Fuck me, I’m glad that’s over with. Did you find that as dull as I did? Four consecutive posts about major bands on major labels that you could all just as easily have read about in Q Magazine. I even liked the Elbow and REM albums, but I still felt slightly dirty writing about them, although I don’t know why.

This blog is supposed to be a record of my thoughts on music, and I was genuinely interested to hear the new Supergrass and REM, and really excited to hear The Raconteurs and Elbow so why do I feel so flat after writing about them? Why has it suddenly become so unsatisfying to write about bands of that stature?

I don’t think the answer lies in snobbery, per se. I have no shame in enjoying the really big and famous bands that I like, nor do I think anyone else should apologise for liking famous music – or fluffy, superficial pop for that matter. Music is there to be enjoyed, and really doesn’t need to be dissected much more than that*.

Maybe it’s the club-ism; the exclusivity. We share something that They don’t have their hands on yet so it feels more special, like a secret or something. There’s also the issue of making a contribution, I suppose. Me bigging up the new REM album is utterly irrelevant to the band whereas when I write about really small groups I might just double their sales if a few of you go and buy something. And they are much more delighted to see a positive review of their music of course, and that always makes this a more satisfying thing to do.

Ultimately, I think it’s about ownership, really. Pop culture is not something most of us get to participate in in any meaningful way whatsoever, so by writing about smaller bands it almost forces REM and Supergrass to become Pop Culture, whereas the little unsigned acts become Our Pop Culture – more personal, more involved and, crucially I think, a smaller community to be a part of. One which may be global in reach but is not global in numbers. It’s a more comprehensible size, something you can actually feel a part of, something you feel you can come to terms with and something which gives a little back when you go and say Hi at the end of a gig. The global audience for REM is just too big for that. The global audience for Bambi Get Over It is not.

So I guess it’s no real surprise that it just feels so much better to have a tiny unsigned band to write about, or to get some friends in and post their live performances on YouTube. They are people we know, people we can be a bit more emotionally invested in, people whose fans could conceivably all get together for a big piss up in the same place. I think a lot of what is perceived as indie snobbery is not quite as much to do with snobbery and perhaps more to do with feeling part of a community whose edges are still close enough to touch, and where you actually feel like an important member rather than a single album sale amongst millions.

So I’m not going to stop writing about big famous bands, because I am genuinely interested in them, but I am finding myself more and more drawn to the grassroots of the music world – small projects where people are having a go and I feel like I really can help bring their work to a wider audience. It just feels nicer.

Bambi Get Over It – That Girl
Darla Farmer – History
Hotpipes – Born in a Bomb
It’s a Buffalo – Outlines

* I could pretty much delete this whole blog on the basis of that one comment alone!

I feel this could be the quickest review I ever write because I think both you and I know exactly what is going to be in it.

This is a decent-enough record, rockier than Road to Rouen, but basically the only reason I bought it is because I so loved In it For the Money, I Should Coco and, to a slightly lesser extent, their self-titled album from 2000.

Basically, Supergrass’s better days are long since behind them and although I have plenty of respect for the fact that they seem to be challenging themselves and approaching each album a little differently, I am afraid that, as far as my ears are concerned anyway, their capacity for writing consistently infectious tunes has quite simply been used up.

There are a couple of decent tracks on this, which I am going to post, but does anyone else who’s heard this think that they’ve started to sound just a little bit like Stereophonics*?

Supergrass – Diamond Hoo Ha Man
Supergrass – Rebel in You

website | hype | amazon

*Just in case you have no taste whatsoever, this is an incredibly bad thing. But no-one who would need that pointing out to them could be reading this could they? Could they?

Ladies and gentlemen there were some issues with this week’s appearance on The Waiting Room – DC’s 10pm-midnight slot on Error FM. Firstly, I was away and hugely disorganised, so DC had to record his bits in my absence and then sellotape my segment in later. This wasn’t so much of a problem of course, as it prevented him and that Fisk character from moaning about my song choices, which has its benefits.

The Waiting Room, Wednesday 2nd April, 2008

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Unfortunately it means I have no idea if I answered the question properly at all. I mean, indie dance? What? I tried to get information out of the lads beforehand but they weren’t very specific, so I just kind of winged it. Whenever I’ve been to indie clubs in the past they haven’t played a type of music I would have been able to identify as ‘indie disco’ as such, they’ve just played indie songs with a bit of a consistent, bouncy rhythm so that you can dance to them. Even The Smiths wrote a good few songs you can dance to, and if ‘hang the DJ’ wasn’t designed to be an end-of-night dance hall sing-along then I don’t know what was.

Supergrass – Caught By the Fuzz
The Smiths – Panic
The Smiths – This Charming Man

That said, there are a few dancey bands who I guess I would call indie – it just depends on how loosely you apply your category terms I guess. Personally I throw these terms about pretty carelessly because let’s face it, who really cares what specific type of music it is that you’re listening to, so yeah okay, indie disco I guess. Fisk played Stereolab, who are a group I really like, but didn’t play the likes of Saint Etienne, who I would have thought fit that category pretty well, as do groups like Goldfrapp, Blondie and The Long Blondes (the new album really is just dance floor indie – it’s not great, but it’s dancey stuff).

Saint Etienne – Nothing Can Stop Us

That said, I’ve been in clubs where they’ve even played stuff like The Rat by The Walkmen, which is based around the band battering shite out of their guitars for most of the song, and people, myself included, leapt around like maniacs. That wasn’t even remotely dance music by any genre definition, but it proved to be a hugely popular song to dance to at the time. So there you go. Come to think of it, this would probably have made a much better, more considered response to the question at hand, but I had to rush it and given my 20 minute slot I’d never have had time to get all that rambling in there anyway. So sorry DC, not sure I hit the nail on the head with that one, but I’ll do better next week, promise.

The Walkmen – The Rat

And tell Fisk that Orbital are bloody awful.

Playlists are a big thing in digital music, but I am not sure how far I think their influence extends.  This is not least because playlists existed well before the mp3, in the form of mix tapes and their ilk.  Actually, I think the random function has had a bigger impact.

Basically, I have virtually no playlists.  My music collection is just too big to even begin, and now it seems too late.  Instead, I either listen to whole albums or, when feeling friskier, I stick the entire bloody thing on random.  Sites like Last FM and Pandora allow you to do something very similar – essentially we seem to be turning our music collections into our own radio stations.  In other words, as we have less pressure on physical space and almost unlimited opportunity to fill our boots with gigabytes of music files, we have expanded our definition of music that we actively want to own. Collections contain much more stuff we ‘like’, compared to the stuff we genuinely ‘love’.

It appears that collectors amass piles of music, and then purchase hard copies of the things they love the most.  For people not keen enough to make this distinction, I doubt they loved music oh so very much in the first place.  We are finding a significant disparity becoming evident between the value we place on different parts of our music collections.

Some we hoard and love – listening to it is something we do as an activity in itself, be it on vinyl or CD or even mp3 for some people.  You sit down and make time to listen to some particular record that you love.  The value of this music has not gone away, and I would be amazed to see any evidence of this sort of market suffering in the slightest on the back of the digital revolution.  Hard data to support this theory?  None of course, but it sounds sensible to me.  I would wager that even the people who are using the internets to obsessively track down obscure b-sides and live recordings would actually pay for these if there was any reasonable mechanism to actually do so.

The other sort of music is the ersatz radio we have all started accumulating.  Gigabytes of data of music we really quite like, but love?  Probably not.  Even as I consider buying my first record player in fifteen years do I worry about trying to replicate my entire mp3 collection on vinyl?  Of course not – I’ll start with Tom Waits and Nick Cave and work my way out from there.  We accumulate the other stuff precisely because we can.  It genuinely does have less value to us.  We play it while we’re drinking with friends or doing the washing up, which is just one of the reasons people feel so guilt-free in pilfering it.

Imagine, if you disagree, which you might well of course, the impact on you if you were to lose this music.  I would replace Nick Cave, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits without hesitation.  I have to have access to that music.  U2?  Well perhaps not.  Boy probably, but that might be about it, although I genuinely like hearing lots of their other stuff when it comes on.

Artists perhaps have to start accepting that a lot of the music they will sell in future, or give away, has scant value to the person consuming it.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Commercial radio is so mind-numbingly worthless at the moment that people are using this as a replacement.  Fire on the whole bloody collection on ‘random’ and music I love and plenty that I like, but would never describe myself as loving, fills the air.  This latter kind of music has a value to me, but it is not huge.  A speculative digital download of a new album actually should be offered up for no more than a couple of quid because that is about what it is worth to the purchaser.

I would even speculate, perhaps a little tenuously, that the random function has actually created markets for music where none existed before.  I emphatically would not put on or buy many Elvis Costello albums, but many of them contain songs I really enjoy when they randomly appear in the middle of an afternoon’s play on random.

As long as there is something of real value – artwork, personal communication, in-depth informations, videos, extras, bonuses and god knows what else – for the real enthusiasts and your real fans to buy should they decide that they love you, then you are faithfully representing the actual value of your work.  Downloaded files are like blog hits – there may be hundreds of them, but that doesn’t mean you have any more than a handful of dedicated fans.

All this came about because this week’s Contrast Podcast is titled ‘Random’.  You are supposed to post the first song your randomiser plays you, and it got me to thinking, which is where this post came from.

A snapshot from the Song, by Toad music collection radio station this afternoon?  Well the thing was in bloody good form actually, although only one song by a small group you may not have heard of.  Call myself a fan of obscure indie?  I should be ashamed!

Ryan Adams – New York, New York
The Wedding Present – Dare
Half Man Half Biscuit – I Hate Nerys Hughes (Yes!  Get in, randomiser!)
Down the Tiny Steps – Dinosaur Bones
Supergrass – Sometimes I Make You Sad

After my post a few days back about pilfering in pop a certain DC (½ of Drunk Country, the man responsible for this abomination) popped up in the comments and started slinging scurrilous accusations around… no well actually, that’s nonsense.  He just mentioned some rather striking similarities between Sonic Youth’s Silver Rocket and Supergrass’s superb Richard III.

Well I’ve listened to the songs and to be honest I can’t hear it.  I mean, as DC rightly points out, the similarities are obvious, but the riff in question is just not all that complicated. It’s effective, but it’s so simple that I personally find it highly plausible that they could have independently hit upon the same thing.  I would certainly be surprised to hear Gaz Coombes come out and admit to having pinched it.  Ultimately rock ‘n’ roll draws on enormously formulaic structures and very few combinations of notes.  The variations on these things must be pretty narrow, particularly when it comes to writing a basic rock riff, so actually I would be tempted to suggest that, if anything, it’s a surprise that this doesn’t happen more often.

DC’s response to my denial was as follows: “bleh” from which I think it is safe to extrapolate some sort of disagreement, but honestly, I just don’t think there’s enough there to warrant any sort of conclusions of pilfering.  Thoughts?

Supergrass – Richard III
Sonic Youth – Silver Rocket