It’s been a while.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that Kings of Leon are probably the most popular band in quote un-quote rock and roll today. Yes, I suppose there is Muse, with their legions of fans that make gigs seem like science-fiction conventions and ability to sell out Wembley, and U2, with their SUPER MASSIVE MEGA GIGS that still probably don’t make Bono feel any better about his tiny little height, but I think I can name three words will probably trump that. Three words that make the old faithful bunch of KOL fans shudder with a saddening sense of regret, but arguably the three most important words in the Followill’s lives thus far nonetheless. They are, of course, Sex on Fire.

When I first heard Red Morning Light on the FIFA 2002 soundtrack, I could never have imagined that these scruffy, odd-looking Americans would release a song that not only gets to number one in the UK singles chart, but also regular playtime in most popular club nights that don’t solely play dubstep or are full of intimidating African sexual predators. To be fair, when I first heard Sex on Fire, I don’t think I could ever have imagined that these slightly more preened, tight-jeaned Americans would release a song that not only gets to number one in the UK singles chart, but also gets regular playtime in most popular club nights that don’t solely play dubstep or are full of intimidating African sexual predators. They are now a band of colossal proportions, as their multiple festival headline slots and upcoming £50-a-pop arena tour would suggest. As Bob Dylan once sang; the times, they are a-changin’ – though on reflection, that was about the civil rights movement, which is probably more important than the now almost fashionable view  of disliking the mainstream success of a once rather indie little band. Moving on.

I know many people fail to see why other people get so annoyed at what they often cite as “the success of one of your favourite bands” (though it’s not quite that), but I guess seeing this band burning in a white hot ball of Radio 1 success, fawned on by people who didn’t even know they existed five years ago (and even if they did, would have probably classed them as ‘grebs’) is a bit like walking in on your mate [who you don’t really like that much] wanking over a picture of your girlfriend. The material’s ruined for you now, and it all just feels very wrong. I don’t have a massive problem with them being so famous, or even the new fanbase of cultureless idiots who complain when they play Trani live and think Caleb “looks so much cuter with short hair”. Ok perhaps I do have a problem with the second one. I can’t deny I didn’t die a little inside when moronic dick-jockey Greg James referred to Charmer as ‘old school Kings of Leon.’ I can’t believe the BBC actually pay him, I bet his facebook profile picture is him and Taio Cruz doing the peace sign together in his studio. What a stupid little tampon he is. I suppose the problem with releasing two near-perfect albums in a row is people will always expect a third one and that’s quite a burden to carry.

Kings of Leon do deserve every bit of success that came to them with the release of Only by the Night; you can’t deny that they haven’t worked their collective bollocks off to get there - with the forthcoming Come Around Sundown being their fifth record in seven years, and you can’t argue with that kind of output – it’s just always a bit of a shame when their most well received (in terms of moneymaking capabilities at least) album is their worst. It’s by no means a big steaming pile of mainstream poo; at times it is briefly majestic, with the soaring brilliance of closer Cold Desert an exemplary highlight, and I’ll be the first to admit when I first heard a snippet of Use Somebody, I proclaimed it would be the best song they’ve ever released. I still maintain that it’s a fucking good song, however I’m sure most of you will have heard it now more times that you’ve had wanks, though I’m sure you have yet to find experimental new ways of keeping up the enjoyment levels of listening to it.

I’ve been listening to a lot of KOL of late to try and get to the bottom of the big divide, and of course it all just depends on taste; for me, Kings of Leon were about Caleb’s squawk, about the fuzzy guitars, the sheer optimism in the sound of the likes of California Waiting and The Bucket – not the over produced, reverb-laden croonings that oft appeared on Only by the Night. Indeed, the last real flash of testosterone we saw from Kings of Leon was in the tenacious trio of McFearless/Black Thumbnail/My Party on Because of the Times, and while they did encompass some of the veracity seen frequently on the first two records, they weren’t really about anything and seemed a little fuzzy for fuzzy’s sake. It would appear that they had perhaps lost faith in thrashing around like Tennessee adolescents – or they saw that they were never going to earn megabucks from it. When you compare Only by the Night’s 17 to Aha Shake’s Slow Night, So Long, Caleb is in fact singing about the same thing… however the feeble crooning of “ooh she’s only seventeeeen” is characterless and meagre compared to the drawl of “she’s seventeen but I done went and plum-fawgawt it” that kicks off Aha Shake Heartbreak with such cock-swinging charm. If a friend changed quite so dramatically, people would have no qualms in your ill feeling towards them – so why should it be any different with a band? It’s surely not as elitist as many make out.

And so, it was with fairly low hopes, that I received Come Around Sundown just over a week ago. I needn’t have been so pessimistic.  While they haven’t succeeded in producing that third masterpiece, I think they’ve at least produced if not their third best record to date then at least joint-third. It takes a while to get into, but what at first seems a little unadventurous and tame reveals itself as a varied, slow-burning record, mixing in that mucky old Tennessee sound with the Manhattan gleam that tended to suffocate OBTN, and coming out with an album that could well appease the radio one dwelling masses and indie sceptics alike. Of course, it won’t succeed in bringing back the entire original fanbase; many won’t give it a proper listen (NME) and lots will probably just not like it very much, and that’s understandable. It’s by no means an album that sounds like a band eating cigarettes, bathing in whiskey and singing about blowjobs… but then again it’s certainly not the Jonas Brothers either.

Variation is key for KOL here. It’s clear many people didn’t want an album full of reverb-laden, stadium-striving love songs, and I think it’s clear that they didn’t particularly want to record one either. From the sultry, bassy tones of opener The End to the howling desperation of closer Pickup Truck, and from Back Down South’s bluesy Nashville waltz to the bone-rattling stomp of No Money, Come Around Sundown visits many stops along metaphorical the train journey of the Kings’ career. They even take the overproduced stations of OBTN and make them actually rather good, injecting melodies akin to the likes of old classics Joe’s Head and Wicker Chair that their fourth record lacked in so many places. Pyro, with its delicate yet rousing chorus of “I won’t ever be a cornerstone” is a standout moment for the shinier side of the Followills, whilst the lyric which perhaps most sums up this record is found amongst the echoing chambers of The Face - and though Caleb’s compromise of “you give up New York, I’ll give you Tennessee” is almost definitely about some woman or other, you can draw many parallels between this and the mix of old and new age features of their sound on the album.

It’s by no means a perfect record – in fact it could do without the rather boring and/or annoying The Immortals, Mary and Beach Side – but it’s pretty bloody good. Caleb’s back to his [at times] incomprehensibly drawling best (I still can’t tell if he’s singing “walks my ass home” or “wants my asshole” in the second verse Mi Amigo – though I am slightly inclined to think it’s the latter, seeing as the line that precedes it has the words “big ol’ dick” in it), fleetingly showing shades of the Young Man who once sang about his loins more frequently than his heart. I still maintain that you’d be hard pushed to find a more haunting vocalist (bar Justin Vernon and, in a different way, perhaps Matt Berninger) in America today.

While they probably lost the title of The Best and Most Respected Band in North America (left for The National and Arcade Fire to fight over), there’s no doubt that they’re still the biggest – and if they continue to release albums of this quality (as opposed to, as NME have quite wrongly referred to this album as, ‘drive time FM’-style records) I’m sure they’ll climb steadily back up the ladder of respect. Who knows, they might even shed some of their All Saints-wearing, disposable new fanbase along the way…  Doesn’t Jason DeRulo have a new album out soon or something?

A lot’s been happening, a lot except for me doing any form of web-logging my life… Probably cause I’ve ran out of adjectives. What do you do when you run out of words? Make up sounds, of course. Sounds like BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. or  VVVVVVVVOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. or maybe MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

[Cue smooth link from intro to paragraph one] It doesn’t matter how you spell the Vuvuzela horn sound, it doesn’t make the World Cup any less awesome. Some people say they’ve ruined the tournament and are just plain annoying, but it would take, I dunno, the death of my grand daughter to ruin the greatest sports even in the world for me. Not even Fabio Capello’s leathery ball bag face or ITV’s terrible coverage and fawning wankery over the African teams. Not even the amount of times the word ‘efficient’ is used to described Germany’s football. Not even England being really shit. Ok, the last one did ruin it a little bit, but it’s nice to watch the rest without having to worry about how poorly our nation is going to do in the next match. I just feel sorry for the manufacturers of St. George’s flags, I bet they made shitloads more due to the influx of ‘national pride’, expecting the lads to bring the trophy home and turn the whole country into one big, boring, fuck off red cross on white, and are now praying for us all to really get behind Jenson Button in the F1 by flying the flag from every orifice. It’s a shame it didn’t rain in England last Monday, because a load of lonely, soggy St. George flags would have looked quite poetic. As it is, everyone was just sunburnt and pissed off, like the aftermath of an announcement at Malaga International Airport saying the flight to Stansted has been delayed by 5 hours.

In a way, I was a little glad at England’s pathetic exit at the hands of Germany - perhaps our fans will stop harking back to the apparent glory days when we won the World Cup and the RAF was more formidable than a Ozil-led counter attack, realise that actually our national team is full of selfish arseholes who we don’t even like, and that the Germans really don’t give a fuck about this so-called rivalry. They’re not particularly happy that Hitler chose their nation to fight the Brits and kill Jews under, and besides, they’re too busy hating Holland, a country with a decent national team, to care anyway. The chants of ‘You dirty fucking Germans’, ‘There were five German bombers in the air’ (apparently hooligans can’t pronounce Die Luftwaffe) and pictures of fans dressed as Roundheads just prove how much the majority of our deluded fans live in the past. Yeah, we won a war 70 years ago, but that doesn’t make us any less shit a football team. I doubt chants of “you dirty fucking Arabs” or “there were 5 paki bombers on the tube” would have been quite as acceptable against Algeria, but then I guess we haven’t won any Middle Eastern conflicts yet so I suppose we don’t have a natural right to be racist to people our mighty armed forces have yet to defeat. Hmm.

Just ahead of the Fatherland’s crushing dominance over Argentina (another country we’re allowed to be racist to - YEAH TAKE THAT 4-0 DRUBBING YOU POORLY ARMED SOUTH AMERICAN BASTARDS, AT LEAST WE SCORED ONE, UNLIKE YOU IN THE FALKLANDS WHICH WE BEAT YOU IN, REMEMBER? BRITANNIA STILL RULES THE WAVES OFF THE COAST OF YOUR SHIT COUNTRY), Mesut Ozil’s volley against Ghana, Fabio Quagliarella’s divine chip against Slovakia and when Mick McCarthy said about a Nigerian player “I can’t pronounce that so I’ll just call him by his number”, my favourite moment of this wonderful tournament has to be the Quarter Final of Ghana vs. Uruguay. So many brilliant moments to talk about came from this game, firstly the absolutely priceless reaction from the Ghanaian fan park when Forlan equalised with his wonderstrike. The looks of shock are hilarious, it’s almost as if they’re watching Fight Club and they’ve just realised that Tyler Durden is just an imaginary character or something. The angry blow of the Vuvu is the best bit, brilliant anger portrayed through a meek trumpet.

If this wasn’t enough, we had literally the most dramatic end to extra time I can ever remember - the Uruguayan strike Luis Suarez being sent off in the dying seconds for saving a goal-bound header on the line with his hands, followed by Ghanaian star striker Asamoah Gyan smashing the resulting penalty against the bar and meaning the game would go to penalties, which Ghana then lost and were dumped out of the World Cup - the winning penalty audaciously chipped down the middle by Uruguay’s Abreu. Cool as fuck. They showed the Ghanaian reaction to this too, but it wasn’t that funny ‘cause I just felt so sorry for them; it’s never nice to see a load of people crying (unless they’re crying because we beat them in a war, of course) - especially the understandably inconsolable Gyan, who stumbled around the pitch crying his retinas out. It was like watching Comic Relief. Sad stuff emotionally, though in terms of excitement and drama, it was fucking brilliant. However if I was from Ghana and saw Suarez being lifted on his teammates’ shoulders after he’d cheated my team out of the World Cup, I would definitely throw my Vuvuzela at the TV, if I had either of them. To be fair, that save is definitely more important than all of his goals put together so far, so fair play to the lad.

Anyway, I’ve probably written all I can about this wonderful tournament for one night. I’m relishing the prospect of watching the Armada getting battered by the Nazis, they’re about as good at playing football as they are at planning naval attacks in the 16th century. To end, in all seriousness, I hope Miroslav Klose levels Ronaldo’s record of 15 World Cup goals, as he really does deserves it - the finest European striker of a generation, and one that doesn’t dive or cheat all over the place, just plays beautifully simple football. Some might even call it efficient…

So, finally free from the embrace of the comforting arms of free education, one might find it appropriate to celebrate. Couple this with the excellent timing of Nottingham’s finest hour (or fifteen) in the world of entertainment, and you’ve got Dot to Dot 2010, which fell conveniently on Sunday, two days after the end of college.

I’d like to give an in depth report of the whole day, but frankly I can’t quite remember it all, neither do I have enough adjectives stored in my brain, and I’d like to do Los Campesinos! some justice, without having to compare them to some sort of train collision or something similarly silly. So, I’ll give notable mentions to the bands I saw that made it socially acceptable to be drinking at such an early point in the day: in the Basement - New Education, with their Rifles-y twang, made an entertaining start to the proceedings, followed by the rather stylish Crookes at Rock City and baritonal Chapel Club in Trent Uni’s Main Hall. After that I viewed some embarrassingly-uniformed bunch of guys from LA called Fol Chen who I somehow forgot to listen to, but seemed nice people nonetheless.

Next up were Kendal’s Wild Beasts, who had never previously impressed me until a few months ago when I heard All The King’s Men on Jools Holland and realised frontman Hayden had got rid of his turtleneck-and-peadotache combination and become awesome all of a sudden. I’d seen them supporting Jack Penate and rather strangely in a shed with about 10 other people at Underage festival in 2008, but their quasi-falsetto vocals never really washed with my young ears, so I was pretty excited to see them on the bill and at Rock City, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. With the nice warming combination of an empty stomach and a few bevvies I was limbering up nicely for a little dance and they duly stepped up to the plate for me and a couple of thousand others in a packed City main hall. I don’t want to bog this down with too much description, and I’ll try not to, so all I’ll say for now is they provided four early contenders for Song of The Day; Hooting and Howling, All The King’s Men, Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants and We Still Got The Taste Dancin’ On Our Tongues all highlighting Wild Beasts’ unbelievable talent - fuck me, can they sing. 

A tough act to follow, but followed they were, by New York duo (though threesome in live form) Beach House. I’m not such a big fan that I can recognise their songs by name - partly because many sound fairly similar - and this wasn’t aided by my mildly inebriated fixation with their rather enchanting lead singer, but they were very enjoyable, and I helped with backing vocals from the warm confines of the crowd for the superb Zebra (the one I can name).

Following this was a brief Uni express stop (one simply can’t afford £3+ pints all day!) before returning back to Trent Uni to see my favourite band of the moment (bar The National) - the wonderful Los Campesinos! For some reason or other, they keep missing Nottingham off their tours, which I have found to be very annoying, so it felt good to be finally seeing them after a fair few years of liking them, a firm choice over previous favourite band of mine, Mystery Jets who were on over at Rock City. A good choice all round it seems, as MJs failed to play a single song from their brilliant debut, and as well as this, Los Camp absolutely fucking nailed it. No signs of leaving their past behind, or not playing the fan favourites here; LC! stormed through an hour long set peppered with the best from all three albums (or both albums and a choice few from the “Extended EP”, for the LC! pedants out there). Keeping onstage banter to a minimum due to the ever-ticking second hand of the schedule clock, Gareth and his band of merry men and women treated a mixed crowd to old classics such as Death to Los Campesinos! (featuring the always enjoyable shouts of “SUGAR!” during the chorus) and My Year In Lists (featuring the always enjoyable lyric of “nothing says I miss you quite like poetry carved in your door with a stanley knife”), as well as new, er, classics, such as the delightfully lugubrious The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future among a fair few more from their excellent new record. I could keep on about how marvellous each track was and how all of them could have made it on to the songs of the day list (and they really could), but I won’t. I’ll just mention a couple more. With fifteen or so minutes remaining, Gareth signaled “only hits from now on, we promise”, and out came We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed (to which I almost shredded my vocal chords screaming along to the rousing denouement of “I hope my heart goes first”) You, Me, Dancing! (to which I danced around shirtless underneath my denim jacket - fashion faux pas go out of the window for songs this good in rooms this hot) and Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks (to which Gareth jumped into the crowd and I got a jolly nice picture). Dreadfully enjoyable stuff, I think I may have muttered in a drunken stupor that it was one of the best sets I’ve ever seen, and though maybe hyperbole shouldn’t have stretched that far, it was pretty fucking good.

No rest for the wicked they say, and rest I did not - straight off to the Basement to see the rather less twee Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster power through a very loud and impressive set. The whole event seemed a bit animalistic as the shaggy haired (and yet rather dashingly handsome) frontman Guy Knight - not the most fitting name for the singer of a garage punk band, I know - prowled the stage whilst his band thrashed out 3 minute bursts of raucous energy and good looking punk girls seemed to be getting their faces sucked every few minutes amongst the melee of the mosh pit. One girl was even lowered to the floor for a spot of heavy necking - in my mind not only unhygienic but very dangerous, though in fairness she was a looker and she didn’t say no. It felt like we were minutes away from someone taking it too far and we were going to have to use the word “fingered” to recount the story to lots of people later that night. Thankfully/unfortunately, depending on your love of fingerbanging action, Eighties Matchbox finished just before we were all covered in someone else’s cum in a whirlwind of shouting and tinnitus, adding the guttural Celebrate Your Mother to the top songs list. Screaming along to a song about incest may not be particularly socially acceptable, but you’ve got to say there’s not many situations in life when you can scream “I wanna fuck your mother” at the top of your already damaged voice and no one will look at you strangely, because someone’s pretty much getting fucked on the sticky floor. Brillo pads.

A little wearier as the time moves on, I reach Stealth to see the final band of the night/morning - Scandinavian electro outfit Casiokids. At this point in the morning, after 13 hours of dancing and drinking with very little eating, it’s almost a dance-yourself-awake project, and it pretty much worked, managing to persuade myself not to get a taxi home quite yet, and see how much longer I can last. Casiokids were very entertaining, sort of like a Danish Hot Chip, and it was all worth it for their last two tracks, complete with coma-inducing synthesisers, Finn Bikkjen and Fot i Hose (just don’t ask me to pronounce them). The night was almost over - time for a bit of a dance to Doorly, but after a while the novelty of this dubstep lark (which most of the time I find sounds like a keyboard eating decent music, ‘wob wob wob’ with every gargantuan electronic chew) appears to wear off, unsurprisingly along with any intoxicating substance, and left me tired and desperately wanting my bed. A lift home from a friend’s mother at 4am may strip me of any vague notion of being rock and roll, but I couldn’t care less as it meant avoiding a freezing walk home and reaching the squishy nirvana of my bed for some very well deserved sleep.

Stepping away from my brief furrow into the depressing world of politics, I dragged my exhausted body to Trent Uni on Friday night to see the ever-progressive Oxford quintet Foals on the eve of the release of their second record Total Life Forever (do you get the title pun now? I’m so sorry). Having previously seen the band twice; once at Rock City and once at Underage festival - both particularly enjoyable performances - I had fairly high hopes for the gig. I say only ‘fairly’, mainly due to the venue, which tends to be a temperamental venue shall I say; from an almost standstill crowd for Jack Penate to a raucous one for The Courteeners and a slightly subdued Mystery Jets audience, as well as a potentially dangerously slippy canteen floor, it’s hard to know what you’re going to get with Trent Uni. You could get very annoyed standing still when all you really want to be is a sweaty mess, or you could be flat on your arse with lairy lads falling on top of you whilst thinking ‘is that smell piss or cider?’, it’s quite the lottery.

So, when Foals started with the title track from the new album and barely anyone moved, I was making side glances around the largely check-shirted crowd and cursing my luck. What I hadn’t realised was the album was yet to be released so many of these people had clean consciences and had not downloaded the album, and sure enough, mere seconds into the intro of Cassius, I found myself covered in cider amongst a sea of erupting humans. It’s tiring, this pogoing lark. They power through a set just over an hour long, peppered with hits old and new; formidable TLF opener Blue Blood sounds even better live its steady build up and pumping build up and new single This Orient highlights the band’s real musical skill, whilst Red Socks Pugie sounds as fresh as ever and keeps the crowd in glorious all singing all jumping all sweating raptures, but it’s the ethereal seven-minute epic Spanish Sahara that really catapults Foals from a fun live band to a seriously good one. Starting with delicate falsetto from (the surprisingly ripped) Yannis that builds and builds (and is almost ruined by cretinous clapping from the back of the audience) and climaxes in an earth-shattering, spine-tingling swirl of celestial beauty, sheathing the audience in a real velvety envelope of a musical orgasm… If God were to treat a keyboard to seven minutes of beardy pleasure, it might well sound like this.

They finish with old fan favourite Two Steps, Twice, another typically frenetic live number that baits the exhausted audience like hungry bears (or at least that’s what it feels like in the rather annoying ‘circle pit’) with the seemingly endless chants of ‘ba ba daa, ba ba daaa’ before releasing yet another delirium-inducing chorus that no-one knows the words to - something about dubstep? I don’t know… - and leaving me drained and sodden like hair stuck in the plughole. You’ve got to say it’s a bit more enjoyable than having BBC News constantly on in the hope of a positive announcement, even if Nick Robinson’s little face is rather amusing.

—————————————————————————————————————-

Setlist:

Total Life Forever
Cassius
Olympic Airways
Blue Blood
This Orient
Balloons
Miami
Spanish Sahara
Red Socks Pugie
Electric Bloom
————————-
The French Open
Two Steps, Twice

Disclaimer: the following features sickening amounts of cynicism, bias, hate, irrationality and a bit of bad language. SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE, VOTING PUBLIC?

In the aftermath of last night’s election, with the lonely Labour-supporting signs still standing in resilience on the fences of houses down the road, all my sleep deprived brain can do is feel a little deflated by it all. With Nick Clegg on the verge of betraying everything his party stands for by bending over and taking a feeble wad of power-jism up his arse from Dave and the majority of England seemingly inhabited by blue blooded cunts, I’m perplexed, and no number of mind-blowing Jeremy Vine animations can make me feel better about the way England lit up so blue last night. I can’t believe people could be so deluded.

I’m not going to kid myself and say Gordon Brown has been the best prime minister in our history, nor has the Labour regime proved too popular, BUT IT’S NOT BEEN THAT BAD FOR FUCK’S SAKE. I watch the East Midlands news and it really is like being repeatedly hit over the head with a fucking dead fox, I honestly never thought people were so impressionable… It’s just lamentable the way the general public have been attracted to the word CHANGE like a moth to the shine from David Cameron’s forehead.

And that’s just it, I can’t bare that these greedy, elitist bastards have been given at least partial power (the way it stands) by the moronic British public. And in some cases, it’s down to the selfishness of the Liberal vote. I know people will say ‘Oh we’ve got a right to vote for who we want’ and yeah they do have a point, but in these marginal seats in a general election against a Tory threat, it comes to a point when you have to stop being a trend-following idiot and vote tactically for god’s sake. I know I sound like an irrational Brownite, and I know it’s a sad indictment of the voting system - and we may not have this problem again - but it’s just annoying that people were so easily conned by false promises from Liberal candidates with no chance of winning. In Broxtowe the Liberal swing from Labour was 0.8% and the Tories won with an 0.7% majority. So it goes.

I find some solace in the fact that not the whole of the UK (or Scotland, Wales & NI in other words) were not fooled enough to sentence us to a Tory majority, but in many ways it feels worse for me… There’s no joyous flag waving romp to 10 Downing Street for me to sneer at, no pompous victory speech to listen to with a certain cathartic desperation, just this waiting game and impending sense of doom. I think it’s the fact of the Tories not getting a majority that means Labour really could have won this election that really feels like a kick in the balls. Of course it’s not over yet and we could yet see either Brown’s offer of a referendum or Clegg’s realisation of siding with the Tories would be party suicide wing it for a LibLab coalition, but with the knowledge of Cameron and Clegg having a nice chat on the phone looming over me as I write, I can’t help but feel somewhat downbeat. Though, as Grace famously sang in 1995; it’s not over yet.

Well it’s May the third and isn’t it awfully close to the final of Election Fever 2010? I hope Graham Norton presents it the results show, and at the end Gordon Brown has to give the key to 10 Downing Street to Andrew Lloyd-Webber as he sits in his throne, before being winched across the studio as Clegg and Cameron wave him off wearing twee little gingham dresses. It’s a really tough call for who I want to win; I mean Cameron’s a great performer, but then I do love an underdog, and I feel Clegg has really captured the nation with his little cute face and hand in his pocket… He’s like a white Obama, isn’t he? Whatever happens, I’ll be glad to see that jowly, glass-eyed Uggo miss out on the top prize. He’s basically completely copied Susan Boyle - we’ve seen the Scottish freakshow routine before Gordo, and it made us feel pretty sick the first time around.

Ho ho ho, only joking. ‘What larks!, I hear you cry.

Of course, the election is a lot more important than comparing it with Lloyd-Webber’s deeply odd new show Over The Rainbow, though it must be said it’s a very easy one to make. It’s hard to say whether this seemingly new widespread interest in politics from the Youth Of Today, myself included, will have a positive effect on the General Election 2010 and indeed General Elections to come… I do tend to feel it has become a bit of a popularity contest, one that Nick Clegg is winning on account of him having the most generic face, neither ruddy and shiny or sullen and scrotlike, and him offering “change” in a more trustworthy tone than Mr. Cameron. I couldn’t help but cringe upon seeing the Facebook group ‘We got Rage to #1, we can get Nick Clegg to PM’. Still, it’s nice that they have received a lot of new found support, and at least these first time voters who don’t want Labour are Lib Dem voters and not cunts, or rather Conservatives, as they prefer to be called. Still, I can’t help but think Nick Clegg could have said what Brown said in the past two debates and still received the same amount of support in the polls. Anything to stop a Tory landslide isn’t too bad though, I guess.

The thing is, it may just work out into helping Cameron and his party of bastards to slither past the post with a tiny majority, due to Lib Dem candidates saying ‘It’s not a wasted vote!’, when really in many constituencies, it definitely is. It makes a mockery of the voting system but oh well; tactical voting is really the only thing bar a video of a leather-clad Dave being dominated by Sam surfacing, or him being caught on mic using the phrase ‘batty boys’ or ‘mongospastics’, that will keep them out of office. Here’s a nice website that may help.

The prospect of a Tory government, for me, is a little bit like the prospect of your girlfriend getting back with her ex-boyfriend… you weren’t around the first time, but you’ve heard a lot of bad things, and the thought of him (in this instance representing the Conservatives) getting his grubby hands all over her (in this instance representing the United Kingdom) is deeply worrying and makes you feel a little bit sick. I really hope old Big Dave, with his vacuous statements, big shiny face and his team of clueless cronies don’t get in on Thursday, but being a habitual pessimist I fear he might well do. At least there’s the prospect of him plunging us deeper into recession and huge public distrust causing the death of the Conservatives once and for all, but really that’s like falling over in a big mountain of dog shit and thinking ‘at least I can get a new coat now…’

I feel a sad day has passed in the world of television. Without wanting to sound for a BNP-voting bigot or a Daily Mail columnist, it is sad because Comedy Central caved in to extremist Muslim pressure, and heavily censored the 201st episode of South Park to rid it of all visual and audible traces of the prophet Muhammad. Now, you might be inclined to think, that due to the old furore over the Danish cartoonist depicting Islam’s favourite son which sparked worldwide outcry from angry Muslims the world over, as well as the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who made a film (rightly) about the oppression of women in Islamic states, Comedy Central were right to censor the episode - it’s a tricky decision indeed, no one wants to hounded by a gang of angry Muslims; they tend to be pretty unpredictable. Paraphrasing from a General Studies exam guide, I guess you’ve got to look at all the factors involved to come to a reasoned decision.

It’s not the first time South Park have taken the prickly subject of Muhammad on and been censored - in April 2006 Comedy Central censored the episodes Cartoon Wars Parts I and II, which were a satire on the Danish cartoon scandal and were going to feature The Muslim Jesus, replacing his image with a big black box saying CENSORED. Four years on, and South Park air their celebratory 200th episode in typical fashion. It features all the celebrities they’ve ever pissed off; including Kanye West, Paris Hilton, The Pope, Oprah, Bono and most importantly Tom Cruise, who tried to sue creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker over claims about his sexuality as well as ridiculing his religion, Scientology, in the episode Trapped In The Closet. Cruise decides he is sick of being the butt of jokes in South Park after Stan calls him a “fudge packer” upon seeing him working in a fudge packing factory, and along with his celeb friends, aims to extract the ‘goo’ inside Muhammad that makes him seemingly immune to ridicule. O, satire.

I’m keen to point out that episode 200 featured a coke-snorting Buddha, a porn-watching Jesus, as well as Muhammad in a bear suit. Now, I may have already given away the answer to this, but can you guess who took offense? Did it cheese the Dalai Lama right off? Did it cause the Pope to shake his fist angrily? No, no it did not (though I imagine he’s got enough on his plate at the moment without having to watch futile cartoons - unless it’s being used for Altar Boy bait, of course). Now, I’m not going to claim some high Ayatollah has got the hump over this because that would be a lie, however New York-based Islamopedants “Revolution Muslim” have. Personally, I think they probably need to work out the basics of syntax and make their name a bit snappier before they start offering Fatwas left right and centre. Alas, this is what they did, and posting on their internet message board (which I can’t imagine to be a barrel of laughs for some reason. Do you think they have a ‘For The Lads’ section?), they issued a threat to South Park’s creators suggesting they will suffer the same fate of Van Gogh, and not in the half an ear way. It didn’t particularly phase Stone & Parker, and last week they delivered the sequel to 200 to the offices of Comedy Central, ready for airing the next day, featuring the subject of the Proph’ once more. Sadly, Comedy Central took it upon themselves to self censor, and bleeped out every mention of the M word, as well as Kyle’s customary moral speech at the end of the episode, which, ironically, was apparently about standing up to intimidation.

In a cartoon room full of celebrities and religious figureheads of all races, all satirised to the point of insult on many occasions, it was the least maligned Muhammad who was exempt from criticism, from anything. And why? Because a minuscule portion representing a religion many people fear spoke up about it. I’m not looking to directly offend anyone (not least those Krazy Islamic X-Tremists), but sometimes I feel people need to lighten up. Yes, there is the undeniable fact of sacrilege and blasphemy, but it’s not just towards Islam. Jesus presented a chat show on previous episode of South Park, in one episode the Pope Benedict said the words “a chick bleeding out her vagina is no miracle. Chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time.” Admittedly, the Catholics weren’t too pleased with that bit, but an apology was enough for them,which is nice and civilised. Perhaps if there was nicely coloured stainglass windows of the hallowed Prophet in their places of holy worship, they might be inclinded to chill out a bit more. The mere fact that these people (Revolution Muslim) see a blight of the sacrilegious faith of Islam as a crime punishable by death suggests they’re living in the fucking dark ages, let alone their attitudes to women and homosexuality.

It is sad that Comedy Central are sending out a message saying in essence, “Yes, we are scared of getting bombed, so we won’t challenge that and we’ll just carry on with kneeling to your demands.” I fail to see how succumbing to pressure is the best way to deal with a problem - if anything, in making a big deal of it by censoring it only elevates the status of the problem and in doing so heightens the fear. It’s a shame, because it really wasn’t done in a malicious way - it was an episode that was funny as well as being a really very astute criticism of the hypocrisy of it all. But what can you do, eh? Unfortunately, so it would seem, very little. Something to think about though…