Some bands are amazing, but don't get nearly enough love. It can't have escaped your attention that approximately 88% of the bollocks written on the internet is about unbearably new, frankly unproven bands with two decent songs. Best of luck to them all, of course, but also, it pains me a bit that the world is literally awash with bands who despite their obvious talents, can't get arrested. Bands and musicians who didn't quite appear at the right time, or wear the right hats, or something, and have therefore failed to become as massive as they really deserve to be. There are lots of bands in this category I love, but none more so than the Veils.
I shan't bother to give you the full Wikipedia spiel on them. Suffice it to say that if you have ears, and they work properly at least some of the time, you need to listen to this man sing:
The crazy-brilliant Nick Caveisms don't stop there either. I got into the Veils thanks to a particularly effusive review in Q, which had taken time out from blowing Coldplay and Muse to review the debut release by a bunch of stragglers from New Zealand called The Runaway Found, in 2004. In that review - no more than a paragraph or so long, was something about a man with a voice that combines the best bits of Liam Gallagher and Jeff Buckley's singing. I picked the album up soon after, on spec, and can kind of hear that in the early stuff, like this:
I've never seen them live, as they seem to appear in front of people about as often as Halley's Comet, but will do (hopefully) when album four comes out next year. More here:
Aren't they just fucking fabulous? Show them some love here, follow them here and buy everything they've done off iTunes or wherever. Don't torrent them, else I'll be round to slap you in person.
Oh, one more thing:
OK, now you can go. Tell everybody! Run, you fools!
Perth's premier bleary-eyed bong-rockers Tame Impala have returned, sluggishly, bearing a new record. Lonerism expands on the (already pretty, ahem... 'expanded') template of their debut effort, 2010's Innerspeaker. Lonerism applies a new level of focus to their obvious affection for late-period Beatle-isms, Can, the Soft Machine and Spiritualized into one long, paisley-patterned carpet-ride back to 1969. The lead single, below, kind of crystallises what I mean:
All of which got me thinking about Jarvis Cocker's comments in the Guardian the other day about the continuing deification of the Beatles (down to the supposed 'significance' of the Post-Its Lennon left out for his milkman), the long-term effect on youth culture of how great the Sixties allegedly were.
This in turn led to a big ol' mind-wander around the commodification of 'cool' by big corporations, which manifests in things like the O2 Arena's clear association, through the 'historic' pictures of fans going nuts in the foyer, with yesteryear. Apparently, then, these sepia-tinged visual cues are supposed to make us draw a line of association between waiting for a hotdog before Coldplay start and the mass hysteria generated by Elvis' first TV appearance in 1957.
But why would we want to do that? What is so good about the past? If we are, as Cocker supposes, 'children of the echo' - a beautiful way of putting it, I thought - what keeps us coming back to that time, and why won't we leave the Beatles and their later period - say, Tomorrow Never Knows to The End - alone?
What was so fucking great about it the first time around? More importantly, have an entire generation wasted their time trying to get back to something that only exists in its clearest form inside Liam Gallagher's head? Just as a for-instance, and in the interests of full disclosure, here's the full head-spinning remastered version of Tomorrow Never Knows - which might be my favourite song by my (often) favourite band. More on this later, no doubt...
Are we saying that the obvious achievements of the Fab Four are still the apex of freewheeling experimental pop genius? Why is that? Surely we're supposed to have done better than this by now? Maybe it's because, while plumbers are supposed to get better at their jobs the longer they do them, their jobs don't require them to take the accepted, Western ideal of what a sink should be, and with no prior training, fuse it expertly with the ancient Sanskrit ideal of a sink, as communicated by a chanting pensioner on a hillside in Rishikesh.
All I know is, music now is an order of magnitude shitter than it clearly, abundantly was between 1950 and 1980. Being a child of the late Seventies, my generation is still massively chuffed with itself because it invented music that made it easier to jig about to while hopelessly off your knackers on E. In jazz, my grandfather's generation, on the other hand, came up with something as mysterious, challenging, varied and diverse as an entirely new language during a massive and universally terrible war. Not to be outdone, my dad's lot had a go and came up with rock'n'roll. Fucking hell. In other words, faced with the discovery of calculus and the breaking of the sound barrier, we presented history with a lager-soaked whoopee cushion. Well done, all.
To illustrate my point, check out Miles Davis in bombed-out Paris, sounding, I'm sure you'll admit, as cool as a man made of fuckoff. Not bad for a little bloke on bin-loads of heroin and sixty a day:
Alright - Miles is a cheap shot - everybody knows he invented about 329 different forms of jazz in his own right - it's hardly fair to compare him to anybody else of this century. Except for the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Hendrix (who he reportedly revered) and all of the other cultural touchstones we still hold above our own modern equivalents like holy artefacts.
Fast forward to the Sixties, then, and at this point, ignore all of the established godheads. I'm trying to work out whether modern music really is bollocks, here, so let's take an example of what I consider to be a 'middling' group of the time, and see how they compare in terms of musical ability, composition, body of work and influence with what we currently have. To do this I've chosen a band who, while they've rightfully taken their place among the great and the good, aren't exactly standard-bearers. I give you The Band:
I'm a big fan of The Band - great players, and I always loved their commitment to melody and the musical understanding within that band. No world-changers, though, were they? That said, are they in all important respects, better muscians than the current mainstream can offer? Is it just me, or is music getting thicker, more derivative, more obvious, and less based on four friends' shared vision and willingness to learn to play - or at least to create surprising, innovative songs - than it used to be?
I'm aware that Zeppelin recycled old blues riffs, making them louder, not about slavery and approximately a billion times more fun, and David Bowie was a genuine one-off. That said, I think punk has to be the next major port-of-call on this badly-constructed ramble through the musical ages. Punk was clearly designed to upset the established way of doing things - and quite rightly, because life with Status Quo at number one and no heating three days a week sounds monstrously shit on all levels.
Punk clearly fucked with some established ideas about what was cool, and what just would not stand. Maybe the Fates that govern such things were all in favour of a shift towards more direct, snotty, Windsor-baiting music, too - after all, how else do you explain the cellist from ELO's freakish demise at the hands of a runaway hay-bale? Eh?
Again, there are standard-bearers from this era, and we all know who they are. I won't bore you with the Pistols, or X-Ray Spex, or the Clash - you know about those. Let's once agian take a random sample of 'the middle' of 1977, and see if it stands up to Coldplay, Kasabian and the Maccabees in terms of playing, passion, songwriting, production and influence, shall we? What about, er, this lot?:
Despite containing lamentable televison piano twat Jools Holland, Squeeze were brilliant. Check the words out: that line in the first verse about the 'little kicks inside her' is pure genius. They also win a shitload of points in my book because they sounded exactly like Television would have done if they'd come from Crawley. And the song's structure is really inventive, too - it basically comes to a dead stop after the intro for no good reason, and kicks 4/4 into touch, which is always nice for a bit of variety.
I guess what I'm getting at is - even the average bands of the last four decades would have kicked the arses clean off the Maccabees, and the latter are playing massive sheds nationwide the week after next. Somehow, this doesn't seem right. I'd say that for the exception of Radiohead, there are no acts around at the moment that will be venerated. Can you honestly see Kasabian and the rest standing the test of time in the way that Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, the Beatles et al did? I can't, and that's weird to me.
Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of current acts, but none of them have the permanence of their forbears. We've made disposability part of the deal; built-in obsolescence, almost. The concept of the album as a long-playing body of work is near to collapse - what will sustain the reputations of new acts into the future? A bunch of half-remembered singles? I don't think so. It's a weird future in prospect.
"At the campus of Ole Miss in Jackson,
Mississippi, things got a little out of hand after Barack Obama's
re-election was confirmed, AP reports:
"A protest at the University of Mississippi against the re-election of
President Barack Obama grew into a crowd of about 400 students with
shouted racial slurs as rumors of a riot spread on social media.
Two arrests were reported. University officials say there were no injuries or property damage Tuesday night.
A university spokesman says the gathering began after midnight with
30 to 40 students protesting Obama's re-election but quickly grew.
Rumors exploded on Twitter after student journalists posted a video
calling the gathering a riot.
Chancellor Dan Jones condemned the disturbance, saying most students and faculty are "ashamed" of the actions of a few."
The music is nearly. nearly, nearly finished. Just tinkering, mastering, tricksy little edits that I'm either like 'fuck it, no-one'll care' or 'just get that fixed, and we're away' about. I am actually excited about this. Hardly anyone's heard anything, and I'm hopeful it'll surprise people. It's good enough to, mostly. Vocals are the icing missing on this arhythmical cake, and I'm still in two minds about them. Might try it.
Videos, a YouTube channel, a Twitter feed, a blog, a brand and emails to people in the know will all be prepared prior to 'launch', but the hardest bit is almost there... unless I persevere with six months of multitracked vox and additional real-world sounds, of course. Still no proper name for it though. Will think up something suitable soon.
"Those eyedrops you gave me, they didn't do shit."
Apple's recent strife around iOS 6 and now its latest senior management kerfuffle has got me thinking that I might leave the 'walled garden' when the opportunity next presents itself. It seems to me that Apple hardware, especially its phones, has peaked at the 4. I have a 4S, and Siri is clearly a bolt-on new feature designed to boost sales in the wake of a new chassis or genuinely innovative additions to the phone.
Now that Jobs is no longer barracking everyone involved and driving them to excel, it seems that the company have lost a little internal momentum. Jobs said there was no need to do 7in tablets, and I have a feeling that if he were still around, Apple wouldn't be joining the fray in that space. They have built a reputation on thought leadership: the reason the iPad is bigger than 7in is because of the superior user experience at that size (although why it's not widescreen is beyond me). Following every Tom, Dick and Harry into an already saturated and 'low-rent' market is a backward step, and one that Apple devotees, used to 'their' company leading the way, will be concerned by.
I love Apple, have owned every iPod since their launch and have worked in Apple-centric media in my time. I would never buy a PC, and all my music and movies are on Apple's platforms. I still feel that their current range of laptops is an order of magnitude greater than everything else avaialble, in terms of usability, UX, build quality and reliability. I held off from buying an iPad, though, because for the first time in ten years I couldn't see the piont of an Apple product. When my contract is up next year, I will be going to an Android phone and tablet, and hope to be woo'd back. Apple creates so many brilliant things, I'm sure it won't be long.
EDIT!
Like I said, yo. "The decision to dump Google's maps for its own, and the changes at the
top of the company to eject Scott Forstall and John Browett point to a
subtle downward trajectory"
So, Radiohead were pretty awesome. Lots of new material as expected, and an airing for lesser-known songs like These Are My Twisted Words, which they played the last time we saw them at Reading in 2009. The intro of Everything In Its Right Place contained a few verses of The One I Love by REM - a tribute to one of Radiohead's musical touchstones, who split up this year. Here's Reckoner. Warning: Thom's voice is /absolutely ridiculous/.
They're a subtly different band than they were the last time I saw them - the addition of Portishead and Tricky collaborator Clive Deamer on second drums added considerable heft to In Rainbows-era tracks like Weird Fishes. And with a CV like that, he's no doubt a real song-and-dance man to have on the tourbus, too. The version of !5 Step at the O2 seethed in a way I've always thought the recorded version should have done. See?:
And then, of course, there's Mr Greenwood. Taking time out from casually composing Oscar-nominated minimalist film scores and frightening avant garde Polish classical composers in their eighties with his Ondes Martinot, he was on spectacular form. Johnny's influence is all over how the current 'version' of Radiohead work - one minute he's hopping about behind a nest of keyboards and various bits and pieces during the opener Lotus Flower; the next he's frantically waving at his brother Colin (Radiohead's 'rhythm' guitarist) to get him more involved in the first few songs. I read the other day that Johnny's even programmed a piece of software that allows other members of Radiohead to 'scratch' takes they put down in the studio, DJ-style, and compose in an entirely new way. He does this kind of thing because he's a floppy-haired, rail-thin, multitalented Fucking Genius.
At times it's as if Jimi Hendrix has been given the keys to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and told to being his favourite oscillators and synths to a Radiohead show, and just mess about with them. In football parlance, Johnny is the difference on the night. He even bowed his guitar Jimmy Page-style at one point - a trick I have to try one day.
As for the gig itself - I hated the venue: big, echoey, and transparently devoted to commercial opportunities rather than ensuring that the events it stages are good or not. Sadly a sign of things to come, I think. Also, typically for a big London show, it was full of old blokes who can't tell the difference between a pause between songs towards the end of the set, and the end of the show, because they only go to one gig a year. I never thought watching Radiohead would be punctuated by the sight of men in their middle years heading up the aisles under the mistaken assumption that it'd finished, only to scamper lumpenly back once another song started.
Anywho, Radiohead played:
Lotus Flower
15 Step
Bloom
Kid A
The Daily Mail
Myxomatosis
Climbing Up the Walls
The Gloaming
Separator
These Are My Twisted Words
Like Spinning Plates
Nude
Identikit
Karma Police
Feral
Idioteque
Encore:
Pyramid Song
Staircase
Morning Mr. Magpie
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Reckoner
Cor - what larks. Currently on a rail-rattler on the way to the Greenwich SpaceWok to see Oxford's finest with Mr Mitchell, who casually announced he had a spare with my name on it after we met him and Shaun for drinks the other night.
Not the ideal way to preface what's sure to be a loooong day at work in Leatherhead tomorrow, but hey - gotta take these chances when they come up. Feel a bit pone about leaving T with the post-holiday shambles that is our house too, but as I say, gotta do it.
Haven't seen Radiohead since the epochal Reading show in 2009, an the promise of new material is too good to miss, really. They're just so damned good at doing... whatever it is they do. It's kind of an honour to see them to be honest.
I have always subscribed to the view that they are as significant musically as Pink Floyd. Might sound overblown, but what a big gap in modern music they would leave if they were all of a sudden popped out of existence. You don't get Paranoid Android, or anything like it, from anyone else. The National et al have their moments, but there is only one Jonny Greenwood. Amen.
Given the astonishingly flaky nature of 3G and the fact that I craft these words from the back of a coach on the M4, this might fail horridly, but you never know. Here goes, etc.
Fuck me. What a week. Broke the front door on Tuesday [actually the enquiry into an incident surely to be dubbed Doorgate in years to come is still awaited, but we're going for a Wear and Tear defence at this stage] and lost the fucking back door keys the same night! Unbelievable Jeff!
Cue much shouting and hollering which has of late been resolved, unsurprisingly, by Tam, who ordered a temporary lock via the web. Had to wait for that to arrive this morning, head into work to do something relatively pointless for KBR, then batted it over to Vicky Coach Station to get on the FunBus to Swindoom.
Another bus to Brinkworth will follow, wherein I'm going to lurk in a locals' pub and be collected by T. The total cost of this journey is still only going to be £8. No worries. More later.
To be fair, whereas this article basically proves how poor England are at present, I don’t think we could seriously be expected to go any further in the competition. We did pretty well, generally. Performance wise, we were OK, but the more encouraging things are the intangibles: I like the attitude of the team, I liked the way we defended in formation, and the manager’s more of a realist than the last two were. I don’t like Lampard, generally, but I thought we missed his drive, and if we ever dare to put Oxlade-Chamberlain, Walcott, Wellbeck and Carroll on at the same time, we are an attacking force of sorts.
I have to say I think Wayne Rooney, as an international footballer, is over. Too slow by half, he looked well off the pace throughout, and didn’t create anything of note – one tap-in aside. It’s difficult to reconcile the reputation with what England get from him on matchdays. I can’t imagine him winning a match for us against a last-eight side. Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain both have real pace, however, and might just do that.
Amazing. Hard work, being an opera – albeit one in English – but the staging, lights, performances and general otherworldliness of it were brilliant. Plus, Damon Albarn is basically incapable of doing wrong in my book, and seems to be turning into his generation’s answer to David Bowie. He really does have a fearsomely creative mind, that man. He has a sort of ‘chorus’ role, and spends the whole performance perched on a step at the side of the stage in a leather jacket and jeans, singing 10 or so songs throughout. The music is provided by Albarn on acoustic guitar, and a band of medieval instruments, African stringed things and a jazz drummer.
The Better Half and I are considering going on different holidays this year. Don’t fret – she wants to go rock-climbing, canyoning and various other active things that trigger my fear of heights, and I might just go to the lake district and do a residential guitar course, or something. Could be a laugh, either way. I have also been asked to join a Stone Roses tribute band on bass here in London, which is a noisy and entertaining way to spend Thursday nights in my book.
The essential problem with creativity is its transient. I can't get things done because there are too many things to do, too many things to complete, more things that need starting, and still greater piles of unsorted, scrappy ideas knocking around in the dusty corners of life. Because of this, completing projects is rare.
So, I need to tidy my head up a little. I need a couple of long-term goals, a couple of short-term goals, and one to achieve by the end of the week.
So, the Queen’s job is still safe. Good news. Very much enjoyed hanging around on a soaking wet riverbank waiting for Her Maj to pootle past, and the various festivities laid on in Battersea Park were good fun, too. Miraculously, The Other Half managed to win some serious doshmoolah on a vintage one-arm gambling apparatus, and according to another contraption designed to reveal my worth and age on death, I am to father 12 children and be cold in the ground at 60. This kind of schedule will be news to the Other Half, but hey, God loves a trier.
Saw a documentary on John Cooper Clarke the other night. Life-affirming stuff. I think I might compose some performance poems and take to the stage.
The main difficulty one has with the idea of writing a novel is the physical act of writing a novel. There is nothing to write about; nothing in my head, unless I look for it. Most of the time, though, I don't know where to look. So a circular process starts: want to write, can't write.
Story Pitches (one line)
A girl and her cat are befriended by a unicorn from another dirmension who is convinced that the little girl is his own world's lost queen.
A man wakes up hungover in a side-street in downtown Seoul with no recollection of how he got there. On his wrist is the word 'Jemima'. In his back pocket, a receipt from a nightclub with the words '£23m, 1800' and tomorrow's date. What does he do?
A man is befriended by his future self in the carraige of a train on a long journey. The older man is on the run, and needs to borrow something from his past to return to their future.
The internet, banking and IT records of the Western world were accidentally erased by a careless student on work experience at Cisco, causing the collapse of Western society and an unforeseen run on formerly niche items such as hessian and all-weather trousers.
Have just re-read the post below, and realise that I've actually become one of those snobby hipsters. What a pretentious cockend. Oh well, at least there's now a name for my 'musical' 'project' there...
Igad, it's early. 0730 is no time to be messing about at work while you're supposed to be in bed. Long story short, Someone Important had to be up early, and I thought 'why not?'. Turns out there's very little reason why not, as early mornings are pretty cool. Well, they would be, had I not just schlepped a mile and a half in the sun carrying Someone Important's luggage for them.
Anyway, lots of projects on the go at the moment, personally. Music, writing, a film-editing course in the next month. It's all good. The music side of things is my favourite waste of time at present - having created over 100 little bits of bits and pieces in the last year, I've probably now got 20 I'm happy to promote. The last 10 or so, which have more of a Bop/Oneohtrix Point Never/Emeralds thing going on, I'm confused about. I read something the other day (and for the life of my now can't remember where it was) that said that Boards of Canada-indebted, 'hazy' music - which is how I'd best describe my stuff - is actually heading for a lot of attention. I can believe that, given the amount of press given to the likes of Oneohtrix - who won Pitchfork's Album of the Year prize, and has had the oxblood-trousered among us positively tenting with excitement thanks to his sporadic remixing work). There's several reasons to really like this nascent scene.
It's Home Made
Labels like Warp, 4AD, Software etc put out work by people with little more than some oscillators, a tape machine, some fucked guitar effects and a youtube account. Then of course there's the fact that it's more about 'layers' or 'screes' of sound than melody per se - this music is designed for, and is brilliant at, evoking a mood, a time and, specifically, memory, either accurately recalled or not, of a time long past.You can almost hear the dust. Because it's put together using (often free) bits of software such as GB, and the new wealth of oscillators, synths and 'random' music generators out there, but then mixed with considerable skill, basically anyone with a computer and enough samples can do it. It's a democratic, open-source and entirely welcoming area of an often prohibitively costly genre.
There Is No Right Answer
You can do what you like with this kind of approach. Don't fancy singing? Don't bother. Bored of verse/chorus/verse? Don't have any. Ideas stretch and mould around beats, snippets of dialogue, snippets of snippets of radio hiss, tape echo and the like, creating a style I've read described as 'hypnogogic' and 'hauntological'. Bit wanky, that last one, but you get the piont. I just call it hazy, as it reminds me of half-remembered bits of dreams etc.
The First Person to Put A Decent Tune Out In This Style Wins
Imagine if, say, Burial were to produce Miles Kane's next album, or Flying Lotus (whose output is already all over Radiohead's radar, clearly) was to do Florence Welch or Kasabian's next one? What kind of hellish, cool-as-fuck chart-based randomness would ensue? Obviously it wouldn't happen that way - DJ Shadow, FlyLo, Oneohtrix et al are already well-known to the sinister pop hitmakers of this world, so we can expect boiled-down, Bat For Lashes-esque stuff to appear in the next few months. But a genuine collaboration between a large mainstream act and one of these people? Christ. I'd buy that. Why not?
What does all of this mean for my stuff? I don't really know. I'd like to finish the demos I've been working on, then arrive at a 'greatest hits'-style complilation of the last two phases of work so that there are 15 songs that are great, rather than 30 that obviously need trimming down. I'm then torn between just finishing with them or then adding vocals, traditional instruments and the like to these 'beds' - forming them into more recognisable song structures. Much more work, possibly involving a session singer, but an interesting next step anyway.
Another option is to package up the best bits, design a brand/logo/visual presence/website etc, and stick it on bandcamp. This route would lead to the need for live performance etc, which is problematic, as I don't know how that would really work in practice.
Jesus, projects, eh? They're like buses - buses full of work. Anybother, I have decided that I am going to write 5,000 humourous words on 50 topics, by way of secretly writing two amazing books.
Just because I can. And obviously plot, write, and with The Better Half's help, design a book for Violet by the end of August. Crikey.
The Better Half - not for the first time - said I 'wasn't interested in many things' the other day, which hurt. Fuck that - I'll show her.
Still proud of self after manging 19.6 miles in 1 hour 6 mins on a bike in the gym yesterday - with a calorific cost of 715, no less. Can't do much more than that really. Still not smoking, either.
Had another email from a guy who I got in touch with about a Stone Roses covers band. I was originally really keen, but am now less so, as I have had a practice and realised I'm shit, and also facebooked the guy and he looks like a killer. Might just duck him, I think.
