In the Mix

Britney Spears has participated in her share of shock value MTV VMA award appearances, from smooching with Madonna to cavorting with a giant python. But if those spectacles were silly, Sunday night's was sad.

The song was "Gimme More," the effectively funky dance track produced by Nate "Danjahandz" Hill that seemed poised to announce her return from shaven-headed underwearless ignominy with its opening salvo: "It's Britney, bitch!"

But while Spears has mainly been known for bad behavior of late, this was just bad. Prefab pop wouldn't seem to be that difficult to pull off live: Nail your choreographed dance steps, lip sync like you mean it, and make sure your abs are tight. But the Britney comeback train derailed at every turn, as she sleepwalked through her dance steps, didn't bother to mouth the words much of the time, and appeared unforgivably soft bodied, with a disturbingly vacant look in her eyes.

Sarah Silverman's follow up comments might have seemed egregiously cruel if Spears hadn't been so terrible. She called Spear's children "the most adorable mistakes you'll ever see" and labeled the former teen star "amazing. She's 25 years old, and has accomplished everything she's going to accomplish in life." Ouch.

Bruce Springsteen fans who tried unsucccessfully to buy tickets on the Internet last Saturday for the Boss' shows at the Wachovia Center on Oct. 5 and 6th might still have some reason to believe. It seems that many customers who did get through exceeded the four ticket per show limit, according to Dave Homan, COO of Wayne's New Era Tickets (which does the ticketing for ComcastTIX).

Those that did so, Homan says, will get busted and have their allotment taken down to four per show. And rather than just put those tickets back up for sale, a random selection of people who pre-registered and logged their phone numbers with ComcastTIX but got shut out will be called in the next few days with the offer to buy the tickets.

Don't get your hopes up too high, hard up Bruce heads. It's not a lot of seats, "probably a couple hundred," says Homan, who added that the Springsteen with the E Street Band ducat demand "was way bigger than the supply. It was the largest demand we've ever seen. Bruce could have sold out six shows, easily."

Jamie T, "Sheila." Along with Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good," this makes for two Brit-pop songs this year that product place Stella Artois. Twenty one year old Londoner Jamie T. (last name Treays) has a packed with ideas debut album called Panic Prevention been variously described as "the bastard lovechild of Billy Bragg and Mike Skinner doing his best Joe Strummer impression" and, by my colleague Steve Klinge, as "Ian Dury for the Lily Allen generation." He's on an excellent bill at the North Star on Saturday with Illinois and Yah Mos Def. Wish I could get me a monkey to do my vacuuming.

Back in 1978, Nick Lowe had the cheek to call his first solo album Jesus of Cool. (In his native Britain, that is: stateside, record execs saw to it that it was renamed Pure Pop For Now People.) Thirty years later, the Brinsley Schwartz founder and Elvis Costello producer still came off as impossibly suave at the World Cafe Live on Tuesday.

The natty gent didn't have a band, and didn't really need one. It's no easy task to hold a packed house's attention from start to finish with just an acoustic guitar - strumming Canadian Ron Sexsmith, who opened, didn't quite manage it - but Lowe pulls it off with panache. His hour plus set tossed in a a few tasty morsels from his pub rock past - "Heart" and "Heart of the City" from his days with Dave Edmunds in Rockpile, plus a sweet and sad version of his own "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding?" The 58 year old is a canny craftsman and charming entertainer (with a great head of aging rock star hair), and the spare setting and crystalline sound made it clear that he's still a subtlely soulful singer and deftly understated guitar player. And he also made an excellent case for the latter stages of his career, with plenty from his excellent new At My Age, as well as curmudgeonly blues such as "Man That I've Become" and "Lately I've Let Things Slide."

Here's a clip of Lowe and Edmunds kicking up a cloud of dust back in the '70's, on "Heart of the City."

Bono's in town today, in his celebrity activist/statesman mode, to pick up the Liberty Medal for himself and DATA at the Constitution Center. The interview's here. Besides his love for the Declaration of Independence, and the Founding Fathers, who he admires, among other reasons, because "they committed an act of treason," and Thomas Jefferson, who he called "a Romantic figure. Keatsian. And he drank a lot of wine!" he also said this about U2's early days: "Philadelphia and Boston were on us before New York. We used to meet Bruce Springsteen and he would tell us: "If it's going off for you in Philadelphia, then it's really going off. 'Cause that's the place. They really know music."

And for a reminder that he's more than just a never-stops-talking head, here's a clip from the 1997 PopMart tour in Mexico City, which is just out on DVD.