freedom: Radiohead, Kylie and Tony Benn

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 17 October 2007 19:16:00

Well,  Radiohead copped £2 for In Rainbows, and they were lucky to get that. Not that I don't support their ethical stand in letting us decide how much to pay for the download - but my support would probably best be communicated as "I should fucking well think so!". We should start a petition to get them to backdate the policy to all their previous albums, available as instant cashback in any branch of HMV on presentation of a battered copy of Pablo Honey. That'd kill off the feelgood pretty quickly. Anyway, I'm skint. I quite enjoyed it, not exactly feel-good-happy-clappy-sunshine but the lyrics are pretty intense sometimes. But then I stopped paying attention to music halfway through the 90s.

So the Kylie exhibition at Kelvingrove was a bit of a shock. You ought to go. It's tiny, free, massively overhyped, and absolutely heaving with people. Weirdly hypnotic too. Kylie, eh? Her constant reinventions effectively mirror Madonna's, except that M's are supposedly her own decisions. With Kylie I feel like someone *else* has dressed her up like a little doll. Someone rich and callous.
Still. It's free. So you can expect me to go every week for the rest of the year.

Most legitimately mesmerising experience of the week was Nick Stadlen's 2006 interview with Tony Benn, which I found as a podcast on Guardian Unlimited. It is just magnificent. I hope I really am the last person on earth to hear this, but in case you're in the same boat, go and download it now, and listen to it. Here's my favourite quote:

"There are some socialists in the Labour Party. There are some Christians in the churches. It's an exact parallel." (Tony Benn)