Sophie Ellis-Bextor + Freemasons = very good indeed

We love The Freemasons. We REALLY love Sophie Ellis-Bextor. We sometimes slip into this fantasy world where she's our cool older sister, but the less said about that the better. Anyway, it goes without saying that The Freemasons' remix of Sophie's new single 'Bittersweet' is one of the best things you'll hear all year.



Seriously: Heartbreak Make Me A Dancer, Murder On The Dancefloor, Groovejet, Catch You, Take Me Home, and now Bittersweet. Why is Sophie still only a peripheral pop star, instead of having a knighthood and a statue on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square?

'Bittersweet' (Freemasons Remix) by Sophie Ellis-Bextor (dodgy radio rip)
[audio:sophieellisbextor-bittersweet-freemasonsremix.mp3]

Unlike the rest of the internet, we quite like the Eurovision entry

Over the weekend, the winning performance of the UK's Eurovision entry has racked up 1,110 comments on YouTube. We've only read the first 60, plus a couple of pages of Twitter comments, and they're almost entirely "zOMG worst song evaaa??!?!?!"

This might come as a shock, but for once the anonymous commenters of the internet might be overreacting a bit. Consider the following:

- The beginning sounds like 'Better the Devil You Know'
- The middle sounds a bit like Kids In America
- The end sounds like the theme tune to Shooting Stars
- The lyrics of the chorus are like Blame It On The Boogie

Not bad reference points to cram into three minutes.

However:

- Josh does look like a city worker who's just taken off his tie to do a bit of karaoke
- There's no key change

To summarise:

Is it as good as Bad Romance? No.
Is it a solid Stock/Waterman effort (although apparently written entirely by Mike Stock) which is memorable within one listen, isn't going to alienate anyone and is basically a solid Eurovision entry? Yes.
Will it win? No.

So there you go.

Well it's more watchable than Webcameron

People of Love Machine, we have witnessed THE FUTURE! Although we witnessed it on Friday but were a bit busy and didn't write it up until now, so it's probably THE PRESENT by now. Who knows.

To be honest we've not been keeping track of these things so we don't know quite what part of it was the incredible revolutionary bit, but Love Machine favourites MINI VIVA did a half-hour live webcast thing where they sat on a sofa chatting away to the camera. And to prove that it actually happened and they weren't pulling a Sandi Thom, they were responding to questions submitted by Facebook and Twitter.

Yes, Frankee and Britt were doing the modern equivalent of saying "Mr Watson come here, I want to see you" into some kind of trumpet. We 'liveblogged' the event, and it went something like this:

16.31 There they are!
16.36 Over 200 viewers. An advert for a language school in Tokyo has just popped up: 'when keyword matching goes wrong'
16.37 Someone asks "Frankee can we get a closeup of the pattern on your top". It's all gone a bit Babestation.
16.42 Britt: "I like smelly cheese"
16.44 Strange fan ident video. If this was Chat Roulette we'd definitely have clicked "next" at this point.
16.46 Crashed. Boo!
16.47 We're back! "Did Britt forget to put 50p in the meter?"
At this point someone phoned and distracted us so absolutely anything could have happened for the next ten minutes
16.55 Frankee really does have brilliant hair.
16.58 Someone asks, ""A QUESTION FOR BRITT. HAVE YOU EVER ACCIDENTALLY PUNCHED ANYONE IN THE EYE? MAYBE ON YOUR BIRTHDAY?" Controversial.
16.59 That's it!

We can't help but feeling that the best popstars have an aura of untouchability - you can't imagine Lady Gaga sitting on a sofa talking to a camera about cheese even at the start of her career - but if fan interaction is what you need to do, this was fan interaction done well. Apparently this is becoming a weekly thing, so tune in next Friday at 4.30 to ask Mini Viva those burning questions. A Love Machine t-shirt goes to whoever can trick them into saying the smuttiest innuendo.

Off the Hook

The new Gaga video, for Telephone, featuring Beyonce, was premiered today.

Now, we here at Love Machine are not prone to exaggeration (Kaci Battaglia's Crazy Possessive was the best pop song of 2009, and was the best song of 2010 until Ke$ha's Dinosaur....and now this.....but we digress), but watching it did feel like some sort of seismic event. Some thoughts:

-Somewhere out there is the sound of Madonna crying herself to sleep. It's still not really apparent whether Lady Gaga actually has anything to say artistically, or whether she's a particularly great singer, but then Madonna never stood for anything, wasn't a great singer but is/was an amazing pop star by channeling the zeitgeist, turning reinvention into an artform and surrounding herself with the best people. Gaga is doing exactly the same, at breakneck pace (this is still technically her debut album remember). The whole Telephone package simply blows anything Madge has done since Ray of Light out of the water; can she really come back again now that Gaga has so comprehensively stolen her position in pop?

-Why didn't we get something this good when Beyonce and Shakira did their song together? Remember we only have our Lord and Saviours The Freemasons for rescuing that one from total disaster

-How many product placements can you get in one song? A lot, is the answer, especially in 9 and a half minutes

-You just don't get videos like this from the Pigeon Detectives do you?

We're off for a lie down, watch the vid below.....

NW MGMT TRCK

"Hi, we're MGMT. You might remember us from such global smash hits as Kids and Time To Pretend. Well hey, none of that shit was our idea. All our old slacker buddies in Brooklyn hate us, even though it was all the record label's fault that they insisted on releasing the listenable tracks from our album instead of the psych-prog weird shit. Selling records isn't cool.

We're no sell-outs. Our new record won't have any singles, and has artwork our buddy did in 5 minutes with Microsoft Paint and a load of acid. Here's our new track 'Flash Delerium' - remember, it's not a single. It's pretty much a jumbled noise, but Fearne Cotton will still have to play it and will probably rave on about how brilliant it is. Now leave us alone and start blogging about some other buzz band - I hear The Drums are pretty dope."

'Flash Delerium' by MGMT
[audio:mgmt-flashdelerium.mp3]

Venus Brill-iams

(sorry)

Here at Love Machine we're not down with the fetishisation of new music. Generally, old music is always going to be better purely because you're still talking about it way later rather then getting caught up in the hype cycle. However, sometimes a new band comes along which is worth writing about straight away, and today's case in point is The Venus Stare.



Once we got over the disappointment of 'Close To You' not being a Burt Bacharach cover, we enjoyed its 80s-ness, and particularly the cheese rock guitar solo towards the end. Then we enjoyed the pastiche video in which a moustacheod man gets literally injected with a bolt of lightning. Then we enjoyed the incredible Fear of Tigers remix (below). Then we visited Fear of Tigers' MySpace page, saw their background image and had nightmares for weeks.

Close To You is being released on cassette on 22 March, which is worth buying if only to remind you how ludicrously impractical it was as a format and how lucky you are to be around now when you can instantly steal buy anything you want without fear of it being chewed up by a tempramental walkman.

'Close To You' (Fear of Tigers remix) by The Venus Stare
[audio:venusstare-closetoyou-fearoftigersremix.mp3]

Goodbye Mr. Q&A

We may have mentioned once or twice that we enjoy the music of The Hoosiers, and we've been known to have stand-up rows with anyone who feels otherwise. So imagine our delight when Irwin and the boys wasted valuable studio time answering our stupid questions ahead of their DJ set at Love Machine this evening. If the album release date ends up getting pushed back, you know who to blame.

Hello The Hoosiers! How are you?

A 3-piece from ... sorry I thought you said "who".

We literally could not be more excited about your DJ set at Love Machine on Friday. What are your surefire crowdpleasers of the night?

Anything by Mogwai and Belle & Sebastian. Nope really - we will tailor our sounds to your poptastic aims. No idea yet though! Probably some Shakira though.

What are your DJ names? You need something to top MC Margaret Scratcher and DJ Shadow Cabinet.

I may borrow my Scottish pal - Andrew McClaughlin's (cunningly nicknamed "Mc" (pron: "muk") of "M.C Mc". Only really works when written down and even then, barely.

When we've finished being excited about your DJ set we'll crack on with being excited about your second album. Please tell us something about it which you've not told anyone so far.

It only took us 3 years to make but that's down to us learning each other's instruments and swapping instruments owing to our wanting a deeper-understanding of each other's work-lives, as advised by our marriage-guidance counsellor: ALL the true great bands have them to enhance inter-bandmember relations.

We were talking about you the other day and our 6 year old cousin started singing Goodbye Mr A. We were very proud. What songs have you been singing around the house recently?

Ahhh, that is delightful. The theme tune from The Flumps for reasons unknown.

Please give us your band projections for 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Scouting for Girls will run the world, aided by a breed of subservient ant they've been working on in between band practises.

Who is your favourite Saturday?

The 3rd May.

Knowing my luck, that's a Tuesday.

Thank you The Hoosiers!

For more information about what's shaping up to be the biggest Love Machine party yet (tonight at The Monarch, did we mention that?) look here, then join the Facebook event here. See you at the bar!

Flashdance (What a Rip Off)

We're all for a few 'cheeky nods', 'references' and 'influences' in pop - after all, there's only so many pop chord sequences and melodies around, a few are bound to cross over a bit.

But Jason Derulo. Come on. This is a joke.

The man with the best facial hair in pop since Craig David has already ripped off Lady Gaga's Just Dance on his current 'smash hit' In My Head, but surely this is too far?.....

Maybe it's just us.....readers, you decide......if you can place the song (in fact, songs) that is/are 'similar' to Sky's the Limit, then email us on the back of a carrier pigeon to the following address:

Flashdance Towers,
Near Go West Street,
Irene Cara will be sueing-on-sea
And so will the Village People Kingdom



And he's bloody stolen the air horn from JLS' Everybody in Love. That really is unforgivable

Gorilliant

The lead single, 'Stylo' from the new Gorillaz album was premiered on youtube today. Key points:

-The song sounds like Yazoo meets DJ Shadow. It is great and works really well as a movie soundtrack to the vid
-Mos Def sounds even cooler than ever before, which is some feat
-1:56 OMG The video has Bruce Willis in
-3:10 Bobby Womack does the best 'owwwwww'' since James Brown died

Now stop Monkeying around and watch it



Note to Ed: do we have enough gorilla puns to make it to the end of the album campaign? I only have seven or ape ones left......

The Girl Dane Good

Aqua gave the world Barbie Girl in 1997, and Alphabeat unleashed Fascination in 2007. We weren't expecting another mega Danish pop song til 2017 so Love Machine was pleasantly surprised to find that they're way ahead of schedule with this great tune, I Will Love You Monday (365) by Aura Dione.

It's basically one of those brilliant pop moments that shouldn't work, but somehow does. It sounds at various points like Gabriela Cilmi's Sweet About Me, Shania Twain, Dolly Parton and Shakira....and then the bloke from Aqua seems to come in halfway through (it probably isn't the bloke from Aqua although you never know, he might be Denmark's Nate Dogg). She also can't really pronounce 'love' which is a bit unfortunate given the song title (they should have got Jonathan Ross in to do the 'running round, running round' bit in the chorus).

But it's brilliant. And ridiculously catchy. You'll be singing this all week, trust us.

*WARNING: CONTAINS SINGING SHOES*



She's really brought home the bacon etc etc