It's cold up here at the Watusi Country Club and there's frost on the croquet lawn. Reminds me of the 'Middle Class Blues”.

'Woke up this afternoon and both cars were gone / Woke up this afternoon and both cars were gone / I felt so low down and disgusted I threw my drink across the lawn.”
Stay at home is my advice. That's what I've been doing. But my team of international informants dug up the following items from around the globe. And from here.
First up, a big swoop of the cowboy hat to the two Tauranga bands who made it through the regional heats to the national finals of the 2013 Battle of the Bands.
Storm Eater will be playing at the Kings Arms final in Auckland this weekend on Friday (28 June) along with sixteen others. They an impressively heavy outfit who describe their music as 'Half a cup of Punk, a quarter pound of Classic Rock and five eighths of sweet FA, stirred well, with a pinch of 80s hair metal.”
The band have a very active Facebook page which, this being a family newspaper ‘n' all, I should mention is probably x-rated on account of being a bit sweary. But there's an active little community there and a video of the band in action.
The other outfit come from a different genre. Fronted by eponymous singer/songwriter Tilly, Hurricane Tilly deliver a reggae/r&b vibe with original songs and boasts some well known musicians amongst its ranks including ex-left Hand Break drummer Mike Hauraki and singer Carlee Williams on keyboard duties. They also have a Facebook page and can be seen on YouTube.
Hurricane Tilly duke it out with a further sixteen hopefuls on Saturday at Auckland's Juice Bar. Good luck to both these bands. I'm not entirely convinced that competitions are the best approach to music but if you're having one then it'd be nice to see one of these excellent Bay groups get the recognition they deserve.
And on into the wide world...
This weekend is time for the UK's famous Glastonbury Festival, an event I fondly remember from my days as a young Watusi living in England. But it's grown so much in the past forty years as to be almost unrecognisable from the modest festival it was back in the eighties. The numbers these days are truly mind-boggling. Try these...
There are expected to be something over 150,000 punters attending; there are more than 60 individual stages; there will be more than 2,000 separate performances from over 10,000 performers.
It sounds like an organisational nightmare to me, requiring a crew of thousands. Indeed, the art department alone has 150 people. And, in case you were wondering, there are over 3,000 portaloos (and the organisers expect 11,000,000 litres of water to be used!).
And, in totally unrelated news from the American courts, where you can be guaran-damn-teed something weird is happening on any given day, another story of music company malfeasance is emerging. Or maybe not. We'll have to wait for the actual case to be decided but Warner/Chappell, pretty much the world's biggest music publisher, is being sued over the rights to 'Happy Birthday”.
It's fairly widely known that 'Happy Birthday To You” (to give it its full title), although composed in the 1800s, is still under publishing copyright, netting the publishing house the tidy sum of around $2,000,000 a year for its use in films and suchlike. The new case argues that the copyright to the song, if it ever existed at all, 'expired no later than 1921.”
The story of the song is long and weirdly complex. The short version is: A pair of sisters published a song called 'Good Morning to You” in 1893. Over the next few decades, the song morphed into 'Happy Birthday to You.” In the 1920s and '30s, a couple versions of the birthday song were published in copyrighted songbooks. But 'Happy Birthday to You” was in wide circulation for years before it was published and copyrighted, and it's not clear who wrote that version of the song...
It all gets terribly confusing. But, after all those years of raking in the dosh Warner/Chappell might find they have a considerable sum to pay should they lose.