Interesting News Of The Week 09/07/2012

A little late tonight but lets get straight on with it,
Here's the stories.

Florence out of Music
Now before anyone panics Florence from "Florence and the Machine" is not out of the music game, shes just been temporally removed by doctors orders.
You'll understand what I mean in a minute.
Here's the story.

The singer Florence Welch from "Florence and the Machine" has had to pull out of two European festivals after losing her voice.

Florence went on Twitter to announce that doctors have told her to rest her voice after she felt something "snap", it is unclear as to whether this was during a performance or in practises.
She followed this by returning to the social networking site to thank fans for their support.

The singer recently performed at Radio 1's Hackney Weekend, which it is speculated to be where things started to go wrong for her.
She has apologised on her website for having to cancel further gigs.

She made a statement to the media saying "I'm so sorry to all the fans, I was desperate to still perform, but was told without question not to, so as not to do permanent damage."

What interests me about this story though is that Florence Welch is not the only singer to have had voice problems within her time in the music industry, never mind recently, last year singer Adele had to cancel numerous appearances due to a haemorrhage on her vocal cords, in simple terms damaging them.

Florence + The Machine are booked to appear at other festivals this summer, including a headline performance at Lollapalooza in Chicago this August, and hopefully Florence will have recovered her voice by then to return to perform the gig.

The band may also get their first number one this Sunday with their single Spectrum after performing well in this weeks midweek charts, so we will see on that one.

Sorry this story is quite short but here's a nice picture of Florence on her way to an event:

O2 Outage
As many people may know O2 the mobile phone company suffered from server problems on Wednesday and continuing on to today, effecting a lot of mobile phone users not only on O2 mobiles but on Tescos and GiffGaff as well, because they all use the same masts.

I've chosen this story because it effected both me and Gemma yesterday and mostly last night.
Here's the story.

O2 has described the recent connection problems as a "Network Fault".
There have been few details have been given about what has caused the issues to so many users.

O2 representatives said "We can confirm that the problem with our mobile service is due to a fault with one of our network systems, which has meant some mobile phone numbers are not registering correctly on our network,", the numbers affected seemed to be mostly the Tescos and GiffGaff users.

It is not clear how many of O2's 23 million customers were hit by the fault but the operator said the problem was not based on geography (a specific place) beacuse across the country some were still able to connect at the same location as others who cannot.

As with most situations both consumers and businesses have sent messages via Twitter to complain about the issue, here's a couple.

Joanne Clarkson from Newcastle said "Being the mother of a child with special needs I need my phone. Until this is fixed I will have to stay home so I can be contacted by my landline if the school needs me,".

Chris Benson, owner of Crystal IT services based in Barry, Wales said "It's a little difficult to direct our workforce, contractors or suppliers when they all have to rely on landlines." meaning it had effected his work and business.

The widespread issues began "at lunchtime" yesterday which meant many lost voice and data services.
In a statement today the firm said: "We can confirm that our 2G network service has now been restored. Customers who were affected should now be able to make and receive calls. Our 3G service is starting to restore and customers should expect to see a gradual return of data services as the day progresses.".

So at the moment services are partially restored, and the company is advising customers still affected by the outage to switch their mobile phones off and on to reset their devices so that they will hopefully connect to their 2G services for the time being.

Having the 2G network back up means that customers should now be able to make and receive calls, and for others can also send and receive texts again, if you think about it its like going back to the old networks for the old black and white display mobile phones.

Customers have been told they can keep track of developments via O2's service status page (put in a link so you can get there from here).

Here's the news coverage from the BBC talking to a representative of Gizmodo.com:

Summary of the week

So this week we have yet more singers in bad conditions resulting in stopping performances and the O2 network having server problems that have effected many customers.

Interesting News Of The Week 11/06/2012

Did you miss me?
Yes I know, I missed another week last Thursday and I am truly sorry, but I was spending the week on holiday with my amazing girlfriend Gemma Oliver, so In a way I am sorry, but in others I'm not.

Anyway, lets get on with this weeks stories.

Stone Roses gig ends in confusion

The first story this week is on a slightly musical note and is about the band "Stone Roses" and their apparently disappointing gig in Amsterdam.

Fans were said to have been left confused after the band failed to play an encore at their gig in Amsterdam on Tuesday, this was reported to have taken place because the drummer of the band Reni had left the venue and the band.

Singer Ian Brown appeared on stage alone after the performance of their last song at the Heineken Music Hall, to tell the crowd the gig was over, standing in front of all his fans, just to disappoint them, that takes guts.

Fans had expected to hear the song I Am The Resurrection, which the band had closed their show with in Spain last Friday but were left unhappy and disappointed.
Brown reported to have said said: "I'm not joking, the drummer's gone home."

Many of the fans then booed the announcement, which was expected really, but according to journalist Peter Shuttleworth, who was at the concert:
"Ian just said something like 'Come on, get all your negative vibes out on me. I can take it'," However, Shuttleworth claims the jeers were "short-lived" and fans were "more bemused than disappointed".

It was also said that Reni (who's real name Alan Wren, weird, guess his stage name comes from his last name) had stormed off stage and that he and guitarist John Squire had hugged as they left, maybe there's been a band fall out.

The band seemed to have planned to play an encore, telling fans: "If you want us to come back, we're going up four storeys, so you have to cheer loud", what literally? See you up there then.

The Stone Roses started off their first tour in 16 years in Barcelona last weekend.
They have a summer of dates planned, including three homecoming shows in Manchester's Heaton Park at the end of June, but I guess we shall all now need to wait and see if these dates come through.

Fans have dismissed speculation that the gig in Holland signals problems for the rest of the tour, calling the show "quality" and the crowd "enthusiastic".
Several reports quote an insider who suggested there had been a problem with the drum kit, but this has not been confirmed, so it could be a cover up, or the truth, who knows.

Paul Roberts was at the gig and emailed BBC 6 Music: "At one point I saw Reni waving his arms wildly at the stage mixer, obviously not happy with something.", so maybe there was some drum kit problems after all.

Another person at the scene, Matt Morris, claimed Brown's announcement "was followed by a volley of beer thrown at the stage and booing",

Remaining dates on the Stone Roses tour are expected to go ahead as planned, with the band due on stage in Sweden on Thursday, so we shall await further news on this event.

There is no video for this story so here's a lovely black and whit picture of the band:

Westlife singer declared bankrupt

The second news story this week has kept to the musical theme of the first story.

This story is about Westlife singer Shane Filan and his declaration of bankruptcy in the UK.

Westlife (an Irish band) have sold millions of records over their time in the music industry but Filan has suffered enormous losses in his country's property crash.
In a statement, he said he had "worked long and hard" to tackle his debts and was devastated that his problems have come to this conclusion, must be really gutting.

The pop star filed for bankruptcy in the UK instead of back in Ireland, probably to avoid embarrassment really.

Filan owns a property company called Shafin Developments Limited, with his brother Finbarr.
It was established in 2004 and had been involved in developments in Counties Leitrim and Sligo in the west of Ireland, their way of helping improve their home, Ireland.
Last month, the company was placed in receivership.

The singer was declared bankrupt at Kingston-upon-Thames County Court and his name has been placed on the UK insolvency register, must be fun in that group.

Ireland has agreed to liberalise its bankruptcy regime as one of the conditions of its EU/ IMF bailout, meaning it will be easier to list bankruptcy in the country (that's partly why Filan came to the UK).
However the country's banks are concerned that the reforms could lead to a flood of mortgage defaults as ordinary homeowners use bankruptcy to escape from negative equity, an easy way out for homeowners in other words.

Anyway back to Westlife and Filan, Westlife is said to be one of the most successful boy bands of the last decade, selling more than 44m records, which is confusing to think about, because if the band is making so much money, why had Filan gone bankrupt?
I smell the "fee's" of the label company of the band.

It also looks like Filan isn't going to be able to make enough money to bring himself out of bankruptcy because last October, Westlife announced they were splitting up.
The band is currently in the middle of a farewell tour and continues to fill major concert venues, bye bye Westlife.

There's no news coverage of this news story either, but instead of leaving you without a video this week I've selected a melody video containing various songs from Westlife, I thought it may be appropriate:

Summary for this week

So this week we have band problems, upset drummers, bad sound systems, break ups and finally a showing of the harsh reality of our world from Westlife and bankruptcy (could be seen as karma too).

Bonus Info
Very soon their will be a new page added to this blog and a brand new post based around it, the only clue I will give you for now is its to do with camera's (those of you who know me will know what this means).