Before they were famous, I had heard of both Franz Ferdinand and The Zutons. I admit, not long before — we’re only talking about a year at most — but it bothered me that I had no documentary evidence of this, so that when people could talk to me about this cool new band they’d seen on CD-UK, I could just sigh, and refer them to my year-old enthusing, perhaps with a casual wave of the hand and a sip of mint julep. I could have been so annoying. I probably was anyway.

With this in mind, I’ve decided this year that, along with several million other people across the, ahem, the ‘blogosphere’, to make a few auspicious predictions of the shape of things to come. By doing this, I can more or less guarantee that they will all fail to come about.

I predict a riot

This coming year, the new artists you should keep your eye on include Bloc Party, Willy Mason, The Kaiser Chiefs and The Mooney Suzuki. The Kaiser Chiefs in particular have been repeatedly likened to Franz Ferdinand, and Ferdinand themselves have also been hyping them. The Mooney Suzuki will be the Jet of 2005.

Athlete will attempt to be the Coldplay of 2005, and will only be prevented in doing so by the appearance of Coldplay’s third album. The Futureheads will continue to rise in popularity and success. Ex-Libertine Carl Barât will flirt with various side projects (so far appearing on Client’s ‘Pornography’ and as part of supergroup ‘The Chavs’) before forming a new band proper, and Pete Doherty’s vanity project Babyshambles will continue to self-destruct. Eventually Doherty will die of an overdose, forcing the NME to find a new drug-addicted darling, having essentially handed Doherty the needle.

Single sales will continue to plummet, music downloads (both legal and non-legal) will continue to soar. Various people will be sued, to little or no effect.

Whatever happened to Mr. Hussein?

A general election will take place sometime between February and May, and Labour will win but with a reduced majority. Voters will swing back to voting Tory purely due to the fox-hunting issue. The Liberal Democrats may gain some seats on the back of anti-war sentiment. Tony Blair will be the Prime Minister once more, but although he’s decided he’s going to sit for a full third term, his close association with Dubya may make him more of a liability, and, once safely back in government, the Labour party may encourage him to step down to make way for Gordon Brown.

Under Dubya, America will continue becoming a worrying, terrifying place.

Israel and Palestine will form a unified, peaceful state, as an example to us all. Kidding! They’ll keep on killing each other.

India and Pakistan will resolve their disagreement over the Kashmir province. Kidding! Etc.

Osama Bin Laden will remain free. Iraq will implode.

Geek chic

Apple will continue to be effortlessly cool despite their association with U2, and will release more iPods, more iMacs, more of everything. I will continue to wish that I had a Powerbook. I will not get a Powerbook.

Podcasting will be trendy for a few months more before fizzling out as the novelty of hearing design geeks talking about American Emo wears off. Flickr and del.icio.us will continue to be popular until something new and equally uninteresting comes along to distract people.

Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP will launch in Britain FINALLY. Launched in Japan for £75 and £100 respectively, they will be released in the UK for £150 and £200, and without any decent packaging, and all the games will come in cheap cardboard boxes instead of the robust plastic packaging the rest of the world gets. All of our games will run at half the frame-rate and with half of the levels and extras missing, and all of the best games will remain unreleased due to ‘localisation issues’. The PSP will be initially successful because of the Playstation branding, and the fact that Ridge Racer looks absolutely fucking nuts on it, but the novelty may wear off as early adopters discover that the battery needs charging every night and the facia is a magnet for scratches and greasy thumbprints. Meanwhile, the DS will also be initially successful because of us Nintendo fanboys, but the novelty may wear off as we discover that only Nintendo are releasing games for the thing, at the rate of one per quarter. Despite this, we will still forgive them, because the games will be uniformly excellent.

Du-aye fiffTEEN. SAM ‘as gone t’Diary Room

Television will continue to suck.

Right, that’s enough of that. I’ll revisit this next year to see whether I managed to get anything right. I’m fairly confident of that last one.