Music

January
The BPI wins its first UK court cases against file-sharers
I remember some girl who’d been downloading songs and then the parents got lumbered with a bill for five grand. I felt sorry for the parents. That’s worse than her just being on the phone, in’t it? It depnds what she’s been downloading as well. She should’ve got a discount if it was all, like, McFly. That poor girl, she’s probably never gonna have any more pocket money in her life. I can’t really talk about it from a particularly strong position because I’ve never downloaded a piece of music either illegally or legally. Not from any moral standpoint, but it just doesn’t excite me at all. I’m slightly sad: I like going into record shops, I like getting me fingers dirty. I’ve bought plenty of crap records that I’ve regretted afterwards, even if I’ve only paid 50 pence for them, but there’s a commitment with them because they’re in your house, taking up valuable space. It seems to make it more official somehow. Feature continues

Charles Kennedy resigns as leader of the Liberal Democrats, his hand forced by his admission of alcoholism
Yeah, and then he woke up the next morning, realised what he’d done, and regretted it straight away. Poor old Charlie. There’ve been many cheap jokes made at his expense, all of them quite funny. ‘He likes his liberal measures’ and all that. I mean, not that the Liberal Democrats have got a hope in hell’s chance of ever getting elected, but this thing about leaders of political parties having to be whiter than white just leads to you having more weirdos in charge. Because of the amount of scrutiny that someone’s personal life comes under, you’re not going to get a human being in charge – you’re either going to get someone who is very good at hiding it, and so is really dodgy, or someone who just hasn’t got any kind of human desires or foibles at all. The rest of the population are getting hammered all the time, so why not the leader of a party? And if you believe what history reports about people like Winston Churchill – he liked to put it away, and yet he got us through the dark days of WWII. I’m not saying politicians should be tanked up all the time, but I just think this thing of expecting people to be absolute paragons of virtue doesn’t work.