The Arcade Fire's "difficult" second album

The Arcade Fire's first album, Funeral, crept up on me. It crept up on a lot of people. A complete word of mouth, listen to this, I'll burn you a copy type of sensation. And somehow, it seemed to be all the better for being under-hyped but simply discovered.

But with tickets to their recent London gigs selling out before the venues even realised they had them, and the music press going into minor convulsions of expectation over this - there was always the possibility of extreme disappointment.

But Neon Bible so far lives up to the hype. And beyond. It's still got the same huge sound. A big band unafraid to mix it up instrumentally - a triangle on top of a huge church organ, or Springsteen's cast-off three chord guitars.

My advice - if you copied Funeral, buy this. You won't be disappointed.

Infamy, Infamy, they've all got it in for me

Love her or loathe her (or in my case have a chat with her on national TV when I was 8 - but that's another story) Margaret Hilda Thatcher generates fantastically strong opinions. Especially when, as today, rumours of her death were greatly exaggerated.

I don't know whether to be more surprised by Alex Hilton's Recess Monkey blog which ran a newsflash last night saying she was dead, or with the minor inferno around the blogosphere it generated and the hundreds of uber-geeks adding comments all through the wee small hours.

While it might not have done his reputation that much good for being the home of breaking news - it will certainly have got him noticed.

Murdoch V Branson

So the two heavyweight gorillas have been touring the media correspondents over the last week or so talking up their own offerings as Sky and Virgin locked digital horns. I suspect that Virgin have dramatically under-estimated how many people would switch - not just the loss of 24 and Lost, but also with Sky's £26 offer.
As for me - I did the sums a while ago and arranged to switch as soon as my last Telewest contract was up. A rushed Sky man put up a dinky dish on Saturday, so now I'm helping the Dirty Digger line his pockets. Still - I get to watch the football and we didn't miss a minute of 24. And my 16 meg (as if) broadband is (so far) OK, but not 16 meg...
But the worst experience of the whole lot has been Virgin's customer service. Abysmal. Comments on Digital Spy say it all.