Paul Weller has stiff competition for the Mercury prize this year Bookies have slashed the odds on Paul Weller winning tonight’s Mercury Prize, making him the 1/10 favourite, after a number of large bets were placed. Weller has a bit of form here. A series of last minute bets for Weller to win Best British Male Artist in last year’s Brits Awards was blamed on a gambling syndicate with advance information. The cumulative effect of small bets placed by a group of men touring bookies in London and Guilford was estimated to have cost the gambling industry £100,000.

The thing about the Brits, though, is that the vote is essentially taken before the ceremony is even organised, so a lot of people are potentially aware of the result. The Mercury Awards, by contrast, would be nigh on impossible to fix. The judges only meet for the second time tonight to have a discussion and espouse the arguments for their personal favourite. And the final vote is not taken until after the performances.

Rather, I think the late run on Weller probably reflects an attempt to second guess the judges.

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“I’ve never intended to be controversial,” Morrissey once claimed, “but it’s very easy to be controversial in pop music because nobody ever is.”

Well, he’s gone and done it again, with an interview in the Observer, in which (as a particularly outspoken vegetarian) Morrissey conveys his disgust at a news story about the treatment of animals in China with the comment “Absolutely horrific. You can’t help but feel the Chinese are a subspecies.”

It is an unfortunate choice of word, certainly, although not quite the call to rise up and expunge all foreign blood from our soil that it is being portrayed as. It’s a bit off, is about the most you could say of it. Indeed, the comment was so throwaway that the self-absorbed interviewer (poet Simon Armitage) barely seemed to notice it at the time, including it amidst a jumble of disconnected quotes in his article, without any context or follow up questions or attempt to clarify.

Nonetheless, it has led to Morrissey being condemned as a racist, as if we haven’t all got more serious things to worry about than a famously opinionated pop star making provocatively controversial comments. It is the proverbial storm in a tea cup, which is exactly the kind of storm you can imagine Morrissey being pleased to provoke,

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“I’ve never intended to be controversial,” Morrissey once claimed, “but it’s very easy to be controversial in pop music because nobody ever is.”

Well, he’s gone and done it again, with an interview in the Observer, in which (as a particularly outspoken vegetarian) Morrissey conveys his disgust at a news story about the treatment of animals in China with the comment “Absolutely horrific. You can’t help but feel the Chinese are a subspecies.”

It is an unfortunate choice of word, certainly, although not quite the call to rise up and expunge all foreign blood from our soil that it is being portrayed as. It’s a bit off, is about the most you could say of it. Indeed, the comment was so throwaway that the self-absorbed interviewer (poet Simon Armitage) barely seemed to notice it at the time, including it amidst a jumble of disconnected quotes in his article, without any context or follow up questions or attempt to clarify.

Nonetheless, it has led to Morrissey being condemned as a racist, as if we haven’t all got more serious things to worry about than a famously opinionated pop star making provocatively controversial comments. It is the proverbial storm in a tea cup, which is exactly the kind of storm you can imagine Morrissey being pleased to provoke,

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Only the hair remains the same

Robert Plant & The Band of Joy: One Mayfair, London (live review)

Warming up for his UK tour, Robert Plant played a secret gig in a converted church in London’s West End. “It’s nice to play in one of the Houses Of The Holy, now sadly obsolete and available for receptions of all kinds,” the singer joked.

It was the only reference to Led Zeppelin that the erstwhile rock deity made all night but the privileged few hundred worshippers had no cause for complaint. With a smile of real enjoyment lifting the corners of his goatee beard, Plant and his carefully assembled group of Nashville session players blew through a set of sinuous, groovy, high-powered roots rock, country, folk and gospel that radiated musical joy.

Indeed, Plant has named his new ensemble The Band Of Joy, in honour of his pre-Zeppelin psychedelic blues outfit.

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‘The modern world has always slightly mystified me,” says Laura Marling. Just 20 years old, already an NME cover star and nominated for next week’s Mercury Music Prize (for the second time), Marling is about as contemporary as you can get. Yet somehow it is not in the least surprising to find the wispily graceful, soft-spoken singer-songwriter proclaiming herself at odds with the times.

“I’ve got my laptop, but it troubles me in many ways. I don’t have Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It ruins a romantic idea, which might just be an illusion, a sense of depth or continuity. I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.”

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Is heavy metal conclusive proof that the devil actually doesn’t have all the best tunes? I am not entirely convinced by the Reverend Rachel Mann’s proposal that Christians could learn a lot about life from heavy metal. The only thing I ever learned at a heavy metal concert was to keep my ear plugs in.

OK, that’s a cheap shot. Heavy Metal (and all its spawn, death metal, black metal, speed metal, thrash metal, rusty metal, dented metal, plastic metal, easy listening cocktail bar metal – I admit I may have made a couple of these up) has never been my music of choice.

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The Libertines, HMV Forum, London

They arrive onstage to Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’; four men dressed in black staring at their feet and instruments, barely acknowledging the 2,500 strong audience or each other. But as the first clanging chords of ‘Horrorshow’ ring out, the place erupts, with energy, with noise, with emotion. Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, the Likely Lads of British indie, appear to be singing at the same mic, in a head-shaking frenzy like a couple of mop tops in a storm of Beatlemania, but you can barely hear them for the lusty bellowing of the crowd. The Libertines are back.

The first time I saw The Libertines, in a densely packed Glasgow club in 2003, they almost broke up after the show. I’m not sure they were built to last,

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Katy Perry: Teenage Dream (Virgin)

Katy Perry must curse the day Lady Gaga donned her exploding bra. Just two years ago, Perry was the new bad girl on the pop block, done up like a Forties burlesque pin up, singing smart, funny anthems about youthful misbehaviour.

She had costumes, wigs, an engaging wit and hit No 1 in 25 countries with the provocative I Kissed a Girl. Then along came Gaga like a haute couture disco Valkyrie and suddenly a faux lesbian snog didn’t seem quite so risqué.

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Why do people continue to want to believe in The X Factor? The revelation that auto-tune has been used to enhance (and possibly, in some instances, even worsen) performances has been greeted with shock, with fans voicing disappointment and tabloid headlines denouncing it as the TV scandal of the year. But, for me, the biggest surprise is that anyone is surprised.

The use of post-production studio trickery to shape contestants’ vocals simply adds another layer of manipulation to a show that is contrived to the point of near-outright fraudulence. Defending themselves against accusations of sharp practise, ITV boss Peter Fincham declared “The X Factor is the biggest entertainment show on British TV,” carefully avoiding any use of the dread phrase “talent contest”.

So that’s entertainment? It is as if Simon Cowell has been recast as a cabaret act, a magician pulling pop stars out his hat. We all know it’s a trick, we just don’t want to see how it was done.

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Bob Dylan in 1965 Photo: rexWith all this talk about auto-tune, I’ve been wondering what Bob Dylan would sound like if the pitch correction device had been available in the 60s? “Someday everything’s gonna be smooth like a rhapsody / When I auto-tune my masterpiece.”

Better not to go there. As someone said to me on Twitter, the thing about auto-tune is that good musicians don’t need it and bad ones don’t deserve it.

There has been much controversy about the use of auto-tune on the X Factor, and I weigh in with my thoughts on it in tomorrow’s Telegraph. But, for anyone surprised at revelations about the ubiquity of vocal enhancement in modern recording, it is worth making the point that auto-tune is not inherently evil.

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