Eurovision 2017: Already falling to pieces

To think we were all alarmed when Ukraine won Eurovision this year - would it make things tricky having them host?

We were worrying over nothing, I'm sure.

It'll all be going swimmingly:

It was supposed to be Eurovision's big announcement about exactly where next year's contest will be, but it went a bit wrong.

The 2017 competition is in Ukraine but the host city is yet to be decided.

Fans were told it would be revealed on Youtube Live at 2pm, Thursday, but it didn't happen.

Eurovision organisers said they needed to cancel until further notice and there was no immediate explanation as to what was going on.

So, there's no reason to worry at all. They'll come up with somewhere, I'm sure. I'm sure.

Everytime I turned on the radio, there was somebody else, singing a song about the two of us

Courtney Love believes that most of the songs written in the 1990s were about Courtney Love:

“I remember I used to date this movie star in the ‘90s and we were listening to KROQ,” she continued. “Of six songs in a row, five of them were about me. I told him that, and he was, ‘No, they aren’t!’ I was, ‘Yeah, they are. I dated every one of those guys, dude.’ He was like, ‘You’re such a slut!’”

You'd hope at this point that Courtney kicked the "movie star" in the nuts at the suggestion that having had a lot of songs written about her was "slutty"; the only thing you can really say it proves is that Love has a type.

But this is the 1990s, which wasn't the happiest of times for Courtney, so it's possible she's misremembering the story, or - perhaps more plausibly - that she's remembering something she thought happened. It's possible she was playing a Hole CD when this happened rather than listening to the radio.

Standon update

If you read the piece last week about how Standon Calling has somehow hit difficulties in returning money locked into its cashless wristbands, it probably won't surprise you to know that yesterday's promised deadline for returning the cash floated by again without a recharge.

Shrewed move, making the promise for the start of a Bank Holiday Weekend...

Labour: I pity the Foos

The Labour Party - increasingly the Freddie And The Dreamers of British politics - is having a torrid time of it at the moment, as it struggles to try and find a leader who can get through the day without making Theresa May giggle with joy.

In the midst of the current leadership election, the party is beset by the political version of Do You Remember Bagpuss - purges, entryism, jokes about Derek Hatton's suits. I'm half expecting to switch on the Ten O'Clock News to catch a package where Jamie Theakston, Kate Thornton and Stuart Maconie try to remember the lyrics to The Red Flag.

Ah, but purges are awkward things, and apparently a Labour Party member has been suspended for the oddest of reasons. At least according to the Daily Mail:

Labour has suspended a new member from the party and denied a vote in the leadership election after she posted about her love of rock band Foo Fighters on Facebook.

Catherine Starr, a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, was shocked to receive a letter from the party's General Secretary Iain McNicol telling her that following a vetting procedure she was being refused full membership as she had 'shared inappropriate content on Facebook'.

It said this related to a post on March 5 when she had shared a clip of Dave Grohl's band and wrote 'I f****** love the Foo Fighters'.

We should approach this all with a level of caution - we're living in a weird period of politics where you can't even trust an old man sitting in a vestibule, and this is the Daily Mail whose last honest piece of reporting on the Labour Party was "Kinnock resigns".

To be honest, it's not clear that Starr was suspended over a Foo Fighters post - the Mail does concede she'd been sharing other prime content that day:

That day Mrs Starr, 33, had also shared a friend's inoffensive poster about animal free cosmetics and a cartoon about veganism.

You know how much the Mail loves animal rights, right?

It is possible that the NEC has some ongoing beef with the Foo Fighters. Or maybe they see "Foo Fighters" as some sort of code for those who have recently joined the Labour Party for nefarious purposes.

It's much more likely that a party which has raised the bar on disarray to a level which would be offputting to Ekateríni Stefanídi have made an honest mis... okay, a dishonest mistake. They probably got the day of the offending post wrong, or the name of the offending poster wrong, or maybe confused the Foo Fighters and Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds.

The party hasn't responded to the story yet, but almost certainly will deny it, admit it but say the details are wrong, look crossly over its spectacles at us, and pretend to never have heard of the Foo Fighters. All at the same time.

Svenagliobit: Lou Pearlman

Here's a sentence that might bring you up short:

Figures from the pop music world have paid tribute to Lou Pearlman, the founder of Backstreet Boys and Nsync, who has died in prison aged 62 while serving a 25-year sentence for a $300m (£229m) fraud.

Yes, the death of Lou Pearlman, without whom we'd not have had Backstreet Boys on NSYNC, has got those who owe him everything trying to thank him while not upsetting those from whom he took everything.

The Nsync singer Lance Bass tweeted: “Word is that #LouPearlman has passed away. He might not have been a stand up businessman, but I wouldn’t be doing what I love today without his influence. RIP Lou.”

The US singer Aaron Carter also paid his respects on Twitter:

#LouPearlman my old manager died in prison... Rip Lou not the best business guy really at all but he did discover me karma is real

"Not the best business guy" is how you'd describe someone who tries to sell hamburgers at a vegan festival. Pearlman was a disgraceful con merchant - and even Bass' "not a stand-up business man" doesn't really come close to how huge his deception was:

According to the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, at the time of Pearlman’s investigation he owed his investors $96 million, but had less than $15,000 in the bank. The investigation found that Pearlman’s records neglected to show the more than $38 million he had withdrawn for himself and his companies.

You can see why Bass - one of the minority of people who shook Pearlman's hand and came away with the same number of fingers he started with - would be trying to look on the positive.

He ended up in such disgrace that when the Hollywood Review met with Pearlman in jail, you could hear Simon Cowell walking away backwards from a claim to kinship:

So yes, he is well aware of record-breaking pop juggernaut One Direction and boasts, "I know if I was out there, we'd give One Direction a run for their money." He reminisces about his "friendly rivalry" in the '90s with that band's puppeteer, Simon Cowell. (Responds a spokesperson for Cowell: "Simon hardly knows him. They were only ever introduced once, and there wasn't any kind of friendly rivalry.")

And that's before you even get to the rumours of sexual abuse, most deeply investigated by Vanity Fair in 2007:

In the November issue of Vanity Fair, Pearlman, for the first time publicly, is described by several former singers, aspiring singers and their parents as a lecher, who used the same deceptive charms to cop cheap feels off teenage boys as he did to allegedly bilk 1,400 investors out of more than $300 million.

Talking to The Hollywood Reporter from prison, Pearlman offered a watertight defence:

He adds that fellow inmates have come to know the real Pearlman through the years and never hassle him about the molestation charges: "They realize that none of that can be true."

'The guys on B Wing don't think I'm a nonce, so how could I be?'

The only trouble with this is that while he's saying he's not a sexual abuser, he also denies having run a ponzi scheme too. In fact, the only thing faster than Simon Cowell trying to distance himself from Pearlman is Pearlman trying to distance himself from the likes of Bernie Madoff. Pearlman insists that he was different because he had a way of making money to repay those he fleeced.

Which is puzzling, as a lot of people invested in a fleet of airplanes which turned out to exist solely as photos in a glossy booklet.

Lou Pearlman was 62. He'd been due to stay inside until 2029.