Hack at work.
Killing Bono
"The best book I have ever read about trying to make it in the music business" - Elton John
"A fantastic book, which manages the difficult trick of being simultaneously very funny and very sad." - Bob Geldof
"I was Neil McCormick's fan in school. He was much cooler than me, a much better writer and I thought he'd make a much better rock star. I was wrong on one count. He's written a great book" - Bono
Why Paul Weller’s not a shoo-in for the Mercury Prize
September 7th, 2010
Paul Weller has stiff competition for the Mercury prize this year Bookies have slashed the odds on Paul Weller winning tonight’s Mercury Prize, making him the 1/10 favourite, after a number of large bets were placed. Weller has a bit of form here. A series of last minute bets for Weller to win Best British Male Artist in last year’s Brits Awards was blamed on a gambling syndicate with advance information. The cumulative effect of small bets placed by a group of men touring bookies in London and Guilford was estimated to have cost the gambling industry £100,000.
The thing about the Brits, though, is that the vote is essentially taken before the ceremony is even organised, so a lot of people are potentially aware of the result. The Mercury Awards, by contrast, would be nigh on impossible to fix. The judges only meet for the second time tonight to have a discussion and espouse the arguments for their personal favourite. And the final vote is not taken until after the performances.
Rather, I think the late run on Weller probably reflects an attempt to second guess the judges.
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Morrissey provokes storm in a (China) tea cup shock
September 6th, 2010
“I’ve never intended to be controversial,” Morrissey once claimed, “but it’s very easy to be controversial in pop music because nobody ever is.”
Well, he’s gone and done it again, with an interview in the Observer, in which (as a particularly outspoken vegetarian) Morrissey conveys his disgust at a news story about the treatment of animals in China with the comment “Absolutely horrific. You can’t help but feel the Chinese are a subspecies.”
It is an unfortunate choice of word, certainly, although not quite the call to rise up and expunge all foreign blood from our soil that it is being portrayed as. It’s a bit off, is about the most you could say of it. Indeed, the comment was so throwaway that the self-absorbed interviewer (poet Simon Armitage) barely seemed to notice it at the time, including it amidst a jumble of disconnected quotes in his article, without any context or follow up questions or attempt to clarify.
Nonetheless, it has led to Morrissey being condemned as a racist, as if we haven’t all got more serious things to worry about than a famously opinionated pop star making provocatively controversial comments. It is the proverbial storm in a tea cup, which is exactly the kind of storm you can imagine Morrissey being pleased to provoke,
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Morrissey provokes storm in a (China) tea cup shock
September 6th, 2010
“I’ve never intended to be controversial,” Morrissey once claimed, “but it’s very easy to be controversial in pop music because nobody ever is.”
Well, he’s gone and done it again, with an interview in the Observer, in which (as a particularly outspoken vegetarian) Morrissey conveys his disgust at a news story about the treatment of animals in China with the comment “Absolutely horrific. You can’t help but feel the Chinese are a subspecies.”
It is an unfortunate choice of word, certainly, although not quite the call to rise up and expunge all foreign blood from our soil that it is being portrayed as. It’s a bit off, is about the most you could say of it. Indeed, the comment was so throwaway that the self-absorbed interviewer (poet Simon Armitage) barely seemed to notice it at the time, including it amidst a jumble of disconnected quotes in his article, without any context or follow up questions or attempt to clarify.
Nonetheless, it has led to Morrissey being condemned as a racist, as if we haven’t all got more serious things to worry about than a famously opinionated pop star making provocatively controversial comments. It is the proverbial storm in a tea cup, which is exactly the kind of storm you can imagine Morrissey being pleased to provoke,
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Heavy metal: why the devil doesn’t have all the best tunes
September 1st, 2010
Is heavy metal conclusive proof that the devil actually doesn’t have all the best tunes? I am not entirely convinced by the Reverend Rachel Mann’s proposal that Christians could learn a lot about life from heavy metal. The only thing I ever learned at a heavy metal concert was to keep my ear plugs in.
OK, that’s a cheap shot. Heavy Metal (and all its spawn, death metal, black metal, speed metal, thrash metal, rusty metal, dented metal, plastic metal, easy listening cocktail bar metal – I admit I may have made a couple of these up) has never been my music of choice.
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Is Autotune Evil?
August 25th, 2010
Bob Dylan in 1965 Photo: rexWith all this talk about auto-tune, I’ve been wondering what Bob Dylan would sound like if the pitch correction device had been available in the 60s? “Someday everything’s gonna be smooth like a rhapsody / When I auto-tune my masterpiece.”
Better not to go there. As someone said to me on Twitter, the thing about auto-tune is that good musicians don’t need it and bad ones don’t deserve it.
There has been much controversy about the use of auto-tune on the X Factor, and I weigh in with my thoughts on it in tomorrow’s Telegraph. But, for anyone surprised at revelations about the ubiquity of vocal enhancement in modern recording, it is worth making the point that auto-tune is not inherently evil.
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Sommerfesten: The greatest festival you’ve never heard of
August 23rd, 2010
Damien Rice gets bashful at Sommerfesten pic: Stig Havnevik/Sommerfesten.
I know I said I wasn’t going to go to any festivals this summer. My intransigence lasted as far as Latitude, which I justified attending on the basis that it’s more like a picnic crèche for middle-class arts lovers and their kids. But then 30,000 other people turned up (twice as many as previous years), and there were two rapes, which must be a first for a crèche. I don’t think I’ll go back.
I did, however, find a festival to fit my anti-festival mood, although I had to travel all the way to Norway for it. Sommerfesten, on the island of Giske, is small, free and conducted with such a positive spirit that even the headliners perform for bed and board. Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice, who has been taking a year off, pitched up with his guitar to headline the event, mingling with the audience and pitching in to all the activities. “I love things like this,” he told me, “where there’s no money and everybody does it in the right spirit.”
He made this declaration over a plate of beautifully prepared fish. Food is key to Sommerfesten. Indeed, people talk about the food as much as the music. Entry to the festival is free but the audience are asked to bring food to share, and the whole event is run as a big picnic.
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U2’s manager: how to save the music industry
August 17th, 2010
One of these men is not a rock star: Edge, McGuinness, Bono, 1987
Bono’s back. And so am I.
I’ve been on holiday and so (no doubt to the dismay of my personal Twitter parodist) missed the return of U2 to live action. I gather all is going well and that Bono’s back problems have been sorted out: “rebuilt by German engineering” as the man himself said. Apparently his doctor told him he would “run further and faster in the future.” Vorsprung Durch Technik and all that. I still say they could have saved a lot of money, disruption and heartache with the simple deployment of an ergonomic stool. It worked for Val Doonican.
Anyway, enough about the man who stands at the front of the U2 juggernaut. In the new issue of GQ, we hear from the man who stands behind it. Manager Paul McGuinness has written a fascinating article: How To Save The Music Industry.
There is no doubt this is a business in peril.
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Tom Jones: the oldest swinger in the charts
July 29th, 2010
If midweek sales hold up, 70-year-old Tom Jones is on course to becoming the oldest man to top the British album charts. Jones previously held the record as a mere stripling of 59, when his contemporary pop duets set Reloaded went to number one in 1999. But he was superseded by then 68-year-old Bob Dylan last year with Together Through Life. Now Jones is poised to take the crown back, with an album or raw rocking gospel music, Praise And Blame.
The old guys are but spring chickens (well, autumn chickens, maybe) compared to Dame Vera Lynn, who got to number one last year aged 92, although that was with a compilation album recorded in her prime.
Age used to be one of the battlegrounds of pop culture. Now, one has to almost wax nostalgic to think back to a time when fans debated whether this or that artist was too old to rock and roll.
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Mercury Prize: does anyone actually want to win it?
July 20th, 2010
Gorillaz reflect on their narrow escape from the curse of the Mercurys
Well, here’s that Mercury Prize list. I got six out of twelve in my predictions, so half marks: Corinne Bailey Rae, Laura Marling, Paul Weller, Villagers, Wild Beasts and the XX. I’m not particularly surprised by any of the other six, apart from the Kit Downes Trio, which takes the annual token jazz album spot with a record that has had no impact outside of its tightly enclosed genre whatsoever.
But it is hard to argue with the quality of the contenders. It is a more substantial and, in many ways, more mainstream selection than last year’s list, which I think is down to the simple fact that there has been a lot of interesting music released over the last year that has crossed from the margins to the mainstream. The only question worth posing is whether this absolutely represents the best of British and Irish music from the past year:
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Mercury Prize 2010: my predictions
July 19th, 2010
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on The XX
The shortlist for the Barclaycard Mercury Prize will be announced tomorrow. But I thought I’d get in there early and announce it myself. Or at least make my predictions. I am slightly hampered by not really understanding the criteria for the prize, but since this seems to be the case for the judges too, I’m not going to let it hinder me.
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