Joe Kavanagh's Music News

Ireland's foremost contemporary music award, the Choice Music Prize, which rewards the country's best current album, has provided yet another shock just one year after Julie Feeney came from nowhere to walk away with the honors for her album: 13 Songs. Despite bookies and music fans both placing Duke Special's Songs From The Deep Forest as the firm favorite, it was Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon who walked away with the award and €10,000 in prize money, shocking those on hand for the ceremony in Dublin's Vicar Street last Wednesday night. Hannon's album, Victory For The Comic Muse, was a 50-1 outsider and was not even considered to be in contention by most analysts, who felt that the Derry-born singer's best days were behind him... The other big awards show in Europe last week was last Thursday's Shockwaves NME Awards, which dished up their usual array of controversy and excess, but for me, the event was most memorable for showing up just how poor the new crop of bands in 2007 have been up to this point. Big winners on the night were Arctic Monkeys, who walked away with two awards, Muse, who won Best Band, The Klaxons who won Best New Act and The View, who walked away with the Best Song Award for their track: Wasted Little Deejays. George W Bush won the Villain of the Year Award for the third consecutive year by a landslide and is in fact the only winner of this category since its inception in 2005. Aside from a few notable exceptions, most of the performances on the night lacked excitement, so it was the controversial incidents that provided the most remarkable aspects of the night. First up was Kate Moss, whose choice as Sexiest Woman had caused some in the rock fraternity to wonder just what place she had at a music awards show. They need not have worried because the supermodel and her boyfriend, Pete Doherty, were actually thrown off the premises when the couple allegedly used the same stall in the toilets several times, while other reports claim the final straw came when Doherty was seen secreting a spoon up his sleeve - hardly a good sign given his recent heroin habit. Their expulsion meant that Moss was not present to hand the Godlike Genius Award to Primal Scream as scheduled, but luckily Clash guitarist, Mick Jones, was there to take her place. The night's other big talking point was the escalation of the feud between Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys, who have had the needle for each other since AM's singer, Alex Turner, referred to the KC's as 'a bit boring' in a recent interview. The Kaisers began making 'provocative hand gestures' at the Monkeys during their live performance, while Turner and his bandmates responded by throwing silverware and basically anything they could lay their hands on at the stage. The fun didn't end there with The View's Kyle Falconer unable to attend his photo session afterwards because he was in the bathroom throwing up, while the band's guitarist, Pete Reilly, threatened to smash cameras and cameramen if photographers took any pictures of him, such was his 'delicate' state...

One band that should be making a US trip in the near future is Portishead, who made a welcome return to the stage in their home city of Bristol last week, with a secret gig that showcased their first new material in over a decade. The band performed under the name, Grumpy Man DJ's to a tiny crowd of onlookers that could not quite believe what they were seeing and virtually every report from the gig was positively effusive in its praise of the new songs...

Controversy has already erupted around this year's upcoming Eurovision Song Contest after Israelis chose a politically charged track as their entry in this year's competition. The song, Push The Button, by Teapacks was chosen in a landslide vote by Israelis in a televised competition but it is widely construed to be an attack on Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The track includes lyrics such as: 'The world is full of terror, if someone makes an error, he's going to blow us up till Kingdom come.' Another line reads: 'There are some crazy rulers, they hide and try to fool us, with demonic, technological willingness to harm.' Organizers of the ordinarily inane contest would like it to remain exactly like that and are anxious to keep politics out of the camp competition, so a panel is meeting this week to discuss whether the entry will be allowed to go ahead. Israelis claim that the song, which is sung in English, Hebrew and French is an example of multiculturalism at work...

While we're on the subject of the Eurovision, one rumor currently going around the UK music industry claims that former Darkness frontman, Justin Hawkins, will make a concerted effort to be the British entry in this year's competition only months after leaving the metal band to get away from music. Other acts putting their name forward for the British include failed hip hop act Big Brovaz and former East 17 singer, Brian Harvey. Incidentally, Ireland's entry for the contest is the absolutely awful, They Can't Stop The Spring, which will be performed by traditional Irish act: Dervish. In fairness to the band, they had no choice in the song, which was picked after viewers of Irish TV show, The Late Late Show voted for the song by text. I actually can't believe that I just spent that amount of time writing about the Eurovision. I'm off now to have a shower and check my temperature...