6 Music - it's all for the ladeez

Turning the television on slightly early - I'd decided to watch Being Human while I was doing the ironing, as I thought it looked like it might be alright from the trailers - I came across the BBC Three news bulletin, and immediately felt depressed. What is the point of the BBC Three news bulletin? All the news that's fit to print in a crap free newspaper for commuters, read by someone who wouldn't get a job on Newsround. Presumably it's there to scrape some sort of remit provision, but, really, I thought, surely it would be impossible for even BBC Three to come up with anything more soul-destroying.

Then there was a trailer for The Lily Allen Programme. Drums roll, cymbals crash etc.

I just about made it through the first scene of Being Human even though it was set to Chasing Sodding Cars, but when the second was set to Amy Fucking Winehouse I decided that I'd rather do the ironing in silence, punctuated only by the sound of my email alerter not alerting me to any emails that had arrived because no emails had arrived.

"Don't forget to take a poster of Tom from The Enemy on your way out"

The thing with Skins is, while it isn't hatefully bad or anything, it doesn't strike me as being special or anything. Maybe if you're 17 it may say something desperately profound to you about your life, and if does then that's great, but I can't believe that there's anything remarkable for anyone who's, say, old enough to have got a job reviewing television programmes for a living. I'm going to stick with it, though, in case there's a bit with loads of kids in their drawers like in the posters and that.

While I'm reviewing things, here are some in-depth reviews of some bands that I went to see last night, because I really don't have a lot to write about at the moment, and to conclusively prove that checking for misplaced apostrophes in books about law's loss is music writing's gain. No, hang on.

REVIEW: Band of small children who weren't Cut Off Your Hands

See, they weren't very good, but they were quite endearing, for these reasons:

a) The singer had clearly stolen all of his vocal styling from him out of The Young Knives, and if only the band had sounded a bit more like The Young Knives I could have called them "The Younger Knives", because they were all about 12.
b) The singer also appeared to be slightly embarrassed about them being there, and I like other people being slightly embarrassed, what with it being pretty much my default state and everything.

REVIEW: Los Campesinos!

Back when John Peel did the Peelenium, when he came to 1978 he decided to play Teenage Kicks last of the four songs. And I can't believe that this was the first time that I'd ever heard him play Teenage Kicks, and I'd heard him talking about the song and what it meant to him, but hearing him trying to compose himself at the end of the song was the first time that I really understood what it meant.

And that was roughly how You! Me! Dancing! made me feel last night. I just... went. It was all slightly worrying.

REVIEW: Future Of The Left

Kelson is scary. It can't have been just me who was convinced that he was staring at them, all wild-eyed and beardy. And the two-sizes-too-small pink Slits t-shirt wasn't helping.

Also, since I last saw Future Of The Left they've become really, really, amazingly good. Not that they weren't good then, but now they're incredibly good. Even the songs off the album that I didn't like as much as some of the others (but which I still liked, because the album's great) were actually really, really great. But if I go to see them again I'm standing on Falco's side.

REVIEW: Les Savy Fav

Thing is, him out of Les Savy Fav is tremendously entertaining, but the songs are dull. Well, they're quite good for 30 seconds or so, and then they become dull. And to be honest it wasn't worth staying for the third song of the encore to see if there was another costume change to come and missing a train by one minute, deciding to get a different train, that train getting stuck behind the train I'd missed, then missing a bus by one minute and having to stand around in the cold for 25 minutes while some kids talked loudly about people that they'd robbed and on the other side of the road bouncers argued noisily with with people outside a bar pumping out crap dance versions of 80s ballads, before getting home and sending probably-regrettable emails to women like I was 19 or something.

Someone's just delivered a mis-spelt cake on Skins, so I'm quite glad I stuck with it now. Still not brilliant, but watchable enough I guess.

Things you don't want to hear when you're sitting on the toilet (number 1 in a series of 1, hopefully)

A man with a broad Australian accent saying "Someone's taken a piss on the floor here".

The Metros are utterly vile

Personally I'm hoping that Ashes To Ashes is an unreserved triumph, if only because I'm interested as to what the next iteration of it would be called. Tin Machine? Awkward Drum 'n' Bass-Inspired Period? Gene Hunt Gets Married to The Lovely Supermodel Eamonn? The possibilities are manifold. Either way I won't know until the weekend at the earliest, because I'm going to watch the African Cup of Nations instead.

However, the prospect of any part of the BBC's output being an unreserved triumph ever again is somewhat undermined by this:



So, that's something on the Listen Again feature that you're being warned not to call in to because it's already happened. Despite it being a spoof phone-in show that you can't call into in the first place. That, in this particular episode, makes a point of making a joke about calling in to. This said, this does raise a tantalising possibility as to the addition of George Lamb to the 6 Music roster; that he's not there because they're after an audience of morons, he's merely been placed there until there's a vacancy for him presenting You And Yours.

Not worth waiting three weeks for

I was stood in the queue at a West End Sainsbury's. Prior to this, as I'd wandered around the shop looking for cheese, I'd noticed the music tinkling away in the background but hadn't quite realised what it was, and truth be told in the 30 seconds or so it had taken to decide whether to get mature or extra-mature (it's a long month, so I chose the cheapskate mature option) I had forgotten about it.

Next to the queue for the tills is a video screen, which alternates between details of offers and unbiased editorial comment on how great Sainsbury's is, and a screen taken up mainly with pop videos but with news stories of the day scrolling along the bottom of the screen and a weather forecast on the right. As I joined the queue the screen had been detailing an offer, but then switched back to the music that had been playing earlier. And it was then, upon seeing Thom Yorke's partly-submerged head, that I realised that the tune had been No Surprises by Radiohead. And this is odd, because I should have recognised No Surprises by Radiohead; I can only thing that the unlikeliness of hearing it in a West End branch of Sainsbury's threw me. If you had to pick an apt tune to shop to, it probably wouldn't be No Surprises by Radiohead. You wouldn't want to eat a meal that had just been cooked by someone who'd bought the ingredients while listening to No Surprises by Radiohead.

A news story wobbled across the bottom of the screen. It was about the latest victim of the 'internet death cult'. I found myself wishing that I was better read, as real life had given me nothing that I could successfully compare this situation to.