It is, by most standards, quite an entrance. Joan Wasser arrives onstage at Club Uncut with a mug of tea in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other, and a pair of giant plastic sunglasses that appear to have some kind of beaklike noseguard attachment. They’re so preposterous, in fact, that Wasser can’t bring herself to sing in them. For the rest of the long, hot night of this Joan As Police Woman solo show (her bandmates are waiting for her in Florence), they’ll act as an occasional prop to add emphasis to her between-song chats. About Uncut, say, and what she always thinks of first when she hears the magazine’s name. . .
From a British music biz perspective, it’s hard to imagine anything else going on this week beyond the small matter of that Coldplay record. This morning, though, a sobering corrective arrived in my inbox. In America, the email announced, “Lil Wayne has broken Mariah Carey’s record for the highest opening album sales of the year. He has sold in one day what Mariah sold in her entire week.” That’s 420,000 sales, incidentally; something for Chris Martin, Guy Hands and their competitive chums to aim for, I guess.
