Balls Entertainment

I am sure that the fine folks of the Trinity May Ball entertainment committee are all really, really lovely people – and I will be ringing both Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan to check they are recovering well. It is true – I am merely assuming they will need to recover, just as I am merely assuming they will get hunted down and beaten for their choice of ‘entertainment’.

This year, ladies and gentlemen, your chosen Trinity headliner is.. wait for it.. a band you’ve never heard of. And if you have, it’ll only be for a very few reasons: a) they appeared on Dragon’s Den with a ludicrously flawed business plan (yet still managed to squeeze £75,000 out of those fiery dragons); b) you found a dirty flyer in an obscure part of Cambridgeshire with their name on it; c) their name is so shit – and I mean real emboldened, capital-lettered POO – that you had to look at said flyer/Trinity ticket 276 times to believe that they’d wasted the ink writing it down: HAMFATTER. I mean really..

Hamfatter (b.2002-d.as soon as I get my hands on them) are a Cambridge band. Now first and foremost, it should be known throughout the kingdom that The Tab is all in favour of promoting local musical talent and seeing it flourish, but as you have already noticed, I used the word ‘talent’ and Hamfatter will therefore not be promoted. They are an indie band the likes of which you have definitely heard in your local pub ‘The Generic’ – you know, the one in ‘Heard-it-before-ville’. Their Myspace site has three tunes on it, including their biggest hit – ‘Sziget’ – named after the very cool Hungarian music festival that I assume the singer went to once. I cant believe they were actually ever booked for it. NME called the song ‘amazing’ and decided that it ‘deserved to be a hit’. I say it sounds like a less evolved version of a Boy Kill Boy number without the synths. In fact all the Hamfatter tracks you can find on the internet seem to be dumbed-down adaptations of those of much better bands. The lyrics are pretty damn awful too – one song on their Myspace site has a 30 second section about being on myspace. Ironic yeah? Yeah. About as ironic as the lines from the song 21^st Century Sex: ‘I didn’t like my landlady, she took away too many drugs from me.’ Nice.

If Trinity’s entertainment committee isn’t subjected to a beating from their punters, then they will get ‘boxed up’ by Wiley’s heavies. Wiley was booked to play at Cambridge’s own Soultree last year, where he turned up 2 and a half hours late, performed for 13 minutes and then drove off – but, allegedly, not before getting his cru (or whatever they’re called) to forcefully demand his full fee from the Soultree management, even though he was in breach of contract. One eye-witness maintains that ‘there were blades involved’. And not the sort of blades the First and Third are up for.

If, however, Wiley does show up, it will be a tip-top gig. It won’t matter that the Cuthberts, Hughs and Camillas in the audience wont have a clue what he’s rapping about, he has produced some heavy, heavy tracks which every lady, gentleman and Johnian will be able to shuffle to. Have a listen to one if his mixtapes. If you’re wondering, Eskiboy is one of his aliases. Its short for Eskimo boy and it is used because he is ‘cold’. If you’ve got even more time on your hands, have a look at some of his photos and especially the captions under them. Comedy Gold.

Finally, we have Athlete. Its actually quite hard to say anything nasty about Athlete, so I shall just state some facts. Their album ‘Tourist’ went straight in to the charts at #1. ‘Wires’ – their most famous song – won an Ivor Novello Award. They’ve toured stadiums with Coldplay. A man called Camp America has remixed ‘Hurricanes’ very well. They are signed to what is probably most respected record label of them all – Parlophone records, along with people like.. Oh, I don’t know.. Radiohead, Queen, Blur, Kylie Minogue, The Verve, The Beatles, Tina Turner.. Heard of them?

Now it’s a pretty impressive resume I know, but there is one final fact that – as anyone who has listened to Athlete can tell you – might be a slight problem at Trinity May Ball: they are the musical equivalent of a quiet kip in the park. For Athlete’s sake, I am praying that the committee put them on very late, at a point when people don’t want to boogie anymore.

To round up, you Trinitarians have one act who’ll have you rushing to the bar, one act who might stab you and one act who might send you to sleep. Either way you’re leaving unconscious…