Wednesday, 29 May 2013
Anyone for Kool AId?
It was always strange. That first night in the UK at the Royal Festival Hall when the power cut and they played on and the power cut back in at exactly the right moment. The endless festivals where rainclouds would part as they walked onstage to dazzling sunshine, the guy who crashed his bike watching them being pictured in Hyde Park and woke up surrounded by people in white robes with Texan accents. It was always strange and it was always brilliant.
It was many of the things I thought rock n roll should be. The cultish vibe, the drive of Tim Delaughter and Julie, the choir's endless energy, the post rave vibe of the shows. The Union Chapel with Tim walking over the pews in suitably challenging mode, collisions of cult and God and irony, the humour and intelligence at the heart of it all. And a sense of family, 23 really good friends rolling into town and making everything technicolour.
So I am most pleased to say, once again, that I am the pr for The Polyphonic Spree.
News on album and tour soon.
Monday, 20 May 2013
Here Comes The Summer
Been a trying week so let's start with something to cheer me up then I will tell you all about what Loudhailer folk are up to in the next few weeks.
So now that it's all a bit cheerier, what's happening?
Half the roster was in Brighton last weekend for The Great Escape. Loudhailer was unfortunately called to sick child duties so missed such great moments as the Towns / Velcro Hooks joint show, Tripwires getting Sticky at Mike's, Night Engine wowing The Guardian and The Independent's Sunday and daily alongside four rather sweaty shows, Balthazar bringing the wonders of 'Rats' to the south coast, The Elwins making their first seaside steps and Mary Epworth on a Saturday afternoon, which sounds a hell of a lot more fun than my actual Saturday afternoon.
Back in London town, Matt Berry was ending his UK tour with a big show at Islington's Academy, another which duties cancelled for us but which is all over Youtube.
Looking forwards brings two album in June. Matt Berry's quite astounding 'Kill The Wolf' which remains one of the most musically unafraid albums I have heard this year, a rare case of going for the tune rather than an approved approach and all the better for it and Tripwires melding of US alt rock, late 60's whiteout and 90's sonics into whole new shapes on their debut 'Spacehopper'. Both are out on the 17th June. July shapes up with another two, Editors 'best yet' 'The Weight Of Your Love' and The Elwins 'And I Thank You' debut of sparkling pop with a dark underbelly. On the former I remain open mouthed. Having worked with the band since the beginning, the progression to this album underpins both why I continue to do this (sometimes stupid) job and my continual awe at the abilities of some musicians and writers. The latter has a purity which shines through its arrangements, taking traditional sounds but playing them with such dedication and joy that it renders the album timeless.
Editors debut their live shows at Glastonbury in June as well. Now that's something to look forward to i would suggest.
Let's pretend they didn't cancel Snub TV and play video half hour
So now that it's all a bit cheerier, what's happening?
Half the roster was in Brighton last weekend for The Great Escape. Loudhailer was unfortunately called to sick child duties so missed such great moments as the Towns / Velcro Hooks joint show, Tripwires getting Sticky at Mike's, Night Engine wowing The Guardian and The Independent's Sunday and daily alongside four rather sweaty shows, Balthazar bringing the wonders of 'Rats' to the south coast, The Elwins making their first seaside steps and Mary Epworth on a Saturday afternoon, which sounds a hell of a lot more fun than my actual Saturday afternoon.
Back in London town, Matt Berry was ending his UK tour with a big show at Islington's Academy, another which duties cancelled for us but which is all over Youtube.
Looking forwards brings two album in June. Matt Berry's quite astounding 'Kill The Wolf' which remains one of the most musically unafraid albums I have heard this year, a rare case of going for the tune rather than an approved approach and all the better for it and Tripwires melding of US alt rock, late 60's whiteout and 90's sonics into whole new shapes on their debut 'Spacehopper'. Both are out on the 17th June. July shapes up with another two, Editors 'best yet' 'The Weight Of Your Love' and The Elwins 'And I Thank You' debut of sparkling pop with a dark underbelly. On the former I remain open mouthed. Having worked with the band since the beginning, the progression to this album underpins both why I continue to do this (sometimes stupid) job and my continual awe at the abilities of some musicians and writers. The latter has a purity which shines through its arrangements, taking traditional sounds but playing them with such dedication and joy that it renders the album timeless.
Editors debut their live shows at Glastonbury in June as well. Now that's something to look forward to i would suggest.
Let's pretend they didn't cancel Snub TV and play video half hour
Monday, 13 May 2013
Will we ever see their like again - what happened to the pop star?
Of course it was all so much simpler at the beginning. If you were a boy like Elvis, dirt poor, and the world opened up for you like that, you’d take it. More to the point if you saw it happen to Elvis, it could happen to you. That story didn’t change for some time, by 1962 The Beatles had set the prototype for the ‘hard working’ band with their sojourn in Hamburg. Rock ‘n’ roll was born on a very specific promise. That of not living like your parents, of breaking moulds and redefining what was important. An immediacy, an us (youth) against them (squares and parents), that was about modernity, newness, glamour and fun. Until the late ‘60’s that didn’t change much. The fans wanted to see their band at the top of the charts, their band kicking against the pricks and changing their world.
When the likes of Pink Floyd came along to queer the ‘working class boy’ (or girl once Motown really got into swing and the likes of Dusty and Sandie Shaw got into gear in the UK) made good story there was a new narrative. This was pushing the boundaries, not about making money but about making art. Nonetheless the fans wanted the band to succeed, even if, with many of the late 60’s into early 70’s middle class art bands (see King Crimson and friends for starters) it was in a cult sense, an ‘I’m cleverer than you with your pop stars and their big houses and their big cars and jets’. Some, like the Stones and more so The Beatles, managed the two in tandem now and then (but then the former had Keith and Charlie and a whole sense of mixed bag ‘rags to riches’ meets ‘art school boy’ to play with). Perhaps we should have seen what was coming when Dylan was called ‘Judas’ but for now, fans still wanted bands to succeed, the media wanted bands to get bigger, it made sense. Bigger bands equals more fans equals more buyers for stories about and interviews with those bands.
Quite where that story ran out of steam is hard to tell. You want to say punk but then think about the likes of Soft Cell , Human League, Echo & The Bunnymen and Smiths of the 80’s. They were ‘art’ and ‘big’. Even Spaundau Ballet got their name from a dark corner of post war history whilst Duran Duran cited Barbarella, an art house film. Intelligence and fame could still co-exist for the media, one did not preclude the other. Heaven 17 covered ‘Temptation’, made an album mocking London’s mythologizing of city boys and delivered a Northern, socialist swipe to the chops of the Tories whilst soundtracking their coke and champagne fuelled disco nights. The city boys that is, not the Tories..(perhaps). Certainly the last time the ‘working class lads done good’ to general favour happened around these parts was Oasis for the UK and probably Nirvana, in a much different way, in the US. And we all know how that turned out for both parties. As for big and art, Radiohead probably put the kybosh on that when the resolutely ‘art’ ‘Kid A’ signalled the end of ‘big’ Radiohead and the beginning of ‘you don’t like the old stuff do you?’ Radiohead.
Quite when did we start to equate success with selling out again after its brief, post punk nonsense blip that a combination of real post punk (Banshees psychedelia, Cure popness, Crucial Three splintering into wonderful myriad pop moments) and new romanticism blew away? Artists these days are left in a straightened position. The vagaries and sharp edges of the blog world at its pinnacles demand an almost monastic approach to gaining money and an obsession with the micro that has altered mainstream media interaction with album artists to a situation that resembles a very very big U at the top on the left the new bands, unproven but given large spaces to talk about how they formed and their first, media wide approved single release, in the dip everyone else and on the right the monolithic likes of The Killers, Muse, Coldplay, The Stones etc; guaranteed can’t go wrong so big they are beyond criticism behemoths.
Where once we had the steady rise we now have the vertiginous ascent and lemming like drop. Witness the delight in the sub scene world that permeates the internet where music is concerned, the need for demos not releases, just formed, not toured for a year or so. The crèche of the music world transformed into its research and development arm, a nonsense disguised by marketing and desperation in equal measure, a chase for an elixir that never existed, a perversion of what actually made rock ‘n’ roll, that hackneyed overused phrase, so vital in the first place. There is little of the romance that once went with the ascent of a band even as wedded to ideas of art as REM. For a band to be successful, and by this I mean genuinely successful, not feted in East London and the East Coast of the USA, successful is to say goodbye to serious appreciation from critics. Is it really that band’s albums get worse as they get bigger? Is it really that, once they are beyond a certain point, those very albums get better again? As with politics the centre crumbles and we are left to look from indie purist cliff over the depths of misery for the majority to the nirvana of the chosen few.
But these online quibbles are both representative and indicative of what has been done to our pop music by cultural forces. As the plethora of entertainment options has widened, following the industry’s inability to deal with the advent of online distribution and dissemination and powered by a ‘last dance on the Titanic’ attitude with the advent of cd, the music industry lost the key to what made it so powerful whilst it was pulled away from its outstretched hand by the forces of economics. See, there aren’t many kids like Elvis in the Western world as there once were. There are not towns of field hands plucking acoustic guitars nor Scouse kids playing in bombed out terraces dreaming of turning a monochrome world technicolour.
The aspiration to be a pop star has, at one side, been trodden over by an increasing government ability to deliver minimum level aspiration and comforting surroundings that flatten ambition and preclude wild dreaming and, at the other, by the sense that so many other ‘extreme futures’ are both more glamorous and more profitable. Such theory can range from local drug dealer at the darkest end through minor TV celebrity to Premier League footballer. It is not that such things are necessarily attainable, they are as removed from likelihood as the 60’s / 70’s pop star dream, rather that they are desirable. Exactly in the way that the pop star dream once was.
We are now sold quicker versions of notoriety. Why learn to play an instrument when you can get on tv without being able to sing? In fact, if you are really awful you will get your moment on X Factor or the other one, or the one that is like them but I can’t remember the name of. It will be fleeting but not that much less fleeting than winning it and you’ll have to put in a micro percent of the effort of a real musician, none of that gigs to one man and a dog, none of that tricky creation of music thing. Just go, be an arse and there you go. Quick shot of notoriety. Or you can use Twitter to slag people off, get a ‘reputation’ as somebody who is ‘funny’ and, who knows, you may even get a book deal. You won’t be the next Wilde, even the next Banks, but you will get a moment where your book is talked about for nano-seconds before you disappear again.
In a world where the average civil servant can party like the classic (male) 60’s pop star; the drug use, the casual sex, the all night parties and so on, another facet of the rock star is removed, the concept of the ‘free spirit’. In a world where there is no chart, no Top Of The Pops, no national conversation about pop music, there is no more notoriety nor adulation. Remove the mega brand stars, the Beyonces and the Jay-Z’s and the next level down, those scaling that right hand incline of the ‘U’ are likely not to set armies of teenage girls screaming or legions of teenagers up and down the country safety pinning their school tie. No wonder an increasing amount of our successful bands are (reputedly) middle class. This isn’t about having to be anything anymore, it’s a gap year approach to music, a little stop that may or may not lead to something before moving on if it doesn’t succeed. The age of the pop star may well be past.
This is not to say that the age of music is past. History suggests that this will never be. As far as we know where there has been man there has been music. All cultures have music deeply embedded within them. In a way this isn’t about music, it’s about the appeal of pop music to youth and its slow decline. Beethoven caused riots once too. It’s just a shame that we seem to be living through the first moment in recent history where music is a soundtrack to outrage, rather than its cause.
When the likes of Pink Floyd came along to queer the ‘working class boy’ (or girl once Motown really got into swing and the likes of Dusty and Sandie Shaw got into gear in the UK) made good story there was a new narrative. This was pushing the boundaries, not about making money but about making art. Nonetheless the fans wanted the band to succeed, even if, with many of the late 60’s into early 70’s middle class art bands (see King Crimson and friends for starters) it was in a cult sense, an ‘I’m cleverer than you with your pop stars and their big houses and their big cars and jets’. Some, like the Stones and more so The Beatles, managed the two in tandem now and then (but then the former had Keith and Charlie and a whole sense of mixed bag ‘rags to riches’ meets ‘art school boy’ to play with). Perhaps we should have seen what was coming when Dylan was called ‘Judas’ but for now, fans still wanted bands to succeed, the media wanted bands to get bigger, it made sense. Bigger bands equals more fans equals more buyers for stories about and interviews with those bands.
Quite where that story ran out of steam is hard to tell. You want to say punk but then think about the likes of Soft Cell , Human League, Echo & The Bunnymen and Smiths of the 80’s. They were ‘art’ and ‘big’. Even Spaundau Ballet got their name from a dark corner of post war history whilst Duran Duran cited Barbarella, an art house film. Intelligence and fame could still co-exist for the media, one did not preclude the other. Heaven 17 covered ‘Temptation’, made an album mocking London’s mythologizing of city boys and delivered a Northern, socialist swipe to the chops of the Tories whilst soundtracking their coke and champagne fuelled disco nights. The city boys that is, not the Tories..(perhaps). Certainly the last time the ‘working class lads done good’ to general favour happened around these parts was Oasis for the UK and probably Nirvana, in a much different way, in the US. And we all know how that turned out for both parties. As for big and art, Radiohead probably put the kybosh on that when the resolutely ‘art’ ‘Kid A’ signalled the end of ‘big’ Radiohead and the beginning of ‘you don’t like the old stuff do you?’ Radiohead.
Quite when did we start to equate success with selling out again after its brief, post punk nonsense blip that a combination of real post punk (Banshees psychedelia, Cure popness, Crucial Three splintering into wonderful myriad pop moments) and new romanticism blew away? Artists these days are left in a straightened position. The vagaries and sharp edges of the blog world at its pinnacles demand an almost monastic approach to gaining money and an obsession with the micro that has altered mainstream media interaction with album artists to a situation that resembles a very very big U at the top on the left the new bands, unproven but given large spaces to talk about how they formed and their first, media wide approved single release, in the dip everyone else and on the right the monolithic likes of The Killers, Muse, Coldplay, The Stones etc; guaranteed can’t go wrong so big they are beyond criticism behemoths.
Where once we had the steady rise we now have the vertiginous ascent and lemming like drop. Witness the delight in the sub scene world that permeates the internet where music is concerned, the need for demos not releases, just formed, not toured for a year or so. The crèche of the music world transformed into its research and development arm, a nonsense disguised by marketing and desperation in equal measure, a chase for an elixir that never existed, a perversion of what actually made rock ‘n’ roll, that hackneyed overused phrase, so vital in the first place. There is little of the romance that once went with the ascent of a band even as wedded to ideas of art as REM. For a band to be successful, and by this I mean genuinely successful, not feted in East London and the East Coast of the USA, successful is to say goodbye to serious appreciation from critics. Is it really that band’s albums get worse as they get bigger? Is it really that, once they are beyond a certain point, those very albums get better again? As with politics the centre crumbles and we are left to look from indie purist cliff over the depths of misery for the majority to the nirvana of the chosen few.
But these online quibbles are both representative and indicative of what has been done to our pop music by cultural forces. As the plethora of entertainment options has widened, following the industry’s inability to deal with the advent of online distribution and dissemination and powered by a ‘last dance on the Titanic’ attitude with the advent of cd, the music industry lost the key to what made it so powerful whilst it was pulled away from its outstretched hand by the forces of economics. See, there aren’t many kids like Elvis in the Western world as there once were. There are not towns of field hands plucking acoustic guitars nor Scouse kids playing in bombed out terraces dreaming of turning a monochrome world technicolour.
The aspiration to be a pop star has, at one side, been trodden over by an increasing government ability to deliver minimum level aspiration and comforting surroundings that flatten ambition and preclude wild dreaming and, at the other, by the sense that so many other ‘extreme futures’ are both more glamorous and more profitable. Such theory can range from local drug dealer at the darkest end through minor TV celebrity to Premier League footballer. It is not that such things are necessarily attainable, they are as removed from likelihood as the 60’s / 70’s pop star dream, rather that they are desirable. Exactly in the way that the pop star dream once was.
We are now sold quicker versions of notoriety. Why learn to play an instrument when you can get on tv without being able to sing? In fact, if you are really awful you will get your moment on X Factor or the other one, or the one that is like them but I can’t remember the name of. It will be fleeting but not that much less fleeting than winning it and you’ll have to put in a micro percent of the effort of a real musician, none of that gigs to one man and a dog, none of that tricky creation of music thing. Just go, be an arse and there you go. Quick shot of notoriety. Or you can use Twitter to slag people off, get a ‘reputation’ as somebody who is ‘funny’ and, who knows, you may even get a book deal. You won’t be the next Wilde, even the next Banks, but you will get a moment where your book is talked about for nano-seconds before you disappear again.
In a world where the average civil servant can party like the classic (male) 60’s pop star; the drug use, the casual sex, the all night parties and so on, another facet of the rock star is removed, the concept of the ‘free spirit’. In a world where there is no chart, no Top Of The Pops, no national conversation about pop music, there is no more notoriety nor adulation. Remove the mega brand stars, the Beyonces and the Jay-Z’s and the next level down, those scaling that right hand incline of the ‘U’ are likely not to set armies of teenage girls screaming or legions of teenagers up and down the country safety pinning their school tie. No wonder an increasing amount of our successful bands are (reputedly) middle class. This isn’t about having to be anything anymore, it’s a gap year approach to music, a little stop that may or may not lead to something before moving on if it doesn’t succeed. The age of the pop star may well be past.
This is not to say that the age of music is past. History suggests that this will never be. As far as we know where there has been man there has been music. All cultures have music deeply embedded within them. In a way this isn’t about music, it’s about the appeal of pop music to youth and its slow decline. Beethoven caused riots once too. It’s just a shame that we seem to be living through the first moment in recent history where music is a soundtrack to outrage, rather than its cause.
Loudhailer at The Great Escape
Brighton beckons for a lot of the roster this week so, in one handy list, here is who is playing where
LOUDHAILER PRESS AT THE GREAT ESCAPE
BALTHAZAR
Thurs May 16th Prince Albert @ 10.15pm
THE ELWINS
Thurs May 16th Blind Tiger @ 12.30pm / Sticky Mike's Frog Bar @ 7.45pm
NIGHT ENGINE
Thurs May 16th Sticky Mike’s @ 10.45pm
Fri May 17th Republic of Music’s Courtyard @ 1.15pm / Above Audio @ 3.10pm
Sat May 18th The Mesmerist @10.20pm
TRIPWIRES
Fri May 17th Sticky Mikes Frog Bar @ 8pm
LOUDHAILER PRESS AT THE GREAT ESCAPE
BALTHAZAR
Thurs May 16th Prince Albert @ 10.15pm
THE ELWINS
Thurs May 16th Blind Tiger @ 12.30pm / Sticky Mike's Frog Bar @ 7.45pm
NIGHT ENGINE
Thurs May 16th Sticky Mike’s @ 10.45pm
Fri May 17th Republic of Music’s Courtyard @ 1.15pm / Above Audio @ 3.10pm
Sat May 18th The Mesmerist @10.20pm
TRIPWIRES
Fri May 17th Sticky Mikes Frog Bar @ 8pm
Thursday, 4 April 2013
When One Makes Many - the new relativism
You couldn’t have scripted it better. Just as the furore over the welfare reorganisation comes into force up pops the epitome of the ‘scrounger’ trailing dead children, sexual depravity and a host of other large and small push points for the majority for the Mail and, by extension, those who support the changes, to point and say ‘See, that’s the kind of people we are funding’. So it was no surprise that Today featured Mail journalist AN Wilson using the case as an outrider to support the changes nor that the Telegraph has joined in the fun.
One point to hypocrisy. On the same program two days earlier Iain Duncan Smith had rolled out the familiar (and repeated in reference to his interview ever since) line that he would not discuss the matter on the basis of the one quoted example of a gentleman living on £53 a week. This position was thought eminently reasonable by both the Mail and The Telegraph, yet here we were on the flip side of the argument doing just that. Whilst the challenge to IDS to live on £53 a week is indeed facile, the use of the Philpott case as a battering ram for cutting welfare transcends the usual bullshit rough and tumble that has become UK politics and marches straight into offensive.
At heart the British public is being conned. Sometimes I think the British public likes to be conned, more comfortable with shouting at each other from fixed positions than thinking about the problem and debating the merits of different approaches. The middle class laugh at the Jeremy Kyle show but every day on Twitter their version is played out, entrenched views flying backwards and forwards making equally invalid claims and strident statements that move our culture nowhere and create a vista of hate and bile that seemingly grows day on day.
In one respect this should not be a huge surprise. Any viewer of Adam Curtis’ excellent ‘Century Of The Self’ can discern a move towards the primacy of the individual without resorting to that tired Thatcher quote about society. An investigation of social media postings reinforces this truism; that the majority now believe, somewhat perversely, in the triumph of their own views over those of any other sans debate. Never mind that those views are formed by download from the media organisation of their choice and are therefore 'borrowed' rather than created. Hence a family member of mixed race posts on her Facebook an article from ‘The English Patriot’ about immigrants without seeing an irony, fully inside the tent for now until those she support gain power and send her back to where she came from. (Which, given the answer is Essex would be interesting). The quality and depth of debate from the Commons to the pub have been downgraded to such an extent that it is not alarmist to suggest that we are heading towards a society where single issue politics are decided by an unholy combination of Facebook likes, Retweets and glib soundbite scoring from those in power who really should know better. The caricaturing and reduction of the role of the civil service in the political process is just one facet of this culture that allows reasoned thought to exit as public relations policy and U-turns under apparent ‘public’ pressure take hold.
This leaves us with a poor culture and a poorer society. It is irrefutable that societies with less social division and a smaller gap between the richest and the poorest function more productively and deliver a better quality of life and sense of fulfilment to their members. The current welfare debate ignores such facts to score quick political gain in those areas where votes can be harvested, all parties are engaged in a struggle for power rather than a quest for a better society for all. Ultimately, that approach leaves us all poorer, whether by cash in pocket or the wreck of the society that those of us with money negotiate. Spending power does not equate to happiness, if we could step back for a moment and consider and think before opening our mouths it is not that fanciful to think that we could yet rediscover a collective way to deal with the problems that we face.
Thursday, 28 March 2013
Pyschedelic noise explosions
I'm very happy to announce the return of the excellent Tripwires to the Loudhailer roster. Having been with the band at the beginning when this still quite astounding video for 'Cinnamon' got a few folk in a twist nearly two years ago, the lads made the (currently) extremely brave decision to decamp to New York to make their debut album and snag a deal with French Kiss. The album will be with us in June and my totally unbiased decision is that it was time well spent as it has all the hallmarks of a record that we will still be talking about in a decade. Big claim? Sure, but sometimes these things are true. The band go on tour with another Loudhailer member, Towns, throughout April and May in what can only be billed as a psychedelic noise pop explosion.
As if having one new band wasn't enough Loudhailer also welcomes Matt Berry to the fold. His debut 'Witchazel' was a revelatory delight to me given that I knew him, as many did, for his comedy work, in particular his repeated scene stealing moments in 'The IT Crowd'. If you haven't seen his first appearance on the show then I heartily recommend stopping what you are doing for a few minutes and clicking here. The new album, 'Kill The Wolf' maintains his interest in the pysche sounds of the late 60's, making him a fellow traveller to the wonderful Mary Epworth who recently returned from the clusterfuck of South By South West and will tour the UK from next week. Mary dates are here and Matt's UK tour (featuring Mark Morriss of The Bluetones in his band, a friendly face from my Hall Or Nothing days) are here.
I was lucky enough to spend some time in the studio with Editors last week. It has been a while since we last heard from them but the album is pretty much in the bag now and announcements on the debut single will be with all very soon. I have heard it. It rocks. I can also now say that they are playing Glastonbury. More on this soon.
Monday, 4 March 2013
It's all about the money, money, money
This week's seemingly unrelated comparison brings me to my two favourite things (after my daughter and my wife), football and music. As a young football fan I fondly remember the days when the then First Division was, to some degree, an open book. Within the likes of Liverpool and Arsenal and (later into the 90s) Man United, the likes of Watford, Everton, Spurs and more could challenge for the top and come close if not be successful. Not winning the league wasn't seen as a devastating indictment of the manager or team, even relegation (and as a Man City fan you got used to that) wasn't the end of the world. How things change.
Strangely, the alteration of music and football seem to have run in parallel. Britpop forever changed the expectations of what an 'alternative' band should manage, the Premier League similarly ruined the idea of skill and teamwork triumphing over money. Where Watford could achieve a second place with Graham Taylor in the 82-83 season, Swansea, who strike me as their modern equivalent, will be aiming for 8th or 9th. Post Britpop every new band was either 'destined to be huge' or chucked on a scrap heap, the days of My Bloody Valentine not grazing the charts but being respected are long gone, the same could be said of football players.
Listening to Radio 5 in their hysterical build up to yesterday's North London derby, probably a fight to the death for who finishes somewhere between 3rd and 6th (!), an interview with Theo Walcott brought this all into focus. Walcott was, like so many indie bands, heralded as the future, in footballing terms somewhere between the second coming of Christ and George Best at the age of 17, brought into the England squad for the World Cup to sit and watch. He's never truly recovered because, even in this excellent season, expectation will always run ahead of what he can do. Any reader of the indie runes will recognise this as a pattern that repeats endlessly for bands, I still recall someone telling me that The Twang's debut album sales in excess of 200,00 in the UK must have been a 'disappointment' given the hype with which they had arrived. Beggars belief doesn't it?
This led me to consider a debate that is once again whirling around my circles, why do so many bands fail at the second album? Partly, as well documented, this is down to pressure and that age old trueism that bands first albums tend to be made up of songs that they have had time away from the glare of public expectation to write and refine but it occurs to me that a pattern seems to be in place that is not often discussed.
As with Premier League football, the team around a successful first album band are often poached before the second album comes into view. Thus second album artists can find themselves in a room of unfamiliar faces come second album time, all those who were instrumental in building their public profile and advising them on how to negotiate the perils of being in a band departed to a new 'club' and the chance of more 'titles'. This may explain why we currently look to the likes of XL with their settled management team (the Man United of the record industry if you will) as paragons of best practice. Further, as with football as any Chelsea fan in particular will be aware, no one is allowed to fail. All this hype around Bowie and yet we seem to forget that the career we are lauding would simply not be possible now. Given his up and down critical path he would have been dropped before he even became famous.
Quite how you change this I don't know. Certainly a little more proportionality across the board would be a start, the space hogged by the five or so 'must see' bands could be apportioned across a lot more acts of interest (and this applies as much to radio as print and online) giving a better picture of the music scene. More focus on allowing musicians to create and experiment, to fail and recover, is a necessity if you want to create any more long terms artists. You can't expect people to turn down better jobs in a climate of instability but, again, perhaps a little less 'shit or bust' and a little more career long perspective from those in the labels wouldn't go amiss. If that culture was more prevalent then you have to believe that some would forgo the bigger pay packet to create something long lasting.
In Loudhailer world Spring seems to be here with a lot of the acts already on tour or putting in dates.
Velcro Hooks, whose exceptional video for 'A Love Song For TS Eliot' premiered on Artrocker Tv last week come to London with the Howling Owl massive on Thursday and The Joy Formidable end another massively successful UK jaunt at the Roundhouse on Friday in the company of Night Engine. The coming weeks and months bring newcomers The Elwins to the UK for the first time, Mary Epworth tours in the wake of last year's very well received 'Dream Life' debut and there are dates for Glasvegas and Editors in the pipeline. More on those when they are confirmed.
Strangely, the alteration of music and football seem to have run in parallel. Britpop forever changed the expectations of what an 'alternative' band should manage, the Premier League similarly ruined the idea of skill and teamwork triumphing over money. Where Watford could achieve a second place with Graham Taylor in the 82-83 season, Swansea, who strike me as their modern equivalent, will be aiming for 8th or 9th. Post Britpop every new band was either 'destined to be huge' or chucked on a scrap heap, the days of My Bloody Valentine not grazing the charts but being respected are long gone, the same could be said of football players.
Listening to Radio 5 in their hysterical build up to yesterday's North London derby, probably a fight to the death for who finishes somewhere between 3rd and 6th (!), an interview with Theo Walcott brought this all into focus. Walcott was, like so many indie bands, heralded as the future, in footballing terms somewhere between the second coming of Christ and George Best at the age of 17, brought into the England squad for the World Cup to sit and watch. He's never truly recovered because, even in this excellent season, expectation will always run ahead of what he can do. Any reader of the indie runes will recognise this as a pattern that repeats endlessly for bands, I still recall someone telling me that The Twang's debut album sales in excess of 200,00 in the UK must have been a 'disappointment' given the hype with which they had arrived. Beggars belief doesn't it?
This led me to consider a debate that is once again whirling around my circles, why do so many bands fail at the second album? Partly, as well documented, this is down to pressure and that age old trueism that bands first albums tend to be made up of songs that they have had time away from the glare of public expectation to write and refine but it occurs to me that a pattern seems to be in place that is not often discussed.
As with Premier League football, the team around a successful first album band are often poached before the second album comes into view. Thus second album artists can find themselves in a room of unfamiliar faces come second album time, all those who were instrumental in building their public profile and advising them on how to negotiate the perils of being in a band departed to a new 'club' and the chance of more 'titles'. This may explain why we currently look to the likes of XL with their settled management team (the Man United of the record industry if you will) as paragons of best practice. Further, as with football as any Chelsea fan in particular will be aware, no one is allowed to fail. All this hype around Bowie and yet we seem to forget that the career we are lauding would simply not be possible now. Given his up and down critical path he would have been dropped before he even became famous.
Quite how you change this I don't know. Certainly a little more proportionality across the board would be a start, the space hogged by the five or so 'must see' bands could be apportioned across a lot more acts of interest (and this applies as much to radio as print and online) giving a better picture of the music scene. More focus on allowing musicians to create and experiment, to fail and recover, is a necessity if you want to create any more long terms artists. You can't expect people to turn down better jobs in a climate of instability but, again, perhaps a little less 'shit or bust' and a little more career long perspective from those in the labels wouldn't go amiss. If that culture was more prevalent then you have to believe that some would forgo the bigger pay packet to create something long lasting.
In Loudhailer world Spring seems to be here with a lot of the acts already on tour or putting in dates.
Velcro Hooks, whose exceptional video for 'A Love Song For TS Eliot' premiered on Artrocker Tv last week come to London with the Howling Owl massive on Thursday and The Joy Formidable end another massively successful UK jaunt at the Roundhouse on Friday in the company of Night Engine. The coming weeks and months bring newcomers The Elwins to the UK for the first time, Mary Epworth tours in the wake of last year's very well received 'Dream Life' debut and there are dates for Glasvegas and Editors in the pipeline. More on those when they are confirmed.
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