Brett-Butler

Bring back the tug of war, and remove synchronised swimming.

They picked up a bit of blog attention back in 2019 with a separate song (they made the weekly Fresh Faves on Fresh on The Net, a website I occasionally contribute to, at the time), which I presume garnered them enough attention to get signed to Domino. I presume if it wasn't for the pandemic they would have been building up a live presence over the course of 2020 instead of focusing on recording.

I first noticed this song a few months ago when it was being hyped up by people I follow on Twitter that I would never have expected to be commenting on new music, which is usually a good sign that it has the potential to have a crossover hit appeal. It's been hovering around the iTunes download chart the past few days, so I think it could turn into an actual chart hit by the end of the year. It's a great little song.

Gigs and concerts can return in Northern Ireland from tomorrow. Yay.

Give me Japan please. 🇯🇵

An article in Music Week announcing the news that Suede would be releasing their 9th studio album on BMG Records also included a tidbit about sales figures for their biggest selling album. From the article - As expected, it's their 3rd album, "Coming Up", which is their biggest seller. It was certified platinum for 300k sales/shipments in January 1997, which would suggest that it's sold approx. 135k of those sales in the past 24 years. Their albums "Suede", "Dog Man Star" and "Head Music" are all certified Gold for 100k sales/shipments, as is their 2003 Singles Collection. Their 2010 Best Of has been certified Silver.

I’m presuming for OCC purposes the new version of “Whole Again” won’t be combined with the original 2001 version as they’re lyrically different and with a different title?

Looks like Atomic Kitten won't be going top 40 then.

The Northern Ireland COVID dashboard has good information showing hospital numbers. It does show that in NI that admissions to hospital are rising slightly, but still with reduced numbers, and they seem to be spending less time in hospital than before. Also, being in hospital with COVID doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the COVID itself that warrants the hospitalisation. One of the people I know who is hospitalised had a heart attack a few months ago, and even though after catching COVID the doctors don’t think that she is at any risk from COVID, they kept her in hospital just to be on the safe side due to the other underlying condition.

The less said about the 2010 version (officially credited to "The Squad) the better.

Congratulations to Kim Leadbeater for coming through in the end. As discussed, the fact the Tories' candidate barely campaigned in person during the campaign cost him a fairly decent chance of a victory, whilst George Galloway once again showed his ability to build up support of a large amount of a electoral population in a short length of time. Of course, the biggest winner of all is me, given I've won £80 from the various bets I made on this income. Now looking forward to hearing from those who would have demanded Keir Starmer to resign if Labour didn't win this election to claim that this victory was due to Kim Leadbeater and Kim Leadbeater alone.

70% turnout means that either the result will be less clean-cut than expected, or that one particular group of voters have managed to get more fired up than usual and the winner will get well over 50% of the vote. Either way, with that sort of turnout, at least Batley & Spen will at least get a representative that large swathes of the population actually want.

Stuck another tenner on Labour to win at odds of 4/1, so I've raised the stakes on this. Will be watching the bookies with interest tomorrow to see if the odds shorten during the day.

East Enders have put all the episodes on iPlayer in advance, so would be interesting to see what their ratings are like once this is taken into account. Either way, not good.

Future years will likely see this as the ugliest by-election since Bermondsey back in 1983. Seeing the vile Chris Williamson campaigning with George Galloway doesn’t help things. Labours odds have lengthened to 4-1, so Inshould have waited a few days before putting my wager on.

I’ve been watching past episodes of The Weakest Link in Challenge recently and realised looking back just how cruel Anne Robinson was in some of her remarks to contestants, which made me think that there would be no way to revive this show in 2021, and if they did it would have to be someone who can engage in gentle ribbing without crossing over to downright cruelty. I thought that Robert Rinder would be the ideal person to fit that purpose, but it’ll be interesting to see how different the show is with Romesh Ranganathan.

Good. Better late than never.

SACK THE ADULTERER.

There was a BBC News article about this only a few weeks ago. John Oates himself seems to think that it was its inclusion of "500 Days of Summer" that turned it into a streaming titan.

Already have. Stuck £10 on it with 9/4 odds.

I do, but I do travel to border towns every now and again (where it's easy to cross over to O2 Ireland even if you haven't crossed the border), plus I intend to travel down-South more regularly once "the event" fully subsides.

Happy 5th Anniversary of the Brexit vote. A great day for O2 to inform me that they are re-introducing roaming charges outside the UK if you use more than 25GB of data whilst abroad (£3.50 per 1GB above that limit). Those with a long memory will remember that it was the worry about roaming charges being introducing due to living on an island where you're likely to inadvertently find yourself crossing into another jurisdiction was one of the things that made me vote "Remain" in the end. I doubt I'd go over the 25GB limit even if I was roaming, but it does leave a sour taste, and it could be the start of bringing them back regardless of how much data is used.

I'm still going to predict Batley & Spen as a win for Labour. Even though I've been reading stories all week about George Galloway pulling away support from potential Labour supporters all week (and I think he will finish in a better-than-expected 3rd place), I think that there will be enough support to get Labour over the line.

Watched The Father. What a gut-punch of a film it was. Was beautifully made and well acted by Anthony Hopkins (who definitely deserved the Oscar), with good supporting turns from Olivia Colman & Rufus Sewell. Was almost like a psychological horror in some places. 1) Nomadland 2) The Father

Will be interesting to see the streaming numbers for "Flowers of Scotland" tomorrow.