Shane Lynch Irish 47-year-old former member of Boyzone, alleged singer, and born-again Christian has said that Taylor Swift and many other rock and pop artists perform satanic rituals in their stage performances and send demonic messages in their music. He made the claims in an interview with the Irish newspaper Sunday World. Perhaps Boyzone would have been a tad more exciting if they had dabbled with satanic messages in their songs. How about “Love Me For A Satan”, “Satan And Son” or “Satan Can I Hold You” for starters. Lynch said “I think when you’re looking at a lot of the artists out there, a lot of their stage shows are Satanic rituals live in front of 20,000 people without them realising and recognising,” and “You’ll see a lot of hoods up and masks on and fire ceremonies.” I wear a hoodie and dance around at gigs, do I also worship the devil? Of course not, but then I don’t worship an imaginary friend in the sky either. Shane droned on and on about it, adding “Even down to Taylor Swift – one of the biggest artists in the world – you watch one of her shows and she has two or three different demonic rituals to do with the pentagrams on the ground, to do with all sorts of stuff on her stage. But to a lot of people, it’s just art and that’s how people are seeing it, unfortunately.” He went on to say that this is the reason he’s given up listening to several genres of music, including hip-hop.” Personally, I would be very pleased if he said he was never making music again, although to be fair has he ever made music?
Mr Lynch borrows Lucifer’s pitchfork
The devil has been an ever-present in music for years ever since Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul at the crossroads. So many satan related tunes are out there from the Rolling Stones with “Sympathy For The Devil” to Cliff Richard (yes the Christian Mr. Clean with “Devil Woman”. Is rock and pop an easy way into satanism? Of course not. Does Taylor Swift worship satan? I doubt it. Is Shane Lynch talking utter bollocks? Of course, he is! OK, dear readers I would love to hear your thoughts regarding Satan in rock and pop!
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I know it is hard to believe but With Just A Hint Of Mayhem has been with you for fifteen years. We began on 9th February 2009 with a tiny pffft sound and one day we might make that huge bang! Thank you to every single one of you who has visited, liked, commented, or participated in this endeavor! I thought an appropriate way to celebrate was with fifteen songs with 15 in their title, so without further ado, blow out those 15 candles, get your party trousers on, and feel free to sing me a happy birthday tune of your choice!!!!
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I know a lot of people don’t like the end-of-the-year list craze, but I do, so the Mayhem Albums Of The Year feature is back for 2023! I tried to keep it to a top ten, but I failed miserably, so it is a top twenty. Is your favourite included, or conversely, is your least favourite one of my favourites? There are a lot of big artists on the list, because whilst I focus on newer and smaller artists, I still listen to the big ones, what can I say, I just bloody love good music! I am not going to write a piece on every album and artist included, but I would love to hear your choices for 2023. So here it comes, the Mayhem top 20 albums of 2023!
Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd – Lana Del Rey
Black Rainbows – Corinne Bailey Rae
Heavy Heavy – Young Fathers
Chaos For The Fly – Grian Chatten
Drop Cherries – Billie Marten
The Ballad of Darren – Blur
Seven Psalms – Paul Simon
UK GRIM – Sleaford Mods
Smile – Skindred
Fata Morgan – Liz Davinci
The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons – The Hives
Vertiginous Drops – Carol Hodge
Venom – WARGASM
Chronicles of a Diamond – Black Pumas
Black Classical Music – Yussef Dayes
1989 (Taylor’s Version) – Taylor Swift
Things Lost – Suncharms
Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart – Lucinda Williams
CACTI – Billy Nomates
10,000 gecs – 100 gecs
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In my humble opinion companies like Viagogo are, in simple terms ticket touts that have somehow become legitimate. These companies refer to themselves as “ticket resale agencies” a rather cuddly and friendly title for what feels like industrial-level scalping. But there are other “ticket resale agencies” I hear you say. Yes, there is Stub Hub, but did you know they merged with Viagogo? There is also Seat Geek which has branched out beyond resale and is now a ticket agency in its own right. In fact, it is the ticketing partner for numerous sports teams and venues in the USA and in 2020 signed a similar deal with Liverpool Football Club in the UK. There are other scalping agencies, perhaps too many to mention.
Recently Taylor Swift tickets for her Eras tour became available on Viagogo at pretty much the same time they went on general sale, including pre-sale tickets, that smacks of some kind of high-level scam. Some were on sale for more than £3,500. The price for most legitimate tickets for her UK tour were reasonably expensive to start with, between £100 and £200. Cris Miller who owns Viagogo was asked at the time to justify the huge price of Taylor Swift tickets for her ERAS tour on his site, According to MyLondon, the BBC, and other press publications, he said that Viagogo was “ensuring that there’s a secure, safe transaction“. So does this mean safer than the more legitimate ticket agencies like Ticket Master (another company I am not a huge fan of, but they will be covered in a future article). He also stated that “There’s not going to be enough seats. So, from our perspective, ensuring that there’s a secure, safe transaction that takes place is the single most important thing“. Well, there never are enough seats to satisfy demand when artists on the scale of Taylor Swift tour, unless she played three shows a day every day for six months that is unlikely to ever change.
So, the bottom line suggested by that comment is that Viagogo is all about creaming as much money from fans as possible right? Well, that is certainly my takeaway. Miller went on to claim that “fans prefer to buy more expensive tickets on Viagogo”. Seriously? What the actual fuck is that about? How many people do you know who would honestly prefer to buy tickets at ten times the face value? I know people do, but do they prefer doing that? Of course, they don’t. Miller said, “I wake up every single day, as does everybody else that works at the company, thinking about one thing, and that’s getting fans into these events all over the world”. That might be true, but it is more likely about how much money they can scam off said fans.
Scammers like Viagogo and their ilk pay a lot of money to Google and other similar sites to promote themselves as legitimate ticker agents, falsely in my opinion. This enables them to show up on the top of page one of a Google search when you search for gigs and shows. They operate in an incredibly devious and sophisticated way to give genuine fans and ticket buyers the impression that your tickets are direct from the authorised seller. They often charge an increased base price for tickets and add an inflated booking fee. There have also been many incidents of fans buying tickets for shows only to find that on arrival at the event their tickets were not valid. This impacted fans of the Rolling Stones and Take That in the years leading up to Covid. In 2018, even the UK Government expressed negative thoughts about Viagogo when the then Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries, Margot James stated clearly on BBC Radio “Don’t choose Viagogo. They are the worst.” However, the company is now legal in the UK and that statement from Margot James was possibly the last sensible thing a UK Minister has ever said in public.
A few years before Covid I used Viagogo to purchase a ticket for the Reading Festival, that is the one and only time that I have ever or will ever use them. I had left it a bit late to get a ticket and weekend tickets had sold out. So, believing Viagogo to be a genuine fans resale company I purchased via their website. It cost me almost double the face value. Never again! I would rather not go than pay ridiculously inflated prices. This happens for almost every major event not just Taylor Swift. The same thing has impacted recent shows by Harry Styles and many UK festivals. What makes it even worse for me is that since Covid many shows struggle to sell out and having large tranches of tickets in the hands of legitimised touts and scalpers will not help change this. Late last year Rammstein mounted a successful legal fight that forbids Viagogo from selling tickets to their shows, let’s hope more artists do the same. Also last year UK independent TV channel ITV worked with the Fan Fair Alliance to discover that nearly all tickets on Viagogo’s site are supplied by just three traders, which means that only around 10% of tickets on the site were on offer by what we might call ordinary punters.
Meanwhile, there is the NME who, back in the day, were bastions of positive and liberal thinking and even recently they have written some quite strong pieces that slagged off Viagogo. But now, presumably thanks to advertising revenue, the once proud NME who, back in the day, really knew how to “stick it to the man” is licking Viagogo’s tarnished golden rim by publishing paid-for advertising features for Viagogo. Is Viagogo legitimate? Sadly, it is in most places, they currently have operations in more than 60 countries. Is it ethical? Well for me that is at best a very grey area, personally, I don’t believe that they are. Can I stop anyone from using Viagogo? No, I can’t. Can I implore people to avoid the company forever? Yes, I can and I really believe you should do some research into this awful organisation before you consider using them!
This is a screenshot taken from the Viagogo site on 27th July 2023 for Taylor Swift tickets for the Liverpool shows. These are just floor tickets!
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Weird lyrics are great aren’t they? Often they might be confused with crap lyrics I suppose. Such as Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak” contains the line ‘tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in this town’. Somewhere? Obviously it will be at the jail won’t it? That for me is a crap lyric. A weird lyric for me comes from Haircut 100’s “Love Plus One” as in ‘where do we go from here, is it down to the lake I fear’. Then of course this little gem from Pharrell William’s wonderful song “Happy”; ‘Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof’. Anyway, maybe there is a very thin line between weird and crap, what do you think? Online music company Blinkbox Music recently undertook a survey to find out the weirdest lyrics. They asked 2,000 people for their opinion and the resulting top 10 weird lyrics were;
The Killers – “Human”- ‘Are we human, or are we dancer?’
The Beatles – “I Am The Walrus”- ‘I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.’
I’m a bit late with this but I thought the 2013 YouTube awards deserved a mention. (Thanks for the reminder Mr H). The highest profile awards went to Eminem who was artist of the year and Girl’s Generation a South Korean K-Pop group won the video of the year for their song “I Got A Boy”. Other winners were;
Response of the Year:Lindsey Stirling & Pentatonix, “Radioactive”
I felt that it was a nice surprise that Lady Gaga, who played a new song “Dope” at the awards show, won no awards. Eminem has also been in the news a lot recently. His recent UK number one single “The Monster” featuring Rihanna was the seventh consecutive year that Rihanna has had a UK number one. Only Elvis Presley and the Beatles have managed that before. In a two sevens clash numerical coincidence Eminem’s new album ‘The Marshall Mathers LP 2″ became his seventh consecutive UK number one album. He is the first US artist to acheive this feat.
Not content with picketing the funerals of servicemen and women, gay people and Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman those arseholes at the Westboro Baptist Church are now attacking Taylor Swift. They have called her the ‘poster girl of the young whores of doomed-America‘
Taylor sends a message to those twats at the Westboro Baptist Church!
Clearly these fundamentalists have shit for brains and how come the Christian right isn’t shouting them down for at least being unpatriotic; ‘doomed-America’? How would these fuckwits react if we picketed their funerals and constantly pestered them with hate messages? Would anyone care if the Westboro Baptist Church was destroyed? I doubt even god would care. I suspect that if he/ she exists (and I don’t believe he/ she does) he/ she would break into a wry smile when hearing the news. But equally the fact that arrogant religious nutcases like this exist helps prove to me that there is no god, because if there was why would he/ she create such a bunch of moronic, bigoted wankers as those who are a part of the Westboro Baptist Church?
The same people who picket funerals send their kids out like this? That really is obscene!
The video has sacrificial goats 🙂
If God exists I suspect he would carry a placard that says GOD HATES THE WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH!
It’s Brits time again and I will be typing live ready to publish later in the evening. It is opened spectacularly by Muse with an incredibly large orchestra and pyrotechnics. Although they were a long way from being Catwoman’s favourite I thought they were superb. It appears that James Corden is over the worst of the tonsilitis and back to present the Brits for the fourth time.
Damien Hirst has designed this years trophies. The first one presented this evening is for the best British female solo artist. It was given by Taylor Swift to the delightful Scot Emilie Sande. A very gracious speech too. Sadly we then switched to an at table interview of One Direction by Mr Corden. I really don’t like Boy Bands. Then to make matters worse Robbie Williams was the next live act. Regular readers will know how little I like him. Whilst “Candy” is not a bad song I dislike Robbie immensely. But the monochrome set and costumes of the dancers was very effective.
Next up it’s Best British group presented by Simon Pegg and a Bond Girl.The winners unsurprisingly were Mumford and Sons. At least it wasn’t One Direction. Some great British pride from the Mumfords too. It was the Best British Breakthrough prize next presented by Grimmy. I was expecting this to go to Jake Bugg Does anyone agree with me that James Corden is not particularly funny? A world exclusive by none other than Justin Timberlake was next to appear. It’s an ok song and whilst he wasn’t bringing sexy back his jacket was bringing shiny back!
Ed Sheerhan presented the best British male award to Ben Howard. Why no nomination for Jake Bugg when that Muppet Olly Murs was in the nominees? Now it’s time for the critics choice award and it goes to Tom O’Dell. Dermot O’Leary and Sharon Osbourne were introduced as man and wife (what a horrible thought) to give the Best International female statuette to Lana Del Ray. One Direction are on stage, will someone please kill me. How flat were some of those notes? A dreadful performance. Do this lot have any personality and stage presence? On this showing I think not. Bring back Blondie.
Coldplay won the Best British live act, strangely they are a band that I’ve not seen live, well not yet anyway. That is their 8th Brit award since they began. Tom Daley and Jonathan Ross (what a strange combination) gave out the best single prize to Adele for “Skyfall”. Sadly she wasn’t there as she is rehearsing for the Oscars. Thank god James Arthur or Olly Murs didn’t win!
Taylor Swift dressed as a wedding cake to perform between two braziers. Unlike Wand Erection though she can really sing. Losing that dress for the hot pants was a good move. Best International group was presented by a true rock god Dave Grohl. The award went to the fabulous Black Keys who sadly weren’t there, very worthy winners in my opinion. After winning two prizes so far Ben Howard was on stage to perform “It’s Only Love” which let’s be fair is a beautiful if somewhat sleep inducing song.
A brief interview with Mercury Prize winners Alt J by Mr Corden came up next. Now we have the best International male. Frank Ocean won it, what a damned good choice! The War Child charity won a new special recognition award. This is truly a great charity, a well deserved prize. Collected by Ben Knowles from Warchild and Damon Albarn. Mumford took to the stage for “I Will Wait” I saw them at the Reading Festival in 2011. They were bloody good, but I feel they peaked very early and that their second album was nowhere near as good as the first. I’m sure I won’t be the first to say that Mumford have become a bit dull will I?
None other than Byron Ferrari was on hand to present the Best British album gong to Emilie Sande for ‘Our Version Of Events’. Personally I love her voice, but I imagine she is a bit Marmite in that you either love her or hate her. Yet another Global Success Award was presented by Robbie Williams to One Direction; oh joy, two of my least favourite acts ever! What the fuck? Was this award invented just so that Wand Erection didn’t sob all over their school books? I bet that arsehole Simon Cowell was behind that! Emilie Sande closed the show and yes she was good. But that Global Success award to One Direction has left a bad taste in my mouth. In fact it has turned a relatively dull Brits into something quite shit! Can we have some proper rock n roll edgeiness back next year please? Preferably a bit more edgy than Sharon Osbourne mentioning Harry Styles’ willy!
Well it’s been a long wait but Felix Baumgartner has done it. he has jumped from a balloon some 128,000 feet above the earth. He has broken a record that has been held since 1960 by Colonel Joe Kittinger. Felix appeared to have a spot of bother at the start of his jump when he was spinning over and over for a short while. He reached a top speed of more than 700 miles an hour. Click here to read the BBC report of his successful jump. I also found it a little interesting that he jumped over Roswell, site of the alleged crash landing of an alien spacecraft in 1947.
To celebrate Mr Baumgartner’s success I thought that you might like to listen to some jump related songs.
So now all the hype and spin of the UK General Election is over for the time being. Maybe for just a short period too, given that we have a hung parliament there might be another election as soon as later this year, just like 1974. I was thinking earlier that all three main parties must be thinking about how badly they have done this time around and maybe about the recriminations associated with that performance. The Tories must have hoped to have won an overall majority, Labour might have expected to fare a little better (I wonder what influence bigotgate had on their result) and the Lib Dems surely would have wished for a massive improvement rather than going backwards in terms of number of seats. I also feel that this country is crying out for electoral reform. How is it fair that a party like the Lib Dems can win 23% of the votes but les than 10% of the parliamentary seats? That can’t be right, can it? To quote Mr Rotten from San Francisco in 1978 ‘ever had the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ I feel very cheated in this election. How does everyone else feel? Still there was a modicum of good news; the Green Party won their first seat in Brighton and the BNP still have no MPs. The BNP also lost 12 council seats in Barking, now that is very, very good news.
Gordon makes it clear what he thinks of his opponents. It certainly doesn't look like an 'I agree with Nick' hand gesture does it?
So back to thoughts of failure, recrimination and blame, with heavy emphasis on the blame element. As I have said plenty of times before this is a music blog so here come some blame songs, please feel free to add your own through the comments option.
“I Don’t Blame You At All” – Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. In this clip the song soundtracks the UK chart rundown on the BBCs Top Of The Pops hosted by Jimmy Saville. Just dig that crazy fashion sense and dancing skills among the audience daddyo! Was that really my generation? Surely not. Back in my younger days I first heard this song on a Motown Chartbusters album, Volume 6 in fact. It was the one with the excellent Roger Dean cover of a Fly/ Spaceship hybrid. What do you think of it?
Motown Chartbusters Volume 6 cover - I reckon they should have called this superfly, although Curtis Mayfield may have been upset!
“Blame It On The Boogie” – Jacksons. The Jackson as they became after leaving Motown, they weren’t allowed to be called the Jackson 5 as Motown owned the name rights. They also left Jermaine at Motown and replaced him with brother Randy. Does anyone know what the ectoplasm going on in the video is? Confusingly this song was written by a British chap who rather confusingly was called Mick Jackson (not Jacko), click his name to hear his version. Either way it’s a brilliant disco song even after all these years
“Blame It On The Sun” – Stevie Wonder. Taken from Stevie’s excellent ‘Talking Book’ album from 1972. I really had to include this for other reasons as well. In particular the UK tabloid the Sun, a part of Mr Murdoch’s empire back Cameron and the Tories to win. So maybe Dave will blame it on the Sun. At least there wasn’t the old headline of ‘It was the Sun wot won it!’
“Blame Canada” – South Park. Before I am inundated with comments from angry Canadians, let me just state categorically that I love Canada and certainly don’t blame them for the election result in the UK. Although I am sure that a conspiracy could be woven around that if required. This song is taken from the excellent South Park Movie from 1999, was it really that long ago? Oh Boy! Have you seen it before? If not then click here to buy it.
“Blame It On The Pop” (Top 25 songs of 2009) – Various Artists. Nothing much to say about this mixtastic, medleytastic bunch. It features 25 artists (and in some cases I use the term lightly) including Black Eyed Peas, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Keri Hilson, Flo Rida, Pitbull, Beyonce, Katy Perry, Jay Sean, Lil Wayne, All American Rejects, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, Jamie Foxx, Kelly Clarkson, Rihanna and Jason Mraz
OK very funny, which one of you b*stards put super glue on the table?
With Just A Hint Of Mayhem 