My Best Tunes

Matter, the 2,600-capacity superclub in Greenwich, has closed for the summer, and its sister club Fabric is up for sale. Is this down to a reliance on big-name DJs?

Dance music is supposed to be the epitome of DIY culture. In the late 1980s, when wide-eyed evangelists began to spread the word about a new vibe emerging from underground raves and warehouse parties, the most enticing thing was that the crowd was the star; the action took place in the audience, not in the DJ booth. Flash forward a couple of decades and it’s clear that things have changed. Now, it’s all about big-name DJs – the Tiestos, the David Guettas or the DeadMau5s. The celebrity culture that has infiltrated British society is alive and well in clubland.

However, Fabric and Matter, two world-renowned London clubs that have been built on this model, now face financial difficulty. Matter, which opened in 2008 beneath the O2 dome, has closed for the summer after its owners admitted huge losses. Fabric, located on the site of a former meat factory in Smithfield for more than a decade, has just announced that it is to be sold.

So what’s the connection? The problem is that booking well-known acts costs money, and when times are tough, high fees can compound other financial problems. Matter has suffered hugely from the closure of the Jubilee line, as well as other transport issues that made clubbers reluctant to travel to London’s docklands. Fabric, which is based in central London and was voted DJ magazine’s second best club in the world last year, has no such problems as it’s usually rammed to the rafters. However, it is probably being sold to help owners Keith Reilly and Cameron Leslie pay Matter’s debts.

One major promoter tells me that venues are held to ransom by agencies that are increasing their fees for big-name acts, despite the difficulties of many clubs in the current financial climate.

“People are going out less, so agencies realise thatacts which guarantee sales will be of a premium – hence raising their fees,” says Pete Jordan of Spectrum, a night that has been staged at clubs across theUK, including Matter. “However, this means clubs have less stability on a week-to-week basis as their budget is stretched. That and raised costs such as travel, drinks prices, and overseas acts costing more because of the weak pound.”

Jordan continues: “The business model at the moment is similar to that of a football club. You need big acts to ensure success, but the big acts are of a premium, so it’s either sell out or nobody comes out. It’s a short-term approach that will ultimately damage the quality of events. None of these acts will have shows in the UK before long. Greed is the key here; agents get paranoid if they think somebody other than them is making money.”

Matter and Fabric are world-class venues. If they both go, it will be a huge loss to London clubland. Fabric’s owners suggest the venue may continue with its current branding and staff under a new owner. It is a remarkably successful venture, and is unrivalled in London for its ultra-cool lineups that attract an eager following. Yet it’s just as possible that the new owners may have different ideas; The End, the central London club previously owned by Mr C, reopened last year as The Den, which is not held in the same esteem as its predecessor.

The capital’s clubland is already struggling after the recession, and faces increasing pressure from police and local authorities. Herbal, the small Shoreditch venue that played host to drum’n'bass icons such as Goldie and Grooverider, lost its licence last year, and nearby Plastic People, a centre for the early dubstep scene, has just announced it will close for the summer. These are, however, the kinds of places that you might expect to face a tough battle to survive, as it’s hard for them to compete with the lineups of bigger venues. Fabric and Matter were supposed to be untouchable, with vast resources at their disposal, fabulous advertising budgets, lots of permanent staff and few problems with the authorities thanks to being located well away from residential areas.

Cynics might suggest that the death of London’s clubland could prove a boon for the dance music scene, a chance to return to the halcyon days of rave. After all, wasn’t everything much better when we were all lost “somewhere in a field in Hampshire”? The reality is that if licensed venues which pushing underground music close, more people will be forced to visit unsafe, illegal sites where the authorities will struggle to control issues of noise and nuisance. That might seem preferable to some than the X-Factorisation of clubland, but the day may come when we look back at memories of venues such as Fabric and Matter, and remember how incredibly lucky we were.

Being a music critic is no barrier to enjoying big, loud, dumb music. But age most certainly is …

My dad always prided himself on bening open to new music in middle age. When I started buying records and going to gigs myself, he embraced the Jesus and Mary Chain, Nirvana, Radiohead and the Prodigy. But one day in 1996, when we were watching the Fugees perform their cover of Killing Me Softly on Top of the Pops, he said: “It’s a lovely song but why does that bloke [Wyclef Jean] have to talk over it?” And he suddenly sounded old.

My dad was 33 when Rapper’s Delight came out, and 40 by the time Run DMC crashed the UK charts, and hip-hop marked the generation gap that he couldn’t bridge. Now that I’m 36, I wonder whether Pendulum might be my Killing Me Softly.

In 2010, there is less music to estrange an older listener than there used to be. The great pop music revolutions – rock’n'roll, punk, hip-hop, acid house – were seismic sonic shifts that, to some listeners, sounded like an intolerable din, inviting cries of “Call that music? It’s just noise!” But in the last two decades no genre has shifted the ground anywhere near as dramatically, hence the common sight of the savvy parent accompanying their offspring to concerts and festivals. Teenagers want to see the Stooges or Neil Young; their parents are au fait with Animal Collective and the xx.

In this cross-generational love-in, 36 is no big deal. Only when I hear Pendulum do I feel ready for my free bus pass. They’ve sold out Wembley Arena and topped the charts with third album Immersion, so they must have something going for them, but I’m damned if I can work out what it is. To me, their cyborg fusion of drum’n'bass and heavy metal is the worst of both worlds: a boring racket. I first came to them hoping for the self-consciously ridiculous gonzo energy of Jason Statham’s Crank and found instead the self-important bombast of Transformers 2: a lot of expensive machinery clanking away to no great end. (And before you say, “You have to see them live”, I caught them at Bestival, midway through lobotomising the Prodigy’s Voodoo People. “It’s a lovely tune,” I thought. “But why do they have to talk over it?”)

Clearly, I am not alone. Yesterday I tweeted my dislike for Pendulum and received over 20 replies from fellow haters, with one lone voice of half-hearted defence. Reviews tell a similar story: the band will not be papering their studio walls with glowing panegyrics any time soon. “I’ve never come across a band who inspire so much ire,” wrote Dan Martin on NME.com yesterday.

Martin suggested that they just weren’t meant for critics, and in doing so he ended up reinforcing the stereotype of critics as snooty aesthetes, sipping malbec and leafing through the London Review of Books while listening to Joanna Newsom. One Pendulum fan accused the Guardian’s Will Dean, who gave Immersion two stars, of fitting in his review “between games of croquet”. Alexis Petridis, who gave their live show a reluctant three stars, calling their appeal “baffling”, was told that Pendulum-haters are “too busy eating dictionaries and making up arty-farty words”. To which I can only respond: indubitabulously.

But it’s not true. Most critics I know enjoy plenty of big, loud, dumb music. Not everything has to be fodder for a thesis. And this isn’t traditional critic-proof Asda music such as Westlife. Pendulum are an underground dance act who have ramraided the mainstream. Many of the people who hate Pendulum love the Prodigy, whose Liam Howlett guests on Immersion. I couldn’t care less that they’re not “proper” drum’n'bass. I should at least embrace them as a trashy, lizard-brain pleasure, until I ruin it by actually listening to them.

So, at least in my case, I think it’s a question of age rather than being a critic. Part of me suspects I would love them if I were 15, even if I felt embarrassed by it later. Their music evokes the hormonal fug of a teenage boy’s bedroom; a certain overfamiliarity with the art of the first-person shooter.

I still think Pendulum are joyless, witless and grindingly dull, but the more I think about them the more I find something almost perfect in their ability to annoy me and the people I know. They prove that the generation gap is not dead, that we are not all trotting hand-in-hand through the fields of Latitude to see Fleet Foxes, and that’s reassuring.

I’ve never warmed to the kind of music fan who hits a certain age and prides themselves on not knowing who is No 1, as if pop’s future were beneath them and only its past worthy of their attention. I want to be excited by the new and the popular, and I frequently am. But Pendulum have defeated me. For that, in a strange way, I salute them.

So which bands were the first to make you feel on the wrong side of a generation gap?

Last week we wanted minimal lyrics, this week it’s as florid, or even as floral, as you like

There was a brief moment on the 10 words or fewer thread in which I imagined we might go a whole week without a single, solitary Bob Dylan nom. I feared that if such an event came to pass, the foundations of the world would begin to shake, but fortunately somebody chipped in with All the Tired Horses and life continued as normal.

Dylan was not the only regular semi-ignored in a week in which the balance was tipped away from lyrics and towards tunes. As a result, there was also a striking shift away from the rock-heavy lists of concerts week.

The A-list: The Bar-Keys – Soul Finger; Napalm Death – You Suffer; Dave Clark Five – Move On; Funkadelic – Get Off Your Ass and Jam; Dizzy Gillespie – Salt Peanuts; Soft Machine – We Did It Again; The Trashmen – Surfin’ Bird; Jay Dee – Workinonit; Soulwax – I Love Techno; The Ramones – I Got a Lot to Say.

Toute de suite, la liste B:

The Meters – Chicken Strut

A big favourite of mine; just one play of this track once converted my Geordie cousin to funk and hip-hop. The squawking did not count as a word.

Sun Ra – We Travel the Spaceways

They travel from planet to planet, pausing only to record beguiling and bewildering funk-jazz. And that’s the way they like it.

Górecki – Miserere

Am grateful to Beltway Bandit for posting the lyrics as my Latin ain’t what it used to be, if you get my carpe diem Rodney. As observed on the thread, it’s a beautfiul 32 minutes, though I found the mood to be oddly stuck halfway between soothing and spooky. But maybe that’s just me.

Mylo – In Your Arms

He’s a MacInnes, did you know that? I met him a few times and we even called each other “cuz”. And just like cousins we haven’t spoken for years. He knows his way around a dancefloor, that’s for sure.

Mongo Santamaria – Watermelon Man

A Latin rework of the Herbie Hancock track that crucially, and for no obvious reason, repeats the title throughout. Perhaps otherwise it just wasn’t watermelony enough.

Queens of the Stone Age – Feelgood Hit of the Summer

Not sure if the music is supposed to reflect the experience of being on all the various listed stimulants at once, but it could be. Not much by way of melody or hook, but it has the punch you expect from this band.

The Beatles – Wild Honey Pie

Bad Beatles, crazy Beatles! This song only truly makes sense if you yourself have just eaten wild honey pie (main ingredient: LSD).

Terry Callier – You Don’t Care

As some of you will know I have a soft spot for Terry noms and while this has an interlude-ish feel to it, it still touched me in a tender place.

Alvin Cash – Twine Time

There’s something about the drums on this that gets me. Couldn’t explain the reason why, and whether it’s deliberate or not, but they have a muddy, dulled sound that I find particularly groovy.

Sheila Chandra – Om Namaha Shiva

While some of this week’s numbers have used vocals as instrumentation, or even punctuation, this song is nothing but words. A mantra, a chant, that’s given grace and just enough nuance by Chandra.

They say great minds think alike, which I guess makes me and Marconius the equivalents of Einstein and George Osborne in our fields (I’ll leave you to decide which). The reason for this assertion is that we both came up with the same idea for this week’s topics, those delicate, smelly things that you give to your other half. Yes, dirty underwear. Sorry, I meant flowers. As Marco points out, they have featured before as a subset of Trees, Grass and Flowers, but not in their own right. I’m looking for songs specifically about flowers, but also songs that feature them as symbols or props. An incidental mention won’t really be enough for A-list consideration, but if you think special dispensation should be applied, please do feel free to justify.

The toolbox: Archive, the Marconium, the Spill, the Collabo.

DO Post your nominations before midday on Monday if you wish them to be considered.

DO Post justifications of your choices wherever possible.

DO NOT post more than one third of the lyrics of any song

DO Be nice to each other!

See you on the blog!

Tom Robinson has turned his 60th birthday into a prolonged petition to save his current radio employer 6 Music, with the help of, among others, Franz Ferdinand. But it’s when he dusts off his own angry humanist anthems that the night catches fire.

You might call it a case of “Thank you for the music – but now please change your name”. Abba tribute acts, who have kept the memory of Sweden’s most famous export alive since the band played their last concert more than 25 years ago, have been told by band’s record company they can no longer use the group’s name.

Tom Robinson has turned his 60th birthday into a prolonged petition to save his current radio employer 6 Music, with the help of, among others, Franz Ferdinand. But it’s when he dusts off his own angry humanist anthems that the night catches fire.

You might call it a case of “Thank you for the music – but now please change your name”. Abba tribute acts, who have kept the memory of Sweden’s most famous export alive since the band played their last concert more than 25 years ago, have been told by band’s record company they can no longer use the group’s name.

As I Am Kloot return to the fray with their fifth album, Sky at Night, maybe it’s time for some of Elbow’s magic dust to fall on one of the lesser lights of their home town.

“Sometimes I can play too rough,” Matthew Houck croons on “Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough)”. “Tell me baby have I gone too far?” He pleads. There’s scant rough stuff tonight, and Houck’s pugnacious Brooklyn-based outfit are refreshingly, delightfully “far out”.