Setting Sun cover Tom Petty’s You Got Lucky

Dee Lite’s Groove Is In The Heart (retro throwdown)

At the risk of sounding like a broken (vinyl) record, they just don’t make em’ like they used to. Rhiannon, Britney and co, the superstars (for better or for worse, with a strong lean towards the latter) of today, couldn’t hold a torch to the dancing divas of yesteryear, as this funkadelic clip from New York group Dee Lite proves.

The Style Council rock Japan, 1985

I put together a few mix CDs for a friend’s party the other week and had to include this track from the Modfather himself, Paul Weller, during his Style Council period, which marked the second distinct phase of his ever-changing career. Weller may have disavowed much of his back catalogue, but for the rest of us, there’s still much pleasure to be had living vicariously through soulful, introspective moments like these.

Blasphemous Rumours

The song Blasphemous Rumours by Depeche Mode is just about the most dark, beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. There’s something very compelling about it all: it’s gloomy and depressing during the verses, but then this sexy, almost hypnotically melodic chorus bursts in out of nowhere. The song came out in 1984 and is reputedly based on a true story, with singer Dave Gahan concluding at the end of it all: ‘I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour, and when I die, I expect to find Him laughing’. Brilliant.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

FAIL! Man wears crack jacket to drug trafficking court date

From the ‘what were you thinking’ file comes this news report of a man in Fort Lauderdale accused of drug trafficking who turned up to court for his trial wearing a jacket with a cartoon recipe for cooking crack cocaine. Yes, smart indeed.

New Banksy artwork angers the Catholic Church

Banksy has struck again, this time offending the Catholic Church with a bold artwork that critiques their stance on ongoing child abuse scandals. Banksy has taken a replica of a bust of an eighteenth century member of the Catholic hierarchy and added multi-coloured tiles to the face — pixelating it — as a comment on what he considers to be the Church’s cover-up. ‘I’m never sure who deserves to be put on a pedestal or crushed under one’, Banksy noted. And who are we to disagree? Read more

Tattoo artist sued by ex-girlfriend for obscene design

Oh boy, this is so bizarre it could only be true. Apparently a Dayton, Ohio, tattoo artist has been slapped with a $100,000 lawsuit by his ex-girlfriend for tattooing an image of, erm, excrement with flies on her back rather than the scene from Narnia that she had requested. The reason? He’d recently found out that she had been cheating on him with one of his buddies. Damn! And here we were thinking this was the hot new look for trailer park trash crowd.