card and thrashing your monitor wrth the phone.
I If. like the Leech though. you had the smarts to counterfeit B/ue Peter badges as eBay collateral for your tickets. nice work. If you weren't so sharp, never mind. Fill this summer's Glastonbury-shaped hole with Glastonbury the dOCLimentary. True. the Leech sat thinking 'kill all hippies' throughout. until Primal Scream appeared. at which pornt thoughts of 'kill Bobby Gillespie' took over.
becoming 'Kate Moss. Chris Martin and
Sir Paul's sulky offspring too if yOu're in the Primrose Hill area' by the end. Feeling suitably soned and muddied. the Leech headed south.
I Overrun by weekend celebrity. Brighton is forever dear to the Leech's
12 THE LIST 13-27 Apr 2006
.Y—‘A’r Fat girls
heart. It's a faded dame of a seaside town where a ‘special song' alerts employees that the pier is crumbling seawards again. It was here in 2002 that the Leech )orned Fatboy Slim and 250.000 other revellers on a beach of rocks and discarded needles for a night of excess that left smashed bottles all the way to the Royal PaVilioii. And this June. StOrmrn' Norman is bringing all that fun to Loch Ness.
I The Leech bumped into the ex- Housemartin on a flight to Pisa recently. Mr Zoe Ball telling your correspondent “excuse me. you appear to be in my seat'. Chuckling. the Leech dismissed the beat bludgeoning goon With a shower of complimentary cheese savouries and an uncomplrmentary verdict on his last album. The miffed Boy Slim was later observed texting. thereby threatening to bring the entire plane down with a devrce the Leech has since uncovered you can purchase at any Carphone Warehouse. An expose for your next documentary there. Mr Thomas. Cheque to the usual address.
I Admittedly. the Leech can't wait fOr this Loch-in party wrth Mylo and Carl COX. But local wrtch Keyin Carlyon and local monster Nessie feel differently. Apparently Locn Ness' resident high priest plans to Curse the gig for disrupting four couples’ outdoor lovemaking as he attempts to help them conceive. Yeah. 20.000 partygoers will do that. Carlyon is also concerned that Nessie might be disturbed. though the priest needn't get his robes in a twrst. Early reports from Here Lies Love. a mus:cal ab0ut the Philippines” former first lady Imelda Marcos by Fatboy and DaVid Byrne. suggest it's an affectionate treatment of the disco loving dragon.
’ SLEEP -
It is hard to find something that is
free. abundant and that makes you feel better the more you
indulge. It may not be the most socrable of pastimes but at the moment wrth the clocks gomg forward and spring making little more than a vague hint at arrivrng. we should embrace the ioy of quilt. pillow and long lie-ins. Don't take sick days from work. take sleep days.
PUNCTUATION
The original works of Shakespeare were apparently a complete shambles when it came to full stops and semi colons. Equally. too much punctuation can be a bad thing. We got an email 0&A back from Gene Pitney (bless his soul) last issue and every single question (and there were about 40 of them) was answered wrth an exclamation mark at the end. Now we’re mourning his passing. but we still can't forgive his grammar.
5 BITS OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Can't seem to finish what you've started? You ain't seen nothing.
Pity these unlucky chumps.
Orson Welles There are piles of unfinished Welles projects waiting for some young buck to ruin. There 's The Deep. which ended up as Dead Calm with Sam Neill, The Other Side of the Wind about a Hollywood director being stifled by executive influence (see what he did there?) and Don Quixote. which he returned to on and off for 30 years before his death in 1985.
Juneteenth When Ralph [:|ll.‘5()ll wrote //l‘,//.';If)/l,‘ Man In 195?. a starry future seelnetl certain for tlii“, Oklahoma scholar. But the follow up (lirln't (,()ll‘(: so easily. Firstly. the novel 'nxent up in flarile‘; airing Wllll his house in 196i and then he tired in 100d. leaving behind 2000 pages of )tilnlglrxl manuscript Jl/llf,‘!t}(,’lll/l was releach lo a lukewarm response ll'.’(: ,rearf, lziter.
‘I’hursday tho 1 2th If the purpose of making a TV show is to get the thing on the box. then this story counts as unfinished business. A murder mystery about a high-ranking politician (Ciaran Hinds) and a dead girl in his pond. the show was originally due to be shown in 2001. But then someone remembered there was an election coming up. It is yet to be shown.
Smlle In 1967. at the height of their powers. the Beach BOys began WOrk on Smile. Amid a tangled laWSuit. the Beatles stealing even/ones psychedelic thunder wrth Sergeant Pepper and Brian Wilson baSrcally cracking up. the album went on the shelf. And there it won stay W a further 37 years when Wilson returned afresh to the songs.
Wombloy Stadlum Back in 2000. Germany’s Dieter Hamman buried Kevin Keegan’s career as England manager by scoring the last goal in the old stadium. Political shenanigans. buckled sewers and a collapsed roof have delayed the reopening. Whether it is ready for the man who will eventually take over from Sven's successor is up for debate.