My Best Tunes

The sound of several thousand women screaming hits you like a hurricane. A man dressed in tight trousers skips across a stage, white shirt opened up to reveal a smattering of neck jewellery. “Wooo,” he says. He stands there, beaming, not flinching in the face of such audible adoration. Soon, the noise becomes an wall of sound. The floor and roof of the Hammersmith Apollo reverberate, slightly embarrassed. “Woo,” says the man again. Little does he know, but the navigation equipment of an airplane far above goes wonky and a flock of migrating birds swerves off course. Ladies and gentlemen (well, just ladies, really): Jesus has arrived.

Radiohead have just released new collector’s editions of Pablo Honey, The Bends and OK Computer. The band’s most dedicated fans will be the first to acknowledge the release as a cash-in by their former label EMI and nothing to do with the band members. After all, just two months after the band decided to go their own way and sell In Rainbows themselves digitally in October 2007, EMI released a seven-disc box set. Another release from Radiohead will of course be a most welcome cash injection to the ailing label, but what’s in it for the fans?

The sound of several thousand women screaming hits you like a hurricane. A man dressed in tight trousers skips across a stage, white shirt opened up to reveal a smattering of neck jewellery. “Wooo,” he says. He stands there, beaming, not flinching in the face of such audible adoration. Soon, the noise becomes an wall of sound. The floor and roof of the Hammersmith Apollo reverberate, slightly embarrassed. “Woo,” says the man again. Little does he know, but the navigation equipment of an airplane far above goes wonky and a flock of migrating birds swerves off course. Ladies and gentlemen (well, just ladies, really): Jesus has arrived.

Radiohead have just released new collector’s editions of Pablo Honey, The Bends and OK Computer. The band’s most dedicated fans will be the first to acknowledge the release as a cash-in by their former label EMI and nothing to do with the band members. After all, just two months after the band decided to go their own way and sell In Rainbows themselves digitally in October 2007, EMI released a seven-disc box set. Another release from Radiohead will of course be a most welcome cash injection to the ailing label, but what’s in it for the fans?

I find it funny that my kid is as obsessed with the Stone Roses as I was more than 20 years ago. As Ian Brown put it: ‘The past was yours but the future’s mine.’ It still is

Watching John Squire on Newsnight last week reminded me just how much I miss the Stone Roses. When presenter Gavin Esler repeatedly asked him if he was sure he didn’t want to re-form the band, Squire’s typically northern deadpan reaction exposed the ridiculous nature of the questioning. This example of a classic uninterested interaction with the press was pure Roses, and made me miss them more.

The big question is why people want the Stone Roses to re-form? Is it just because we’re living in a retrospective age with reunions, reissues and Don’t Look Back concerts becoming exceedingly popular. Or is it because, when the music scene becomes stale, you have to look back to understand how to move forward?

The Stone Roses’ ascendancy to the top was spectacular. They exploded on to the music scene and made it exciting during the dark ages of defeatist indie in the aftermath of the Smiths’ split. When Brown sang I Am the Resurrection, it truly felt like they were. Their incarnation was five years in the making and during this gestation period they were completely removed from the dominating London trends. The Roses took the punk template, understood it and reimagined the myths and legends of classic rock’n'roll and re-contextualised it for an acid-house generation who were under the influence of working-class culture, the dole, raves and northern soul all-nighters.

They captured the pop zeitgeist without the permission of the press, who initially wrote them off as boring, retro retreads. They took their self-promotion to the street and spray-painted their names all over Manchester through staging happenings and guerrilla gigs. They even took the music industry to task when they sued their record company. Unafraid of success, the Stone Roses were the voice of a new generation. As Brown succinctly put it: “The past was yours but the future’s mine.”

Even though their back catalogue has already been reissued and repackaged (with a tacky badge) I am looking forward to the June re-release of their first album to mark its 20th anniversary. It will be intriguing to hear it removed from the cultural baggage of “Madchester” and “baggy”. If you divorce their self-titled debut from such media tags the sound is timeless. It could be dropped into any musical period post-1966 and would still be unstoppable.

I find it funny that my kid has become just as obsessed with the Stone Roses as I was more than twenty years ago. He even sent me MP3s of his latest discovery, the Ruling Class, a contemporary band fully under the influence of the Roses. The band (named after an obscure Peter O’Toole comedy) have taken on the epic Roses sound. This sound wasn’t merely retro pastiche, as some critics suggest. It was complex in its foundation, containing a hydra-headed monster of influences from krautrock, funk and psychedelia to rock and reggae. But the Stone Roses, under the direction of Squire’s kaleidoscope of jingle-jangle guitars and Ian Brown’s situationist sloganeering, not to mention Mani and Reni’s supremely tight rhythm section, took this tapestry of genres and created a fresh and effortless debut. No wonder the world is still waiting for the Stone Roses.

As part of their takeover of guardian.co.uk/music, PJ Harvey and John Parish asked the Chapman brothers – who directed the video to Black Hearted Love – to blog on the art of the music video

We’re not wholeheartedly into the idea of the music video. At least, not without a certain amount of condemnatory scrutiny.

There are several aspects that strike us as odd. At its worst the music video is simply an unexamined visual narrative, a literal story created to match the music. It’s all a bit Jackanory. A bit creative writing GCSE. There’s also an expectation that the film should be cut to make the viewer’s experience as passive and palatable as possible. Finally, there’s this implicit rule that the singer should be lip-synching to the song. All of these ideas we reject.

This formula, which demands you provide eye candy for ear candy, isn’t one we want to follow. For us, when you’re making art the point is to intervene in the formula. We’ve made two videos. The first, for the Peth, was basically a camera disappearing up Rhys Ifans’s arse. The second, Black Hearted Love, for PJ Harvey and John Parish, featured Polly jumping up and down on a bouncy castle, which undermines the rules of what a pop video should be.

This music we’re working with, these slightly forlorn gothic ballads with screechy guitar, is a sophisticated language within itself. But all the time in pop videos, the visual language is forced to comply with the dictates of the music. I think we’ve managed to created a visual language to match the music but we’ve had to deskill ourselves in order to achieve that. I think we’ve been super, super clever.

Making a pop video is obviously different to making art. While the time pressure is greater, that’s alleviated by the resources. It’s the difference between building the Eiffel tower and the pyramids: it all depends on how many slaves you’ve got. There are also expectations of the form; public and commercial interests may converge but the creative urge will always head in a different direction. Videos are usually made to help to sell a record. But we’d like people to watch our videos, go out into the street and burn their Porsches.

Jake Chapman was talking to Paul MacInnes

Once dubbed the Official Home of Rock, the festival famous for hosting metal monoliths has gone all indie

When this year’s Reading and Leeds festival lineup was announced at an industry party last night, you may have heard the distinct sound of rockers spluttering into their beer. For the infamously hard-rockin’ festival boasts the least “rock” lineup ever. None of the headliners – Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead and Kings of Leon – are known for their riffing or tattoos. Slightly further down the bill, you’d be struggling to find a convincing, balls-out rock band amid the likes of Bloc Party (second on the bill for two consecutive years), Glasvegas, Vampire Weekend and Kaiser Chiefs.

Granted, the world’s oldest surviving pop festival has been through one or two phases since it began as the National Jazz festival in Richmond in 1961. But since the 1971 shift to Reading, it has always been primarily a rock festival. For most of the 70s, it was synonymous with progressive rock, and singers dressed as flowers.

The dalliance with punk during 1978’s festival was a bold experiment that led to battles between fans. The Ramones – who appealed to punks and rockers, not least because of their genre-bending uniform of rock barnets and leather jackets – still featured on the bill the following year. But in the 80s, Reading became known for acts like Alice Cooper, Marillion and, er, Status Quo, while occasionally being able to shoehorn a rockish act like the Mission on to the bill.

However, rock’s slight slump in popularity in the late 80s led to the infamous and disastrous attempt to take the festival in a more commercial, AOR direction. Thus, in 1988 – the year of acid house – Reading rocked (albeit softly) to the ghastly sound of poodle-permed Starship, followed by Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler. Meat was greeted with a hail of bottles, while Ms Tyler probably had a Total Eclipse of the Heart when she realised they contained urine.

Since then (and especially when it acquired a second site at Leeds) the festival has settled into being rock-oriented. Nirvana headlined in 1992, when Kurt Cobain was famously pushed onstage in a wheelchair by Guardian music blog contributor Everett True. There’s always been a lot of indie (Pulp and the Stone Roses) and a bit of rap (Ice Cube, the Beastie Boys) – but at least one whole day has always been dominated by bands with loud guitars and metal piercings.

As recently as 2002, rock acts featured on every single day, whether they were the Sick of it All, Jane’s Addiction, Cave-In or Reel Big Fish. The rock day in Leeds was a total noise fest – Slipknot and the Offspring topped off by a rare sighting of Guns N’ Roses – although a minor riot prompted a subsequent change of site.

In the last three years, Reading and Leeds has still hosted rock monoliths from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica to Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine. Which makes this year’s bill suddenly look very different. You have to examine the lineup closely to see metal acts such as Funeral for a Friend and the Deftones, all of them buried down the bill. You can’t help wonder if some bod booked the Eagles of Death Metal to pacify the purists – until someone pointed out that actually they weren’t death metal. Or the Eagles.

Meanwhile, all the bigger rock acts seem to have been booked by Download. So has Reading and Leeds lost out, or made a calculated decision to realign itself with indie? Or has the festival simply forgotten how to rock?

It’s the free music service that’s attracting thousands of new users every day, and now Spotify is taking on the daddy of online music – iTunes. The on-demand streaming service has signed a deal to sell MP3 downloads as well as just playing them.

A concert featuring a collaboration between Malian desert bluesmen Tinariwen and English folktronica pioneers Tunng seems on paper a musical mix-and-match likely to result in either high-brow chin-scratching or confused head-scratching. The latter certainly seemed a possibility, given the bands’ difficult rehearsals, late to start after the inevitable visa problems of bringing an African group to tour the UK, and hampered by disintegrating banjos and a severe language barrier.

It’s the free music service that’s attracting thousands of new users every day, and now Spotify is taking on the daddy of online music – iTunes. The on-demand streaming service has signed a deal to sell MP3 downloads as well as just playing them.