Popular beat combo McFly (I love the phrase popular beat combo) are moving in the direction of Prince and Paul McCartney by giving away their new album with the Mail on Sunday.
While the newspaper's readership may seem far more suited to long-established acts, McFly, who are all in their early twenties and younger than many of their predecessors' biggest hits, recently split from record label Universal to set up their own label, Super Records.
The album, Radio:ACTIVE, will be their first on the new label and will go out with every copy of the newspaper on July 20th. It will differ from Prince's effort, Planet Earth in that it will also be available in 'deluxe' edition to buy through retailers in September. McCartney's Memory Almost Full was only available in Starbucks.
I always thought it would be Darren Huckerby. I know that can be taken a number of ways, particularly in light of the groundbreaking You Tube hit that I can't get out of my head.
Norwich City players on MTV is my point. Ashley Ward, the kind of film-star looks footballer who could have been David Beckham but lamentably never was, was on the excellent Footballers' Cribs, but that was long after his sadly brief tenure as the Canaries' great hope had ended, and I suspect had more to do with his interior designer wife, who I believe has designed gaffs for the likes of the Rooneys, among others. When I get a minute I'll write more about Ward, in particular a post-match interview I remember with It's A Knockout's Stuart Hall, and the whole Footballers' Cribs thing.
Anyway, Darren Huckerby has yet to make his MTV debut, to my knowledge. While Dion Dublin has followed the likes of other ex-Canaries Andy Townsend (minus the Tactics Truck, now allegedly the home of The Onion Bag ) and the terminally uninteresting Tim Sherwood into the pundits' little glass box, Darren Eadie has popped up on Sky from time to time, Efan Ekoku is rolled out for the African Nations by the BBC and the rest of the time is a superb pundit on international coverage of the Premier League, and even Jeremy Goss and Bryan Gunn got on A Question of Sport back in the olden days. The days when it wasn't a joke.
None of this illustrious band of former yellows can match Jason Shackell. I saw a very young Jason (he's still only 25 to be fair) play for Norwich as a left back at Crystal Palace the season we were promoted back into the Premiership (as it was at the time). Then, I suspected he would go the way of a Shaun Carey or Cedric Anselin , particularly as I'd seen pretty spectacular early promise in Paul Dalglish and Marc Libbra, both of whom went on to achieve nothing.
Little did I suspect that Shackell would become a young Norwich skipper. Much less did I realise he had pin-up potential to rival even Ashley Ward himself.
Yet he has. Shackell was rumoured to have appeared in a 'reality TV programme', but nothing much was made of it. I know they struggle for stars on some of these 'celebrity' shows, but a Norwich player would be a real stretch, and I'm an ardent fan. No, Jason and his lady-talking ways managed to wander into an American show, The Hills, and even made the final cut.
If you watch the clip I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. He's hardly the footballing equivalent of Russell Brand, but then it's still pretty impressive. Most lads go on holiday to pull random slappers from Mansfield (apologies to anyone from Mansfield, I had to choose somewhere. Everywhere has slappers, not Mansfield in particular. I've never been there to be honest, so it might have none. It's a fair bet there are a few though.), or suspiciously young locals.
You don't expect to head to the States, walk into the living set of a vacuous bunch of Beverly Hills natives so remarkable in their shallowness that MTV have been moved to share it with the world. Let alone get somewhere with one of them. And then head home to carve the notch on your own bedpost.
There have been a couple of Norwich youngsters who have had medium profile nightlife blunders in recent months. Initially outstanding midfielder Matty Pattison's less impressive performances culminated in getting his collar felt allegedly trying to drive to training on a Sunday under the influence. It may have had something to do with living in a travel tavern a la Alan Partridge. He'd probably been at the Ladyboys:
Young striking sensation Chris Martin, not to be confused with the Coldplay singer, has managed to destroy his reputation as rapidly and spectacularly as it was built. Apart from his lardy, lethargic performances, he has also apparently got himself barred from all the pubs in his home town of Beccles.
The pair of them need to buckle down and try to hit the heights of Sir Jason. You've pulled like a superstar, now bloody play like one.
I've always felt a strangely compelling urge to follow football as closely as possible whenever a match of any remote interest is on. Nowadays, of course, there are myriad ways of finding out whatever you want about a game going on almost anywhere in the world. It wasn't always so.
The days of watching matches unfold on Teletext (or Ceefax, sometimes one half each, always stick with one when a goal is scored for your team) seem a hell of a long time ago. The development of the beloved Gillette Soccer Saturday has rendered it pretty much obsolete, but its spirit lives on in the basic, slow and highly unreliable 'live' scores available on most mobile phones.
Until recently I made as much use as necessary of this rudimentary system, which didn't even have the decency to show scorers on the main score page, and even when you've clicked through fails to distinguish own goal scorers from others, as well as ignoring incidents like red cards. Even Teletext managed, and it must be a while ago because of the individual and event involved, to catalogue a 'Salako stretchered off' during a Zenith Data Systems Cup Final.
I can't help feeling that the old televisual text missed a bit of a trick. The driving force behind this is the BBC Website's brilliant Live Text coverage of matches, often in the company of the vaguely demented Caroline Cheese.
Cheese, who is apparently a real person and of whom I have even managed to track down video footage, brings a lot to what must be an incredibly arduous task.
She'll often, at least in my imagination, be sitting watching several matches at once while simultaneously chronicling both for the usually sky-less public. The live feeds are so beloved that they have extended them to sports like cricket and golf (try betting on the US Open in play with only this as a tool. You won't make money).
I've even sat among the respected members of the press at Wembley and seen several checking their facts by referencing Ms Cheese or one of her colleagues. Now there's a ringing endorsement.
Much like the Guardian's take on the same technique, irreverent humour plays a big part in the unfolding events. It was this that led me to start trawling around on the ultimately disappointing quest to see if Cheese actually existed, or was a made-up 'staffer'. I don't suppose you could make it up.
Unless you work in Google's offices, where most of the walls seem to be working white boards (I'd still be reluctant to write anywhere in case they weren't), it would be quite handy to have a portable feature for recording brainstorms.
I recall a meeting during which our department bandied around some fairly ridiculous initial ideas for a Media Owner competition. Thanks to our quick-thinking boss, who faithfully recorded some of the rubbish that was suggested (a lot by me) and then took a snap of the board, we were able to capture all the ideas, develop them and ultimately win the competition.
You can now potentially cut out the middleman, however, using Dabbleboard, a web-based whiteboard which converts free-hand shapes to proper shapes that can have text inserted, and allows archiving and sharing of files.
There is more of a guide to the application, which is currently in Beta, here. I wish I could say the examples here were mine, but they aren't. Sorry.
I wasn't planning on using this blog to plagiarise other people, but I've just come across one of the most amazing phenomena on Neil Perkins' Blog and I want to share it:
Face Your Pockets is the name, sticking your face in the middle of a scanner, surrounded by the contents of your pockets, is the game.
Having just returned from seeing the Glasgow School of Art Degree Show over the weekend, which featured all manner of delights to open the eyes of anyone rooted in the mainstream as I am, the concept of such a simple but artistically effective form of popular and accessible art seems brilliant.
I'm going to make sure to set up my printer/scanner at home that's been sitting there in the box since Christmas and have a go at 'facing my own pockets', which sounds like an excellent euphamism for 'having a long hard look at yourself'.
