thoughts and ramblings

20 Choons that are chiming with me currently and other self-indulgent useless facts

2008-04-02T00:25:00.000-07:00

2o Current Listening Tunes
Grey Will Fade - Charlotte Hatherley
High Tide - The Comsat Angels
The Pain Inside - Cosmic Rough Riders
Gun - Durutti Column
Thrown Down - Fleetwood Mac
Just Look At You Now - Howard Jones
Goodnight And Go - Imogen Heap
Send Me One Line - John Martyn
Shine - Joni Mitchell
Silent Shout - The Knife
To the Country - Laura Veirs
Teen Angst - M83
Special - Mew
Blown A Wish - My Bloody Valentine
Hold Me For A While - Oleta Adams
Day After Day - The Pretenders
The Good That Won't Come Out - Rilo Kiley
Start Me - Sophie Barker
The Toast - Steve Hackett
Goodnight Song - Tears For Fears

5 Books Recently(ish) Enjoyed Reading
Cider With Roadies - Stuart Maconie
Love All The People - Bill Hicks
Grumpy Old Men - David Quantick
The Hungry Years - William Leith
The Revenge Of Gaia - James Lovelock

Fave Newspaper
1. Independent
2. Guardian

Best Art Exhibitions Recently(ish) Seen
Richard Long at The Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Howard Hodgkin (screen prints) at The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

Best Recent Holiday
Short hill walking break at The Wasdale Head Inn, Cumbria

Favourite Brand Of Toilet Pa..
Okay I think that's probably enough for now

Coming Clean

2008-04-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Iggy Pop or The Archies? Deacon Blue or Talking Heads? Joy Division or The Carpenters? The Cranberries or Laura Veirs?
Another question, apart from the sometimes implied 'do you have taste or don't you?' by the self appointed cool dudes/dictators of musical fashion could be 'are you submissive enough to (Nick) cave in to our choice or brave enough to think for yourself and do your own thing?" out in the cold, all on your own.. Except that we're not! The mostly wonderful web has allowed us to form 'clubs', interest groups and links of our own determining and b****cks to the would be dictators of fashion!
Well, I have some serious confessions to make.
Howard Jones.. I like some of his tunes. Deacon Blue.. some brilliant, gorgeous pop tracks. Phil Collins.. I'm sorry but he's done, in my view, some beautiful tunes. Plus he's an excellent drummer. Oh My God you're aligning S&PJ with these artists? No not especially. But they have all influenced me musically. (I'll tell you later who are our biggest influences.)
I'm telling you this not because I want to particularly blow the trumpet for these artists or mark myself out as having questionable taste but rather because I believe there's too much hipocrisy regarding who's pushed out as 'cool' and 'uncool' by the self appointed arbiters of taste.
There's a book I've just read called 'Faking It' by Hugh Barker & Yuval Taylor which blows out of the water most music afficianados preconceptions of what constitutes 'authentic' 'real' music.
"It's roughly recorded, slightly out of tune, relates to the delta blues or some obscure artist of old, is musically basic and displays no aspirations to greatness" - .. hey must be cool
"Ooops. What are these weird harmonies and time signatures? Where's the down beat? Do these guys display some kind of musical proficiency? Hang on this sounds suspiciously poppy" - Yikes, it's crap
There's a lot more to the book than that would imply but one thing I enjoyed about it was I felt it vindicated my hotchpotch/cross genre tastes in music.
"How can you like Slowdive & Sting? Rilo Kiley & Robin Trower? Husker Du & Howard Jones? Elliot Smith & Enya? The Comsat Angels & Coldplay?" Easy, cos I love music and love has no bounds. Also if I'm honest I hate being dictated to as to what I can & can't like and maybe react against it!
Biggest musical influences? Cop out time, too many to mention.
Here are a few though (past & current) that maybe I've not mentioned before: Talk Talk, China Crisis, OMD, Landscape, Art Of Noise, Focus, Genesis, John Martyn, Joni Mitchell, My Bloody Valentine, The Who, Tears for Fears, Thompson Twins, Sigur Ros, Simple Minds, Rush, Peter Gabriel, Pet Shop Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Durutti Column, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Everything But the Girl, The Proclaimers, Coldplay, The Blue Nile, Chicane, Aphex Twin, Orbital, ..

"Sugar Sugar" by the Archies was the first single I bought (with pocket money).
With the music Sophie and I produced, I never felt it was affiliated particularly with The Fall, Smiths, Wedding Present,etc. type genre (although I have bought albums by the first two of these) but maybe more so with Aztec Camera, Strawberry Switchblade, and even dare I say Japan and Tears for Fears and the like. I also relate to Captain Beefheart's unorthodox music and his brave and crazy outsiderness.
Whatever. I'm totoally new to this blog game and have probably given too much away already.
Take care people & talk more soon.
Pete

Extreme opinions in music

2008-04-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Well we had a crap review for our latest album in a local free music rag called NARC & I certainly got narked about it! Maybe it was the fluey virus that's been dogging me for the past couple of weeks that lowered my already habitually fragile defences or the fact that it was our first and only album review for over 20 years or maybe it was that the reviewer stated it was "the worst music heard since man evolved the ear.. just awful, awful cheesepop"!
I found the reviewer's MySpace page and emailed him to register my dismay and question his opinions he replied with a 'hey I wouldn't have thought you'd have cared' type angle which maybe reflects some kind of 'hey anyone can spout off any extreme opinion anywhere and not be remotely answerable for it and it's cool to do so' type vibe and then he said "I admit that I certainly exaggerated my distaste for your music... my review was over exaggerated"
Oh f**k me then that makes it all okay!
Whatever. I didn't want to take the matter any further even though apparently I would possibly have grounds for libel.
I can happily accept that many people won't in any way dig our tunes and of course I'm totally fine about that. As long as we have our fan base who kind of validate what we do then we're in business so to speak. But why be so aggressive & damning.. especially when you don't even mean it? Jeez!!
I'm not going to go on a 'grumpy old men' type rant about the 'younger generation' especially as I personally know some magnificent youngsters (nephews, nieces, that type of thing) who are, to my mind, highly tuned in and sussed individuals. Maybe the guy felt inconsequential standing before what he saw as some establishment edifice of music and kicked out not thinking it would register with us..
Anyway about extreme opinions in music.. Maybe it's the Simon Cowell effect and all that i.e. to say "Ooo, I think you're maybe quite good. I'm not sure, possibly you could appeal to a wider audience" won't pull in the viewers but dogmatic unequivocal "you've got it" or " you're crumby" messages kind of assuage people's uneasy uncertainty in this age of too much choice.