Well well well, what a surprise hey, the BBC are thinking about closing down 6 Music and the Asian Network, (both part of their digital radio package) because the listening figures have not increased as they had hoped.

You could say this is a bit of a strange decision, as although 6 Music may only have 700 000 listeners a week it has grown faster than any of the other BBC digital radio-only channel, and in a recent BBC Trust review was described as “distinctive and well-liked by its listeners”. The loss of 6 Music and the Asian network would not only piss on the chips of the above mentioned 700 000 listeners it would also have a huge knock on effect on everything from; up and coming new music/bands/artists, the BBC’s commitment to ethnic minorities and Digital Radio on the whole. On the other hand the report goes on to say that it only reaches 1% of the adult population, with only 20% of people knowing that it even existed, which honestly, like Cliff Richard saying he’s straight, I find a little hard to believe.

Here’s one reason why, I live in Sweden and I have to say that I and many of my friends here, being either English or from further afield (Venezuela for example) listen to 6 Music on a daily basis. I cannot think of one other radio station that caters to so many different styles of music both new and old alike, heck even their mission statement describes them thusly:

“Brings together the cutting edge of today and the iconic and groundbreaking music of the past 40 years.”

So the whole thing strikes me as being odder than a Madonna and Jacko love child! If it were up to the BBC they would have us all listening to the slowly deteriorating quality of Radio 1, which only really seems to play the same set of songs throughout their daily schedule (which are paid to be on there by the larger record labels). And most of these same songs are by the same artists who are pretty much constantly fighting for the top spots in the charts, which a large amount of the radio listening public wouldn’t even piss on – whether they were on fire or not. (Now I have to conveniently skirt around both Radio 2 and 4 as I don’t listen to them, although I do get regular sms’s from my mum telling me: ‘they’ve just played a song by Elbow, or Doves on Radio 2, told you they were good!’

6 Music was set up to offer a little diversity to proceedings, offering a home to, among others; the hilariously brilliant Adam and Joe (who recently won three Sony Radio Silver awards don’t you know), one of my favourite new DJs Jarvis Cocker, Lauren Laverne, the legend that is Steve (Lurpak) Lamacq and the rather shit, but I’ll let them off, George Lamb. This makes a refreshing change to the star line-up of the (overpaid, but let’s give him another crack at this TV lark anyway) Chris Moyles, Jo (duller by the day) Whiley, and not my favourite DJ in the world Zane Lowe.

And what about the Asian Network, if this station goes then where else will you be able to hear everything from Bhangra to Bollywood and beyond. And due to the lack of exposure and Performing Rights Society (PRS) money paid per play on stations like 1xtra and the Asian Network it could mean curtains to many artists trying to break into the industry as well as having a massive effect on the scene, both in relation to exposure and income.

From the outset 6 Music seemed like a John Peel wet dream, its DJs strived to offer the opportunity for small, up and coming bands and musicians to have their music heard over Lady Gaga, every single X Factor, (Pap) Pop Idol and Britain’s got Talent contestant, ever, and (The Official WORLDS WORST GROUP) The Black Eyed Peas. This is also alluded to by Mike Smith, managing director of Columbia Records (not the Black Eyed Peas bit, although I’m sure he agrees), who recently stated that:

“6 Music has been the first place that a lot of bands have played live sessions. It is one of the few places where the DJs actually play their own music and as a result it has a strong personality.”

Its not just the record label peeps who are throwing in their tupance worth, Royal Family member David Bowie stated:

 ”6 Music keeps the spirit of broadcasters like John Peel alive and for new artists to lose this station would be a great shame.”

Sir Charlie Brooker:

“I was going to buy a digital radio next week. If they get rid of BBC 6 Music I might as well not fucking bother.”

The Guardian:

“If the BBC closes 6 Music it will be because it cares more about listening figures than fulfilling its public service remit.”

A Facebook group has also been set up by Jon and Tracy Morter, the couple who succeeded in stopping the Dark Side that is Simon Cowell’s evil empire of Pap Idol dick cheeses from getting, yet another Christmas number 1, by encouraging the British record buying public to cause the sales surge that saw Rage Against the Machine crowned as the Christmas No 1 Kings.

Some hope has also been thrown the way of 6 Music, the Asian Network and its listeners by the Chairman of the BBC Trust Sir Michael Lyons when he said recently that if there was a big enough public response about the cuts then he would ask management to rethink its strategy:

“If we find that… there’s massive public concern that we need to take account of then we will go back to the director general to rethink the strategy before it’s approved,”

So this said, let’s all log onto Facebook (although I’m sure you’ve already updated your status at least 3 times today already) and sign up to one of the groups.

Oh and what’s this, it is indeed one of those group links, handily laid out for you!

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=278123313911&ref=ts

Having had the great fortune to be at the UK’s IMAX premiere of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, I feel obligated to enthuse about the IMAX at Waterloo. With a screen 20 metres high by 26 metres acros, 11,600 watt sound system and full 3D digital projection, It has to be one of the greatest cinema experiences imaginable (until they introduce D-Box in the UK anyway). It’s a big airy cinema, with friendly staff and well priced snacks that is miles ahead of your average multiplex in terms of enjoyment. Anyway… IMAX rave over… what about the film?

Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is a sequel of sorts to Lewis Carroll’s books Alice’s Adventure In Wonderland at its sequel Through The Looking Glass. It is set ten years after Alice’s first venture into Wonderland, and the 19-year-old is having dreams of rabbits in waistcoats having forgotten her first foray down the rabbit hole. To cut a long story short, she ends up back in Wonderland, meets all your favourite characters, does all the same things again, and so on and so forth.

With its imaginative visuals and dizzying 3D, Tim Burton’s Alice is not a wholly unenjoyable trip to the movies, but for me, it was one of the most annoying films I’ve seen in a long time. With only very sleight nods to Disney’s first animated foray into Wonderland, anyone expecting the visuals treats and gentle whimsical humour of the animated original will be sorely disappointed. The live action ‘real world’ sections are so woodenly acted and slow moving, its almost as if Burton just filmed the cast rehearsing, it’s just so dull, but things don’t even get much better once she tumbles down the rabbit hole.

Mia Wasikowska, the young Australian playing Alice seems stifled by the English accent imposed on her. She looks the part but her delivery is so stilted you just want her to get on with it. Any internal struggle is totally lost in the delivery and half the time she doesn’t seem to know what to do. When you start to lose interest in your central character, you’d better have some other characters to fall back on. But Tim Burton has gone for the safe option once again casting Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, and his wife Helena Bonham-Carter as the Red Queen.

Depp’s involvement has led to the Mad Hatter being elevated to a central character, but I couldn’t have cared less for him. His accent veers from English to Scottish without rhyme or reason, and his eccentricity begins to grate instantly. Don’t even start me on the dancing scene… What were they thinking? Bonham-Carter is fine as the Red Queen, but is upstaged by a much more nuanced performance by Anne Hathaway as the White Queen. If Burton weren’t stuck in such a creative rut he’d have realised that there would have been a much more interesting film to be made with Hathaway as the Red Queen.

Talking of creative rut, the score is done by long-time Burton collaborator Danny Elfman meaning that the soundtrack just sounds like they’ve asked for them to make it sound Tim Burton-esque. Boring. The most annoying aspect for me though was the over-reliance on CGI. Bad CGI has always been a bug-bear for me, and the mere hint of it can sour my view of a movie irreparably. Burton has a strong tradition of creating fantastical and macabre situations out of the ordinary – see Edward Scissorhands or Batman, but in Alice he practically uses it as a creative crutch. To be fair to him used sparingly, as in the Red Queen’s enlarged head, it looks great, but for some inexplicable reason, one of the main characters played by Crispin Glover has a full CGI body but a real head. His head looks unattached to his clearly digitized and extended body. Every time he came on screen I was asking myself why? There also close ups of horses, and instead of using a real horse, they CGI one in? A horse and a human body? Just use the real thing… GAH.

The original book is a classic children’s whimsical fantasy, full of eccentric English humour, but all this been abandoned in favour of quirky/annoying characters and situations a with a wholly unnecessary Narnia-esque battle scene tacked onto the end. The plot is fairly incomprehensible and moves forward without any real explanation of who wants what and for what reason. The film has a few saving graces that make it nearly bearable – Matt Lucas as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle_dum, Stephen Fry’s Cheshire Cat, and some moments of genuine invention (Alice hopping the moat of giant floating heads), but otherwise I found it all fairly irritating. Nice 3D though.

2/5

Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is the low-point of a once-great directors nadir of output. He needs to do something else… something different, preferably without Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter and Danny Elfman. Let’s see something more personal like Ed Wood please.

Tron Legacy Trailer Report

You’re probably aware that there is a sequel being made to the 1982 classic Disney film Tron, due out December 2010, but did you know that the viral marketing campaign has already begun? After a protracted sequence of events, tickets became available online to a mysterious ‘event’ at locations across the world, and I was lucky enough to bag a couple of tickets.

Note to Disney – if you want to raise expectations to your film ten months before it’s released… give the fans something to get excited about. We queued patiently for nearly 40 minutes at London’s IMAX, then we were herded into the screen, had a complimentary “Flynn Lives” Tee thrust into our hands and sat down waiting for the lights to dim.

We were then ‘treated’ to the new 2-minute Tron trailer comprising of new unseen footage, which I’ve found out, is due to be shown before Alice In Wonderland when it is released in five days time. So all this fuss and effort to get is there, and all we see is a 120 second trailer. When it finished, there was no applause, no cheering, nothing, just an overwhelming sense of disappointment. There were shouts for them to play it again, but no response.

And what of the trailer? It starts with Flynn’s son on the roof of a building meeting a private eye, who informs him that he has had contact from his missing dad (the hero of the original). Flynn Jr then visits his father’s dusty video game arcade before we get plunged into Tron world. The trailer is OK, but I felt a tangible sense of disappointment and not just from the mishandling of a ‘hype’ event, but from the fact that Tron 2 will look nothing like the original. Part of the joy of the original was the wholly unique grainy visual style inherent with the rotoscoping techniques used couple with the early pioneering computer graphics. Tron now looks like a Matrix-style universe where people where glowing clothes.

I still have high hopes for the film, but I have lowered my expectations accordingly. The trailer will be available to view online sometime this week, so we’ll post a link when it does and you can have a look for yourselves.

The Hurt Locker was the big winner at Sunday night’s annual BAFTA awards picking up six awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, which doesn’t bode well for the box-office behemoth that is Avatar. James Cameron’s sci-fi epic looked set to go toe-to-toe with his ex-wife’s Iraq war film for top honours at this years Oscars, but losing out at the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes to The Hurt Locker means that it looks unlikely to pick up any more awards than simply technical ones for special effects and so forth.

My mum asked me as we were watching the BAFTAs – “If Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time – then surely it’s also the best? Why hasn’t it won best film?” But the simple fact of the matter is the quality of a film, in terms of artistic achievement, doesn’t always equate to its box-office success. Poor of Hurt Locker hardly make a dent at the box-office which is a shame, but an understandable one – people just aren’t ready for Iraq war films right now, they need some breathing space before they’ll be ready, its all still too current and fresh. Avatar, in the meantime, is a fantasy film with an incredible marketing campaign from one of the most commercially successful directors of all time, so it was always going to do well at the box-office, but unfortunately, the film aint that great. Check my review here.

So is Hurt Locker a worthy best-picture film? I saw the film at a preview sometime last year, and I was gripped from start to finish, it is a tense, smart and clever action film with some incredible performances throughout, but I remember coming out thinking – “yeah that was good, but not great”. I’d recommend you seek it out, but I stand by my thoughts that Inglourious Basterds was a better war film, infinitely more fun and hell of a lot smarter. My vote for Best Film would have been for Up, a incredibly worthy film, but the type that will NEVER win a Best Picture – an animated movie.

It was nice to see the BRITISH Academy giving the best acting gongs to Brits Colin Firth and Carey Mulligan, but don’t let that tempt you into backing them for the Oscars, methinks it was a kind of national nepotism that got them the vote. If you’re going to put money on anyone – go for Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) and Sandra Bullock (Blind Side). The groundswell of support for both these two in the States currently seems unstoppable.

Review by Tom Butler – follow him on Twitter here.

Dustin at Stickerdrop dropped us a line to let us know about the contest they’re running on their site.

+100 Stickers in Prizes. 3 Ways to Enter. 3 Separate Chances to Win.

Enter by:
Becoming a fan on Facebook.
FOLLOWING and LISTING Sticker Drop on Twitter. Then TWEETING “Hope I win the #connectcontest by @StickerDrop.” List may follow/include other people.
Joining the Mailing List.
Do all three and you will be entered in all three separate drawings. Please, share and retweet!
Last date to enter has been extended to February 22nd, 2010. Contest is open to both US and international residents, except where prohibited by law. One winner per house hold.
Comments and questions can be posted below.

These handmade SphereTouch mouses from OreObject come in Platinum, Titanium and Steel.

Touch sensitive buttons make the use less strenuous. High resolution laser sensor, high speed horizontal scroll wheel and a nylon mesh USB cord to stop those annoying tangles when waggling your polished piece around your work desk.

Universal to take on pirates!!

No, relax, this has nothing to do with Universal Pictures trying to take on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise with a Ricky Tomlinson fronted all singin’ all dancin’, swashbuckling Pugwash trilogy (although maybe it’s something they should think about! James Cameron’s next 3D epic perhaps?). Or sending Lady Gaga with whatever it is hiding in her tight Shrew skin imitation leotard to fight the Somalian super tanker stealers somewhere on the high seas. No in fact I’m chatting about Universal’s internet download bunk up with www.freeallmusic.com or SpiralFrog (www.mymojo.com), from hunting around on the internet they both seem to be grabbing a bit of URG’s pie so I’m not sure who to trust!?

Anywho here’s a little bit of info for you. On 11th January 2010 Universal Music Group announced that it was getting into bed with freeallmusic.com to offer music fans the chance to download its back catalogue for FREE! All that was required from you was that you had to sit through a few adverts for affiliate companies/products of your choosing (from the list that they provide for you) and you would be given 20 downloads a month/5 a week (songs or albums I doth not know!?) in return. Good deal? Bad deal? Well, check it…

UMG are the World’s biggest music company with a shed load of record labels under their Vivendi corporate umbrella (ella ella) and are the first record company to offer this kind of service. Although HMV, Virgin, MTV and Microsoft are all soon to follow suit, so this can only be a good thing right?

The one problem that I have is that I’m into a lot of different types of music, and like nothing more than discovering new up and coming bands. The problem with this is that a lot of bands are shying away from the big record companies and opting for self release or smaller independent record labels due to all of the pressure and constraints that are forced upon them by the larger companies. In turn this cuts down on many of the bands that I would consider downloading, legally of course. And on the flip side, not every teeny bopper chart topper is on Universal, so for the Top of the Pops fans this limits your options somewhat also.

As I mentioned above, and I have never done this, but many of my friends have downloaded music from illegal torrent websites (tut tut), however I personally have been scared witless of putting food on Osama Bin Laden’s table and funding terrorism, as those adverts on many DVD’s would have you believe, so I have always been a good little boy and either bought the CD’s themselves or copied my friends music libraries onto my hard drive. So the option of legally downloading tracks for free straight from the record companies could appeal to many. Let’s check this out…

I tried to access the service to find out the crack of it all, but its only available to our buddies in the US or for a useless (to me) mojo ringtone site, so I hit a bit of a brick wall here and can’t give any kind of info on the usage of the site, however I’m guessing that it will be simple to use as they are going up against the already established Apple Store and don’t want to befuddle their already loyal fan base.

Did you know? that for every legal download 40 are done illegally (no wonder no one can find Bin Laden, he’s probably holed up in some secret layer fashioned out of an old volcano with all of the loot he must be raking in!). So it’s no wonder that record companies want to cut down on this and gain a little bit of the $1.1 billion market. So up step Universal to the plate, 1st at bat.

This is all well and good; however I have discovered some minor flaws thus far:

• FreeAllMusic.com is only open to our friends from across the pond, so unless you’re a yank, living in yanksville you aint getting bubkiss!

• Search for spiralfrog.com and you end up getting redirected to mymojo.com which is some shit bag mobile ringtone site. And unless you were one of the backwardly inbreed social rejects who paid good 6 fingered money to get Crazy Frog to number 1 in the UK you won’t be liking this much!

There are as well a few other mishaps waiting to befall the download generation. I give them to you thusly:

Downloaded songs from, spiralfrog.com, or no wait its mymojo.com won’t play on your iPod (although it does state on Universals press release that freeallmusic.com downloads are compatible!?) as you have to use DRM from Microsoft (which was conveniently cracked the other day) and seeing as everyone in the world has at least 2 of these little iPod buggers, you’re a little scuppered! Now what would MacGyver do?

Another small obstacle is that any music downloaded cannot be copied onto CD. So unless you like making mix tapes for loved ones, but hey let’s face it this is becoming an old past time, like eating bread and dripping for tea or watching Die Hard on DVD rather than crisp as chips Blue Ray, I don’t foresee this as being a massive problem.

So in summary…

It is still early days as the announcement was only made at the turn of the year, and I’m sure a European site will soon be sent to the front lines to fulfil our downloading needs, but in the meantime it seems that your best bet would be to stick with iTunes or Pirate Bay (who said that!?).

Article by Ryan Cook

Skinny Jeans…The beginning of the end?

Well not quite. Skinny jeans have quite a history…and though maybe 5 years ago if your average Joe Bloggs strolled round the local shops in a pair of Jeggings he may have ended up with literal egg on his face, they’ve never completely disappeared. Though it does feel like time for something new…in comes Carrot fit jeans. Loose and comfortable at the waist / hip, tapering down into a skinny ankle – this is a statement wardrobe piece with more guts than the skinny. We’re not suggesting that you should head to the back of the loft and re-emerge wearing your MC Hammer pants (you have them too, right?) but it’s time to refresh your denim for 2010. Levi’s were hot on these a couple of years back, Topman now sell more than their fair share whilst ASOS and the like are slowly cottoning on to the trend too. So what are you waiting for? We suggest you head out, grab yourself a pair of Carrot Jeans and get ready to say goodbye to the Skinny – for now.

Post by Lewis Hamilton

The 6th installment of Curated by Arkitip has been gorgeously created by Artist Evan Hecox for Incase iPhone and Macbook covers. His illustrations of London, NYC and Tokyo will really grab anyones attention who likes to spoil their favourite gadgets in life.

Source.

Ferry Gouw…sound familiar? If you live in London and have an interest in art and music then this guy is certainly one to watch for 2010. Not just one of a million DJ’s or producers coming out the woodwork for their 5 minutes of fame, Ferry can claim with integrity that he’s worked with some of 2009’s most influential faces. From Major Lazer to Mystery Jets and beyond, his work has even received an MTV VMA nomination.

So what does he do? Mr Gouw is a very talented comic-style artist. With a style all of his own, and citing Al Columbia and Chipp Kidd as heavy influences it’s no wonder his work is as impactful as a bull dozer – perfectly fitting for the artist he works with. And did we mention he’s also in his own band – The fantastic ‘Semifinalists’ Is there no end to this guys talents? Keep your ears to the ground (though we actually recommend saving ferrygouw.com into your favourites…) and spread the word – this guy will blow up in 2010!

Post by Lewis Hamilton

Major Lazer – Hold The Line Official video from Ferry Gouw.