Music Blog

Genesis are apparently just about to reform, only without not just Peter Gabriel, but without Steve Hackett either. In other words, it’s the vacuous 80s incarnation of the band.

Scott sums up my feelings exactly:

Why bother? I don’t ever need to hear Illegal Alien again. The rumors in the past couple years of a full reunion teased me, but this? This just isn’t what I wanted. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of people who will love hearing Invisible Suck again, but I’ll stay home, thank you very much. I know why Gabriel passed, but nothing at all from Hackett’s camp which surprises me, as he’s been one of the ones who really wanted to do this.

According to the official Genesis website, there will be a formal announcement tomorrow.

But I’d mentally written off the reunion as a waste of space once I heard Gabriel wasn’t going to be involved. My opinion of post-Hackett Genesis is much the same as that of rabid Fish fans towards Marillion with Steve Hogarth. For me, the 80s music was bland commercial fluff that hasn’t stood the test of time anything like as well as their earlier music. Watered-down pseudo-Motown played by white people has never really appealed to me.

It wouldn’t even surprise me if it’s a flop; the audience for 1980s Genesis weren’t really music fans, it was the three-CDs a year crowd made up of people called Kevin and Sharon; the demographic who’s present day equivalents listen to Coldplay and James Blunt. I wonder how many of them will know or care about any reunion?

It’s a 1950s jungle movie, probably as politically-incorrect as only a 1950s jungle movie can be.

As our heroic explorers head through the virgin jungle, the sound of tribal drumming can be heard in the distance.

“When the drumming stops, we are doomed”, says one of the native guides.

“What do you mean”, asks the heroic explorer.

“When the drumming stops, we are doomed”, relies the guide.

Then the drumming stops.

“We are doomed”, cries the native guide in panic.

“Why”, cries the explorer.

The guide stares at him and replies, “Bass Solo”.

In a post about music and radio stations, David T of comes up with this gem, deep in the comments thread:

There’s Radio 2, for those who have resigned themselves to their middle aged fate.

Then, there’s 6Music. Which is basically Radio 2. But it plays more Clash.

For a few years, I thought: ‘Oh, this is cool – I’m still into new trendy music, and so I’m never going to get old and die’. Then I realised that things like 6Music, the (excellent) Word magazine, and all those revivals of punk bands etc. were actually just an enormous marketing ploy to make me feel as if I was still in touch with coolness; and were, in fact, the cultural equivalent of wearing lo-slung jeans with a middle aged gut hanging over them.

Indeed. Reminds me very much of that work colleague who I’ve mentioned before.

In fact the only cultural different between the current crop of formulaic new-wave of new-wave of new-wave post-punk retreads and the third-generation prog-rock I listen to is that the prog-rockers never try to pretend that they’re cool and trendy. Oh, and they know more than three chords and therefore play far better actual music. But if you’re reading this blog you knew that already.

As a bit of an experiment, I’ve included an Amazon aStore on this site. It’s still a bit rough and ready, and not yet fully intergrated with the rest of the site, but give it a try.

You’re probably going to call me a total commercial sellout for this.

Like last year, there’s a lot of live music coming up over the next couple of months. This represents as many shows as I saw in the whole of 2004.

• Opeth, Manchester Academy 1, Friday 10th November
• Hayseed Dixie, Manchester Academy 3, Friday 17th October
• Mostly Autumn, Bilston Robin 2, Friday 1st December
• IQ, The Mean Fiddler, London, Saturday 9th December
• Mostly Autumn, Crewe Limelight, 20 December

So far I’ve got tickets for the first four of those. The Crewe Christmas gig isn’t quite a definite for me yet, but Mostly Autumn’s Xmas shows are usually well worth attending.

Rather silly article by Philip Hensher which is supposed to be about why rock musicians shouldn’t attempt anything more ambitious than three-minute pop songs, but really says a lot more about the snobbery of large sections of the classical world.

One of the reasons such enterprises often fail so dramatically – and it’s very difficult to think of any that have lasted more than a couple of performances – is that their composers rarely have the technical ability to record and convey their intentions with any accuracy.

Many rock musicians can’t read music and have what strikes most classical musicians as rather a loose conception of authorship, relying on amanuenses to transform vague ideas into detailed life. In the world of popular music, such transcribers, arrangers or “producers” have always done a great deal more than the public suspects.

Note the scare quotes around the word ‘producer’. I know that it’s not exactly a secret that a lot of best-selling chart acts have extremely limited musical abilities, and their records owe more to whoever’s producing them than anything else. But there are plenty of other rock artists with plenty of compositional and arrangement ability, especially those working in genres outside the fashionable ‘indie’ mainstream. Some can ever read music!

When he starts talking about ‘amanuenses’ (yes, I did have to look that word up), Hensher reveals how little he understands rock music and how it’s created. He can’t get his head round the idea that you can have highly complex and sophisticated music that doesn’t completely revolve around ‘the dots’. If a lot of rock musicians can’t read music, then a lot of classically-trained musicians are incapable of playing by ear. I remember a bassist telling me how frustrating he found it to work with musicians who couldn’t play a note unless they had those dots in front of them. The reason rock works the way it does because of the ubiquity of recording technology, something else he fails to grasp.

Actually, one of the worst things about many rock/classical crossovers is the appallingly lacklustre playing by some of the orchestral musicians. Frank Zappa has railed against this sort of thing on some of his many orchestral collaborations, especially the complete lack of rhythm of some orchestras. Listen to the original recording of Uriah Heep’s “Salisbury”, where what’s actually quite a good composition is spoiled by some very sloppy and out-of-time playing.

The article ends with a rogues gallery of unsuccessful rock/classical collaborations, while conveniently neglecting to list any of the successful ones.

Have Railroad Earth done a Robert Johnson and sold their souls to The Devil in order to play that shredding mandolin and fiddle? Is there an Ümläüt in the making? If you think I’m worrying unnecessarily, look what’s happened to one of their fans.

At work I’ve spent most of the past year’s work as an IT tester working on an extremely complex work allocation function as part of a housing management system. Some of my test data is somewhat humourous; I’ve got aging rock stars as operatives, “Disinfestation of rats and mice” as one of the jobs, and “Sharp pointy stick” as one of the required material items. Little did I know that reality would catch up!

Update: Now it seems that “Disinfestation of Pigeons” needs a Pelican.

Insightful post from HippyDave, on the divide between innovation and nostalgia:

Marillion are a band who have never felt the need to stick slavishly to a particular sound or approach. This is to be applauded, I feel: too many bands endlessly xerox their past work until they paint themselves into a musical corner, and end up like current-day Yes, or The Eagles; fine bands, but essentially playing endless gigs on the nostalgia circuit. Condemned to play their increasingly ancient ‘fan favourites’ ad nauseaum whilst almost totally ignoring anything they’ve written in the last ten years, these bands play to expectations. Their gigs are wall-to-wall ‘classics’, the band feeling that to stay in the game, they have to play to the expectations of their fanbase, who hunger after a particular period in their favourite band’s history. Nostalgia wins, and true artistry suffers. I blame it on lazy listeners. Yes, we all like to hear a few favourites from time to time, but with bands like Yes or The Rolling Stones, that’s all you get. Nothing new and interesting, just the same old songs you’ve heard a million times before.

Actually, with Yes, the problem is that most of their output since the mid-80s has been pretty lacklustre. The one really good song from the mid 90s, “Mind Drive” was in the setlist the last time I saw them, and they played a pretty awesome version too. But I noticed that a lot of the audience didn’t recognise it, presumably they stopped buying Yes’ albums after Tormato.

I’ve been critical of Mostly Autumn in the past for falling into the nostalgia trap. They’re a band who have only been going for ten years and recorded five albums, but recent setlists seem to be dominated by the same old songs that everybody has heard many times before, to the vociferous applause from sizable proportion of the fanbase. Which is a pity when there’s a lot of good recent material that’s not getting played live. Will they end up as their own tribute band? Or will they eventually go down the Marillion route? Or find the happy medium between the two?