Manics grounded

The Manic Street Preachers won't be at V in Chelmsford; their plane refused to leave Budapest. They still hope to be at the Staffordshire leg tomorrow. If they can find the Ted Danson plane.

Gordon in the morning: Diplocarpon rosae

So far, the Stone Roses reunion has benefited from attendees having turned up convinced they'd be seeing something historic and important. How did it go when they moved into the festival circuit, where the audience are coming in treating them as just one band amongst many?

Didn't go that well:

THE Stone Roses’ incredible run of amazing live shows hit some dodgy ground at V Stafford.

Ian Brown was getting all Bruce Lee with the crowd after a pint of lager clocked him early on.

Then they started Love Spreads four times before they got it right.

John Squire broke a string during a guitar solo and Ian started moaning about the sound.

It's a lot harder when you're not being kept aloft on a sea of goodwill, isn't it?

In other news:

I suspect we're only a couple of years away from the OED adding "not now in polite use" into the entry for boffin. There are many ways you can describe a pretty good mathematician; telling the Sun chose two words which sound - at best - double-edged.

Gordon in the morning: Court report

There's an actual, proper news story leading off Bizarre this morning, so Gordon's let John Kay and Richard White do the heavy lifting as Liam issues a libel writ against Noel:

I HAVE taken legal action against Noel Gallagher for statements he made claiming Oasis pulled out of the 2009 V Festival Chelmsford gig because I had a hangover.

That is a lie and I want Oasis fans and others who were at V to know the truth.

I was gutted when I couldn't play the gig because I didn't want to let the fans down.

But the truth is I had laryngitis, which Noel was made fully aware of that morning, diagnosed by a doctor.

Noel also falsely stated the demise of Oasis followed a massive row in which he claimed I demanded to advertise my clothing range Pretty Green in the Oasis tour programme.

The truth is there was no such discussion or row between us.

I am used to being called all sorts of things by Noel and I have in the past said things about him. But what Noel has alleged this time went way beyond rock-and-roll banter and questioned my professionalism.

I tried to resolve this amicably but have been left with no choice but legal action. All I want is an apology.

That's Liam's explanation for why he's suing. It's not entirely clear who he thinks cares, but it's clear he couldn't resist the opportunity to push the risible sideshow deeper yet into Jeffrey-Archer-novel territory.

The pair of tireless news terriers attempt to add some meat to the bones of Liam's statement, quoting - of course - a source:

The source added: "Liam felt he had no choice but the courts. He feels a mix of anger at how he has been treated by his own elder brother and sadness it has come to this.

"Liam is an old-school rock star. I'm sure there have been times when he has taken to the stage after a big one the night before. But that night he had laryngitis.

"He lived for being the frontman of Oasis and singing in front of millions of fans."

Did I say Jeffrey Archer? It sounds a bit more like a terrible episode of Lark Rise: All 'e wanted to do was sing 'is toons, sir, and 'e would 'ave, too, 'ad 'is throat not been all broken, your 'onour.

Still, it'll be interesting to see which camp Gordon ends up throwing his weight behind as this sorry saga limps on and on over the coming the months.

No V in Oz - perhaps

The global facsimile V Festivals looks like it has reached the high water mark and is now busily receding, as Australian co-promoter Michael Coppel Presents have pulled out. MCP seem to be planning to carry on doing festivals, just no longer in collaboration with the alien-remake-overlords of V.

Gordon in the morning: Something to celebrate

If you wish you had something to celebrate like the way cricket fans are celebrating, you could try Gordon's pages this morning:

No more UK Oasis gigs after band pull out of fest

Wow. Gordon is close to Oasis - or, rather, hangs around them a lot and often gets a mate to take a picture of him almost in focusing distance of Noel - so he really must know something to carry such a final headline. What do you know, Gordon?

IF you were one of the lucky punters at V Fest in Stafford on Saturday, you can now claim the honour of seeing the last ever OASIS gig on British soil.

Did the management tell you this? Was it something you overheard Noel saying?

The Manc legends pulled out of their headline slot at Chelmsford's V last night because frontman LIAM has been struck down with viral laryngitis.

Yes, yes, but why is it the end? Did Kasabian text you to tell you they've moved up place up the 'laddish live' league ladder?

The lads still have a few European tour dates left to play, but...

There's a but?

unless someone offers them silly money to take the stage once more in Britain then I can't see them performing together again.

Ah... so Gordon's big, eyecatching story is something that he's guessing?

Smart doesn't even bother to make up a source or a pal, but just mentions that Noel and Liam don't get on. A dangerous state of affairs for a band, albeit one that they've managed to scrape by under for over a decade.

Were you a betting man, you might consider that Gordon had intended to flood this space with guff about what a brilliant time he had backstage hanging out with Oasis and had to scrabble about to fill the space with something, anything.

Stars tell us what they think about Oasis pulling out of gig:

Anything at all, it turns out.

Actor STEPHEN GRAHAM said: "It's bad form. I can't believe it. I'm only at V to see them. I don't believe Liam lost his voice. It must've kicked off."

Yes you do; he was the bloke who was involved in that dodgy tobacco-selling scam with Steve McDonald.

But it's not just rising actors who Gordon canvassed. He, erm, even listened to the radio:

JAMES MORRISON told Absolute Radio: "Everyone's gonna be gutted. It's a shame, definitely, it'll be a big gap."

But is everyone going to be gutted? Gordon, Ben Bradlee would demand a second source to stack this one up.

HARRY POTTER star RUPERT GRINT said: "I'm gutted. I was looking forward to Oasis. It was going to be the highlight of my weekend."

Okay, everyone was gutted.

Still, even with Oasis sending the filling-in-a-page-of-newspaper industry into turmoil, Gordon had other work to do at Essex. Yes, even travelling out of the M25 doesn't spare him from his need to push JLS at us like they're mouldering fish and we're very, very hungry sealions:

PULLING machines JLS didn't play at V but still made their mark with the ladies there.

MARVIN HUMES has been bombarding PIXIE LOTT with flirty texts and the singer blushed when I quizzed her about it.

I don't know which members of Gordon's family Simon Cowell is holding, but

No Essex Oasis

Oasis have pulled out of their headline V Festival date this evening. Apparently Liam has got laryngitis, and it's not merely the fear of bumping into Zoe Griffin which is keeping them away.

Griffin done... the V festival again

Zoe Griffin hails the genius of Lily Allen:

Leggy Lily Allen brilliantly combines old stuff (LDN) with new (22) at V Festival.

Brilliant! Wherever did she get the idea for playing some of the old stuff everyone likes with some of the new stuff nobody's as keen on, eh? Let's hope Allen is smart enough to patent that brilliant idea. But she will be because she's brilliant, isn't she? Brilliant.

Griffin done... the V festival

Zoe Griffin has gone to the V Festival - happily, she doesn't bother to mention which of the two locations she's at. And it's a triumph for her journalistic and organisational skills:

I caught an intimate gig by Melbourne rockers Jet in the Absolute Radio VIP area almost by accident - but I loved the Are You Going to Be My Girl group.

The Absolute Radio VIP area is the only place in the festival to catch live music, but I have to confess I only discovered that when I had tried all the free stuff in the other VIP area.

I suspect she means "it's the only place" in the sense of "daaahling, it's the only place one would go", but there is a real possibility that she's spent so long hanging round the free bar she hasn't noticed that there are a load of other stages with bands playing on them.

Still, nice to see that she views these events as a chance to freeload as much as humanely possible.

Jet played an acoustic set to a chilled out crowd including Girls Aloud’s Kimberly Walsh (as the Absolute radio area is the place to go when you don’t want people to hassle you). Wish I’d found the space earlier as there were hammocks to chill in!

It must be nice that Zoe has found a place where she won't be hassled, isn't it?

And how delightful for the suckers who paid the £130 to get in to discover that the best sets are being played in a roped-off area they can't get to. Perhaps next year they could print a note on each ticket showing what proportion of the price is going towards funding the likes of Griffin's jollies.

[UPDATE: To be fair to Zoe, there turns out to be a stream of posts of badly-taken pictures of her with people who were famous-ish in the past, and she does reveal she's at Essex in those.]

Robyn blind

There's an unusual story in today's People:

RED RED ROBYN

Has Robyn been persuaded by the delights of the Beijing games to embrace communism?

Not quite:

Don't mess with feisty GIRLS ALOUD - as embarrassed singer ROBYN found out when she objected to them singing her No1 hit With Every Heartbeat at last week's V Festival.

The band have been belting out the song at gigs all summer, but after Robyn's complaint on Sunday they hit back by dropping it altogether. A source said: "It caused a bit of a hoo-ha so Girls Aloud scrapped it from their set."

Am I being a bit thick? If Robyn didn't want them to do the song, and they didn't, why would Robyn be embarrassed by that? Is the People suggesting that perhaps Robyn wanted Girls Aloud to only sing the chorus? "Oh, how embarrassing... I asked them to not sing my song... and they only went and didn't sing my song. Do I feel a chump..."

V tickets - beat the rush

With Glastonbury bringing its ticket sales forward, the organisers of the V Festival have decided to announce plans to flog off a slew of tickets - at inflation busting 2008 prices - before this year's event has even finished.

NME.com reports they're going on sale both on Tuesday, and on the 18th August, which means either we need a refund from the manufacturer of our desk calendar, or one of those claims is wrong.

Prodigy: Not going, not our fault

The Prodigy have pulled out of a Korean festival - the Summer Breeze - but can't stress enough that it isn't their fault:

"The band were very much looking forward to going there," they wrote, "but the organisers could not fulfil their obligations and as a result they have cancelled our show. This is in no way due to any fault of the band."

The Prodigy will, however, be turning up at the V Festivals this weekend. That, unfortunately, they will have to take the blame for.

No big names interested in joining a Canadian Virgin

Last year's extension of the V Festival brand to include Vancouver looks like being a one-off: plans for a 2008 event have been dropped because the organisers couldn't find any big names interested in playing. Even Jack Johnson said no, although if he'd said yes, they'd have had to try and sell an event where he was the highlight which would have been a working definition of 'a hiding to nothing'.

Bacardi's successful sponsorship

Good work for the people at Bacardi: their sponsored tent at the V festival played host to two young women (Kate Moss and Sarah Harding) having a screechy bitch fight, which ended with Harding sobbing in the toilets as people tried to coax her out. Exactly the sort of results you usually see when people have been enjoying Bacardi's fine products, then.

Doherty's derring-do

We wonder what portion of truth is contained in the thrilling tale of Babyshambles rescuing a man from a car crash:

ete and Co were travelling back after a storming set at the V Festival in Chelmsford there on Saturday night.

They were on their way to Stafford for their Sunday V gig when they saw a car smash into a concrete reservation at Toddington.

A band source said: “They saw the overturned car billowing with smoke in the middle of the carriageway. They stopped and pulled a guy in his 50s from the vehicle. He had hit a concrete block on the side of the road and the car flipped over.
For more pictures from the V Festival

“The man was insisting that he had only had a few fruit juices, but they thought he was protesting a bit too much.”

You'll notice there's a surprising lack of actual detail to the story, leaving room to picture Pete Doherty pulling a man from a blazing car - although we'd put money on the road crew being more likely to have performed any intervention.

An interesting way to secure a later slot

Babyshambles have got themselves "stuck on the motorway" en route to the V Festival, and so have wound up headlining the second stage.

Yes, we're not quite sure how only Babyshambles have managed to get get stuck - despite all of the bands who played Chelmsford making the same trip and not turning up four hours late, but if Pete Doherty says the dog ate his homework or something, we're not going to see that as some sort of lame excuse.

NME explains the rehuffling in the light of this:

They take over from The Coral who had been asked to play second set at the festival because Rodrigo Y Gabriela had pulled their performance due to exhaustion. Ironically the Mexican duo had been promoted to play the tent after original headliners Bright Eyes dropped out due to illness.

As a result of all this, somehow The Klaxons are now going to have to play the winner of of Rushden & Diamonds versus Newport in the next round of the FA Cup.

Zoe's world

Talking of Zoe from the Sunday Mirror, our eye was caught by the headline on her blog entry about the the V Festival. It was headlined with a not-at-all-self-regarding opener:

I'm off to V - as in ViP

We don't know why she put the I in lowercase, as, clearly, the (self) importance is at the heart of things here.

But this, this is almost modet compared to the way Zoe describes herself at the head of the column:

Hi, I'm Zoe, the youngest, coolest gossip columnist around.

Now, you might give that line to the bad guy if you were scripting a Bratz movie, but who, really, would type that in the 'about this author' box on their blog on a national newspaper site and then hit 'publish'?

Still, the blog does give an insight into how Zoe does her work - after announcing that she's off to Chelmsford she invites readers to do her job for her:

If any of you readers spot any goss down there then please email me and say what you have seen - zoe@sundaymirror.co.uk.

You might wonder why Zoe needs to get people to fill in the gaps in her column, but she explains: she's going to be busy, dammit:

I'll be hanging out in the VIP area, no doubt with the rent a crowd of Eastenders and Hollyoaks cast.

Why, Zoe, you make it sound like they'll let just anyone in the VIP area...

Kasabian get our hopes up

We were thrilled by the NME headline:

Kasabian 'V Festival is the perfect farewell

But the detail was disappointing:

"This is the swansong for 'Empire'," guitarist Serge Pizzorno told NME.COM. "We've got some gigs lined-up but this these are the last big shows. Both these shows are the perfect farewell, it's the big 'thank you, see you on the next record."

This doesn't even make any sense - how can it be the farewell if you're still going to play it at a slew of gigs? It's like trying to divorce your husband but still schedule in some sex for the last few weekends of summer.

Wire cutters

It's been quite a while since one of Nicky Wire's predictable but amusing attacks on his fellow musical toilers, but he's back on form for the V festival:

Of Snow Patrol he says: "They are utterly deplorable, there is something irredeemably shit about them, you can't quite put your finger on what it is.

"It's a desperate form of music, the endless repeated lines, over and over, the same drab fucking little thing on and on.

Even Snow Patrol fans might feel a little aggrieved at being accused of repeating lines endlessly from the You! Love! Us! You Love Us! You Love Us! Oh, You Love Us, Yeah You Love Us bloke, but Nicky is already moving on to The Killers:

[B]randing their second album "truly dreadful," adding: "There's no authenticity in that record at all, extremely false and calculated.

"People might like it, but people with brains don't."

And how do the 3AM Girls describe Wire in the piece?

He would be :

"the eye-liner wearing bassist"

Describing Nicky Wire as wearing a bit of eye-liner is like saying Danny La Rue sometimes wore heels, surely?

V festival bill continues to crumble

Winehouse is probably out; Allen says she's in, but you can't be sure. Bright Eyes have gone. They're predicting it's going to tip down.

And now The Bravery have pulled out of the V festival.

There's no explanation as to why and, since they've been replaced by the-not-exactly-similar Robyn, it doesn't seem like V organisers could even be bothered any more.

This just in

Coldplay, Chilis for V2003 - it's a repeat of 2001, in other words. Inspirational programming, no?