Is still this, which I was reminded of by last week's Glastonbury email. It's the stunning last song of Spiritualized's closing Other Stage set on the Saturday of the one and only Glastonbury I ever attended (1998) – which I watched on telly at home, having abandoned the festival on the Friday night.

And even though this is a crappy-quality video, remember – it's still about 10 times better than what you see if you're actually there.

So predictably, the internet is alive with people mad at Spotify, who have finally rendered the free version of their music-streaming service unusable. After ramping up the frequency of ads until they were after almost every song, then restricting free users to 20 hours of listening a month, and then reducing that to 10, the latest wheeze is to only let users play any particular song five times ever, before locking it away.

But hey – if you're not paying you've got no grounds for complaint, right?

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I'm pretty old. I also have a lot of spare time, and those two facts mean I think about stuff a lot. Far too much, in fact, because in my experience the more you understand about the world the less happy you are – Christ knows how Stephen Hawking even gets up in the morning. (Oh, right. Sorry.)

Eventually, unless you're some sort of superbeing, you come to a plateau of experience where nothing much surprises you any more, and every new horror doesn't shock, just wearily reaffirms what you already knew in your heart about the ugliness of the human condition.

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Long-time WoSblog viewers will already be aware that I've embraced my gay side when it comes to Eurovision now, thanks to the simple expedient of entering into the spirit and watching it with other people. (If everyone else is even briefly out of the room for some reason I get very twitchy.)

But for those of you still struggling, here are this year's highlights, with the minimum of campness and the maximum of ROCK!

(NB "Maximum" does not necessarily mean "a lot".)

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"…put out the streamers/It's gonna be a good day for the dreamers."

And stumble across something I really wasn't expecting. Wandering around the former Virgin/Zavvi record shop in central Bristol last week, I spotted this sitting unassumingly on a rack in a corner:

From the ultra-mint condition and the surroundings I had to assume it was a brand-new vinyl pressing of the most important 7-inch single of this writer's life, coincidentally being displayed in circumstances eerily similar to the first time I ever saw it. Which begs the question: Huh?

We all remember this, right?

(Click the pic to watch on YouTube. We can't have it embedded here because the repellent corporate nightsoil at Sony Music Entertainment have laid a copyright block on it and there STILL isn't a remotely decent video plugin for WordPress. This is the original TV version, incidentally.)

It's fantastic, of course. But on this occasion it's not the truly awesome thing.

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Because I never thought I'd ever see this again:

There are two reasons I'm incredibly happy about suddenly and unexpectedly rediscovering it – as I just have – of which the first is the less important.

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Because when you've made your point, why pad it out with filler? I mean, we've all got stuff to be getting on with, right?

Apparently their gigs are 25 minutes long. Count me in.

Have been stomping all over someone else's tunes again today. The new album from Swedish lounge metallers Hellsongs recently came to my attention – like the others it's a pretty hit-and-miss covers collection, but the best track is a tremendous version of Alice Cooper's "School's Out".

It's got a fantastic and joyful brass hook line that's tragically cut off in its prime at the end of the song, so I've fixed it with a quick bit of remixing (two versions, here and here – I think I prefer the fadeout one).

If you like it, check out the rest of the album via Spotify here.

WoSblog needs your help, chums. I happened to be in Top Man earlier today, and heard a rather spiffy tune being played over the tannoy. However, there was nobody in sight to ask what it was, plus I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that I was in Top Man. 

I scribbled down a few of the lyrics from the end of the song, which was a reverby fuzz-pop number in the vein of the Raveonettes (or maybe The Enemy at a pinch), in which a male singer repeated the line:

"Oh, when I die, when I disappear, leave my troubles behind"

But surprisingly a Google lyrics search has failed to turn up anything even remotely close. Sound familiar to anyone? Get the right answer and you could win $100,000! Although it would have to be a heck of a coincidence.

Lots of people are aware that the celebrated Northampton comics auteur Alan Moore penned several volumes (recently reprinted) of Swamp Thing comic for DC in the mid-1980s, giving the strip a radical new direction and a powerful environmental message.

Fewer people know the secret origins of the author's connection to and inspiration for his controversial take on the character, which he first explored a few years earlier via the medium of interpretive dance as part of a protest group making a statement against the overuse of dangerous pesticides.

The footage has only recently been found and translated. He kept his beard a lot tidier in the early days.

(Original discovery via WoSblog's top pals at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who amateurishly failed to recognise the cultural significance of what they thought was just a funny video of a Czechoslovakian banjo band.)

I already tweeted this, and I'm doubtless the last person on Earth to have heard of it, but it still really needs to be seen by all people who are alive.

I have things to do today, but Go Home Productions have made it very hard to get away from the computer.

There's little I like more than a good ice-cold hate ballad (Radiohead's Exit Music (For A Film) gives me the absolute shivers), and while I was pottering around hammering nails into stuff today the iPod Nano plugged into my stereo in permanent Shuffle mode threw up one of my favourites that I hadn't heard in donkey's years.

Knife In The Water (named after a Roman Polanski film) from Austin, Texas are one of those bands who slipped posterity's clutches. None of their 20th-century work appears on Spotify, and there's nothing by the band themselves on YouTube either.

The video above is a pretty good amateur cover, slightly slowed down from the original (and with a word wrong) but if anything even more chilling because it doesn't take much imagination to see the person singing it as a real-life vengeful crime-of-passion killer.

Or maybe that's just me.

This is what Muse would sound like if they weren't such a bunch of weedy Dungeons & Dragons nerds.

("Dirtier than my browsing history" – Someone off the internet.)

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