La Roux played another rocking concert last night at Manchester Academy in Manchester, England. Lead singer Elly Jackson’s signature superdo was rockin’ as well. Included in their set, was an amazing electro-fied cover of the Rolling Stone’s “Under My Thumb”. Flip through to see the “Bulletproof” singer in action. More »
This morning, reports surfaced that Charlie Watts had quit the Rolling Stones, with the Australian Web site Undercover quoting a “source within the Stones inner-circle” as saying “Charlie Watts has quit the band. He will never record or tour with the band again.” Undercover went on to say that to them, the news wasn’t a surprise, and that the band already had a backup drummer ready to go. Well, guess who the news did surprise? The Stones’ publicist, who issued this denial a few hours after the Undercover story went viral: More »
John Nelson Palmer, a 62-year-old Colorado resident who passed away on Monday, certainly was: According to his daughter, he cursed the fact that a man who allegedly snorted his father remained on this mortal coil longer than he did with one of his dying breaths. “I can’t believe Keith Richards outlived me,” Palmer said shortly before he passed. The 65-year-old Richards hasn’t yet commented on Palmer’s last words, but here’s hoping he at least thinks to send a tasteful flower arrangement. [Aspen Daily News via Gawker] More »
Now that the Carolina Hurricanes have been eliminated from the NHL playoffs, Merge Records impresario Mac McCaughan has moved on from chronicling the ‘Canes’ efforts to talking about the music that arenas employ to get fans in prime freak-out mode. In 2006, he brought some albums put out by his label down to the Hurricane home base, RBC Center, in hopes of breaking through what he called its “particularly stultifying mix of Top 40 / Classic rock / Emo (? i don’t know what to call some of the songs on there) / Sports Disco,” and it worked, at least a bit; “Punch Me Harder” got played during the 2006 NHL Finals, which–coincidence?–the Hurricanes won. Anyway, McCaughan has provided his own suggested playlist for hockey arenas to the local paper, and man, is it so much better than the nu-metal and snipped bits of Eurodance that I’m used to at my sporting events. A few selections: More »
The 33 1/3 book series, in which one album is given a book-length treatment by a writer, has finally narrowed its latest shortlist down to 11 titles. The list of approved albums–and the authors who will be taking the albums on–for the 2010-2011 roster of books after the jump: More »
One of the two copyright lawsuits facing Lil Wayne has been settled, with the delightfully litigious music publishers at ABKCO winning out over Weezy and producer StreetRunner in a battle over whether or not the two borrowed heavily from the Rolling Stones‘ “Playing With Fire” on their track of the same name. Billboard reported that all sides were pleased with the settlement, which I assume involved some amount of money as well as the removal of the track from future copies of Tha Carter III as well as the virtual shelves of online stores. (For better or worse, the track will be replaced with the wonderfully titled David Banner production “Pussy Monster.”) The two tracks, after the jump.
So, a new version of Thom Yorke’s Grammy ad, which crafts a mosaic of the Radiohead frontman’s face from the titles of various songs that have influenced him, is out there, and keen-eyed viewers will notice a few key differences between the initial print (at left, as sourced from Pop & Hiss last Tuesday) and this iteration, which is being rolled out with a TV spot in which Yorke talks about his dreams of becoming David Bowie someday. Let’s play a little game of “catch the edits,” shall we?
An English town is naming 13 of its its streets after Rolling Stones songs—although it’s doing so in a rather pathetic way, using songs like “Get Off Of My Cloud” and “Sympathy for the Devil” for inspiration instead of, say, “Brown Sugar” or the simple and obvious “Sex Drive.” The neat concept, yet somewhat flubbed execution by the town of Dartford, where Keith Richards and Mick Jagger grew up, made me wonder what American cities would rework their municipal geographies in honor of musical artists.
The Rolling Stones haven’t been known for sticking around at one label for long, having jumped around from Atlantic to CBS to Virgin in the past. So the announcement that they’ve signed a long-term deal with Universal Music Group is no particular surprise. More »
Perhaps wanting to believe that there’s still life in those Rolling Stones yet, The Sun is reporting that guitarist Ronnie Wood has left his wife of 23 years for a 18-year-old Russian waitress from a cocktail bar. More »
