Jarvis Cocker

'Does music still matter? Yes ... and no!'

Jarvis Cocker, guest editor, sits down with a cast of famous friends to discuss pop in the 21st century, iPods and selling baked beans


The Observer

Setting the scene

Jarvis: I've been asked to edit the Observer Music Monthly, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about what music is for. Now that sounds a stupidly vague question. But I'll explain why I'm posing it and why you've kindly agreed to join me here in Dublin. It seems as if music is everywhere these days: on TV, in hotel lobbies; it's inescapable in modern life. But is it being used for its correct purpose? Is there a correct purpose? I've made a list, which I'll read out. Music can be for:

Mood

Instruction

Dancing

Communication

Atmosphere

Revolution

Comfort

Soundtrack

Advertising

To start with: advertising. I don't live in England any more but I came back the other day and was watching telly and that Johnny Cash song came on ['Hurt']. But it was advertising Nike trainers, and that struck me as being a particularly inappropriate use of music.

Nick Cave: I personally find that offensive. Iggy Pop's 'Lust For Life' was used for a car ad. I used to drive around in my car when I was 19 screaming that song, and it had an anti-establishment purpose. For it now to be appropriated by the advertising industry ... I think that's fucked. I don't know what situation the people who have written the music are in, if they need the money or ... I'm not trying to take the moral high ground but I wouldn't allow my music to be used in that way.

Jarvis: Do you get offers?

Nick Cave: Often. There's a song called 'Red Right Hand', and a sanitary napkin company back in New Zealand wanted to use it, which was tempting ... but that was the closest I've ever come. You do get an enormous amount of money waved in front of you, more money than you make anywhere else in the industry, and all you have to do is say yes ...

Paul Morley: In the early 1980s New Order were offered huge amounts of money to do adverts and they would just say no, and then a soft drinks company in America offered them £200,000 to re-record 'Blue Monday' and eventually they gave in. But the only way Barney [Sumner] could sing it was to have '£200,000' written in front of the mike stand, so he could see that while he was doing it.

Nick Cave: People have been married to my music ... and I just don't think it would be very cool for them to switch on the TV and 'The Ship Song' comes on a Cornetto ad or something.

Anthony Genn [the Hours]: 'The Ship Song' for P&O Ferries!

Antony Hegarty: Artists have to make their way through and support themselves.

Paul Morley: I do think it's fascinating that 25-30 years after these pieces of music had a meaning to people who felt so passionate about what they stood for, they're being used to sell something. I think that's what you mean when you say music is everywhere now. Twenty-five years ago, when we were beginning our little lives in this world, music was oddly marginal and, oddly, it meant something, and now it has become a commodity. People of a certain age find it very bewildering. All those things we thought were important ... they've been co-opted by the capitalist world to give what it has to sell the illusion of hipness and cool, so that the whole world feels as if they're in on the revolution and that they're hip and they're cool. But the meaning of it has been sucked dry.

I blame Busted. Before Busted there was no guitar music anywhere; it had been wiped away by pop groups and by Pop Idol ...

Nick Cave [quietly, to Beth Orton]: Who are Busted?

Jarvis: They were a boy band but they played guitars so they were like an indie boy band.

Paul Morley: It was as if all the boy bands and girl bands had wiped away the illusion of coolness created by the record industry, so they had to rehabilitate the illusion of cool. So a boy band, who would usually sit on stools like a bunch of Val Doonicans, held their guitars to kind of signify they were in rock. And after that came a flood of guitar bands - as if it was 1983 again, but without the politics. It was just that that kind of music by now felt comfortable enough for the mainstream. So that's why I blame Busted.

Jarvis: I think you're putting a big burden on their shoulders there. But I agree that post-punk has been revived with none of the ideology. It's been reduced to style.

Beth Orton [to Nick]: What about rap?

Nick Cave: Well, with punk, people were embarrassed about the money you could make, whereas with rap music it has been the other way round. It's about wearing the right brands, it's very much about advertising.

IPods: Good or bad?

Jarvis: Who's got an iPod around this table?

Everyone puts up their hands apart from Mary Margaret O'Hara and Antony Hegarty - although, reluctantly, he admits to owning one

Jarvis [shouts at him]: So why aren't you admitting to it then?

Paul Morley: People are starting to collect music in the same way that they collect stamps. People who weren't really interested in music as such are now worried about whether they've got 15,000 songs, and I think that's had an interesting effect ...

Nick Cave: That's rather cynical. Surely there are kids that are listening to stuff that they might not have otherwise. My kid is listening to all sorts of music, a far greater range of music than I listened to, actually, because I'm still pretty blinkered.

Paul Morley: Music has opened up so people can grab whatever they want whenever they want it, which is fantastic, but the music industry is trying to shape and control what's happening. I find the little white box and the little white wires of a company trying to control the decisions we make sinister.

Nick Cave: But they're not really succeeding.

Anthony Genn: Because kids are downloading music from Limewire for free. And getting away with it. If I sit on the tube opposite 10 people now, seven or eight of them will be listening to music, and that can only be a good thing. I don't know what they're listening to, but ...

Jarvis: It could be dangerous.

Beth Orton: Why could it be dangerous?

Jarvis: Because they're not taking notice of where they're walking.

Nick Cave: But they might be taking notice of something more important than where they're walking, which is music.

Antony Hegarty: I've got a question about whether that radical diversification of people's interest in music threatens the same kind of community that music used to create 20 years ago. If it's mobilising people in the same way, if people are creating soundtracks that are so utterly personalised. Whether it yields the same results in bringing people together, especially counterculture-wise

Jarvis: Well, I think that if you can use music on a tube journey to blot out reality, it's a good thing ...

Nick Cave: Which is one of the things that music is for, surely.

Jarvis: ... but it is a very solitary experience wearing headphones. And you choose what is on your iPod and you choose what you listen to. You can say it's empowering because you create your own environment but perhaps it is stopping people talking to each other

Nick Cave: The kids - well, I don't know that much about the kids - but the kids I know seem to be really connected with music nowadays. They share music and turn each other on to different music and it seems healthy.

Antony Hegarty: I agree that people are really into music, but I wonder how connected it is to reality ...

Nick Cave: Do you think things should be connected to reality?

Antony Hegarty: Well, I think people have retreated into themselves. People feel alienated by the big picture, and people have retreated into a personal universe as a means of survival. I don't think a lot of people are interfacing with the big picture in a way that they may have done 25 years ago. In the way that punk tried to have a dialogue with what was going on in the world. A lot of kids today might be listening to an obscure artist from the 1950s instead..

Jarvis: It's true that we haven't had music connected to a social movement for quite a while. Not since acid house.

Paul Morley: But it might be that those things are over now, that we're moving into a different set of realities. The next generation might be entering into something that we can't possibly recognise. It might be that punk, acid house and those movements were a part of time, and now that's over and something new is coming that we can't see.

Mary Margaret O'Hara: I went to a show the other night, a band called Hot Chip, and they were great.

Paul Morley: We're all spoilt for great music at the moment, because everything that's ever been is instantly available and there are some fantastic representations of everything that's ever been available from a lot of new groups.

Nick Cave: Are there?

Paul Morley: I think so. Hot Chip are a great unexpected hybrid.

Anthony Genn: If you go down to Hoxton on a Friday night, there are thousands of people going to see live bands. There are people creating their own scene and it's exciting.

Paul Morley: Well, they can create their own scenes because they know how to: they've got so much to refer to and appropriate. But those scenes seem quite cosmetic.

Mary Margaret O'Hara: They probably don't believe that, though. They're still trying to find their way, and a way of being different among everything that's on offer. There's so much nowadays and nobody trusts what is bad or good, and everyone's suspect in a way. Before you could tell what was bad and good, but it's like no one trusts what is good or bad any more.

Beth Orton: Most people want something to matter again.

Back in the day

Anthony Genn: What was the first concert you ever went to?

Nick Cave: Deep Purple, when I was about 15. Deep Purple, Manfred Mann and Free; it was a triple bill in Melbourne.

Mary Margaret O'Hara: The Beatles, and then Bob Marley.

Paul Morley: T-Rex.

Nick Cave: You liar!

Paul Morley: T-Rex, Manchester Free Trade Hall. Twelve shillings.

Beth Orton: The first band I really remember was the Fall at the Norwich Gala House, when I was 12.

Antony Hegarty: I don't remember ... I'm too ashamed to admit it ... I can't ...

Everyone: Come on!

Antony Hegarty: It was Duran Duran.

Anthony Genn: Mine was The Stranglers in 1981.

Jarvis: I think mine was The Stranglers as well.

Antony Hegarty [mortified]: Mine was the worst ...

Anthony Genn: People are freer to make music than they ever were. Even in the days of punk, someone had to pay for you to make a record. Now you can download software to make your own music. Twelve-year-old kids make bands and they have their MySpace sites, and it sounds alright, man.

Antony Hegarty: My friends [the group] CocoRosie went to Brazil to play a concert, and their music isn't distributed in Brazil but there were 2,000 people there singing along; they knew all the words. But their record isn't even in the shops in Brazil!

Should music be shrouded in mystery?

Paul Morley: What about if everyone gets involved? Everyone has an opinion nowadays on everything, everybody has a blog. What if everyone made music? Doesn't that ruin the point of it being essentially something magical, if everyone does it and it just reduces it to the point of filling the shelves with baked beans.

Mary Margaret O'Hara: The best thing is to be connected but you also want to stand slightly apart ... sorry, I'm rambling.

Paul Morley: No, that was good .... What I'm saying is that if music becomes so democratic that everyone can do it, then surely it loses some of that mystique of being something that only some people can do.

Jarvis: I don't know about that. I mean, there might have been fewer people making music 30 years ago, but there were still a lot of crap bands. There have always been bad bands.

Beth: Not as many as there are now, surely

Jarvis: Probably proportionally, yeah.

Antony Hegarty: It kind of reminds me of another era when everyone made music in their kitchen. When music was almost like a family experience, or a local experience.

Nick Cave: It takes a talent to be able to sit down and write a hit. You're catchy [to Jarvis], you can do that.

Beth Orton [to Anthony Genn]: You're catchy.

Anthony Genn: The flu is catchy!

Paul Morley: But going back to the beginning of the conversation, lots of people form bands now as if it's a career choice they're making. Because of certain TV audition shows, and the materialism of hip hop, you can actually envisage a career in pop music now, whereas back in our day, you would just make a song at a time, and go from week to week. The thrill of playing a gig and you never knew when or where it would end ...

What makes people create?

Beth Orton: Ultimately - this is my hippy self talking here - but ultimately, it's a desire to create akin to having babies. I was talking to someone about this yesterday and it's like, 'Why is that so many men are artists and writers?' It's because we all have a desire to make and create, it's part of our nature and, for me, it's about connecting to that nature and that eternal other side ...

Nick Cave: What happens in the market, I don't consider it, downloading and all that. For me what music is for is very much a selfish thing. All I know is that I have to do it on a regular basis or I don't operate correctly. What happens with the records and the history of the thing: I feel I have absolutely no control over that, and I'm not even interested in it personally. It's just very much a selfish act of going in there and ...

Beth Orton: Connecting with beauty ...

Nick Cave: It's just an act of survival. To go in there and have that feeling, which is incredibly addictive and doesn't really go away. Whether it's with lyrics or whether it's with the music itself where you feel something happen, some change of body chemistry that happens when you actually make music and a few musicians actually play something together and it's like, 'Shit, that's really good' and you get lost in the moment and everything else is just unimportant. And for me that is what music is for ...

What I mean to say is we can talk about where music is going but we don't really know where music is going and there might be some wonderful stuff that comes out of this. That's what it's about and what it has always been about. That's not to say what I do is good or bad, it's just that it has this effect on me that I don't get from anything else. I don't get it from playing with the kids, I don't get it from my wife, I don't get it from anywhere else.

I guess that's why I was getting upset at the start when we were talking about advertising, because it seems a very cynical betrayal of that moment, of that precious, almost religious experience.

The other thing about music that I really like ... when I was kid there was no real information about music. You got a record with a cover - and you didn't really know much about the band - and you put the record on and stared at the cover and that's pretty much all the information you had, and these people were heroes. They were mysterious, heroic people ... And the internet and everything else has taken a certain amount of that away.

The mystique is disappearing. Now that might be a good thing or a bad thing, but for me, I don't want to know everything. I want the people I really love to remain difficult to get to.

Jarvis: Really, the detail about people's lives isn't that important.

Nick Cave: Anything that anyone has to say outside making a record isn't that important. You get a record and you think this is pretty cool and then you read 15 interviews and you're like [pulls face] .... And there are some very big bands [who operate] like that.

Paul Morley: I guess what we're saying is that more and more is being written about music and less and less is being said.

Jarvis: What I'm saying is music is becoming more mundane, because it surrounds us so much, it's no longer something that tears through modern life, it's something that is the part of the fabric of modern life.

Beth Orton: It does all go in cycles, so after a period of heavily manufactured music, something else will come again. If we think that our instincts are being messed with, we will return to the source.

Jarvis: I think we've established the distinction between the artistic process and what happens afterwards to it. I suppose as long as people don't allow what happens next to affect the first bit, everything will be alright.

Who's who

Nick Cave

An author, screenwriter and creator of classic albums such as Kicking Against the Pricks and 2004's Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus.

Paul Morley

OMM's critic-at-large is also a celebrated author and one-half of the group Infantjoy.

Beth Orton

The contemporary folk singer released Comfort of Strangers, her first album for four years, in February.

Mary Margaret O'Hara

Publicity-shy Canadian songstress and creator of 1988's classic cult album (and her only full-length LP), Miss America.

Antony Hegarty

The New York-based voice of Antony and the Johnsons, winner of last year's Mercury Prize for the extraordinary I Am a Bird Now.

Anthony Genn

Front man of hot new band the Hours, whose first single 'Ali in the Jungle' is released this month on Polydor.

music

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Girls Aloud interview

Girls Aloud: 'We're not little kittens'

Girls Aloud confounded critics with a string of Top 10 hits.

James McNair talks to them about songwriting, sexy shoots and celeb boyfriends.

They came out of reality TV, but Girls Aloud have confounded their critics with a string of Top 10 hits. James McNair talks to them about songwriting, sexy shoots and celebrity boyfriends.

Love them or loathe them, pop stars hot-housed on reality TV shows continue to appear. Whoever wins The X Factor this year, however, would do well to emulate the success of Girls Aloud. Created on ITV's Popstars: The Rivals in November 2002, the group were a reminder that team selection can be as important as the music where lucrative pop is concerned. In cherry-picking a redhead from Runcorn, two blondes from Ascot and Derry, and two similarly pretty brunettes from Newcastle and Bradford, Popstars' creators were mindful of the "catch-all" template that proved so fruitful for the Spice Girls. Give every boy his "type" and every young girl a look they might aspire to, runs the theory, and you've one hand on the prize.

Such savvy groundwork - together with some decent songwriting - was undoubtedly a factor in Girls Aloud scoring a Christmas No 1 with their debut single "Sound of the Underground". Three studio albums followed between May 2003 and December 2005, and now, less than four years since the band's inception, Cheryl Cole, Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh have released a greatest hits package, The Sound Of Girls Aloud.

While a "best of" CD seems decidedly premature, career years are as dog ones in pop's fickle universe. Besides, as Cole points out, Girls Aloud have packed a lot in thus far. Their 13 consecutive Top 10 hits, for example, constitute a feat unsurpassed by any other girl group. Such are the indignities, some moan, that the reality TV-moulded Girls Aloud have wrought upon Diana Ross and the Supremes, and, erm, Bananarama.

Today, I meet Cheryl Cole (née Tweedy) and bandmate Walsh at Highgate Studios in north London. Cole - pink tracksuit, hotel-issue slippers, occasional use of the "F" word - is the most vocal, while Walsh - mustard Sixties-style coat, black jeans, homely Lancashire accent - comes on like a younger, shyer Melanie Sykes. Both girls are poised on high stools with legs crossed, their sparkling eye make-up clearly the work of trained professionals. They are aware of their beauty, and to meet their gaze is to be temporarily disarmed.

Cole is quick to defend the reality format that spawned Girls Aloud, pointing out that for every hopeless fantasist that sees such programmes as a fast track to wealth and fame, there is a hardworking "diamond in the rough" for whom such shows are a lifeline. "It's definitely a great opportunity," agrees Walsh, "but I was naïve about how gruelling it would be. The first two weeks of the band, we slept about three hours a night and even today, we were up at quarter to six."

"Tomorrow it's 4am," adds Cole. "We've got to get ready to lead the Harrods Christmas parade. I'm not complaining or anything; the Spice Girls had to work twice as hard as we do because they did America and the whole shebang in no time. When I was sitting next to Victoria [Beckham] at the World Cup, she was like, 'Are you sure it's all right for you to be here? Shouldn't you be doing a gig or something?'

"Another time she said, 'We were just like you lot, Cheryl: five random girls auditioned and thrown together.' The only difference was that the Spice Girls were groomed and media-trained before they came out, and we had to do all that in the spotlight. It was like selling your soul to the devil."

And what of Girls Aloud's comparative longevity? How have they survived in a market where careers last about as long as a Popsicle? "I think it's a mixture of things," says Walsh. "It's partly the quality of the songs, and the fantastic relationship we have with our producer Brian Higgins and his main songwriter, Miranda [Cooper]. We connect with our material and we always try to bring something fresh to our performances. People have to be wowed by your new look and your new sound, otherwise they're not willing to buy the records." "We've always had a bit of an edge, too," adds Cole. "We're not little kittens who just sit there and purr. We have strong opinions."

Credibility, one realises, is the commodity that most manufactured pop acts would give their eye teeth for. The boy band that plays its own instruments; the girl group that writes its own songs - both gain a slighter higher rung on the ladder of authenticity. For Girls Aloud, though, being poptastically successful seems to be enough. Though they and their band mates have dabbled in co-writing, both Cole and Walsh are comfortable with the fact that their job is primarily to sell what others have crafted. But don't dare belittle their half of that quid pro quo. "It would be a shame if someone like our producer Brian Higgins went unnoticed," says Cole. "He can't sing a note and he definitely couldn't front 'Love Machine' or 'Biology'. Those songs would never have come to light if it hadn't been for us."

"It infuriates Brian when people say bad things about us not writing our own songs," adds Walsh. "He's like, 'I couldn't have this kind of success without you and the whole team of people around us.' The way we look, the way we are as people - all of that inspires Brian to write. We just sing bits and pieces of the songs and he builds the music around us. Our vocal performances are a big part of the song, though."

What about choosing the songs they record - do they have much say there? "The songs go to our A&R man," says Cole. "He chooses his favourites and then it's kind of up to us to pick from them. But we're not naïve about the process, and we don't always know what's best for us. We hated 'Love Machine' when we first heard it, but then it was a huge hit and we were forced to eat humble pie.

"That's why you have a record company and a manager," Cole continues. "You have to let them do their job. Look what happened with the Spice Girls when they sacked [manager] Simon Fuller. It all went tits-up."

Jokes about how fetching such an eventuality might look aside, things have yet to go "tits-up" for Girls Aloud. Even E4's fly-on-the-wall documentary Girls Aloud: Off the Record seems to have worked in their favour - and this despite Cole's regular mini-tantrums. Some of her outbursts are archived at YouTube.com; one of the best sees her flip out when faced with the challenge of climbing a steep hill in stiletto heels. "Does anyone actually care that we're going to be at the highest point in Greece?" asks Cole, arms outstretched imploringly. "It smells of shit here."

"I watch it and go, 'That's Cheryl - that's how she is'," smiles Walsh. "But other people go, 'My God! She's a real moaner!' Cheryl just talks everything that she's thinking, but if you don't know her you're not in a position to judge her. The best thing about doing that show was that we've got six months of our lives logged for when we're older, and I know we're going to appreciate that. We went to Australia. Who knows if that will ever happen again?"

"People said I was complaining all the time," laughs Cole, "but a lot of it was the way they edited the footage. They make it look like you can only be bothered to climb five steps when you've actually climbed 5,000."

Despite reality TV's double-edged sword, Girls Aloud clearly have the people's vote - and that of some of their fellow pop stars. Arctic Monkeys have covered "Love Machine", Lily Allen has said she'd like to look like Cole, and the girl group's appearance in the forthcoming Oasis documentary Lord Don't Slow Me Down should help their visibility in 2007.

The cameo came about when the girls stumbled across the Gallagher brothers while working at the same studio, Cole's less forward band mates goading her to make the introductions. "Noel went, 'Our kid! Come on out - it's Girls Aloud!'" laughs Walsh. "We had our photo taken with them - it meant a lot to me coming from their neck of the woods." Given that Liam Gallagher is married to Nicole Appleton, one quarter of rival girl band All Saints, this is all very intriguing, of course. Who knows - perhaps the Girls Aloud footage will end up on the cutting-room floor.

Still, what of their own relationships? With Cheryl married to Ashley Cole, Nadine dating Desperate Housewives actor Jesse Metcalfe, and Kimberley seeing Triple 8 singer Justin Scott, the reportedly single Sarah Harding must feel a certain pressure to bag a celebrity of her own? "It's not really like that," says Cole. "It's more about trust and finding someone who likes you for yourself, not being in Girls Aloud, someone who supports what you do, but isn't intimidated by it." Like Ashley? "Exactly!"

What's his favourite Girls Aloud song? "When he joined Chelsea he had to sing a song to the other players as a kind of team-bonding thing, and I printed him out the lyrics for 'The Sound of the Underground'. He didn't go for it, but I know he really likes that song."

From the twanging, almost Monkees-like pop of "Love Machine", to the fabulously melodramatic, cod R&B-imbued "Biology", Girls Aloud have "fronted" (to use Cole's term) some great pop tunes. Not (quite) for nothing has their producer Brian Higgins been called a Phil Spector for the 21st century. Still, as Higgins and his Xenomania production house team also pen tunes for Sugababes and others, and competition for the cream of their crop is fierce, Girls Aloud's greatest hits collection is peppered with cover-versions.

Last Christmas, your scribe found himself in the somewhat embarrassing position of being genuinely moved by their take on The Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You", though, in my defence, I'd have to cite its limpet-like adherence to the arrangement of the fine, Chrissie Hynde-penned original. Make no mistake about it: Girls Aloud can carry a tune.

Throughout today's interview, one of Cole and Walsh's PR bods has been perching on a nearby stool, a lifeguard ready to wade in if necessary. Recent spats with Boy George and aforementioned rivals All Saints - together with persistent, but untrue rumours that Harding is leaving Girls Aloud - have led to a line of questioning that the group would rather avoid. Much more pressing, it seems, is plugging "I Think We're Alone Now", a cover of the Eighties Tiffany hit with which Girls Aloud hope to secure this year's Christmas No 1. "The higher it gets, the better the album will sell," says Walsh, "and ultimately that's what we're trying to promote."

The girls have filmed a video for said song in which the storyline sees them attempt a heist at a Los Angeles casino. It's being billed as a "fans' choice" video, since customers of 3 Mobile can download three different denouements: "shocking", "funny" and "sexy". No prizes for guessing which will prove most popular.

Of course, only a fool would deny that the girls' sex appeal - as milked in promotional videos, calendars and regular shoots for FHM and the like - is a huge factor in shifting their CDs. As in 2005, this year the aforementioned magazine featured all five Girls Aloud members in its "100 Sexiest Woman" list, but on the surface at least, Cole (sixth, down from second), and Walsh (66th, down from 44th) seem unaffected by any tensions these ridiculously arbitrary rankings might spark.

Boy George, on the other hand, is currently a source of great irritation, largely because the singer recently called Girls Aloud and their music "vile". "I knew George didn't like us from the moment he walked in the room," says Walsh, choosing her words carefully, but her ever-feisty band mate is more colourful. "While we were playing our arena tour Boy George was sweeping shit off the New York streets," says Cole, her silver-painted eyelashes sparkling. "He's bitter that he's not succeeding and we are."

Download the 'fans' choice' video for 'I Think We're Alone Now' via 3 Music until 15 November (www.three.co.uk)

music

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Beatles still alive

Roll Over, Brian Epstein: The Beatles Get Mashed

Frank Herrmann

George Martin with Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in 1967.

By JON PARELES, Published: November 19, 2006

THE latest Beatles collection, “Love” (Capitol), isn’t a retrospective: it’s a recombination. After the innumerable reissues, archival gleanings and rescued live recordings that have made the Beatles catalog an endlessly milked cash cow for EMI Records and the Beatles’ own Apple Corps, the “Love” CD and its surround-sound DVD mix, both due for release on Tuesday, are different. Instead of simply collecting Beatles tracks, “Love” actively manipulates them.

Songs are edited together, dismantled, reconstructed from unused takes, overlapped, mined for guitar licks or orchestral bits, segued into free-form montages, even run in reverse. The result is both familiar and disorienting. “Love” is part of that snowballing 21st-century phenomenon, the mash-up.

It’s an authorized one, approved by the Beatles and their families and made by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, and Giles Martin, his son. They assembled this music for the Cirque du Soleil production “Love,” now running in Las Vegas. The tone is admiring verging on reverent.

Mash-ups can mock their sources; “Love” emphatically does not. Nor does it venture outside the Beatles’ own catalog. All the music is from the Beatles, 1963-70, except for a new string arrangement by George Martin, which is overdubbed onto the bittersweet, acoustic-guitar version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that appeared on “Anthology 3,” part of the “Anthology” series of alternate takes.

For people who have been hearing Beatles albums since they were first released, “Love” is a memory test, a jolt to the ingrained experience of the music. Did it always sound that way? Wasn’t that guitar solo in a different song? All mash-ups do that to some extent, but the déjà entendu effect is exponentially stronger with material like Beatles songs that millions of listeners have memorized from end to end. The effect, as it was with the “Anthology” albums, is not to devalue or dethrone the well-known versions, but to illuminate them.

Giles Martin said in an interview that he was tempted to have the album packaging read, “No original Beatles recordings were harmed in the making of these tracks.” It’s a nervous joke. By reshuffling Beatles nuggets even this much, the Martins have breached the hermetic domain in which the Beatles have tried to keep their music.

The Beatles’ EMI recordings aren’t available on iTunes, and Apple Corps turns down most requests to use the Beatles’ catalog in other contexts. When Danger Mouse made “The Grey Album,” his razzle-dazzle combination of the raps from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with microsliced samples from “The Beatles” (a k a “The White Album”) in 2004, he immediately got a cease-and-desist letter from EMI Records, which instead could have capitalized on a new surge of interest in a 1968 oldie. (The album circulated anyway as a widespread free download.)

Like any other recordings the Beatles’ songs have been fodder for unauthorized mash-ups. But officially, they have been treated like sacred texts, to be kept inviolate. “Love” doesn’t open the door to Beatles recycling (which was going on anyway) as much as it recognizes the inevitable.

“Love” was made for Cirque du Soleil, which, astonishingly, persuaded the surviving Beatles and family members not only to let Beatles songs be used as the soundtrack for a big Las Vegas production but also to allow them to be rejiggered. Cirque du Soleil’s needs clearly affected the programming of the album — of course the Beatles’ circus song, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” is included — but “Love” was also a good pretext to sift through the tapes one more time.

The Martins searched the Beatles catalog for coincidences of key and tempo, for bits of songs that could be turned into connectors or musical puns. Vocals from “Nowhere Man” drift in above the keyboard and cello of “Blue Jay Way”; the guitar introduction to “Blackbird” leads into “Yesterday” instead.

It’s an album of connoisseurship, revealing the inspired details tucked into so many Beatles songs. (Paul McCartney’s bass line in “Something” emerges, with the rhythm guitar track removed, as a true countermelody.) It’s a sonic close-up too.

Because “Love” was made from early generations of the Beatles’ original, unprocessed studio master tapes, the timbres of voices, fingers on strings and drumsticks on skins are more immediate than they have been on other digitized Beatles releases. Which ought to raise the pressure on EMI to release better remastered CD’s of the original Beatles albums.

Some of the juxtapositions are revealing, pointing to threads that run through the Beatles’ music. “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You” were both in the same key, so the rhythm track of the first can fit the melody of the second. But both were also Beatles songs that matched mystical reflections to the drone of Indian raga. Other combinations are merely clever, a matter of trivial coincidence. A few are cutesy and annoying.

The “Love” version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” imagines the song being constructed: first John Lennon singing it by himself with acoustic guitar, then the other band members joining in one by one as a rhythm section, then layers of backup voices, of electric guitars, of horns and electronics, but with Lennon’s voice always vulnerable at the core. It’s touching and fascinating, like a time-lapse version of the Beatles at work. And then, unfortunately, the production goes off the rails, piling on bits of other, unnecessary songs.

“Love” isn’t the last word on the Beatles catalog — or at least it shouldn’t be. There’s far more material in the group’s archives than a single collection can encompass, especially if the point is not only preservation but extrapolation. The Beatles in their heyday held their music to extraordinarily high standards, but they weren’t rigid or exclusionary about what went into it, whether it was Bach or the Beach Boys.

They were playing in every sense of the word — even doing their own premonitory mash-ups in songs like “Revolution No. 9” and “I Am the Walrus” — and with “Love,” some of that old playfulness returns. Back in the 1960s the Beatles were pop’s vanguard; now, in this guarded way, they have joined the cut-and-paste present. Their originals stand up, but it wouldn’t hurt their legacy one bit to let some outsiders play with them too.

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html

music

Poets and Music

This be the verse.

Don't ask the latest wave of singer-songwriters which albums they've been listening to - they're more inspired by books than music. Laura Barton talks to the new poets of pop

The Guardian

Poets' corner ... (clockwise from top left) James Yorkston, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Joanna Newsom, and Josh Ritter.

Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Earlier this year, Southern Records published the lyrics of a little-known singer-songwriter called William Elliott Whitmore, binding them together as a 16-page songbook entirely devoid of accompanying notes or guitar tablature. Taken from Whitmore's three albums, they are songs of buzzards and blackbirds, gallows, graves, gravel roads, full of lines like "the morning glories and the Queen Anne's lace are baptised by the wind", and "the crow is calling and I hear him well up in the red bud tree". "Is there anything more elemental?" waxes Southern Records' James McArdle in its introduction. "Poetry on a banjo." "It's rare," added Jon Resh, the songbook's designer, "that any lyrics, sans music, make for such good reading as his."

In 2005, sales of poetry in Britain drifted to 890,220 books - said to be the worst figure in some time. By contrast, we bought 45,772,541 novels. In the same year, a survey conducted by Book Marketing/TMS found that of the 63% of Britons aged between 12 and 74 who bought any kind of book, 34% purchased fiction, and just 1% chose poetry. The publishing industry was aghast and set about dreaming up harebrained schemes such as texting verse to mobile phones to bolster our poetic sensibilities. But is there really great cause for panic? Might it be that today we are finding our poetry elsewhere, away from the printed page?

From Dylan to Eminem, the case has been thoroughly argued that the new poets of popular culture reside in rock'n'roll. Now, however, we have entered a golden age of rock lyricism, and precisely as those poetry sales dwindle, songwriters are filling the gap, drawing their influences as much from literature as from other musicians: Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Bill Callahan (who records as Smog), John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, Josh Ritter, Joanna Newsom, James Yorkston, M Ward. A glut of albums have arrived from these songwriters in recent weeks, and all feature songs that are as satisfying and fascinating lyrically as they are melodically, and offer words that easily stand alone.

Poetry and music have weathered a long and tortuous relationship. Until the 16th century they made happy bedfellows, and a poet and a composer was frequently the same thing - the majority of poetry was created to be sung or chanted. Thereafter the relationship largely fizzled out. It was rekindled, arguably, with the arrival of rock'n'roll.

"Rock'n'roll is characterised by driving and simple but not necessarily easy rhythms, and the words hover between the rhythms," says Christopher Ricks, Oxford University's professor of poetry, who has written about Bob Dylan's importance as a poet. "The question is, what do these wonderful simplicities of rhythm do to the words? Just because in the art of song, words are joined by music and melody, that doesn't mean they are less important. It's a bit like saying oxygen isn't as important in water because it's a compound."

But is it possible to describe a songwriter as "poetical"? After all, like "literary", it's an ambiguous term. "One way to address the dilemma of resolving what is and what is not poetry is to subscribe to what [Leonard] Cohen says: poetry is a verdict rather than an intention," observes David Boucher, author of Dylan & Cohen, Poets of Rock and Roll. But even that is fraught with subjectivity. "To call something poetic, or artistic, is deliberately to invoke this positive sense of approval," Boucher says. "The positive is not of course universal, and for some, poetry and the label poetry may be tainted by unpleasant associations with school and the 'high' culture of the establishment."

Indeed, poetry - in the book sense - has a bad reputation among even the most literary songwriters. "I see a huge gulf between poetry and song lyrics," insists Bill Callahan. "Poetry is so often an internal and individual thing. Music is a social art that speaks to the body more than the mind. Even if you choose to listen to music alone, you are still a part of a living thing. Poetry is about separating yourself out from the masses. It's about not being a social animal. I dislike poetry!"

Poetry can certainly be off-putting. To the uninitiated, it can appear as intimidating as stepping onto a dancefloor without the requisite moves; the difference is that to many, observing the onomatopoeia seems a whole lot less enticing than doing the mashed potato or learning how to pony like Bony Maroney.

"The greatest disservice that a poem can do is to act as a wall between the writer and the reader, or the performer and the audience," says Josh Ritter. "That is what I believe is happening to poetry these days. Somehow, poetry has been turned into a lock-box which we can only write or read after we've gone to graduate school. People seem worried that poetry isn't selling. If you have nothing useful to sell, people aren't gonna buy it. Poetry is supposed to be useful. It's supposed to help us with our lives. Writing is supposed to be generous."

Callahan's lyrics are characterised by their strong narratives, from the tale of a river guard watching over prisoners swimming, to the youthful adventure of finding "skin mags in the brambles". It is not surprising, then, that Callahan finds motivation in other forms of literature. "Prose is a different story," he declares. "I read a lot of prose but I don't see any direct influence on my songs. I can read anything as long as it rings long and true. It's more inspiration than influence. If I get up in the morning and read for an hour, instead of watching TV, it tends to make me write stuff. It tightens your brain and makes you shoot out some words of your own."

While Callahan denies direct literary inspiration, other songwriters are more forthcoming: M Ward tells me of stealing lines of Emily Dickinson; Josh Ritter based much of his last album, The Animal Years, on the writings of Mark Twain; the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle wrote a whole collection of songs inspired by Don DeLillo's habit of comparing the sun to an "orange ball", and composed a group of songs featuring the same characters, inspired by the Dream Songs sequence of the poet John Berryman. Joanna Newsom readily admits to a little literary theft on her latest record: "I filched two characters that in my head had life to them, were so finely drawn that they became archetypal: Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, running with his hands in his pockets, foreshadowing greed and repression - he became a touchstone; and similarly in the song Emily there's a reference to Lolita. Not directly to the character but to the heavy, languorous energy, that listlessness and decadence, the rangy long limbs of her adolescence. He's giving her candy and fancy dresses to fill the hole he's creating in her heart."

Naturally, the process of songwriting is different from writing poetry or prose. M Ward generally starts with the music. So does Newsom: "It starts with a melody," she says, "but I hate arbitrariness in lyrics. I've never chosen a word just because it sounds good. It's important that each line has musical value, which in my mind is similar to poetical value. There has to be correlation between instrument activity and word activity." Callahan goes in backwards: "I can't write the music first," he says. "I write a block of words that holds together, for me, without music. But I am also hearing the music in a ghostly way as I write the words."

For Ritter much of it is about wordplay: "I make up things off the top of my head," he says. "I like them best when they rhyme. I'm pretty unapologetic about that part. A rhyme grounds the thought being expressed in a bedrock. It gives the game rules by which to play. When you do a crossword, you have boxes of white and black to go by. Songs are the same way." Darnielle tends to go in both guns blazing: "The songs tend to be written with the guitar, hands going back and forth, scatting almost," he says. "Blurting out sounds to find where a melodic line is, finding out what the line length is. And then writing a line or two, but improvising words to see how they fit in. Maybe just a phrase." It is different, he says, to other forms of writing. "Poetry I sit down and write."

Many of these songwriters have aspirations to experiment in other genres of writing. Darnielle's other passion is writing poetry. The son of an English tutor, and a former literature student, he knows his stuff: "Gentlemen used to read poetry, women too, but it was a kind of a gentlemanly pursuit. My professor, Robert Mezey, is always insisting - and it seems like a romanticised past - that any educated person, set to it, would be able to give you four lines of pentameter as part of their education. Now, this is not the case." The reason, he suspects, is the rise in electronic media. "You base a lot more now on seeing and hearing than on reading," he says.

There is also a lot of bad poetry about these days, which he thinks is another factor. "The disappearance of objective criteria on which to judge poems sort of opens the floodgates for a lot of bad poetry," Darnielle explains, sitting cross-legged on the edge of his hotel bed and frowning a little. "And when a market becomes flooded with stuff that's poor, then the customers go away. And bad poetry - there can't ever have been so much as there is present today." It's Walt Whitman's fault, he says. "I would blame my own country, especially uncle Walt, for this. Uncle Walt is the supreme egotist. Everything exists in his world with respect to his own gaze and presence. By his relation to it." He draws his mouth into a line of thin resignation. "Because it's a complex issue to discuss, beyond most of us including me, people just throw up their hands and go, 'Well, I don't understand it but it must be good!'"

Still, he believes human beings have an inherent need for poetry. He quotes William Carlos Williams' poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: "It is difficult to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." He shrugs. "I think that's why rap is popular. There's not a rock writer as good as Ghostface [Killah]. He's just shocking. And David LaDude. Oh boy." And even so, Darnielle believes, rap is past its lyrical peak.

Darnielle still writes poetry. "I like bizarre images, collages. I really like the sounds of words," he says with relish. Would he hinge a whole poem or song around one particular word? "Oh yeah, I'll bite down on one," he grins broadly and displays a fine set of teeth. "If there's a word I want to play up. People have words they say well." And what are his? "It's been observed that I say window, hair and water a lot. Fire is a nice one always. Monkey is an outstanding word but you have to go light on it. You can run it into the ground."

Newsom, meanwhile, who dropped out of college where she was studying poetry-reading and short-story writing to pursue music, sees her new album as at least a sidestep towards prose. "They're long songs, and in a lot of ways I was thinking of them as short stories," she says.

Ritter plans to write novels alongside his music, and Callahan too has his eye on writing prose: "I'm working on an epistolary novelette," he says soberly. Already, however, he is finding the new creative form something of a challenge: "It is more difficult than songwriting. The horizon is so wide and it's so quiet - there is no music!"

Post-War by M Ward and Get Lonely by the Mountain Goats are out now on 4AD. Ys by Joanna Newsom is released on November 6 on Drag City. Josh Ritter plays Whitehaven Civic Hall on November 16, then tours.

Related article

03.10.2006: Pete Doherty on the poets who inspired him

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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Not exactly goodbye...

but almost...

Yes, I have finally decided to put this blog into a hiatus... for a while at least...

I'm actually waiting for Google to make some changes into this Blogger thingie.

Until then I'm going to keep on posting, but in my French blog.

This way please :

Tomorrow Never Knows

On the left side you have "Categories" where you can select English...

of course you can practice your French as well.

And as Terminator used to say :

I'll Be Back..!

See you mates.

Blogalaxia Tags: Blogalaxia
Musica

Evanescence news

Evanescence Talk About Their New Album

Evanescence (photo by Ros O'Gorman)

by Andrew Tijs @ Undercover

September 12 2006

Amy Lee, raven-haired singer for Evanescence, has spoken about their new album, the loss of members and “the Christian thing”.

In an interview with Billboard, Lee discussed the trials and travails of working on their sophomore album ‘The Open Door’. Out in October, it follows up their 2003 multi-platinum debut ‘Fallen’.

Lee admits “It took longer than I thought. But, I am a perfectionist. We took all the time we needed and wrote and wrote and wrote. If it wasn't good, I threw it away. I wanted every piece of it to be as good as it possibly could be.”

She also spoke about the reconfigurations of the band since the first album. Bassist Will Boyd and Lee’s songwriting partner Ben Moody are gone. Lee said, “Without (Moody), it wasn't like I was thinking, "Oh, my God, what am I going to do?" It really had gotten to the point where it was so horrible and dramatic, it was a relief and I knew the band could continue.”

Lee rejected “the Christian thing” in the interview, “I'm so over it. It's the lamest thing. I fought that from the beginning; I never wanted to be associated with it. It was a Ben thing. It's over. It's a new day.”

Broken Social Scene

Just one big happy family, eh?

How can you keep track of a band with no fixed line-up, scores of side projects, and whose founder is disappointed in himself? Laura Barton reports from Toronto on the soap opera that is Broken Social Scene

Friday August 25, 2006
The Guardian


Canada's supergroup ... Broken Social Scene

Ableary-eyed Amy Millan is winding her way across Toronto in a desperate search for coffee. The traffic lights switch to green and she scans the streets with a face dogged by a hangover and startled by makeup. A pair of sparkly red ballet slippers sits in the passenger seat. We pull up outside Jet Fuel Coffee in Cabbagetown, where Millan used to work, and she is two steps on to the pavement when the heckling starts. "Hey Amy!" they holler. "Aren't you some big star now?"

Millan is indeed some big star here in Toronto. Poised to release her solo album, Honey From the Tombs, she notched up a fine reputation with the Montreal-based band Stars, flaunting a voice that is fine-spun, breathy and distinctive. But it was her role as a vocalist for Broken Social Scene that truly led her into the limelight; with Millan, as with so many Canadian artists today, all roads lead to Broken Social Scene.

BSS is a Canadian supergroup or artistic collective, call it what you will, that began in 1999 with Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, and has been accumulating members ever since. Today some 20 musicians drift in and out, including solo performers Leslie Feist and Jason Collett, plus Emily Haines and James Shaw of Metric, as well as countess others. BSS has somehow succeeded in producing three albums: the mainly instrumental debut Feel Good Lost (2001), the exceptional and impressionistic You Forgot It in People (2002) and last year's Broken Social Scene. But it is live that they catch fire, as a kind of indie jam band. At times BSS on stage will accommodate five guitarists, horns, drums, strings, three female vocalists and a couple of male voices to create a whirling, diving, clamour of sound, in shows that can stretch to three hours.

Today the offices of the BSS's Toronto-based record label, Arts & Crafts, are crammed with boxes of merchandise, waiting to be shipped across to Olympic Island where tomorrow the group are curating a festival. The show will see 10,000 fans make the short ferry-hop from the mainland to bask in the sunshine and in performances by Raising the Fawn, J Mascis, Feist and Bloc Party, with a grand finale by BSS.

To Jeffrey Remedios of Arts & Crafts, the Olympic Island show is a celebration of four years of hard graft, during which all involved lived with a persistent fear "that we were going to fuck it up". Five years ago Remedios was working for Virgin, craving a little more independence, a tad more creativity. "At the same time what was happening in Toronto was this incredible burgeoning music community," he recalls. "All these bands were starting to really come together, all these clubs were full, everyone would be going out to see local bands, which was a relatively new thing for us. It sort of hit critical mass at a certain time."

Already a good friend and sometime roommate of Canning and Drew, he at first took a mild interest in their project. "But then they made You Forgot It in People, and they got me into the studio and said whaddyathink? And I said I'm in, I'm totally in." That meant leaving Virgin to found a record label, management company and music publisher with Drew, "that would just be like an arts collective, like the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, that kind of theory".

Arts & Crafts started with one band, Broken Social Scene, and has grown steadily since. "Social Scene really are the band that are at the centre of this community," insists Remedios. "The true ethos of that band is a collection of people collaborating together from other projects. So they're in the core. In the beginning they would play shows at [Toronto venue] Ted's Wrecking Yard, and they'd play all new songs every show, and they'd play once a month. You Forgot It in People was birthed from that. So one week James and Emily from Metric would be there, the next month Feist, the next month Amy and Evan from Stars. And it just hit, it hit really fast."

Back in Cabbagetown, Millan, propped up by latte, is attempting to explain the complex, intertwining histories of the members of BSS. She first met Kevin Drew at summer camp. "And of course Emily I met on the first day at school. She came up and asked where the music class was. We walked in and we were late, and there was what felt like 200 kids all facing us. But it was better because we had each other, and that sort of bonded us as a force. We were very, very good friends for a very, very long time. Emily was already writing absolutely amazing songs and I started singing with her and ..." She has barely begun her story when another fan wanders over. "Amy! Hey Amy!"

While its shape-shifting enormity has been part of BSS's attraction, it has also provided its own complications, particularly for Canning and Drew. "The family is constantly expanding," nods Canning. "But we let ourselves get pulled in a lot of different ways, and you can kinda forget we're the founding members of this group. It just feels like this abstract thing." And the difficulties have not just been musical. "Over the years there's been such emotional tumult. It must be the same with every band, but then when you throw men and women together and start playing music together, it's like being at summer camp."

It's easy to imagine that Canning and Drew might grow a little irked by the constant to-ing and fro-ing of their band members, but Drew insists not. "It would annoy me if their bands were bad. But they're not. Bands like Stars and Metric need to be there, and we've been very grateful for the time they've devoted to us." Besides, he argues, they enjoy a kind of symbiotic relationship. "They will burn out on their own shit and come back to us and say, 'Can I just not think about stuff for a month?' And they take that energy and they use it really well in their own bands."

Two BSS members currently pursuing another project in earnest are Emily Haines and James Shaw, singer and guitarist in the more straightforward, punky Metric. "James and I write with BSS pretty regularly," she explains, "but it's a very different kind of role, especially for me. I really enjoy playing the supporting part. Social Scene is about donating yourself. And the thing is, we don't see each other that often. It's a way to romanticise your friendships, because you don't have to put up with the day-to-day."

Though Metric formed in New York, the band members have since returned home to Toronto, making them more available, presumably, for further collaborations. "It just felt like the right time," says Haines. "[Canada's] a pretty utopian place at the moment, there's a lot happening. I guess what keeps me going is my interest in other people. Everyone I know, that seems to be their desire: to collaborate. They need to connect."

Drew, however, isn't feeling the connections so profoundly these days. "None of us has any time any more in this band," he says over dinner the night before the Olympic Island festival, spearing his pasta. "There's lots of families and personal stuff, other bands going on, so Social Scene has become ... it's lost a bit of its love outside of when we're together, but when we're together it's there." Does the loss of love concern him? "It disappoints me a bit because I feel that if we all gave it 170% then we would be doing a lot better than we are. We were always a music band that loved music. And we've now gone into a format of playing the same songs all the time. It's great because we have rotating members so you always have different magic, and personality-wise it's difficult to always be on the road so it's nice to have different conversations. But we've been touring non-stop for the last four years now, so it's just at a point where we've got to find something new about it."

He is quick to point out that he has thoroughly enjoyed the past few years. "But it's also been some of the most stereotypical narcissistic times in our lives," he says. "I think you hit a point where you're disappointed in yourself maybe, and that point for me was when I kind of took it for granted. And it's also very difficult to make music when you're talking about it all the time, you're always planning your future and where you're going to go and all that, and it does suck the life out of why you wanted to do it."

What would he rather talk about? "I'd rather learn," he replies earnestly. "I'd rather use conversation as an education platform, instead of talking about booze and how fucking hard it is to cope as a group or a family or a band. We were always an experiment in intimacy. That's something Jason Collett said to me once, and I liked that. I liked the idea that people were into us because it never was supposed to work with this many people, and financially we were supposed to be ruined and internally we were supposed to be ruined. There's be a lot of fucked up things that have happened over the last couple of years, but we're still here and there's still love for each other."

It is 12.59pm on Olympic Island, and there is a still patch of calm before the gates open. The sun shines slow and steady, beers sit cooling in big icy barrels. You hear the squeals first, then the thunderous approach of the first stampede of hipsters charging across the grass to secure their territory at the front of the stage. By the time Broken Social Scene take to the stage shortly before 9pm, the crowd is itchy with anticipation. It is an outstanding, unexpectedly moving performance, the already preposterous number of band members on stage bolstered by the friends and family that seem to spill from the wings. The night concludes in a final, stunning triumvirate of Ibi Dreams of Pavement, It's All Gonna Break, and KC Accidental. And, for a glorious while, Broken Social Scene, in all its fragmented, dissonant, weary parts, seem again united.

Five essential records from the Canadian scene

Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It in People
Back in 2002, cramming umpteen musicians on to an album seemed an outlandish concept. Yet You Forgot It in People bloomed with a mesmerising creativity, best illustrated by the breathless, otherworldly Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl.

Metric - Live It Out
One of this year's best albums so far, this is the second offering from Metric, and marks out Haines as one of the brightest stars in music right now. Politically charged and with a stoked-up fire in its belly, Live It Out is also disturbingly danceable.

Feist - Let It Die
The solo project of BSS's Leslie Feist. Unabashedly romantic, Let It Die is steeped in cocktail jazz and bossa nova; it's her most sumptuous offering yet.

Stars - Set Yourself on Fire
Stars are made up of Chris Seligman and Pat McGee, along with BSS members Amy Millan, Torquil Campbell and Evan Cranley. Their piece de resistance is this album from 2005: a cathartic confection of strings, horns, colliding female-male vocals and Casio keyboards.

Jason Collett - Idols of Exile
Collett is a part of BSS's wall-of-guitar sound, but here he drifts back to his folkier roots to bring us a delightful album, full of summery, wistful tracks such as Hangover Days.

· Broken Social Scene and Metric play the Carling Weekend at Leeds on Friday and Reading on Sunday

Related articles

27.01.2006: CD: Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene
21.12.2005: Broken Social Scene, Cargo, London
07.07.2006: CD: Metric, Live It Out

Useful link
Broken Sccial Scene official site

MySpace OurMusic

MySpace to sell music from nearly 3 million bands

By Yinka Adegoke Fri Sep 1, 9:38 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - MySpace, the wildly popular online teen hangout, said on Friday it will make its first move into the digital music business by selling songs from nearly 3 million unsigned bands.

MySpace is the latest company to try to take on Apple Computer Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) iTunes Music Store, but unlike many other start-up rivals, it already boasts 106 million users, as well as the backing of parent company News Corp (NYSE:NWS - news).

"The goal is to be one of the biggest digital music stores out there," MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told Reuters. "Everyone we've spoken to definitely wants an alternative to iTunes and the iPod. MySpace could be that alternative."

In the past year, MySpace.com has become the single most visited Internet address among U.S. Web users, according to Hitwise, with mainly teenagers and young adults using the site to socialize, share music and photographs.

Before the end of 2006, De Wolfe said MySpace will offer independent bands that have not signed with a record label a chance to sell their music on the site. MySpace says it has nearly 3 million bands showcasing their music.

Songs can be sold on the bands' MySpace pages and on fan pages, in non-copyright-protected MP3 digital file format, which works on most digital players including Apple's market-dominating iPod.

The bands will decide how much to charge per song after including MySpace's distribution fee, said Rusty Rueff, the chief executive of Snocap, which will manage the e-commerce service. Snocap provides digital licensing and copyright management services and was started by Napster founder Shawn Fanning. Rueff said the "small" distribution fee was not yet fixed.

BOOMING SECTOR

DeWolfe said MySpace would be "enhancing and customizing" its online music store as the service evolves, aiming to eventually offer copyright-protected songs from major record companies.

"I don't think the record companies are going to be interested in distributing music without copy protection anytime soon," said David Card, analyst at Jupiter Research.

Though DeWolfe would not give any details of discussions with record companies, an industry source close to the matter said EMI Group (EMI.L) has had discussions with MySpace. EMI declined comment.

EMI, Vivendi's (VIV.PA) Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group (NYSE:WMG - news) and Sony BMG own around 75 percent of mainstream popular music. Most of this music is only available on MySpace for live streaming as a promotional tool.

Digital music is the fastest-growing sector of the record industry but the market is dominated by iTunes, which has more than 70 percent of U.S. sales, according to NPD Research. iTunes is only fully compatible with the iPod.

The market has been abuzz with news of new entrants in recent weeks. Privately held SpiralFrog plans to launch a free music download service supported by advertising before the end of the year, and has reached a deal with Universal Music.

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) is planning to launch an iPod rival called the Zune, which will be supported by an integrated music download store similar to iTunes.

MySpace said it is working with eBay Inc.'s (Nasdaq:EBAY - news) PayPal for the site's online payment system.

Shoegazing Nation

Sole survivors: the legacy of shoegazing

Shoegazing is a half-forgotten musical genre, but its legacy lives on, says Robert Webb

Published: 30 August 2006

There was a joke circulating in the early Nineties. Q: How can you spot an extrovert indie guitarist? A: They stare at your shoes, rather than their own. Shoegazing Shoegazing was the rather dismissive term given by the music press to Britain's indie scene, circa 1989-94. The music was characterised by a six-string drone, quiet harmonies and an introspective take on the rock 'n' roll sneer.

Emma Anderson formed Lush, one of the most successful acts from the period. "When we started out in 1989 this shoegazing thing didn't exist," Anderson says. "We became aware of the movement in about 1990." Anderson wasn't offended by the name, although she does think it ridiculed unfairly. "What it really meant was that we were staring at the effects pedals, I think, rather than our shoes," she says. Wedged in between the heady Madchester years of the late Eighties and the excess of mid-Nineties Britpop, Shoegazing was too laid back to predict a riot, too unconfrontational to make the tabloids. No shoegazer was ever going to slurp tea at No. 10.

It's recently become the subject of a 16-track anthology from Sanctuary Records. Like A Daydream, compiled by the former Melody Maker writer Ian Watson, is the first retrospective of the movement some tagged "the scene that celebrates itself". This nickname referred to the apparent mutual support enjoyed by the bands: journalists reported that it often seemed as though a significant portion of the audience at a shoegazer gig was other shoegazing groups, cheering on their chums (whilst, one assumes, staring at their Airware).

Along with Lush, the bands highlighted - most of whom were signed to either Alan McGee's Creation or 4AD - include Ride, Curve, Cranes, Chapterhouse, Telescopes and Slowdive. Ride provide the harmonious title track. Curve are represented by the velvet-chainsaw buzz of "Horror Head". Slowdive's "When the Sun Hits" tiptoes around a looping, swooning melody that typifies the genre. The vocals on "Pearl" by Chapterhouse are so low-key they're lost in the fuzz. Also-rans include the prog-influenced "Mercy Seat" by Ultra Vivid Scene, not unlike some of the more psychedelic outings of Robyn Hitchcock, and Great Yarmouth's own Catherine Wheel, whose "Black Metallic" is as cool as a raspberry ripple on a North Sea beach.

This was the first pop movement since punk to prominently feature women. Slowdive had the guitarist Rachel Goswell and Cranes were built around the brother/sister duo Jim and Alison Shaw. Anderson, who formed Lush with a schoolmate, Miki Berenyi, found that the fact half the band was women was neither a boon nor a bane. "We used to be asked by journalists if we had problems with our label, but there were plenty of other women on 4AD," she says. "So, no, we didn't have a problem. It wasn't like we were on a major corporate label."

Lush, like many of the bands, took their lead from the progenitor footwear-gazers, My Bloody Valentine, an early discovery of McGee, who signed the four-piece in the mid Eighties. "My Bloody Valentine were important," says Anderson. "But we had some quite diverse influences. We had quite a pop sensibility." Nor were Lush solely a studio band. "We played in pubs a lot." So did Anderson find a lot of her compatriots at their gigs? "Not really," she says. There was a camaraderie, though. "We knew Chapterhouse, who shared our management, and Ride. I think the picture painted isn't quite accurate. It was just a case of lazy journalism."

Robin Guthrie of fellow 4AD signees The Cocteau Twins produced Lush's first EP, "Scar" and their debut album, 1992's Spooky. Guthrie leant heavily on drum machines and preferred to plug the guitars directly into the effects, rather than an amplifier. "The records have that Cocteau sound," Anderson concedes. "But the songs were very much written by us and rehearsed before we went into the studio with Robin. If we had done those records with somebody else, the songs would have been exactly the same." The Anderson-penned hit "Sweetness and Light" is a high spot of the new compilation.

Lush split in 1996, after the suicide of their founding drummer, just as Blur, Oasis and Pulp were roughing up British pop. "The movement got a bit of a kicking," Anderson admits. "When our first album came out, in America Nirvana were happening. Over here bands like Suede were coming through and they were more of a precursor to Britpop than bands like us." By mid-decade, people had had enough of the shoegazers. They were all laced up with nowhere to go.

Although the genre is now half forgotten, Anderson can hear its legacy. "Post Britpop, lots of bands sound very shoegazery," she says. "The press wouldn't call it that though." Its rhythms echo in acts as diverse as Radiohead, Sigur Ros and Mogwai. Played back to back, Slowdive give Coldplay a run for their money and Pale Saints' bass lines grumble over chord shapes not unlike those of Editors.

Ten years on, Anderson has gone on to form Sing Sing and also DJs at a shoegazing club, Sonic Cathedral. She spins tracks by House of Love and even Roxy Music and Simple Minds. "After all," she says, "how much Slowdive and Telescopes can you listen to in one night?"

Like A Dream: The Story of Shoegazing (Sanctuary) is out now

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited