A grim reminder

`You Oughta Know'

Testosterone-fuelled hardcore rock is very popular, though you wouldn't guess it from reading the music press. But while the style fulfils a function for teenage boys, is it really any good?

No group captures the spirit of the 1990s quite like The Prodigy. Their prime mover tells Ben Thompson how they've done it

In the late 1980s, before grunge and Britpop, shoegazing (so called because performers were doing literally that, staring at their feet while playing) was the buzz word on the UK indie scene and Lush, whose drummer Chris Acland committed suicide on 17 October, were prime exponents of that much misunderstood musical genre, along with Ride, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. After the early success of the Spooky album (a top ten entry in 1992), Lush floundered somewhat, but came back with a vengeance and three hit singles earlier this year.

FLIPPER Alan Shapiro (PG) BRIT BOYS Ross Crookshank / Duncan Roy (nc) LA REGLE DU JEU Jean Renoir (PG) BLOOD SIMPLE Joel Coen (18)

Porno for Pyros, Good God's Urge, Warner Bros 9362-46172-2

Alanis Morissette is young, Canadian and mainstream. Does that make her a fake?

Their follow-up to the six million-selling Blood Sugar Sex Magik finds the Chili Peppers' essential bouncy-toy appeal undiminished, despite the often testy attitude and the usually adult themes on show. Substantial chunks of the album feature typical Pepper party-time punk-funk, at its best on tracks like "One Big Mob" and "Aeroplane", wherein lead singer Anthony Kiedis offers the equation "I like pleasure spiked with pain/ Music is my aeroplane".

ANY BAND that risks third-degree burns in the name of entertainment is all right by me. At the Reading Festival, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were all right by everyone. Their Sunday night performance packed the field fuller than it had been for the entire weekend, so you could be sardined in the first 500-odd rows, or stand so far from the stage you might as well have been watching the show on TV through someone else's sitting-room window.

PEACE, love and brotherhood will prevail in upstate New York next month, after settlement of a feud between rival concert organisers which threatened to derail the 25th anniversary celebrations of the legendary rock festival known as Woodstock.

The US government withdrew an Aids prevention radio advertisement featuring Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer for Red Hot Chili Peppers, after it became known he had been convicted of sexual battery, Reuter reports from Washington. The new campaign shows an uncharacteristic explicitness in addressing Aids prevention through condom use.

A SLOW NIGHT in the Viper Room, West Hollywood, and a fair-haired woman in a Harley-Davidson leather jacket is trying to attract the attention of a man sitting at the other end of the bar. She gets her friend to draw a large-breasted and naked woman on a Viper Room paper napkin. Then she writes: 'SMILE]] IT CAN'T BE THAT BAD]]' The barman delivers the message. The evening passes without further incident.

SNOOP DOGGY DOGG