Stand-Up, Downstairs

Stand-up comedy is something I file alongside successfully playing Queens Of The Stone Age’s ‘No-One Knows’ on Guitar Hero – it’s so difficult to nail spot on I couldn’t really ever see myself doing it.

My friend Rich Heap, however, is rather a dab hand at it, and last night downstairs at the King’s Head in Crouch End he won over a tough crowd – some of which were wearing tracksuits.





Of the 14 acts only three – including Rich – won the crowd. The woman who repeatedly shouted about Gordon Brown and Barack Obama being robots wasn’t one of them, and neither was the girl who kept making jokes about sodomising three year-olds.

There were a few heckles at the weaker acts – and one dude got a bit shouty during Rich’s set. His cogs of retort immediately began whirring into action, but they didn’t need to – the crowd turned round and loudly boo-ed the heckler before swinging their eyes back round and cheering Rich.

It was a MOMENT! Go and see him live – here’s his MySpace page.

A Bull On A Bike

The other night in Dubai I went to a press preview of HoofbeatZ.

Unfortunately, far from being an equine take on hip-hop culture, as the name suggests, it was promised to be a dancing horse show illustrating the dynasty of the four-legged carrot-munchers through history.

In reality it was a bunch of bored looking Dobbins being led around a sand-pit while a voice not dissimilar to Ballsy – the booming voice of the Lotto – outlined the importance and wonder of our retractable penis-boasting furry friends.

It was pretty shoddy, the low point being the jousting section, where instead of actual jousting a dude in a tin foil suit picked up large hoops with his jousting stick to a ripple of under-whelmed applause.

But then, just before the interval, my evening was made. It was the matador section, featuring this ‘bull’:








Yes, it’s a man on a battery-run two-wheeler clumsily traversing around the sandpit. I nearly had a heart attack. Go and see it!

If David Beckham Played Sim City…

…Dubai is probably what he’d come up with after a couple of days of mouse-clicking.

And (appropriately) situated on ‘The Palm’ is the gaudy jewel in the crown: The Atlantis hotel. The place decided that it is a six-star hotel and is the pad that they flew over Kylie and Lily et al for the launch, along with a slew of magazine editors in preparation for a plethora of fawning, freebie-oiled reviews.





It’s hilariously vile; overweight, over-rich football hooligans saunter past statues of mermen, Liverpool FC replica shirts flapping in the slipstream. Guests admire the central statue that resembles something from ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ while working up an appetite for their visit to the in-hotel branch of Nobu – Lily Allen goes to the London one, didn’t you read?

BUT as much as Atlantis is clearly the most detestable place I’ve set foot in since I took a flight with US Airways, I find it impossible to fuly condemn somewhere that has a FRICKIN’ WHALE SHARK in its reception area:





He’s called Sammy, and he rules. How much are rooms, again?