Music Blog

A few days ago, Harry listed a few artists he describes as ‘musical broccoli’. The sorts of music he would have spat out instinctivly in his youth, but which he’s grown to like in recent years. His list includes Steely Dan (who I’ve never listened to, but suspect I’d probably like), and the late, great Frank Zappa, who’s reputation for sexist and scatalogical lyrics sometimes got in the way of his musical genius.

My list would include a lot of stuff I spent the late 70s and early 80s trying to avoid. It took me years to get past my reaction against music press Stalinist revisionism and admit that some of the 70s punk bands actually did make some great rock’n'roll records. And that not all 70s disco was rubbush either. Perhaps it’s because the passing of time has winnowed out all the third rate drivel, and left the gems. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve grown out of the musical tribalism of my youth.

An announcement out of the blue from the Karnataka official website:

We are very pleased to announce the return of Karnataka with an exciting new line up:

Ian Jones – bass/guitars

Gonzalo Carrera – keyboards/vocals

Nick May – lead guitar/keyboards

Bob Dalton – Drums/vocals

Alquimia – vocals/multi instrumental

For those who don’t know the history, Karnataka were a six piece progressive rock band, who suddenly and unexpectedly announced they were splitting last year, cancelling the tour they’d already booked. The band never gave any reason for the sudden split. The excellent double live album Strange Behaviour turned out to be the band’s swansong.

Reactions on The Storm, the Karnataka mailing list, have been decidedly mixed. The viewpoint of many is ‘wait and see’. Others wonder whether Ian Jones, although the legal owner of the name, should really be resurrecting it for what’s effectively a completely new band.

Not sure what the other five members of the original Karnataka are making of this.

Liberal England sees the changing nature of the Eurovision Song Contest entries as a symbol of the changing nature of Europe.

It is that the heart of Europe has moved east. You could tell that from the Eurovision entries. When Britain’s was chosen we probably thought we were daring to pick a song with a Bollywood sound. There turned out to be nothing daring about it. Poor Javine was lost in a crowd of eastern sounds, led by that Moldovan granny and her drum.

Which means we are going to have to reconsider what Europe means to us. For a couple of generations it represented a more civilised way of life. They had subsidised public transport, sane labour relations and adventurous sex lives. Even more exciting, they had proportional representation.

This Europe to which Liberals owed allegiance, which convinced them that, despite appearances, they were the party of the future, was the Europe of the six original Common Market members. That Europe no longer exists.

What we see instead is a more diverse and interesting Europe. Yet it scares some, as the prominence of Turkey in the French referendum campaign shows. You also wonder how long Western voters will be happy to go on funding it – or the song contest, for that matter.

I still think we should have got Mötorhead to perform the British entry. What would the Moldovan grannies have made of that? Probably they’re as tough as Lemmy anyway…

I know my musical taste is at 180 degrees to the collective groupthink of mainstream rock critics. I’m still an unrepentant fan of the much-maligned progressive rock bands of the early 70s, which is ridiculed and sneered at even by those who’ve never heard a single note of Yes, Genesis or ELP. I think most of today’s music would be vastly improved with the addition of more guitar solos (of for many bands, some guitar solos).

Consequently, I find a lot of the bands awarded iconic status to be rather overrated. None of those listed below are truly awful, down to the level of the hideous Morrissey. But the mainstream groupthink consistently rates these far above bands like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, which to me is simply… wrong.

The Kinks. As far as I’m concerned, they were no more than a fair to middling band who had a few hits in the late sixties. I saw them live at the 1981 Reading festival, and found them dull and uninspiring, and wondered what all the fuss was about. But nowadays loads of dull bands seems to namecheck them. I can pretty much guarantee that any band claimed to ‘evoke the classic English songwriting of The Kinks’ is going to suck badly, and isn’t going to be worth listening to.

Roxy Music. OK, so there was some interesting stuff on their early of albums, especially when Brian Eno was still in the band. But they would have sounded better if they’d had a proper singer rather than that ridiculous poseur Ferry. Their major crime was to advance the idea that style mattered more than the actual content, which resulted in so many dreadful bands in the 1980s.

The Clash. I might have felt differently if I’d ever seen them live. But they never managed to reproduce the sound of their “ultimate high energy rock’n'roll” onto their often tinny records. And with the bloated ‘Sandanista’ album they proved that punk could outdo Yes or ELP when it came to self-indulgence. At least “Tales from Topographic Oceans” had some good music on it. If Roxy Music were the triumph of style over content, then The Clash were they triumph of attitude over content.

Harry thinks Robert Plant looks old and past it, and should retire gracefully.

Robert Plant appeared on BBC2′s “Later with Jools Holland” on Friday night. Plant and his band The Strange Sensation played three songs, two from the new album “Mighty Rearranger”, plus a reworking of the old Led Zep classic “When the Levee Breaks”. This didn’t sound like a washed up relic of the past to me; while Plant has abandoned the screaming vocals of the Zeppelin years (A 1969 clip of “Communication Breakdown” made an interesting comparison), he’s still in fine voice for the sort of material he’s playing nowadays, an eclectic mix of rock and ‘the exciting bits’ of world music. Certainly impressed me enough to make me buy the album.

Also on the show were ‘punk legends’, The Fall. I’m not sure if people only pretend to like the The Fall because they were championed by the high priest of unlistenably bad music, John Peel, or this was just a bad performance. They were awful. The bored-looking band robotically ground out a monotonous two-chord thrash while Mark E Smith ranted incomprehensibly into the microphone. The final song lapsed into chaos, only saved by Jools’ humour and professionalism. I don’t know whether he was really drunk, or whether he’s always like that. If anyone on that show was a shambling has-been, it was Mark E Smith.

Definitely Classic Rock 1, Punk 0

One of Harry’s commenters, Pawoodster, quoted this from Popbitch (I’ve partially excised the blue language)

Mark is the only artist in the history of the show to have a clause in his contract to state that Jools will not play f—ing boogie-woogie piano over any of his songs, or words to that effect. He also delayed filming several times by wandering in and out of shot, calling Robert Plant c—y and just generally behaving like what he is The Last Great Englishman….Robert Plant turned up in a bullit proof limo, the Fall were transported by Salford Van Hire.. oh and the Go-Team kept f—ing up much to the annoyance of all.

That popbitch quote crystallises everything that’s been wrong with the British music scene in the past 25 to 30 years.

Artists like Robert Plant are hated because they represented ‘the old guard’ back in 1975.

Unlistenable rubbish like The Fall now represents ‘the establishment’, but the pseudo-intellectual old punks can’t forgive Robert Plant for still being around in 2005.

The punk generation are as tiresome as America’s baby boomers. They think their stupid generational prejudices are eternal truths, and that the whole of history revolves around their coming-of-age.

Last night I quit as a member of Blogcritics.

I had been a member of this site since it’s inception, when it was focussed on music, book and film reviews. Over the past few years I’ve posted a fair number of progressive rock album and concert reviews, many of which have been syndicated across a number of other sites; which means my writing has been reaching quite a large audience.

Blogcritics has had a politics section for quite a while, which has always had it’s fair share of flamewars. But with the original membership composed largely of music and film fans, people were all over the map politically, and the wingnuts and moonbats of the far right and far left tended to meet their matches.

Sadly, in recent months, that has ceased to be the case, and the politics section has been slowly poisoning the rest of the site. There has been a steady stream of new members who have no interest in music, books, film and culture, but are just blowhards seeking a soapbox for angry political rants, and almost all of them have been from the ugly hard right. My heart sank when I saw that a notorious troll and bully I remember from usenet a few years ago had joined the site a few months back, and he has done a great deal of damage.

The final straw came yesterday, with a really offensive post bordering on hate speech from yet another new member. He turns out to be one of the chorus line from the notorious anti-muslim hate site Little Green Footballs. The same posting from his own noxious blog has been enthusiastically linked from the white supremacist Stormfront.org, which really tells you all you need to know about it.

My conscience will not let me contribute to a site that gives a platform to that sort of material.