Music Blog

As an unrepentant prog-rock fan, I was never really a fan of The Clash. My memories of the 70s and early 80s was being told by punk fans that all the music I liked was by obsolete dinosaurs. However, I have to admit they were probably the most significant band from the British punk scene. Quite possibly, had there been no clash to counter the mindless nihilism of the Sex Pistols, punk would just have been a footnote in music history.

Michele has posted a eulogy of sorts. On the other hand, Lawrence, not a fan of The Clash at all, is more interested in how many points he would have been worth in the Dead Pool

I don’t visit the Marillion web site as often as I should, or I would have picked up on this a few days ago.

When we asked you two years ago to take a leap of faith and BUY an album we hadn’t even written, 13,000 of you stepped forward, placed your trust in us, and helped launch an idea that is still being talked about in music industry circles and in the press over two years later, and YOU made this possible.

We are currently in the studio writing and recording our new album (with Dave Meegan in the producer’s chair). We think it’s our most important album ever and we’ve decided the time has come to make a big noise about it.

Once again we need a new strategy and we intend to break all the rules and do something revolutionary. We can’t do this without you, our fans. We have an idea of what we want to do and we need your feedback because your views are very important to us AND you might have an even better idea!

As you know, with Anoraknophobia we were signed worldwide to EMI Records. We were very happy with EMI’s distribution. We were disappointed, however, with EMI’s marketing and promotional strategy. In some countries around the world, very little money was spent and so therefore we had no chance of selling records outside of our existing fan base, and sometimes we didn’t manage to reach some of those fans either! We have decided we must address this problem before a point in the future where Marillion’s very existence comes under threat. As the old saying goes: “If you want a job doing properly DO IT YOURSELF!”

The solution is to “push” (ie promote and market) this band ourselves. To do this takes a lot of money and a lot of promotion. We have the capability to do the promotion but we unfortunately don’t have the money…yet.

What they’re trying to do this time is not only raise the money to make the album from their fans, but to raise enough money to promote the album by touring, including the US where they haven’t visited for years. Read the entire letter for more information on some of the things they’re considering doing.

The fan-funded album “Anoraknophobia” was their best release in years; let’s hope the new project is as much of a success!

Some odd choices in the top 10 from the BBC World Service poll to find the ‘Worlds favourite song’. Eric Olsen, naturally isn’t impressed, especially as the only American song is by Cher, and one of the three English-language songs is his favourite, “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

High on the list, but outside the top ten were such delights as the cheese-metal classic “Winds of Change”, and, for Cthulhu’s sake, “The Ketchup Song”.

Of course, these polls are ultimately meaningless; they’re prone to ballot-stuffing (how else could an Irish republican anthem get to #1?), and can produce distorted results, such as no Beatles songs because their votes were split between 10 different nominations. Although I’m glad there nothing there by The Smiths!

Love comes to you and you follow
Lose one on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with its arms
All around me

Lost on a wave and then after
Dream on on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with so many around me
Lost in the city
- Yes, Heart of the Sunrise

I get a lot of flack for being a prog-rock fan – progressive rock is the probably most maligned form of music on the planet, with the possible exception of jazz-funk.

The ‘prog-rock is awful’ meme seems to date from the punk era, when an influential clique of London-based Stalinist music journalists decided that music with three chords and a sneer was to be the only game in town. Since then this line has been repeated by successive generations that weren’t even born in the early-to-mid 1970s when progressive rock was at it’s height, and have probably never even listened to any 70s Genesis, Yes or Pink Floyd.

Progressive rock is always doomed to be judged by it’s worst excesses, not it’s best moments. Nobody would ever judge punk by acts like Sham 69 or the Cockney Rejects. But everybody always judges prog-rock by Yes’ “Tales from Topographic Oceans” (One of their worst albums) or obscure and inaccessible works by people like Henry Cow (No, I’ve never heard any Henry Cow – he might be incredibly brilliant)

Why do the journalistas hate prog rock so much? I have some theories:

• Prog-rock has more complex melodies and rhythmic structures, and needs more intense listening, while music journalists always want to judge a record on the basis of a couple of spins.
• Music journalists, being writers, are more interested in the lyrics than the music; and prog-rock is emphatically not about lyrics. The best bits of prog-rock albums are often the instrumental sections; the lyrics are usually nothing more than decoration. The scribblers just don’t get this – their most common complaint is that ‘the lyrics are nonsense’. So what?
• Prog-rock is perceived as being ‘middle class’, and the Stalinist clique cling to the myth that rock is exclusively a working-class thing, something that was, is, and always has been total and utter bollocks. I’ve heard it said that you need some exposure to classical music at an influential age to fully appreciate prog-rock, this may have something to do with it.
• The British music press is simply made up of tone-deaf cloth-eared idiots.

Of course, prog-rock never went away, it just went underground. While the great 70s bands like ELP, Genesis, Yes and Pink Floyd either split, blanded out, or became soap-opera parodies of themselves, successive generations of bands have kept the spirit alive. There are plenty of so-called neo-prog bands from the 80s and 90s. Marillion may be well-known enough to appear on the journalista’s radar screen and get flack from them, but bands like IQ, Dream Theater and Spocks Beard have also produced some wonderful music in recent years. Sadly the media is in the grip of the Journalista’s prejudices, so the chance of any of those bands ever appearing on anything like the BBC’s Later with Jools Holland is virtually nil. Bah!

Not only has Yngwie Malmsteen not made a decent record for something like ten years, but he’s also an idiotic jerk than gets into fights on planes.

YNGWIE MALMSTEEN threatened to kill a fellow passenger on a flight to Tokyo, Japan after the woman poured a glassful of water on the guitarist.

The passenger, who had no prior contact with Yngwie, allegedly overheard Malmsteen making derogatory comments about homosexuals and decided to show her disapproval by emptying the contents of her glass on the hefty axeman.

Better still, someone in Yngwie’s entourage recorded the whole exchange on tape – you can download the MP3!

I bet those ‘derogatory remarks’ were loud enough for the whole plane to hear. Just shut up and play the guitar, Yngwie!

(Link from BoingBoing)

Julia notices that she doesn’t have very many of Pitchfork.com’s Top 100 Albums of the 80s.

My CD collection of several hundred albums contains precisely two out of that hundred, King Crimson’s “Discipline”, and the eponymously-titled debut by The Stone Roses. That so-called top 100 list is dominated by the dreary alternative/indie bands that trendy music journalists have always drooled over. None of the unfashionable stuff I liked – no room for anything by Marillion, or for Blue Öyster Cult’s magnificent “Imaginos”. Bah!

I posted a link to this article by Nigel Williamson months ago, when I first started blogging, but at the time I didn’t make any further comments. Recent postings about “Bohemian Rhapsody” remind me of it.

You can read the whole article here

A cold and cheerless Saturday night in December 1975. Spend the rest of Saturday evening getting pointlessly drunk in Henekey’s Wine Bar in Bromley High Street, London, or go the short distance to Ravensbourne College of Art to see an unknown band called the Sex Pistols? We opt for the latter and hand over our 50p at the door. Within minutes we wish we’d stayed in the pub, for there is more future in getting mindlessly obliterated on Newcastle Brown than in listening to this racket.

The Sex Pistols can barely play their instruments. Each tuneless thrash that passes for a song sounds the same as the one before. And while the spotty, under-nourished front man knows how to sneer, he certainly doesn’t know how to sing. After retrieving our Afghan coats from the cloakroom, we shuffle off into the night, back to our squat to skin up a spliff and listen to the new Little Feat album.

Some months later, we set off to see an R&B band called Roogalator at the 100 Club. They have cancelled and the replacement is the Jam, playing one of their first London gigs. They are almost worse than the Sex Pistols and we ask for our money back.

Yes, I admit I never got punk. I was 22 years old in 1976, and by rights I should have loved it. But I hated its lack of imagination, its absence of musicality and its empty nihilism. Yet today, as we face a nostalgic jubilee around the 25th anniversary of the Pistols’ God Save the Queen, it has become heretical to point out that punk actually wasn’t very good.

He’s probably exaggerating things just a bit, but the article does nail three big myths about the 70s punk explosion in Britain. Those three myths being:

Punk was invented in England Which completely ignores earlier American bands such as the New York Dolls etc.

Punk was the pivotal moment in the whole of music history. A generation of music journalists that grew up at that time have perpertuated this one – it’s the eternal hubris of generationism; that the important thing in their lives is the most important thing ever.

The music scene immediately before punk was uniquely awful. To me, an unrepentant prog-rock fan, this is the most damaging of all the myths. Were the mid-70s really worse than the late-80s? Or the last couple of boy-band dominated years? If punk really was a revolution against bland corporate stadium rock, then corporate blandness was back with a vengeance ten years later, only far blander and far more corporate. Surely 70s Led Zeppelin were better than 80s Bon Jovi? 70s Genesis better than er, 80s Phil Collins?

Eric Olsen doesn’t like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, especially when it gets voted as best British single of all time.

But, this abomination makes me wonder whether they really got a handle on the whole mad cow thing over there, because picking “Bohemian Rhapsody” as the greatest single of all time makes me want to pull the plug on the whole island and watch it sink under the briny blue if I could be assured that all traces of this sub-parody of operetta cliches grafted onto cheese-metal would be destroyed along with it.