Pop: Sleeve Notes

HER 1993 tour was called Girlie Show, but will Madonna pip the Spice Girls to the neonatal post with Mummie Show? The protean Italo-American "friend of Johnny Vaughan" has said she will hit the road later this year for her first tour in six years. Not to be upstaged, Alanis Morissette and Elton John also plan world tours. Meanwhile, Harvey Goldsmith, a big promoter in the music biz and the man behind Live Aid who wasn't Bob Geldof, has hinted on Talk Radio that there may be a Live Aid-style concert for the millennium. Yippee.

PLANS ARE afoot to ensure that this year's summer festivals don't go off like 1998's damp squibs.

A safe bet for success is the 10-day festival to be held in Carlyon Bay, Cornwall (6-15 August), to mark the first total eclipse of the sun in this country since 1927.

The Phoenix Festival will rise from the ashes after last year's cancellation, scheduled for 15-18 July at Long Marston, Stratford-Upon-Avon. The Mean Fiddler organisation has plans to make the Reading Festival a two-site event, running the same weekend in Leeds and Reading. Could there be a problem with the Leeds site also being used for the V99 Festival, only the week before?