Cultural shorts: from Damon Albarn to Wexford arts

Damon Albarn performed his track Everyday Robots to a select audience that included androids in Tokyo recently, in a probable bid to secure their favour for when man eventually gets replaced by machine.
Finally the score of Britpop disputes has been settled.
In your analogue faces, Oasis – you didn't think of robots,
and future-think is an approach that, these days, always wins widespread approval. If Noel Gallagher could only have marketed his disgruntled musicianship in hover form, he could have had it so much better.
This comes just two months after Albarn and the boys collectively gave up on there ever being another Blur album. While statisticians continue to argue over how many times the towel has been thrown in on the band, robots globally are being trained how to stand-offishly wear Fila jackets and drink pints.
Reports that Blur's 2013 recording sessions broke down over an awkward studio commute and the weather being 'a bit hot' are suitably middle-aged enough to be believed. This allowed the oddly overgrown four-piece to return to their has-been agendas. Dave Rowntree is still a solicitor and radio DJ, Alex James is still pursuing his lifelong ambition to out-do Jonny Greenwood's fringe, and Graham Coxen is still detached, disagreeable and cold (even towards his fans, and probably even towards his own mother).
Damon Albarn, meanwhile is right now working on a binary album of zeros and ones. He will undoubtedly continue on his path of proposing reunions and immediately disbanding them before eventually replacing everyone but himself with an android, even you.
EMILY LONGWORTH

Wexford goes into cultural overdrive
There is something about bank holiday weekends which sends the Irish going-out psyche into overdrive. For many, the upcoming long weekend will be treated as a last hurrah before Christmas and every single promoter with something to flog is on the case up and down the country.
Wexford is a particularly busy arts and cultural outpost at present, with the 63rd run of the town's illustrious Opera Festival about to get underway. There's also the 62nd outing for the Fringe Festival, with all the hoopla and Spiegeltenting which goes with that kind of crack.
It's also a big occasion for the Wexford Arts Centre, which marks 40 years in business in the heart of the old town with a special presentation of short plays by four renowned local writers. John Banville (left) , Eoin Colfer, Billy Roche and Colm Tóibín are the writers in question, with Ben Barnes directing the programme. The four plays – Prince Charming and the Dame, My Real Life, The Dog and Bone and Erosion respectively – reflect an abundance of local themes and landscapes.
There will be eight performances in all, nightly from Wednesday October 22nd to Monday October 27th with matinees on Saturday and Sunday. For more info, see wexfordartscentre.ie
JIM CARROLL

God only knows!
Hurray! A performance of one of my favourite songs, God Only Knows by the Beach Boys. Okay, the orchestra's tuning up. That's a little annoying – they could have done that before we came in – but let's bear with it.
(A few seconds pass) Splutter! This is a terrible choir! None of them has bothered to learn all the words or to sing at the same time. Chris Martin is actually lying down. And the only people singing together are those asymmetrically coiffured toddlers shortly after the halfway mark (editor's note: that's One Direction).
They couldn't be doing it on purpose, could they? It doesn't make narrative sense to divide this song up line-by-line. It's a first-person love song not a play. Do all 27 of these people constitute one continuous consciousness, knowable only to God in my absence? I find that hard to believe.
As for the production! Why is Kylie floating around in a bubble? Everyone knows she's not allowed have bubble mixture. And who covered Deirdre Barlow in butterflies? (Editor's note: that's actually Elton John). One call to pest-control and I could have this place shut down!
Also, many of the performers appear to be in the sky – on balloons, up ladders, sitting
on half-moons. That Paloma Faith is careening on a sort of celestial swing. It's a goddamned sound engineering/ health-and-safety disaster. And is that tiger going to savage Brian Wilson to metaphorically represent what's been done to his song? I'm no zoologist, but almost definitely.
What? This is actually a star-studded promotion for BBC Music? Oh, I like it so.
It's only as music that it's
daft. As an ad it's genius.
PATRICK FREYNE