Looney Tunes

News this morning that Chris Martin is to appear in an episode of The Simpsons’ underlines not only that Coldplay‘s King Of Sincerity has a sense of humour – something he’d already demonstrated brilliantly with his dry-as-a-drought performance in Extras and, unintentionally, in a duet with Jay-Z – but also just how mahoosive Coldplay are in the States. It’s not just anyone who gets a personal invitation from Matt Groening to get the jaundice treatment – only the likes of U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The White Stripes, Green Day and, in their heyday, Smashing Pumpkins have previously been plucked from the guitar-y landscape to visit Springfield – and Martin will be hoping that The Simpsons scribes are at the top of their game when penning his appearance – he has a way to go before he matches up to these three animated treasures:

U2 Vs. Sanitation Commissioner
Ok, so a lot of people would like to see Bono poked up the arse with a hot stick, but here The World’s Most Annoying Midget shows he’s game for some piss-taking out of his poppycock politics. U2’s appearance in The Simpsons sees their Pop Mart tour roll into Springfield, only for the show to be hijacked by Homer campaigning to be the town’s next Sanitation Commissioner. The best moment in their two-minute cameo comes when The Edge greets Bono’s pious missives with a “here we go, what’d you say we slip out to Mo’s for a pint?”, followed by only-just-clean former-alcoholic bassist Adam Clayton calling The Edge and Larry Mullen Jr “wankers” when they reject his request to join them at the pub, meaning the only person to get the wanker message across in person to U2 is their own bassist. And a cartoon version of him at that.

Smashing Pumpkins Play Homerpalooza
“Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel,” goes Bart’s explanation as to why so many kids are enamoured by Smashing Pumpkins’ melancholic riffarama in a Simpsons episode titled Homerpalooza, aired at a time when Pumpkins were the biggest rock band in the world, giving a chance to notorious stooge Billy Corgan, a man who makes Gordon Brown look like Krusty The Clown, to show he’s on the joke by portraying, err, a humourless miser with the emotional range of Michael Schumacher.  “I like your statement,” says Corgan to Homer, “when life takes a cheap shot at you, stand your ground.” It was advice the Corgster was clearly still holding onto over a decade later when he invited a heckler onstage and berated him for not liking Pumpkins’ new songs. “We envy you Homer,” goes Billy’s sign off, “all we have is our music, our legions of fans, our millions of dollars and our youth.” Oh well, you still got your music, eh Billy?

Radiohead Visit South Park
At the start of the new millenium, if there was one band less likely than Smashing Pumpkins to strap themselves into the stocks then it was Radiohead. In 2001, they were the best band in the world, yes, but that didn’t mean they had to look like they were having a good time doing it, did it? Tour documentary ‘Meeting People Is Easy’ showed a band who not only shunned the mainstream, they shunned fucking smiling, too, with the brilliantly bleak ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesia’ snapshots into a band determined to wrestle their way out of superstar status with a scowl. They might have already toyed with their cartoon selves in the video that accompanied ‘Paranoid Android’, but it was still a surprise when they cropped up in a twisted South Park plotline - confusingly, a month before they played a giant homecoming show in Oxford’s South Park – to goad Scott Tenorman for being a cry baby because he’d eaten a chilli con carne made out of his parent’s recently deceased corpses. Admittedly, that sentence doesn’t make it sound as hilarious as it is, but what Radiohead’s South Park slot did do was leave the floodgates slightly ajar for Thom Yorke to become a more darkly playful in the years that followed, with a not-so-distant version of his sardonic South Park self appearing on various Radiohead webcasts, in lyrics and, most ludricously of all, in his appearance alongside Jimmy Carr in 2008′s The Big Fat Quiz Of The Year.