Tag: Song

Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Turn The Radio Up This Summer

Each year the summer feels like it begins with the melodic ringing of a catchy light hearted pop song that will stay in our heads for the entire season of hot weather and barbeques. There seems to be a song that signifies summer for all of us. Let’s take a look at some reasons to turn the volume dial to max.

1. Madonna – Holiday. It’s cheesy, easy and often the bragging song for those lucky enough to have booked a beach holiday. It’s not uncommon to hear Madonna’s holiday ringing round the canteen at work as Dave from Sales rubs it in that you’ll be taking on his workload for 2 weeks while he’s off to Majorca.

Year: 1982 UK Chart Position: 2

2. Cliff Richard – Summer Holiday. If you’re under 40 you may not have heard this song ever, and if you do, it’s unlikely that you’ll be rushing out to buy it. Before CDs had been invented and no one knew iPods were even possible, the squeaky clean crooner Cliff Richard managed to string the song out in to an entire film and the album of the same named topped the album charts. Expect embarrassing parents and grandparents to sing this one prior to a trip to the seaside or a family picnic.

Year: 1963 UK Chart Position: 1

3. Fresh Prince & Jazzy Jeff – Summertime. Before Will Smith began chasing aliens around films sets he was making funky friendly rap music under the alias The Fresh Prince. This is a good song for cruising in the car with the top down.

Year: 1991 UK Chart Position: 8

4. The Beach Boys – Surfing USA. Released the same year as Cliff Richard’s summer holiday but much cooler, because it’s about surfing and surfing is cool. If you haven’t heard this summer song you clearly haven’t been to a beach bar, school disco or the USA.

Year: 1963 UK Chart Position: 34

5. Wham! – Club Tropicana. Club Tropicana drinks are free – well if you’re on an all-inclusive package holiday they are! George Michael dances round the pool in this popular eighties hit that takes the listener off to the topical cocktail pool party dream.

Year: 1983 UK Chart Position: 4

6. LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem. For modern pop fans this dance track signifies the start of summer, late nights in Ibiza and hot sweaty night clubs for of scantily clad youngsters. Hear it once and it will stay in your head. All summer.

Year: 2011 UK Chart Position: 1

7. Mungo Jerry – In the Summertime. This classic tune has been used for many TV adverts. It’s a feel good, low key track but yet has achieved the status of the biggest selling single of all time worldwide. A cover version from the 1990s by Shaggy got to number 5 in the UK charts too.

Year: 1970 UK Chart Position: 1

Summer tunes are the soundtrack to happy days and carefree relaxation, whether you take your holiday as a road trip, visiting the vineyards with a house exchange France, camping in the woods or jetting off to the Balearics. For luxury home swapping accommodation for holidays all around the world, visit Lovehomeswap.com who kindly provided us with these top summer songs.

May 26, 2012
7 Reasons That This Is The Worst Song Ever

Incredible news, 7 Reasons readers: I’ve discovered the worst song of all time. Surprisingly it’s not Mull of Kintyre, We Didn’t Start The Fire or that turgid Whitney Houston one that I first heard in 1993 and for all I know is still playing in the room I ran screaming from. It’s a song called Don’t Have Any More Mrs Moore that was made famous by Lily Morris in the 1920s. I didn’t mean to discover it. It snuck up and pounced on me while I was watching a documentary about Pathe News. It’s embedded below. I recommend that you don’t listen to it. Here are seven reasons that it’s the worst song ever.

1. It’s…Aarrgghhhh! Okay, you may have ignored my recommendation and if you did, that’s probably something approximating the noise you made on listening to it. I know that my initial reaction to hearing the jaunty and rather creaking string introduction followed by the first few bars of Lily Morris warbling about Mrs Moore was to shriek obstreperously and try to jam a dining table, a map of Scotland and half finished packet of Foxes Glacier Fruits into my ears. Sadly, they did not completely muffle the ear-grating, fingernails-down-a-blackboard, mating-sounds-of-a-half-strangled-cat-in-a-biscuit-tin, out-of-tune-soprano-with-her-on-fire-hair-caught-in-a-blender sheer unremitting screeching bloody cacophony that is this song. Listening to it is the aural equivalent of putting your penis on a desk and having it repeatedly struck with a hammer by an addled and vengeful dandruff-specked minicab driver with halitosis and grey shoes; something that every right-minded person would choose to spend an entire Saturday doing when given the choice between that or hearing a fraction of a nanosecond of a bar of this song again. It may well have been the first recorded instance of a father waking his baby up by screaming in the middle of the night. It is popularly said of ugly celebrities that, “…he/she has a face for radio”. Similarly, Lily Morris has a voice for cinema. Silent cinema. A silent cinema buried deep under the ground. Under Peru. In fact, under a very noisy thing in Peru. Under a man having his penis repeatedly struck with a hammer by an addled and vengeful dandruff-specked minicab driver with halitosis and grey shoes in Peru. Between the airport and the pneumatic drill testing centre.

2. It Fails The Test Of Time. Cole Porter; George and Ira Gershwin; Ivor Novello; Hoagy Carmichael; Kurt Weil; Irving Berlin: Just a few of the talented songwriters working in the 1920s that had absolutely cock-all to do with this song. Sadly, while their work has aged well, this song has not. It is the Mickey Rourke of popular song. It clearly had some sort of popular appeal in its day because Lily Morris sang it many times and I can find no written accounts of pandemonium as masses of horrified music-lovers stampeded from music-halls.   But there’s another possible explanation. Perhaps those that witnessed this horror were simply too traumatised to write about it; I wish I was. Perhaps people back then – who were able to vividly recount the sheer bloody horror of mechanised war and mass genocide – were far too disturbed by the ordeal of hearkening to this interminable and harrowing din to leave their descendants a warning from history. That seems eminently possible.

3. It’s Strange. In the song, Lily Morris is singing as a character, rather than as herself, addressing Mrs Moore. Not content with singing in her own character’s voice (and who would be content with that) for the whole of the song, Lily Morris inexplicably sings a verse of it as a Dutch vicar. From Namibia. I have no idea why she sings it as a Dutch vicar from Namibia, but I suppose if you’re going to pretend to be a vicar, you have to come from somewhere, even if it is Namibia. And you are Dutch.

4. It’s Ironic. The central theme of the song is a woman using drunkenness as a euphemism for wantonness or wantonness as a euphemism for drunkenness (I thought of checking, but I decided I’d rather have rusty razor blades stapled to my forehead instead) and cautioning another woman (Mrs Moore) against one or the other (or both). The irony is, however, that this is a song that positively no one could ever bear sober. This is a song that no sane person could experience (even partially) without having imbibed so much strong alcohol in one sitting that their liver would have a half-life of several millennia and would smell pungently of juniper berries for at least four and a half eternities.* The only way that anyone could possibly listen to this song without alcohol is if they were dead, and even then they would have to have been dead for at least a century and would need to have their wrists bound and the remains of their chest pinned to the floor by an anvil with Eamonn Holmes and the cast of Gandhi seated upon it, to ensure that they did not rise up and scamper from the room squealing in terror and urinating uncontrollably on the carpet.

5. It’s Historic. The discovery of this song has created a wholly astonishing and unforeseen development of historical proportions. A transpiration so unexpected that no one will ever have conceived of reading the words I’m about to write together in the same sentence. So momentous is this situation that, if I were to tell Nostradamus, Zephania, Philip the Evangelist and Derren Brown what I’m about to tell you, their reaction would be “Blimey! I didn’t see that one coming”. This song would be improved if covered by Jedward.

6. It’s Immortal. Once heard, this song cannot be killed. It’s an ear-worm that refuses to leave. Once it gets into your head (even if you only hear it once) this song becomes that bloody glittery vampire – the one that all sane people wish would just go away and die – that never goes away and dies. Of all the songs that you could ever get stuck in your head, this is the stickiest and most recalcitrant. It literally seems to bond itself to the inside of your brain somewhere between thoughts about tiramisu and thoughts about ducks. It is said that men think about sex every seven seconds. That is not true of men that have heard this song. Men that have heard this song think of this song every seven seconds (even when they’re asleep or flying an aeroplane). This song is no mere musical entertainment, it is a frightening disease of the mind.

7. It’s…Aaaaaarrrrrgghhh!!! Don’t Read This Reason!   If you think about this song long enough – every seven seconds since last Friday night, for example – it spawns the song of Satan. Because sooner or later (in a variant of infinite monkey theorem known as infinite poor suffering bastard that heard Don’t Have Any More Mrs Moore once and is now hearing it internally and infinitely for infinity theorem) the song will mutate. As you think of – or hear – another song this song will begin to segue into it. And then, with a creeping sense of trepidation and mounting dread, you will one day hear something so abominable and ghastly that it might well prove to be one of the signs of the apocalypse. You will hear the chorus of this song segue into that of another. You will hear:

Don’t have any more Mrs Moore

When there’s room on my horse for two

And with that perfectly seamless transition you’ll discover that you have, in your head, a mutant Lily Morris/Rolf Harris hybrid creature (Rily Marris?) singing a mash-up of Don’t Have Any Moore Mrs Moore and Two Little Boys at you every seven seconds for the rest of time. See, I told you not to read it.

*And why the hell does the word eternity have a plural?!

September 6, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons ‘Red Light Spells Danger’ By Billy Ocean Should Be Used As An Educational Tool

Today sees the sofa experiencing something it would rather not. A Babylon5 marathon. But that is the price we pay for guest posts and at least we know it will come back in a good condition. Last week I had to scrub it clean with my Aston Villa shammy leather cloth after it had been infected by a Birmingham City supporter. Anyway, viewing Babylon5 – until the rugby starts – is Rob Lee. Or, if you prefer, Wobbly. I, incidentally, am Jelly. I often feel our double act days could have been so much more. Right, enough reminiscing, here’s my brother who ain’t heavy.

Billy Ocean

1. ‘Red light spells danger’. This says it all really. The red light that says don’t drive when stopped at traffic lights, the red light that tells you not to cross the road at inappropriate moments, the red light that warns you not to press the large, round flashing button attached to all that sophisticated computing equipment and large missile. It teaches children to fear red lights, and this is good, because red lights spell danger.

2. ‘Red light means warning’. Teaching young children is quite often based on repetition – clearly Mr Ocean was in touch with such modern teaching methods when he wrote this in the 1970s, as not only does he teach that a red light spells danger, but also that it means warning. This is very effective teaching – the children believe that they have been taught two different pieces of information, thereby preventing them from becoming bored, whilst they have in fact had the same important message twice drilled into them. Red lights mean danger. And Warning. Which are sort of the same thing. Sometimes.

3. ‘You got me on a ball and chain, doin’ things I don’t wanta’. Despite his lack of grasp of the correct grammatical use of the English language, which is not setting a good example I’ll admit, our education-minded singer is in this instance warning of the uncomfortable experience going to prison would result in. Not only being tied to a ball and chain, but also having to do things you don’t want to; traditionally this might be breaking large rocks into smaller rocks – this is of course bad for your teeth, so the lyric contains a valuable lesson about not eating too many sweets as well.

4. ‘Hold on, heaven guide me’. This is clearly a teaching about the importance of having faith. If you believe in that sort of thing, if you don’t, well, holding onto things is usually a useful practice too. Especially eggs, not holding on to eggs means you drop them, causing a mess, and then you’ll have to clean them up. Cleaning up a mess is probably something you don’t want to do, and as the previous point, erm, pointed out, doing things you don’t want to do isn’t much fun, and can be bad for your teeth. Anyway, if you do believe in heaven, then letting it guide you is a good thing to do, and if you don’t, holding onto things will suffice.

5. ‘I always used to kiss and run’. Having given it much thought, Billy also decided to include the rules to a common playground game in his song. Although, on reflection, the objective of kiss-chase was always to run after someone and then kiss them, not kiss them and then run away. Mind you, that might depend on whom you kissed. After all, running up to Big Ron, the class bully, and giving him a quick peck on the cheek might not be a clever idea, so, in fact, Mr Ocean is providing useful instruction on what to do should you run after the wrong person and kiss them. (N.B. this also applies in adult life, not just the school playground. Besides, kissing probably isn’t allowed in the school playground any more, for health and safety reasons.)

6. ‘I can feel the heat is on’. here we move to the significant element of home economics (that’s cooking lessons to the uninitiated). Checking that the heat is on in your oven is sound advice, since otherwise that cake you’ve just made won’t cook. It will sit in the oven, but without heat it will remain a mass of uncooked cake mixture. If you check first whether the heat is on, you’ll know when to put your mixture in the oven, and, therefore, end up with a delicious treat rather than a sickly pile of goo. However, as with all electrical or gas based equipment, you must naturally check that the red light is not on. Because red light spells danger. And warning. Just in case you weren’t sure the first time.

7. ‘Can’t hold out, I’m burning’. Many people believe that they should suffer in silence and not inflict their problems on other people, especially in these trying times. This is why they don’t walk around with a red light displayed on their head. In certain areas of the city there is another reason why they don’t wear a red light but we won’t go into that. Anyway, the point is, Mr Ocean is telling pupils not to remain silent if they are, in fact, burning, but that they should tell someone. Preferably a teacher. Lesson 7 – If you find yourself on fire, always tell the teacher. If you can’t find a teacher, display a red light. Because red light spells danger, and fire is quite dangerous.

March 12, 2011
7 Reasons To Act Like A Lion (Today)

I doubt it has escaped your notice, but if it has, let me be the first to tell you that it is now March. Well done us. We made it. And to celebrate I feel it would be appropriate to adhere to the idiom that states, ‘March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb’. Or at least the first part of it. I think we can all agree that it would be impractical to go out like a lamb before one has even attempted to come in like a lion. So today, and only today (and all subsequent March 1sts) I urge you to act like a lion. Here’s why:

1. Roaring. Everyone has times when they just want to roar in the face of someone. We have held back though because it is not correct etiquette. But what if you were acting like a lion? When a lion gets annoyed he roars or eats you. I have consulted the 7 Reasons lawyers and apparently we could find ourselves in trouble if we advocate – even humorously – Hannibal-style activity. Roaring is fine though. So this is your excuse. If there is someone out there who annoys you, walk up to them quietly and then roar in their face. It doesn’t even matter if you spray a little saliva. That is what lions do.

2. No Cooking Required. Lions eat raw meat. I need not explain this further.

3. Hair. No doubt someone will comment on this post in the many months to come and tell me that I haven’t done my research and in fact lions take great pride in their appearance. Until that eventuality occurs however, I will categorically state that lions are not in the least bit vein. They are quite happy to let their hair grow long and wild. So today, you don’t need to use that comb. Or that razor. Or that waxing strip. Just let it all hang out.

4. Sponsorship. If you don’t tell anyone the reason you are acting like a lion – and they haven’t read this post (a very strong possibility) – you could be in the money. If I see someone wandering around the office acting like a lion, I immediately assume they are doing it for charity. In theory this should probably be my second thought after, ‘what the bloody hell is that person doing in my lounge?’, but anyway, we’ll ignore that. So, if someone offers you 50p, don’t refuse and tell them about 7 Reasons, just take it. I reckon you could earn £20 just by roaring every half hour. Easy money.*

5. Economy. I know this is a regular theme in my posts, but it is a serious matter. We must find a way to stimulate the economy. Given that none of you assisted Marc and I in our bid to trick or treat our way out of the recession last year, I can only hope you will finally see sense and help us ‘lion’ our way out of the mess we currently find ourselves in. It’s a novel approach I admit, but desperate times call for innovative thinking. Hire a lion outfit for the day. It’ll only cost you £12 and more than likely keep you warm and snug for a full twenty-four hours. The fancy-dress market will receive a massive boost of £372,000,000 overnight which they can use to increase costume manufacture. Increased costume manufacture means more jobs. More jobs means more people with disposable income. More disposable income means more fancy dress outfit hires. It’s a beautiful circle. So let’s do this. Go to your local fancy-dress shop and hire that outfit. For the love of Britain, please.

6. Wales. Today is St. David’s Day in the Principality and what better way to celebrate than by acting like a lion, an animal that features on both the Royal Coat of Arms of England and Scotland? Exactly

7. In The Jungle Flash Mob. I’m not a fan of flash mobs especially when I get stuck in the middle of them in Trafalgar Square and end up singing along to Hey Jude, but I do feel a mass flash mob where we are all dressed as lions and perform In The Jungle could be particularly good for the soul. Something like this. Without the animated Hippo and Dog obviously. Or maybe with. TBC.

Make sure you come back on March 31st to read, ’7 Reasons To Act Like A Lamb’.

*Just a friendly reminder that our cut is 15%.

March 1, 2011
7 Reasons That Love is Important

It’s Valentine’s Day!!! On Monday. Apologies for any panic we may have caused there, but the 7 Reasons team have decided to jump the gun and celebrate St Valentine’s Day prematurely. Because we’re lovesick. Well, one of us is in love and that just makes the other one feel sick, but that’s near enough. So, in honour of the patron saint of pink stuff everywhere, here are seven reasons that love is important.

1. Make Love Not War. It’s a tired expression, but – short of a nuclear missile – love really is the one thing that can end conflict. For good. We are not interested in truces. Like a dirty weekend in a Travelodge outside of Leeds, it won’t last. Real love means complete acceptance of what others believe and how they choose to live. A marriage of acceptance if you like. Not that I’m suggesting we should accept or indeed make love to radical extremists. That would be extreme. And quite dangerous if their grenades are dangling above your head. If you do find yourself in this situation we suggest you wear a helmet. Just in case.

2. Passion. That’s what love is really. Whether it’s passion for your partner or passion for your team or passion for passion fruit, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you feel something for something. Because it’s those feelings that keep us alive. Without emotion we’d be robots. And if you read yesterday’s post you’d realise that’s not a good thing.

3. Compromise. I guess I got lucky. The person I fell in love with also loves what I love. No, not myself. Sport. Which means we don’t have to do the, ‘You can watch Eastenders all week so long as I can watch the rugby all weekend,’ thing. Claire gets to watch Eastenders and the rugby and I get to do the ironing and watch the rugby. But we know we are in the minority. Other people really do have to compromise. And while it may mean missing England beat Wales, you do it because you’re in love. And I admire that. I admire it because I couldn’t do it. Which is why I told Claire before we even started dating that watching England play cricket or rugby comes before anything else in my life. A year later I still haven’t missed a game. And that just makes me love her even more.

4. Inspiration. Throughout human history, love has acted as a spur, a stimulus, a motivational factor in many of mankind’s greatest accomplishments. The life’s work of Thomas Aquinas; Shelley’s One Word is Too Often Profaned; Shah Jahan’s construction of the Taj Mahal, the historical examples of great works inspired by, and created out of love are almost boundless. Essentially, if we didn’t have love, we’d still be slimy-fish creatures or animal-bothering Neanderthals living in caves or swamps or our own poo or something. But thanks to love, most of us aren’t.

5. Tennis. I don’t think anything in the world explains love better than a tennis match. As I am sure you are aware, ‘love’ in tennis is the equivalent of zero. Zilch. Nothing. In other words, it is valueless. And that is what love outside of tennis is too. You can’t put a value on love. Unless you are in Amsterdam. Though between you and me I don’t think ten minutes* with a Dutch girl called Helga really counts. Love is the most valuable commodity in life and yet it is free. I have always thought that is a rather wonderful intricacy. We pay our taxes so that the NHS and the Police are there for us when we need them, but the people who are there for us when we don’t need them are free.

6. Popular Song. If it weren’t for the eternally prevalent theme of love, pop music would be wholly different. There’d be no Renée and Renato’s Save Your Love, there’d be no Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love in my Tummy by Ohio Express, and there’d be no When We Collide by Matt Cardle. This might initially seem like a spectacularly good anti-love argument, but it’s quite the reverse, because when repugnant, saccharine dross like this is being played, you might just find that across a crowded room, someone else is also covering their ears with their hands and bellowing, “What is this shit!?” And at that moment, your eyes may meet, and that’s when you’ll find true love. And all because of love songs, which really do begat love. However circuitously.

7. Emotional Intensity. Love – and this is important in these straitened economic times – is free. Your other half loves you because you’re you, not because of what you can give them. Love – true love – transcends the baser human tendency toward being fiscally and materially acquisitive in favour of devotion to and acceptance of another person; no matter what their circumstances or their idiosyncrasies. When you have found your true soul-mate you will have found unconditional acceptance. Which is why my other half is going to love her Valentine’s Day card this year, no matter how much it cost.

She's gonna love this.

*Okay, two and a half.**

**This never happened.***

***Well, it probably did to someone exciting.

February 11, 2011
7 Reasons Owl City’s Fireflies Is Nonsense

1. “You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies, lit up the world as I fell asleep.” Ten million fireflies? Seriously? Do you know how difficult that would be to organise?

2. “’Cause they’d fill the open air, and leave teardrops everywhere.” Erm…if a firefly cried it would just put itself out. In fact it would probably drown itself. Logic fail and animal cruelty in one sentence. Classy.

3. “It’s hard to say, that I’d rather stay,  awake when I’m asleep.” Well of course it bloody is. Even the most accomplished of sleep-talkers struggle to say what they want when they are asleep. Most of them talk about cows.

4. “’Cause I’d get a thousand hugs, from ten thousand lightning bugs, as they tried to teach me how to dance.” No, no and no again. So that’s one hug from every ten bugs is it? How exactly does that work then? And what the hell happened to the other 9,990,000 fireflies? Oh, that’s right. They died in a teardrop suicide pact.

5. “A foxtrot above my head, a sock hop beneath my bed, a disco ball is just hanging by a thread.” What? What the hell is a sock hop? Is that the thing a newly pubescent boy uses eight times a night?

6. “To ten million fireflies, I’m weird ’cause I hate goodbyes, I got misty eyes as they said farewell.” Yeah, not just weird to fireflies buddy. Now stop being a big tart and grow a pair.

7. “But I’ll know where several are, if my dreams get real bizarre, ’cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar.” What is wrong with you man? You keep fireflies in a jar? Can’t you afford a lava lamp?

February 13, 2010
Russian Roulette Sunday: 7 Reasons We Were Wrong

The good thing about 7 Reasons – or should that be one of the good things? – is that it never gets bogged down in fact. Ninety-nine percent of the time, ninety-nine percent of all our reasons are nothing more than opinion. Which is great, because it means you get the chance to disagree with us. Or at least it would if our opinions weren’t so well thought out and presented. However, just occassionally we do get proved wrong. And when I say we, I mean me. I’m Jon. Here are 7 Reasons I got wrong. And 7 Reasons they were wrong. Which common sense would suggest means you have 14 Reasons to read. You don’t. You have seven. Twice.

1. 7 Reasons To Become An Artist
Reason Put Forward: It’s A Con. You can do anything and call it art. Take Tracey Emin for instance. No, actually don’t bother. No one is quite sure where she has been. Instead take a look above. That’s Emin’s artwork. My Bed it’s called. The Saatchi Gallery describe it thus, ‘Tracey Emin shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she’s as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world’. This is how Jonathan Lee describes it, ‘Bollocks‘.
Reason I Was Wrong: People are making a mint out of forging Tracey Emin’s work.

2. 7 Reasons To Write A Song About Rain
Reason Put Forward: Grace Kelly – Singing In The Rain. Standing in the rain and having a sing-song is quite frankly a stupid thing to do. You’ll get wet and cold and the sound of the rain hitting the ground will drown out your harmonies. But if you are a songwriter then you have free license to try and brainwash people.
Reason I Was Wrong: The reason is perfectly acceptable. Suggesting Grace Kelly sang it, is not. It’s Gene Kelly. Always was. Always will be.

3. 7 Reasons The Tiger Woods Story Is Annoying Me
Reason Put Forward: It’s Not Happening. If the allegations are true, a few people will be outraged. But that’s it. No one is going to make an example out of him. Tiger is too big a star to be dropped by those who sponsor him. Not even Nike. Nike need Tiger more than he needs them. This is the world we live in. I don’t care whether you like it or not. It’s a fact. Nothing is going to change so get over it. Stop wasting your time by drawing up pointless petitions asking Nike to drop him. It. Will. Not. Happen.
Reason I Was Wrong: Pretty much everyone was outraged. Pretty much everyone dropped him. As getting things wrong go, this is one of my finer efforts.

4. 7 Reasons To Fly With British Airways This Christmas
Reason Put Forward: Sir Richard Branson. He never flies with BA.
Reason I Was Wrong: He has. A few times. According to Chris Evans’ autobiography, Sir Richard Branson was so keen to get Evans to sign for Virgin Radio that he joined Evans on a flight to New York – on Concorde – just to try and get his signature. And in 2008 Branson flew to China as part of a British Government delegation on BA744.

5. 7 Reasons Buying A Christmas Card Is Infuriating
Reason Put Forward: Brothers. Why is it you can no longer buy a ‘Merry Christmas Brother’ card? It’s always ‘Bro’ or ‘Bruv’ or ‘Brother and Wife’ or ‘Brother and Girlfriend’ and new for this year ‘Brother and Boyfriend’. My brother is not gay. He has not got a wife. I am not sending him a text in which I may shorten to Bro. And he is not in some downtown hood where everyone goes around punching fists and calling each other ‘Bruv’. He is just my brother. I want a card that says that. Is that too much to ask?
Reason I Was Wrong: I found one. It said, ‘Merry Christmas Brother’. All I had to do was look a bit harder.

6. 7 Reasons To Love A Cardigan
Reason Put Forward: The Dog. No one is going to tell me that the Cardigan Welsh Corgi was not made for riding.
Reason I Was Wrong: In the words of the guy in Clevedon at Christmas, “Get off my f***ing dog! It’s not a horse!”

7. 7 Reasons 2010 Will Be Great
Reason Put Forward: The Winter Olympics. We’re only a few months away from Vancouver 2010 and what an Olympics it is going to be. Great Britain have their most successful games ever after clinching Gold medals in both the male and female snowball fighting events. Unfortunately they lose out to Canada in the final of the gritting competition, but the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown still hails the achievement as “remarkable” and “a terrific reflection of what global warming can do for our country”.
Reason I Was Wrong: Not only are gritting and snowball fighting not included in this years Olympics, but the British Ski and Snowsport Federation is going into administration.

February 7, 2010
7 Reasons Why Songwriting Is Easy

1. Tackle Dangerous Ground. You can take two areas that should just not work together, i.e.: sex and fire, and merge them. You couldn’t show two people having a fondle on a bonfire in a TV show, but you can write a song called Sex On Fire and it’s fine.

2. Huge Creative License. You can call something something when it’s not actually that something. Alanis Morissette’s Ironic for example. “It’s like rain on your wedding day.” This is not ironic. It’s unlucky. Or to be expected if you book your wedding for a Tuesday afternoon in January. It always rains on a Tuesday afternoon in January.

3. Endorse Nonsense. You can write things that don’t make sense and never will make sense. Yet listeners will spend ages being confused by them. “Are we human or are we dancer?” I haven’t got a clue what Brandon Flowers is on about. And are the two things really mutually exclusive? Can’t we be a human who dances? Or is he suggesting we’re puppets? I am no puppet Flowers. I’m going to go and listen to Coldplay.

4. Lack Genius. You can be a simpleton and write a song. No offence to Lady Gaga, but I am pretty sure I came up with the lyrics to Bad Romance when I was about two months old. “Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-roma-mamaa! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la! Want your bad romance.” Just shut up you silly, silly woman.

5. Promote Drugs. You can tell people what it’s like to be addicted to drugs and, in the process, make it sound awesome. “We skipped a light fandango. Turned cartwheels cross the floor. I was feeling kind of seasick. But the crowd called out for more.” Whatever Procol Harum were on, I want some.

6. Promote Drugs. You can tell people what it’s like to be addicted to drugs and, in the process, make it sound bloody awful. “I am the eggman. They are the eggman. I am the walrus. Goo Goo g’joob.” Whatever The Beatles were on, I don’t want to go anywhere near it.

7. Promote Sex. And more to the point, promote extramarital sex. All you have to do is write the lyrics in French and get the singer to have an orgasm at the end of the song. Then Bingo! There is your hit. Between you and me I think Jane Birkin was faking it though. Je vais et je viens, entre tes reins.

November 15, 2009