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
The xx factor: its the quiet ones you have to watch
Published: 21 Jul 2010
When the Mercury Prize was announced this week, the xx were quickly installed as bookies favourites. Actually, they were favourites before the shortlist was even announced, topping every critic’s list of predictions.
There are more established names up for the prize (Paul Weller, Dizzee Rascal, Corinne Bailey Rae) but the xx have been taking the music world by stealth not storm, creeping up on the slow lane with one of the most original yet seductively approachable debut albums in recent memory. It never even broke into the UK top thirty (peaking at number 31, although that is likely to change now) but it has already quietly notched up over 150,000 British sales, with another 179,000 in America (where it just scraped into the top 100, at number 92).
Quietly is the operative word. Everything about the xx is low key and understated. Even their name is typed in lower case. Indeed, so minimalistic is the xx’s ethos that when keyboard player Baria Qureshi left right before a gig, they opted not to replace her, instead boiling down their already basic arrangements to accommodate a three piece of drums, bass and guitar.
What is truly remarkable is that they manage to create something unique with such a standard rock line-up.
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Latitude: they threw a picnic & a festival broke out
Published: 19 Jul 2010
The first thing I saw as I arrived at Latitude was Sadler’s Wells ballet company staging Swan Lake on a platform on a river, a dancing, dying swan surrounded by reeds and rippling water. A massive rock festival crowd had gathered to enjoy a bit of high culture in the sun. The psychedelically painted sheep, munching grass in their enclosure, blithely ignored the whole spectacle.
Backstage at the literary arena, veteran performance poet John Cooper Clarke described Latitude as “the festival for rock fans with library cards.” Over in a packed comedy marquee, proudly working-class comedian Micky Flanagan joked that the middle classes were out in force because “they’ve heard about the falafels”.
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The Next Big Thing (there’s an app for that)
March 24th, 2010
Fang Island, buzz band at SXSW. You read it here last.
Finding the Next Big Thing used to be considered the job of music company A&R men and critics. It was a magical, mystical, unscientific task, an entirely subjective art of prediction based on unquantifiable assessments of talent, taste, fashion and the appetites of the public.
Nowadays, of course, there’s an app for that.
Next Big Sound have created a buzz list of bands touting their wares at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, by counting increases in social media activity. In other words, the more fans tweeted and blogged about an act, the higher they scored.
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