Midgets in leather keks

Went to see U2 on Monday night, very good it was too. Even if you weren't a big fan you'd struggle not to get whipped up in the atmosphere with 80,000 folk going potty and such a massive spectacle as the claw, or spacestation as Bono called it.

I only bought a ticket on Monday afternoon. When tickets went on sale months ago (and sold out in hours) I decided not to bother - it was over seventy notes a ticket for stadium floor standing by the time booking was involved, and no one I knew showed any interest in going. I actually thought it'd been on about a week before as they'd been in Sydney for various things and had been in the papers and on the TV etc knocking about by the Opera House. it was my work's Christmas party last Friday and I was chatting to a couple of work mates who said they were going on Monday, and with 80,000 tickets sold, there were plenty to be had on Ebay/Gumtree so I got one for a few bucks cheaper than face value on the day, the lad even dropped it off at my office!

The setlist is here, though disappointingly, I preferred the setlist they did the night after, which had All I Want Is You and Pride in it instead of Where The Streets Have No Name and Bad. We did get a brilliant version of Hold Me Thrill Me though... which was relaced by Ultraviolet the next night.

All in all, very enjoyable, though Australia's shite at putting on big events - there were teams of police walking through the crowd and generally lurking around (all those middle aged U2 fans being well-known troublemakers and drug takers), and as with quite a few big gigs I've been to here, they shut the bar well early. I was one of the last people to get served and there was still a good 45 minutes of the gig left, which in a two hour set is virtually half way through.

Jay-Z was the support, which was good as he's someone I wanted to see but I wouldn't have lashed out cash and gone to one of his own gigs. He was good.

The lad in the picture is my work mate Iain, who's from Glasgow. We were trying to pulling weird faces but it's ended up looking like he's just grabbed my nuts.

Speaking of gigs - The Complete Stone Roses are playing here in January! They're doing a two hour set including playing the whole first album all the way through, the stand alone singles and some b-sides. On a Friday night no less! Know why I won't be going?

...IT'S THIRTY QUID A TICKET!

Fuck me! We paid twelve to see them at The Garage what, eight years ago? Fair enough prices only rise, and I might have gone to twenty, but thirty notes to see a tribute act!? I'm quite pissed off 'cause they're great, but that's taking the rise. Primal Scream are playing Screamadelica in the same venue the night after for fifty quid - and for that you get the actual band playing their early-90s classic album all the way through, not a bunch of Scottish chancers playing someone elses. I remember when I interviewed Ian Brown (have I mentioned that before?...) and he said he makes about three/four grand a year in performace royalties from the Complete Stone Roses. Based on these prices that'll be into five figures now... except it won't, because they're currently touring the UK and it's fifteen quid a ticket, which includes support from the "Kings of Lyon" no less! (Quite funny that I'm wearing a Stone Roses shirt in the U2 photo above.)

Gigs here generally take the piss - how much were The Scream in London recently? It's well seen there ain't been a recession here.

DD34

HarbourLife

I went to a one-day festival on the harbour on Saturday, appropriately enough called HarbourLife. (I took that picture, click on it for the big version.)

A mate of a mate won two tickets, couldn't go, so flogged them to my mate for fifty bucks, so off we went. It's quite a small one, and it weren't sold out, so it was nice and cosy, in a stunning location right on the harbour opposite the Opera House. The beer tents and toilets and that were in the trees of the park and stage was down some steps right on the harbour.

The Temper Trap were headlining, but I hadn't heard of any of the other acts on the bill, which wasn't surprising as they turned out to be dance acts and DJs (I'd vaguely heard of Metronomy, who are from the UK). I didn't know until I got there that it's normally headlined by a big dance act and the whole thing is more of a dance festival than anything rock-based. Which would also explain the heavy police presence with sniffer dogs at the gates on the way in. Which would also explain everyone being off their tits on pills by the time we moseyed on down there at about half four.

The first band/DJ came on at two and the thing finished at ten, and I'm guessing the Essex-Police-circa-1995 style heavy-handed tactics meant that people who were indulging in naughties necked them just before they rocked up to the gates, so that by the time we got there they were all having a rare old time. Rather than me, who just felt very old! Most of the punters were kids, which was fair enough, but there were quite a few folk our age and older, and looking at them mushed off their chops and giving it the large gave me the right fear. This remember, is all in blazing sunshine and 80 degree heat.

The 'Trap were very good, though they've only got one album so it was over fairly sharp. Then we walked into the Cross and went to the Darlo Bar, and then the Green Park Hotel as the Darlo shuts at midnight but the Green Park's open until two. By that time we were in quite an advanced state of refreshment so it was only natural I then got myself home. And sat up until four watching Birmingham beat Chelsea, about which I can remember very little.

A Sproston Green Design For Life

The last week was a big one in terms of entertainment, especially for 30-something expat Brits in Australia.

Last Thursday it was The Charlatans, and on Monday just there it was The Manic Street Preachers, both playing the same venue, The Metro.

There's a lad who must have similar taste in music and be a youtube buff as, like with Ashcroft in August, he's bunged up videos of various songs from the gigs, which is nice of him. He must have been standing near me at The Charlies as the view on this video is pretty much the same one I had:



It wasn't sold out and like Ashcroft, there were tickets going for less than half price outside, but the upside was that you could easily get a decent standing position down the front. By the time they played Sproston Green I was seven beers in and not in a mood to mess about - the intro built everyone into a frenzy and when it kicked in me and the lad I was with leaped forward and joined the melee of about fifty mid-30s lads going properly potty, jumping about and shouting our heads off like it was the mid-90s. Much like Dan and Danny at Rage Against The Machine, it's been a few years since I emerged from a gig soaked in sweat and buzzing, so it was only natural that we went straight from venue to pub for another four beers. I eventually got in about half one, properly gattered. Work the next day was bliss.


The Manics was sold out, all the tickets went in double quick time. I didn't exactly know why until about two songs in when James Dean bradfield told the crowd it'd been over ten years since they were last here, meaning the last time they played Sydney, Mick was there! Madness.



It was on a Monday, which is the seventh best day of the week for going to see a gig, but it was a cracker nonetheless and I was once again able to stand down the front and off to the side without too much hassle. I like the new album (thank you DD) and they played the greatest hits to a crowd who were well up for it. They're also one of the tightest live bands I've seen.

The setlist for the Charlatans is here, and for The Manics here. If you put "Charlatans/Manic Street Preachers Sydney Metro" into Youtube you'll get a few more videos an'all.

Going to gigs is brilliant innit? I had a proper good time as these two and none of you lot were even there!

Dave 'Bruce Wayne' Dumville

The double life of the man from the Mail. There's a brief glimpse one minute forty five seconds in, and then from two minutes fifteen seconds the secret identity is fully revealed as the man we previously knew as an England supporter goes proper loopy. And to think I sat in your house watching England vs Scotland at Euro '96, copping it large from you and your old man as Gazza scored that goal and (prompting an even bigger celebration from you...) Seaman saved that penalty.

As this was BBC Scotland, there's also some of the best commentary you'll ever hear in your life, the Jock version of "Your boys took one hell of a beating", except this time it was a team saving their reputations from taking a hell of a beating, saving themselves from being forever remembered as being unable to beat a team from a country whose population is smaller than the capacity of the ground the game took place in.

MD32

Happy birthday Max! Apologies for the lateness - camera issues and then waiting for a suitable event. As it turned out, a 'suitable event' turned into what's being described as one of the greatest ever finals play-offs, and like Gillingham in 1999 against Many City (as opposed to the year later against Wigan) it didn't turn out well.

There are match reports here and here, but as is the case with these things, reading it doesn't do the game nearly enough justice. The Tigers finished the regular season 3rd and the top eight teams go into a properly convoluted finals system called the McIntyre Final Eight System, that meant they played the team who finished sixth, which was the Sydney Roosters, who are the team of the Eastern Suburbs (where I live), who loads of people hate as they're seen as a bit of a Chelsea, coming from a posher area with a higher percentage of 'what what what' casual fans, as opposed to the West Sydney teams who are 'working class man-of-the-people clubs'.

Tigers should have won the game by about twenty points but they're famous for self-destructing and they pissed it away in legendary style last night, letting the Roosters equalise with zero time remaining on the clock after only needing to run down the clock with six tackles and thirty seconds left, and then after twenty minutes of golden point extra time made a horrible pass mistake which was intercepted and run home for the win, after about three solid chances where they should have won it themselves. Properly end-to-end, tearing your hair out, "it's the hope that kills you" stuff that left Tigers fans stunned and Roosters fans going mental.

There's no segregation at games here and there were a few Roosters fans near me that were giving it the big one and were on the verge of getting killed by loads of pissed up Tigers fans, coppers were lurking about near them. We were in the area that was designated as the Tigers home end, but it's a voluntary scheme and you can sit where you like. I was cracking up, 'cause if it had been in the UK there would have been about four folk beaten to death by angry mobs just in the area where I was sitting.

This round is the 'qualifying finals' - two teams go out, two get a bye, and the other four go into the semis, two go through from this round to play the two who got byes, and the winners of that round play in the Grand Final. If the Tigers had won they'd have got a bye to the semis as the Panthers, who finished above them in second, lost to the Canberra Raiders. As it is The Dragons, who finished top, need to beat the Manly Sea Eagles (who finished eighth) otherwise it's the Tigers who go out this round along with the Warriors, who finished in the bottom half of the draw and then lost to Gold Coast Titans, so they don't get another life. If Dragons beat Manly then the Tigers will play Canberra in the next round. Whilst there's no chance the Dragons can go out even if they lose, a win will see them get a bye so obviously the incentive to win is there, though arguably not as much as Manly as it's straight knock out for them.


Update: The Dragons wiped the floor with the Eagles, so the Tigers play the Raiders in Canberra next week.

School days

I'd like to think this blog was read by millions and that whilst I don't have to go to work because I make so much from advertising on the site, I go because it gets me out the house.

Unfortunately it's not, which is why I probably met more than half of you reading this twenty years ago this week.

I was at the school a couple of days, knocking about with the other new lads in Alpha 2 (Anthony O'Neill and Martin Watts spring to mind) until we had our first German class of the year with Van Der Fleet, which is when I knocked you all bandy with my fantastisch Deutsch.

Straight after the class I remember being swamped by a load of you asking me all sorts of questions, the most important of which was obviously "Which team do you support?" As I'd just seen them draw with Hearts in a friendly at Tynecastle a couple of weeks before, and they had the likes of Gascoigne and Lineker fresh off the back of a fine Italia 1990 campaign, I said Spurs, and as Danny had yet to fully discover the golden path that led to Priestfield, he was the one that celebrated the small victory of having the new lad support the same team as you. Unfortunately he tried to double up on the second most important question: "Where do you live" and when I said Hempstead, asked if that was the top end, via Maidstone Road. I'd discovered it wasn't, it was mid-'Stead, via the woods and the 'love tunnel' under the link road. This meant I soon walked to school with Mick of a morning, who was more concerned with the fact that I'd been living in his road for the past three months without appearing on the French family radar in any significant fashion.

I was appearing all too often soon enough though, as my time-keeping was shit-house even then and meeting at the top of the road at ten past eight normally meant Mick knocking on the door at quarter past to see if I was coming or not, whilst my mum wrestled with my nine-month-old baby brother.

I solidified my reputation about two weeks later when I got a "DT" from Wooton and had to pick up litter with Grievsy and Godfrey for an hour after school - after a whole lesson of being called Wiggy (Handa being weirdly lairy in Wooton's class) he lost it and belted me with a DT for an innocuous "Ah nae danger pal!" to which the whole class pissed themselves laughing and he thought it was some cruel in-joke that deserved a harsh punishment. Did I ever mention I had to steal the note he wrote about that incident from Harvey's office in the sixth form? Four years later I'm idlly flicking through my confidential file (He was tops Harvey weren't he?) when that 'report' from my first few weeks at school is still there. I was getting ready to do UCAS forms and all that caper! The Wiggy prick wasn't going to sabotage a glorious higher education so I nicked it, ripped it up and chucked it away later on.


Happy days!

(I'm glad we never had mobile phones in our day.)

Uni days

I trust we've all read this?

Three years dossing at university? It's the only way to train for life

I never think back to uni and get misty eyed about the lectures I attended.

Alright, actually I do sometimes, especially these days 'cause back then having a row with some Toby or Clarissa in a seminar about politics and popular culture was considered the 'work' part of going to uni, as opposed to the 'work' part of life these days, which is a lot less interesting and takes up a much bigger part of your day.

I'll always remember having a mature student from Coventry in my politics classes. He was a big burly working class lad, probably about thirty, and the happiest bloke on campus, everyone used to know him because he was so chipper and an all-round lovely bloke. I got to a class five minutes early one day (that's not the interesting part...) and he was sat outside in the sun with his walkman on. He took it off and said "Hello mate - ain't this grand? I'm sat here listening to some world music on my walkman and waiting to go into a politics class I really enjoy when, like the rest of my family, I should be down the car plant working my nuts off for a pittance."

He properly loved it and would put the rest of us to shame in the way that we would show up the kids if we went back to uni now - after getting a sniff of the real world, and coming to realise that the subjects you're learning about are in fact interesting, you'd enjoy getting stuck into the books and doing a 'massive' sixteen hours a week work, which is what they recommended you do at my gaff - eight on lectures and seminars and eight personal study.

Sixteen hours a week! You'd happily let them cut an arm off for that kinda of schedule these days and yet at the time there was more chance of a nose-fulled threesome with Emma Noble and Kimberley Davies than there was of going to all your classes and then doing the same hours again down the library.

On Fire

I watched Arcade Fire live from Madison Square Garden during lunch today, it was brilliant. The gig was streamed live on Youtube and directed by Terry Gilliam. Apart from the odd drop out and buffering issues, the quality was very high (1500kb) and the new stuff sounded very good (even Sprawl, a new one that they restarted after the drum machine started playing up during the first minute).

It won't be long before slight improvements in technology make quality issues and drops out a thing of the past, and I reckon that's when you'll see Sky Sports style pay-per-view tickets being sold. Watching it live on a screen wasn't half as good as being down the front, but it was almost as good as being up the back, albeit in a different way. When you're up the back of the big venues you get the vibe but not much sense of what's actually going on, other than what song they're playing. With this there were cameras all over the shop and when he went walkabout in the crowd during We Used To Wait there were cameras on him the whole time.

It don't seem too much of a stretch to think of a time when, like the premier League, going to 'premier' gigs is for rich folk (if it ain't already…) and normal folk and kids in the suburbs (see what I did there…) will spend their money on a TV ticket.

Might only work with huge bands, as the cost is obviously prohibitive and you'd need five figure ticket sales, but if Arcade Fire (or whoever) were playing in Manchester on a Thursday night and you weren't going out, you'd go what, a fiver, to watch it streamed live? How much is it for a pelt rom-com on Sky Box Office? If it had been Oasis in the mid-90s we'd have gone in a quid each, gathered round Dave's with cans of Strongbow and watched it before tearing off down the Ave at the mercy of our hormones.

The gig itself was a cracker, highlight being Power Out straight into Rebellion followed by Month Of May, Keep The Car Running then Tunnels. It was weird sitting at my desk getting goose bumps and wanting to down a pint and go mental. The goose bumps bit I mean. I quite often sit at my desk wanting to down a pint and go mental.

DB33

Bitter frontman not so Splendid etc

I went to see Richard Ashcroft at the Enmore Theatre on Saturday night, he was down here to play the Splendor in the Grass festival, which he was doing so the next night, and had played a gig in Melbourne on the Friday night.

He was decent. The crowd was mainly made up of ex pats and Micks (some of whom were dressed like Boyzone circa 1995, workboots and denim dungarees etc, very weird), and he played a decent mix of new (average guff) and old ('the classics'). Though in a place not much bigger than the Shep's Bush Empire (Enmore holds 2200, the Empire 2000), it was only about two thirds full, which I was surprised at given the amount of Brits over here and the fact that he hadn't been over here for at least a couple of years. In the classic sign that things haven't gone to plan, touts were punting out tickets outside for significantly less than face value.

Like that first Shed 7 'comeback' gig we went to, he spaced out the hits so there was a rush on at the bar and the bogs every time he played a new one, but there was still goose bumps when he played Lucky Man, Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Drugs Don't Work, Lonely Soul, Sonnett etc. Half the gig's on youtube already, here's Bitter Sweet Symphony.

He looked liked he was going to make my night by saying something like "What one do you wanna hear next?" before playing about a minute of History, then stopping and going, "There's that one, or..." then a minute of On Your Own, "or that one..." which was annoying.

But not as annoying as it would have been for any punters who decided to watch him headline a tent at Splendor on the Sunday night, up against The Pixies and Aussie heroes Empire Of The Sun, who were headlining the two main stages at the same time. There's various reports (here and here), but essentially he stormed off one song in, apparently fucked off with being put up against big names and getting a small draw as a result, or because he got tonked on the head with a bottle and waded in to the crowd to try and show the thrower the error of his ways. Either way, there's nothing the Aussies love more than someone who loves himself and gives it the big I am, so he's getting a bit of a shoeing now, as the comments underneath that Daily Telegraph article show.

Election fever

Hola friends, apologies for such a long hiatus, I've been boring myself with the normalities of the everyday and haven't had the motivation to spin everday tales of life into the comedy gold that I've presented to you in the past. But that's all changed now, so let me bore you witless entertain you once more with tales of a slightly different life with more annoying accents.

The term of office for a Government over here is three years, and as Labor (no U for the party name over here, but the word meaning graft has it...) swept to a 1997 style victory just after I got here in 2007 (a good example of always being about ten years behind the UK…), there's another one due soon.

Just over a month ago Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard (she's a taffy by birth) knifed Kevin Rudd in the back and became Australia's first female PM overnight. I'm sure you probably heard.

There'd always been stories that Kev was a Gormless McBroon control freak nutter who worked twenty hour days and constantly lost his rag with his staff etc so he didn't have many friends within his own party, but that was alright as he was King Kev who'd got them into power and who had the love of the people to back him up. Then came the GFC and he spent big, saved the country from recession, but in the post-mortum got a lot of stick for wasting some of the cash. He then also failed to introduce a carbon tax bill (voted down by the Greens, who said it wasn't strong enough, teaming up with the Liberals, who said it was too strong), and then the big one was taking on the mining companies in trying to introduce a mining super tax.

The mining companies have been making billions and paying what was seen as a relatively small amount of tax for taking minerals that were seen to 'belong to all Australians and non renewable'. Basically the mining companies would pay an initial fee to secure a permit to mine somewhere then pay normal amounts of tax for digging up and selling huge parts of Australia. As they flew round in private jets and looking at ways to avoid paying tax, Kev saw that taxing them would be a popular move with the people and help pay off the huge deficit that had been run up staving off recession.

Except the mining companies have obviously got a lot of money and clout and before you knew it there were loads of prime time ads going out saying that the mining tax would destroy mining, cost jobs, cripple the economy, and Kev was out to ruin hard-working families and the country in general. They spent millions on the campaign and weren't looking like they were going to budge soon. The unions, who've got a lot of say in the Labor party started getting pressure and started getting worried, and as polls showed Kev's popularity was dipping a bit, started moving against him. With the other things Kev had got a bit of grief over (focussing on the bad stuff that was real, rather than the unprovable hypothetical bad stuff he saved the country from by making Australia one of the best performing countries through the GFC) Labor started getting worried that they might lose the upcoming election.

So they got his deputy PM to assassinate him, dump him overboard and call an early election before anything else went wrong and they dropped their lead in the polls altogether... except that plotting to, and then killing your leader in a vicious and cold-blooded way can, to some people, look quite moody, and might be the sort of thing that makes you look a bit evil and untrustworthy. Which is just what you're after going into an election. Also, using the argument that "Kev and all the bad things he did have gone now, so vote for us!" doesn't really work when the folk saying that are the ones who were in his cabinet and stood next to him and agreed with his decsions.

It was quite mental - they plotted against him and made sure that when they called a vote of no confidence and a leadership battle they had the numbers behind Gillard to beat him. He'd dropped a few points in the polls but was still well ahead of the opposition, but with so many of his own hating him, and them getting spooked by the direction of the polls, they happily stuck the knife in. With rumours flying about that there was a plot to do him in, Julia Gillard came out and said there was more chance of her playing Aussie Rules for the Bulldogs than there was of her challenging Kev for the leadership. On the night the story broke, Kev held a press conference and said he had the support of the people. The next morning Julia went to his office, told him his number was up, and he stepped down without challenging (as he knew he'd be hammered in a vote) and then gave another press conference stepping down as PM and party leader. He nearly burst into tears about three times, which is quite weird for a Prime Minister to do on live telly. You could see he was gutted but also totally fucking raging and having been whacked by his own. The resignation speech lasts about ten minutes and in the background his missus looks worried that he's going to lose it any minute, and his teenage son is standing on the other side looking like he'd rather be naked on stage at Brixton Academy, wanking into a cup with an orange stuck in his mouth. You can watch it on youtube here, it's not often you see Julius Caesar-style intrigue played out so publicly.

In the speech Kev the egomaniac rears his head as he can't resist banging on about how brilliant he's been, listing all his achievements, with his most proud moment being the official apology to the Indigenous people. Which is quite funny, because more than two years since he did it, the Aboriginals now properly hate him because making a big empty gesture and publicising it around the world in shameless PR is all he's done, and all the other promises of money and support and improved services for them haven't appeared, they're no better off than they ever were. I felt sorry for him until I saw the speech, then you could see that underneath he probably is a right arsehole.

...but maybe not as big as the two the country now has to choose between! Julia Gillard, the Maggie Thatcher-style psycho who murdered her boss, dumped him overboard then smiled sweetly to the camera and asked the nation to trust her, or opposition leader Tony Abbott, a mad catholic who regularly nearly drops himself in it by coming out with mental religious stuff about hating gays, that a woman's place is in the home, abortion is a sin, and Jesus is the greatest saviour. Then he gets into a pair of speedos and does a triathalon.

The first thing that Julia did once she became PM was backdown on Kev's mining tax crusade and appeased big business by agreeing to much weaker terms. By doing that and trying to distance herself from the mistakes she was intimately involved in under Kev's rule, and also being the key assassin (et tu Brutus etc), the Labor party have dropped even further in the polls and are now level with the mental bunch of right wing, big-business-loving religious nutters that are the opposition.

After seeing Kev get toppled by not being allowed to deliver on the promises he made in order to get the top job in 2007, there's now this weird spectacle of both major parties running an election campaign but too scared to announce any policies for fear of not being able to deliver on them and getting killed off as a result.

On top of which Labor want Kev to come out and stand next to Julia and smile and campaign and say everything is alright, to try and win back the voters who think they're a bunch of evil murderous arseholes (this is especially important in Queensland, as Kev pitched himself as a good Queensland lad and it's a big state with loads of farmers suspicious of us city types and our disloyal ways). Kev seems to be enjoying the power he's now got as so far he's refused to join her on the campaign trail and is being blamed for damaging leaks that have come out about Gillard recently. Sources say he's definitely the kind of chap who would wait patiently for revenge, and who would laugh like Patrick Bateman as he took it.


Anyway, I can't vote and they're all a load of twats who are making my life busier at work, so a pox on all their houses!

Fozza's Two Cents

I was watching the evening news on SBS last night, the channel that's showing the world cup. They also show the Champion's League and have highlights of the regular seasons from around the world in 'The World Game' so have a couple of lads who are 'the faces' of Aussie football.

Their Gary Lineker (ex-pro turned anchorman) is Craig Foster (who had a brief spell at Palace in the late nineties). Like the mahogany jug-eared crisp seller he's even got the silver fox hairdo going on, though I've no idea if he likes to cheat on his wife (allegedly). Anyway, watching the news and when it's time for the sport they go to "Foz" in South Africa who reads the world cup news from behind a desk, giving out the results of the most recent games, injury updates, and the reactions to Australia's defeat etc

And then he goes totally mental. Goes right off the reservation. He flows straight from reporting the football news into a massive rant about Pim Verbeek and how he should be sacked straight away after Australia's disgraceful performance and choice of tactics against the Germans. Starts ranting on about how if Verbeek wants to keep his job for the next match he should be made to justify his decisions to a panel made up of former Socceroo captains!

Absolute quality. Can you imagine Lineker losing it live on the BBC and demanding that if Capello wants to remain in charge for the Algeria game he must justify picking Rob Green and Heskey to a panel made up of Tony Adams, Emlyn Hughes and David Beckham?! He was dropping in the odd we-hate-foreigners comment as well, like: "it's not his team, it's Australia's team, it's our team, he's not Australian". Brilliant.

He reckons himself as a big authority on the game and has come out with some right whoppers in the past, he also hates Verbeek, despite banging on about the Dutch style of play for donks before they got him in (he's had big rows with Craig Johnston in the past as his theory is that Australia aren't good enough for total football and should play route one).

It cut back to the two main news bods in the Sydney studio and they were sitting there like stunned mullets, spluttering out "Well, err... fighting talk from Foz there, we'll see you again tomorrow night, have a good evening..."

He later did the same thing on a highlights panel show, which has been reported here. Dunno if you'll be able to watch it outside of Australia but the clip is here. (It was much more Kent Brockman,and much better, on the news though).

Not quite as bad as the yanks, but...

...Australia did take defeat to Germany very badly. Fair enough, four nil is a drubbing, but the way they were going on was funny, as if they were one of the 'second tier' clubs (like England?) and that four nil was a humilation, rather than a slightly worse defeat than the one everybody predicted.

It's a bit schizophrenic, because in one sense the Aussies never expect to lose at anything, and if they do they assume it'll be a tight battle. Even when they're playing their fourth sport against one of the world's best teams. On the other hand, with Tim Cahill getting sent off, there's lots of talk about his world cup having finished already if he gets a two game ban. Now, that's obviously true, as one way or another they're going to be without their best player against Ghana, who they have to get at least a point off to keep their hopes alive, but it's weird that they're so stunned to get beat by Germany and yet aren't looking beyond the group stages.

They didn't go potty about the red card either. Like everyone else they thought it was a bit harsh, but they saw that he was roaring in so late that he had ample time to see the ball get passed away, realise he was going to get in trouble for such a late challenge, and start to pull out if it, before finally clattering him with his knees.

My boss is mates with the legendary HG Nelson, and he got him to write this yesterday, which I knocked into shape and stuck on our site (terrible speller). The lads who play Roy and HG (John Patrick Doyle and Greig Pickhaver) were made members of the Order of Australia in the Queen's birthday honors list. Years of great work for charidee mate...

There is a lot of attention on the football though, which has been to rugby league's benefit, as they've had a racism scandal in the run up to the second leg of the State of Origin series, and the detriment of tennis, as Leyton Hewitt beat Federer on grass for the first time in a hundred years.

Andrew Johns, brother of Matty "I love a bun with the lads" Johns, and the lad who got done outside the Church in Kings Cross with pills on him and later coughed to years of drugs whilst a legendary player, is helping coach the NSW origin team and has been liberal in the use of somewhat "old fashioned Alf Garnett-style" language when describing the aboriginal members of the Queensland team. Click the link to see a video of a NSW player who walked out of the team then gave his reasons for doing so on camera.

Once again, Australia feels like it's still in the '70s, and not in a good way. Still, it makes me feel like some liberal progressive man of the world. Which I am, obviously.

MF33

Happy birthday mate, this is the link to the FIFA Fan Fest. It's costing the city buckets of money, but they see it as an investment in the world cup bid. If they get it it's almost nailed on that I'll be back and have to get up in the middle of the night to watch the big games live, much like I'm going to be doing from this weekend onwards...

"League's darkest hour"

It's gone very pear shaped for rugby league here - Melbourne Storm, who won the title (Grand Final, twice, in 2007 and 2009), won the league three times, and have pretty much been been the dominant team for the past five years, have been cheating for years and have now been stripped of their titles and hammered in fines and points.

They were fiddling the books so that they could spend more than the salary cap and therefore afford a better team than anyone else. The salary cap per team per year is $4.1m. They were generally spending about 400k more per year, which is what a star player would be on, or it'd be spread amongst a few to keep a team together.

At the end of every season there's always a lot of transfer movement because if you got a new player in, you'd have to get shot of someone (or two, or three, depending on the quality of the player coming in). They'd go to other clubs, who in turn would have to release players to be able to remain within their cap. Alternatively, if a young player blooms into a star over the course of a season and his contract is up for renewal, then he either goes to a new club that can pay him more, or his current club has to get shot of other players to be able to raise his wages to keep him.

Melbourne got away with it for so long because they got shot of some of their stars the same way everyone else did - teams like the Brisbane Broncos used to raise more eyebrows by being more successful at keeping their teams together.

With Melbourne and Victoria as a whole being an Aussie Rules state and only having the one League club, there's talk that this will be the death of Rugby in Victoria. It's aknowledged that the players and coaches had nothing to do with it, but their medals now mean nothing, and the teams they beat don't want to be awarded a tainted title by default (which they're saying wont happen anyway). They've also had millions of dollars in sponsorship deals cancelled.

As champions the odds of them coming bottom of the table this year were about 250-1, and bookies knew something was up when they started taking big bets on that outcome recently. They've been stripped of their points and been told that even if they win their games this season, they won't be awarded points so will automatically come last.

As silly as the wages are in the Premiership, at least it means that couldn't happen there, but imagine if it turned out Man Utd or Chelsea had been somehow cheating for years, by bribing refs or summat? Stripped of their titles and docked so many points they couldn't help but come last. It'd almost be worth the damage to the game just to see the look on John Terry's mooey. Mental.

The lad at the centre of it (Brian Waldron) has resigned as the top boy of the Melbourne Rebels Super 15s rugby union team, six weeks into their first season as a new club, and as he used to be chairman St Kilda in the AFL between 2001-4, which also has a salary cap, they're now getting their books looked at very closely.

In other news, Thailand's looking like it's going to go off properly, I reckon I could have called it right by saying this weekend could be when the laksa hits the fan. The reds and the yellows are shaping up for a big row, the army's in there and there's now pink shirts who are getting the hump at all the commotion that the others are causing. Someone's got to give the airport a tickle surely? That's how you get the world to notice, non? Excellent. If I was supersticious I'd think I wasn't supposed to come back, there's been the odd sign here and there...

Getting Better

"It's getting better all the time, I've got my wings and I can fly, I will fly to you..."

Here's hoping eh?

Things are looking up, but there's still many ways in which it could not happen, and at the moment that seems to centre around the fact that hundreds of planes and thousands of crew are out of position, and that flights will still be cancelled due to that for a fair while after planes are flying normally again.

The story I've imagined as the dream scenario is already happening though: one of the people they interviewed coming off one of the first flights to land at Heathrow, a flight from Vancouver, had been booked on that flight all along, and whilst he was sharing the plane with folk who'd been trapped for days etc etc, for him it went off as planned and there was nothing too out of the ordinary about his journey.

That would obviously be brilliant, but as any Gills fan knows, it's the hope that can kill you... then again, stuff like big important trips to Wembley have been successful twice as many times as they haven't in recent times...

BA are concentrating on getting their long haul services up and running first, which is encouraging, and I'm not due to arrive into London until Monday morning, which is five days from now, but the better the chances get the more you start to believe and the greater the uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach gets, along with that little voice going "it could still very easily go the way of the pear".

If my backside did manage to get onto a seat I'd obviously now prefer to fly straight through and not bother with a 'relaxing, jet lag-easing' stopover in revolutionary-ready Bangkok, but at this stage there's about as much chance of 'tinkering' with your itinerary as there is of Arsenal winning the league. Not that I'm too worried. If I find myself in Bangkok I'll be a happy man, and staying out the way of protests and slaughter for 24 hours shouldn't be too hard going by current news. It won't be a spot of shopping and a wander round town before a swim and a massage, but a kip and a feed in a hotel near the airport will more than suffice.

Fingers crossed!

Some of the secondary not-so-serious stuff is starting to spill out now an'all - this story here says Qantas aren't taking any new European bookings until the middle of next month, but you can get a quote for a single-journey econony seat on a BA flight for next week - for a mere seven grand. Business and first class seats have been 'adjusted' to reflect the new circumstances as well, by about forty percent.

Let It Flow

There are all sorts of gags to be had about no one wanting to hear about a new Ash release, or that it's the biggest excitement there's been about an Ash release since 1977 etc, but frankly, I'm in no mood for lame jokes about Irish pop rock trios. (Even if the above title is the aptly-named eighth track on their finest work.)

The new belch from Iceland means that plans to get things back in action by mid-week might not get off the ground (OFF THE GROUND! HAHAHA!), so I'm still sweating as chances get smaller, wondering if I'll be coming to the UK next week or next autumn.

The main problem isn't really my work (though that is an obvious consideration) it's that if my flight is cancelled, the queue of people waiting to get onto flights once they do get up and running is absolutely huge, and we'd be going to the back of it.

A mate of Anna's boss was due to fly to the UK last Sunday, obviously couldn't go, and the next available date they were able to offer him was May 9th. And even that was based on flights getting going again mid-week. Lovely! Presumably if we got cancelled we'd be offered something about four weeks from now, and we'd then have to look into whether that worked or not. To say nothing of waving goodbye to hundreds that have already been spent on stuff like deposits for Edinburgh accommodation, train tickets, hotels etc.

With the corporate belt-tightening that was going on before this, they tried to make sure every scheduled flight was as close to full as possible, and with tens of thousands of extra passengers to try and cram on to the flights that do go ahead, if my flight does go it'll be absolutely rammed, but that's better than no flight at all...


On a 'lighter' note - for those of you who watched the first series of Underbelly, the main character in it, Carl Williams, was murdered in prison yesterday. There were rumours that he was spilling his guts about other folk in order to reduce his 35-year sentence, and the day before he was topped a story appeared in the paper that the police were paying the private school fees of his daughter, which seemed to back up the rumours.

The third series of Underbelly started here last week, starring a load of old Neighbours, Home and Away, and Heartbreak High bods (as I've mentioned before, there are approximately twenty seven full time actors in Australia) as well as Anna's client, and it went off, doing huge numbers.

This time it's about the rise of John Ibrahim in the 90s, a dodgy geezer who is still a top boy and runs a lot of shady business in Kings Cross as well as nightclubs etc and who still regularly gets gangland death threats and raided by the police. His brother was shot in an attempted hit last year, though I still see him driving round my neighbourhood now and then in a subtle bright orange Lamborghini, and he loves hanging out with bits of skirt from Home & Away etc. I don't reckon it'll be too long before someone does him as well, though he's been known as 'Teflon John' for years so maybe he's charmed.

Down to the wire

Really? A volcano? Brilliant.

Not a strike by BA, or a death-filled red shirt revolution in Thailand, but a bit of a low-level geo-burp in Iceland is what is causing total mayhem across the travel world and may knacker my visit.

It's a bit of a perfect storm in that this window is pretty much the only time we can come until nearer the end of the year - Anna's TV show finishes this Wednesday, and my work project kicks into a higher gear from May 24 until mid-September, which whilst not ruling out any holiday from May to September, does rule out any 3-week trip back to the UK. I've heard of a few mad buggers from here going back to the UK for ten days, but I'm not mental enough, or rich enough, to be thinking about that anytime soon.

Even if the airspace opens and planes get back in the air by midweek there's all sorts of stories like this one saying that it'll take at least a week of chaos after that to get back to something vaguely normal from a logistics point of view, due to planes not being where there supposed to be, crew on disrupted work and sleep patterns, and the huge backlog of folk who were supposed to be flying now being crammed onto any spare seat that might be available on the flights that can now get going. Important Business-class John might trump me when it comes to getting a seat on the plane (or worse, get me moved from the exit row seat which I've pre-booked).

A bit like the Gills chances of survival, the run-in looks iffy and despite earlier confidence-boosting results, there's now quite a decent chance it could all end in tears. We haven't yet started looking at three weeks in Bali as an alternative, but it's a possibility.


It's almost a quaint distraction now, but Thailand's got worse over the past couple of days - the army's moved into the financial district, and the yellow shirts, who closed the airports the last time they got uppity, have told the Government to sort out the red shirts, or they'll be back on the streets waving their wads of baht in the faces of the poorer rivals. They made this announcement on Sunday, and gave a seven day ultimatum before "showing their voice". If they were punctual in 'displaying their noise' it would be getting an airing this coming Sunday, which is when we're due to be in Bangkok for a 24 hour stopover, flying out at just after midnight on Sunday night. Marvellous.

After 25 folk died in the clashes last week (many near the Ko Sahn Road), the comments coming from the yellow shirts are slightly scary, calling on the reds "to value their own lives by not making any untrue statements saying that the government killed the people."

"If you value your life you won't say that government troops killed a load of folk by firing into the crowds, even though they did. Just shut it, right? Or you'll get some more of the same which will result in even more of your lot not getting killed by government troops. Long live the royal family!"

"What has Thaksin Shinawatra ever done for us eh? Alright, apart from supply fresh water and electricity to poor rural areas. Yeah, and provide other forms of basic infrastructure vital for economic development in underprivileged parts of the country. But apart from that..."

The land of smiles. and bloody revolution.

That's it properly kicking off in Thailand then, brilliant. For our stopover we're looking at an airport hotel or somewhere well outside the centre of Bangkok anyway, but if it gets moodier then the protestors might fancy giving the airport a tickle, which would be a hassle for me and the many overweight middle-aged Germans hoping to find Miss Right.

Gormless Broon loves the Gills

...and we're off! For years a joke (home of the Chav etc), but what does the Prime Minister do as soon as he announces the date for a general election? Gets on a train and tears down to the most important part of the country, the Medway Towns.

It's only natural. It's only right.

My mum will be spewing, she does the odd trip over to Morrison's (supermarket variety being the spice of life and all that), and having been a radical Marxist whilst living in San Francisco in the sixties, would have relished the opportunity to pin Broon down on his socialist beliefs, and the abandonment of such. (Not really, she'd have got in a flap and hovered about gawking, then given me chapter and verse on it for an hour when I spoke to her on the blower on Sunday. She saw Prince Charles visiting a retried serviceman's home next to Gillingham Park last year, so she's got form in this area.)

So, it's going to be the tightest election in years and Cameron could be the youngest PM in nearly two hundred years. It seems like it might be really close because it really is a close call trying to decide which lot you dislike the least. Well, out of the top two anyway. I'd vote for the Lib Dems and their promise to introduce proportional representation, but then you can promise all sorts when you've got Bob and none of winning. It might count if it's hung though.

So Labour or the Tories then? As much as Gordon seems to have done a shocking job since coming in, and generally seems a bit mental and unsure of himself, like Cloughie at Leeds rather than his Forest or Derby days, the fuck ups he makes seem like accidents, whereas Cameron seems to be trying to hide his true identity until he can get his foot in the door, trying to get you to avoid looking too closely at what are scary Thatcher-type beliefs. It seems that once he was in, getting fucked over wouldn't be any accident at all. If you're minted, got private healthcare, put your kids in private schools, he'll probably be the best bet, but as the rest of the country went to shit you'd have to build a bigger wall around your little world to protect it from increasingly desperate times.

My old boss is big mates with Dave, went to Eton with him and still goes round his house for dinner. My boss also toned down his nyron-n-hookers stories from the good old days once Dave was shaping up to be top boy of the Tories and then the country, but there's no doubt he enjoyed himself as a lad. Which is all well and good, but it's the hypocrisy that has to follow in your quest to secure the Tonbridge Pensioner Daily Mail vote.

Annoyingly, it's Broon that probably got up to nothing much more than ten pints and baring his arse for the rugby team as a lad, so he's probably in a better position to appeal to right wing old farts who shit themselves every time their doorbell goes thinking it's some Romanian come to rob and rape them. Give them my old boss's nudge-nudge wink-wink stories about what him, big Dave and Charles Spencer got up to back in the day and they'd be voting Labour quicker than you can say Daily Mail.

My boss seemed like an alright lad at times, and he had some cracking tales to tell when we'd be out on a work do and he got loose-tongued after a few bevvies, but then every now and again he'd come out with some right wing viewpoint or some story about growing up with servants and you realised he was from a different planet and you had absolutely fuck all in common with him. He was the owner, you were the worker who made money for him. Unless you were a fit bird, cause as well as making money for him he'd take you out for a long lunch, get you pissed, and try to give you one. Marvellous.

Labour with a small majority? Could a hung parliament be any use? I'm not a fan of voting someone in then watching as they do whatever they like for five years, completely ignoring the public until the next election then using "we're better than the other lot" as a campaign slogan. Pity there aren't more top boys like Jezza Corbyn, voting for him didn't leave a bad taste in the mouth or seem like a total waste.

Gillingham's got to turn Tory this time hasn't it? It's always felt more conservative than labour. Get your applications in now to the Upper Gillingham Conservative club, I'll get my uncle to put in a good word for you. I think it's still under one-fifty for a pint of lager, there's a snooker room, and the fruity jackpot is two hundred quid. All that and you're on the winning team, what's not to love? If it goes really well it'll be back to the days of Masonic handshakes and climbing the business and social ladder with one elbow propped on the bar. Happy days.

DS33

HH33

Hot 100

Australia day (Jan 26th) is the day for announcing the previous year's hottest 100 tunes on Triple J. This year was yet another example that as I age I drift further from the coal face of new music, which is quite a weird feeling when I used to be a bit of a miner back in the day, bopping around London town interviewing the latest hip cats and checking out their groovy vibes live.

Mumford And Sons were number one, with Little Lion Man. I've heard the song, but (get this...) only because I read about them as 'ones to watch' in Q Magazine! Q are always about three months late with that sort of caper and in my previous life as the digital teenage girls' Everett True I used to snort with derision at these old farts with their paper and printing.

The full list is here and once I'd gone through the top twenty and realised I only knew six of them I decided to stop there to save myself further pain.

I'm going with the 'Aussie music is generally shit' defence, which on the evidence of Adelaide's aweful, ageing hip hop rap singers the Hilltop Hoods at number three, is a defence that's not without legs.

But I have to admit I'm not totally without blame - as is brought into stark relief when you're being told by your mates twelve thousand miles away to check out a swinging bunch of new dudes who are from the country you live in (The Temper Trap).

It's probably not something that would have happened when I was the internet's answer to a late-70s Tony Parsons: getting pally with McFly, chummy with Busted, and once almost being offered out by Cheryl Cole. Good times.

A substitute for God

See this story? - Robbie Fowler refuses to start on the bench, gets dropped and reveals that his missus isn't settling into the fast-paced, cosmopolitan style of life in tropical far-north Queensland.

With the population of Townsville roughly three quarters of that of Medway, and only a jaunty 800 miles from nearest major city Brisbane (another one of the southern hemisphere's most exciting metropolises), you can only assume that time has mellowed the former party boy and moving back into such excitement has made him and his family realise that living la vida loca is no longer for them.

Frankly I'm stunned. Who could have seen this coming?

It's the fans I feel sorry for.

Especially all those, whether they were Townsville fans, neutrals, or fans of the opposition, who turned up to games in Liverpool shirts, often outnumbering the Townsville fans and giving the (obviously wrong) impression that they didn't give a shit about who was playing, as long as they could gather together near the front row of the stand and scream at their idol, begging him to come over and sign their shirt like mid-30s women at a Take That concert.

Extreme weather chaos

(Phew what a scorcha part 26)

If it snows you can stick a scarf on, and you might even get a day off work, so whilst you throw snowballs in your winter wonderland, spare a thought for us poor souls, baking in the heat over here...

I'm not sick, but I'm not well...

You see the odd Aussie celeb round here, a couple of weeks ago Lara Bingle was getting in to her rather flash Aston Martin outside the local shops (she's the bird who was in the "Where the bloody hell are you?" advert and who's now engaged to Michael Clarke, the Aussie cricket vice-captain). I was checking out her motor before I recognised it was her getting into it.

However, I couldn't say I wasn't surprised to walk past Super Hans yesterday morning! I'd just left the house on the way to work and as I got to the station he was there with a little girl of about three of four. I might not have thought it was him if Anna hadn't told me the night before that he was filming a new Aussie series with Claudia Karvan, the bird from Secret Life Of Us and Love My Way. It's by the same production company, and she plays a dentist who forms a friendship with the ghost of a dead 80s rock star, played by Super Hans, or Matt King as he's apparently known. The show's called Spirited and starts here in August, and no doubt some channel in the UK will take a punt on it eventually, seeing as there's a million channels pumping out shite. According to a bio of his he's writing a show called 'Whites', based on his time working in a Michelin-starred kitchen before he turned his hand to acting and stand up comedy. I hadn't known that he beat Russell brand to the role of Super Hans either, with Brand auditioning for it before he decided to become an Ealing Comedy version of Jack Sparrow and take over the world.

I haven't seen the sixth or seventh series of Peep Show, and after thinking about getting six on amazon I then discovered that it's all on youtube, which is a touch, even if it ain't as good as watching it on a big telly.

New Year's Eve madness

I was in Melbourne for new year's eve (as some of you will know from the odd drunken text I sent - apologies for that). Anna's client was paid to sing a few tunes at at 1950s rock 'n' roll themed party at Crown Casino, who put on a gratis party every year for their 'high rollers', to thank them for all the money they've pissed away over the year, and no doubt also to get them back in for a big spend on a big night.

I sorted myself out with an outfit - varsity jacket, white tshirt, white converse and slicked backed hair - as it was either that or 'dinner wear' for the evening. Needless to say I was one of the only blokes in 'fancy dress' and most of the others had just worn a normal suit, or a shirt and strides (I don't suppose they enforce the rules very tightly on big spenders, at one point I went to the dunny and there was a Chinese lad in their smoking a huge stogie). I didn't know that many people and Anna was mainly working until midnight when the lass she looks after had finished her duties. As the lass was previously in Neighbours for years (as Izzy), and one of her storylines involved Karl Kennedy leaving Susan for her, she's big mates with him and he was on our table with his missus, who wasn't bowled over when I started blethering away to her: she asked what I did and I told her I worked for the ABC, then I asked what she did, as I didn't have a clue who she was - she's apparently a newsreader for the ABC...



Big first impression having been made, I played it pretty cool until after the bells, when we legged it from the party (filled mainly with rich pikeys, shifty gangster types, and loads of shifty gangster-type Asians, some smoking big cigars in the toilet whilst shouting on their mobiles) up to the top-floor suite that they'd laid on as part of the deal. I was quite merry by then and once Nyron popped in for a chat there was no chance I wasn't going to give Alan (or Fletch, as he's known to his close showbiz pals) a bit of an ear-bend - I'd been introduced to him earlier, then made a solid impression on his wife (who'd then done the off to another party at about half ten) so then we chatted about his band and being on Jo Whiley when he's in the UK. He was quite upset that his good mate Jo had been goonered in favour of Ferne Cotton, and he told me about getting her a cameo on the show when she was in Melbourne, and he blethered about his two kids for a bit but I was fairly gone by that point so I can't remember very much. I'd be very surprised if I didn't give as good as I got on the bletheing front but fortunately we were both slightly worse for wear by that point, as you can see in the picture. Which is very unflattering, but worry not, I haven't cut my hair (it was slicked back) nor put on a load of beef (weird angle? That double chin's come out of nowhere).

He regularly appears at the Neighbours pub nights with his band Waiting Room, punting out stuff like I Predict A Riot and a load of other modern classics for the discerning backpacker audience. He also told me that the story about Toady getting barred for getting stuck into the female fans wasn't true, a terrible fabrication, but then I doubt he's going to start spilling all the good stuff to some gattered oddball in Happy Days fancy dress.