9 February 2010

Editor’s Blog: 9 February 2010

To review or not to review? That’s the burning question which raised its ugly head last Saturday night. It was the night of the much anticipated NME Awards tour in Manchester which featured an old favourite, The Maccabees, and some newer hyped acts: The Drums, Bombay Bicycle Club and The Big Pink. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a prime example of incompetent sound and lighting management, especially (and critically) the former. It started with The Drums and lead man Jonathan Pierce doing a rather good imitation of Morrissey. I wasn’t impressed with the retro music menu but the sound made it impossible to definitively decide one way or the other. Then The Big Pink arrived and proceeded to deafen the audience with sound that was way too loud and distorted. Bombay Bicycle Club arrived on stage and immediately experienced problems with their guitars which had to be changed. Now this young Brit band seemed sonically quite distinctive and original, but once again the sound management was awful. The Maccabees made a better fist of the sound - marginally. I saw them play last year after the release of WALL OF ARMS, and they sounded many times better. So what do I do? How could I review a gig that boasted some of the worst sound management I’ve heard in the last twelve months? How can I give an accurate appraisal? I couldn’t, and therefore, regretfully, did not. Lighting was not as bad but still pretty dire (I had to give up trying to photograph band members through a total lack of light). It’s not fair for the bands or their fans but is a worrying trend with those responsible showing an almost total lack of knowledge of experience. And it wasn’t only me who had difficulties in hearing. During several breaks in the smoko area several punters said they had to leave the auditorium due to the sound… Incidentally, The Maccabees blew the other bands away, regardless…

In sharp contrast, undergound ska band The King Blues from London’s East End appeared in a modest Wrexham club and managed to squeeze out the best sound I’ve heard at the venue. So it can be done, with a little care and attention. The band impressed me in many ways, not least in the raw simplicity of their great songs, and the way they connected with their audience.

8 February 2010

I’m a sucker for bargains and especially those HMV 2 for £10 offers. Now it’s a really clever promo strategy because there’s always a release you want to catch up on, but to secure the deal you have to buy two CDs. So you agonise over which other CD to select. I know I did. First selection was Radiohead’s IN RAINBOWS which has been missing from my local HMV shelves for yonks (well, a few months…), so at a fiver it was a bargain and the ideal candidate for my radio show. Then comes the second CD problemo… is it to be the Foo Fighters or Noah And The Whale or highly acclaimed Animal Collective? I plumped for Animal Collective and went solely on the fact it was highly acclaimed worldwide as I hadn’t heard anything from it. Well, it was okay, but just okay. Then I remembered back in my youth when I worked at Harrods in London and each week I would go to the record department, sit in one of many listening booths (for as long as I needed to) and then decide. Today of course you can click onto Amazon and hear short snippets of every album song, but it doesn’t come close to the listening booth. Happy days!

Sean ‘Drowned In Sound’ Adams had an interesting piece in The Sunday Times Culture section. Seems that Ellie Goulding was upset at comments he or his hacks made, and she actually emailed him with a ‘thousand-word self-defence.’ Now I may well be with Sean on this one in that from what I’ve seen and heard from this young lady is very vin ordinaire. My approach is to ignore and spend column inches on what we feel is good, unless there’s a compelling reason to ‘slag.’ Miss Goulding also made an immature mistake in responding - most of the time ‘silence is golden.’ The bigger question for me is why the publicly funded BBC is promoting somebody like Goulding, or indeed any artist, in this way (they carried out a poll of the music industry’s ‘great and good’ to choose their ‘Sound Of 2010′). Immediately this gives the winning artist(s) a head’s start over other more worthy artists, and that’s not what the BBC should be about.