Sam Smith still complaining about pop stars

You'll recall the last time we came across Sam Smith, he was telling Chaka Khan how terrible modern pop stars (apart from him) are.

He's still banging that particular drum, this time wailing to GQ about how awful they all are:

“I won’t name names, but I will never act like some of the current pop stars have acted toward me,” he tells GQ. “We can be friends, you know? We can. It’s not a competition. There’s space for all of us. There’s always space for good music.”

I don't know what 'good music' has to do with how people relate to Sam Smith; it's a bit like the Burger King complaining he can't find a space to open a branch in town suddenly talking about how there's always room for fine dining.

But why won't existing pop stars worshipembrace Smith as one of their own?

Maybe because he says things like this:

The explanation comes after he says he wants to be a pop star, “but I also don’t want to be a pop star.

“You know, I want to be the biggest star in the world, but I also want to maintain the soulfulness. I don’t want to lose my mind or my humor.”

"I want to maintain the soulfulness".

Interesting, by the way, to see a man who uses any public platform he stumbles onto to wail about how all the other kids are so mean insisting that he doesn't want to lose his senses of humour or perspective.

Noel Gallagher has some views

GQ has decided that Noel Gallagher is its Icon Of The Year.

No, I checked, it's definitely from this year. It's unclear what Noel has done that is iconic this year - maybe he had a hand in the death of Thatcher that we shan't discover until the Thirty Year Rule reveals its secrets.

As a thank you to GQ, Noel has given them half-an-hour of his 'drunk nan at Christmas' worldview. Shall we take a look?

On radio promos: "Why have I got to be there at seven in the morning? Who's listening at f***ing seven in the morning? C***s, that's who's."

Perhaps if you weren't fading into pantomime damery, they'd give you a slightly better slot, Noel?

It's interesting that Gallagher seems to have abandoned his man of the people act here; the obvious response - 'those cunts are the ones who get up at six thirty to go out and work to earn they money they spend on seeing you play your stupid Union Jack guitar' - has eluded him.

On the Brit Awards: "You can be sat at a table with a load of people from an insurance company. 'Where you from? Classical label?', 'No. AIG.' 'Well, what the f*** are you doing here?'"

Noel, you've gone to an event organised by that major record labels to sell their products. Who do you think own those labels? Are you assuming they're some sort of mutual organisation? They're owned by shareholders; most of those shareholders will be insurance companies and pension funds and investment banks.

Those people are your bosses. Your role at the Brits - and, really, have you not worked this out after all these years? - is to be a dancing bear for the people who underwrite your career.

I really hope someone from the AIG team leaned over and said "these are the 2013 Brit Awards - what the fuck are you doing here?"

And Noel has a thing to say about books, too:

I only read factual books. I can't think of... I mean, novels are just a waste of f***ing time. I can't suspend belief in reality... I just end up thinking, 'This isn't f***ing true.' I like reading about things that have actually happened. I'm reading this book at the minute - The Kennedy Tapes. It's all about the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis - I can get into that. Thinking, 'Wow, this actually f***ing happened, they came that close to blowing the world up!' But... what f***ing winds me up about books...

...is, like... my missus will come in with a book and it will be titled - and there's a lot of these, you can substitute any word, it's like a Rubik's Cube of shit titles - it'll be entitled The Incontinence Of Elephants. And I'll say "What's that book about?" And she'll say, "Oh it's about a girl and this load of f***ing nutters..." Right... so it's not about elephants, then? Why the f*** is it called The Incontinence Of Elephants? Another one: The Tales Of The Clumsy Beekeeper. What's that about? "Oh it's about the French Revolution." Right, f*** off. If you're writing a book about a child who's locked in a f***ing cupboard during the f***ing Second World War... he's never seen an elephant. Never mind a f***ing giraffe.

On the same basis, I'm launching a class action lawsuit against Noel and The High Flying Birds because there are no birds whatsoever in the band, and nothing particularly high flying about them either. Why didn't he just call the band what it is, Noel Gallagher And Some People Who Have Mortgages.

There's something unsurprising but dispiriting about a songwriter - a fucking songwriter, as Noel would put it - who lacks the ability to even understand the concept of metaphor. At all. A songwriter who cheerfully admits he lacks imagination.

This, then, is GQ's icon - a man happily ill-equipped for his job, and too stupid to realise it.

Gordon in the morning: Gordon goes to the GQ awards

The superclash - Booker Shortlist, Mercury and GQ Awards all happening around the same time - was going to create a loser. And that would be the GQ Awards. Guess which one Gordon went to?

He did manage to get a scoop, though:

YOU might imagine a summer holiday for Bono involves sleeping in an oxygen tent at Cannes or counting his collection of hats.

But at the GQ Awards last night the U2 frontman confessed to a far less glamorous activity — walking his new pet dog around Dublin.

Yes, in return for the hire of an ill-fitting dinner jacket, Gordon got a story that Bono has a bought a doggy.

Here's the painful list of winners for the prize, awarded by a magazine that some of you might remember from the 1980s:

International Man – Bradley Cooper
Lifetime Achievement – Duran Duran
Woman – Lara Stone
Band – U2
Sportsman – Rory McIlroy
Politician – George Osborne
Designer – Tommy Hilfiger
Actor – Benedict Cumberbatch
Solo Artist – Tinie Tempah
Music – Hugh Laurie
Writer – Keith Richards
TV Personality – Professor Brian Cox
Comedian – Rob Brydon
Chef – Heston Blumenthal
Editor's Special – Bill Nighy
Tanqueray Most Stylish Man – Matt Smith
Help for Heroes – The Armed Forces
Inspiration – Mario Testino
Surprise Award: Man of Next Year – Lord Sebastian Coe

You would have to agree; George Osborne is every bit as good a politician as Keith Richards is a writer.

Gordon in the morning: Mercury rising

Yesterday, readers of Gordon's column were sent to the bookies almost certain of a Mercury win for Florence And The Machine, mainly - admittedly - on the strength of 'giving Gordon an excuse to print a sexy picture':

FLORENCE WELCH is the front-runner to scoop glory at tonight's Mercury Music Awards.

And if she does bag the 20 grand prize for 2009's best album, I suspect that by the end of the evening she could be pulling a similar pose to this - crawling around London's Grosvenor House Hotel.

So, this morning Sun readers must be... apparently not at all surprised at the outcome:

The Sun's Something For The Weekend section said last week that Speech was the "most deserving" nominee.

Still, regardless of Speech's win, Gordon knows where the moral victory is, and marks the occasion with a large, sexy photo of Florence Welch in a short leather skirt.

Elsewhere, Yoko Ono popped up at the GQ "man of the year" awards. You can calibrate how well-judged these prizes are by considering that they believe Guy Ritchie to be filmmaker of the year and George Osbourne to be politician of the year (a view which even David Cameron would double-take.) Yoko's appearance was yet another part of the grinding publicity for the Beatles Game ("was quite a coup for the magazine publishers"), but she ended up being asked to talk about Take That:

Beaming Yoko said: "I love Shine. I know most of their greatest hits. They're a great British band."

It might sound like faint praise to you, but she didn't have to write any of the names on her hand, and she didn't go "that one from the adverts with Alan Hansen in - that's one of theirs, isn't it?"

Gordon, though, senses high praise:

And the feeling's mutual.

Mark said: "It's amazing that Yoko thinks that about our music. It is an honour to accept an award from her."

"I quite like some of their greatest hits" and "it's nice that Yoko quite likes our greatest hits". Mutual love-in, isn't it?

By the time this has been processed for an article teaser, it comes out as this:

Yoko Ono: TT are new Fab 4

JOHN Lennon’s widow is a big fan of the man band – naming Shine as her favourite track

Or at least the one that somebody whispered in her ear before she went on stage.

Darkness at 3AM: Even they lose interest

The 3AM Girls also went to the GQ awards and have Mani's "joke", but we suspect their hearts might not have actually been in it.

UPDATE: And I just notice that they reckon it was Gillespie, not Mani - but if there's something Gordon Smart is good on, it's identifying blokey rock blokes.

Gordon in the morning: Terror!

The photo is, unmistakably, of Lily Allen. The headline is unequivocal:

Lily Allen's kidnap terror

Blimey - what has been happening overnight, then?

It turns out it wasn't actually her terror, or her kidnap, but the kidnap of a friend. About six weeks ago. And most of Gordon's story underneath is not about kidnap - of Allen or her acquaintances - but, erm, about the GQ Awards. A glittering affair, it seems:

[M]y quote of the night goes to PRIMAL SCREAM star MANI.

Collecting the Band Of The Year gong from ELLE MACPHERSON, he said: “Fucking hell, a giraffe in a dress. Nice one.”

And, yes, alongside Elton John's "Amy Winehouse can't be with us, but we must crack on" gag, "ooh there's a tall woman" probably did sound like sparkling wit.

Still, I'm sure GQ will be delighted that their expensive awards bash has generated, erm, acres of coverage about Lily Allen's mate being kidnapped.

Elsewhere, Kate Moss has had a small anchor tattooed on her wrist:

I’m not sure what it’s supposed to symbolise – maybe it’s because she has spent the summer sunning herself on boats.

Or maybe it’s some sort of rhyming slang for ex PETE DOHERTY.

Yes. Maybe it is. I know when I've had a public, painful break-up, my first thought is "how can I scar myself in a random way to remember him by?"

Lily Allen collapses in on herself

Lily Allen is set to implode in early 2008, as her constant slew of contradictions are starting to fold-in on each other. Like at the end of the Heroes, when all the people with the magic powers come together in the same place to help blow up the city.

Her GQ shoot has managed to line-up her pointless semilebrity feud with Cheryl Tweed Cole, and her modish self-hatred:

The 22-year-old called Girls Aloud star Cheryl Cole a "stupid bitch" for taking part in a sexy photoshoot, but has appeared in men's magazine GQ herself since shedding 21 pounds.

She said: "This shoot was a big thing for me. A lot of the stuff I said before was probably because I didn't feel confident enough to do this.

"I felt like, 'Oh, God, I'm short, fat, ugly... and I hate all those people that flaunt their beauty'. But I feel great at the moment. It's nice to do this for once."

We're a little confused, though: surely the point of her attack on Cole was not that she was a stupid bitch as such, but that the flaunting made other, normal-sized women feel terrible about themselves. So even if Lily is feeling good about herself at the moment - a good thing in itself - isn't then flaunting it on the cover of GQ still going to make normal-sized women feel bad about themselves? So in what way is it "nice" to do that?

Of course, if this was Heroes, there'd need to be a relative who'd turn up and fly off with her. Funnily enough, the People is reporting that Keith Allen is going to take Lily off to Hungary when he films the next series of Robin Hood.

(Although we're not entirely sure how a grown woman would tell the various entertainment companies who have a stake in her that she's going to live in Eastern Europe for five months.)

[Thanks to James P for the link and the collapsing world imagery]

Slim pickings for Lily Allen

Lily Allen's well-known for her attacks on size zero, the fashion industry and those magazines whose choices of cover girl reinforce the idea that unless you're slim, you're not worth anything.

Here, for example, she's doing just that in Manchester:



So, erm, who's on the cover of Gq "showing off her new slimline figure"? Could it be Lily Allen?

Take the needle off it

You know something stinks about a person when the BNP runs an article praising them, and it's Danni Minogue who is giving succour to the scum this time round.

The Anti Nazi League News has got some background on the thicker of the two Minogue's dribblings about how great LePen is, and how asylum seekers, Gypsies and people who live on Council Estates are scum. Amusingly, the ANL point out that it's a bit rich for someone who themselves has come to a foreign country to make money to attack the concept of economic migration anyway.

What must have really hurt Minogue is that even when fascists are praising her politics, they still describe her as "Kylie's sister" rather than a person in her own right.

The dimwit's response is to threaten to sue the BNP over 'misquotation'.

Now we're getting into even stranger territory, because it's almost possible to have sympathy for the BNP here. They point out all they did was copy out what they'd read in GQ. Danni's defence - startling and stupid as the original comments - is to make a simpering meaningless claim that she's proud of Australia being the "most multicultural melting pot" and then say that when she said Jean Marie LePen "struck a chord" and that some street signs in Australia are in Asian and that gypsies, asylum seekers and council estate dwellers have made streets "unsafe" she was merely "stating facts" and not expressing disgust.

No, Dimwit. Saying "A cheetah can outrun a school bus" is stating a fact. Raising things like signs in other languages and suggesting that foreigners have made streets unsafe is, at best, unwitting racism. Singling out a stinking racist scumpimp like Jean Marie LePen to praise him for "striking a chord" is to actively laud a racist.
Either Danni, you are the world's most stupid person - which I don't quite believe - or you are racist. Which is it?