Is this the end of Readers Recommend?

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Tim Hall

Sad news that, barring a last-minute reprieve, The Guardian is calling time on the weekly Readers’ Recommend column.

For those not familiar with it, every Thursday evening the Guardian website puts up a post containing the week’s subject, for example “Songs about mountains“, and readers are asked to nominate songs in the comment section. It will always run to several hundred comments. The “Guru” of the week must read all the comments, listen to as many of the nominated songs as possible and assemble a playlist which will be published the following week.

It has been running for a decade now.

For the early years the Guru was one of The Guardian’s own writers, beginning with Dorian Lynskey who frustratingly never chose any of the songs I nominated. More recently there have been rotating volunteer Gurus selected from the community itself under the stewardship of Peter Kimpton, and that appears to have given the whole thing a new lease of life. It’s certainly drawn me back in and I’ve seen significantly more of my nominations make the playlist, including Panic Room and Mostly Autumn songs.

It’s spawned a remarkable and unique sub-community within The Guardian’s site. I cannot think of any other long-lasting music community that hasn’t been based around a shared love of particular band or genre; the tastes of the RR community is all over the map, and that is its greatest strength. It has one and only one cardinal rule, “thou shalt not rubbish anyone else’s taste“.

I have no idea why The Guardian have decided to pull the plug. It’s may be that The Guardian just don’t know quite what to do with something that’s a bit of an outlier compared to the rest of the site. Perhaps we don’t fit the 25-45 age group demographic that Guardian Music wants to target. Perhaps they just don’t like something they can’t gatekeep? Look at the disgraceful way they arbitrarily disqualified things from the Readers’ Album of the Year poll because it was the wrong sort of music nominated by the wrong sort of fans. RR just doesn’t back the mid-life-crisis consensus groupthink of too many of the paper’s own writers, so it has to go.

It’s being suggested that Readers Recommend doesn’t fit because Guardian Music is more interested in celebrity lifestyle reporting than in expressing deep passion for actual music. If you look at their writer’s picks for their best articles of the year, what appears to be the top two are both awful clickbait thinkpieces about Taylor Swift and Kanye West which are all about identity politics with little to say about the actual music. I’m sure there is a place for that sort of thing, but not at the expense of actual music writing.

It’s a shame. Readers Recommend is something unique and special, and I hope the extended community survives in some form. As I’ve always said, online forums and social media platforms come and go, but what endures and what really matters is the relationships you make through them.

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It’s galling to see Lemmy being eulogised by publications that would never have given Motörhead the time of day during their prime. The irony is that Lemmy always represented everything they kept telling us rock’n'roll was supposed to be about.

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Lonely Robot, The Scala

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Tim Hall

The album “Please Come Home” by Lonely Robot, the solo project from John Mitchell of It Bites, Frost* and Arena fame was a definite highlight of the early part of 2015. He had previously performed some of the material live as an acoustic duo with pianist Liam Holmes, but the full-band showcase gig with an array of special guests at The Scala in London a few days before Christmas promised to be an Event.

The capable support band, Helz deserve a mention. Their highly melodic twin-guitar prog-metal relied on solid composition rather than technical showboating, though they still found room for a few bursts of fluid lead guitar. They succeeded at exactly what what a support band is supposed to do, setting the scene for the main event.

Lonely Robot’s stage set featured an array of pop culture detritus; Star Wars and Dr Who toys, a Space Shuttle, an 80s 8-bit computer and a big old-fashioned television. The show began with a NASA astronaut removing his helmet and turning on the TV to show imagery from the early days of space exploration, before the band came on and launched into the spiralling guitar-shredding instrumental “Airlock”.

For this gig and one earlier show in Holland John Mitchell put together a four-piece band featuring drummer Craig Blundell, who had played on the album, plus Caroline Campbell on bass and Lauren Storey on keys. While you shouldn’t expect a band put together for a couple of one-off gigs to display the onstage chemistry of a band who have been touring together for years, they lacked a coherent visual image; the stage outfits made them look not only like members of completely different bands, but completely different genres.

Musically, though, it was an altogether different matter, and for a progressive rock audience that’s the important thing. They were exceedingly tight and the entire album came over powerfully live, going from the industrial metal of “God vs Man” to the 80s pop of “Boy in the Radio” within the first few songs. Craig Blundell in particular was a force of nature on drums. Peter Cox, Heather Findlay and Kim Seviour all reprised their guest roles from the album and enhanced the show without stealing the spotlight, as did Mitchell’s partner-in-crime with Frost*, Jem Godfrey. The sound quality was excellent down the front, though reports from further back suggested the mix had too much drums and not enough vocals.

Lonely Robot

The consistent quality of the material made it hard to single out highlights, but “Oubliette”, the duet with former Touchstone singer Kim Seviour with the chorus “Don’t Forget Me” was particularly poignant given that it might her last appearance on stage for a while. In contrast, “Why Do We Stay” with Heather Findlay foretold John Mitchell adding yet another band to his CV, as he will be joining her band for their tour in April.

With the album “Please Come Home” forming the whole of the main set, the encores began with an absolutely epic drum solo from Craig Blundell. Jem Godfrey returned for the intense swirling tapestry of notes that was “Black Light Machine” by Frost*. Finally came a progged-up cover of Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” with Kim and Heather joining on backing vocals.

As the last significant gig in progressive rock’s calendar, it made a great finale to the year. John Mitchell has already said that there will be a follow-up album to “Please Come Home”, which made this less of a one-off showcase, more the start of something bigger.

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RIP Lemmy

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Tim Hall

Lemmy has left us, just days after his 70th birthday.

He was an outlaw figure whose raw and dirty rock’n'roll occasionally irrupted into the safe world of top 40 pop and scared the life out of Top of the Pops presenters. But by the end he’d become a national treasure, revered even by those who hated his music during his prime.

There was nobody else quite like him.

Although ill-health meant he was a diminished figure on stage in his final years, he could still cut it in the studio right up to the end, as the barnstorming final Motörhead album “Bad Magic” was to prove.

Though he was best known for Motörhead, his stint with Hawkwind in the 1970s shouldn’t be forgotten. He sang lead on their big hit “Silver Machine”, of course, as well as writing “Motorhead”, “Lost Johnny” and “The Watcher”, which he would later re-record with Motörhead. But it was his distinctive and unique bass playing where he really made his mark. Listen to “Lord of Light” from the definitive live album “Space Ritual” for example; when Hawkwind toured five years ago it took two bass players to do that song justice live. Or the combination of his bass riff and Simon House’ Mellotron opening “Assault and Battery” on his last album with the band, “Warrior at the Edge of Time”.

Lemmy was the embodiment of the spirit of rock’n'roll. If he was an In Nomine character, he would have been word-bound, and there are no prizes for guessing the word. He didn’t just play rock’n'roll, he lived it.

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Heather Findlay Band to tour in 2016

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Tim Hall

John Mitchell and Heather FindlayHeather Findlay has announced a tour in April 2016, to support the album “The Illusion’s Reckoning.

Because Dave Ketzner and Dave Kilminster are both unavailable due to other commitments, the tour is billed as The Heather Findlay Band rather than Mantra Vega, though they’re promising that they’ll be playing the album in full along with a few selected older favourites.

For this tour it will be a six-piece band including Angela Gordon on keys and flute, and John Mitchell on lead guitar alongside Chris Johnson and the rhythm section of Alex Cromarty and Stuart Fletcher.

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Music Journalism in an Age of Niches

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Tim Hall

The shenanigans over the Guardian end-of-year list are surely a sympton of far deeper problems. The internet-era music world is fragmented into myriad overlapping niche scenes, and it’s harder for one publication to cover it all. But to cover a small subset of niches and pretending it’s the “mainstream” doesn’t work. Because beyond the mass-market corporate pop of Adele and Coldplay there is no mainstream. It’s all niches.

The Guardian is full of former NME types who have grown accustomed to acting as gatekeepers and tastemakers. But it’s a different world now; what worked in 1995 isn’t going to fly in 2015. If a broadsheet wants to continue with in-depth music coverage and wants to continue to be relevant, it needs to reinvent itself.

To start with, they must engage with those niche scenes they had been pretending weren’t relevant, and ensure they have the writers, either staff or freelancers, who understand those scenes.  Only then can they genuinely have have the broad coverage of music they currently only claim to.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Have The Guardian just rigged their readers’ poll?

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Tim Hall

Disgraceful behaviour by The Guardian for The best albums of 2015 – readers’ picks 

We are in accord! For the first time any of us can recall, Guardian readers and Guardian writers had the same two favourite albums of the year, in the same order. This year, in a rare moment of rigour, we decided to exclude obvious attempts to game the system – so, Tinker’s Mitten (“like a beefier Flying Pickets”, one reader suggested, enticingly), Jodie Marie and Karnataka, we’re sorry; but next time you suspect your admirers might be voting for you en masse in a poll, tell them not to all vote at the same time (we record exactly when each vote is cast, for exactly this reason). Had they only spread their votes out a little more, all might well have featured in our top five.

So The Guardian admit to rigging the ballot, and the results then just happen to validate the boring consensus picks of the paper’s own critics.

Sorry, Guardian, but this stinks to high heaven.

If you run a poll with a public ballot on the internet with a very low barrier to entry, you surrender your riight to gatekeep the results, and accept the risk that outsiders might come and gatecrash your party. This happened last year when veteran punk satirists Half Man Half Biscuit was voted readers’ album of the year. The general consensus at the time was “Good on them. Anyone else could have done the same”.

What’s different this year, aside from Karnataka not being sufficiently fashionable for the gatekeepers? Running a ballot, then changing the rules when you get a result you don”t like really is out of order.

The irony is that had they not excluded Jodie Marie and Karnataka, they wouldn’t have have ended up with an all-male top five.  So much for the diversity The Guardian prides itself in.

A couple of minutes Googling reveals that there is no such band as “Tinker’s Mitten”. This might be because The Guardian got their name wrong, or it might be that The Guardian got pranked with votes for a fake band.  But Karnataka and Jodie Marie are very real. Were they just accidental collateral damage?

At this point the best thing The Guardian can do is admit that they screwed up, and republish a top ten (not a top five) with both Karnataka and Jodie Marie reinstated.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

The good thing about reading individual’s end-of-year lists like Scott’s or Skin Back Alley’s is the way they highlight things you may have missed over the course of the year. It’s also why the aggregated lists by mainsteam publications are useless; all the quirky individual choices get squeezed out by the predictable consensus choices.

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Farewell King Coal

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Tim Hall

Farewell King Coal

Poignant photo (taken from Facebook) from Ferrybridge signalbox marking the final shift at Kellingly Collery, the last deep coal mine in Britain.  The end of an era.

The histories of the British coal and railway industries have been intertwined from the very beginning. The first railways were built to carry coal. If you look at a historial rail atlas, all of Britain’s major coalfields were covered in a maze of lines, most of them now long closed.  Even after privatisation, coal was still one of the major freight traffics on the network.

The railways still carry a fair bit of coal, mostly foreign imports plus a handful of opencast mines in Scotland and Wales. But as CO2-emitting coal-burning power stations are being phased out it’s already in steep decline. Relatively new bogie coal wagons are  starting to go for scrap because there’s no longer enough work for them.

The closure of the last deep pit marks the beginning of the end.

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Traditional RPGs vs. Story Games

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Tim Hall

I do not understand the holy war between “Traditional RPGs” and “Story Games”.

I’ve played many great immersive traditional games over the years, using systems from AD&D to RuneQuest to GURPS to Traveller to Call of Cthulhu. There was one game of In Nomine that was so intense it ended up filling my dreams that night.

I’ve also played some highly enjoyable Forge-school narrative-style games such as Primetime Adventures and InSpectres. Indeed, of my favourite new games of recent years has to be Umlaut: The Game of Metal, which screamed “Play Me!” the first time I read it, and every session has turned out to be huge fun. That’s a pure story game; there’s no GM, the mechanics are boardgame-like and revolve around narrative control. Every session have been memorable for all the right reasons.

But here’s the thing; they are really two different kinds of game. They both do what they do well. There is really no point in fighting a holy war over which one of the two is best.

It seems to me that this holy war is driven by personal feuds between rival cliques of game designers and their supporters. So we get that risible claim that the players of traditional RPGs were “brain damaged”, and the depiction of story game advocates as “swine”. All of which leaves the most actual players bemused and wondering quite what all the fuss is about.

It all reminds me of the messy Protofour vs. Scalefour battles in the world of model railways back in the late 1970s. And I still have absolutely no clue what that one was all about.

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