Comment allez vous?

It may surprise you to know that I talk a fearsome amount of bollocks. I don't just talk bollocks here either. Not just in this forum but in other media commitments, in my personal and private life, to anyone who will listen and plenty who won't. I do it because I believe very strongly that bollocks must be spoken, and for bollock dialogue to be properly propagated throughout society, individual talkers-of-bollocks must strive with every effort to expedite this. Plus I like the sound of my own voice and shit. (Check that. I do not actually like the sound of my own shit. Needs more bass response. Acoustics in my local 'facilities' are somewhat tinny.)

It may surprise you further to know that there are some individuals who, rather than talking bollocks on a voluntary basis, actually get paid to do so. Professional bullshit artists, perhaps, though that would mean mixing one's scatological metaphors (although still along bull-related lines) and that would never do. These people are called commentators. Some of them are very good at what they do. Most of them are untrammelled dog flange. In order to dissociate those that are The Shit from those that are simply Shit, we present Cash for Comment: the legends, the motormouths and the irrevocable fucktards of the com-box.

These folks are The Shit:

10. Neil Crompton, motorsport, Seven Network/Ten Network/Seven Network again In his day Cromley was a handy race driver - a couple of Bathurst podiums for various decent teams attest to that. (He actually started in the mid '80s for Brock's Holden squad and Funnily enough if he'd been able to get his international race licence in time for Bathurst '87 he would have ended up in the car which Brock took over to win the race after the Euro Ford Sierras were disqualified.) Anyway Crompton was useful but not a lot more, but he's been at the commentary gig for as long as he's been driving the things - instead of driving in that '87 Bathurst he was reporting from pitlane for Seven - and is one of those in the current Seven V8 Supercar combox who clearly knows their shit. As distinct from the rest of them who clearly know they're shit.

9. Rabs, league and swimming, Nine Network (and before that Ten, but we won't mention that now)
Call it a token of our appreciation, just for having to deal with Fatty, fucking Phil Gould, and now Laurie Daley, best known for flogging himself witless in the change rooms after Canberra's first NSWRL grand final win while PM Hawke and NSW Premier Greiner were being introduced to the victorious side. At least he's got Sterlo to offer some sort of vaguely sensible contributions (though if he says 'If we freeze play there' one more time he's getting that tellustrator up the shnozz).

8. Fox Sports rugby (the A team - Greg Clark, Phil Kearns, Greg Martin)
Buddha Handy used to live over the road from our place. He was fat and hideous and so was his son. Anyway he's long since been pensioned off and the Fox Sports combox now features the abovementioned bunch of good bastards, all of whom are head, shoulders, knees and toes above the dour, dreary, chippy lot of fuckers who Sky Sports NZ employ to commentate on their deadly-bloody-serious rugby coverage (other than Murray Mexted, who usually can be relied upon to say something completely inappropriate about any random hottie which the Sky camera monkeys can locate in the crowd while bored during halftime). Australian Super 14 broadcasts are entertaining. NZ ones aren't. Symptomatic of a country which seriously needs to get the fuck over itself with reference to union, backed up by the fact an independent auditor was called in to review the AB's quarter-final exit in the World Cup, whose report was made public today (just the six months or so after the game.) The equivalent Wallaby report would have been published within 15 minutes and would have read something like: The story of the Wallabies at World Cup 2007: They sucked. The End.
Anyway, more power to the Fox team; anyone who can make even Reds games fun to watch have to be worth the monthly subscription.

7. Sky Sports NZ cricket (Martin Crowe, Mark Richardson, Simon Doull, Ian Smith et al) What the Kiwis DO do well is cricket commentary, with a tribe of irreverant, knowledgeable, opinionated ex-players who unlike their fawning Strayan counterparts in the Nine combox (particularly the late arrivers - Tubs, Slats and Heals, I'm looking at you) aren't afraid to dispatch rockets up various underperforming local 'heroes' as and when the situation merits it. Yet despite being willing, unlike Nine or their own network's rugby coverage, to set national propaganda aside and point out how arse their own troops are on occasion, they're still a funny bunch of bastards who resolutely decline to take themselves too seriously.

6. Keith Huewen and Julian Ryder, world superbikes of the late Nineties and early Naughties, WSBK international feed
Good commentators need to have at least two critical bases covered in order to do their job properly: they need to be factually correct, and they need to be impartial. Keef and Julian were neither, particularly when FOGGGGYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!! (aka multiple world superbike champion Carl Fogarty) was going around - he was a Brit and so were they. But unlike some of those on the Other List below, Keef and Julian get a pass on this for being highly amusing cunts. They were also helped by presiding over probably the most dynamic era of motorbike racing, the World Supers of the late 90s. While MotoGP (then known as 500cc GP) was languishing in post-Doohan, pre-Rossi dullness, World Supers were going through their golden era (not counting their current golden era) of works bikes for Africa, elbow-to-elbow racing and last-lap dices every second race, and Keef and Julian were well amongst it. I think they do the domestic BBC British superbike coverage these days, while we get the shouty Jonathan Green (a converted football commentator) and Steve Martin, freshly-retired Aussie world superbiker and remarkably perceptive rookie pundit.

5. Martin Tyler, football, Sky Sports UK and occasionally SBS Speaking of football... which we weren't, but anyway.... Martin Tyler IS international football in Australia. His dulcet tones have illuminated most of the last twenty years' world cups and Euro championships (on top of countless other international fixtures, Champions League and English Premiership games) and without exception each game he's called has benefited from his contribution. The Richie Benaud of football commentary.

4. Richie Benaud, cricket, Nine Network/BBC The Richie Benaud of cricket commentary. An absolute, unalloyed, Teflon-coated, cast-iron, armour-plated legend. When he goes, the legend of the Nine commentary team (as lionised by Billy Birmingham) will go with him. Nine are just hoping like the Jesus fuck that he's not going particularly soon. ('Jesus fuck', in case you were wondering, was Mary Magdalene's job description.)

3. Barry Sheene, MotoGP, Nine and Ten Networks 1987-2003
From one who will inevitably leave us one day to one who sadly already has. From the early days with 'Huuuuuugggge' Darrell Eastlake on Nine, calling Gardner and Doohan doing battle with Rainey, Lawson and Schwantz, 1976/77 world champ Sheene is THE reason that I ended up loving bike racing as much as I do. 'E was the morster of goin' forster, know wot I mean? And thanks to Bazza, allegedly useful Spanish bike-pedaller Carlos Checa is still to this day known as 'Charlie Chuckit'. Even if his punishing overuse of the phrase 'consistently inconsistent' made you want to grind off his other pinkie.

2. Les Murray and Johnny Warren, football, SBS and noone else thanks very much For Bazza and bikes, read Laszlo Urge, Captain Socceroo, the fine institution of the Special Broadcasting Service, and football. We didn't get SBS in the sticks until around '95 (about the same time we got Triple J) but even before then the legend of Les and Johnny had made it as far as the Clarence. I'll always remember the sight of Johnny Warren breaking down in tears at the end of the MCG Iran World Cup qualifier in 1997, when we were 20 minutes away from France 98, and still managed to fall short. Fucking El Tel. Captain Socceroo never lived to see us make a World Cup, but he was remembered the night we did; cue SBS pundit Craig Foster's cry after Aloisi's penalty, not of GOAL!!! or ALOISI!!!! or even HERE WE COME GERMANY YOU LOT OF STEIN WIELDING LEDERHOSEN FREAKS!!! but of... JOHNNY WARREN!!! Oddly fitting, really.

1. Roy Slaven and HG Nelson, pretty much everything (but particularly The Greatest Game Of All), Triple J and occasionally the Seven Network at Olympics time And now let's welcome the team that can open the batting and take the new ball up the hill into the wind. Who can turn defence into attack in a twinkling of an eye. Who've enjoyed the highs and learned from the lows. Who are all the better for recent racing and in the wash-up at the end of the day win a lot more than they lose...
Roy and HG are not only brilliant satirists, after more than 20 years calling games they're also brilliant commentators. They fucking rule. The End.

Highly commended:
Dennis Cometti, AFL, Seven I'm with Fitzy on this - he'd be a reason to watch AFL, if AFL was in any way watchable.
John McEnroe, tennis, various networks Calls it as he sees it. A fairly unattractive character quality as a player, but illuminating as a commentator.
Tiffany Cherry, sports news, ESPN
For no other reason other than she's managed to parlay a career in serious sports journalism despite having a name more befitting of a Californian porn starlet.
At least it gives her some alternative employment options going forward.


...Whereas these folks are simply Shit:

5. The Moose, league, mostly Ten
...a.k.a. Thesaurus Rex Mossop, dual international, Manly stooge, bigot, homophobe and tautologist extraordinaire. The Moose's commentary confabulations were so prominent that Australian playwright Alex Buzo used to publish annual awards surrounding his mullering of the English language. Aside from being from Manly and for lines such as 'Those two twins look fairly similar, particularly around the head', Rex mainly makes the list for the penultimate characteristic on our initial list, in particular leading an aggressive Christian protest against a Northern Beaches' male nudist beach on the grounds that he refused to have male genitalia 'shoved down his throat'. Odd considering he grew up playing union.

4. Ian Healy, cricket, Nine
Heals is hand-over-fist the worst of the new generation of Strayan cricketer who's made the transition to the central commentary position. While Tubs has his cheerful, hey-everyone-I-used-to-be-captain-and- now-I-flog-Fujitsu-aircons-with-the-Nissan-Cedrics schtick, and Slats can rely on enthusiasm and a not-insubstantial ability to actually commentate on cricket games, Heals has nuthin'. Other than jingoistic parochialism and some very half-arsed ideas, usually shut the fuck down very swiftly by Richie, Chappelli et al. Just like in the grown-up Australian team, this is another representative cricket side in which he's probably going to be replaced by Adam Gilchrist - and this time there won't be boos ringing around the 'Gabba when it happens.

3. Pretty much any golf commentator, golf, television
Golf is gay. OK, playing it's all right, hitting several shades of Christ out of a small white object can't help but be cathartic, but watching it on TV? And getting paid to talk about it? OK, so that pair of Poms who Seven drag out every year to accompany Jack 'Position A, Sandy' Newton are listenable, and Radar Riley is engagingly drunk the entire time he's on course, but everyone else - fuck off. Particularly Johnny Miller. And Faldo, you dreary old fart. You were duller than a wet Tuesday in Invercargill throughout your career, you're not John McEnroe, don't pretend to be interesting now.

2. Paul 'Fatty' Vautin, league, Nine
...Actually fuck it, half the Nine league commentary team are shit. Brandy Alexander and Warren Smith are better on Fox, they're actually better for having offloaded 'Tugga' Daley onto Nine. But Fatty and Gould... Jesus suffering fuck. (Mary Magdalene had a headache that day.)

1. James Allen, Formula One, ITV and the universal F1-TV English language feed
James Allen is unequivocably the worst commentator to draw a salary for talking about sport on television anywhere in the world. He is the mother and father of all shit commentators. As discussed earlier, to be a decent commentator you need at the very fucking least to be (a) factually correct (usually would do), and (b) vaguely impartial. Allen is neither. He is both constantly, unutterably, amateuristically WRONG about some of the dumbest shit you can imagine a long-term F1 journo-broadcaster to be, and he is about as unbiased as a lawn bowl, particularly now that Hamiltron 1.0, The Ultimate Driving Machine, has been loosed upon the world. Enough has been said by this and more esteemed sites (such as Sniff Petrol's Stop The Cock campaign) about just how face-clawingly shit James Allen is at commentating about car racing, or breathing, or anything, but perhaps his greatest offence is this: His festering Little Englander hideousness, newly evoked in the wake of Hamiltronmania, has even started to infect his previously excellent colleague at ITV, former F1 pilot Martin Brundle, to the point where Brundle publically (and without any evidence whatsoever) accused Nando Alonso of having 'brake tested' Hamiltron in the recent Bahrain GP - that is to claim Nando stuffed his brakes on in a straight line so that Hamiltron would pile into the back of him. Why, exactly, would anyone do something so fucking stupid, let alone a double world champion who could probably figure out F1 cars work best when they haven't been run into by other F1 cars? Yet this 'brake test' line was repeated and perpetuated by The Cock along with the whole ITV commentary clusterfuck, a shower of 'tards with the mentality of Fleet Street and the IQ of an ant colony, even though any bastard could tell Hamiltron had simply fucked up a couple lines of code and ploughed straight up the Russell Coight of Nando's Renault, which was slower than Willie Mason. As later proven by Renault when they busted out the telemetry from Nando's shitbox, and borne out by Hamiltron when he 'fessed up to fucking up. And yet no apology yet from Allen, Brundle and ITV for slandering the dude on international television...

But chin up all you Cock haters (no, not you butch lesbian types), there may be light on the horizon - the BBC have outbid ITV for the rights to F1 from next season onwards (after ITV trumped the Beeb for Champions League rights) and there's a decent chance the existing ITV commentary team won't move across with the rights.

So here's to international English-language F1 coverage with something different: a refreshing lack of Cock.


The Doctor is OUT.

Sitch for brains

There's a line in one of the songs on the new Hives album which runs 'You become what you hate, and you hate what you've become.' It's hardly a profound line. It's hardly a profound song either, they're basically trying to sound like Is This It-era Strokes for reasons as bewilderingly unfathomable as the song is borderline unlistenable. But it has some resonance. Not with me, I should point out. Despite being homicidally unimpressed with the idea of having to turn 30, having done so I'm rather pleased about how I've actually made it this far and how I've turned out, despite the lack of Formula One world titles, FIFA World Cup winners' medals and/or sexually-exhausted, baby-oil-smeared supermodels littering my bedside. Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh? In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea. A cup o' cold tea. Without milk or sugar. Or tea. In a cracked cup, an' all. Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper...

Enough of that. Any more and someone will have to lick road clean wit' toonge. Anyway, the become what you hate/hate what you've become nexus ain't my bitch, it's that of a guy called Sitch. Fuck, we've gone all beat-poetry all of a sudden. Either that or Dr Seuss. I do not like green eggs and ham, largely because they've clearly gone off for fuck's sake.

Anyway, Rob Sitch. What a cunt. This is not exactly a breaking news flash to interrupt transmission on all channels with, but it's worth discussing.

When I was half the man I am today (mathematically, I mean, not as a result of some hideous bacon-slicer malfunction since remedied) Rob Sitch was one of my heroes. The D-Generation's 1992/93 Late Show was for me, as it was for a lot of you bastards, a Big Thing in my young adolescence. For a show on at stupid o'clock on a Saturday night, it rated its arse off; it spawned videos, DVDs and ABC Shop merchandising a-go-go; it launched careers (or re-launched them, after the D-Gen's original late-80s star had faded after an abortive attempt to go 'commercial' on Seven, and they'd ended up pulling breakfast shift on Triple M Mudbourne) and earned itself a place in the Strayan Generation X cult hall of fame.














Available from your ABC Shop, or wherever hastily-cobbled-together piles of offcuts and shite are sold









And Rob Sitch was pretty much star of the show, at least as far as I was concerned. Sure, Martin and Molloy were nominal hosts of proceedings with their stand-up-esque intro duologue segment (which they managed to parlay into several years of drivetime radio on syndicated commercial FM radio), Santo was funny and Jane was hot (then again at that age, half the girls I knew looked pretty hot, it's called Being A Teenager) but Sitch was in everything. The crap celebrity impersonations of the Late Show News? Check. The half-arsed stunts of Shitscared? Check. The less funny one out of Graham and the Colonel? Check and mate. (Which Jane eventually did, much to her discredit.) Plus he was the only one I remembered from the old D-Gen shows from the 80s (that Thunderbirds sketch is still piss-funny to this day).
















Just Roy and HG with Richie Benaud wigs

Anyway there was a Late Show sketch which remains memorable - largely because it made the Best Bits Of The Late Show Volume 1 video as well as the subsequent DVD - which ran the gentle viewer through the process of hosting a dinner party. Cue Sitch, in a preposterous pony-tail and jacket as the mother, father and daughter (all at once, providing 60 Minutes are shelling out for the interview) of all shit dinner party guests - loud, smug, pretentious, self-aggrandizing, self-promoting, punishing and insufferable. 'Why people invite Australian Democrats, it's got me beat' was Tommy G's not-in-any-way-telegraphed punchline for Sitch's bit (postscripted by some piss poor adlib by Sitch, fairly typically).

Fast forward fifteen years or so. We've had The Castle, The Dish, and The Panel, along with that fucking tedious fishing show they made, and that equally wank theatresports thing with all their tired old mates from the dusty archives of Australian television (Shane Bourne from Hey Hey, anyone?) Anyway, it's Christmas night 2007 and there's absolutely diddly fucking squat on TV, other than The Panel's Christmas special. And by Christ, have you ever seen such a fat, smug, faded bunch of has-beens as the former doyens of alternative, edgy Australian comedy - the ones whose original '80s ABC show used to follow on straight after The Young Ones, for fuck's sake - now fat and indulgent from their own success, and the Ten network's endless pandering to their every whim. And Sitch front-and-centre, bald, belligerant and spouting bollocks, barely one nylon-polyester ponytail from turning into the right-wing dinner party wanker he used to parody.

Which brings us to another ABC series. The last episode of series six of Red Dwarf - the last of the 'dodgy old special FX' series before they redid everything in the late 90s - had the crew meeting their future selves who'd found some magic widget and had spent the last umpteen years flitting about the galaxy basically on the lash. They'd turned into fat, bald, hideously over-indulged Florida matrons, in dire need of a rocket up the jacksie (which, in due course, followed.) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the D-Generation. That's what was brought to mind by watching The Panel on Christmas Day. And that the old man has a bunch of decent stand-up DVDs I could have been watching, so what the fuck was I doing watching Sitch pretending to be Andrew Symonds with a faceful of boot polish slapped over his shit-eating grin?

All that said, still keen as buggery to get the Bargearse/Olden Days DVD. That, truly, is Champagne Comedy.

The Doctor is OUT.

Recent and decent

This time around our recurrent New Music Update should really be retitled New Music Out-Of-Date given the months which have elapsed since these albums were first released. But, even if we're a bit slack at the World of Bollocks, unlike Maxim magazine in the States, at least we have actually listened to the fuckers before 'reviewing' them.

Then again they're probably right, it's a fair bet that Black Crowes comeback album's going to be a bit av.


Foo Fighters
Echoes, Patience, Silence and Grace

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are it's not a fucking squirrel. This looks like a Foo Fighters album, sounds like a Foo Fighters album, smells like a Foo Fighters album and may indeed taste like one, should the collective offerings of Hairy Dave, Nirvanan drumkit wrangler extraordinaire and his mates, actually taste like anything at all. If they did, it'd probably be Burger King. You know the ingredients, you know the constituents, you know the target audience. It'll probably taste marginally less than the sum of its parts, but you knew that when you walked in the door.

Which is not to say that EPSG is a poor album, or a derivative one. It's just a little hard to differentiate from the others. Distinguishing between Fooies albums wasn't always this hard - there was the first one, on which Dave did everything but operate the CD pressing machine and drive the delivery truck to the wholesalers; the second, which sounded like the first with better written songs; the third, which had Michael Klim's neck tattoo on it and was more laid back; the fourth, a bit grumpier and edgier following a bunch of drug problems for most concerned and Dave's moonlighting with the Queens of the Stone Age; the fifth, the infamous double album with 'hard' and 'soft' CDs, the hard being almost too shouty to be listenable, the soft more middle of the road than that 'roo which the last semi through cleaned up; and now the sixth, which sounds like... the average of all of the above. With stronger statistical weighting to the mellower tones of There Is Nothing Left To Lose and the soft half of In Your Honor.

Spin it: The film clip for The Pretender kicks just as much arse as the song itself; also watch enthralled as Super Dave hands out props to the Beaconsfield miners (Ballad Of The Aforementioned) and slapdowns for the emo brigade (Cheer Up Boys, Your Makeup Is Running).

Bin it: Like pretty much all the Fooies albums, EPSG begins with a generous helping of strong, engaging, well-constructed songs, then goes wandering off on its own without much of an idea of where it's off to or what it's trying to say when it gets there. The Colour and the Shape was the original prototype for unfocused Fooie efforts, but this fits the mould neatly as well. Pity, because in seven albums of material, there's probably three or four excellent, coherent albums which the Foo Fighters might have released, had a more ruthless hand been at the producers' desk.

Bollocks rating: To co-opt the same miserable cop-out which several 'professional' reviewers also took with this disc - if you're a Foo Fighters fan, you'll love it. Which is a piss-poor attempt to review an album but is, based on the above dissertation, actually true. Rating: Three drummer jokes out of five.


Airbourne
Runnin' Wild

Oh, Christ. They're taking the piss, surely? Frizzy mullets, shirts off, leather pants - and that's just the album cover, our four fearless bogan heroes bustin' out of H.M. Pentridge and, well, Runnin' Wild. This has the potential to be either very good, or very, very bad.

To cut to the chase, it's the former. This album is genuinely, un-ironically, fist-pumpingly brilliant. And more to the point, it's more fun that a bouncy castle full of cheerleaders. It's easy to sneer - in fact it's a requirement of the position - but these boys are a hell of a lot more than an AC/DC tribute band. To be fair, there's a bit of Rose Tattoo in there as well, and some Angels if you squint hard enough. This is Australian pub rock at its finest - a genre of music which is, in fact, one of Australia's greatest (and only) contributions to modern music, one which simply doesn't exist elsewhere in the western world. Bogans like the O'Keeffe brothers invented pub rock, along with circlework in RSL carparks. The riffs are the size of monster trucks, Joel O'Keeffe's howl is resonantly equidistant between Bon and Brian, and the lyrics range from appropriately seedy to profoundly wrong - case in point What's Eatin' You, which relates a first-person tale of banging two sisters at once while Daddy bangs on the door with his gun in his hand (ahem), and resonates with the artfully constructed hook 'I've got just one wood, six holes to play/Things ain't fair on this fairway...'

But what really carries this album, other than monster-truck riffs and gutter smut, is that it's actually an impressively coherent offering, as determined by the ultimate test of album listenability, the Car Stereo test (i.e. leave the fucker in your CD player for a week and see if there's any tracks you start skipping; zero marks off for the Warrnambool contingent.)

Spin it: All good Track Ones should be a statement of intent, defining the band and its message. In that vein, please welcome Stand Up For Rock And Roll, as impressive in that role as Smells Like Teen Spirit or Hells Bells. Likewise the lead single Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast carries more AC/DC signatures than Angus Young's chequebook. But it's all good. Embrace your inner bogan - shake your fist in the air in traffic, air-guitar with your seatbelt and drum furiously on the dashboard.

Bin it: Only if youse are some kind of fucken city poofta.

Bollocks verdict: An unprecedented, and unironic, five bourbon-and-cokes out of five.


Grinspoon
Alibis And Other Lies

All Hail The Spon! Triple J's inaugural Unearthed winners - not that they seem to get any J airplay any more - and Your Correspondent's local neighbourbood rock band, having emerged from just up the road from the World of Bollocks.

However, things haven't been so rosy in Sponland in recent times. As detailed in endless cheap gags in this august tome, Grinner-in-chief Phil Jamieson spent most of 2006-07 either munted on P (I know it's called ice where he lives, but naming a drug after wee-wees is funnier), coming down from being munted on P, or nicking stuff from his bandmates to take to Theft Converters so he could buy more P to go and get munted on, or reluctantly attending rehab so he could stop himself from getting munted on P. Somewhere amidst all that, the lads wrote, recorded and polished Alibis And Other Lies for the listening public, and by the time it hit the shelves, Phil was clean again (relatively speaking) and the lads were ripe to go and rock the Big Day Out like a bunch of mad bastards.

So the Spon are back! Is it good to have the Spon back? Hell yeah!!! Does it mean their new album is any good? Not really!!! No, unfortunately it's a bit pants. But then again Grinspoon albums are usually a bit patchy - even their finest overall effort, 1999's Easy, had the odd potholes which needed to be skipped over. The songs that are good, are very, very good. Pity there's less than a handful of them.

Spin it: Black Tattoo is vehement old-school Grinspoon all over, and is thunderous. Meanwhile Choirboy and What You Got are new-school Grinspoon (think Hard Act To Follow rather than DCX3) and are equally fucking tops; in fact Choirboy may be this reviewer's new favourite Spon song of all time, it's that immense. As the Captain observed, cowbells are where it's at.

Bin it: Well, don't bin it, just don't buy it. Just buy the above three off iTunes, plus Living In The City. Then go and buy the Airbourne album instead.

Bollocks verdict: Completely bipolar in personality. And therefore a return to consistency from the Spon, whose albums are usually unlistenable navel-gazing brightened by the occasional furiously good rock song, like The Vines on different drugs. Three green P spoons out of five.


The Checks
Hunting Whales

The Checks are a Kiwi band who burst onto the scene here as long-haired teenagers with an unearthly ability to kick it like a '60s British invasion blues-rock band - think early Stones, Kinks, Who and the like. Their 2005 debut single What You Heard received plenty of rotation on radio and music TV and remains fucking immense. Since then the Checks have been touring with the demented intensity of a circus full of carneys (is there any other kind? Other than Cirque du Soleil which is a circus full of haughty French-Canadian acrobat types), have refined their act on the gig circuit in Engerland and been lauded by the British music press as the Next Big Thing, which of course means they're completely fucked now. And now, finally, they're released their first long-player, with a provocative name (Hunting Whales) and an equally provocative cover (the big sister of the baby off Nevermind in similar pose. Probably. Camel toe ahoy, anyway.)

And yet, despite all that, it's a bit... inconsistent? Is this becoming a theme? (Or is album covers in monochrome the theme for this week?) For the best songs on the album, the ones which engage the lister immediately and have something interesting to 'say' (in a musical sense rather than lyrical - can't expect a bunch of nascent twenty-somethings to have anything illuminatory to say given their life experience of roughly 15 minutes) are... the original single What You Heard and its B-side, the album opener Mercedes Children (presumably written about the other snotty rich kids being dropped off to school at Takapuna College on Auckland's North Shore).

Spin it: What You Heard, Mercedes Children and the title track.

Bin it: All of which are either singles or B-sides on singles. Making the point of purchasing the entire album as an integrated continuum... what, exactly? Then again, 'C' for Checks is only a bit to the right of 'A' for Airbourne, so at least you've not got far to walk to go buy something better.

Bollocks verdict: Three Takapuna tractors (any pretentious Euro-luxo 4WD which only goes off road if the driveway to the polo club is gravel) out of five.


The Hives
The Black And White Album

The long awaited followup to whatever it was they called the long-awaited followup to Your New Favourite Band, the album (really actually a hits compilation) which launched the Hives onto an international forum at the same time as bands like the Vines, the Strokes and the White Stripes were kicking off the New Rock Revolution (TM and copyright New Musical Express Publications, 2001). Despite being largely unheard of before then outside their native Sweden, the Hives have actually been around for more than 10 years. So, like the Fooies and the Grinners, they long ago ran out of new ideas and are scratching about for new ones. Unfortunately their old ideas were better. Throwing fistfuls of production, copious amounts of electronic fiddling and collaborating pointlessly with tossers like Timbaland ain't going to change that, lads.

Spin it: Single Tick, Tick, Tick... Boom crashes along spectacularly, as does the filmclip. Try It Again, which scored a bit of J play, and Square One Here I Come are fair efforts as well.

Bin it: The remainder of the album is full of poorly thought out discombobulations, weird shit, and the odd idea which might have worked had they executed it properly. Much like its predecessor, the one which came after Your New Favourite Band. Veni Vidi Vicious, which leant most of its content to Your New Favourite Band, proved the Hives could actually write a good album (as distinct from a handful of singles.) This and the last album proves they're too concerned with being famous to bother doing so. But they're still handy live, apparently.

Bollocks verdict: The Black And White Album? Haven't they all been? Did the printery run out of colour ink this week? At least Airbourne had some red text on theirs. Buy that one instead. Two and a half back-issues of Black and White magazine out of five. Actually, buy that instead, at least it had photos of vaguely famous starlets with their kit off.


The Doctor is OUT to go listen to the Airbourne album again.
Stand the fuck up for rock and roll, motherfuckers.

Achtung baby

McLaren Formula One team supremo Ron Dennis is, to be fair, a bit of a knob. Actually, he's a tool of industrial standard, but we'll cut him a little slack on the basis that he's had a fairly shit year, really. At the start of last season, his McLaren-Mercedes outfit were carrying numbers one and two, with reigning double world champion Nando Alonso, freshly headhunted from Renault, to be partnered by long-term Dennis protege Lewis Hamilton, heading into his rookie season in 2007 after having dominated the junior GP2 class the previous year. The McLarens were super-quick in pre-season testing, all was looking fabulous for the coming F1 year, and Ronzo had maintained his position in the previous year's All-England Rich Fuckers' List with a net worth of just the odd ninety million of your English pounds.

And then it all went pear-shaped. Lewis Hamilton actually turned out to be Hamiltron, a doomsday mechanoid robot driver sent from the future, and hence a bit too quick for a number two driver. Which didn't make team leader Nando that happy, given that Hamiltron was the golden boy in the team having been under contract to them since his days in Huggies. And then, just as that blue was simmering away nicely, a disgruntled Ferrari staffer photocopied the entire Ferrari blueprints and sent them over to an old mate at McLaren for his perusal. And then the FIA, world motorsport's governing body, found out, and the shit really hit the fan. Slanging matches erupted in the press between Ronzo, his driver(s), his team, the opposition and the rulemakers. Ronzo's team were kicked out of the teams' championship and fined a fucking unbelievable amount of money, one hundred million Amurikan dollars, which on John Birmingham's reckoning is about four hundred shoeboxes stacked full of cold hard foldables. Ronzo himself came within a gnat's pube of a total mental breakdown and his wife of 22 years buggered off with the postman, or someone. This pre-season, in comparison to the last, has been all about how dog-slow the Maccas have been in comparison to their red Italian competition, how the continuing criminal investigation in Italy over the espionage case is still hanging very seriously over Ronzo and the team, how Mercedes have lost all faith in Ronzo and are days to weeks away from leveraging him out and taking over control of the McLaren team themselves, and how much grief McLaren are having trying to fit their ignormous bloody team transporter slash media liaison slash sponsor entertainment facility (a.k.a. the Death Star) down the crappy end of pit lane as befitting the team which (technically) finished stone-cold-motherless in last year's championship.

However, you might have forgiven poor, befuddled Ronzo a wry grin earlier this week. For 'tis the sport to see the engineer foist on his own petard, and all that bollocks. The engineer, if not the executioner, of much of Ronzo's grief in the past 12 months has been his long-term adversary, FIA president Max Mosley, who was rightly accused by the media and by legends such as three time world champ Sir Jackie Stewart of conducting a personal vendetta against Dennis, comparing McLaren's treatment to previous punishments (or lack thereof) handed out in precedent cases of inter-team espionage. To which Mosley's response was to call Sir Jackie a blithering old git and reach for his lawyers. He's that kind of cunt, you see. And given that he's politically twinned with eternal F1 commercial czar Bernie Ecclestone - the same miserable wrinkled old vag that's been petulantly demanding Melbourne move its race to night time so that Euro softies don't have to get up at sparrows' to watch it (diddums) - there doesn't look like there's any getting rid of Mosley anytime soon.

Well, until Fleet Street got involved. Who remain a little snotted off about how Mosley's mission to smudge Ronzo into the dirt (over some historical slight from back in the day when both ran F1 teams, neither of which is prepared to talk about now) largely because it meant the new darling of British sport (i.e. the only bastard who was winning something at the time), Hamiltron, the Ultimate Driving Machine, was being shafted out of his opportunity to be the first rookie ever to win the F1 title. So, after they'd collectively done their best to turn Nando Alonso into British Public Enemy No. 1 (other than Polish immigrants taking peoples' jobs and Islamic types wearing burkhas in schools), the News of the World turned their attention to Max, just to see if there wasn't something newsworthy there that could be brought to light.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

The Screws hit the fucking jackpot. Max Mosley, president of a multi-billion-dollar international sport-industrial complex, in a six-way sadomasochistic clusterfuck with five prostitutes in an underground 'torture chamber' near his Chelsea home, in the best traditions of several British Tory MPs. You can probably write the headlines yourself - FIA CHIEF NAZI SEX SLAVE ROMP (or near offer) - let's face it, it's each and every one of any tabloid subeditor's favourite words used all at once, they must have almost exploded with delight at their workstations.

After being vewy, vewy quiet on the issue in the week or so since the story broke, Mosley has come out (no not like that) and declared himself, while somewhat 'embarrassed' (really?), defiant about the invasion of his privacy and preparing to lawyer-up as we speak. Mosley was particularly unrepentant about the Nazi connotations, declaring these allegations 'entirely false' and adding 'I intend to pursue legal proceedings against the newspaper in the UK and other jurisdictions.'

All of which would be perfectly acceptable and potentially believable, given the UK tabloids' penchant for massive hyperbole and distortion of the truth, and Mosley's reputation as a lawyer, FIA president and an upstanding member of society. Except for the following minor, slightly Nazi-scented elements to the tale:

• Everyone's speaking in German. (To be accurate, everyone's barking orders in German. NEIN! SCHNELL! ACHTUNG! OFFEN MEIN SCHIESSE! and so on. As South Park The Movie observed... dude, what is wrong with German people?)
  
  
• Everyone's either dressed in Auschwitz-style prisoner rags or Nazi war uniforms. Hmmm.
  
  
• The point of the exercise, which ran to five hours and two and a half grand (according to the Screws) centred around re-enacting concentration camp scenes in which the girls wearing mock death camp uniforms were repeatedly whipped by the girls wearing the Nazi war uniforms. While barking orders in German.
  
  Oh, and one other thing -
  
  
• Mosley's old man was Oswald Mosley, head of the British Fascists before WW2 and Hitler's man to take over Britain once the blitz brought Blighty to its knees.

So the son of the guy who was going to be post-war Chancellor once Adolf finished mopping up western Europe is found in a dungeon being barked at for five hours by German dominatrixes (dominatricies?) dressed in Nazi war uniforms, while they whip seven shades of shite out of a bunch of other rent-a-shags dolled up as death camp attendees.

And this has no Nazi connotations whatsoever.

Riiiiight.

Screws 1, Screwers 0. And score one for Ronzo and the beleagured McLaren team. They might have been absolutely bent over and reamed by Max (and by the Ferraris in Malaysia last fortnight) but at least the money McLaren paid for the pleasure went to charity, rather to a bunch of German spank merchants. In fact given most of the cash came from McLaren majority owner Mercedes-Benz, that seems oddly appropriate...

Herr Doktor is OUT like Max from his current position. And we don't mean tied to a death camp bedframe and spanked at vast personal expense.

Brown out

Next year it will be thirty years since the second most successful rugby league side in history, the Big Red V of Kogarah (and latterly The Gong), managed to win the big cheese on offer. It will be thirty years next year because thanks to the stellar work of the St George-Illawarra board, they will most definitely fail to win it this year, having turned incumbent coach Nathan Brown into the lamest of lame duck leaders by announcing the signing of the Broncos' grumpy grandpa Wayne Bennett for 2009 and beyond. While announcing your club's coach is to get the arse mid-season (or even mere weeks thereinto) appears to be a trend in both rugby codes at present - Ewen Mackenzie just picked up his pink slip from the Waratards, while the Cowboys couldn't even be bothered waiting until the NRL season actually kicked off to turf Graham Murray - the question of why a club would consciously sacrifice one entire season's opportunity to win the comp in favour of the potential to win in years to come seems almost as unfathomable as the question of 'What the fuck has Neil Henry done at the Raiders that's so bloody good to warrant getting the Cowboys gig anyway?' While most of the ink that's been spilled on the Bennett-to-Big-Red-V story has dwelt on the positives for the Kogarah concern going forward - with even Brown himself admitting he'd have signed Bennett had he been a club director - it's the fate of Brown which most have forgotten, or ignored. Other than the players of course, those who've had the most benefit from application of what Roy and HG have called 'the Brown polish'.

But first it's conflict of interest time, for Brownie, as you may know, is from the same bit of coastal NSW as your correspondent, went to the same school several years apart. His stepmother ran the aerobics class my mother went to. (Small hick towns, eh?) Less positively his stepbrother failed to give evidence as the crown's spectacularly ineffectual witness in an assault case where a good friend of the World of Bollocks got several shades of crap belted out of him by a bunch of pissed fucktards. By that stage Brownie was already a first-grader at the Dragons, and in accordance with recent tradition, had already lost two grand finals, 1992/93, both to the Broncos - the afterparty of the latter witnessed a very, very pished Darren Lockyer mounting the rostrum at the presentation to begin the chant of 'St George can't play'. The Dragons went on to utterly disprove Associate Professor Lockyer's hypothesis by losing another grand final in 1996 to the stinking cheating silvertail bastards of Manly-Warringah, and yet another in 1999 to the stinking cheating Super League corporate whores of the Melbourne Sturm und Drang, and the dodgiest, most illegitimate grand-final-deciding penalty try in the history of first grade rugby league grand finals in this country. A statement which absolutely cannot be argued against, as it was in fact the only grand-final-deciding penalty try in the history of first grade rugby league grand finals in this country.

Brownie pulled stumps on his league career shortly after, not realising at the time that he'd mixed his metaphors horrendously in the process, and as such was probably better suited to a position in football commentary. Instead he became an assistant coach and then head coach at the Dragons, where in five years in charge, despite his years of loyalty to the club (let's not mention his attempt to skive off to Super League in mid-'96, only halted by the club being granted a supreme court injunction) and despite leading the Dragons to the semis more times than not, he was invariably only three games away from being fired. His three games were finally up after the first three games of this season.

Which brings us to the two main reasons Brownie got the arse:
(1) His teams didn't know how to win, because neither did he
and
(2) His players were too young, immature and/or stupid to follow game plans on the field or conduct themselves properly off it, because he was barely 15 minutes older than them and still got carded at Liquorland when he went to buy beers.

For evidence of (2), you have to look all the way back to... last week against Incoming Cowboys Supercoach Neil Henry's Raiders side, whereafter only the Warriors' desperately inept Monday night performance v Manly managed to create more lopsided stats re incomplete sets and handling errors. The Dragons failed to trouble the scorers all second half, watching a comically impotent Canberra attack led by a white-trash-tattooed, drink-driving carney (Todd Carney to be specific) carve them up like, well, Saint George himself - he of the shiny armour and sharp pointy stabby ouch metal thing. As for off-field conduct, look little further than the quality of human - 'toey human' at that - who Brownie selected as his captain for the season: the 'Fire up bitch' man himself, Mark Gasnier. And the fact that in an early match in charge he had to slap Trent Barrett across the chops mid-spray in order to get the bogan prettyboy's attention to the fact that his team was losing and he might want to listen to his coach a bit. Then again, Brownie's reputation as one of the boys had its upside - if you can call 'winning' Dell back from retirement, who's been on record in the last 24 hours as saying Brownie was the reason he'd chosen to join the Dragons after his powder-related exclusion from competitive sport, an upside.

But in the end it's the inability to win which really did for Brownie, particularly up against the record of the grumpy grandpa from Brisvegas, whose CV runs to more pages than the Illawarra phone book. Whether it was ending up a perennial loser throughout his playing career, or having such a fucking loser for a stepbrother, Brownie couldn't inspire the final ruthless cutting edge in his sides needed for ultimate victory. They were perpetually pretty to watch, had brilliant backlines and could rack up fifty points on a side as soon as look at them, but they were a bit soft around the edges and could curl up like a centipede on a hot rock if you poked them with a sharp enough stick. Brownie's best chance was 2005 - Barrett's last year before heading off to England to get pissed in Earls Court and crash on a mate's floor like all the rest of the Aussies there (whaddya mean he actually had a paid job to go and do there? That's fucking un-Australian!) when they were almost unbackable favourites going into the semis, with all the experts picking a Dragons-Eels grand final. Of course the experts would prove to be less use than a busted arsehole when the NRL decider ended up being played out between the Tigers and the Cowboys, but that wasn't much consolation to the Dragons Army. Who, in the latter days of Brown's reign, supplemented their range of fabulously witty banners with slightly more political numbers such as 'Step down Brown' and 'Oust Doust', referring to the unpopular club chairman who gave Brownie the gig in the first place.

Ungrateful fucktards.

Like the England football fans who bellowed for Sven's head when all he managed to deliver were quarter-final appearances in two world cups and a Euro champs - only to belatedly realise after watching Steve McClaren flubber about in the job that making the quarters with that pack of bloated, overpaid, overrated tosspots was in fact quite the fucking achievement - the Red Army will one day admit (probably after Old Man Bennett fails to get them to win next year either, notching up an even thirty years since winning in '79) that Brownie mightn't have overachieved with the cattle he had, but he didn't underachieve either. That was probably about as good as they were going to be anyway. A bit like 'Brad' Kimmorley, Trent Barrett was handy, but he was never as good as he was made out to be - The Man might have been full of shit but when Mundine was playing six, noone even noticed Barrett playing seven. And the rest of that side of the early Naughties was also handy, but were they as good as the salary cap rorting Dogs of the same era? Or the 2000-04 Rooters, who almost managed to break the Dragons' record for managing to win their way through to grand finals and once there playing like busteds? Of course not. And even on a good day they couldn't live with the Melbourne Sternum playing to the best of their ability, or likewise the Shoncos, or even the Rabbitohs (on Charity Shield nights anyway, eh Craigos?)

So good luck with the Centrelink queue Brownie - unless the Broncos get a bit desperate, it might be time to follow your old happy-slapper mate Trent over to England, methinks. (Mind you it'd hardly be the first linkup between the two clubs, who've had a bizarre co-dependence over the years. Despite playin two lopsided grandfinals in the early 90s, there's also the flow of players between the two clubs, which was primarily northward in the beginning - Big Gordie and Big Stupid Dell started at the V and joined the maroon and gold; The Man left Kogarah during Super League, signed for the Broncs for about 15 minutes, then came straight back afterwards; and more recently Ashton Sims and Michael Ennis have made the trek. However, now with Saint Benny joining Saint George, the flow might just start to reverse. Which leaves only the question of how Bennett will react to having the much less deferential, much more antagonistic Sydney league media interrogating him in press conferences, rather than the hero-worshipping hacks of Uncle Rupert's northern outposts...

The Doctor is OUT like an out thing that's out. (I'm not paid by the simile folks.)