Oh what an exciting update!

Exciting times isn't it?

Wagner is on the road to X Factor glory! and you've all been following it like faithful pups, sitting comfortably at the heels of Cowell and the other three, lapping up any polished-up piece of shit he hand feeds you and thanking him gleefully for yet another filling instalment of prime-time entertainment.

Where would we be without it?

As you already know from my previous article about X Factor, I'm not the biggest fan. But this could be something rather special. Wagner to win? it's like the skin's been stripped off the body of Sarah Palin and you can see all the toxic waste and bile and evil spew from the inside to reveal what's really hidden underneath. Scary stuff

In recent years a facebook campaign has proved to be a vital method of protest and influence. Get Rage Against The Machine To Number One! Jodie To Win Big Brother! Kill The Paedophile Who Lives At This House (Address inside)! and now, Wagner to Win! Yeah!

If we ignore the fact that this debauched numb-nuts has been claiming thousands of pounds worth of our hard earned money on a false benefit claim (after he was welcomed into our country with open arms), we might find it in our hearts to actually pick up the phone and vote for the hairy, talentless beast who looks like a melting Madam Tussauds exhibit because it will expose this program to the majority as the advertising-hungry, publicity-absorbing, money-sucking sham it is - with talent clearly being bottom in the line of priorities.

It really is a plethora of hypocrisy. 'Oh this program's about talent'....'oh this programs about entertainment'...make your minds up, ey?!

Recently the mighty Cheryl Cole blasted Wagner for some comments he made regarding her and her upbringing on a council estate in Newcastle. Word for word, the Brazilian nut-job referred to Cole as 'A girl from a council estate who got lucky'. This annoyed Cole. Fantastic.

But lets deconstruct this comment which bought the Geordie tart to tears. Firstly, she is from a council estate and much like 'Jenny from the block', she blubbers about how she's proud of her roots, just a normal girl living the fucking dream, right? apart from when her Latte gets cold and there's not enough red Skittles in her dressing room. Why did this comment rile her up so much? she confronted Wagner about this, red-faced and slightly peeved, claiming slander from the nearest Max Clifford office. SHE IS FROM A COUNCIL ESTATE! it's not an insult, it's a statement of truth, perhaps it was said with a smidgen on malice, but hey-ho, take it on the chin you rough and ready street urchin. That young black female you hit outside a Guildford nightclub certainly took it on the chin like a pro. So calm it Cole. And, as for the 'lucky' implications - he's right isn't he?

Her solo trash is just another confirmation of the fact that people will buy anything with a celebrity on the cover. I mean, the Cheeky Girls sold thousands of singles, Peter Andre continues to do so, popularity really isn't a clarification of quality. And as you already know, i believe she has no right to comment on other peoples musical abilities because all she does is sing other peoples songs with a heap of auto-tune and, well, she doesn't even bother live - just moves her lips to a pre-recorded audio-screech claiming to be a song.

So, Wagner to win. I wont be watching it as it nearly makes me sick, but this advance could be the catalyst we need for exposing the crippled backbone of this corrupt creation - you're all mugs. You all voted for Jedward, you continue to consume this tripe and you continue to help this abomination breed. Some of you are beginning to realise the errors of your ways, but its to late. You've sewn your poison, now enoy the effects.

That Muscle Shoals Sound...

God bless Muscle Shoals...

Drive-By Truckers @ Concorde2, Brighton

The soulful croons of that illusive Muscle Shoals sound started early on at the Concorde2 the night of Drive-by Truckers last U.K date. Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Otis Redding and a wonderfully solemn James McMurty number all blasted from the stereo prior to the bands onstage arrival. The real legacy and potency of that mysteriously salient catalyst of genius shines though at moments like this, with a sold out crowd beginning to hop-scotch with the excitable contorts of children on Christmas eve, and it became infectious.

As bottles of Jack began to appear onstage, the hair-raising coos of some black-and-white 50s country-goth ditty commences and its distinctive haunting gloom of utter Southernisms mean only one thing, enter Mike Cooley and co. stage right.

Searing volume instantly launched its uncontainable waves into the atmosphere, ragingly brash and howling like the screech of a 747 Booing jet engine as Cooley growled into ‘Where The Devil Don’t Stay’ from their southern-rock masterpiece, ‘The Dirty South’. It stomps with the ferocity of Lucifer himself, hollering with vigour and doused in the slurring whiskey that soaks their numerous albums, and then, out of the shadows comes Patterson Hood’s ‘Tornadoes’, straining a tense elongated yearn as he bawls, ‘I can still remember the sound of their applause in the rain, as it echoed through them storm clouds, I swear, It sounded like a train’.

Drive-by Truckers eighth album, ‘the Big To-Do’, was released earlier this year. Continuing the theme of creepy cartoon cover art, this was a record that sustained to coagulate the Atlanta-formed gang of musical outlaws as an unprecedented and unintentionally surreptitiously vital driving force in American rock and roll. Hood’s astute sense of being has always captured me. On the Southern Rock Opera he cast his acumen out on a line, particularly on ‘The Three Great Alabama Icons’. Hood, whose Dad was a Muscle Shoals bass-wielding legend in his own right, muttered about the misunderstood mythical element of Lynyrd Skynyrd, undervalued in all its gritty fabled glory, and I would argue that the same avowal applies to DBT - to a certain extent. But after two hours of DBT tonight, it’s clear that the genius of southern wit and brainpower, pooled with the assault of face-melting guitar riffs that will propel the roof off any venue, is near unstoppable.

Introducing the following belter as a redneck anthem for his redneck friends, Hood spills into honkey-tonk rock-punch ‘The Company I Keep’, followed closely by the whimsical stirring of ‘Self Destruction Zones’ with Cooley at the helm. Its insightful pennings and grubby group delivery, lyrically rich in cunning social observations, pin-pointing problematic generational issues that illuminate unfortunate concern: ‘Till the pawn shops were packed like a backstage party, hanging full of pointy ugly cheap guitars, And the young'uns all turned to karaoke, hanging all their wishes upon disregarded stars’.

The vital wordings of these songs are so affluent in the diversity of story telling - they cascade from poignant declarations of societal issues to the boozy joys of the duality of the southern thing. And it’s this beautiful multiplicity that makes DBT an extremely accomplished song writing outfit, but when Cooley lets rip like a rampant bar-room rocker who’s playing for his very existence on ‘Hell No I Aint Happy’, they reveal they are so much more than simply a rock and roll band - they’re the pulsating mainline artery of American rock and roll and everything debauched, doped-up and outrageously raucous that embodies the divine nature of this illicit necessity.

As the night goes on and the Jack Daniels slowly sinks until the bottle becomes transparent, bassist Shonna Tucker holds her own with a couple of bottles of red, delicately plonked on her bass amp, and after a few well-earned swigs she’s introduced by Hood and the band burst into the edgy ‘(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So’ followed swiftly by a dazzling amped-up instrumental-riot of ‘World Of Hurt’. This perspicacious country-rock anthem ebs and flows with the tender of Little Feat’s ’Willin’’ and all the acumen of Ronnie Van Zant’s ‘Am I Loosin’, as it ponders love, loss and pain - the three incessant topical mediums. It’s a creation clearly constructed by someone who, in their own right, are a priceless factor in this rock and roll dream and when Cooley gets his mits on it, the subdued country ballad revamps into a riotous eruption of rock and roll bliss, and its all summed up by Hood in a brief lyrical ache…

“"To love is to feel pain" there ain't no way around it
The very nature of love is to grieve when it is over
The secret to a happy ending is knowing when to role the credits
Better role them now before something else goes wrong”

Now tell me that aint the words of a genius…

James McMurtry - We Cant Make It Here Anymore

James McMurtry is the son of Larry McMurtry - author of the phenomenal Western ‘Lonesome Dove’. If you’ve ever read this book or seen the brilliant film adaptation with its stellar line up including Robert Duvall and Tommy Jones, then you’ll know that this is a narrative that’s brilliantly adheres to the particularly quirky traits of the South while deepening its tale via tangents of wisdom and a struggle for a better existence, with its inevitable fuck ups along the way.

Fast forward and now Larry’s son James is in the story tellers chair, and the world sure has changed but we’re still swamped with problems, this time however, of a different nature and of someone else’s doing. Mr George W. Bush.

And that's how it is
That's what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not

Songs of a political disposition are often unsteady ground. Sometimes they’ll come across as uninformed ramblings of wannabe politico hot-heads, sometimes they’ll come across as do-gooder slurs of clueless uneducated part-time anarchists but very rarely they’ll strike a nerve of sincerity and authenticity. Springsteen is completely capable of crafting a politico anthem that actually endures worthy substance, much like The Clash and Dylan, but new music rarely hit’s the spot and reflects little more than just another musical faux pas, an ill-informed cliché without heart.

With James McMurtry however, it’s different. It’s hardly a new song, penned during the height of Bush’s corruption and lies as he and his crooked colleagues flashed untrue claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but it’s a vital rock and roll anthem that demonstrates the fist-fighting vigour of rock and roll sure aint lost. In ‘We Can’t Make It Here’, a song from McMurtry‘s 2007 album, ‘Childish Things‘, the song writing, guitar-tooting Southerner ignores the focal point of these oil-hungry lying smear-merchants and sings about the struggle of soldiers returning from someone else’s Hollywood war - much likes The Boss’s ‘Born In The USA’ and ‘Atlantic City’.

Will work for food
Will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks

Lyrically this is one of the most accomplished and sincere songs of the last ten years. It’s blistering country-rock riff calls to mind films like ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘The Deer Hunter’ with its conspicuously 70s Southern bar-room-rock sound. It’s the sort of sound that paints explicit images of an era that we’ve come to conjure through the songs of that time. Jefferson Airplane in ‘Platoon’, The Doors in ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Creedence in ‘Forest Gump’.

‘We can’t make it here’ isn’t in a film though. It’s the soundtrack of coherent problems. We don’t have producers picking songs to soundtrack our lives, the bands and the artists do that themselves and you pick the soundtrack to your own existence, and even though you don’t know it, McMurtry has penned an anthem to soundtrack all of our lives. Locked up far away in middle class suburbia or a boarding school in the far ends of Scotland or a semi-detached in leafy Surrey or University Halls in Birmingham, you may think you’re safe - and although you are, this shit continues to trundle on through the world and McMurtry has found a way to bring the terror and strife and heartache to your door - and you better fucking listen.

Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze
One leg missing, both hands free
No one's paying much mind to him
The V.A. budget's stretched so thin
And there's more comin' home from the Mideast war
We can't make it here anymore

With the current economic climate, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and the countless soldiers who wont return home to their families this Christmas and the endless bloodshed throughout the world, the struggle faced by the lucky ones who return is colossal.

As well as focusing on the money problems of people in today’s crumbling society, this mind-blowing rocked-up power-house punch draws on the dying identity of America, the jobless and the homeless, the imported goods that have forced unemployment to an all-time high, the throw-away nature of society and the general despair felt by thousands upon thousands of people throughout the world.

With it's filthy distorted-out guitar sound and layered out wailing vocals that pile up on the song like the bulked-up harmonies of John Fogerty on a Bloodkin record, this is one hell of an anthemic heartbeat of hope.

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in
Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away

This isn’t some moral message that’s going to tell you to get up off your arse and fucking do something, because I’m guilty of this, we all are. It’s just a message telling you to listen to this song - there’s still some good left in this world, and at times, I think that this song could be why McMurty was sent to us in the first place…