The UK's culture minister Kim Howells is shooting his mouth off again, this time at Robbie Williams:
Culture minister Kim Howells condemned Robbie Williams today, accusing him of supporting drug and prostitution rackets by saying internet piracy was "great".
Howells said he was "appalled" at the chart-topping star's comments which amounted to "defending theft".
Williams - whose album Escapology was last year's biggest seller in the UK - made his remarks at a music conference in Cannes.
He is reported to have said of internet piracy: "I think it's great, really I do. There is nothing anyone can do about it."
Howells is already on record as having described last year's Turner Prize entrants as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit", and as disliking the Royal Family and British film makers. He's more recently notorious, though, for claiming the rise of hip hop culture in Britain, especially in the form of a 30-member garage group from London called So Solid Crew, was responsible for the shooting deaths of two teenage girls (this Grauniad article amusingly reels off a list of other things popular music should be indicted for while he's at it). The case against Howells on this point is made here:
But last night Conor McNicholas, editor of the music magazine NME, described the minister's outburst as "deeply racist".
"He doesn't understand the culture. It is this idea again that we have to do something about these out-of-control black people in our streets and the nasty culture they are perpetuating," he said.
What does Kim have to say for himself? Well, if this article's anything to go by, he evidently thinks he was once a dangerous man:
What did he think of Gillian Wearing's "Fuck Cilla Black" G2 cover last week? "A mistake." And what about having his tender sensibilities protected by a customised warning on the front page of the main paper? "I start reading from the back, so I never saw that warning. I go to the sport. I thought it was a grotesque, old-Guardian-style spelling mistake.
"I was a much more radical artist at Hornsey College of Art in the 60s than these British artists today. I once did a litho with Father Christmas cowering in front of a sign that said, 'Bugger off, Santa.' It was very popular. I did that sort of stuff long before Gillian Wearing."
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