Author Archives: Tim Hall

They don’t have to be your favourite band, but if you have no time at all for Led Zeppelin, I do have to question whether or not you really like rock music.

Posted on February 3, 2013 by Tim Hall | 3 Comments

I’m experimenting with different menus for different sections of the site, which means hacking some of the PHP code. The idea is to make the different subjects (Music, Testing, etc) look more like a family of separate blogs rather than one single blog. Let me know what you think.

Posted on February 3, 2013 by Tim Hall | 3 Comments

Morphus Rising and Also Eden in York

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Tim Hall

York old-school twin-guitar metal revivalists Morphus Rising will be playing the Duchess in York on Friday, March 15th. They’re always an entertaining live band, and this gig has the added bonus of the excellent “Neo prog my arse” of Also Eden as support. Should be a great night, since both bands are well worth travelling to see.

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You can tell you’re a Panic Room fan if whenever one of the band wanders off into the crowd mid-set and keeps playing (As happened with Blue Coupe last night) you describe it as “Doing a Yatim”. First time I’ve seen a drummer do that, though…

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

A blog post by Steven Waddington uses the metaphor of Twitter being a kind of virtual pub where you can meet and chat with interesting people. By comparison, Facebook can be like an awkward family gathering where you have to avoid bringing up certain subjects because they’ll set off Great Uncle Kenneth…

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Mostly Autumn – Live at the Boerderij

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Tim Hall

As announced on the Mostly Autumn website:

We’re delighted to announce that the DVD recorded at the Boerderij NL last September is ready for pressing.

For 2 weeks only we are offering a pre order package consisting of the the Live at the Boerderij double DVD signed by Olivia and Bryan and the double audio CD at half price – a total of £27.50 (+ P & P).

Get it here!

After 2 weeks the DVD will be on sale at £20 (+ P & P) and the CD at £15 (+ P & P).

Delivery is expected in around 3 weeks.

I was at the show at the Boerderij last September where the DVD was recorded, it was a fantastic night, and the from the promo, the DVD seems to have captured it well. This is a band who have completely reinvented themselves over the past couple of years, and Olivia Sparnenn has found her voice since taking over as lead singer in 2010.

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Fish on the economics of touring

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Tim Hall

Fish has written a very interesting blog post on the economics of touring with a band playing the rock club circuit at his level. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about the cost of live music, how much gigs cost to put on, and exactly where the money goes. (Not much of it to the poor support act, it seems, and people I know who have supported Fish in the past confirm this!). Are there really still people who multiply the ticket price by the number of warm bodies through the door and assume the whole lot goes to the artist?

It’s the sort of thing that causes endless discussions over what the “fair” price of a ticket ought to be. I’ve lost count of the number of gigs I’ve been to that can’t possibly have covered the overheads, especially when charging prices far lower than I’d spent travelling to the gig. One memorable one was was Breathing Space and Mermaid Kiss in a working mens’ club in Mansfield five years ago. A total of twelve musicians, only three quid on the door, and there were just 60-odd people in the audience. It was, I remember, an absolutely stunning and very moving gig, but it was clear nobody there was doing it for the money – because there wasn’t any.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Leave the EU? No thanks.

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Tim Hall

The best argument in favour of continued UK membership of the EU is to look at agenda of the people who want us to leave. The vast majority of them are ideologues of the hard right, with a few hard-leftists and a rather larger group of borderline racist swivel-eyed xenophobes.

What they all have in common is a vision of Britain that is not the sort of country I want to live in. They’re all people for whom any form of social democracy is anathema.

The Tory right tend to keep quiet about their future Britain without all those pesky EU regulations and nonsense about worker’s rights. As quoted in Jonathan Calder’s blog:

Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss, who are all seen as rising stars on the right of the party, describe British workers as among the “worst idlers” in the world, and urge David Cameron to reform work places along the lines of the Asian, rather than the European model.

Yes, they look forward to a nation in which people work far longer hours in much poorer conditions in order to be competitive with the sweatshops of the far-east.

Yes, the Barclay Brothers, the Rothermere family and the pornographer who owns the Daily Express churn out anti-EU propaganda in the newspapers they own, like Britain’s very own version of America’s Koch brothers, and people fall for their simplistic populism.

But read the above quote and ask yourself: Is the Britain they want really the sort of country you want to live in?

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

When bands end rather messily, as frequently happens, why do they always “implode”?

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

The Mars Volta Split

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Tim Hall

The Mars Volta have imploded, live on Twitter, with singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala letting loose a stream of angry tweets telling of his frustration with guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez work with his new project Bosnian Rainbows at the expense of a Mars Volta tour.

The Mars Volta are a band who have done as much as anyone to put progressive rock back on the map. They were favourably reviewed in places like Pitchfork, but they were no style-over-substance act loved only by hipsters; when it came to progressive music, they were the real deal. It’s probably true that their later albums lacked the manic intensity of their early work; their incendiary début “Deloused in the Comatarium” is a record that ought to be in every prog fan’s record collection, and is one of the defining albums of the decade. Combining the complexity and virtuosity of progressive rock with the visceral energy of punk, there was nobody else quite like them. They did indeed sound exactly what a band called The Mars Volta ought to sound like.

I will never forget the one time I saw them live, at Manchester Apollo back in 2006. Eight people on stage, and the entire set, just short of three hours, was a single continuous jam. No support, no interval, and played right through to the curfew, all one seamless piece of music, with an incredible energy and intensity. I remember chatting about it in the pub before a Dream Theater gig a few months later at the same venue, and someone said he wasn’t sure if that was the greatest gig of his life, or whether they were completely taking the piss.

That’s as good as description as any.

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