I don’t know about you, but the dog days of August are making me long for some levity. And what better way to bring in some hilarity than to think about the late Boots Randolph’s delightful “Yakety Sax,” a.k.a. “that Benny Hill Show song,” a.k.a. the best way to make any YouTube clip hilarious? Noted “Yakety Sax” enthusiast Jess Harvell and I put together a pair of lists related to the song—namely, a top 10 countdown of artists who need to cover the song soon, and a counterpoint list of 10 artists who should never get within a 25-mile radius of its implied hilarity, for fear of ruining it for all time. The countdowns after the jump. More »
Back in my school days, Valentine’s Day was a time for exchanging cheap perforated Valentines cards and inedible Necco hearts, and punishing the unpopular kids by “forgetting” to give them anything. (I was perhaps one of those unpopular kids.) If you were really lucky you got a mixtape from a girl, and I did get a few in my day, even if they were from girl-space-friends and not girlfriends. What was disturbing was the presence of “Every Breath You Take” on said mixtapes, given it’s the kind of love song that John Wayne Gacy might write. Even Sting himself says it’s a paean to controlling someone:
Lutist Gordon Sumner, Robert Fripp collaborator Andy Summers and Oysterhead drummer Stewart Copeland have announced that they’re retiring their supergroup, The Police, after a final show in New York this August. The venue has yet to be announced (too bad CBGB closed!), but the proceeds will go to arts programming on public television. John Tesh to return to Red Rocks? If you insist, Gordon.
The Daily Mail has an almost-cameraphone-quality shot of Sting leaving a brothel in Germany following a show by the Police in Hamburg. The brothel, Relax, advertises itself as a strip club, and according to the German paper where this indiscretion was first reported, “”What he did inside is unclear. More »
Last year, we theorized that there may be a so-called “Curse Of Sting,” and noted that just about every non-musical entity Gordo touches tends to end in catastrophe. We based part of the idea on the fact that Sting (lute in tow) was one of the first musical acts on the doomed Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip.