Comments on: The Guardian Needs More Dom Lawsons

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 17:26:10 +0000

The thing is, any band with with a dedicated fanbase could have encourage their fans to vote, it’s just nobody other than The Enid managed to motivate their fans in sufficient numbers to affect the results.

And yes, James Walsh was being heroically snotty. How dare a bunch of uncool prog fans gatecrash his cosy little party?

By: Flightless

Flightless — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 17:04:45 +0000

On an interesting tangent to this The Enid made No 9 in the readers AotY list. The bits I found ironic were the comments.

The first was somebody saying that open polls were bad because they allowed bands’ fans to vote. The implication was they’d rather be dicated to by press gatekeepers.

The second was James Walsh doing the ‘I listened to it so you don’t have to’ then deriding it as “heroicaly naff prog”. As usual this reminded me of your comments from a while ago about mainstream criticism being broken.

There seems to be a blindness to the ideas that a) people who read the Guardian actually like prog already & find it’s music coverage cringeworthy b) if more people listened to prog they might find they liked it and most importantly c) that prog does not equal naff

By: PaulE

PaulE — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:48:54 +0000

Give the Grauniad credit for at least hiring the guy. It suggests they acknowledge that they have weak spots in their coverage. They just need a bit more persuading that they need a few more similarly independent writers.

These”add the points up” end of year charts are a bit meaningless – if the number of votes determined quality then the charts would be better. But at least they get people talking about the year’s releases.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 21:15:26 +0000

So say a lot of people, with the exception of all but one of The Guardian’s writers, it seems.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 21:11:06 +0000

FYI, Swans’ “The Seer” is indeed a phenomenal record.