Tony Blair, man of the people

He was on the legendary Radio Five Live soccer phone-in 6-0-6 last night, and some of his pronouncements about the England team ahead of tonight's game against Sweden sounded a little familiar. All the talk about judging people on their records not on public perceptions; it sounded like a defence of Sven and the faltering England team as a non-too-subtle cipher for a defence of TB and the faltering Labour government. So in the name of reading too much into things (always better than reading too little), I present some subtle alterations to the transcript:

"Hargreaves should be given a chance... at this stage the most important thing is that we get behind the team."
Replace ‘Hargreaves’ with ‘I’, and ‘team’ with ‘new Iraqi administration’.

"I also think Beckham gives the team something as captain. I think Beckham is a potential match-winner - you saw that in the first match against Paraguay and against Trinidad and Tobago."
Replace ‘Beckham’ with ‘I’, replace ‘potential match-winner’ with ‘election-winner’, replace ‘match against Paraguay and against Trinidad and Tobago’ with ‘successive Labour landslides in electoral history’.

"And the only thing Sven will be focused on is, not frankly, what happens to him after the World Cup but making sure that he wins the World Cup because that is what he's there to do."
Replace ‘Sven’ with ‘I’, ‘him’ with ‘me’, the first ‘World Cup’ with ‘Labour party conference’, replace ‘he’ with ‘we’, ‘wins the World Cup’ with ‘win back the respect of decent, hard-working families’, and ‘he’s there to do’ with ‘we were elected to do’.

This is getting a tad cumbersome now innit.

Also can I just re-iterate, the reason nowt's going on over here, is that for this glorious World Cup month, anyone with any sense is at our World Cup blog.

Horses in the sky, heroes on the stage

A review of A Silver Mt Zion at Koko last week, for y'all that were wondering. Their new stuff is immense. They are immense.

I never thought I'd say this after feeling underwhelmed - and almost a little confused - by their initial releases, but I think they might just be as important, and as ground-breaking, as Godspeed were.

There aren't many bands that can excite me live anymore, as ATP proved - (The Gossip, Sleater Kinney, and Lightning Bolt were brilliant, most others just left me rather cold) - but ASMZ had us totally absorbed for two hours.