musicOMH began life in January 1999 after I split off the music reviews section of my personal home page.
Staggeringly, that was a whole 10 years ago. It's rather crept up on us, but we deduce this means WE ARE 10 YEARS OLD THIS YEAR. Double digits! The number after 9!! The one before 11!!! wOOt!!!! Anyway, we're told we're only 10 once and should DO SOMETHING. But what? How exactly should we mark this milestone? Best suggestion wins a balloon.
musicOMH is looking for new music writers. ARE YOU ONE? If you are, you'll want to thrill the world with your knowledge, innate good taste and opinions and you'll really, really like going to gigs and festivals and listening to albums. Maybe you'll enjoy interviewing musicians and thinking up features. You'll certainly be able to write to a given house style, to a high standard of English, and you'll proofread your regular contributions. If this sounds like you, drop me a line saying so, together with some recent URLs, your last three gigs and why you believe your writing should be published on musicOMH. (Note that all positions are unpaid.)
 Big day for big music news stories, this. So here's another. The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of breaking copyright laws.
The filesharing service, which was set up six years ago, has been facing a Swedish beak on piracy allegations centred on allowing access to torrents for filesharing purposes. Its top brass intend to hold a press conference today (Friday 17th April) at 1pm Swedish time. It will be streamed on the front page of their site: thepiratebay.org
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde have each been sentenced to a year in jail but are expected to appeal. The site, which has tens of millions of users across the globe, includes a page detailing various legal threats they've received from everyone from Microsoft to Warner and from Apple to Dreamworks. It's been pointed out elsewhere that anyone can use a search engine to find torrents too, so the verdict may have knock-on effects on how the search engines index files on the web. Yet with YouTube announcing deals with major film studios to stream movies free of charge only yesterday and Spotify scarcely seeing a day pass without being trumpeted as the saviour of the recorded music industry, it's also possible that The Pirate Bay, like Napster before it, could find itself fighting yesterday's battle before very much longer.
Zavvi, the music retailer formerly known as Virgin Megastores, has been placed in administration, adding further woe to an already miserable year for high street shops and music retailing.
Zavvi's website has been unable to sell anything since the collapse of the Woolworths-owned EUK distributor, Zavvi's main supplier. It has been reported that Zavvi owed a substantial sum to EUK. Administrator Ernst & Young have said they'll try to keep the chain running until a buyer can be found for the business.
In the same week as Whittard of Chelsea and The Officers Club folded and Woolworths' administrators began to close their shops, Zavvi's failing will leave even more shopworkers concerned for their 2009 outlook; the company operated 125 shops across the UK.
If Zavvi closes it would leave the record industry with just HMV, owners of Fopp and Waterstones, as the last major music chain selling their physical products on the high street. It's unlikely that pressure from supermarkets and the internet, in particular Amazon, will let up on the business, but the failures of Woolworths and Zavvi in quick succession should at least give His Master's Voice a breathing space.
In better news, independent record seller Rough Trade, celebrating its 30th birthday in 2008, reported its business growing by an impressive 7% year-on-year despite being caught up in the failure of the distributor Pinnacle earlier this month. If big chains failing offers hope to the likes of Rough Trade, perhaps there's some semblance of a silver lining to the gloom. Here's hoping so at least.
 Russell Brand has resigned from his BBC Radio 2 show following the furore surrounding his and Jonathan Ross's moment of (recorded, cleared for broadcast) madness involving an answering machine, an actor and Brand's rampant... ego. "I got a bit caught up in the moment," he said in a statement that was signed off with "Hare Krishna".
Ross had already apologised for his "juvenile" behaviour and sent flowers to Andrew Sachs, aka Manuel from Fawlty Towers. But over a week after the original broadcast on the station's The Russell Brand Show, which reportedly attracted just two complaints, the Mail On Sunday racheted up the temperature on the presenters with a front page splash. Cue horror, outrage and even David Cameron and Gordon Brown weighing in with opinions. Headlines across the BBC and beyond have been impossible to ignore. Last we looked, over 18,000 complaints had been logged. The final straw seems to have come today when the BBC's Director-General Mark Thompson was forced to cut short his holiday (the horror!) to respond to the whirlwind. His statement was unequivocal, and he announced that both presenters would be suspended from broadcasting across the BBC while an internal investigation was carried out into how the situation happened. As well as the presenters' Radio 2 shows, this week's Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, which was to feature The Killers and Miley Cyrus, has been cancelled. With Brand gone, will Ross ride the lightning and emerge into calmer waters? It's certainly been an extraordinary set of events. And the whole episode underlines the continuing power of the Mail papers in influencing events and careers.
Has just led a congo line of 2,000 odd people out of the comedy tent around the site with the aim of creating the longest queue possible at one of the vegan food stalls. He has then been carried on people's shoulders, tossed into the air and then, well, dropped. It was bound to happen... But still.
The third biggest "social networking" site, Bebo, has been gulped down.
Following News Corp's acquisition of MySpace, Microsoft's investment in Facebook and CBS's purchase of last.fm, AOL, part of media giant Time Warner, has reportedly paid US$850m for Bebo, which claims a global membership of about 40 million users.
So whichever social networking site you prefer, rest assured that a giant American conglomerate now supports your messaging, photos and events calendar.
Amid much OMGing from news sites' comments forums, the full extent of the devastation visited upon NW1 on Saturday night hit home.
Confusion amongst some news organisations was the only light relief from seeing a well-known part of Camden engulfed in flames. On BBC News 24 the newscaster referred to the Hawley Arms as a "nightclub". No, it's a pub. Here's the evidence:
Better still were the names of celebrities listed as regular clientele. Heard of "Neil Fielding" or "Neil Gallagher"? Me neither.
So yes, along with just about everyone from London who has anything to do with music, I've of course been to the Hawley too many times to count. Yes, the beehive was there more often than not, sat on her own, eating lunch and not being interrupted. I've interviewed artistes there (on one occasion the beehive interrupted proceedings) too - the upstairs area being popular for such activities during daytime.
Despite the pub's reputation in mainstream news media as some fantastical glittering nirvana for "troubled" singers, it really was just a decent boozer. Probably a tad passé for some of the more trendoid tendencies of this world now, but it had charm, especially in the afternoons when it wasn't too packed.
The people behind the Hawley had only a couple of weeks ago launched their second pub, Clerkenwell's Wilmington Arms, which has a gig space, and a small record label, which had just released its first single.
They're sure to recover from this, as are the Canal market traders whose livelihoods are also threatened by the inferno of 9th February. There will be a rallying round. And some time soon, when the refurbishments are complete, the Hawley will have an excellent excuse for a big relaunch party. Hell, they might even attract some slebs along. Here's hoping it's not too long before we can toast the Hawley's reincarnation. And maybe it should consider a name change to herald its new era. The Phoenix, perhaps?
Our pick of this year's best albums:
http://www.musicomh.com/music/features/albums_review-2007_1207.htm
We'll still be sporadically publishing features and reviews in the music and film sections over the break, with normal service resumed on Wednesday 2nd January.
Meantime, thanks for reading in 2007, happy Christmas and all the best for your 2008.
Fanciful kisses,
Michael and all at musicOMH.com
Russell Brand now tops the UK book charts with his Booky Wook – beating Nigella Express and Hamster Hammond by a hefty margin this week.
On Wednesday he pays homage to Jack Kerouac on BBC4’s Russell Brand On The Road. On 21st December the new St Trinians movie is out – and he’s in that too (with Stephen Fry, Rupert Everett, Lily Cole (!) and Girls Aloud (!!!!!)).
Big Brother was only watchable during Big Brother’s Big Mouth when Brand hosted it. His articles in the Guardian are never less than articulate. And his appearances on chat shows and panel game shows (such as I’ve seen) have been memorable. Then we have his 6Music and Radio 2 DJ tenures...
Yet there seems to be, for some, a niggling feeling, something akin to guilty pleasure, about liking him.
Is Russell Brand a good or a bad thing - an irritatant or a genius?
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