Joe Kavanagh's Music News

A novel - if somewhat strange- Irish effort to attract sperm donors came screeching to a halt last week when its website was inundated with offers from potential donors, in the wake of an unusual marketing ploy. Spermfortickets.com offered to provide potential donors with tickets to any music festival they wanted to attend in Europe, as long as the donors came up with the goods, so to speak. The response proved so overwhelming that the site was closed down only days after posting the offer. Ireland has seen a drop of over 40% in sperm donations since the turn of the millennium and demand now outstrips supply...

After recently telling the world that there would no such thing as Elbow, if there had not been a Radiohead, Guy Garvey proceeded to have a pop at Yorke and company for the controversial manner in which they released their latest album, In Rainbows. Speaking to Gigwise.com, the Elbow front man also claimed that bands should be allowed to "lock" albums on iTunes, so they can only be purchased as a whole, saying: "Ultimately, iTunes is a device for selling hardware, MP3 playing hardware, so they should give the artists the freedom to lock their records if they want and it's something that I'm personally gonna see if I can make happen because it's f*****g important. Our art form is the album, it's not the individual track. iTunes has to agree to lock albums so you can't buy any original tracks without buying the whole thing."It's not like I want £7.99 instead of just 79p. I'd rather people went ripped the whole thing for free than got the individual tracks for 79p each, you know what I mean, there's no point in doing what we do. In Rainbows is available track for track on iTunes now. After all that fuss and all that f*****g flag waving you can buy that album song for song on iTunes, Make a f*****g stand or don't, you know what I mean."...

A recent extended study into the hopes and dreams of children and young adults, carried out in the UK by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, provided a telling glimpse of just how celebrity obsessed society has become in recent times. 53% of boys questioned said that David Beckham was their ideal role model, while 30% of girls held prune-faced Posh Spice up as the person that they would most like to emulate. Astonishingly, or perhaps not, a whopping 32% of secondary school girls claimed that they would like to "be like Paris Hilton" while still more wanted to "be famous for being famous." One of those behind the study, Dr Mary Bousted, stated: "It reflects the current media obsession with celebrity and the effect of celebrity culture on society as a whole, however, we are deeply concerned many pupils' believe celebrity status is available to everyone. They do not understand the hard work it takes to achieve such status and do not think it is important to be actively engaged in school work as education is not needed for a celebrity status. Celebrity culture can perpetuate the notion that celebrity status is the greatest achievement and reinforces the belief that other career options are not valuable."...

Critically acclaimed, darling of the media, Sebastien Tellier has been chosen to represent France at this year's Eurovision Song Contest. The charismatic Tellier, will perform the track, Devine, taken from his album, Sexuality, when the contest takes part in Belgrade this coming May. Given his pedigree, it's a little bit difficult to understand why he would enter his name into the camp-fest that is the Eurovision, but the decision shows just how seriously the French are taking the competition. The Irish people on the other hand, voted to send a turkey puppet, named Dustin Hoffman as our representative. While I am a big fan of Tellier, I'd have to say that his cool quotient will take a bit of a hiding if he gets beaten by a toy turkey. And I'm betting he will.