Author Archives: Tim Hall

I’m still on the distribution list for Fish’s email blog thingy. Today’s email contained this line:

I still had most of the afternoon in my hands and headed back into Soho past the pub we slid into after the Astoria show. Memories rallied – ‘stolen smiles across a crowded mews, desperate eye contact, lingering looks, polite interrogations from whisky breathed, drooly bearded, stoat eyed acolytes with beer bellies stretching black t-shirts as they wait on the bus and the trek back north with the troops pillaging their last orders for the knock out blow to take them painlessly home’

I presume this must be Mostly Autumn’s Astoria launch party back in February. I’m probably the only person there that managed not to recognise him. I’m trying to work out who these “whisky breathed, drooly bearded, stoat eyed acolytes” might be. I can think of at least one candidate

A post in The Guardian Music Blog sets up a challenge. It’s based on a late-night pub discussion where Guardian journo Jon Wilde was challenged by Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller to name his ten favourite songs in just one minute.  He wondered if he should include his real favourites, or list what he thought those two would like. Not that I would have considered them to the ultimate arbiters of taste in the first place.

This is the list I came up with.  I  expect that Weller and Gallagher would think as much of this list as I think of the music of Weller and Gallagher.

• Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song
• Yes – Parallels
• Blue Öyster Cult – Astronomy (1977 live version)
• Rainbow – Stargazer
• Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb
• Fish – Plague of Ghosts
• Marillion – This is the 21st Century
• Karnataka – Talk to Me
• Mostly Autumn – Carpe Diem
• Porcupine Tree – Anaethetize

My list seems to be equally divided between the 1970s and the 2000s (well, almost. Plague of Ghosts is from 1999), with nothing from the two decades in-between. Not sure what that says about me.

(Psychochicken has also had a go at this, and let it loose on the Blogosphere)

I’m listening to Odin Dragonfly’s album Offerings, which arrived in the post this morning. Yes, the music is as stunningly beautiful on record as it is live; I’ll post a full review when I’ve had the chance to give it a few more spins.

When it reached the final song, a cover of Stevie Nicks’ Forsaken Love, this email arrives in my inbox.

I suppose He Who Shall Not Be Named would call this a ‘Fellini Moment’.

A post in Harry’s Place suggests that concert ticket prices are being bumped up to recoup the money being lost because of falling CD sales due to downloading and filesharing.

It seems hard to imagine now that when the Rolling Stones demanded £25 a ticket for a Wembley concert in 1990, it caused eyebrows to be raised. If they did that now it could be considered practically a giveaway. Today with the Stones on stage you can expect to pay £150 for a seat at the back – and if you want to get right up close, you’ll need £350. £90 buys a ticket to see the Police, the best seats in Wembley went for £160 when Madonna performed, and £180 would get you into Robbie Williams’ Hong Kong concert. Elton John broke records in Las Vegas by charging $690 (£345).

I’m not convinced by this argument. I don’t think it’s meaningful for those of us that grew up going to gigs in the 70s and 80s to compare the prices we paid two or three decades ago with the prices we pay for the same acts now. What we’re seeing is 70s and 80s bands that now appeal to affluent fortysomethings rather than skint teenagers; the prices they’re charging reflect the target audience’s ability to pay. And these affluent fortysomethings with 2.4 kids probably don’t to more than a couple of gigs a year.

Newer acts or people in the cottage industry side of the business outside the commercial mainstream aren’t charging anything like those sorts of prices. I want to see more evidence that internet filesharing is responsible for high ticket prices; until I do I’ll be sceptical.

I’ve been to an awful lot of gigs this year; a few have been major established acts, like Deep Purple in June, and Journey back in March, and (cough) Bryan Adams last month, who did charge 30-40 quid for a ticket. But the majority have been lesser known bands, the likes of Porcupine Tree, Mostly Autumn, The Reasoning and Karnataka, charging far less, in some cases less than a tenner.

What I think is happening is there’s too much media hype directed at a relatively small number of bands; as a result everyone that takes their cues from the mainstream media all want to see the same overexposed bands, and the laws of supply and demand force the prices up.