Music Blog

That band readers of this blog with have heard of by now get a mention in an Independent article claiming that in the age of downloading, the CD is far from dead.

Someone who does make a living from his albums is Bryan Josh, the leader of the nu-prog-rock band Mostly Autumn who, over nine years of diligent touring, have built up enough of a following to fill places like London’s Astoria, without any major-label assistance. This week’s Heart Full of Sky album is their sixth studio one.

“It has been full-time for five years now,” Josh explains. “We fund the band through record sales and ticket sales, selling albums at concerts and through our website. That generates enough money to enable the band to keep going. For the initial funding of an album, we make a special limited edition – the last one was two and a half thousand – and sell them first, which covers our costs. Then afterwards we release a standard edition on general release.

“If it goes as normal, we’ll probably do about 12,500 of Heart Full of Sky. Anything above that depends on publicity and radio-play. But we generate our fanbase from people coming to see us, which is the best way. We do two main tours a year, and some festivals, writing and recording the albums in between. It keeps us busy – too busy, in fact, so we’re trying to reduce the number of dates we do, but do bigger ones, because we like to put on a good light show.”

‘nu-prog’? That’s a new genre on me. I prefer the ‘York/Swansea Sound’, since there are enough bands in it to qualify as a ‘scene’.

As for the general thrust of the Independant article; no, the CD album is not dying. What downloading might kill off is the sorts of albums made up from two or three singles plus a load of filler. We may see a return to the days when the music world is split into ‘singles artists’ whose work is largely downloaded, and ‘album artists’, who will continue to sell most of their work on CD.

Fish and Heather Findlay have announced their engagement. And read the whole thing; I know Fish is an incurable romantic, but you couldn’t make stuff like this up!

After hearing of Fish’s presence in the audience at Mostly Autumn’s Astoria show two weeks ago, I’m sure I’m not the only person who isn’t really surprised by this. Congratulations to both of them.

Deep Purple don’t want people to buy their newly released album, a dodgy live album recorded in 1993 as the Mk2c lineup of the band were in the final throes of disintegration. As quoted in The Guardian:

Speaking on this morning’s Today program on Radio 4, Gillan explained that tensions within the band led to a dreadful performance on the evening in question, saying, “It was one of the lowest points of my life – all of our lives, actually.”

Gillan believes his label Sony BMG were wrong to release the record and that they were “opportunist fat cats”.

It seems that every time a band changes labels, their old record company always churns out as much cynical cash-in product as they can get away with; too often they manage to find creative ways of ensuring the band don’t get a single penny of royalties from the sales. The other victims are the fans, especially new ones, who find themselves having to sift through dozens of dodgy compilations containing the same songs in different orders, or dubious-quality live recordings.

When the revolution comes, the cynical record company executives who oversee the production of this drek will be sent to the same re-education camp in Rotherham as the people who invented DRM.

Interesting interview with Deep Purple, in, of all places, The Sun. Ian Gillan says some predictably rude things about Ritchie Blackmore (“I was brilliant and he was a tw*t”), and doesn’t think much of Blackmore’s Night. But he also has some telling things to say about the music business. On downloading, for instance:

It’s short-sighted. They should have embraced the digital revolution. All the creative people I knew in the studios — managers, producers writers — were thrilled when this whole thing came along.

We all had this vision of the great jukebox in the sky; how great it would be to download movies, anything, how great it would be. The industry itself saw this as a threat. Instead of embracing it, they fought it.

I’ve often said that it was a digital revolution is a threat.. to their existing business model that revolved around maximising sales from the smallest possible roster of massively hyped artists. The digital revolution could result in a completely different model; much more of the ‘long tail’ with a huge range of artists playing different styles of music, promoted by electronic word-of-mouth, and a vibrant live scene.

The big media cartels just don’t get it. As Ian Gillan says:

There are a lot of people who have no respect for music.

There was a meeting at AOL/Time-Warner, which a friend of mine was at. And the great Ahmet Ertegun from Atlantic Records — one of the great record company guys, what a history — was summoned because he hadn’t spent his budget for the previous year.

They were going to cut next year’s budget and he was trying explain to them that sometimes he invested it, sometimes he saved it, so he could work on an artist he was nurturing.

Anyway, he was told, just a buy a yacht just spend it. And there were these two blokes who had just joined the board and one said about Ertegun: “Who the f***’s that guy?”

And the other said: “I don’t know, some sort of content provider”. That pretty much summed it up how much interest these mega corporations have.

It’s looking like I’m going to exceed last years’s 14 gigs; I’ve been to four already and it’s only February! This is what’s coming up in the first part of the year. I’ve also got one train show and one RPG convention on the diary so far; both of these have clashed with gigs I’d liked to have gone to in previous years..

March 18 – Karnataka, Manchester
23-25th March – Mostly Autumn Convention, Ringwood (Tickets booked!)
April 19 – The Reasoning, Crewe
April 20 – Porcupine Tree, Preston
April 22 – Deep Purple/Styx (Gotta do one enormodome show once in a while)
(2 June – DEMU Convention in Burton on Trent)
7 June – Either Mostly Autumn at Crewe, or Marillion in Liverpool (awkward dilemma!)
8 June – Mostly Autumn, Bilston
16 June – Marillion, London
30 June – Mostly Autumn, Bury
(6-8 July, Stabcon in Stockport)

Not all these are definite yet; I still have to decide who to see on 7th June, for instance. April’s three gigs in four days is going to be a killer; Monday at work is going to be hell.

I’m really looking forward to the MA convention; at the last count there were going to be eight sets by four different bands over the three days, plus a whole load of other fun events.

Update Tickets ordered for Marillion (in London), Porcupine Tree and Purple. There’s also a gig by Breathing Space in Newton-le-Willows (of Vulcan Foundry fame) on June 22 which I could well be going to.

In just a few minutes, I’ll be off to the Astoria Theatre for the official launch party for Mostly Autumn’s new album “Heart Full of Sky”. Just the thing I need to get over a really crap week at work.

Quite a few music forums have interminable threads where people list the CDs they’re recently been playing. They’re often illuminating about what makes fans of certain bands tick, and can provide useful pointers towards bands worth checking out.

But this weekend I’ve had my parents (known as ‘The Crumblies’) to stay, so I’ve been restricted to playing “Crumbly-friendly” music. So I started with Opeth’s “Still Life” It was a Xmas present from them, so they seemed to want to find out what it sounded like. I did warn them it went “Hrrrrrrrggghhh”, but…

It lasted about three minutes, two of which were the acoustic intro before the Mikael Åkerfeldt’s death vocals kicked in.

After that:
Apocalyptica plays Metallica on four cellos
John Lord: Before I Forget
Miles Davis: A Kind of Blue
Steve Hackett: Wild Orchids
Renaissance: Live at the Carnegie Hall