Music Blog

This one is a bit happier that the last piece of news about the band. I’m not normally in the habit of posting about the private lives of musicians, but now things have become public, I’m linking to this post on the Unofficial Mostly Autumn Forum, which is itself a repost from another forum, by a well-known tall Scottish fellow who I’ve seen live once or twice.

As some of you may have guessed I have been “dating” a young lady by the name of Heather Findlay since December. Heather is lead singer with “Mostly Autumn” and despite our occupations we have been seeing each other regularly in recent months as she lives in York a mere 2 hour train journey away from Dunbar station. Heather is out with the band playing at Baja Rock this week (ironically Marillion are out there too ) . If it hadn’t been for parental duties I would have been out there on a special guest spot – who with would have been an interesting question. Her band are on tour in the coming months and thankfully it appears we are out at the same time. I will be singing a couple of numbers with them at the Scottish shows on the 23rd march at Glasgow Uni. and Lochgelly Town Hall on the 24th (check their website out for details) To show how serious we are Heather has become a commited Hibby and has so far been at three matches and has tickets for the semi final in Glasagow on the 2nd April As you already know she will be singing at the convention and we have already discussed a number of songs for both the acoustic and electric shows. Me happy

Why do I start thinking about Robert Fripp and Toyah Wilcox?

I’m wondering whether I can make any dates on the Mostly Autumn Spring tour. I’m not quite like Scott, who follows his favourite band all round the country, but I’d like to make at least one show.

Unlike previous tours, where they’ve returned again and again to the same venues like the Limelight Club in Crewe, (where I’ve seen them twice), this tour sees them play far and wide. Some of the venues seem odd choices, far off the beaten track. Workington, Great Torrington, and Builth Wells are an awfully long way from any major centres of population. I wonder what sort of audience such shows will attract?

Unfortunately, most of the shows reasonably close to, such as Runcorn or Preston are midweek, making them awkward to get back from and get to work the next day. The same applies to those further afield where I have relatives or friends living in the area, such as Aberdare or Exeter, making them impractical without taking two days off work Just about the most accessible is looking like Rhyl, of all places. It’s on a Friday, and I could conceivably make a weekend of it; a chance to sample the Beyer-Garratts on the Welsh Highland Railway, which should be running by May.

HippyDave is getting cold feet about the band, has decided to give this tour a miss. I’m not sure I completely share his opinions of the band.

Shock news from the Mostly Autumn camp. They’ve parted company with long-time keyboard player Iain Jennings. To quote the official announcement from Bryan Josh:

I feel strongly that it is my duty to inform you personally that, at least for the foreseeable future, Iain Jennings and Mostly Autumn will no longer be working together. I can honestly say from the heart that working and writing with Iain for the last ten years has been a great privilege and a great pleasure. We both shook hands recently and expressed this to each other.

I can’t put into words the magic I feel we have created together and shared, also the friendship that will still remain. I guess as time moves on things change, people change and we move in different directions, it’s just part of life, the previous albums will always be there and will always celebrate our musical partnership.

This comes as a big surprise. I’d thought of Iain as one of the core members of the band, a significant contributor to the writing, contributing songs like “The Gap is Too Wide” and “Hollow”. The band won’t quite be the same without him. Looks like December’s London show was Iain’s last appearance with them.

A post on The Ministry of Information questions the methodology of a US experiment that seems to show that people’s choices of music is based more on peer pressure than anything else.

Sociologist Matthew Salganik, who conducted the survey, said that success was not relative to the quality of the music.

“It also suggests that even if an act creates high quality music, you might not be successful,” he said.

Doing my best Ron Edwards impersonation, I could say that artists like Marillion or Porcupine Tree are objectively better than Coldplay or Franz Ferdinand, despite the much higher sales of the latter bands. But this is only true for a given value of ‘better’. I maintain that Porcupine Tree give a vastly better listening experience than any of the more popular four chord bands provided you’re prepared to invest the effort to get under the skin of the music. I suspect the legions of people who lap up the formulaic Coldplay albums can’t be bothered to do that; they just want the musical equivalent of a kebab

And there are always going to be those who blindly follow the hype, and miss out on some good stuff as a result. Their loss.

The NME has come up with their annual list of best albums of all time.

1. The Stone Roses The Stone Roses
2. The Smiths The Queen Is Dead
3. Oasis Definitely Maybe
4. Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks
5. Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
6. Blur Modern Life Is Rubbish
7. Pulp Different Class
8. The Clash London Calling
9. The Beatles Revolver
10. The Libertines Up The Bracket

Much as I would have expected, it says more about the NME than it does about any artist on the list. Are they really saying that the flavour-of-the-month Arctic Monkeys are better than The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie or Pink Floyd?

One thing to remember is that the NME doesn’t represent anything like the whole of British rock, but just those bands that fit a very narrow template of what they think rock should be. The great tragedy is that the NME has had far too much influence over what new music gets exposure; they have the same malign influence over UK music as corporate commercial radio has in the US.

The other thing to remember is that Britain’s baby boom was a decade later than America’s, and came of age during the punk era in the late 70s. Just like America’s boomers they’ve mistaken stupid generational prejudices for eternal truths.

This explains the lack of late 60s/early 70s artists in the list; they represented everything that was completely out of fashion way back in 1977. Later generations of NME hacks seemed to absorb these prejuduces by osmosis. For example, anything connected with 70s prog-rock is dismissed with derision; which is why you’ll never see Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin on any NME list.

Saying that, the list is stupid even by NME standards; the ridiculously over-hyped Arctic Monkeys only released their album a week ago!

Simon Hoggarts Diary in the Grauniad today listed a whole load of viola player jokes. A few minutes Googling leads me to believe he got them from here. There are three whole pages of viola jokes, of which this is an example:

Q: Why did the violist marry the accordion player?
A: Upward mobility.

Although it’s mostly about orchestral musicians, there are the inevitable bass player and drummer jokes:

How many drummers does it take to change a lightbulb?

1. “Why? Oh, wow! Is it like dark, man?”
2. Only one, but he’ll break ten bulbs before figuring out that they can’t just be pushed in.
3. Two: one to hold the bulb, and one to turn his throne (but only after they figure out that you have to turn the bulb).
4. Twenty. One to hold the bulb, and nineteen to drink until the room spins.
5. None. They have a machine to do that.

How many bass players does it take to change a lightbulb?

1. None. They let the keyboard player do it with his left hand.
2. Don’t bother. Just leave it out–no one will notice.
3. One, but the guitarist has to show him first.
4. Six: one to change it, and the other five to fight off the lead guitarists who are hogging the light.

I went to more gigs in 2005 than any year I can remember, double the number in 2004. By all accounts 2005 was a good year for live music, whatever genre you prefer. I managed to see the following:

• Rammstein
• Asia/Barclay James Harvest
• Porcupine Tree (twice)
• Mostly Autumn (twice)
• Fish
• Marillion
• Paradise Lost
• Van der Graaf Generator

I’m not even go to try to rank these in order. High spots were the pyrotechnic sturm und drang of Rammstein at the beginning of the year, the awesome sonic maelstrom of Van der Graaf Generator, and by complete contrast, the imtimate atmosphere of the two Mostly Autumn shows, including the Christmas show in London. Who else can combine Floydian epics, celtic jigs and a traditional Christmas hymn without any of them sounding out of place?

The only real disappointments were the cancellation of The Mars Volta, a band I’d very much like to have seen live, and the quite awful performance the pseudo Barclay James Harvest supporting Asia. Even Fish, whose live performances can sometimes be decidedly patchy, put in a good performance on his ‘Return to Childhood’ tour.

So far, I don’t know what 2006 will bring, gig-wise. There’s nothing on the immediate horizon.

Everything that could possibly exist can be found somewhere on the Internet. But Iron Maiden album covers with Eddie replaced by Spongebob Squarepants? (Link from Making Light)

2005 has been a good year for music if you ignore all the overhyped four chord whiners and poseurs that clog up the charts. Here’s my top ten albums of the year. It excludes albums like The Darkness’ One Way Ticket to Hell or Rammstein’s Rosenrot, which came too late in the year for me to get the chance to listen to.

The Best

I can’t single out any one album as the best of the year, but there are four that stand out.

Opeth: Ghost Reveries

Mikael Åkerfeldt and his fellow Swedes’ finest album to date, seamlessly mixing Scandinavian death metal with English progressive rock to produce a dark, swirling masterpiece.

Mostly Autumn: Storms Over Still Water

Another solid release by York’s finest, continuing the evolution of their sound. The earlier folk stylings are largely missing this time around, in favour of commercial hard rock and some wonderful soaring progressive epics. They’ve improved tremendously as musicians, and I think their best is still to come.

Porcupine Tree: Darkwing

A harder-edged album than earlier releases, which drags progressive rock kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Porcupine Tree manage to combine metal, indie-rock, progressive and psychadelica in equal proportions, and display some superb musicianship without ever falling into self-indulgent widdling.

The Mars Volta: Frances the Mute

The Mars Volta take their frenetic punk-prog crossover even further out, with high energy improvisations of boggling complexity, and even more exotic ingredients added to their heady brew of influences. Easy listening it certainly isn’t.

The Rest

Deep Purple: Rapture of the Deep
The album that comes in a tin! Difficult to believe that it’s now ten years and four albums since Steve Morse replaced Richie Blackmore, and only now does his guitar sound seem fully integrated with the band. Light years away from ‘Smoke on the Water’, this one takes ‘No One Came’ from Fireball as the template, updated for the noughties. Get the special ‘tin’ edition for the bonus track ‘MTV’, a caustic swipe at the conservatism of American classic rock radio.

Dream Theater: Octovarium
While I still believe DT peaked with their fifth album, Metropolis II, their second-best is still more impressive than many other bands’ best. More prog and less metal, this one is an improvement on the rather tuneless Train of Thought.

Leaves Eyes: Vinland Saga
The surprise of the year. I caught this band live supporting Paradise Lost, and found their female-fronted viking-flavoured Euro-metal quite infectious. It certainly evokes images of longships and horned helmets.

Paradise Lost: Paradise Lost
With a self-titled tenth album, the Yorkshire doom metallers cut back on the electronic Depeche Mode sounds in favour of their earlier walls of twin guitar. A long-awaited return to form, or a cynical attempt at a retread of past glories? You decide!

Spocks Beard: Octane
There second release since the departure of founder and main man Neil Morse. With tighter arrangements this has a more streamlined commercial sound compared with earlier work, but it works well, and there’s some excellent songwriting and musicianship here. And there’s plenty of Mellotron.

Van der Graaf Generator: Present
Reunited after 28 years, their comeback double album is patchy but excellent in parts. Five new songs, two of them classics, and a whole disk of instrumental improvisations.

The Ministry of Information draws attention to a bit of a spat between Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree and Roine Stolt of The Flower Kings.

Steven Wilson:

Bands like the Flower Kings and Transatlantic? The DEATH of progressive music. These are the bands that reinforce every prejudice people have about progressive rock: old-fashioned, pompous, pretentious, hung-up on sci-fi concepts – that for me is rubbish.

Roine Stolt:

What he present is his opinion that we are the ‘death of progressive rock’, it is not that nice a statement really. I suppose he’s trying to say that bands like us scare the younger audience or the hip crowd and press away, that he now apparently is eager to please, it is in his ‘marketing plan’.

I don’t like to see musicians slagging each off in public, especially when it escalates to claims that some bands have no right to exist. Porcupine Tree and The Flower Kings are trying to do quite different things; why can’t they just leave it at that? Leave that sort of behaviour to louts like Liam Gallagher or the now-sacked bassist of The Darkness.

It reminds me of some of the endless flamewars the Marillion mailing list Freaks, a few years back. Why do people that prefer a more modern streamlined progressive-tinged sound feel the need to constantly condemn those bands who stick more closely to a 70′s template? I’d still much rather hear a slightly derivative copy of 70s Yes or Pink Floyd than any one of the endless production line of overhyped third-rate copies of XTC or The Jam that infest the present-day music scene.