Joe Kavanagh's Music News

They may not be quite as big as Jesus yet, but U2 can lay claim to being bigger than a man who holds himself up as the Big J's representative here on earth, after the Dublin act broke a longtime attendance record at Giants stadium in New Jersey last week. The band was in town for a pair of gigs, which saw over 84,000 people attend each night, breaking a record that had stood since Pope John Paul II visited the same venue in 1995. No word on whether Bono managed to break the Pope's record for preaching at the site. In other U2-related news, the group's manager, Paul McGuinness told UK tabloid, The Sun, that the band's current tour costs over $750,000 each day it is on the road, even on those days that the band decides to take off. The mogul claimed: "The engineering problems are enormous and costly. Whether we're playing or not, the daily overhead is about £470,000. That's just to have the crew on the payroll, rent the trucks and everything else. There are about 200 trucks in total, including merchandise and catering." He went on to tell the newspaper that the tour has seen an outlay of almost $64,000,000 since it took to the road in June, and maintains that the current jaunt has yet to generate a profit. Yeah right, if you believe that then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you because U2 did not earn their shrewd reputation by traversing the globe for the heck of it...

Liam Gallagher has become the unlikely face for preserving bees in the UK, after a public outcry over the alarming drop in their numbers during the course of the past two decades. Speaking to the media last week, the Oasis front man stated: "You've got to look after the birds and the bees, man. The bees are vanishing. We've got to save them before they all buzz off. It's important. It's a really worthwhile cause. Without them we're in proper bother. I like honey. If it weren't for honey, I'd have a rough voice." Cheesy, but effective I suppose. Goodness knows how his voice would sound if it weren't for honey because to many people's ears it already sounds like a rusty saw cutting off a pirate's wooden leg. Anyway, if Oasis turn out to be half as bad as critics expect them to be, now that Noel Gallagher has left, then there'll be no more need for honey for his vocal chords. And Liam will be going the way of the bee...

Speaking of Noel Gallagher, if reports in music magazine NME are to be believed, then the guitarist might just be hooking up with a rather unlikely musical bedfellow, with word that Snoop Dogg intends to offer him a job now that his Oasis days are behind him. Snoop was recently made creative director of EMI offshoot, Priority Records, and maintains that one of his first orders of the day will be to offer Gallagher a contract, saying: "Would I sign Noel Gallagher? Hell yeah. I'm definitely trying to find a rock band right now. Would I collaborate with him? Yeah, definitely. Set it up... I love his style." From henceforth I would suggest that NME don't even have to send a reporter to interview Snoop because from that quote, it appears that he is more than capable of asking himself the questions. At least he didn't do the whole third person thing, like: "Would Snoop Dogg sign Noel Gallagher... etc." because people that do that should be hung up by the inside of their nostrils... Over hot coals...

Ozzy Osbourne claims that if he had it to do over again then he would not have gone down the whole reality TV route, telling an interviewer: "It was as if I went to bed in one world and woke up in a completely different world. We went down to this market in Beverly Hills where you can just walk around artwork and statues and dolls and all this stuff and I got this really creepy feeling. I look around. People aren't looking, but I could feel eyes on me. I thought I was getting paranoid or something." At least he didn't add on at the end there that the experience made him go out and write a song for Black Sabbath because that would have proven that he has lost all comprehension of linear time. I've got news for Ozzy though, he would do it all over again if Sharon said so because that woman doesn't just wear the pants in that relationship, she wears the pants with the holster that carries a Colt 45. Ozzy also claims that the entire reality TV experience was like "an experiment that went wildly out of control", which coincidentally is how many people would describe his family...

In a chat with Interview magazine last week, former New Order front man, Bernard Sumner, disclosed that he and his family had a close call in August, when their boat was attacked by a giant shark as they were sailing from Scotland to the island of Barra. The guitarist/singer stated: "I had a collision with a 30ft shark. The boat nearly sank and there was a big imprint of a huge shark in the paint on its bottom. There was this God-almighty crash, like I'd hit rocks. I checked the charts and there were no rocks, so I called the coastguard and he said other boats that had been up there that morning had reported six large sharks in that part of the sea. My family were in bed, so I was pulling the floorboards up every 10 minutes to see if we'd taken on water." There's only one thing for it. Next time bring Chris de Burgh and James Blunt...

Stewart Copeland is unsure whether The Police will ever take to the road again, after the band's hugely successful global tour of 2007/08. The drummer told a recent interviewer: "Who knows? I mean, I intend to be on the planet here for another 50 years; who knows what'll happen. To escape from The Police, we had to melt down the cage and... dismantle the huge behemoth that grew up around the band. The three of us had to get away from it. As to whether or not we do it again, who knows?" If I may throw my two cents in; I think that they should hold off until Sting thinks about doing another solo album, then it's all hands to the pump time...

In an interview with NME last week, Ian Brown recalled that his lowest moments as a member of the legendary Stone Roses were when he witnessed guitarist John Squire struggling with a cocaine problem. Brown declared: "Walking into John's room and seeing him with another delivery of cocaine in a big pile on his table. It's 11 in the morning and he's snorting lines of cocaine and I'm thinking, 'S***, is that what we are now? Do you have to take coke at 11 in the morning just so that you can come up with a guitar line?' I thought we were against all that. I thought we were the real article. If he could have seen himself when he was 15, doing that, he'd have been horrified." What Brown fails to mention is that he only went into the room to see if Squire had a loan of a machete to chop up his own stash of weed. I'm teasing. Despite his reputation as a toker extraordinaire Brown claims that he rarely used class-A drugs and came to the herb relatively late in life - in rock star terms - telling the interviewer: "Because of my cheekbones people think I'm a crackhead... I've never even tried crack, I've never taken heroin. I didn't start smoking weed until I was 22." Brown's latest album, My Way, hit shelves last week...

Acclaimed indie act, Noah and the Whale are positively livid because all of their equipment was stolen after a gig in Manchester last week, but are adamant that the show will go on. Speaking to the media, distraught singer, Charlie Fink appealed for the public's assistance in finding their equipment, stating: "The thing is, we've been doing this tour... it's been f***ing hard, because we've been doing it on the cheap, lifting our own gear and carrying everything ourselves. And this just feels so unbelievably unfair. But we've just got to get on with it now." Sad as it may seem, I would imagine there is more chance of me finding Bigfoot riding around on Shergar's back than these poor sods getting that gear back. I wouldn't mind but the Mancunians are always accusing Liverpool's scousers of being thieves. I guess we'll have to exchange the word Mancunian for scouser in the old joke, Q: What do you call a scouser in a three-bedroom semi-detached? A: A burglar.