Ten for 2014

The songs that soundtracked my year...

So 2014 actually turned out to be a pretty decent year for music all told. Much of that for me actually revolved around older acts. Firstly, my band Black Night Crash’s return to action was a dizzying thrill, with three exhilarating shows and some new songs in the works that seem to be a step up from anything we produced first time round; safe to say I am very excited about what 2015 could bring. Then there was the long overdue news that my absolute heroes Ride (who of course inspired the BNC name) were finally reforming, coupled with the equally good news that the desperately uninspiring Beady Eye were calling it a day. I managed to get tickets for the much discussed Kate Bush show, a truly unforgettable and inspiring experience. As a live spectacle this year for me this was only matched by seeing Manic Street Preachers performing The Holy Bible in full – it could have been rather awkward and embarrassing, instead it was urgent, vital and visceral, a sonic slap round the chops that underlined what a stunning piece of music that record is.

But there was also a fair chunk of decent new music released this year, and here are ten of my favourite tracks, as with last year’s list in no particular order…

Warpaint – Disco//Very

Yet another act that add weight to the argument that California may well be the music capital of the world. They’ve been kicking around a while now, and their new album this year was really something. This juddering mess of a tune is discordant enough to leave you scratching your head while being catchy enough to stay in there for hours, days, weeks… 

  
The War On Drugs – Red Eyes 

Another act from over the pond, but a lot more traditional in their approach. Proving that good, honest song writing still has a place, this is an epic, arms in the air or round your mates’ shoulders piece of brilliance.

Royal Blood – Little Monster 

Making more noise than it should be possible for two people to make, these lads have (as the crap pundits say) smashed it in 2014. Their stuff may not be the most original or varied, but boy is it infectious. It’ll be interesting to see where they develop, but for this stomper alone they will be remembered. Hit play, then hit repeat.

Pixies – Magdalena 

EP2 dropped in the first week of January, and very little throughout the year has topped this one song since. Love, love, LOVE it. Nothing else to say.

Marika Hackmann – Deep Green 

I had the joy of seeing her live in front of a pitifully (though unsurprisingly – what is wrong with our city?) small crowd in York, and she opened the show with this. Album on the way in the new year; potential superstar in the making. 

Cheatahs – Get Tight

While Ride are reforming to easily whip the crown away from any other pretenders, there is still decent new shoegaze being produced. At the grungier end of the spectrum are this lot, based in London. This is the stand-out song from their debut album, and there’s new stuff on the way shortly as well. 

Chain & The Gang – Stuck In A Box

One of the prolific Ian Svenonius’s many projects, I love the ‘Minimum Rock and Roll’ concept: a whole album of stripped-down, simple, and quite honestly fun tunes. This is probably the most irritatingly catchy, in the best possible way. What’s your favourite flavour? 

Broken Bells – After The Disco 

The first album released by this genius collective is so good (I still listen to it in full several times a month years after its release), I almost didn’t want them to release another. But their second offering is just as well crafted, and none better than this, the title track. Utterly perfect pop music; they really should be the biggest selling band on the planet. 

Brian Jonestown Massacre – What You Isn’t 

One of the most compelling stories in modern music, there seems to be no let-up in Anton Newcombe’s relentless production of wonderful music. ‘Revelation’ I reckon has to be my album of the year, and this is THE track. 

Douglas Dare – Clockwork

The term “haunting” must have been invented for Douglas Dare. This shimmering piece of genius off his debut album will have you gazing out of windows for hours, wishing it was raining if it isn’t already. Spellbinding. 

So there we go, on to 2015. Happy new year everyone, and to paraphrase Pauline Calf: if you like it, listen to it; if you don’t like it, listen to it, you might like it.

 

Death of a Party

On whether Britpop was the last British music scene...

This year has been designated the 20^th anniversary of Britpop, a phenomenon that at the time seemed all-consuming, infiltrating every corner of our cultural consciousness. But my Black Night Crash colleague Adam Bailey poses an interesting question: was Britpop the last true British music scene, and could it or anything on a similar scale ever be repeated?

Firstly, was Britpop even a ‘scene’, or was it simply a genre or type of music? There’s very little in the definitions when it comes to the different shades of popular music. A scene, you feel, should have some geographical element to it, which is not necessary for a genre. Britpop by its name alone has a geographical element to it, and by all accounts much of it did revolve around The Good Mixer pub in Camden, so we are probably safe calling it a scene of sorts. 

The theories behind its success have been well discussed down the years. The most popular is that it was a reaction against the influx of American grunge, which at the time was dominating the guitar music landscape. Grunge itself was seriously strong in ‘scene’ terms, based as it was mainly around one city (Seattle, WA). 

At the time Britain had its own strain of heavily distorted, fuzzy guitar-based scene – shoegaze. While this was going on predominantly in the south, the north also had a vibrant and fairly self-contained scene in the Madchester phenomenon.

So why didn’t either of these catch on and go nationwide (and beyond) in the way that Britpop would a few years later? Madchester’s dancey cross-over element made it commercial enough that a number of the groups under that umbrella enjoyed chart success, though it was very much of its time and so localised (and overtly drug-influenced) that it was unlikely to have much longevity.

As for shoegazing, much as I utterly adore it, the other moniker commonly associated with it – The Scene That Celebrates Itself – tells you all you need to know. Far too introspective and serious to conquer anything beyond its own boundaries, epics of the style such as Ride’s Drive Blind or Slowdive’s Catch The Breeze were never likely to be chart hits in the way Parklife or Common People would be. 

Tellingly, many current bands, including some significant names in America, cite the likes of Ride as major influences. You might not find quite as many who would claim to have been inspired by Menswear. Shoegaze is very much a musicians’ genre.

The clue to Britpop’s success where these others failed again is in the name. It was pop. Stylistically this was a return to the three-minute wonders that the British popular guitar music-loving public have inevitably come back to ever since Merseybeat. 

And it seemed to take over everything in our lives for a year or two. Blur’s involvement with the likes of Damien Hirst, Phil Daniels and Ken Livingstone provided links to the worlds of art, stage, screen and politics, and their battle with Oasis dominating the news ensured that current affairs were covered as well. 

Many are decrying the current anniversary as cynical nostalgia, nothing more than the BBC trying to fill a bit of airtime at a quiet point of year. To that, personally I would say so what? It’s nice to look back. The arguments over when Britpop started and finished (Blur, Pulp, Suede, Radiohead and others were knocking out stuff of a Britpoppish flavour before 1994) and indeed what or who should be included are never likely to be fully resolved. What is not in doubt is that the Britpop ‘thing’ was a major movement. 

And this brings us back to the original question: can anything like that happen on these shores again? Since Britpop there have been other scenes and genres that have achieved reasonable levels of popularity. Britpop’s aftershow party was soundtracked by drum ‘n’ bass as Roni Size and Reprazent won the Mercury Music Prize and drew attention to the Bristol scene. A few years later a large collection of fast and furious guitar pop bands appeared in Sheffield, spearheaded by the now global stars Arctic Monkeys, which with its shared style and location was very definitely a scene.

Why didn’t these become global phenomena? Like Madchester and shoegaze before them, drum ‘n’ bass did not have much commercial appeal, while the Sheffield thing for the most part was too localised, and not stylistically original enough. Where Britpop was heavily influenced by the 60s, and we were ready for that kind of music again, the Sheffield collective were heavily influenced by Britpop and quite simply not enough time had passed.

Where has guitar music got left to go? Is there anything new that people can do with guitars? Everything from 100% unplugged to brain-melting death metal has been covered, with all stops in between. We’ve seen all the cross-over styles you could conceive of working. We have now entered what seems to be a genreless era, where all new bands, as great as many of them are, are simply refinements or tweaks of existing styles, but all off doing their own thing and difficult to categorise. There is nothing especially groundbreaking, and no major movement to speak of.

Britpop itself was of course not particularly original in its musical style; it simply captured a moment. Who knows, maybe in 20 years, something similar will happen with a major revival movement of a similar style. Maybe before that there’ll be a sudden explosion in popularity of metal or folk. 

The way in which we now consume music is also a significant factor. As standardised education and the spread of broadcast media has been credited with eroding differences in language, accent and dialect, the rise of digital music platforms and the Internet has been said to have killed the album, the single and the charts as we knew them. We have such ready access to such an unbelievable wealth of sounds, we would be foolish not to consume as much as possible. 

But this could also mean that the concept of the ‘scene’ has been killed off as well. Physically real communities, scenes and movements will struggle to establish themselves in an age where with the right app on your phone you can listen to local radio stations on the other side of the world if they play the kind of music you like.

The Britpop years were the final few before the Internet took over our lives. This alone, I feel, makes it unlikely that we will see anything on that scale again. For the musician looking to establish themselves this is tricky – being part of a scene or movement can undoubtedly give you a leg up. There are plenty of the Britpop crowd who would never have got signed in another less favourable era.

For the music lover though, there should always be enough people out there producing music in sufficiently different styles to keep everyone happy. We only need to worry that the industry remains strong enough to reward the musicians adequately that they can afford to keep churning out the tunes. It can’t all just be given away free.

Here’s Sleeper…

Public Outpourings

On celebrity deaths and public grief...

The reaction to celebrity deaths in recent times has become more analysable than the deaths themselves. Social media has provided a bigger platform than ever before to share views and reactions at lightning speed, and as such it is quicker and easier to gauge public reaction where before we would only have the mainstream media and our immediate social circle for reference. And people, as it turns out, are curious creatures.

Public figures by their very nature feel like part of our lives. Their familiarity gives us the sense that we know them, and so unsurprisingly their death can feel for many like a personal loss. But is it really natural to feel genuine grief for these people who in reality we actually don’t know at all? No doubt it depends on the individual, and their particular psychological circumstances. Personally I have only ever once been moved almost to tears by a celebrity death (John Peel, if you were wondering), and I must admit I struggle to understand the phenomenon.

In Britain, we seem to have something of a reputation for public grief, typified and possibly even provoked by the hysterical outpourings following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Of course the violent suddenness of her demise provided the shock element, but still, the reaction was if not over the top then certainly mighty close to it. She was a well-loved public figure, though one tainted by scandal and no longer part of the royal family at the time of her death, and millions grieved as if their own mother or sister had passed.

Another more recent case that struck me as fantastically odd was the grieving for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. For the head of a technology company to be viewed with such messianic status, and mourned as though humanity had lost one of the most significant figures in its history surely heralded the imminent coming of some kind of reckoning. One of the few sane voices came from former Channel 4 technology correspondent, Benjamin Cohen, who put together a tempered obituary pointing out that Jobs might not actually have been the messiah (though not much of a naughty boy). 

The standing of the celebrity in question obviously plays a major role in the reaction. In the past, the usual formula for celebrity death reaction would see the sombre mass media obituaries complemented by tasteless (but usually brilliant) jokes in the streets. Social media now also provides the opportunity to counterbalance the purely respectful position of the mainstream media, and boy have we grabbed that opportunity. No longer can the opinion of people at large be conveniently ignored.

The death of Margaret Thatcher last year was a litmus test of public decency. As it turned out social media wasn’t really required, as the haters took to the streets in celebration. For years I had placed myself in the ‘would celebrate’ camp in the event of her shuffling off her mortal coil, but when the time came, I found I didn’t really feel anything. Sure, I went off on a few rants at my Italian students who knew her more as Meryl Streep than the Milk Snatcher, but ultimately I simply didn’t care that she was dead. I didn’t know her. 

Conversely, any dissenting voices in the wake of the passing of Nelson Mandela were severely frowned at from most quarters, yet here was another controversial and highly divisive figure depending on which side of the political spectrum you fall on. Like with Diana, popular opinion left no room for negative sentiment or discussion. Around the time of death is not the time for this anyway, but it’s understandable how it happens, as those with negative opinions struggle to hold back in the face of the gushing praise. 

This month has seen a rush of high profile deaths with a variety of reactions. Bob Crow and Tony Benn left the left in mourning, the former more of a sudden shock and a more divisive figure. Unlike with the Thatcher, very little in the way of celebrating was in evidence, just debates and arguments for and against his actions and beliefs, just as when he was alive. This, really, is the way it should be; death should never really be something to celebrate. 

Then we had the death of the designer L’Wren Scott, notable mainly for the initial morbid reaction of some sections of the media, and the subsequent critical reaction of others. That reaction centred more on the grieving state of her partner, Mick Jagger, and the poor woman herself has actually been somewhat overlooked in the whole affair. From this we learn not much more than the tabloids are still soulless vacuums of sensitivity, and are probably best ignored in these instances. 

Finally, we have the passing of the head of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps. Once again, Twitter has displayed the amount of disdain you would expect to be directed at such a divisive figure, the jokes fairly mirthless, the contempt not even vaguely disguised. Again, this should have been a death I should celebrate, but I can’t. Again, I just don’t care. Fred and his church are quite frankly absurd, and beyond the relatives of the people whose funerals they picket, I can’t understand anyone getting offended by such blind bonkers nonsense. In fact as regards WBC, the people I feel most sorry for are the poor offspring of the older wackos who are brainwashed into the cult as they grow up. Phelps’ death should not be celebrated. It should not even be acknowledged. They crave attention, so we should give them nothing.

The tabloid treatment of celebrity death can be distasteful or even offensive, as can public reaction given the new voice offered to people via social media. Ultimately it is a sad thing when someone dies, whatever their standing. Someone out there will be genuinely grieving for them. For the rest of us, we don’t know them, so a simple, metaphorical doffing of the cap and a muttered “my sympathies” should more than suffice. 

Gentlemen and Hooligans

On the antipathy between football and rugby...

The Six Nations rugby championship is currently underway, providing one of the few moments of the year when the sporting spotlight here is not 100% focussed on football. Of course not everybody is excited about it, but that’s ok, isn’t it? It seems not. In fact it seems for some sports fans the passion of the love of their sport is matched only by their antipathy towards supposedly rival sports.

I’ll nail my colours to the mast immediately: I love both football and rugby (bisportual?), and really can’t understand the need of some people to be so negative towards the others. If you like one of the sports more than the other, fine, but why not let the other side get on and enjoy themselves?

There is without a doubt a class element to the rivalry, which while not necessarily a defining factor, certainly cannot be ignored. Rugby is seen as elitist, the game of the public schools and ruling classes, whereas football is considered a working man’s game. Rugby was famously invented at a grammar school, and many of its fans and participants still come from that kind of environment. Indeed if you look at Rugby World magazine, they still have comprehensive coverage of (public) schools rugby, and in all their player profiles list which school the player in question attended. Does anybody have any idea which schools any of our football stars went to? No, partly because it’s irrelevant, but also because the overwhelming majority will have attended state schools.

With this kind of background, it’s fair to say a lot of rugby fans can be awful snobs. The famous old quote that “football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, while rugby is a hooligans’ game played by gentlemen” still holds sway. Rugby folk see football as a game for effeminate weaklings. One of the reasons I stopped buying Rugby World were the constant unchecked references to “Wendyball” in the letters pages. Like much of the rivalry, petty and unnecessary.

In fact the constant comparisons with football by rugby people could be said to show insecurity and even envy on their part – envy that football is by far the most popular sport on the planet. Another reason I stopped buying Rugby World and sometimes find TV rugby commentary and analysis irritating is the number of football references. Too often you read of such and such a team being “the Manchester United of rugby”, or errors near the try line described as “like missing an open goal”. How often do you hear Arsenal or Chelsea described as the Saracens or Harlequins of football, or a chip forward described as a box kick? Football is secure in its position at the top of the tree so does not need to make such comparisons. Rugby would do well to recognise the hypocrisy of making references to football while simultaneously criticising it.

The issue of cheating also brings unfavourable comparisons. Football is undoubtedly blighted by this, seemingly getting worse the higher the level. I rarely watch top level football these days, and would cite the diving, feigning of injury and moaning and harassment of match officials as the main reasons. But rugby should be wary of taking the moral high ground here. Indeed it seems to delight in the dark deeds that take place in the ruck and scrum. How is it that this is considered entertainingly cunning and devious, while a footballer feigning contact while trying to win a penalty is horrendous cheating? The feigning aspect seems to be the key point, though again rugby should check itself here – the Bloodgate scandal of 2009, when Harlequins used joke shop capsules to fake a blood injury in order to return their best kicker to the field at a key moment of a Heineken Cup quarter final, was as bad or even worse than anything you will ever see on a football field. As George Orwell once said: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”

Where rugby wins hands down though and a key way in which it won my affections is the spirit in which it is played and indeed watched. The players will hammer the hell out of each other, but the swift and instant punishment of any backchat towards the referee is the one rugby thing that football folk often lament the lack of in their sport. The now legendary put-down from top referee Nigel Owens, reminding a mouthy player that “this is not soccer” perfectly illustrated this striking difference.

I love the fact that you can go to watch a rugby game without being herded around like cattle by police and mix happily with opposition fans. The passion of the rivalry between fans is a major selling point of football and I sincerely hope the game never becomes so sanitised that this disappears, but sometimes you really just want a quiet afternoon out to watch a decent game. This is often the difference for me now: I go to football for the experience of being a football fan, whereas I go to rugby to watch the game.

So what else has football got on rugby other than its elitism? A big claim is that it’s boring. I would completely refute that. Both sports are capable of producing desperately dull stalemates (though draws in rugby of course are a lot less common) or high scoring end-to-end rollercoaster rides. Football at the highest level is a game of incredible subtlety and finesse at times, but the speed, invention, handling skills and interplay of the best rugby sides can be equally spellbinding.

Football fans who also like the noisy little brother, Rugby League, are even worse in this regard. Personally I don’t like League much at all. I find it devoid of thought and tactics, often making for quite a dull spectacle. And I will never understand the claim of League fans that it’s a much harder game, when they have to stop after each (one- or two-on-one) tackle, compared to Union where you see umpteen bodies flying into a ruck, risking life and limb.  

Many of the misconceptions I feel are deeply ingrained and hark back to the amateur era, when rugby was a slower and arguably less exciting prospect. The game is now so vastly changed from even 20 years ago as to be almost unrecognisable. You have to hope the encroaching commercialism won’t turn rugby into the bloated, offensively cash-rich, self-important megalith that elite football has become in recent times. But the changes on the field are enormously welcome. The game is no longer a mud-wallowing battle slugged out between overweight barroom oafs, but a high-octane contest of strength and skill between frighteningly powerful, professional athletes.

Both games have served me well in life. Many of my oldest and most durable friendships are forged in football, while almost my entire social life during my three years living in Italy revolved around a wonderful group of disparate oddballs brought together by a shared love of rugby. Both sports have their good and bad points, but I just wish the more passionate fans of both could just live and let live. The often ignorant stereotyping, snobbishness towards the other side and comparisons are pointless for the most part and neither party comes out of them very well. You don’t have to like the other sport, but there’s no need to criticise those who do.  After all, at least it's not bloody tennis.