News International (I do not need to tell you) is one of the most repellent organisations in the world, but this whole business might just end up working out to their advantage, in a twist of supremely Machiavellian achievement.

NI decided to close the News of the World a long time ago, as you can see from this Guardian article detailing the plans being set in place to deal with its disappearance, dating from weeks ago. The sunonsunday.com URL was registered before any of this even kicked off.

As much of a right wing, darkie-hating, shit stain of a wank rag that the NotW has always been, this might turn out to be a masterstroke by the Murdoch empire. They have been caught out in some of the most disgraceful acts of both illegality and moral offence in the history of the press, and they have managed to actually turn it to their advantage.

They close the NotW to show how serious they are about this sort of legal transgression, they reduce their market share of the UK press, and as a result they might just manage to persuade people that they are neither a monopoly concern, nor a dangerous blight on political discourse, and in doing so secure the kind of domination over the UK press and hence UK political debate which could turn us into the next United States – forever having to pander to the latest reactionary retard wheeled out on Fox News to agitate the bigots and the racists.

Because let’s face it, NI are not weakened by this event, they are consolidated. The Sun and the NotW basically catered to the same market: ignorant, unpleasant, narrow-minded racists. Closing one just strengthens the other, but if this PR stunt enables the BSkyB takeover to take place we will still be faced with one of the most conservative, racist, morally repellent organisations in the modern world owning a scarily large chunk of UK media.

Day-to-day journalists have all been fired (although given they work for the NotW in the first place I have no fucking sympathy), but the people who actually engineered and implemented all the craven, corrupt and utterly illegal actions we’ve learned about recently will all continue to work within Murdoch’s empire of sleaze.

In other words, what was potentially one of the greatest PR disasters in corporate history might just end up being turned into the kind of publicity stunt which turns the British media into a shameful mirror of the hatred, bigotry, and outright lies which is Fox News, by consolidating the power of a group of people who treat the world like their own fucking puppet show and care for nothing but insulating their own twisted version of reality to the point where a writer of dystopian science fiction simply couldn’t make this shit up.

Anyway, and breathe…

Here are your five questions for this week.

1. Your number one news media hate figure.
2. Compare someone in the news to a movie or cartoon villain.
3. Whose phone would you hack if you could?
4. Cameron and Murdoch is a predictable terrible twosome.  Pick a less predictable one.
5. What will your lunch be today?

This week’s five songs are from a tape called ‘Cheerful Choons, Innit’ which I found in the van recently.  I was living in Cambridge at the time, which was home to a surprising number of mockneys, hence the title.

Clem Snide – Ice Cube

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Lambchop – Up With People

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Eels – Jungle Telegraph

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The Pernice Brothers – Shaken

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Barry Adamson – Set the Controls for the Heart of the Pelvis (with Jarvis Cocker)

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This may be the limpest of all excuses I’ve ever had for naming a podcast.  You know why it’s called the Jeffcast?  Because I kinda mention Jeffrey Lewis a couple of times.  Oooh, yes, that makes sense.  Still, sorry, I couldn’t think of anything else really, off the top of my head.

I suppose I am off to see Jeffrey Lewis directly after recording this, so I guess it sort of counts.  He is playing a secret gig at Henry’s Cellar Bar after sneaking out of the Beggars Banquet Christmas Party at the Picture House over the road.  It’s one of the things I love about the anti-folk crowd: you genuinely get the impression that they’d rather be playing to an appreciative crowd of their mates, rather than a bigger crowd of anonymous punters who may stand there and demand entertainment.

So there you go, that’s the deal for tonight.  For the rest of the weekend we’re putting together Meursault albums, ready for the official (re)launch of their record next Friday at the Song, by Toad Christmas Party.  So, after folding and screen-printing a thousand of the bastards we’ll all be well ready for Gimme Shelter in the Caves on Saturday and a spot of Candythief action in the Jazz Bar on Sunday.  Enjoy the 48th Toadcast.

Toadcast #48 – The Jeffcast

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01. Yo La Tengo – Double Dare (04.12)
02. Wolf Parade – Call it a Ritual (07.29)
03. Modey Lemon – Loch Ness Monster (11.25)
04. Sly & the Family Stone – Life (17.09)
05. The Velcro Quartet – The Love Song of Little Cosmo Nostradamus (20.03)
06. The Pernice Brothers – The Ballad of Bjorn Borg (25.57)
07. Caramel Jack – The Lincoln Jackson Incident (34.37)
08. The Magnetic Fields – All the Umbrellas in London (38.29)
09. Sparklehorse – Happy Man (Memphis Version) (44.46)
10. The Veils – Birthday Present (49.44)
11. Grandaddy – Miner at the Dial-A-View (54.24)

I know, I know, there are plenty of women who visit this site with absolutely excellent taste in music.  And some of the best music blogs out there are written by women.  But the title of this post is not to criticise all women, it is aimed at a very particular sort whose relationship with music makes me want to set fire to cute little bunny rabbits, and in particular a song that, no matter how incognito they try and remain, always roots the old boots out in any situation.

Specifically, it’s women whose response to ‘that song is fucking dreadful and makes me want to burst my eardrums with knitting needles’ is invariably ‘oh don’t be so boooring’.  Or ‘just relax and have fun’.  Or something equally deserving of punishment by breast cancer.  ‘Having a good cry, sweetheart?  Chemo getting you down?  Fuck’s sake cheer up – don’t be so boooring.’  Just relaxing and having fun is not an option when this shitty Radio 1 Party Mix is playing.  No amount of relaxation, even to the point of a coma, is going to be sufficient to not fucking detest Dancing in the Moonlight by that curly-headed cunt and his baldy-dwarf-shagging cohorts.

Why so bitter about this in particular?  Well there is a very specific reason.  Firstly, the ‘don’t be so boooring’ defense has irked me since school.  People always used to respond with this stinker when you didn’t want to dance, and they had things completely fucking backwards.  Having a pleasant conversation with one’s friends is not boring.  What is boring is spastically hopping about to some fucking woeful Glenn Medeiros number in a desperate attempt to assert your social conformity.  How the fuck is choosing not to do something I don’t particularly enjoy boring, you silly tart?  And why is it always, always the most unimaginative, lifeless, one-dimensional, ultra-conventional dullards who use this particular gambit?  Sometimes I like to dance, sometimes I don’t.  Go.  The Fuck.  Away.

But more specifically this is about that one song: Dancing in the cunting Moonlight.  Unspeakably awful it is in the first place, but the sort of vapid, bovine old slappers who embraced the bloody thing back in about 2001 or whenever it was made it even worse.  You’d be in a bar and that teeth-grindingly awful intro would play: doodn-do-DO-DO-DOO! and whilst you tried to find a door in which to slam your penis in hope that the pain might distract you from the song, invariably the most depressing, largely unattractive, not as young as they pretend they still are, slightly overweight old heifers in the place would give an incoherent little shriek of delight and start, in the unusually large herds in which they tended to move, doing that little epileptic black woman’s Jerry Springer head movement, whilst stepping back and forth in the exaggerated style that is meant to say to everyone ‘Yeah, I can move.. yeah, I’m out with my friends… yeah, I’ve actually got friends, despite what you may think… yeah, in my herd I can gain some tiny measure of fucking self-esteem back from my completely unstimulating existence and comfort myself with the fact that however much I disappoint myself my friends are all equally mediocre and in this dismal company I don’t feel quite as inadequate as I do when I compare myself with the rest of the world.  Yeah!’

‘Oh can’t you just relaaax and enjoy yourself.  Don’t be so boooring.’
‘Do not tell me to FUCKING RELAX!  No amount of fucking relaxation can make this festering, white-boy  cod-soul by one of the most punchable cockmonkeys on the fucking planet anything less than three minutes of brain-melting, utterly inhumane mental fucking anguish.  Boring?  BORING?  If your capacity to appreciate art is so FUCKING STILLBORN that you are capable of anything other than pathological loathing for this steaming, god-punishing excrement then it is very much not myself who needs to fucking well consider whether or not they might be a little boring.’

The depth of the bile represents the hatred of the song, I hope, rather than any particular misanthropy on my part.  *Cough cough*

Anyway, can you imagine my horror when, at my housewarming party in Cambridge, I heard that unspeakable doodn-do-DO-DO-DOO! emanating from my fucking stereo and all the spastics started to twitch so immediately that I couldn’t even turn it off, although I did consider jamming one of their kids’ fingers in an electrical socket – power failure or poignant punishment: a win-win situation really.  Not only that but one of these tired old mares even had the temerity to say, on hearing this aural abomination in a pub six months later: “I’ll always associate this song with your lovely housewarming party”.  Is there a statement in the world more likely to drive me to suicide?  Or spontaneous combustion?  I doubt it.  That fucking song.  My House.  Please god, no!

I hate that fucking song.  Can you tell?

The music I do associate with that house would be far more along these sorts of lines:

Howe Gelb – Pontiac Slipsteam
The Pernice Brothers – Our Time Has Passed So Quickly
Badly Drawn Boy – Stone on the Water I don’t care how shit the rest of it’s been, this is still a good album.
Doves – Here it Comes
Grandaddy – Miner at the Dial-A-View
Lambchop – Nashville Parent