News, Views and Music Issue 185 (Intro)

March11th:

Dear all, against all the odds our strong hit rate continues! We’re nearly on 85,000 hits now and it doesn’t seem like a month since we were passing 50,000 (probably because it was only a month). The AAA is still big in Sweden, has suddenly started doing well in Brazil and France and we still have heavy hit-rate spikes in the middle of the night when the Americas go online. As ever a big hello to all of you, wherever you’re from! Unfortunately the spammers continue: I’ve given up trying up to keep replying/sifting/deleting all the comments as appropriate (most of them on our article on Wings’ ‘Venus and Mars’ for some reason) and some of them are a bit weird to be honest. Case in point: the message saying ‘Hmm good article but really you didn’t write very much about it and you clearly need to post again having written more’. Err, we at the AAA pride ourselves on writing about albums in more detail than any other music site and the response we usually get from people is ‘why on earth did you end up writing 12,000 words on an album nobody’s bought when most sites dismiss them in 1200?’ We noticed too that there was a message – now deleted – saying ‘Hi, it’s admin here, this is a really rubbish site and we’re not going to run it much longer – and all of you are really stooopid for reading this!’ It goes without saying that isn’t one of our messages to you all, beloved readers that you are, and we will never refer to ourselves as ‘admin’, so if you see another comment before we have a chance to get rid of it, it’s not by us we promise.


In other news, do you want the good or the bad first? Well, actually both are linked this week. David Cameron has says that if the Conservatives win the 2015 election he’ll make sure that the European Human Rights Laws will no longer be part of UK law. No other media seem to be touching this so let me reiterate: prisoners will no longer be treated humanely, the disabled will have no last rights of appeals on having money stripped of them and there will be nothing stopping them forcing the unemployed to work for massive profit-making companies for free as a modern day slave. The fright behind that little heard statement is real and devastating and we need to do something to make sure that day – when several centuries of democracy are thrown out in one go – never ever happens. Interestingly the head of the 1922 committee, who would put this into law, shares his name with Graham Brady, our old friend from our skills exchange days back when we started this site (he’d put this whole political mess right I tell you!) The good news, however, is that hopefully that day won’t come: still smarting from coming third in the Eastleigh by-elections (when the conservatives – and labour for that matter – were nearly overtaken by the local ‘Pets Love Elvis’ candidate (!)) the Tories have said that Cameron has until the local elections in May to turn poll-ratings around or he’s out on his ear. Few papers have covered this story either so let’s just rub it in: the conservatives in Eastleigh had the worst result of any political party in office during an unplanned by-election: in fact the worse since the 1930s when Chamberlain was in a little bit of trouble for appeasing some guy called Adolf Hitler. Already there are rumours that 35 of the 45 MPs needed to vote for a ‘crisis of confidence’ vote have handed over their signatures to ousting Cameron, so we’re not the only ones who hate his guts. Remember the Coalition weren’t elected by us, have no mandate to serve the people and they are to a proper Government what Rod, Jane and Freddy are to Crosby, Stills and Nash (i.e. Godawful).

Rant over (for another week) we remind you that you can view the AAA news stories of the week by pressing this link:

http://paper.li/f-1347835090

And so, with the news over, we hand you back to your regularly scheduled album review...