Even last year's Corpses In Their Mouths single retains some melody though it still seems no more than a

Even last year's "Corpses In Their Mouths" single retains some melody, though it still seems no more than a snippet of a longer song.In fact, it's only the horrific massacre of his first solo hit "My Star", where Brown boldly goes to places where no man's voice has ever been before, that lets him down. The invited audience are delighted, and probably a bit surprised. Despite a consistent record of onstage under-achievement, they are, touchingly, still really rooting for him.The unusual line-up of his backing band is remarkably effective. Consisting of former Fall drummer Simon Wolstencroft, brilliant percussionist Inder Mathura, sporting a magnificent moustache, and programmer Dave McCracken, controlling the entire musical backing by computer, it's an intelligent and excellent sounding solution to the eternal problem of the dance/ rock crossover.The crunching "Gettin' High" is fine, despite a scrappy ending, and the prison plea "Set My Baby Free" is hook-laden and catchy. Though patchy, it's an interesting record, much of it consisting of complaints at the perceived injustice of his incarceration.Brown kicks off with the limp rhymes of the current single "Love Like A Fountain", and it sounds fine, the multi-faceted squelches of the record enhanced in live performance and his voice holds up well.

Then there was the outcry after some breathtakingly ignorant remarks about homosexuality in an interview with the music pressTonight's show is a live Internet broadcast to promote Brown's second solo album, the excellently titled Golden Greats. His career has suffered some rather unusual disruptions such as being handed out one of the first prison sentences for "air rage" (he served 60 days in Strangeways at the end of last year). Columns inside are like bamboo bundles topped with fake fronds; outside, savannah has been turned into jungle so effectively that a Tarzan film was shot in the grounds.Even as it reaches for the stars, WAT&G's latest hotel design opens in the lowest place on Earth, the shores of the Dead Sea in Jordan. In space, where there are no boundaries, these architects will be able to give you the Moon and the stars.. IAN BROWN CONWAY HALL LONDON HE MAY have started the decade with the world at his feet, but the Nineties had become an increasingly unfriendly period for Ian Brown, the former singer of the band Stone Roses, themselves the great might- have-beens of the past 20 years. Since the Roses' gradual demise, which climaxed in the worst performance by a headline band in the history of the Reading Festival (a display largely put down to Brown's wavering vocals), he has sought to re-invent himself as a solo performer.However, Brown's image as a pot-smoking, faintly mystical man of peace has been looking somewhat threadbare of late.

It stands on the lawn outside the Science and Space Center in Houston, Texas.That rocket and its triumphal splashdown in 1969 fired Howard Wolff's imagination to plan a resort in space that is not just a flight of fancy. Most of the hotel and theme-park work that WAT&G designs is rather fanciful - Legoland in Windsor, the Hyatt in Bali, the Four Seasons in Tokyo, Disney's Orlando beach resort, and the pounds 300m Palace of the Lost City in South Africa. Inside a dead volcano there, WAT&G built a hotel from fake-aged, pre-fabricated cast concrete columns that look like balancing rocks. There's no doubt the race to fly into space was slowed down by the death of the first space tourist, Christa McAuliffe, in the space shuttle fire in 1986."In 1969 the astronaut John Glenn strapped himself into his one-man rocket, which was as tightly fitting as an aluminium coffin, lit the fuse and flew off like a firework. If you're in a floating hotel and it hits an iceberg - or, in space, a meteorite - and you need to escape, you don't jump out and survive," he says "So we have planned safety chambers.

Here the best thing is the view of the blue planet called Earth, way below. To help them plan the "life-transforming" viewing-platforms, the architects asked the moon-walker Buzz Aldrin to describe the experience of seeing the Earth from space for the first time It was "like having a globe on your desk", he told them Clearly, the Earth didn't move for Buzz. Computer-aided images will identify which parts of the Earth are flashing past but, unlike desktop globes, the screened world will have no lines of territorial demarcation.Health and safety are big issues but Howard Wolff is at pains to explain that cruise liners already have stringent safety measures in place "I've seen Titanic. "There are lots of fun things to do in zero gravity," Wolff says, "including having sex"; Cupola-land, as he calls it, will have honeymoon suites set among the stars.Astroturf provides pitches for weightless games in which the force of throwing a ball sends the player accelerating backwards.

And no jet lag, either.The weightless zone under the clear cupola is the heart of the hub. Made of cockpit Plexiglas specially toughened to withstand meteorites (plus the debris of those emptied Nasa fuel tanks that have been floating round since the Sixties) the clear cupola is shaped like Madame Tussaud's Planetarium in London, with a lot more things going on under its roof. This will be the first hotel to boast of no rooms with a view. But "it still won't feel like being back on Earth," Wolff says.