My Best Tunes

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrated its 25th birthday last night in the only way it knew how. By rocking out. Some of the biggest names in rock music including Sting and Bruce Springsteen graced the stage at Madison Square Gardens as part of the five hour concert. A further celebration is set to shake the prestigious venue tonight as the likes of Aretha Franklin and U2 provide birthday surprises.

This week’s Spotify playlist is brought to you courtesy of the nice people at Black Cab Sessions, purveyors of the finest musical performances to be found in the back of a black cab anywhere in London.

Following Peter Hook’s recent media blitz, it’s hard to look at Manchester as forward thinking. Do new acts stand a chance? Or shall we just keep on banging on about the bloody Hacienda?

Peter Hook, as you might have heard, has written a book about the Hacienda. You might recognise the story from the film 24 Hour Party People; at least two exhibitions at Manchester’s Urbis; or any one of the hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles that, over the last five years, have rehashed the same facts. Did you know that New Order actually lost money running the Hacienda? No, really, they did.

Elsewhere, there are Hacienda compilations to buy, Stone Roses reissues to own and multiple opportunities to hear Bez and Shaun Ryder DJing at “Madchester” revival nights. Should you wish to explore Manchester’s much-mythologised musical past further, you could rent Control or Grant Gee’s Joy Division; buy rock photographer Kevin Cummins’s latest collection; or pick up tickets to see the re-formed James, Magazine, Section 25 or Inspiral Carpets. For the real connoisseur: how about a night out at that recently reopened, once pivotal, Manc gay club, No 1? A commemorative gig at a Rochdale recording studio? Or a shopping trip to the northern quarter, where, at Vinyl Revival and Richard Goodall, you can kit out your home as a veritable shrine to the past glories of Manchester music?

In other cities it is 2009, but, in Manchester, it increasingly feels like 1989, or possibly 1980. Nostalgia is lucrative, and the same old faces crop up time and time again, both as media commentators, and in key roles within the city. Peter Saville, for instance, is Manchester City Council’s creative director; while Dave Haslam curated a significant music and literature strand at this year’s Manchester International festival. Locally, people moan, with varying degrees of legitimacy, about a dug-in “Manchester mafia”.

This cannot be healthy. Much as the Beatles continue to cast a long shadow over Liverpool music, so too Hacienda veterans suck oxygen from the room. With everyone – media, music industry, Mancunian scene elders – so keen to bang on about the past, is it any wonder that so few new Manchester bands (the Ting Tings, the Courteeners, Delphic) have broken through in recent years?

Likewise, Manchester nightlife. Were you to go, this weekend, to Islington Mill, the King’s Arms, the Deaf Institute, the Warehouse Project, the Roadhouse, the Corner, Sankey’s or Area 51, you would find a vibrant, variegated Mancunian underground, that can still hold its own against the best scenes in the world. But, these days, who outside of Manchester would know that? Everyone is too busy reminiscing.

Ultimately, there is a limit to the amount of attention and publicity a city can hope to enjoy, and, while the likes of New York’s Williamsburg, Berlin, Glasgow, Lisbon and London get on with the important business of pushing music forwards, Manchester is now cast in the role of a roguish old uncle, happy to regale you with tales of his colourful past, just so long as you keep getting the drinks in. Which, after a while, gets boring.

Ideally, young Manchester would make a definitive, uncompromising break with all this. The Hacienda, “Madchester”, Joy Division, the Smiths – it’s all ancient history. Why should they care? They should reject it, and visibly. Instead, I suspect that, far less dramatically, the creative talent which once saw Manchester as a viable alternative to London, but which is finding it increasingly difficult to make itself heard here, will simply move to cities less hidebound by history. But is that really necessary?

This week’s Music Weekly comes with something a little Special. And by that, we mean Lynval Golding. The Specials’ guitarist joined us prior to the
final leg of their 2009 UK tour, while he was still recovering from the previous night’s Q awards, where the band picked up a lifetime achievement award. As theirs has been one of this year’s more remarkable reunions, we wanted to do something a little different, so for part one of this week’s show you’ll hear Golding talk us through the five most influential records of his life. In part two, the guitarist offers his view on everything from Obama to the rise of the BNP, explaining how Lily Allen brought about the Specials reunion and discussing whether there’ll be any new material from Coventry’s most famous musical export.

In between this slab of Specials-ness is Singles Club. Paul MacInnes chooses New Fang by rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, Sarah Boden offers up Be Water by Fence Collective signings Francois and the Atlas Mountains, and Rosie Swash reminisces about her adolescence with Summer Camp’s Ghost Train.

And just when you think you’ve had enough, we give you more, in the shape of the Feature With No Name. This week, Observer Music Monthly’s Luke Bainbridge talks about 1980s Mancunian trio 808 State.

Join us on Facebook and let us know your thoughts on this week’s show. And hey, why not tell us the five records that have influenced your life? We’ve got dibs on Bomfunk MC’s Freestyler, though.

While the recent surge in singles sales is encouraging, there is still a long way to go before the record industry recovers

This year will be the biggest ever for the single in the UK. Last week, the Official Charts Company published figures that showed sales have already surpassed the record of 115.1m singles sold last year by almost 2m, and we haven’t even entered the Christmas run-up. So, has the music industry finally turned a corner and found the panacea to all its woes? To answer this question, we must look at the background to these figures (warning: this blog will include some maths and calculations).

This year, 98.6% of singles were sold in digital formats (I’m surprised that even 1.4% were physical-only, as I rarely see singles in shops these days). 389.2m single downloads have been sold in the UK since the launch of the first mainstream online stores in 2004, which means almost a third of them were sold in 2009.

But these figures only show the number of downloads, not the revenue from these downloads. Album sales continue to plunge, with 6% decline in 2008. At the Gold Badge awards yesterday, Feargal Sharkey (CEO of UK Music) pointed out to me that the actual value of music (as in the cost for the consumer) has gone down by a whopping 40% in the last five years – and that’s not even taking inflation into account. In other words, if you spent £10 on an album five years ago, you would only pay £6 today. As for digital singles, you can now get top 40 tunes for as little as 29p on Amazon.

Some people argue that with digital singles you cut out the cost of physical production and distribution of the CD. However, the physical production and distribution of a record only accounts for 20% of the cost. Sharkey compares it to cinema tickets. “People have no problem paying £10 (or more) for a ticket. The actual ticket, of course, doesn’t cost more than a few pence to produce. What justifies the price of the ticket is the cost of creating the movie and the experience it provides.”

Apart from recording costs, there’s also marketing. If we look at the records responsible for the recent rise in singles sales, there are releases by Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Lily Allen, Alexandra Burke, Cheryl Cole and La Roux. With the possible exception of the latter, these are records that cost a lot to record from artists who are backed by huge marketing campaigns.

Even the likes of Alexandra Burke and Cheryl Cole realise that there’s no guarantee of selling records these days, despite having the added help of the X Factor marketing machine, and that they have to work hard to make the marketing money stretch further.

The margins are a lot smaller with digital singles and, as with physical sales, they’re not much of a profit maker. Instead, they are seen as a way of promoting the album. So, while the numbers show there’s still a huge demand for music, and that the pricing of digital downloads appears to appeal to consumers, there’s a long way to go before the music industry is in safe water.

The Independent is offering readers an exclusive opportunity to hear and download eight Brett Anderson tracks, including four from the highly anticipated album, Slow Attack, which isn’t released until Monday.

The Independent is offering readers an exclusive opportunity to hear and download eight Brett Anderson tracks, including four from the highly anticipated album, Slow Attack, which isn’t released until Monday.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrated its 25th birthday last night in the only way it knew how. By rocking out. Some of the biggest names in rock music including Sting and Bruce Springsteen graced the stage at Madison Square Gardens as part of the five hour concert. A further celebration is set to shake the prestigious venue tonight as the likes of Aretha Franklin and U2 provide birthday surprises.

James Kirby, the mash-up mastermind behind V/Vm, was notorious for mutilating pop music in his sonic abattoir. Now, he has recorded one of the finest ambient projects in recent years

I never had James Kirby down as a genius, exactly. As the architect of music project V/Vm and Stockport-based label V/Vm Test, Kirby came across more as a delighted troublemaker, driven by some deep-seated desire to piss people off. This culminated most gruesomely in the Harold Shipman CD, earning V/Vm Test the title of “sickest label in the world”.

V/Vm and its associated label were entranced and repelled by pop in equal measure, so instead of setting out to kill it, they decided to mutilate it. Some years before the bootleg/mash-up genre was popularised by the likes of Freelance Hellraiser, Kirby and friends were taking songs by Chris De Burgh, Robbie Williams and Chas and Dave and giving them a grisly sonic makeover. The songs were slowed down to a zombie trudge, their rousing melodies curdling repellently off-key. V/Vm’s makeovers were vile mockeries of the originals, released on 7″ and packaged with a string of butcher-related puns that seemed to reflect the label’s reputation as a pop abattoir. Live shows, meanwhile, were more demented Oktoberfest-style celebrations than ponderous experimental concerts, where young men in pig masks caused rowdy mayhem to a set of massacred drinking songs.

V/Vm’s pop perversions even had an influence on the mainstream – his take on Alphaville’s Forever Young soundtracked this startling PlayStation advert that sadly never saw the light of day, but such a flagrantly anti-copyright approach nearly sunk the label. A 2003 project that saw Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax given the once over by a string of V/Vm conspirators apparently fell foul of ZTT, which given its status as a conceptual pop label, took a surprisingly dim view of the interpretations and consulted the advice of a lawyer. I interviewed Kirby in Manchester shortly before he called time on V/Vm, and he had clear ideas about the fundamental wrongs of copyright, while also noting it was time for him to take a different music approach.

That approach was the Caretaker, a pseudonym that already existed in the V/Vm Test archives, but one which soon became Kirby’s main creative avenue. Inspired by Jack Nicholson’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the Caretaker began with Kirby collecting old ballroom 78s, then soaking the crackly waltzes in echo and reverb to give them a ghostly feel. The project grew into a more open-ended meditation on nostalgia and memory – beautifully still pieces stranded between past and present, frozen forever in time.

The Caretaker also provides an indication as to what Kirby is up to now. His new record, a triple-album set called Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was is the first to be released under his own name of Leyland James Kirby. It’s perhaps the best thing he’s put his name to. Described by its maker as “the soundtrack to a world in decline, the heroism of modern life, a document of loss, an essay in gloom”, it consists of long, drifting suites of shimmering sound often dominated by Kirby’s emotional and virtuosic piano playing. At time reminiscent of Selected Ambient Works Volume II – the 1994 album by another of Kirby’s past bête noires, Aphex Twin – it’s some of the finest ambient music of recent times, coldly beautiful but with a powerful, emotional core. And as a twist in a bizarre career, it’s both unexpected, and hugely welcome. 

Judging by the complete absence of new material in This Is It, we may have to wait years until Jackson’s vault of unheard songs is opened

Perhaps it was inevitable that This Is It would be a huge disappointment. In fact, the documentary prompts more questions than it answers. Firstly, despite a tagline that promises we will “discover the man (we) never knew”, why does this rag bag of rehearsal footage recall In Bed With Madonna with all the fun bits taken out? And secondly, why doesn’t it feature any new MJ material?

After news stories about the treasure trove of unreleased tracks in the Jackson vault, the only “new” material featured in This Is It is the title track that plays during the end credits. But, as has been reported, even this song has been released before.

During the cinematic “extravaganza” (”DVD extra” feels more appropriate) the hits are churned out in a pretty workman-like fashion. Variations include a 1940s-style intro to Smooth Criminal and a Mariah-style sing off with a backing musician at the end of I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. But it’s hardly enough. Even the extras on the accompanying soundtrack album are minuscule: two versions of the title track and Planet Earth; sadly not a new song either, but a spoken-word piece. The idea that this project was “for the fans” now seems laughable.

So when will we hear the material Jackson was working on since 2001’s Invincible? It could be a while. Just look at the posthumous cash-ins that occurred after the deaths of Elvis, Kurt Cobain or Tupac. The dribble of new material usually comes tagged on to another Best of, or on an extortionately priced box set made up of previously released tracks.

Clips of songs like A Place With No Name and Don’t Be Messin Around might have leaked, but it looks like it may be many years before we hear the album he was working on with the likes of R Kelly, Will I Am, Akon and Ne-Yo.