Wednesday 4 June 2008

Michael Eavis denies Gilmour snub

Bizarre's Smart Gordon is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, tucked up in a mystery and left to moulder at the back of a puzzle. Is he a lover or a fighter? A geezer or a geek? And, most crucially, does he really like David Gilmour? It's difficult to tell.

We only ask because Smart Gordon has published a follow up to his story about the Pink Floyd frontman being rejected by Michael Eavis as an alternative to Jay-Z.












Yesterday's piece was quite strident, calling Eavis "dangerously out of touch" with his public, as if the septuagenarian farmer was about to invite them to imbibe cyanide and celebrate the end of days. Today, however, Gordon's tone is different; more conciliatory, in fact.

"Michael Eavis has been kind enough to respond to my tale about turning down an offer from Pink Floyd's David Gilmour to play at Glastonbury.

"The festival organiser said of the guitarist's offer: 'By then all the bands were already in place for this year. We've got a wonderful line-up and I couldn't bump one of the artists off, even for him. Hopefully we'll be able to arrange it for another year.' Thanks for clearing that up."

So, 24 hours after going full gun on a story, Gordon now looks like a child writing a thank you letter for a pair of socks. Why? Has he woken up and decided that Dark Side of the Moon is a bunch of self-indulgent rubbish? Has he just got bored? Like we say, that man's a conundrum.

With the previous item in mind, it's perhaps not surprising to find that Smart Gordon's opinion on Lily Allen is shifting around like George the teenage breakdancer.

Here he is on April 14: "It's nice to see LILY ALLEN smiling again. The singer larked around with her headwear in London this weekend - changing from safari hat to Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker."

Here, however, is Smart Gordon today: "Lily Allen is adding lesbian vampire to her list of, er, talents."

Why the "er" Gordon? Don't you know that such qualifiers might stop Lily from smiling, the very thing that you believe to be "nice"?

Anyway, Gordo's item about Lily taking a cameo role in her mate James Corden's big-screen project Lesbian Vampire Killers (sounds a bit Shaun of the Dead-lite to us) continues in the same vein before segueing into an attack on Allen by the increasingly vituperative Kooks frontman Luke Pritchard.

Says Luke: "I find it funny she's a musician now because she never used to be into music at school. I don't really like her music all that much."

Luke's latest album, Konk, fell to number 31 in the charts this week.

Lest it seem that we're Smart Gordon obsessed, here's a little bit of Kim Dawson from Kim Dawson's Playlist for ya. (By the by, has anyone considered the prospect of giving over the column, for one day only, to one half of the Moldy Peaches? Kimya Dawson's Playlist does have a ring to it.)

Anyway, Kim has been talking to Music Weekly guests the Mystery Jets about their anticipated hit Two Doors Down.

"We discovered the joys of Eighties music accidentally listening to Magic FM," the band explained. "Phil Collins is hideously underrated and a big inspiration."

Interesting remarks. On the one hand, Phil Collins is hideously underrated. But only because the degree of esteem in which he is held by music fans falls on the negative scale. On the other hand, you're hardly a 21st-century indie band if you can't ironically cite uncool artists as influences. So we remain unclear as to quite whether the Jets are having a laugh here or not. If they get a support slot on the next Genesis tour, we guess we'll learn the truth.


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