Ryan Adams lashes out at Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Hammond Jr

It’s good to see that good old-fashioned mudslinging still exists in the ether of rock ’n’ roll.

Ryan Adams has vented his Twitter spleen at a number of artists.

SPIN DOCTOR: Good to see that good old-fashioned mudslinging still exists in the ether of rock ’n’ roll, with the once difficult American tunesmith Ryan Adams this week venting his Twitter spleen on the dubious merits of fellow US rockers the Strokes, who themselves laid into Adams a couple of months back in a book, Meet Me in the Bathroom, focusing on indie rock in New York in the early noughties.

At the centre of the stoush was the book’s contention that Adams, a friend of Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr at the time, had been a bad influence on him, to the point that the band’s singer, Julian Casablancas, wanted to ban Adams from their orbit. Resorting to the lingo of the schoolyard, Adams laid into Casablancas regarding his weight and his side-project band, the Voidz. “I sold more T-shirts last night than people who actually made it through a single Voidz song,” tweeteth Master Adams. “What’s he gonna do? Sit on me?” Ouch, although it does seem a bit pathetic. If you’re going to insult someone, much better to go down the path of Mancunian lad Noel Gallagher, who throughout his Oasis career and beyond has seemed born to the task of putting the boot in, not least to “our kid” Liam, with an intoxicating brew of humour and venom. To illustrate the point, I’ve picked out a few choice examples from his litany of put-downs.

On English band Kaiser Chiefs: “The worst thing about them is that they’re not very good. They play dress-up and sit on top of an apex of meaninglessness. They don’t mean anything to anybody apart from their f..king ugly girlfriends.”

On the state of the pop charts: “Phil Collins has to be chased out of the charts. And Wet Wet Wet. It’s the only way to do it, man, to f..king get in there among them and stamp the f..kers out.”

On Liam: “He’s rude, arrogant, intimidating and lazy. He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

On a related matter, another of Adams’s potshots took aim at Hammond Jr: “Hammond is a more horrible songwriter than his dad, if that’s possible,” tweeted Adams, a reference to Albert Hammond Sr, a pop star in the 1970s whose biggest hit, in 1972, was It Never Rains in Southern California. “It rains in [southern] CA & washes out the dirt As you were,” Adams concluded. Perhaps in some perverse way this namecheck will do the older Hammond some good. The 73-year-old singer has just released a new album, In Symphony, on which he gives an orchestral makeover to some of his best-known material, including, of course, It Never Rains in Southern California, as well as The Free Electric Band and songs he co-wrote for other artists, such as Leo Sayer’s When I Need You, the Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe and, recorded by Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson, To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before. Adams’s comment is not without foundation, however. Hammond also had a hand in the truly awful Gimme Dat Ding, a hit for the Pipkins in 1970, and the equally hideous Little Arrows two years earlier, by Leapy Lea. Still, all publicity is good publicity, they say.

Alanis Morissette is back in Australia in January for shows in Sydney and Melbourne, her first shows here in 20 years. Perhaps after such a long gap the Ironic singer may be convinced to do a few more.