End of Year Report

2012.  So how was it for you?  From my viewpoint sitting here in the UK, it was probably an above average year as long as you looked in the right places.  Let’s face it, if you concentrate on the woeful economy and miserable weather you’d be marking it down quicker than a GCSE examiner.  So let’s forget all that real world stuff and focus on firstly…sport!

This year served up some bumper sporting moments if you were a Brit and this is something to be savoured as we, as a race, are not used to winning anything – at least since the rest of the world got to know the rules and beat us at everything.  There was Bradley ‘Wiggo’ Wiggins winning the Tour de France, Andy Murray winning his first Grand Slam Tournament, England’s cricket Team gaining World Number 1 status, the Ryder Cup comeback - and that was just for starters.

The jewel in the sporting crown was an amazing Summer Olympics and Paralympics which made household names of the likes of Ennis, Farrah, Wiggins (again), Hoy, Rutherford, Adams, Trott, Dujardin, Adams, Weir, Simmons, Brownlee, Ainslie, Pendleton, and many, many more.

Of course, nothing lasts for ever and it wasn’t long before the Cricket team lost their Number 1 status (but redeemed themselves in India) and inevitably here at the tail end of the year, the England football team continues to struggle in a poor qualifying group for the next World Cup.  Oh well, it was nice whilst it lasted.

But what about music?  Sad to say, I’ve found little to titivate my palette and consequently have bought very few CDs this year, preferring to pick up much improved remixed/remastered releases of favourite albums from my past.  If pushed to pick out a new album of the year, it would probably be Marina and the Diamonds’ ‘Electra Heart’ which has been on my ipod since release.  A close second would be either The Bangles’ ‘Sweetheart of the Sun’ or Doris Brendel’s ‘Not Utopia’, but other than these three not much else has really moved me which is a bit of a sad state of affairs and no mistake.  I might have to re-name this blog, ‘Sport Obsessive’.

So how does it all stack up when added together?  Well, on the music front, 2012 has under-performed a bit if you look at new music alone but if you argue that the art of re-mixing and remastering old albums has come of age then it has been a pretty good year with some stunningly revitalised stuff to the fore (yes, I’m looking at you, ‘Aqualung’).

But if you add in a massively dramatic sporting summer, 2012 acquits itself with flying colours and proves yet again that there is nothing quite like the real drama of live sport – there’s never a script and anything can happen.  Hoorah!

See you all in the New Year!

What Value Music?

The other day, in a moment of supreme weakness, I made the mistake of answering my phone without checking that the caller had WITHHELD their number.  This can only mean one thing; a cold call and if there’s one thing I hate it’s a cold caller.  I usually ignore such intrusions but this time I was caught and had to go through the rigmarole of politely telling them to bugger off.  This time it was from an on-line wine seller that I use regularly and whilst it started promisingly with the ‘only available off line to you, mate’ patter, it ended with a price that was no better than their normal on-line prices.  What was the point?

The trouble is, everyone wants something for nothing these days, including me, so ringing me up to offer the same price I could expect to spend elsewhere was never going to hold my interest and what goes for wine goes for music too.  Having said that, I am of a generation that at least expects to pay something for music, unlike many of today’s kids who seem to think it is their birthright to download everything for free, so cheap rather than free is always on the menu.

The old marketing hook of offering stuff at low prices can be a bit hit and miss.  For reasons that I don’t really understand to this day, back in 1973 I declined Virgin Records’s offer of ‘The Faust Tapes’ by Krautrockers, Faust for the miniscule price of 49p – an LP for the price of a vinyl single at the time.  Perhaps it was TOO cheap?  See how difficult it is?  In retrospect this was probably the correct decision as it is a jumble of live off-cuts but nevertheless, at that price who cares?

Yet some years before, in 1971, I had snapped up ‘Relics’ by Pink Floyd, a band I didn’t really know much about, but when it appeared on the cut-price Starline label, I couldn’t resist.  ‘Relics’ is a peculiar mixture of 1967-1969 period Floyd material bringing together the brilliant early Syd Barrett singles, atmospheric tracks from the soundtrack album, ‘More’, a collection of B sides and odd album cuts from their first two albums.  It was my introduction to The Pink Floyd and remains one of my favourite albums of theirs to this day.  As I have mused before, the late sixties was a strange period and the music created against the backdrop of social unrest and end of the Hippy dream still has a slightly haunted quality to it.  Certainly, this has an ambience that no other record I know of has.

So in the case of the budget label release, ‘Relics’ scored a hit and set me on the trail of proper grown-up Pink Floyd LPs.  Just let someone ring me up today and try and sell it to me…grrr.

Remixes - Should We Allow Them?

Let me pose you a question.  What would be your reaction if Van Gogh, assuming he was still alive, decided that his Sunflowers were all wrong and painted them out to be repainted as Lilies?  Or if Rodin were to hack off The Thinker’s arm in order to re-site it by his side rather than cupping his chin?  Established works of art should not really be tampered with, should they?  Although painting out details in ‘finished’ pictures is nothing new, it feels wrong somehow.  So what about re-mixing Classic Albums?  Hmm.

 Since the advent of digital music, engineers have taken the opportunity to re-master old analogue tapes for the new medium.  Up until now most of these efforts have been poor, in my opinion, but of late things have changed.  Recent re-masters have improved significantly and I cite The Beatles’ catalogue, Paul McCartney’s Archive series and Steve Hackett’s early albums as evidence.  But progress has now reached the stage where artists are re-mixing as well as re-mastering their old albums in a ‘this’ll fix what I didn’t do at the time’ sort of way.  Can they do this?  What about my memories?

I have three examples of this desire to tinker; Deep Purple’s ‘Machine Head’, Mike Oldfield’s ‘Ommadawn’ and Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’.  In each case, the original multi-track recording has been re-mixed using today’s technology in an effort to improve on the original.  In the case of ‘Aqualung’ I have to say that this has been a spectacular success.  The re-mix doesn’t really change the musical emphasis very much from the original but what it has done is breathe new life into what was a very stodgy final master.  Suddenly there is space around the instruments and their tonality bursts out of the speakers at you.  Drums sound like drums and less like wet cardboard boxes – hurrah!  Steven Wilson, who is the engineer responsible, has a magic touch with old masters as his work on the King Crimson and Caravan catalogues has shown.  His re-mixed ‘Aqualung’ is fabulous and I’d choose it over the original every time.

‘Mike Oldfield’s ‘Ommadawn’ also works well but to a lesser degree.  The re-mix doesn’t really alter the sound of the album too much but it does sound clearer and fresher.  However, I understand that his re-mix of ‘Tubular Bells’ does sound significantly different but as I haven’t heard it, I couldn’t possibly comment.  My real gripe is reserved for ‘Machine Head’ and that is because the modern re-mix uses alternative instrumental takes, such as guitar solos, that were not used in the original.  This is a step too far as it changes the music wholesale and I don’t like it – it has ceased to be ‘Machine Head’ and is now something else.

Whilst I object to the concept that once discarded music is now viewed as an improvement, I am disconcertingly aware that my attitude has been conditioned by the last 100 years, or since music became recorded.  Prior to then, all music only existed in written form and every performance of it was different, so there was no definitive version, just a series of interpretations.  Now that music is cast in stone for all eternity by the recording process, we are led to believe that there is only one interpretation, but perhaps that is wrong?

Re-mixing raises a whole series of ethical questions about art and it will take more than this post to get to the bottom of it.  I’m still unsure and will probably just take on a case by case line until someone can convince me one way or the other. 

Curved Air - The Lost Broadcasts

As a long time aficionado of the Progrock band, Curved Air, I am mightily relieved to report that my eye-teeth are all but safe.  No longer are they under threat of exchange for a sample of dodgy live concert footage from their peak period between 1970 and 1972 as freshly arrived from a well known on-line retailer is a new DVD; ‘Curved Air – The Lost Broadcasts’.

As far as I am aware, this is one of only two videos in existence which captures them during their golden period even if it is not real concert footage and it has its own idiosyncrasies.  The good news is that the two sessions on this disk, recorded in March and September 1971 for the German TV programme, Beat Club, comprise a total of five songs from ‘Air Conditioning’ and ‘Second Album’ including ‘Back Street Luv’ and the epic ‘Piece of Mind’.  The bad news is that for the second broadcast, session drummer Barry deSouza fills in for regular drummer, Florian Pilkington-Miksa and the obsession with weird TV effects (1971-stylee) with blue screen backdrops and the like, is mildly irritating.  However, the only other video from this period, from a 1972 Belgian TV programme, suffers even more from irritating effects and cutaways, so mustn’t grumble.

So in the scheme of things, this is gold dust.  Looking distressingly young – they were all about 22 at the time – the band demonstrates just what a talented lot they were.  The two aspects that drew me to them in the first place are still mesmerisingly magnetic.  First, the combination of Darryl Way’s electric violin and Francis Monkman’s (at the time) groundbreaking use of the early VCS3 synthesiser still has an oddness about it that time has not diminished.

Second is the female vocals of Sonja Kristina Linwood, an asset that most rock bands of the day did not possess and which added a third unexpected layer to the overall sound.  In fact, her performance is even better than I remember from numerous 70s concerts, especially on the atonally difficult melody of ‘Piece of Mind’ where her confidence is awesome.

Of course, the hairstyles and clothes are laughable (whatever happened to velvet loons?) but the musicianship is first rate as one would expect from a band of this vintage.  It would only be a few years before this type of competency would be derided by the first wave of punk.  Nevertheless, with only five songs on offer, it’s a shame that they chose to include Way’s elongated party piece, ‘Vivaldi’, a mass of electronic effects and cleverness, which only just works on stage but falls a bit flat on screen.  But we do have ‘Back Street Luv’ and mercifully in it’s original form with Sonja’s cool haunted vocal rather than the histrionics we got a few years later.  And we do get a slightly-truncated-from-12-minutes version of their masterpiece, ‘Piece of Mind’ complete with spoken verses from TS Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’.  Magical.

Admittedly, this is probably no more than a curiosity to most viewers, a rather dated snapshot of another time and place, but to fans, this is indispensable.

Coldplay and a dollop of Marmite

After much deliberation I have decided that the word that applies here is ‘Marmite’.  It always interests me how words extend their meaning over time and Marmite, despite being a trademark, is one of them.  These days it refers not only to that sticky black stuff that you spread on toast, but also to an attitude towards certain things.  If an object or concept is ‘Marmite’ it is generally understood to divide opinion into those that love and those that hate – there is no half-way house.

Which brings us inexorably to Coldplay and the problem that I have been wrestling with.  Whilst I can readily appreciate that Coldplay could be quite properly described as a Marmite band, this does not quite help with my dilemma.  You see, I’ve gone down a level and have found that it is not the band per se as much as each individual song that is Marmite.  It’s the only explanation.  For some time now, I have found that I am cherry picking about half a dozen of their songs from their catalogue.  These are the songs that I find utterly uplifting yet I reject all their remaining material as dross.

Let’s not be coy.  Those on the list are the likes of ‘Speed of Sound’, ‘Paradise’, ‘Clocks’, ‘Yellow’ and ‘The Scientist’ and maybe one or two more and they sit in a playlist on my ipod as shining examples of modern pop.  But that’s where it stops as far as Coldplay is concerned as I’ve never really got on with the remainder of any of their albums despite owning them all.  In all my years of music obsessive-ness, I’ve never known a band that splits my allegiance on a song by song level to such a degree.  It’s a bit un-nerving and if at the next social function anyone asks me whether I like Coldplay, I’m not sure what I’m going to say.  I’ll probably open and close my mouth a few times like a beached fish and fail miserably to construct any sort of reasoned argument.

I suppose that when it comes down to it, I find Coldplay a bit, well, boring in the way that their fiercest critics propound and that would explain my antipathy to most of their output.  Yet, somehow, when their style works, it works spectacularly well as in the list above.  It seems that they tread a very fine line and the spark that lifts them above it is a rare and splendid thing.  Perhaps it is just as well that it is an infrequent occurrence as it makes the results something to be savoured.

It just pains me to think that I bought all those albums just for a handful of songs.

Death of an Album

News has filtered down that for the first time ever; the Number One Chart Album has sold less than 10,000 copies.  No doubt obituaries for the album-as-we-know-it are currently being dusted off in readiness that this figure falls further and the album dies a horrible death.  In this instant gratification pick-n-mix age, I suppose this was inevitable.

In the natural world everything works to a rhythm and it seems that the journey of the album falls into this instinctive path.  Back in the early days, albums of songs were just that – a collection of 78 rpm discs that housed musical selections.  When the 33 rpm long player emerged, nothing much changed as its contents still represented little more than a collection of unrelated songs – a selection of singles on one disc, if you like.

It was not until the mid-sixties that the album started to take on a life of its own and become a cohesive whole.  Musicians started to believe that an album was a single piece of art, not to be broken down into its constituent parts but viewed as a whole, like a painting or sculpture. Songs linked by concept or theme started to appear, collages with no gaps between songs or single side pieces.  This reached its zenith in the 70s with the prog-rock giants and whilst the format took a bit of a battering from Punk and the new wave, it still staggered on into the 80s and beyond.  During this period, albums had an identity, a time and place and a huge artwork cover to proclaim it (and don’t they look so BIG now?).  Digital files have none of this.

Today, we have almost turned full circle and the nominal ‘album’ has returned to its origins, being little more than a collection of singles.  This state of unrelatedness is an ideal format for the world of cherry picking through digital downloads as there is no reason why individual songs should not be separated from the rest.  But if this is a purposely engineered state, why release an album at all?  Why not just release a stream of singles to be bought individually, with a suitable discount for buying more than one at a time?

I remember that The Pink Floyd challenged iTunes hoping to forbid the sale of individual songs off their albums.  To them you needed to buy ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in its entirety, not just bits of it.  It looks like they failed as Amazon are doing just that.  Progress eh?

RIP The Album.