Little Mix take the big prize

I think that Today managed to do a piece on the Popjustice £20 Music Prize yesterday means that it's now moved beyond a thing that happens to a Vital Part Of Our Cultural Hinterland.

Although Little Mix won it this year with Move.

Which is nowhere near as good as last year's winner...

... but then what is?

Churches scoop Popjustice Prize

If they're over in one part of London praising the "best" album of the year, that means elsewhere, Popjustice will be hosting the annual £20 Popjustice Music Prize for best single.

They are better at choosing singles than the Mercury people are at choosing albums, as this won:

Luckily, nobody called them Crutches or anything, either.

Popjustice £20 Music Prize

You know, it's interesting that the big fuss that they used to make about the Mercury being worth twenty grand has been quietly dropped over the last few years; presumably a sign that the honour is worth it for itself and they don't need to wave a cheque to drag people along to play a song off the record.

It was the PopJustice £20 Music Prize which reminds me of how they used to make a fuss about the cash.

This year's PJ prize for single-minded single making has gone to The Saturdays, by the way. For this:

Popjustice crowns Example as single of the year

If last night was the Mercury Prize night, that must mean it was also the night for Popjustice's glittering Twenty Quid Music Prize for best single of the year.

This was the winner:

Back For Good Enough: Robbie Williams moves back in with Dad

I think it's fair to say that the reunionised Take That had reached a bit of a natural end, with the first bubbling of creativity from getting back together having long since flattened out, so the inevitable lumbering back in of Robbie Williams has come too late to spoil anything too much. 'Williams rejoins Cameron-endorsing Marks And Spencer models' is less of a shame than the 'Williams stamps over the fizzle' if he'd been back in in 2005 or 2006.

Still, the camera-hogging, gurning, 'look! I'm a character' of Robbie towards the end of the BBC News video is a hint of the mismatch between the two sides now. It's like the two little pigs running into the brick house and behaving like they were the expert housebuilders all along.

Still, nobody's really that bothered about whether it's a good idea or not. For the Mirror, it's a chance to feel vindicated:

The move confirms the Mirror’s exclusive story in a March 2009 ­interview with Robbie that the band were getting back together.

Daily Mirror, everyone's been saying 'sooner or later, Williams will turn up with a stupid grin on his face' since Take That first got back as one. I'm not sure that 'just sixteen months after we said it was happening, it happened' is quite the claim you think it is.

obbie said last night: “I get ­embarrassingly excited when the five of us are in a room. It feels like coming home.”

Yes, it's exactly like coming home. But there's no shame in that, Robbie - a surprising number of men in their thirties move back in with their parents after their careers go south.

The Mirror offers a verdict on the hooking-up, with their in-house Take That fan Beth Neil taking on the paper's music critic Gavin Martin. (Gavin Martin's the Mirror's music critic now? Really?)

Beth goes first:

I just hope Robbie doesn’t try to steal the limelight and overshadow the other four, who have grafted non-stop to become the nation’s biggest man band.

Oh, come on, Beth - what are the chances of that?

Still, I'm sure Gavin's got some sort of musical insight to share:

[E]xpect plenty of sold-out gigs, making it an astute move commercially for all five.

Is it, though, Gavin? Take That as foursome could sell out gigs at the largest venues in the country, so all they're really doing is splitting the take five ways instead of four. That looks like a crappy move, surely?

Over at The Sun, Gordon Smart is delighted:

[T]hank the lord for some good news after such a bleak few weeks of murder and misery dominating the headlines.

Oh, yes. I've totally forgotten we've got a bumbling Tory at the Treasury and the Prime Minister believes some people are just innately evil with the news that a band have brought back their worst member.

This reunion is HUGE. It doesn't get any bigger.

Scientists are currently attempting to calculate if this reunion that doesn't come any bigger is larger or smaller than the bigness of a Masterchef final.

Reunions don't come any bigger? Wouldn't Paul and Ringo getting out the mop-top wigs one last time trump it?

Hang about, though, Gordon's about to blow:

The tour will break records on pre-sales, as will the album. Then there'll be the sponsorship, the TV rights, a DVD, merchandising, royalties and publishing.

To say nothing of the acres and acres and acres of coverage churned out by the tabloids, eh, Gordo?

If you thought the boys were rich now, next Christmas is going to see them served up with a whole new level of wealth.

Is it just me, or is a reunion where the reaction is 'this is going to make a lot of money' rather than 'we're going to hear some great music' one which, fundamentally, is more in the interests of record labels and promoters than fans?

The only problem I can see is Robbie's crippling stage fright and his hatred of being on the road.

You don't think that the fifteen years of animosity and his inability to work as part of a team might be a bigger problem?

The Mail calls the reWilliamsing 'Take Two', although surely it's Take Four - the band, band without Williams, band reunited without Williams, Band reunited with Williams? Despite assigning two writers to the story, though, the Mail doesn't show very much interest in the band coming back together - mainly because there's no picture of a woman in a bikini they can run alongside it.

Kim Dawson provides 'analysis' for the Daily Star. She's already started the countdown clock. The countdown to the end:

Another split will only break the hearts of women round the country still reeling from Mark’s infidelity.

Nobody seems to have told Dawson that (a) the reunion is only a fixed-time deal so there will be a natural end and (b) there are precisely no women - apart maybe from Owen's wife - who are reeling from his infidelity. And even if there were: eh? What the hell does that mean?

The Daily Express more or less ignores the story entirely, although it does take care to take the sting out of the response to its short cut-and-paste brief:

Have your say is unavailable for this story

God, yes, you wouldn't want anyone saying anything nasty about Williams and Barlow hugging, would you?

The Telegraph inadvertently gets to the problem of the story. To justify the excitement, there's a desperate desire to present this as an unlikely surprise:

Bandmate Owen said: "Getting the five of us to be in a room together, although always a dream, never actually seemed like becoming a reality.

"Now the reality of the five of us making a record together feels like a dream. It's been an absolute delight spending time with Rob again. But I'm still a better footballer," he joked.

... but the entire world has just been waiting for this moment, and for the last two or three years it's been an inevitable 'when' rather than an 'if':

Despite Williams ridiculing Barlow during his early solo shows, the pair began to bury the hatchet in recent years and their friendship was renewed.

Williams said last year: "You carry around all this resentment and bitterness for such a long time."

[...]

Williams had already revealed he was working with Barlow. Last month he announced the pair were to release a duet Shame which will feature on his greatest hits collection.

Still, the Telegraph does focus in on some people who won't be celebrating:

The new album will be released on Take That's label Polydor, rather than Williams's company, EMI.

Ah, the cost of trying to drag their nosediving big name out the dumper is having to let Polydor get the most cake.

The Times - well, who knows or cares what The Times says these days?

Really, though, at times like this you need to turn to an expert. What have you got for us, Popjustice?

SOMEONE GET LULU ON THE PHONE.

Now, that would be a reunion which didn't come any bigger.

Nicola pockets twenty quid

Congratulations to Girls Aloud for picking up the Popjustice £20 Music Prize for The Promise, and a round of applause to Nicola Roberts for heading over to pick up the cash. It's not like she really needed the publicity. Or the cash.

Nobody from The Sugababes showed up for the £20 Invoice for worst single. Pity.

Very nostalgic feelings for the Zavvi

Popjustice visit the old Zavvi store on Tottenham Court Road to see what's going on there. It's now a temporary clothes shop - a shop that won't be around for long, rather than a shop which sells clothes that fall apart quite quickly. Because that would be Peacocks.

Oh, yes... and you take space in the store. Which leads Popjustice to hatch a cunning plan...

[Thanks to Matt W for the link]

Girls Aloud four quid a head better off

Congratulations to Girls Aloud, winners of the twenty quid Popjustice Music Prize. For Call The Shots.

They beat off this stiff competition:

'A&E' - Goldfrapp
'About You Now' - Sugababes
'Bleeding Love' - Leona Lewis
'Dance Wiv Me' - Dizzee Rascal feat Calvin Harris
'Flux' - Bloc Party
'Money' - Daggers
'That's Not My Name' - The Ting TIngs
'Valerie' - Mark Ronson feat Amy Winehouse
'Ready For The Floor' - Hot Chip
'Song 4 Mutya (Out Of Control)' - Groove Armada feat Mutya Buena
'Stuck On Repeat' - Little Boots

It's a parody of the Mercury, although not to the extent that they feel obliged to include a jazz single.

Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, I wanna start a fight

Popjustice's Song of the day is Pink's So What. Judging on this, it sounds like she's regained her pop form. And it's got a brilliant singalong chorus, too.

Something to listen to: Popjustice integrates PSB

Over on Popjustice for a limited* period, a remix of Itegral by the Pet Shop Boys. A strange, strange remix.

(*we don't know how limited, it could be as long as there's electricity. But it'll die one day. Everyone dies.)

Style, Extract, Pay: Honeyshot flops

Good work over at PopJustice, which has turned itself into a Panorama-style investigative journalist outfit to out the band Shocka featuring Honeyshot. Following PJ's pointing out that the band were a marketing stunt, and their single Style, Attract, Play was effectively an advert for Shockwaves, Radio One has dropped the band from the playlist.

(PopJustice, of course, was able to do the bulk of the research in their own archives - when Honeyshot were merely a Trojan Horse being built by Saatchi and Saatchi to provide a way of "covertly marketing" to young people.

Now, of course, suggesting that this is terrible and wrong is a little bit of a stretch - you could argue that this is merely The New Seekers' I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing, only without the need to make an advert beforehand; or that if using songs to promote commercial products is wrong, then why has nobody complained about when, say, Mission Impossible soundtrack singles get spun on Radio One when, really, that's just about getting people out to see the movie or buy the DVD as much as the Shocka single is trying to get people to use styling products.

But there's something doubly unethical and stinking about this - it's not just that the connection between product and track is intentionally hidden, but that the marketing push seems to be little more than trying to get the advert strapline repeated over and over again. "Style, Attract, Ein Fuhrer" or whatever it is, just being repeated, as if that should be enough. It's like Saatchi and Saatchi are trying to market through mantra, a bid at hypnotism rather than sales.

Adding to the general stench that everyone involved knows a line has been crossed, when The Guardian started to poke about, the first response was to deny everything:

Initially, the Shockwaves press office said it knew nothing about the song and its relationship to the brand. But a spokeswoman called back later to admit "there may be a link" and would confirm when she knew more.

Several hours later a different spokeswoman said she could not speak to anyone at Procter & Gamble, the company which owns Shockwaves, and therefore could not comment further.

Clearly, if Procter & Gamble were comfortable with their part in this dupery, they wouldn't be hiding behind the corporate sofa hoping the people with questions will go away.

The first rule of good corporate behaviour is: if you don't want to own up to what you've created, don't create it in the first place.

Shockwaves, of course, is the sponsor of the NME Awards at the moment. That might make for an interesting event next year.

They forget we took them up

Yes, yes, Popjustice, you have pleased us with your survey of rock-related computer games, but you've forgotten, of course, the Thompson Twins game that came taped to Sinclair User or something of that nature.

It was a flexi disc, which you then taped onto a cassette - yes, although that sort of thing was frowned on - and then you got to use basic text input to help the three twins solve some sort of mystery (They Were Detective, you see?). It wasn't very playable so we never really got much further than the pretty, basic graphics of Alanah Currie, really.

Why we love Popjustice

It's not that they registered justintimberlake.co.uk and put up a picture of him kissing himself... but then they invited comments. Sweet, sweet joy.

Apparently, we hadn't

We got a polite email from the people at Popjustice today, and we suddenly thought we should check to see if we'd ever sat and applauded their activities - we hadn't, which was the sort of gaping hole you don't normally see outside of Michael Jackson's cheek.

Go and apologise on our behalf.