Bad beats and good vibes

John Peel day

Today is the anniversary of John Peel’s last live broadcast, and BBC are marking the occasion, as they did last year, with a day of broadcasting dedicated to Peel. Which basically I hope means a day of not pissing about having inflatable ego fighting contests, and concentrating on playing decent music - things Peel managed with effortless ease all through his career, but something which, alas, apparently requires his death for the rest of Radio 1 to be able to manage once every 365 days.

In the spirit of the occasion, I will be unearthing lost gems from my music collection. I absolutely won’t listen to any albums that last.fm reckons I’ve played in the last 6 months, and hopefully I’ll be able to fill an entire day with songs I’ve bought or acquired somewhere along the way but have so far left languishing at the bottom of piles, never to be heard. I’ll remove any shrink-wrap I find. It’s going to be a great day.

You can see what I’m listening to all day over on the right of the page.

October 12th, 2006, posted by Neil in Music · No comments

The Raconteurs are here!

Caught some MTV over the weekend, including the video for The Raconteurs new single, Steady as she goes. Who be they, I hear the questions. Lumme, where’ve you been - they’re only a cross between Brendon Benson and that bloke out of The White Stripes, Jack Stripe. I think. Not so much a cross, as an actual being of them, in fact. Plus two other blokes I don’t recognise from the publicity stills. So it’s pretty damned exciting, I can tell you. Except for the two other guys.

Good news is that the single’s great, and the b-side isn’t shoddy either. Promising start. You can listen to both right now on the official tinternet site, which is cooler than something pretending to be a terminal ought to be.

Go! To the official Raconteurs site. Now.

April 7th, 2006, posted by Neil in Music · 3 Comments

Death Cab For Cutie - Portsmouth Pyramids

A fellow gig-goer

I went to my first proper gig just after I started University in 1993. Catherine Wheel, at the Hop & Grape in the Student Union. And bloody fantastic it was too. Ever since then, I’ve gone through stages of amazement, amusement, and, er, reassurement, on looking around at my fellow gig-goers and spotting, among the faces and band t-shirts of the indie kids, and the confused looks of the wandered in off the streets by mistake gang, a smattering of strangely old-looking people. Mostly I’d figure they must just be quite cool to still be going to the same gigs that a hip, savvy, young music lover like myself would be at.

Monday night down at the Pyramids in Portsmouth, and a horrible, nauseous, sickening awakening takes place. I should have twigged while I was at the bar and a couple of girls queued next to me: one of them declaring how much she loved being 18. But I didn’t. Lost in the inexplicable desire to get my hands on an over-priced pint of weak lager, I strolled, still in my work clothes (semi-smart, semi-casual, trying to strike the almost impossible balance that satisfies status meetings in the afternoon, and American indie guitar pop in the evening) around to the merchandise stand, thinking of the days when I owned at least 5 Gene t-shirts, and at least 4 Tindersticks t-shirts, and barely a gig went by without an open display of “hey, look who else I listen to. Cool, huh? (used to work well with Belle & Sebastian t-shirts before they were, you know, popular and all).

Then my friend points out to me that there are no old people. Anywhere.

A billion DRM songs later

It just had to be, didn’t it?

Please, no more.

Apple announced the other day that downloads from its Itunes service had hit the one billion mark. The billionth downloaded track? Why, it was Speed of Sound by arch-mediocrists C*play. The poor, miserable sod who had the misfortune to download this track was an American teenager, who completely by accident, I assume, downloaded it as part of the whole of an album that was described by critics who like going to fancy parties and who want to get closer to Gwyneth as “brilliant”, and by those in the know as “less fun than scraping week old fat drippings from a seive”. To make up for the disappointment of downloading such tosh, he receives an iMac, lots of iPods, and $10K. The 10 iPods should come in handy if he ever wants to listen to the whole album without having to recharge the battery half way through, and the 10K should be enough to buy him all the music he needs to erase the memory of this dark hour, so I applaud Apple’s swift response to this appalling situation.

Such altruism and community-spiritedness, if continued, is set to cost Apple dear, however: currently top of their download chart is excruciating ex-army chalk-on-blackboard crooner James Blunt, with “You’re Bootiful”. There aren’t enough gifts and prizes in the world to get victims through the pain that track can inflict.

I’ve got to give Apple some credit in all of this, though. When the RIAA was closing down Audiogalaxy, and when Metallica were flying in to awards shows to complain that Napster users were stealing their property, I knew all along that music lovers (and Coldplay fans) would be willing to pay for music if the price was right, if it was easy to do, if the selection was good enough, and if they could be guaranteed the right quality of download. Sure enough, iTunes has shown this and then some, and even good old Napster are making money legally these days from downloads. It took way, way, too long, but eventually the penny seems to have dropped that downloads aren’t going to harm the record industry after all. Sales of CDs may be down nearly 20% year on year heading through 2005, but when you add on downloads, that gap starts to look a lot narrower.

February 27th, 2006, posted by Neil in Music and Vague rants · 3 Comments

2005. Musically, not half-bad.

It’s nearly February 2006, so what better time than now to look back to last year, and pick out a few of 2005’s top albums, in no particular order. If any of these weren’t actually released in 2005, well done on having the library mind and all, but if I bought it in 2005, that’s good enough for inclusion. (Captain subtext says: I’m too lazy to look up the release dates right now.

Leaves @ The Joiners

Bland Icelandic Coldplay, is how my friend descibes them as I ask him if he wants a ticket. And that’s without even listening to Leaves. Still, it doesn’t put him off coming to the gig. In the end, four of us headed off to the Joiners for a gig that none of us are hugely enthusiastic about. The big worry is that Leaves will indeed turn out to be bland. Of the three of us who have listened to their second album, The Angela Test, none of us can particularly remember any standout tracks, although I make a case for The Spell, even though I secretly wish it didn’t sound quite so much like something from the “Rush of Blood…” sessions.