Hello Mr Sunshine!

A couple of days ago, I mentioned the frighteningly compelling "We Love Katamari" on the PS2. It's a game where, for no particular reason, you have to roll things up into a massive cluster which you release into the sky to make a star.

It is a creation of considerable genius, albeit the sort of genius that comes from eating one too many 'magic' rainbow pills, holding a quart of sherbet in your mouth and drinking four litres of fizzy pop. Every so often, you'll put down the controller and think "this is so weird" before going straight back to rolling up the Arc de Triomphe, or Mount Fuji, or a cow.

However, the best thing about Katamari isn't the game, but the sublime soundtrack. Ranging from Tom-Jones-alike swing bands to deranged a-capella techno, you'll find yourself humming the tunes long after the game has stopped causing violent primary-coloured spots in front of your eyes.

Japan tends to take it's in-game music a little bit more seriously than we do in the West, so (as far as I can gather) the tracks on We Love Katamari are by some relatively famous composers and musicians. To that end, a soundtrack is available - and I've just discovered a website which sells such japanese curios to the UK. It's called Game Melody, and it will keep me singing "Hello Mr Sunshine" long after We Love Katamari gets filed away in the cupboard with all my old console games.

To whet your apetite for this musical feast, I'm putting up a sample of the track "Katamari on the swing" - which should be available for the next 7 days or so. Enjoy!

Download 'Katamari On The Swing' (link fixed!)

Buy the soundtrack

Or the game itself, for that matter

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Video of the week: No Scrubs

I'm not a big fan of Hype Williams' work. His videos for the bad and bling of hip-hop (Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z) exemplify everything that's wrong with post-gangsta rap. They're gaudy, self-aggrandising exercises in style over substance - or money over taste, to be more accurate.

This video, for TLC's "No Scrubs", stays true to the genre but manages to shake off the chains of formula and run, arms akimbo, for the door marked 'pop'. It does so for the same reason the song surpasses its nursery-rhyme melody: the irresistable force of the band's personality. The girls just don't take themselves seriously - rubbing their rumps, pulling faces and, finally, falling about in hysterics as the song fades out.

Interestingly, the only other Hype video I've ever enjoyed pulls off the same trick. Will Smith's "Getting Jiggy With It" is jaw-droppingly good not because of the ridiculous amount of cash it must have cost, but because of Smith's big cheeky grin. And that bizarre dance, where he rubs two hamsters together in the hope of generating enough static electricity to stick them to a nearby wall.

Perhaps we'll come back to that one another time...

Buy Hype Williams' video collection at Amazon

Buy TLC's Greatest Hits on CD+DVD at Amazon

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Yo, what's up? We used to shake it up

Betty Boo. She used to do the do. And there was nothing (nothing) you could do.

But one day, she ceased all the doing she was famed for doing, and went off to write songs for Hear'say instead. "For shame", we all cried.

Great news, though, Betty Boo is back, back, BACK!!! from the dumper. She's stopped asking people to call her Alison Clarkson, cut her hair in a bob again, and made an album with Alex from out of Blur.

They're called Wigwam and they doing the whole pop group thing properly, with a logo, a video shot on a rooftop, and everything. Super news.

You can hear the single , also called Wigwam, on their Myspace site. And Top of the Pops (what's that?) is streaming the video.

But amongst all the joy and celebration, I have to relate a cautionary tale. In the past, Betty has been sent home by a bandmate who said he was busy. He had a visit from his Aunt Lizzy. So, what they did was they postponed a dope beat session until she'd gone home. Betty thought she'd practice all by herself, but realised she'd left her lyrics right on the shelf. When she went back, you wouldn't believe what she found... It was the bandmate and Aunt Lizzy getting on down!

Alex James should try, never lie, and not be more interested in a bit on the side. Or Betty Boo will be through. And there really will be nothing (nothing) he can do.

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I started something I couldn't finish

Who'd have thought that Morrissey and Victoria Beckham would share a taste in books? Even though what that boils down to is a mutual aversion to reading.

Posh admitted to a Spanish journalist last year, "I haven't read a book in my life." And in an interview with True to You this week, Moz claimed, "I don't read fiction. What's the point? The basic details of my own life are stranger than anything I ever come across in modern fiction."

Mind you, if Morrissey's having trouble finishing books, he's got no-one to blame but himself. "With any book, I start at the final chapter and work my way to the first," he says. "This is probably a sickness."

It might not be a bona-fide illness (unless being deliberately perverse is some kind of neurological affliction) but it's certainly not going to help you follow the plot, is it?

In the end, though, you've got to admire a man who believes his own life story is stranger than the contents of an entire novel read in reverse order. Especially if that novel is Sophie's World.

True to you

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NME Awards: A brief conversation

Ant says:
I have to say I'm disturbed. NME readers, yes that's NME readers, have voted Madonna as sexiest female! Obviously the adverage reader age is now 40+ or something has really gone wrong in the head of 20 something boys.

Mrdiscopop says:
Sexy? Have they seen her gusset?

Ant says:
It's like fancying your mum if you're an NME reader...

Mrdiscopop says:
Bad and wrong

Ant says:
As ben in our office would say 'it's captain wrong from the planet don't go there'

Mrdiscopop says:
Mind you - are there any sexy indie ladies at the moment?

Ant says:
Meg's quite sexy from the White Stripes, but that might be me

Mrdiscopop says:
Only when her hair covers her face

Ant says:
Cheeky

Mrdiscopop says:
What about her out of the Subways?

Ant says:
I think the girls are about to fight back in the indie world, there's a number of lady fronted bands on the way...

Ant says:
I don't know what she looks like, I'll have to see

Mrdiscopop says:
Hooray!

Mrdiscopop says:
Lady-fronts are exactly what NME needs

Ant says:
LOL

Mrdiscopop says:
Heidi from the Sugababes - or are you not allowed to like them if you read the NME?

Ant says:
Well if Madonna gets a look in anyone does

Mrdiscopop says:
But I think indie-boys are allowed to like Madonna these days. There's a secret handshake or something.

Ant says:
Subways lady is okay... NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO Madonna not allowed EVER

Mrdiscopop says:
Not sexually, mind, just her cutting-edge dance concoctions.

Ant says:
What ABBA? Not cutting edge just ripping off

Mrdiscopop says:
To be fair, that's only one song

Ant says:
One song is enough

Mrdiscopop says:
Don't some of the other songs make up for hung up? I'm thinking Ray of Light and Like a Prayer here...

Ant says:
Yes but that's in the past not now

Mrdiscopop says:
Which is kind of the point, I suppose. Past it commercially, creatively and most definitely sexually.

Mrdiscopop says:
Just ask Guy.

Ant says:
Which brings us around again to the start of this conversation, Madonna sexiest female, a million levels of wrong

Mrdiscopop says:
I thank you.

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Braff in brief

When I was at university, you couldn't trust medical students to lift a forkful of beans to their mouth, never mind administering dangerous quantities of drugs via a honking great needle. In tellyland, however, all doctors end up being dashing, uber-confident demigods - blessed with the power over life and death, delivered through the cunning use of a pencil and a stethoscope.

Except, that is, in Scrubs. Yes, the show's scripts are as weak as a dialysis pateint's piss, but the characters are flawed and human in a way that makes them more empathetic than their ER equivalents. That's if you can bear the programme's self-conciously zany plots and the fact that every scene ends with somebody gurning down the barrel of the camera like a hamster having an orgasm.

So, it came of something as a surprise that lead actor Zach Braff made one of my favourite films of 2004. Garden State, an indie-romcom with Natalie Portman, was Braff's debut as writer and director. And he shows a natural talent for subtle comedic storytelling - making a movie that's easily a peer to Lost In Translation or The Station Agent.

But what's Braff been up to since? Well, according to his blog it's this:

I am going to be Vesper Lind (the new Bond love interest). After the success of certain films this year, they have decided to "shake things up" this time around. And so Bond will be gay. I play Vesper Lind, a German spy who loves trip-hop and raves. I assassinate my victims by forcing them to drink the fluid inside of glow-sticks. James and I meet when our hands accidentally touch during a "Licensed to Kill" seminar in Dusseldorf. We were both reaching for an "Ain't Misbehavin" CD that kills an enemy after he/she listens to the Act One curtain closer. Not very effective as a means of assassination since the target would have to make it through some really mediocre numbers in the first act, and like I said, it only works on "he/she's" which aren't very common in the spy business outside of Thailand. Can't say much more it's all very hush-hush…

In summary, then: Rent Garden State, read the blog, avoid Scrubs like the plague.

Zach Braff Blog

Buy Garden State on Amazon

Scrubs official site (see just how cringeworthy it really is)

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