The new Siouxsie Sioux single, "Here Comes That Day" is rather wonderful and a overdue reminder of the influence she's had on most of the female singers I've enjoyed over the last three decades -- probably all of them, in fact, aside the poppy Sarah Cracknells and folky Joanna Newsoms. It does make me want to do a rundown of who else from the punk era is still making good records? Mark E. Smith, maybe, although on that last Fall album he sounded like some toothless old drunk doing karaoke through a mouthful of pie and peas. John Lydon reforming the Pistols every half hour doesn't count. (Quick, name his last album, anyone?) The guys out of Wire, although I don't much like anything they've done since 1988's A Bell is a Cup. Who am I forgetting?

(And I know the likes of the UK Subs are still slogging round the clubs but that doesn't count.)

Hi, I'm tasteful John Mayer and here are some pictures of Fender's new Joe Strummer Telecaster (r.r.p. $1285.71) specially beaten-up and distressed for you nth generation punk rock kids* who don't want to have to go to the bother of developing your own style. But you can still be creative and put the supplied anti-establishment stickers wherever you want! Whew, rock 'n' roll.

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* Or more likely 40-something dentists and call center managers who want to show anyone who ventures into their "man cave" that they're not "working for the clampdown" and would like "a riot of my own". And heaven help their grubby fingered kids if they try to take it, or its Eric Clapton counterpart, from the display cabinet.

Not sure what it was I was watching at the time but in the space of one commercial break last night two adverts used tracks from Iggy Pop's Lust for Life. The holiday company advert using the title track has been around for ages (and you can tell how successful it is from the fact that I can't remember the name of the company) but now a car company is using "Success". The album is now 30 years old but it doesn't sound that old. Not as old as, say, Bing Crosby's "The Whiffenpoof Song" from 1947 sounded when Lust for Life originally came out.

Thirty years before Lust for Life there was no rock and roll. Thirty years later it still sounds pretty much the same.

I'm not sure when the album became a marketing standby. It wasn't universally popular at the time it came out and I recall being ejected from a party a year or two after it came out for putting it on the tape deck. Maybe all those original early eighties goths who stayed off the dancefloor until "The Passenger" came on have gone on to careers in advertising and are preparing the way for commercials for pension funds and arthritis treatments using Soft Cell's "Sex Dwarf" and Siouxsie and the Banshee's "Melt" next.