An exciting announcement on Heather’s website.
Troy Donockley of Nightwish, Iona and Bad Shepherds fame will be producing Heather’s long-awaited new album. Recording is planned over the summer, with the words “earthy, widescreen, beautiful, bohemian, magical and mysterious” used to describe how it might sound.
I’m sure it’s not just little Harlan who would love to hear Uilleann pipes on the record.
I haven’t seen the full results of the Prog Magazine readers’ poll, but the scan on HeKz’ Facebook page (in which they made the top ten tips for 2014), also includes the Best and Worst Prog Events of 2013
The Worst list make very interesting reading.
I can’t disagree with #1. High Voltage 2011 and 2012 were great festivals which put the best the scene has to offer with a great mix of old and new in front of big audiences. So the cancellation of HV2013 as a consequence of sponsor HMV going into administration was a great disappointment. No word yet on whether or not there will be a High Voltage in 2014, though if there was going to be one I would have expected some sort of announcement by now.
As for #2, HRH Prog being both 2nd Worst Event and 7th Best Event does imply that it has divided people’s opinions. I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the venue from friends who were, both fans and artists, citing the fact that it was absolutely bloody freezing. HRH Prog 2 this March moves to an altogether different venue in a completely different part of the country. I’m looking forward to this one a lot, even though it’s going to take a very long train journey and a rail replacement bus to get there.
The Cambridge Rock Festival at #3 does come as a surprise. I know I wasn’t the only person who thought the bill was very disappointing from a prog perspective, with no more than a token presence on the main stage compared with previous years. But though I didn’t go myself, everyone I’ve spoken to who was there told me they had an enjoyable time. So voting it worst even of the year does seem a little harsh. My guess is most of those negative votes came from people who didn’t actually attend. But I do think the organisers need to recognise they didn’t get the balance quite right last year. They have yet to announce the 2014 bill, and I for one am waiting for that announcement with great interest.
When a major prog website’s annual end-of-year poll has ten slots for album of the year, three for DVDs but just one for gig of the year, it does leave you wondering if some people need to get out more.
As my end-of-year album list ought to show, 2013 has been a great year for music in this little corner of the world.
My own year in live music started out with Blue Coupe in Banbury and ended with Mostly Autumn in Bilston. In between those were so many gigs I lost count somewhere mid year. It’s gone from Swallow playing covers in Reading pubs to Iron Maiden playing the O2 Academy. As usual, it all went bonkers towards the end of the year, with a mad half-week in November that saw four gigs in four days separated by a lot of miles, taking in Fish, Mr So and So & Also Eden, Marillion and Crimson Sky. Sometimes I think the prog world should be sponsored by Arriva Cross-Country Trains.
Writing for Trebuchet has seen me get press and photo passes for some high profile gigs, including UFO in Oxford and most significantly Steve Hackett’s sold-out show at Hammersmith Apollo, with Anne-Marie Helder as support. It’s also meant seeing a few things outside my normal comfort zone, including old-school blues rock and flamenco-flavoured alternative metal.
I passed on The Cambridge Rock Festival this year because I just couldn’t get excited about the bill, and sadly some prog-specific festivals collapsed due to lack of ticket sales. One of those was Y-Prog in Sheffield in March, which ended up leaving me seriously out-of-pocket due to non-refundable hotel reservations. Definitely not one of 2013′s personal high points.
So the two big events for me were The Marillion convention at Wolverhampton in April which saw one of my all-time favourite albums “Brave” played in it’s entirety, and Celebr8.2 in Kingston in May. The latter featured a whole slew of great bands I’ve never seen live before, including the mighty Threshold, and one of the year’s discoveries, the Spanish/Dutch band Harvest.
2013 has been a bit of an Annus Horribilis when it comes to band lineups, with many of the bands that feature regularly on this blog losing key members, or in the case of Stolen Earth, splitting up entirely. And there are a few acts who have been missing in action for much of 2013; hopefully we’ll see them all bounce back strongly in 2014 with new music and a revitalised live performances.
Sadly every year sees some goodbyes, something which happens more frequently as the heroes of your youth get older. This year we lost Blue Öyster Cult multi-instrumentalist Allen Lanier and Uriah Heep bassist Trevor Bolder.
What 2014 has in store is anyone’s guess, but I think there are plenty of good things in store. We’ve got new albums by Morpheus Rising and Panic Room to look forward to early in the new year, and Heidi Widdop’s new project Cloud Atlas is sounding very promising. Not forgetting Mostly Autumn and Karnataka, both of whom are also working on new albums.
There are bound to be some exciting new developments in the prog world,, but one of my personal musical resolutions for 2014 is to expand my horizons beyond prog, metal and classic rock and explore the world of contemporary jazz.
I remember a discussion a few months back with The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis where I suggested that the aggregated best-of lists that appear in many music publications tended to be boring and predictable. They often end up reinforcing a lowest-common-denominator consensus, and frequently exclude the more eclectic choices of individual contributors. For example, none of Dom Lawson’s excellent choices made The Guardian’s top 40 of 2012
The top 15 of 2013 from The Dutch Progressive Rock Page seems to bear this out. Despite containing many great albums that also appear on my own best of the year list, it does give the impression that it takes a very narrow definition of “Prog”. It’s true that Riverside, Steven Wilson, Haken and Big Big Train have all made great albums that deserve to be honoured. But there’s no place for the likes of The Fierce and The Dead, Luna Rossa, Ihsahn or even Fish, all of which fall under the broad spectrum of progressive music, but don’t fit a narrow neo-progressive template. It’s also notable how male the list is; only one band out of the 15 (Magenta) have a female lead singer.
It would be easy to blame this on musical conservatism on behalf of the site’s contributors, but I strongly suspect that when a list is defined by what it excludes, it merely demonstrates that such aggregated lists are of limited usefulness.
I went to so many gigs in 2013 I ended up losing count; everything from local cover bands in pubs to rock monsters in enormodomes, and everything in between. There have been a few gigs outside my usual comfort zone, such as The Damned and The Orb; I even went to see Iron Maiden at the O2 Arena, a band I last saw in 1982. I even went to see a Fleetwood Mac tribute band…
Picking a best-of list out of all those gigs is a hard one, but these six stand out as ones to remember for all the right reasons.
Marillion – UK Convention Saturday
Marillion’s fan conventions are always amazing experiences, with a hall full of hardcore fans and three sets with completely different setlists over the three nights. The end result is an electric atmosphere that few regular gigs can approach. All three nights in Wolverhampton were amazing experiences, but for me the best of the three was Saturday, with the dark, intense concept album “Brave” played in its entirety.
I got to see Fish four times this year, twice in his spring tour before the band went into the studio to record the album, and twice in the autumn on the tour to promote the album. All were great shows, with the big man on superb form, the London gig in May was a real standout.
Steve Hackett – Hammersmith Apollo
I wasn’t entirely convinced by Steve Hackett’s restatement of his Genesis legacy in the studio; the re-recorded versions seemed to add little to the much-loved favourites. But live it was a completely different experience; a triumphant and uplifting celebration of the magnificent music that deservedly won many standing ovations. The Guardian completely missed the point.
Panic Room + Morpheus Rising – Manchester Sound Control
Panic Room have had a few ups and downs this year, forced to regroup following the departure of lead guitarist and founder member Paul Davies. Their tour in early summer featured Morpheus Rising’s Pete Harwood standing in guitar doing double duty with both the headliners and his own band. The tour ended with two superb shows in Bilston and Manchester demonstrating the band’s ability to triumph over adversity, with great support from Morpheus Rising, themselves premiering a lot of new material.
Mostly Autumn + Chantel McGregor, Islington O2 Academy
Mostly Autumn have been a bit hit-and-miss as live band during 2013, with fluctuating lineups from gig to gig due to various members’ other commitments. But the stars aligned when they came to London in Ocober. Chantel McGregor’s incendiary opening set gave the whole show the feel of a co-headliner, and Mostly Autumn’s barnstorming set had to be one of the best shows they’ve done in the past two or three years.
Steven Wilson, Royal Albert Hall
Steve Wilson came to London’s most prestigious major venue with his band including Theo Travis, Guthie Govan, Nick Beggs and Zappa alumnus Chad Wakerman, with the combined virtuosity you’d expect from a top-flight jazz ensemble rather than typical rock band. They proceed to delivere a mesmerising set drawn almost entirely from Steve Wilson’s three recent solo work, reinventing 70s Mellotron-drenched progressive rock to make it relevant to the 21st century. There are still people missing Porcupine Tree, but on the strength of shows like this, his new band are very good trade.
So The Guardian’s end-of-year album list has zero overlap with mine. I recognise that despite their positive reviews of both the album and the Albert Hall gig, Steve Wilson’s “The Raven That Refused To Sing” was never going to be Guardian enough to feature, but I did wonder if Goldfrapp’s “Tales of Us” or perhaps even Black Sabbath’s “13″ would make the cut. But they didn’t. For those who might be interested, their album of the year was Kayne West’s “Yeezus”. I don’t know enough about hip-hop to be able to say whether it’s good, bad or indifferent, but they closed the comments after about 12 hours in which 700-odd people were decidedly unimpressed with their choice.
Sadly The Guardian’s list is yet again a rock-free zone. The top end of the list seems to be made up almost entirely of hip-hop and mumbling indie, as if they were the only genres that exist. Those records might well be the best hip-hop and mumbling indie records released this year, but anything properly resembling rock is conspicuous by its absence. As is anything strongly based around melody; where, for example was Goldfrapp’s beautiful “Tales of Us”
No, I’m not expecting the whole list to be filled with rock and metal releases, but there’s not even a token presence there. It comes over as so NME it’s quite embarassing; Paramore are the closest to “rock” that it comes, and they come over to me as rock music watered-down for people who don’t really like rock music, mainly marketed to children.
I’ve listed to a few of the YouTube videos or sound clips attached to their features whenever the description made it sound as if it might be worth a listen. But I haven’t heard anything at all that makes me want to listen further to any of them. A lot of it comes over to me as far too scratchy and tuneless to hold my attention. It may well be deeply symbolic of man’s struggle against his social-political environment, but lacks any compositional depth or instrumental flair.
Indeed, Kitty Empire writing about White Denin gave the game away with the line “Bands this proficient can easily end up making pointlessly masturbatory virtuoso-rock“. I found White Denin boring, a band playing well below their abilities is if they were trying too hard to appeal to people like Kitty Empire.
Yes, there are plenty of people out there who like that sort of thing; but it leaves me feeling that a publication that’s not supposed to be a narrow genre-specific one like Kerrang it ought to be covering a far broader spectrum of music that it does, and cover the sorts of music that appeals to a broader range of age groups that just spotty yoof alone.
One wag made a comment suggesting that the list was by thirtysomethings writing about music made for twentysomethings then being sneered at by fortysomethings in the comment threads. But it does make the point that there isn’t nearly enough music in there for grown-ups. And there isn’t nearly enough rock.
Reading band A Genuine Freakshow have called it a day.
We have decided after many years to bring an end to A Genuine Freakshow.
Our reasons are three fold: financial (we haven’t got any money), geographical (we now live further away from each other than we did before) and musical (less of this than the previous two).
First of all we would like to thank everyone who has ever come to one of our gigs, bought a record or a tee shirt (or an Ultimate Fighting Combo!). You have quite literally kept this band going for longer than we thought was possible, so thank you.
A Genuine Freakshow were an impossible band to categorise, with elements of post-rock, indie-pop and progressive rock in their music. The seven-piece made a huge sound, featuring cello and violin and trumpet alongside guitars and drums. I first saw them playing in a medieval church in Reading playing a set that climaxed with the shimmering wall-of-sound of “Luckmore Drive”, enhanced by the wonderful acoustics of the building.
It’s always sad when a band calls it a day, but I hope the various band members will resurface in new projects.
Marillion’s Christmas single, available on iTunes, Amazon and all good Internets. Because there are plenty of traditional carols that can be improved by adding a Steve Rothery solo.
People are asking how you can buy the albums listed in my end-of-year list…
While you can get some of them, including Haken, Touchstone and Maschine from HMV (that’s if you still have an HMV), quite a lot of these are independent releases that don’t tend to be stocked in the high street.