Over one million unsold copies of the Robbie Williams, Rudebox album were sent to China to be crushed by EMI. The recycled end product was then used for road surfacing and street lighting projects.

British singing star GEORGE MICHAEL has been named the highest paid entertainer in Russian history - making GBP1.5 million ($2.9 million) for a 60 minute musical performance. The FAITH rocker performed at a Russian billionaire's New Year's Eve party (31DEC06), and sang for an hour in front of a 300-strong audience to land the multi-million pound reward. Michael was flown out to Moscow for the concert at the unnamed billionaire's estate along with his band and backing singers prior to the festivities.

LEE SCRATCH PERRY :Blame it on money, paranoia, or possibly too much weed, for just as Black Ark Studios reached a creative nexus in the late 70's Perry burned the studio to the ground. Today the truth behind the blaze, whether it was accidental or deliberate, has never been disclosed. In the days leading up to the fire, various eyewitnesses reported that Perry covered the studio walls with graffiti, then painted over all his vowels with black X's. His odd behavior was noticed on the street too, as some claim to have seen him walking backwards down city sidewalks and at times pounding the ground repeatedly with a hammer. One thing is for sure though - the legend of Perry and his Ark would establish him as one of the most entertaining and original record producers of the century.

HAPPY MONDAYS :IN 1992, the now-defunct music weekly Melody Maker reviewed the last Happy Mondays album, Yes Please, with a mere two words: "No thanks." Around the same time, another nowdefunct music magazine, Select, had the Mondays' frontman Shaun Ryder on the cover, with the headline "Happy Mondays: Crack! Heroin! Gangrene! ? !" Inside, the full horror of the album's recording unfolded. Under the supposedly watchful eyes of former Talking Heads Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, Yes Please was recorded in Barbados. The band's label, Factory, in a move which would help seal their financial collapse, had sent the band there with the idea that, on a remote Caribbean island, Ryder would be unable to find any heroin, the drug which had been his constant companion since he was 18.
What they didn't know was that Ryder had, by this time, added crack cocaine to his long list of pharmacological indulgences. And crack, on Barbados, was a mere 50p a rock.
Chaos ensued: Ryder would lock himself in the bathroom, smoking rock after rock until he was red-eyed and strung out. When the band's manager refused to send him more money, he sold his clothes for crack. When he faced walking down the street naked and crackless, he nicked the studio furniture, sold it, and walked down the street naked but high. In the meantime, his bandmate, saucer- eyed maracashaker Bez, crashed a hired 4x4 on the beach. More used to rolling joints than jeeps, he ended up with metal pins holding his arm together. Then he rolled another. (Jeep, not joint. ) That's when the gangrene appeared.
All told, the album cost Factory a quarter of a million pounds, and Melody Maker was right: Yes Please was a mess, and it finished not just the band, but the legendary label which bankrolled it.

The fastest rap MC is Rebel XD (aka Seandale Price) (USA) who rapped 852 syllables in 42 seconds at Regiment Studios, Chicago, Illinois, USA, on July 27, 2007.

L7: The band gained a certain amount of notoriety for their performance at the 1992 Reading Festival, when Donita Sparks removed her used tampon on-stage and threw it into the crowd yelling "Eat my used tampon, fuckers!" in protest against the mud being thrown by the crowd. In the UK, the band are most famous for an appearance on the popular late-night entertainment programme The Word, in which Sparks pulled her pants down to reveal her pubic hair. During a live show in London in 2000, the band offered a one night stand with Dee Plakas as a raffle prize; the winner claimed his prize of sex with her on the tour bus. L7 was also banned from the Christian Coalition of America.