What’s happened to the Danny Baker podcasts?

20 Dec 2007: It promised so much, but ended up a right mess. Danny Baker and friends’ All Day Breakfast Show podcast and the fantastic Baker and Kelly football show, revived this autumn as a podcast, appear to have been killed off. The concept was where many people believed podcasting has been heading from the outset: it could have transformed radio, and indeed, I believe it still will – if not Danny, someone else will start to make this thing work widely. Producing a radio programme needn’t be an expensive business, and if you have a big enough audience paying a few pennies each per show, in theory you should be able to make a lot more money from selling your own podcast [...]

Brooooooooce at the O2: Magic.

20 Dec 2007: The man’s still got it. More importantly, the band have still got it. And best of all, after the sonic disaster of the night before, it turns out that the O2 Arena’s acoustics are actually pretty good – the sound started off reasonably and got steadily better. Sectioned-off areas in the building (due to construction works or the temporary ice rink, I’m not sure) meant that massive queues to get in formed, which were a masterpiece of confusion and irritation. They snaked round the building in loops and crossed each other at least once. A friend who left us in the queue, in order to visit the gents, couldn’t find us again afterwards, so he joined the queue at the [...]

10 Things About The Spice Girls’ London Gig

19 Dec 2007: They brought all their kiddies on stage at the end. Well, Mel C didn’t, obviously, because she doesn’t have any. Although she does have a Lexus RX400h because she was on the telly with Vicki B-H. And Geri didn’t have her kids either, I think. But Emma and Mel B had tiny ones with big green ear defenders. And Mel B had a larger one too. And Victoria had three famous ones, in “Posh” T-shirts. The smallest one cried. That Mel B, blimey, she’s been working out. How do they get to look that fit after just having had a baby? The sound at the O2 is absolutely terrible. I’ve never been to a gig where there’s audibly so much [...]

The Best Singles Ever.

6 Dec 2007: All time top tens are something which really get under your skin: once you’ve started thinking about it, you have to follow it through. So when someone at work asked us all to come up with our top tens, I had to do it, of course. After a couple of weeks of leaving it on the back burner, here’s a selection which I can guarantee nobody else in the world would come up with. Naturally it’ll be different by the time you read this. These things always are. 10. RACING IN THE STREET – Bruce Springsteen Definitely the live version which Broooce played at Crystal Palace a few years back and which I was privileged to see played. Given over [...]

Spice Girls asking for trouble

1 Dec 2007: So my tickets for The Spice Girls arrived today (yeah yeah, I’ve heard it all). Now, I realise that the postal system works largely on trust – we really do have to trust that the vast quantity of mail is delivered as expected, by honest people and all that. But as I understand it, tickets for The Spice Girls have been in some demand. So WTF are the promoters doing sending out the tickets in window envelopes with all those mugs showing through to the outside world? At Christmas time too, when the Royal Mail is presumably full of seasonal workers who can get up to no end of mischief and then disappear back into obscurity. Presumably to start selling [...]