The Second Serve // Kate Crimes

Our congratulations to English Teacher for winning the most recent Mercury Music Prize. The award isn’t quite worth what it used to be though.

Ever since its foundation back in 1993, the Mercury prize money has been £20K for the winning act. And it still is today, 31 years later.

Had it bothered to keep up with inflation, it would now be closer to £42K.

[Check our maths]

Kate Nash relayed an anecdote in the travel section of the Sunday Times this weekend – ostensibly to highlight how cool and inclusive her hiring practices are these days (she boasts an all female/trans/queer tour crew). Yet she also inadvertently highlighted how petty her firing practices can be too.

The story goes that Kate went on a six-week tour of North America back in 2010, ending in Mexico City. Everyone involved turned up to the airport to fly home, when Kate realised she’d left her passport in the safe in her hotel room.

As she describes it, her crew – who had presumably all managed to remember their passports – ended up getting on the flight when she couldn’t. Kate was furious to have been left alone and forced to catch a later flight when she finally retrieved her passport.

So furious that she fired her entire band and crew for it when she got back.

If Prince Harry really is considering inviting the Spice Girls to his 40th birthday party, a word of advice: be explicit about what you want on your gift registry, or Geri will improvise.

When Geri was invited to Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday party, guests were politely requested to make a donation to his chosen charity in lieu of buying him a present. Geri was the only person to ignore that request and brought him a gift instead.

A George Foreman grill.

NI writes:
“Bonehead has form for this type of behaviour. Back in the early 2000s there was a scuffle outside the legendary Moles nightclub in Bath – a spot famous for hosting the likes of The Smiths, Radiohead etc in its tiny venue.

“Anyway, as we left through the melee, we could see a very drunk Bonehead barking that he was going to ‘fucking kill’ the security as he was being dragged away by mates.

“His last words before disappearing into the night were ‘Do you fucking know who I am?’ To which the doorman calmly responded with ‘Yes. That’s why we’re telling you to piss off instead of calling the police’.”

With Taylor Swift releasing a bajillion versions of The Tortured Poets Department to dominate the charts, and now Travis Scott and Sabrina Carpenter releasing multiple cheap versions of their albums last week to juice their Billboard positions – it’s been a banner year for chart shithousery.

But all these new fan-gouging tricks aren’t a patch on the old-skool methods. In fact, the fans never used to get stung at all.

Back in Boyzone’s heyday, there was a point where Ronan and co started getting a little too high on the fumes of their success. So much so that they began talking about ditching their manager, Louis Walsh, telling him they had so many fans they didn’t need his help any more.

So Louis marched the boys out to his car and popped open the boot. Inside were hundreds of copies of their latest single that he had bought.

“There you are, boys,” said Louis, “Here are your ‘fans’.”

The US takeover of Chelsea hasn’t gone exactly smoothly. £1bn+ spent. Managers chopped and changed. And nothing to show for it except becoming the butt of hundreds of jokes by football fans.

Now the two joint figureheads – Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital’s Behdad Eghbali – have fallen out to the point that both parties want to buy the other out so they don’t have to speak to each other again.

Still, they’ve left us with some precious memories:

* Like the time Boehly told a gathering of agents with great authority that no-one should worry about Chelsea being able to pay for their transfer policy as their automatic qualification for the Champions League kept them in clover. (The agents took great joy in pointing out qualification was’t actually automatic – as he’s since discovered…)

* Or the fact that, under their tenure, the club’s stated policy of only signing under 25s earned them a new nickname: DiCaprio FC

* Or the time that American CEO Chris Jurasek (who left the club last week) attended a fans’ meeting on the day of a league cup game last season and horrified them all by showing just how little he knew about their beloved club. Telling them he hoped the team would perform well and “secure three points” – in a knockout competition.

You know the drill by now. We grind up ten songs. Squidge them all together into a rough sonic paste. Squirt it at you through your computer speakers – and let you comb through it for recognisable bits.

Give yourself a point for every artist you correctly identify, and a point for every song title too.

Monday’s Theme: Made In Chelsea, Series 1

[Play it here]

A 4,500-strong Now That’s What I Call Music playlist
[Play on Spotify]

Do TV shows and movies lose rights to songs like video games do?
[Read on Polygon]

Spell out words with NASA’s satellite imagery
[Play around here]