AS IF NOTHING REALLY MATTERS: The March of the SleeperblokeZombies continues, as Catatonia without Cerys continue to pile up songs and promise to carry on, carry on. While you wish them luck, and acknowledge that they were always a great band musically as well as vocally, you can't help feel that this is on a par with the Duchovny less X Files - something sorely missing indeed.
This could be a case for Scully and that other bloke - Cerys, of course, has sung with Tom Jones

THREE LIONS ON MY CARDIGAN: Blimey, I'd thought the Cardigans had split up or gone into some sort of suspended solo-project hell, but The Sun seem convinced they're going to do the England World Cup song this year. On the grounds that Sven Goran is Swedish, and so are they. And Abba aren't going any more.
And the Sun couldn't probably think of any other Swedish bands...
It'll be a cover of my favourite game, of course... - "has sung with Tom Jones" - for shame, Nina...

BYE, BYE: Mariah Carey dropped. Really, this time. It seems that what EMI must have objected to when the stories that she'd been given $25m to piss off out the offices and not deliver any more bikini clad drivel appeared was that they undervalued the amount that they really, really wanted to see the back of her by $3m
BBC reports - now, lets try to find celine dion...

NEVER MIND THE BUZZGOTHS: One of Fields of the Neff was on the line-up on Never Mind... last night, although they looked more like a trip to a Clint Eastwood lookalike convention, and, naturally, it's got all the cybergoths slightly over-excited, as Slashgoth shows.

SIMPLY YEARS AHEAD: An unlikely opponent of the new CDs that you can't play on PCs ("copy protected", as the labels would have it) has emerged in the form of Philips. The Dutch company that invented the format, and still jeaously guards the rules, wants companies who use the copy protection to mark their products with a Poison symbol, and to refrain from using the "Compact Disc" logo. Seems they're upset that the crappy quality of the secure CDs is in danger of undermining trust in the format, and they want it made clear that a CD which won't spin and sing in a CD tray ain't no CD at all. Meanwhile, further opposition to the blocking of copies from CDs is being mounted under 'fair use' rules - because, of course, the giant padlock doesn't only stop pirates from pirating, but people who've paid money for a CD converting it to MP3, say, for their own use. The case is even dodgier for record companies in those countries where they successfully lobied for a surcharge on blank recordable media to reward them for copies made.
Register reports - but has anyone merely tried taping the Natalie Imbroogywoogy track, and ripping the MP3 from that?

... and apparently after her first book come sout Lousie Wener is planning on writing a second about a big chart-rigging scandal. Aha, that'd be how Sleeper records kept getting as high as number 34...

George Harrisson replaces Aaliyah at number one, first time that one corpse has unseated another at the top of the singles chart. Quick, someone put a disco beat on Ernie and rush relase it... go on...