Ten for 2015

This year, I have mostly been listening to...

So let's get to it, my musical highlight of 2015 without much of a contest was finally, after 20 years thinking and assuming there was no chance of it ever happening, getting to see my beloved Ride play live. The songs sounded so fresh, they may well as well have been being played for the first time – in the case of Black Nite Crash, the song from which my band took its name, this tour was indeed its first live outing. Reunions aren't always 100% successful, but this one was an absolute triumph, a truly special and emotional experience for me.

On to new music, then. Defying expectations that they'd be too tired and, well, pointless, three of my favourite albums of the year actually came from other 90s stalwarts – Blur, The Chemical Brothers and The Charlatans all producing strong efforts. Honourable mention too to Tom Jones who narrowly missed out on this list with a stonking cover of Billy Boy Arnold's I Wish You Would; age really is just a number. Younger pups who made nice noises this year but I haven't picked out a song from were Farao, The Lake Poets, Galants and Menace Beach.

Here then are the first 10 songs that jumped out at me as my favourites from this year. A lot of returners from the previous two years' lists, so there remains the nagging feeling that I need to be out there discovering more new folks. As always, in no particular order, because in music we're all winners, aren't we? Yes, we are.

Guy Garvey – Juggernaut

The more than occasionally annoying 6 Music name dropper and lead singer from Elbow (has he told you he's the lead singer from Elbow?) went solo this year and it seemed to be really rather good. This one is simply beautiful.

Ringo Deathstarr – Stare At The Sun

There's obviously something in the more deserty states of the USA that makes people go all shoegazey and psychedelic, which obviously is never a bad thing. These Texans are up there with my favourites. The Levitation festival is up there on my music event bucket list.

Tess Parks and Anton Newcombe – Cocaine Cat

Old Anton was pretty prolific this year, with a few BrianJonestown Massacre releases and also this intriguing album with Tess Parks, owner of one of the most unique and somehow terrifying voices I've heard in a while.

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds – The Ballad Of The Mighty I

The Chief. He's old, he's a gobshite, he's not the most original, but he's also still one of my heroes. The new record was ace, and I bloody love this song. So there.

Marika Hackman – Ophelia

One of my favourite discoveries of recent years, I think We Slept At Last gets my nod for album of the year, a truly magical work which I could have just filled this list with. Skin, the duet with Sivu which is the dictionary definition of 'haunting', was almost my choice for this, but I've plumped with Ophelia instead. Just go and buy the album. Now.

Ghostpoet – Off Peak Dreams

Super talented and seemingly a bloody nice bloke; sickening. This is a great song to open a great album. Well worth seeing live too if you can.

Gaz Coombes – To The Wire

Another Britpop veteran with a wonderful solo offering. Again, a work to listen to in entirety, proving that the album is not the lost art that people would have you believe. The title track Buffalo was on my 2013 list; after much deliberation, this is my pick of the rest.

DMA'S – The Plan

There should probably be some rule about Australians being on this list, but there isn't so here are DMA'S. This might be my most listened to single song of the year… so simple, so beautiful… reach for that repeat button.

Cheatahs – Freak Waves

If Marika is my favourite new artist of recent years, then I reckon Cheatahs are my favourite band. With several EPs, an album, and several tours, it's been a very busy year for this multi-national crew. I saw them twice; they were mint. This is off the album.

Blossoms – Charlemagne

One of the more outrageously catchy efforts of the year, this is another that I often have to listen to more than once at a time. These lads from Stockport will be out and about in the first half of next year; go and see them if you can.

So there we have it, another year is done. No matter what Simon Cowell and the like throw at us, music is still strong; great new music is still popping up out there, so go to a gig, go to a record shop, find it, buy it, listen to it, love it.

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…

This Is Music

On getting the band back together…

This week my band Black Night Crash had its first rehearsal for eight and a half years, as we prepare for a show to mark our tenth anniversary. This has caused me to reflect on my involvement with music, and why this feels so massively important. 

I had an invaluable foundation in music, spending a number of years playing cello in youth orchestras. I didn’t always enjoy it at the time, taking up most of my Saturdays as it did, and as I since realised completely scuppering my football playing ambitions. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing though: I’m a far more competent performer on a stage than I’d ever be on a football pitch. What it did give me was a huge appreciation of live performance, and that indescribable buzz you get from being in a group producing something that people genuinely enjoy.

That group dynamic is vitally important. I loved listening out, observing, and thinking about how everything in the orchestra would fit together to produce the complete work, and the same goes for all kinds of music. I’ve performed solo in the past as well, but it was never really my thing. I much prefer feeling like part of something bigger, creating and sharing together. 

By my mid teens, I’d realised that playing bass in a rock band was ever so slightly more cool than being an orchestra nerd. Most people of my age were swept up in the tsunami of resurgent popularity of guitar band sparked by Oasis and the like, and me and my school friends were no different, bashing out ropey covers of Supersonic, Live Forever and Parklife (just to show we weren’t biased). From there we began trying to take things a little more seriously, writing our own material and becoming pretty decent, I’d like to think. The high point came at one packed out, sweaty show where the crowd bounced around and sang along with words I’d written in songs we’d crafted. Once you’ve had a taste of that kind of rush, there’s very little that can top it.

Fast forward a few years and we reach the era of Black Night Crash. From the very outset it was deadly serious, all or nothing stuff, meticulously planned. In the end, that level of pressure that we put on ourselves was probably our downfall. Aiming impatiently for 100% professional perfection and large-scale success, we fell apart under the weight of our own expectations. Ultimately, it just wasn’t meant to be, for want of a better cliché.

But that’s not to say we didn’t have fun, because believe me we did. Some of the shows we did were incredible. The festivals, particularly Beached, Middlesbrough Music Live, and Guilfest were amazing experiences, playing to big, new, and appreciative crowds. The mini tour we did supporting west country outfit BlackBud I think we would all rank as a proper time-of-your-life episode. 

For me a lot of the stuff out of the public eye was just as enjoyable. When it was just the four of us in a rehearsal room or recording studio, that’s when I felt the most pride and wonder in what we were doing, pushing each other to create the best music we possibly could. A large part of the live performance is just that – performance. You’re a showman, entertaining the people in front of you right at that moment, which of course is fantastic and a vital part of the whole package of being in a band. But when you’re writing and recording, you’re purely a musician, and that’s when you can drink it all in and live that creative output.

People often ask why I pretty much completely stopped playing music when Black Night Crash finished first time around. I suppose for that I would go back to the second point there. As well as those guys being some of my dearest friends, musically we clicked in such a way that I could not possibly imagine reaching those same levels of enjoyment in the simple playing of music with anybody else. The amount of emotional energy invested in the band didn’t leave anything left for anyone else in any case. At our first rehearsal back this week, we immediately hit upon that winning formula again. Clearly some ingrained muscle memory had us clicking straight away, with a tightness that shocked and delighted us all. Most thrilling was getting straight on with working on some new material, and feeling that familiar old buzz as the creative energy started to fizz once more. 

How far will we take it this time? Honestly, I’m not sure. Right now there’s no grand plan and no pressure. We’ll write, record, perform and most importantly, enjoy it. Music is one of the greatest, joy-bringing life forces, and to be able to create it and simply enjoy it is about the greatest thing a person can do. It’s good to be back.

Black Night Crash play Fibbers, York, on Saturday 24 May. Tickets on sale now.