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And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week
Beef Of The Week #369: Danish law enforcement v bad busking
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 25 August 2017
Some pop beefs are complex. They are involved. They consist of multiple chapters, a series of developments, lots of back and forth between the participating beefers and/or their publicity representatives and/or their attorneys.
And when we summarise them here in the all-important Beef Of The Week column, we have to employ all our skills to explain the many developments and the various statements in a suitably concise fashion. Though a substantial word court may still be required.
But this week’s Beef Of The Week is a nice simple one. It’s almost a one liner. In fact, we could have placed it in the One Liners slot. Except there isn’t a One Liners slot today. But there is a Beef Of The Week slot. Hence its inclusion here. This waffley over-long introduction, by the way, also explains the need for a waffley over-long introduction.
Anyway – the beef goes as follows: shit busker sings shit version of Oasis song ‘Wonderwall’; police tell him to fuck off and do some rehearsing; police issue damning statement. It’s possible I should throw an ‘allegedly’ into the mix here somewhere.
Though the damning statement bit is definitely true. It was police in Denmark who decided that a busker in the Danish city of Aalborg was delivering such a terrible rendition of the Oasis song that they should move him on to protect the sanity of all those within earshot.
“Just because you can play ‘Wonderwall’ does not mean you should”, the local police force subsequently posted on their website. Nice. According to NME, the police authority added: “The guitarist [was] loud, bad and noisy. He did not sound like Liam Gallagher. A patrol talked to the singer and sent him home to practice”.
We don’t know if the busker took the police remarks as constructive criticism, or if he still reckons his version of ‘Wonderwall’ is actually pretty good. Meaning this could be a one-way beef or a two-way beef, which is an important distinction to make when you’ve explained the whole Beef Of The Week story in three paragraphs but want to make your weekly Beef column look longer.
