Music Blog

While some of next year’s shows might be sold out already, I’m still going to see the wonderful Mostly Autumn at the Limelight in Crewe tonight. Fortunately I’ve already got a ticket; I believe this show is close to being sold out (only fifty tickets left on Monday).

The trouble with being on a short-term contract is you can only plan things two to three months in advance; which means that you have problems with gigs that get sold out months in advance. So it looks as though I’m going to miss out on The Mars Volta in March and Nightwish in February.

I suppose I should look on the bright side. If a Finnish symphonic goth-metal band can sell out an entire tour in a in a country where the music scene was until recently totally dominated by boring navel-gazing indie miserablists or repetitive three-chord garage strummers, then maybe there’s a chance we’ll see more tours by the sorts of proper rock acts that previously only played the occasional one-off shows in London. We can but hope.

In the worst day for rock since the terrible club fire a couple of years ago, a deranged fan has gone berserk at a gig, killing four people. Two of the dead were members of the band on stage, Damageplan, including former Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell.

Marty Dodge summarises the news reports on Blogcritics.org:

A gunman’s attack on a Texas-based heavy metal band during an Ohio concert left at least five people dead, prompting stunned fans around the country to check in at the group’s Web site early Thursday.

The attack on the band Damageplan began as the musicians started playing their first song Wednesday night. A witness said the gunman first targeted guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, shooting him multiple times at point-blank range at the crowded Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio.

The gunman killed at least four people and wounded at least two others before police fatally shot him.

In what may or may not be an appalling coincidence, last night was the 24th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder by another deranged fan.

Doubtless there will be some that blame this on the aggressive lyrics and high-energy music of many metal bands. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the religious right get hold of this and start screeching ‘Metal is eeeevil’.

What many people don’t seem to realise is that Heavy metal isn’t supposed to be taken seriously; characters like King Diamond and Marilyn Manson are nothing more than pantomime villains. While most heavy metal fans are sane and balanced people who recognise this and play along with it, metal does seem to attract a small minority of seriously disturbed people who take it all for real. I’m not sure what, if anything, the metal community can do about this.

I’m reminded of the two obsessed Judas Priest fans who entered that ridiculous ‘backward masking’ suicide pact a decade ago. At least those two didn’t take anyone else with them.

Update: Contrary to earlier unconfirmed reports, the band’s singer wasn’t one of the dead, although a member of the road crew was killed. Eric Olsen has a good summary of news reports so far. It sounds as though the killer might have been an undiagnosed paranoid schitzophrenic.

Andrew Ian Dodge reviews new ‘indie sensations’ Elefant, and finds both them and their generic indie support bands seriously wanting.

The gig was opened by two non-descript navel gazing bands (described as music for Guardinistas by Jon P), and then we were treated to Elefant. There is a great buzz about this lot as they are suppose to be the next big thing in indie-tinged pop world. Well from what we saw last night, don’t expect much, live at least.

Why does the British music scene contain so many tuneless indie strummers? Every edition of TV programmes like Later with Jools Holland seems to have a quota of whey-faced white guys with tuneless droning vocals accompanied by three-chord strummed guitar and a plodding rhythm. All of them seem to sound exactly the same. And all of them completely leave me cold.

Sometimes I believe that ‘indie’ is actually guilty of all the crimes prog-rock is only falsely accused of; of being totally self indulgent and boring. But unlike prog-rock, they are also totally lacking in any level of technical skill. Put someone like IQ, or Therion (complete with choir) on Later with Jools Holland and it would blow all these tuneless strummers away.

What is the appeal of this kind of band? Are there some deep subtleties that I’m just not hearing? Or is the appeal based on something other than the actual music?

I suspect it’s the latter. Some band’s popularity seems to be based on the sex appeal of the singer, or on how well they evoke a sense of adolescent angst. And for some, especially those overrated acts the music critics drool over, I guess the lyrics are far more important than the music. The fact that The Guardian’s chief music critic is a rabid Smiths fan points in this direction.

Since the music press has far too much influence in Britain, bands that can’t play or sing, but are somehow ‘symbolic of mans struggle against his socio-political environment’ will get attention, while other far better bands struggle to be heard. Many of these better bands might well find an audience if people were aware of their existence. Meanwhile, most of the bands who do get exposure inevitably crash and burn after a single album, simply because there’s no depth in anything they do; there just isn’t the musical or compositional talent there to sustain a career lasting more than a few months.

At least for retailers, Christmas starts with the great switching on of the Christmas lights, which is always supposed to be done by somebody vaguely famous. In most towns and cities, this honour tends to fall to whatever D-list celebrity is starring in this year’s Christmas Pantomime. Typically this is some fading glamour model or has-been comedian. In Cambridge this year, somebody noticed the official start of the high-street shopping orgy coincided with the night the UK tour of veteran 70s punks The Damned comes to the city. The ideal people! So they asked Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible to join the mayor and Father Christmas for the great switch-on.

But not everybody seems to think it’s such a good idea.
Some people are upset.

“It is not appropriate for Christmas,” said Reverend Stephen Leeke, of St Martin’s Church in Cambridge.

“They are a punk rock band with very doubtful lyrics.”

He added that the council had not given much thought to the decision to invite the band – whose songs include Anti Pope.

“They should admit they made a mistake,” he said.

Reverend Dr Peter Graves, of Wesley Methodist Church in Cambridge, said: “We should not give a major function over to a group that goes out of its way to deny what Christmas is about. “

Earth calling Reverends Leeke and Graves. All you achieve with statements like this is to make Christians look po-faced and silly. If you knew anything about popular culture or popular music, you would realise that The Damned are about as blasphemous as Spïnal Tap’s “Christmas with the Devil”.

It’s Halloween night, and Uriah Heep came to town.

This is the second 35st anniversary tour I seen this year; makes me wonder how many of today’s flavours of the month will still be around in a generation’s time. The venue was Manchester Academy 2, part of the Manchester University student’s union. But the age profile of the audience suggested there were very few students in attendance.

Support was a local band called Coldflame, who I’d never heard of before. Their appearance was a one-off for the Manchester show, which for some reason was arranged by a different promoter from the rest of the tour. Don’t ask me why! Coldflame played bluesy hard rock with some very Tull-like flute playing from the singer. A good sound mix and some excellent musicianship made them the best support act I’ve seen for a long while. They do in fact moonlight as a Jethro Tull tribute band, which explains the flute. This time, though, they were playing their own material.

The mighty Uriah Heep hit the stage at nine. One thing I’ve always noticed about them is how much they clearly enjoy being on stage, especially guitarist Mick Box. Many, many years on the road, but it’s clear this is not bunch of jaded has-beens going through the motions. While they went through a lot of lineup changes in during the 70s and 80s, the band has now been stable for something like half their 35 year history. Mick Box (the only remaining founder member!), Lee Kerslake and Trevor Boulder have been around since their 70s heyday, and joining them are Phil Lanzon on keys and Bernie Shaw on vocals. All five of them were on excellent form. The sound perhaps was a little bit muddy, but not enough to spoil the show.

With an extensive back catalogue they tend to vary the setlist a lot from tour to tour; this time the early part of the set mixed relatively recent material by the current lineup from the ‘Sea of Light’ and ‘Sonic Origami’ albums with some less well-known older songs such like ‘Year and a day’. They even dipped into the 80s with “The Other Side of Midnight” from the previously neglected Mick Goalby years, plus a couple of songs from ‘Raging Silence’. It’s noticeable how some of their 90s songs have become standards in their own right now; “Between Two Worlds”, with the poignant line ‘And those no longer with us’ (referring to the late David Byron and Gary Thain) and the epic “Love in Silence” with some great acoustic playing from Mick Box and Hammond organ flourishes from Phil Lanzon. The final part of the set brought out the obligatory classics from the early 70s era of David Byron (RIP) and Ken Hensley; “Look at Yourself”, “Gypsy”, “July Morning”, and the encores “Easy Livin’” and “Lady in Black”, which turned into the obligatory singalong.

Did the infamous Melissa Mills expect the band to have lasted so long?

Most of the music fans at work were genuinely shocked at the news of John Peel’s sudden death. The list of bands he was the first to play on the radio reads like a Who’s Who of British rock for the past 40 years, and I’ve read a great many tributes from 40-somethings for whom John Peel was the soundtrack of their teenage years.

I’m afraid I was never a big listener to his show. I spent my formative years listening to the then unfashionable rock played by Tommy Vance (so did the cat, for some strange reason), and Peel was viewed as the one who played the music that was supposed to have made the music I loved obsolete. I even remember in my student years there was a generation of old-school rock fans who bitterly hated Peel, never forgiving him for turning his back on the music he’d championed during the first half of the 70s in favour of punk and new wave.

This letter in today’s Guardian typifies the views of that group of people:

John Peel’s contribution to music journalism is overrated. If a piece of rock or pop music lasted more than three minutes, he had no time for it. And in the late 1970s he introduced an inverted snobbery into rock music criticism by using his position to present any band that ever tried to do something more ambitious than the working-class rants of the Sex Pistols as middle class and pretentious. Class shouldn’t have a place in music, but John Peel helped keep it there for over 30 years.

Rather over the top, even if there’s a little bit of a point. I think the ‘anything complicated is middle class’ meme should be really attributed to repellent oiks like the odious Tony Parsons rather than Peel. It’s true that John Peel didn’t like some genres of great music, and that music got marginalised as a result, especially in the past few years. But surely that wasn’t the fault of Peel himself; rather the lack of anyone else in mainstream British radio who really loved and cared about music to the extent that he did.

A commenter on the Guardian’s message boards with the handle “FlammeEmpor” presents a more balanced view:

Peel … championed most of the now well-known late 1960s/ early 1970s rock legends, including Bowie, Zeppelin, Floyd, Yes, Genesis, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull….(a very long list), in addition to some who did not make it to super-stardom, like Roy Harper and Peter Hammill. The rest of Radio One at that time was an abomination. (Recall the irony in the voice as John introduced ‘Love Grows where my Rosemary Goes’ on a TOTP retrospective. Also: voiceover to TOTP film of M. Jagger: ‘Let’s spend the night together..actually, on second thoughts..’)

Peel claimed that sometime around the mid-seventies he became disillusioned with the ‘excesses’ of bands like ELP, Yes, etc. In my view said ‘excess’ and the ‘liberation’ of the music scene by punk and the new wave were a bit of a myth. While much of the punk/new wave (and beyond) were magnificent, there was much second division stuff, and some of the old bands were still turning out excellent stuff after punk had burned itself out. Punk happened to come along as some of the older bands like ELP had also burned themselves out or lost direction. Peel bought into the punk/new wave big-time and took a long time to let it go, although I recall him complaining in 1980 specifically that there was a ‘lot of second division stuff’ around. He then spent years getting more hardcore and obscurist, and yet remained the best thing on radio. During the punk era he tended to wind up the old bands, and even some of the softer new bands, like the Boomtown Rats, but stood by The Doors, Pink Floyd – The Wall, Peter Hammill, Ivor Cutler, etc. Even the other year at Glastonbury, during the Roger Waters set, he said (probably about ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, etc.): ‘You wouldn’t believe the effect of that when it first came out – could change your life’.

But in the end there was no-one else quite like him, even if Sturgeon’s law applied to the stuff he played. He will be missed, even by those who seldom ever listened to his show.

What’s the live music scene up in Heaven like, John? I’ve heard the power trio of Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott and Keith Moon are really hot.

Harry isn’t impressed with the “off with their heads” comment at the end, but I found one paragraph of Apostate Windbag’s post on Dinner parties worth quoting.

There is no point in discussing music with these people for the most part because they will, from their eleventh birthday to now, have only ever listened to or enjoyed music that they do not have to seek out in order to hear. I’ll not say that they only listen to top-forty, because it’s not as simple as that, and I’m no snob: there are top-forty hits I appreciate. But for me, music is something you work at, something you investigate and explore. And I feel the same way about film and literature and, well, just about everything in life. The division is not some Berlin Wall between popular art and independent art – because the Beatles and Shakespeare were popular as well as being ‘good’, and there’s also a lot of indie music that remains indie for a very good reason. However, these Commerce grads are as identical in their musical/film/fashion/literature/art tastes as their personalities are identical. And, by and large, they know nothing of what exists beyond the corporate culture they are spoon-fed. So there is no point in talking about any of these topics with them, because they will always say: “Who? I’ve never heard of them.”

That’s the reaction I got from just about everyone I’ve spoken to about the amazing Mostly Autumn gig a couple of weeks ago. Just about the only person who seems to have heard of them is one member of the Demodellers mailing list.

One thing I have to disagree with Apostate Windbag, though. The best stuff may get ignored by the corporate media and the fashionable scribblers. But it spreads by word of mouth. And that means that you have to talk about them.