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…

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.