If they can press up a single, shift some T-shirts, sell out some regional gigs and notch up a few column inches, they'll be able to get on with being a band instead of just waiting for that A&R guy to swoop."The Arctic Monkeys, the newest chart phenomenon, are the definitive do-it-yourself band. They had a press officer and built a fanatic support-base months before the band's buzz brought the record labels scurrying to their tour-van door.As the Monkeys proved, any new band's most vital tool is now the internet: they posted news, fans downloaded their songs, and the excitement spread like wildfire, eventually driving their debut single proper to the top of the charts.Yet bands aren't the only ones to benefit. As we settle into the shadows to watch the first band, the Manchester garage-punksters Kill the Young, a quasi-masonic underworld of music industry types reveals itself. Standing with us are PRs, journalists and band managers - the latter clearly identified by their suit-jacket-and-jeans combos. For their own reasons, they're all keener than ever to hitch their star to a hot new band And the bands are happy to let them.

The tone of this remark was a bit hard to read - but there was something distinctly crowing about it, I thought, the implication that poor old Shakespeare was inextricably embedded in history and probably wouldn't even get what was going on.The article inside added to the general sense of condescension. I noticed this week that Radio Times was having a go, with a cover devoted to the BBC's new Shakespeare season. "Would the Bard have ever believed his plays would look like this?" read the strapline, underneath a group photograph of the female stars of the plays, each of which takes a Shakespeare plot and updates it for a modern setting. You might not find traffic lights very interesting, for instance, but for a short while at least Shakespeare does, and, since he's a figure of famously all-embracing curiosity, your explanation of traffic lights is likely to lead to subsidiary explanations, each of which in turn will branch off into further questions and answers. You can go very rapidly from the mechanical to the political and the psychological.The fantasy is twofold - first of all, that you get some sense of what it would feel like to be a historical stranger in your own time, but also (rather less dignified this) that one of the great minds of history is hanging on your every word.I'm not the only person to play this game, of course. You can play a High Table version in which you're only allowed Elizabethan vocabulary and metaphors but, frankly, that can very quickly turn twee (try explaining the fashionable appeal of SUVs without using any words less than 400 years old and you'll soon see what I mean). So mostly I just make do with the beginner's version - which takes it as read that Shakespeare will understand everything you say. The point of the game is to restore the lustre of novelty to a world worn flat by familiarity.

This column believes in holding out a helping hand to the unfortunate, so as David Blunkett is suddenly unemployed, we have asked him to take over as our guest problem adviser. He is, after all, no stranger to problems, and we feel that his counsel may well be of help and cheer to the more troubled of our readers. It will also keep him off the streets and give him something to do Right, Mr Blunkett All yours! More from Miles Kington. Sometimes, when I'm bored and can't reach a book, I play something I call the Shakespeare game. This simply consists of imagining that Shakespeare is sitting next to me and needs some explanations about the modern world. Put bluntly, if a despairing Mr Blair leaves a party in turmoil, positioned on the part of the political spectrum that is perceived as opposing all reforms to the public sector, the main beneficiaries would be David Cameron and the Conservatives. More from Steve Richards. In the current febrile atmosphere, it is not Mr Blair alone who is on trial, but his almost certain successor and the entire Labour Party.