For those of you who bristle at the prospect of Bis week, let’s break you in gently with a band that isn’t Bis at all (but is in the blessed business of Bis). data Panik formed from the sherbet ashes of Bis in 2005, only releasing two singles before rematerialising phoenix-style into two-dimensional animated versions of their original sugary selves. Short and sweet! more »
katstevens in FT • 1 Comment
Anyone who paid attention in GCSE Geography will be aware of the concentric circle model of a town, with the CBD in the centre and the ‘commuter zone’ around the outskirts. Each zone has its own advantages and disadvantages for why people might want to live or work there.
The same model can be tenuously applied to the proximity of pubs to my workplace (situated bang in the middle of pub-saturated Fitzrovia). more »
katstevens in FT • 4 Comments
Walking past Disney Place through twirling snowflakes that melt on your nose and eyelashes, there’s a childlike magic in the air – it’s the last day of school! Er, I mean, work.
The last Friday before Christmas is of course Demob Day. Even if you have to nominally work for a few days the following week, you know it’s going to be in a half-empty office, and your most pressing concern will be improving your Souvlaki Tetris high score. Demob Day means you can finally relax. It means all the usual suspects will be in the same pub for once. It means arriving already half-cut thanks to extended lunchtime drinks with your colleagues. It means leaving work early anyway despite said lengthy lunch and bagging a good table. more »
katstevens in FT • 8 Comments
Last year’s series of X Factor was far from depressing for fans of well-sung pop. If you were posted to Outer Mongolia last Christmas, here is a quick catch-up: Alexandra ‘Leona II’ Burke received the highest number of audience votes, pipping non-ugly boyband JLS into second. Both acts signed with the same management team and both have recently released their debut albums through Sony; both have clocked two #1 singles each since then. But which one has ended up the REAL winner? The only way to tell is… more »
katstevens in FT • 4 Comments
Thank You For The Music: The Music of ABBA, Hyde Park
We pick our way through the sea of tartan blankets, picnic baskets, foldable chairs, sensible anoraks and fidgeting eight-year-olds who have each been given a bag of fizzy cola bottles and a glowstick as a treat. “Prize for the first person to spot someone in a bacofoil costume!” says Kirsty. Her younger sister Cathy is preoccupied trying to remember how the first verse of ‘I Know Him So Well’ starts: “It’s not ‘looking back I could have played it differently‘ is it? That’s the next line!” Cathy’s friend Lucy-Ann is hungover and is more interested in getting a good close-up with her camera. “I can’t see, is that Chris Evans’ real hair?” more »
katstevens in FT • No Comments
Keri Hilson – In A Perfect World
It’s near impossible to hear or see Keri Hilson without Timbaland lurking somewhere on the sidelines. You almost want to distract him with a tin of biscuits or something to see what Keri would be like if left to her own devices. But does she have any devices? more »
katstevens in FT • 3 Comments
“No jokes, no messin’, we’ll teach you a lesson, a state of confusion to keep you all guessin’!”
Wholesome family entertainers Ant (PJ) and Dec (Duncan) have come a long way since that terrible (but thankfully fictional) Tyneside paintballing accident in 1992, where Debbie and Amanda ganged up on the boys as revenge for two-timing them but PJ had taken his protective goggles off for a split second and got paint in his retinas. Whoops! “Geoff! He cannae see man! Spuggy’s done a sick! Nyooaaoorhhhhhhhhh!“. more »
katstevens in FT • 1 Comment
Last night saw the first episode of Law & Order:UK, a British version of a US television programme! I couldn’t remember this sort of cross-ocean event ever having happened before in the history of entertainment so your intrepid telly reporter here thought she’d give it a whirl. Plus it had Martha from Doctor Who in it. more »
katstevens in Uncategorized • 5 Comments
24. The Orb – Blue Room
It was a dark day when my tape of Rave’92 broke. Repeated rewinding and pausing had caused a hole to develop in the tape, and my rubbish cassette player refused to play it unless I wound it back manually and flipped it over to the other side. I ended up too scared to play the tape at all in case the whole thing spontaneously combusted.
Missing out on Praga Kahn was bad enough, but I was devastated at the loss of ‘Blue Room’. No more mesmerising dance routines incorporating several jumps off the ladder of my bunk bed. I had dreamed up accompanying visuals (just as I had done for ‘Assassin’): an underwater vista filled with shooting stars and bubbles, flicking montages of news channels and snippets of black and white films. I allowed myself to be completely absorbed into the music, to escape the harrowing pressures of… being eleven years old? Er, what? more »
katstevens in FT • 8 Comments
23. Ambassadors of Funk ft MC Mario – Supermarioland
It was an unspoken agreement that you were only allowed to play the shorter ‘B’ game of Tetris in the playground, as everyone had got so good at the (indefinitely long) ‘A’ game that they would hog it the entire breaktime and the complex priority system* would dissolve into chaos. Despite this suprisingly democratic arrangement, the days when D4v1d Ell1s0n remembered to bring in Super Mario Land were immensely preferable: the percentage of people who could get past the big seahorse at the end of world 2 (i.e. those who had their own Gameboy to practice on) was low enough that I often got a quick go. I was a RUBBISH GIRL at it though – whilst my friend Em did our gender proud by regularly getting enough coins to earn an extra life, I kept falling down a gap where there was CLEARLY a platform there a second ago. Stupid Mario. more »
katstevens in FT • 14 Comments
