Matthew hill says rude things about Stockport
See, Stockport’s the bit that missed the toilet — bounced off the rim, the M60, the Manchester ringroad that is — and settled into the carpet halfway between the Pennines and the Cheshire set.
For those of us who live within the borough of Stockport, that’s fighting talk. On the other hand, perhaps he’s got a point. Stockport town centre is a bit rubbish.  And he’s dead right about the most significant landmark, the railway viaduct.
(Photo by Chris Walkden)
So it’s farewall to The Astoria in Charing Cross Road, which closed last week to make way for a new station as part of Crossrail.
It was grungy, it smelled of sweat and stale beer, some of the door staff were knuckle-draggers, the beer was overpriced and rented rather than bought, and the toilets were hideous. But it was rock and roll, and we all loved it anyway.
The Guardian Music Blog has a lengthy comment thread in which people share their memories of the place. Since I’ve been living in Manchester during the period while I’ve been going to lots of gigs, I haven’t been there as often as some. My fondest memory of the place was the Mostly Autumn album launch back in 2007. Blue Öyster Cult was a great one back in 2002.
One hopes there will be a decent replacement – I’m confident that if there is a market for an Astoria-sized venue somewhere in central London that one will appear. I’m sure the capital could manage with one fewer venue for Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals. Not that it would replace the Astoria overnight – it takes years for a venue to acquire character, and decades to acquire a history. But it will happen.
Electric Nose takes a diversion from trains, and posts his top ten album list for 2008
His comments on the current state of the mainstream make my most acidic comments look mild by comparison.
I hear a lot of talk about the woefully plastic nature of modern music. The crass commercialism of X-Factor and similar chav-fests. The lowest common denominator boybands and ten-a-penny corporate-indie ensembles with NME-compliant haircuts. The cheap-to-run ‘Interchangeable Emmas’ of the karaoke diva world. All true. All stereotypes, of course, but all true. Yet this is just one part of the world of music. In fact, I’d suggest, this is more the world of television than the world of music. I’ve no doubt the big money comes from folk tapping out premium-rate voting numbers on their phones while revenue from people actually buying ’20 Menstrual Greats’ from Asda probably barely covers the ‘fruit and flowers’ these days.
Electric Nose doesn’t allow comments (Bah!) so I’ll have to use my own blog instead. Nice to see four of my own top ten in the list, including The Reasoning’s wonderful “Dark Angel”. More significantly, all but one of the others are albums I’ve not actually heard; some of them are almost certainly going to be worth checking out.
Demains I realise I have actually seen live – they supported Anathema back in November. Due to a combination of Northern Rail playing silly buggers and the most slow-moving queue to enter a venue I’ve ever seen, I didn’t get to see the start of their set, but I don’t remember being blown away by them live. But a lot of other people whose views I respect like the album.
There’s been a lot of talk on the interweb tubes recently about The Long Tail advocated by Chris Anderson
Helienne Lindvall, writing in the Guardian, cites a survey that appears to question the existence of the long tail, but on closer examination appears to show that’s she hasn’t really understood what the long tail theory says; you’ll get no understanding of the length or width of the tail when you’re not looking below the neck. Quite a few commenters have pointed this out, although you should ignore the twit who equates going to a gig where a member of the band greets you by name with ‘giving money to buskers’.
The Jinni Blog makes a very imporatant point, that the real importance of the Long Tail is not economic, but cultural. If you’re only interested in the size of Simon Cowell’s bank balance or which corporate indie clone bands get playlisted on Radio One, then you might not care about the long tail. But as far as I’m concerned, the long tail is where most of the worthwhile music can be found. More importantly, it’s where the mainstream will be getting it’s new ideas from.
Just about all the music I love lies deep within the long tail. Of my top ten albums of 2008, no less than seven were purchased directly from the band, either from their websites or from merchandise stands at gigs. And four of those were pre-orders, where fans pay for an album before it’s recorded, instead of the band getting an advance from a record company.
Long live the tail.
The BBC has a list of so-called “tastemakers” who tell us the music that we’re going to be force-fed with over the next twelve months. Their 15 pundits are the A-list of all the people responsible for the utter crapness of the mainstream music scene with it’s wall-to-wall landfill indie and Asda-pop – the controller of Radio One, the appalling editor of the NME, the producer of “Later with Jools Holland”, they’re all there.
I wonder if the people who’s annual record purchases consist of 2 or 3 CDs a year from Asda don’t realise that all the music the mainstream will hear is pre-selected by such a small clique of people, and how cosy the relationship between the BBC, the major record companies and the music press has become. Do they know they’re sheep, or do they just not care?
Personally I think BBC radio and TV is failing to satisfy the public service remit of the BBC charter by it’s marginalisation of all but a narrow range of genres of popular music, and I find it hard to justify the existence of some BBC radio channels in their present form.
After many years, the original Karnataka mailing list TheStorm is finally closing it’s virtual doors. Moderator HippyDave will be leaving the archives up there in read-only form, but new discussions should be directed to the web forums for the three bands that arose from the ashes of the old lineup, the new Karnataka, Panic Room and The Reasoning.
Many thanks to HippyDave for moderating this list, along with a great many others (where does he find the time?)
Through a case of very bad timing, I discovered the music of the original Karnataka just before they unexpectedly split up, and never got to see that incarnation of the band live. I joined the mailing list just after the split to find out what on earth had happened. I didn’t actually find out, but did meet a great number of really cool people, many of whom I’ve subsequently met at gigs.
And it was on that list that I first heard of the various successor bands. Without that I doubt that I’d have travelled down to Swansea in the aftermath of a hurricane to witness The Reasoning’s very first gig, or to Lydney in the remote depths of the Forest of Dean to witness the first live appearance of Panic Room.
So a final farewell to the list, but almost certainly not farewell to anyone on it, who I’m sure we’ll see on one or more forums, and at gigs.
Yes folks – Electric Nose is back! Still doesn’t allow comments, though 
Some of my highlights (and low points) of the 30+ live gigs I attended this year.
Most hard-rocking gig by a newish band
The Reasoning, when they blew the roof off Crewe Limelight. I’ve seen this band six times this year, and they’ve never disappointed. This one was the best of the six.
Most hard-rocking gig by a bunch of grizzled veterans
The mighty Uriah Heep at Manchester Academy 2. They were good the last couple of times I’ve seen them playing greatest hits sets. This time they took the gamble of playing their new album “Wake the Sleeper” in it’s entirety, which might have flopped if the album hadn’t been up to scratch. But with an excellent album, it turned into a triumph.
Most emotionally moving gig
This has to be Breathing Space at Mansfield. This was about two weeks after the death of lead singer Olivia Sparnenn’s father Howard from a brain tumour. The whole show was intensely moving, especially the final encore of the Mostly Autumn song “The Gap is Too Wide”. Not long after this I lost my temper with a Guardian Journalist who insisted that “Amy Winehouse is an icon because she can articulate pain and heartbreak in her songs”. He just doesn’t get it.
Most totally bonkers gig
Has to be The Mars Volta at Manchester Apollo. A three hour set, no support, no interval, and they played right up to the curfew without going off and coming back for an encore. And the whole thing was one continuous jam. Despite owning all four of their studio albums, I recognised very little of what they actually played. It was intense, complex and very, very loud. Even after nine months I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.
Worst performance by a so-called classic artist.
Andy Fairweather-Low at the Cambridge Rock Festival. “I’m a great sixties icon – you have to bow down and worship me”. Reminded me of The Kinks at the 1981 Reading Festival in 1981, and not in a good way. Tedious set of 50s and 60s covers, made no attempt to connect with the audience, and gave me the impression he was was playing for the benefit of Radio Caroline rather than the people in the hall.
The gig that didn’t actually happen
Panic Room at the Peel where the power failed, and we didn’t get any music apart from 20 minutes of the support band. Fortunately I did get to see the excellent Panic Room a further three times, and there’s a rematch of the cancelled gig on January 31st next year – see you there!
I wasn’t originally going to arrange these in order, but in the end I did it anyway, just to annoy those people who hate ranked lists.
10. Van der Graaf Generator – Trisector
Reduced to a trio after the departure of David Jackson, this album proves the slimmed-down version of the 70s progressive rock veterans can still deliver an album in the same league as their 2005 comeback album “Present”
9. Magenta – Metamorphosis
Magenta are very much old-school Prog, wearing their Yes, Genesis and Mike Oldfield influences on their sleeve, playing 20 minute epics with titles like ‘The Ballad of Samual Layne’. They get away with it though superior songwriting and arrangement, and stunning individual performances from Christina Booth on vocals and Chris Fry on guitar.
8. Josh and Co – Through These Eyes
This solo album from Bryan Josh of Mostly Autumn appeared out of the blue at the end of November. Has a similar sound and production to Mostly Autumn’s last album, but the songs are looser and more contemporary-sounding. Quite dark in places, playfully self-indulgent in others, and Bryan cuts loose on the guitar in a way that shows how much he’d been holding back on recent Mostlies releases; I haven’t heard him shred like that for ages. Although Bryan naturally handles most of the vocals, there are also some quite stunning contributions from Olivia Sparnenn which really make me look forward to the next Breathing Space album
7. Uriah Heep – Wake the Sleeper
Nine years since their last studio album, and the mighty Heep are back with a powerful statement that the hard rock veterans are very much in business. Ironically for a band who have spent much of their career in the shadow of the much bigger and more successful Deep Purple, they’ve now come up with something that blows away anything Purple have done in the last nine years. It compares very favourably with their best output from their 70s heyday, and I don’t think they’ve ever rocked harder than this.
6. Panic Room – Visionary Position
The debut from the band that grew out of the ashes of Karnataka, fronted by Anne-Marie Helder. Three years in the making, it’s a rich multilayered album with a real mix of styles from hard rock, folk, pop and full-blown prog which was well worth the wait.
5. Pineapple Thief – Tightly Unwound
Pineapple Thief are one of the new generation of progressive rock bands who mix elements of 70s progressive rock with more contemporary influences to give a streamlined modern sound rather than produce a pastiche of older bands. You can hear the influence of both early Radiohead and Porcupine Tree on this album, although thankfully we’re spared Thom Yorke-style whining vocals, and there is definitely no shortage of tunes.
4. Mostly Autumn – Glass Shadows
A strong release which is a marked improvement on the patchy and badly-produced “Heart Full of Sky” even if it doesn’t quite match their best work. Written entirely by Bryan Josh and Heather Findlay this time around, it’s more mainstream melodic rock than the celtic-tinged prog of their early work, but retains the 70s vibe that’s still a major element of their sound. Musically it has hard rockers, shimmering piano ballads, dreamy atmospheric numbers and soaring guitar-driven epics. Lyrically they’re certainly not singing about Hobbits any more, this is a true life story about heartbreak, joy, tragedy and hope.
3. Opeth – Watershed
2005′s “Ghost Reveries” wasn’t an easy album to follow, but Opeth managed to equal it with “Watershed“, which contains all their trademark elements; piledriving heavy passages alternating with delicate guitar harmonies, Mikael Ã…kerfeldt’s vocals swapping back and forth between harsh ‘cookie monster’ and heartfelt clean vocals, typically all in the same song. It’s not an easy listen, songs average ten minutes, and don’t have anything as crassly commercial as conventional verses or choruses. But when you get what they’re doing, the result can only be described as ‘symphonic’.
2. Marillion – Happiness is the Road
This double album is a vast improvement on last year’s patchy “Somewhere Else“. The two disks are conceived as two separate single albums; the atmospheric “Essence“, and the rockier “The Hard Shoulder“. Both contain plenty of gems and very little filler. Stylistically it’s the same contemporary sound as recent albums rather than a reversion to an earlier sound. Steve Hogarth is on great form, using his voice as much as a musical instrument rather than solely to express the lyrics, and Steve Rothery demonstrates in many places why he’s one of the best rock guitarists out there.
1. The Reasoning – Dark Angel
It’s difficult to choose just one album as my album of the year, but in the end I’ve settled for The Reasoning’s second album. Last year’s debut “Awakening” was one of my top albums of last year, a great mix of melodic hard rock with progressive flavouring, with three-part vocal harmones and a powerful twin lead guitar attack. This one takes things to another level, adding some metal to the mix, full of melodies that get stuck in your brain, sublime vocals from Rachel Cohen, and some amazing but never self-indulgent playing from new guitarist Owain Roberts.
The Observer Music Magazine’s top Twenty Tracks of 2008 just makes me want to beat my head against the table. They claim to cover everything “From Abba to Zappa”, but the reality is they’re hopelessly biased towards ‘Landfill indie’ and ‘ASDA-Pop’. Just read their list and weep. And watch it get shredded in the comments.
A few commentators tried to defend the list, with comments like this.
..shock horror mainly contains tracks that most people..the ones with lives, will actually have heard.
So to him, ‘having a life’ equates to spending your time listening to daytime Radio 1. Bah!
While I don’t expect them to acknowledge the existence of the independently-released prog-rock releases that have defined my year, I pointed out that bands like Metallica, AC/DC and even Guns’n'Roses have all released critically-acclaimed and massively-selling albums this year, yet are conspicuous by their absence on a list which still finds space for the lumpen indie-rock of Oasis. You really have to have been living under a rock not to have heard of those bands. Yet they’re not even on OMM’s radar screen.
Another commentator wondered what age group this list is aimed at. But I don’t think there’s anything like the generation gap in music that existed 20 or 30 years ago – when I find myself liking some of the same bands as my 13-year old niece, the generation gap is as good as dead, at least as far as music is concerned.
While there’s always going to be acts heavily marketed to a particular generation (usually those too young to have developed a musical taste of their own), any band with a degree of musical substance is going to have cross-generational appeal nowadays. You can tell by the mix of ages you see at gigs by bands like Opeth or Porcupine Tree; they appeal to both grizzled 40-something rockers and emo teens in significant numbers. I’ve even seen teenagers at a Uriah Heep gig this year!
Anyway, I think the target audience of this list is people who neither know nor care about music, but want to know the right names to drop at dinner parties in order to appear cool and sophisticated. And people like that probably get the music they deserve.
My own top 20 (or more probably top ten) list will appear on this blog in due course.