Category Archives: Thoughts and Opinions

Opinions and occasional rants about the state of the music scene.

Where is all the good music?

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Tim Hall

We’ve all heard friends like this. “There’s no good music around any more”, they say, like Homer Simpson. We know there’s all kinds of wonderful music out there in every genre from prog-rock to death metal to alt.country to electronic to solo bass to many many more that most people have never heard of. But they only know of the ITV Indie and Asda-pop of the commercial mainstream.

Steve Lawson said on Twitter

Ever heard anyone complaining that there’s no good music around any more? Those people are insane. Ignore them.

But I think Steve Lawson, thought he has a point, is still being a little bit on the harsh side, and although the people he rails about are indeed quite wrong, I can understand where they’re coming from.

When these people were in their teens and early 20s, they had plenty of time to discover new music. All the best music was well outside the commercial mainstream; they listened to the radio late at night, bought music papers, went to gigs, traded tapes with friends, all of it to discover the good stuff.

Now they’re older, with jobs and mortgages and kids, and they no longer have the time do that. All the new music they hear is the lowest common denominator slop served up by the mass media, drivel like X-Factor or daytime commercial radio.

What they forget is the mainstream media always was rubbish. At their seventies peak even huge selling acts like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were conspicuous by their absence from TV or daytime radio, and people who weren’t active music fans were unaware of their existence. TV was filled with the likes of Brotherhood of Man and The Nolan Sisters in the same way as today has formulaic landfill indie.

Same as it ever was, if you want good music, you have to go look for it.

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Alan McGee admits to Trolling

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

A couple of years ago, I blogged about Alan McGee’s notorious column in The Guardian Music Blog, and how it had turned into self-parody.

In this column he claimed that Oasis were the greatest band of all time, Freddy Mercury was really a punk, ELO were better than The Beatles, Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans was an absolute classic, and most notoriously of all, kept bigging up a spectacularly talentless bunch of indie no-marks called The Grants.

The comments sections soon turned into free-fire zones. Once people started recognising the extent that many of his columns were nonsense, he employed a legion of supporters in the comments to back him up. All of whom appeared to sock puppets, alleged to be Paul Brownell, an employee of McGee’s.

Now he admits the entire column was trolling

I’ve done blogs before in the past. One I used to write was for The Guardian and for four years most of the articles, and this is for the record as nobody ever prints this bit in interviews, were complete piss takes of The Guardian readers and journalists. Well, all bar Tim Jonze and Alex Needham.

I claimed to like Phil Collins, Jon Bon Jovi and Foreigner. I actually took it so far they once put me on the phone to interview Jon Bon Jovi and I had to pretend I liked his music.

I actually feel sorry for The Grants. They were just a harmless indie band, never really destined to get beyond the toilet circuit, fronted by a lead singer whose mouth was far bigger than his talent. But the way he hyped them up as the next big thing exposed them to ridicule on a large stage, which I’m not sure they really deserved.

Posted in Music, Opinions and Rants, Thoughts and Opinions | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Don’t Buy the Pink Floyd Box Sets

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Tim Hall

I see there’s a shock-and-awe advertising campaign for the reissues of the classic 70s albums by Pink Floyd.

Yes, an album like Dark Side of the Moon is all-time classic which has stood the test of time and has finally emerged from the long shadow cast by of Punk to take its rightful place in the British Rock Canon. But let’s face it, if you really cared about the album, you’d already have it on CD, right?

September has been one of the best months for new progressive rock releases I can remember for a long, long time. In the space of two weeks there have been new releases by Dream Theater, Opeth, Anathema, Matt Stevens, Steve Hackett and Steve Wilson. That’s one hell of a lot of new music, and you can have all of it for the price of just one of the ridiculously overpriced “Immersion editions” that you’ll probably only ever listen to the once.

I realise the target market for these things is the middle-aged bloke who stopped caring about new music when he got married and had kids decades ago, and now in the throes of his mid-life crisis is desperately trying to reconnect with his long lost youth. He’s probably never even heard of Opeth.

Don’t be that guy. Don’t buy the box sets. Pink Floyd really don’t need your money. And EMI certainly don’t deserve it.

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Credit Where Credit’s Due

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

For years I’ve complained about The Guardian’s woeful coverage of metal and progressive rock. Major releases are either overlooked entirely, or worse still, given a cursory dismissal by someone with no knowledge or respect for the genre. Dave Simpson’s attempt to review Yes is a prime example. Even their most positive reviews came from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in.

Which is why it’s good to see Dom Lawson, of Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Presents Prog fame reviewing Opeth’s Heritage. It’s not a long, detailed review, but it certainly doesn’t read like Tony Blackburn attempting to review The Fall.

One swallow does not necessarily make a summer, but I hope we get to read more reviews by Dom Lawson in the future.

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On Songwriting and Production

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Tim Hall

A question for you all.

When it comes to making a great record, how much is down to the production, and how much depends on the songs themselves?

There is a school of thought that insists that the song is everything, and the best records have stripped-down, simple arrangements shorn of unnecessary ornamentation or instrumentation. But I feel that approach only really works if you’ve got truly great songs to start with. If you’re not Bob Dylan, the right sort of production and some imaginative arrangements are what makes great records out of good songs.

I won’t deny that it’s possible to spoil a good song by overcomplicating things (I own too many later-period Dream Theater releases to be able to say otherwise), and likewise you’ll never have a good record unless you’ve got something worthwhile to start with. As the saying goes, there is no point trying to polish a turd.

There’s a more fundamental question of where you draw the dividing line between songwriting and arrangement anyway. Is the song just the vocal melody and the basic chord progression?

Over to you…

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No Zero-Sum Game

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Tim Hall

As readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of female-fronted prog bands such as Mostly Autumn, Panic Room, The Reasoning, Karnataka, Touchstone and Stolen Earth, all of whom form a definite ‘scene’. All the bands know each other, and the relations between them in terms of shared band members is so incestuous that Pete Frame would have trouble drawing one of his rock family trees.

I think a bit of friendly competition between these bands is a very healthy thing, in that it encourages every band in the scene to raise their game. But one thing I strongly believe is that it’s not a zero-sum game. All these bands are operating below the radar of 99% of the music-loving population. While they’re never going to sell millions, at least without watering down everything great about their music, there’s still a far bigger untapped market out there. The number of times I’ve recommended an album and got “Where have this band been all my life” in response is testament to this. These bands’ competition isn’t each other, it’s the heavily-promoted mainstream artists, and all those bloody tribute bands.

It will only take one (any one) of these bands to experience wider success, and they’re likely to pull the others through in their wake. So it saddens me when I read fans talking of “blowing away the competition” as if there can only be one winner, and “their” band can only prosper at another’s expense. Leave that sort of blinkered partisanship to sports fandom!

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Yet Another Music Biz Rant.

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Tim Hall

Sometimes I wonder if there are people out there who really believe there are no ways to find new music apart from either listening to Radio One or surfing MySpace completely at random. Just read this commenter in a thread about the failure (so far) of digital music products.

I know this sounds trite but it would really help if the big music companies did their job as “gatekeepers” and keep the mediocre music away from the masses. What ever happened to quality A&R departments? With the proliferation of cheap music sequencing programs, horrible club DJs and radio that is beyond unbearable, quality control is more important than ever!

It’s actually worse that that, Big Music is actively keeping far better music away from the masses. They’re pretty much only interested in the lowest common denominator music that follows a small number of proven formulas that they know how to market. And with more and more discerning music fans having made their excuses and left the mainstream, Big Music is increasingly left with the people who can’t or won’t seek out new music for themselves.

I personally think the gatekeeper/elite tastemaker model is fundamentally broken anyway and deserves to die. For better or worse, the Internet has fragmented the market, allowing artists in niche genres to market their music directly, bypassing that small and corrupt clique of gatekeepers and tastemakers.

Such artists rely on fan-to-fan recommendations to build an audience rather than on Big Music’s shock-and-awe advertising campaigns. Perhaps the role of new digital music startups ought to be to encourage that sort of thing, rather than prop up the dying major label business model? The thing about independent artists in niche genres is their business model depends not so much of gaining the largest possible audience, rather on minimising the number of middlemen between them and their audience. Digital startups are new middlemen, they’re only of any use to artists if the value they add is more than the cut they take. And they’re only any use to music fans if they act as a sort of smart filter, perhaps using some kind of wisdom-of-crowds approach to filter out the stuff that falls below the Sturgeon threshold.

Don’t expect the major labels to support such a thing - While they claim to speak for up-and-coming artists, the reality has always been that they’ll do their damnedest to marginalise every new artist except for the small minority that they choose to sign.

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Stupid Music Journalist Quote of the Day

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Tim Hall

Comes from The Guardian’s Mark Beaumont, in a blog post about Radiohead’s Kid A

By the mid-noughties, just like the mid-90s, alternative and mainstream were conjoined by a frothing mass media and shrinking major-label budgets – there seemed little distance between Kasier Chief and Sugababe, between Arctic Monkey and Crazy Frog. There was nowhere for an underground to be.

That really does speak wonders about the smallness of cultural bubble that “mainstream” music critics inhabit, doesn’t it? Just about all the music I love just simply doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned.

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Mark McGuire and the fetishising of lack of technique

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Tim Hall

I have a reputation for being opinionated and argumentative online, which is one reason I don’t post much on band forums nowadays - there are too many self-important sycophants who take offence, often on behalf of others, at what was intended as constructive criticism. So now I’m back baiting Guardian music journalists again.

Such an example is Ben Beaumont-Thomas’ Guardian Music Blog piece attempting to praise the guitar talents Mark McGuire, which starts with this opening paragraph:

Claims for the greatness of guitarists are often badly skewed. Many seem to regard guitar playing in a similar way to skateboarding, that greatness is about isolated feats of technical brilliance (an idea which Guitar Hero taps into and perhaps slyly satirises). Therefore songwriting from the likes of Dragonforce, and to a lesser extent Van Halen, Queen, and Guns’n'Roses is modular: guitar theatrics slotted into a framework, rather than folded into songs.

To which my first reaction is “Oh dear”.

Whatever you might think of Mark McGuire’s music (It sounds interesting, reminds me a bit of Matt Stevens or even very early instrumental-era Twelfth Night), I still maintain that opening with a thinly-veiled slur at Dragonforce (of whom I’m not a particular fan) is equivalent to me opening a review of someone like Panic Room with a paragraph about why I think The Libertines are rubbish. It would rightly be a distraction from the main body of the article.

After getting a few responses from the author in the comments, I realised that the thing wasn’t just about McGuire’s music at all, but was using him as a hook to hang a piece fetishising lack of technique. But far from being the iconoclastic position he implies it to be, all he’s doing is restating the orthodox position of the majority of rock critics from the past thirty years. 17-year old Dragonforce fans do not represent the establishment; that position is held by 40-something old punks. And I believe their attitude is deeply damaging to music. As commenter Troyka says:

Since the punk era it has been the norm to pretend that technique and ability don´t matter as much as enthusiasm. The result of which we can see in the uniform dullness of a lot of today´s younger guitarists (in the U.K at least).

Which is pretty much why we haven’t seen any great guitarists emerge in mainstream British music for at least 15 years. Yes, there are plenty of younger guitarists in metal, blues or prog, but they’re minority genres and largely aren’t on the BBC/NME/Guardian/Q radar screen.

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Time to bring back Top of the Pops?

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Tim Hall

On The Guardian website Miranda Sawyer campaigns for a return of Top of the Pops. Unfortunately she spoils a good argument with the mistaken opinion that The Mercury Music Prize represents the sole valid alternative to Simon Cowell’s X-Factor, and they are the only two games in town.

I’m not sure if the Top of the Pops format will work today, but we desperately need something to reverse the situation in the past decade whereby the general music-buying population is more or less completely cut out of the loop in determining which records and artists become successful.

With records played to death on the radio before they’re even released, we’ve reached the point where everything mainstream audiences get to hear is decided in advance by a very small number of elite tastemakers from the record companies and the media. The Mercury Music prize gives every appearance of being run by this same clique.

What was great about TOTP was the way it used a strict formula based on chart position to decide who appeared on it - nobody got vetoed because a clique of cloth-eared idiots from BBC light entertainment thought they didn’t fit the show’s format. If enough fans went out and bought the record, they got on. So we had Mötorhead on prime-time TV playing “Ace of Spades”, something which would be unthinkable now.

What’s very notable is the way the BBC marginalises genres like metal, jazz, blues or folk, despite their popularity up and down the country, in favour of various flavours of ‘indie’, which is all they think exists as an alternative to X-Factor pop. Yes, they might do the odd BBC3 documentary, but they tend to be very nostalgia-orientated, and don’t feature up and coming acts. Look at their festival coverage. For example, there was an eclectic mix of artists at Glastonbury this year, but you’d never have known it from the bands shown on TV.

Maybe genres have become so fragmented in today’s net-connected multi channel world that a crossover hit like “Ace of Spades” simply isn’t possible any more. But surely the best music of all genres deserves better than being trapped in separate musical ghettos?

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