Some interesting comments followed the story "'My Name Is Mortimer' (unreleased) - Mort Shuman song?" from a few days ago, regarding a song called "A Girl I Used To Know" or "Melanie". Apparently this mysterious song was actually played once on UK and Dutch radio stations, around the time "Sunny" was released (1995). Is it a hoax by a Morrissey imitator or could it actually be real? Check out the comments section of the above article for more (there's one that includes a link to download the song).

Regarding last week's item, "REM approached to duet with Morrissey at Brit Awards - NME", [email protected] writes:

The R.E.M. website says this now:

01.22.01
BRIT AWARDS? NOT THIS TIME!
In order to clear up any potential confusion, remhq would like to report that R.E.M. has no plans to attend or perform at the upcoming Brit Awards, as was speculated in an article on NME.com last week (January 19th). Who knows how these types of misinformation get started?

In other news, the band has just returned from a two week stay in South America, where they performed at Rock in Rio before a record crowd of 190,000 and Campo De Polo in Buenos Aires."

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I see that NME.com has now pulled the "exclusive" story from their site without any explanation, a bit of revisionism on their part. I got the text of the original story from the R.E.M. site, Murmurs.com.

An anonymous person writes:

As a follow-up to the posts made by Mozsing and L'Estrange ("The Smiths' first UK tour recalled Q magazine (Feb.)" - Jan. 2), I just found a copy of the complete article ("The Smiths' First UK Tour"), for those who haven't seen it.