I'm A Believer (and what's happening this week)

Two very different pieces of writing have led me to a single conclusion this week. The likelihood of a link between Alexis Petridis' review of the Palma Violets debut album and the Daily Mail's vicious response to Hilary Mantel's thoughtful dissection of the role of Princesses in history would appear slim and yet looking at both examples there it is, pure and simple; an inability to accept truth. In the case of the review, Alexis' rejection of the band as the saviours of indie, in the case of the Mail, a desire to represent a thoughtful look at media presentations of royal women as an attack on an individual. In both cases, the only loser is truth.

Granted, the Palma Violets review is somewhat out of the ordinary. Using half of the review to discuss other reviews and presentations of the band may seem out of kilter to some but given that the 'story' of Palma Violets is as much about the hype as the music, (and the need of the UK music media to acclaim something every year as the saviour of something), for a broadsheet cultural section to discuss this in the context of the album does not seem particularly odd. Further, with that review following the music monthlies and weeklies, Alexis has put a new voice into the debate and opened up a forum for discussion that is sorely needed as we watch potentially excellent bands put to the sword year on year by unrealistic expectations. This is what I want the upper end of music criticism to do; remove the 'will they, won't they' approach to coverage of bands and instead focus on the meaning of their music and their presentation within the context of culture.

Any discussion of the Daily Mail distorting the truth is, frankly, a waste of words. However, the fuss that has been generated by a two week old Hilary Mantel lecture following the Mail's undoubtedly opportunistic decision to front page it a fortnight later reveals a similar unwillingness to look at something in depth. Whilst the blogosphere abounds with outraged Mail-ites (and more) buying into the wholesale idea that Mantel launched a personal attack on the princess few seem to have bothered to both read and THINK ABOUT the lecture she delivered. As with the Palma Violets there is a refusal to engage with an argument, its simply easier to shout and point and, ultimately, miss the point. Somewhere in all of that is a delicious irony given that a piece about the reduction of women to vessels for the projection of meaning and power has seen a response based on the ugliness of its female author.

Britain has never been easy with intellectual debate. For all our Shakespeare's and our Dicken's from country gossip and witch hunts to penny dreadfuls and the tabloids the overriding culture of this island, whilst complicated, has revolved around a mistrust of anyone who wants to think about things too hard or pull away from the consensus to suggest that the Wizard may actually be a little man behind a curtain. Whilst Mantel's piece about royalty (and therefore power) may be more important in the grand scheme of things, to those of us who care about nurturing and encouraging a truly interesting alternative music scene Alexis' review was equally important. If there is no truth, there is no meaning......

Aside from making tenuous connections between historical novelists and up and coming indie bands this week sees our own new hopes play a very special gig tomorrow. Night Engine's achievement in selling out the Borderline is notable, few new bands manage such a thing so early in their lives. Night Engine are NOT the saviours of indie, no one is or should be, but they are a fantastic band with a wonderful attitude to and engagement with their music and I am very much looking forward to seeing another milestone in their story tomorrow evening. This lovely interview with Fader is a good way to get started for those new to the band.

Monday sees Balthazar release their album, 'Rats'. Another excellent live band, this album continues to reveal little mysteries to me on repeated listens and I love the way that Jinte and Maarten, the two songwriters, have created a world with their music, evocative of smoky bars and stolen looks.

Elsewhere, The Joy Formidable end the week with a support to Bloc Party at Earls Court before setting off for the second leg of their UK tour, more on that next week and there will be news on Jack Daniel's plans for this year in music and, hopefully, a couple of new additions to the Loudhailer family to announce next week. And a new Velcro Hooks video. What more could you want?

Come Back To Camden?

As an A & R in the mid to late 90's I spent nearly all my life in Camden and Kentish Town. Between the Monarch and Dublin Castle and up the road to the Bull & Gate I saw many of the bands that defined the Britpop years in their formative moments. Add in The Falcon and you had the circular motion of A & R's most weeknights. It's pretty much all gone now, no George and Nicki's for pre gig food, no gathering of the clans at The Good Mixer, no Blow Up at the Laurel Tree.

The Falcon went years ago and The Monarch is no longer the jewel in the crown of London's small live venues in terms of pulling power. That pull has gradually shifted east over the last decade to Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, The Old Blue Last and, now Birthdays and the Shacklewell Arms. That's the nature of London, as the demographics and property prices shift, the scenes move with them.

So whilst to me it is sad to hear of the closure of the Bull & Gate as a live music venue it doesn't represent a failure of live music at grassroots in London. If anything there seem to be more venues in London at that level than ever. What is interesting in the statement from Fandango published in Music Week is the crack at a 'storm of free gigs' in East London. As with discussions of freeness, the increasing expectation that gigs should be free is far more dangerous than where they happen. Whilst a 'Save The Bull & Gate' campaign may have emotional pull, a more useful approach would be to win the argument that bands starting out need investment and, at a basic level, paying to watch them is a necessity.

NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISS COMMENT

As a child growing up in Lancashire I had fond memories of the 'stick' that exists (still) between Lancashire and Yorkshire over the Wars Of The Roses. This persisted to my student days in Leeds where, working in a city centre pub over the summer, I took great delight in our cricketing triumph over the White Rose. It was only when I looked into the real history of the wars and the central figure of 'crookback' Richard that I realised that the Wars Of The Roses were less Lancashire / Yorkshire than North v South, a situation that has defined large parts of my life for good and bad.

Growing up in Blackpool in the 80's the North / South divide was ever present. We sat watching mobile phone wielding yuppies drinking champagne on the news whilst around us friend's parents lost their jobs and, in some cases, their homes to the ravages of a recession that seemingly didn't touch the South East. But we had The Smiths, The Tube, Brookside and Yosser Hughes. If nothing else, we were being heard and, more importantly, whilst the South East handed us Wham and Spandau Ballet we held the big cards, the cultural powerhouses that would define popular culture for the next generation, The Smiths, Joy Division, Factory Records, The Housemartins and Kitchenware Records. It happened again in the late 80's when the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays joined forces with the Hacienda, our cousins over the Pennines at Back To Basics and Gatecrasher and changed clothes and behaviour irrevocably. And again when Oasis did it in the mid 90s. We may have been poorer economically but we were streets ahead culturally.

Contrary to the efforts (and pr) of the Blair government, the North / South divide has never gone away. From an economic divide it has widened to a cultural divide and seems now to have become so entrenched that the travails of the North's culture are not even worthy of comment. This excellent piece in The New Statesman details the destruction of arts funding in the North East whilst a more trivial example has been playing out on Twitter today.

The shock and disgust of some that The Courteeners should have secured a midweek Number One with their new album is revealing. Empirically, this is a band that can comfortably sell out the MEN Arena in Manchester, an 18,000+ capacity barn whose audience buying one copy each would easily put them in the end of week Top Ten on current sales. This makes such comments ill informed at best. However, it is the deeper conviction that this music does not 'deserve' such exposure that highlights the cultural disconnect between the critical elite and the tastes of 'ordinary' people, especially when such people tend to be from outside of the South East 'hub'.

For the record I used to work with The Courteeners (on their debut album) and saw this story play out in a slightly different context. The band won the inaugral Guardian Album Of The Year award, due almost totally to the efforts of their fanbase in a public vote. The howls of derision from the commentators on the paper's notoriously deranged CiF focused on such obvious targets as 'landfill indie' and 'bloke rock' and leaned heavily on a stereotyped view of the band and their fans as beery, stupid and, crucially, Northern. Like 'hilarious' transcripts of the Gallagher's - 'ey oop r kid, how's it going mi lad' etc - all the posting massive really revealed was their prejudice towards anything that originated or succeeded North of Watford.

So, the tale repeats. It seems appropriate that a Northern band should stand at the top of the charts on the week that the much maligned, critically destroyed monarch from the Middle Ages should return. No crookback King, a victim of Tudor propaganda, the reverberations of the war remained for a century, leading to the rape of the North under Henry VIII following the pilgrimage of grace, a further Northern attempt to have their culture heard and respected by the powers that be at Westminster and in the City. misrepresented by the arch propagandist Thomas Cromwell. As the new rape of the North gathers pace under Thatcher's children it has to be hoped that, in adversity as ever, the North will continue to excel at projecting their limited power to greater levels.