I know this because for the last few years I have kept track of all the live bands I’ve seen, be it at a gig or festival and stored them all, complete with 10/10 scores, dates seen, venues visited all in a big colourful Excel spreadsheet. It really is a work of art that I’m very proud of and would feel quite lost without. In one tab, the spreadsheet lists bands seen at gigs, including support acts. Each have been given a score out of 10 and some even have comments attached to remind me of certain events (like when I missed half of the Mars Volta’s set in Birmingham a few years back because for some reason they started at 8pm but still managed to impress enough in the short slot to score an 8/10). This first tab also tracks all my festival visits, naturally with scores out of 10 for every act seen. It counts bands seen, distinct bands seen, venues visited and how many times for each. The second tab lists these concerts in order of greatness whilst the third lists the counts of bands which I have seen more than once.

I can imagine you reading this now, reeling slightly away from the writing as if my OCD will creep through and infect you and yes you may mock my affliction but answer me this – how many bands have you seen live? You don’t know do you? I’ve seen 402 different live acts – I know this for a fact. How many venues have you been to? 27 for me. Festivals? 18. Best festival act witnessed? Arcade Fire, Leeds 2005. It’s all in here. How many bands have you seen more than once? You simply don’t know do you? I’ve seen 97 bands more than once and seven bands five times or more. What’s the 93rd best ever gig that you’ve been to? Mogwai at the Wulfren in Wolverhampton for me. Who are the worst support act you’ve ever seen? Without doubt, it’s The Scarlet Harlots (2/10).

I realise that many of you are shaking your head and quite possibly laughing at how silly this all is. But ask yourself this: Is it better to know these things or to wonder if you know them? Is it better to remember seeing an up and coming band in a tiny venue before they got massive or to try and remember the name of that band you saw two months ago that sounded promising? Exactly. Who’s laughing now eh? Who’s laughing now, like a crazed loon, eyes bulging wildly? Ok, that’s actually me but you get the point.

Brimming with glee... or grinning and bearing it?

Continued from Part Une:

After what seemed an eternity, the four of us arrived back at my flat, paid the flap of cardboard masquerading as a cab driver, and watched him drive his rusted ensemble of misery into the distance. Now it was time to get this party back on track. I had already assembled a shortlist of potential songs from which I would choose the all-important introduction to our night part two. It consisted of a choice between The Who’s rousing ‘Baba O’Reilly’, the Fred Falke remix of the Whitest Boy Alive’s ‘Golden Cage’ [Ed - kudos], Underworld’s epic ‘Cowgirl’, Lee Scratch Perry’s ‘Jungle Lion’, or, for perhaps a more subtle approach allowing my guests to settle in, ‘Haiti’ by the Arcade Fire.

What a great tune to take your shoes off and get comfortable to. I was weighing all this up as I lead my friends up the stairs and along the corridor into my room. “Make yourself at home,” I triumphed with a broad face, as if I hardly knew them. Then, satisfied at seeing them take in all my cool stuff, I skipped along to the kitchen to fetch the beers and make that crucial decision. More songs came to me in waves of inspiration as I gazed into the fridge; ‘The Killing Moon’, ‘One Pure Thought’, ‘F.E.A.R’, ‘Last Post on the Bugle’, ‘Voodoo Ray’, ‘Float On’… oh the options! I was brought swiftly back from the realm of godly DJs by murmering from my room, and grabbing the six pack, I approached the arena proudly.

What horror I stumbled on nearly defies comprehension. My friends had sussed out my hi-fi system, a rogue iPod has been inserted into the dock, and the culprit, an acquaintance of mine for ten long and happy years, was about to press his finger of treason into the play button. He was stealing my big moment! The moment every host dreams of! The moment which had almost obscured my enjoyment of the club for the four previous hours.

“Check this tune out,” he smugly said, relegating me to the inferiority of audience, not maestro. I nearly let the beers drop from my hands. I decided in that moment that I would hate the song, whatever it was.

And then it happened. As I let my ears take in the song, the rivalry and resentment was swept aside. Audience became just as important as maestro. That magical feeling of falling in love with a song hit me… the voice, the percussion, the guitar… WHAT a tune! The power of music and the power of friends had forged an alliance and blown me completely away. My friend noticed my sudden enthusiasm, an experience he had planned and which I knew oh so well. As I glanced at him with wide eyes and gawping mouth, he replied to me with a knowing nod and a smile. Within seconds, everyone in the room was dancing.

The song was on another continent from the box, let alone outside of it, and is one I would never have guessed…

James Brown

You don’t often hear anyone calling hiphop ‘meaningless’, which is a neat rhetorical trick – steering the debate away from the pivotal function: to demonstrate ‘lyrical skills’ even in the absence of a band, musicianship, or originality. Hiphop is profoundly democratic in its most basic (and affordable) formula: not even two turntables and a microphone, but one. Effectively, Hiphop is supremely meaningful in its central gesture: to assert the validity and audibility of its underprivileged, under-represented voices, which is why the main line of attack for critics must be on the musical front, where old soul records are recycled. (Arguably, there are complex semiotics here, too: using the records themselves suggests a knowledge of cultural history, unlike white musicians passing off black music as their own.)

Public Enemy

Music aside, to be meaningful is threatening: Public Enemy’s snapshots of black history made them targets for FBI phonetaps, although NWA’s exhortations to comparatively random violence (albeit in response to police brutality) made them inadvertent agents of normativity. Admittedly, Hiphop shades into meaningless (or inaudibility) when it adds to the chorus of black and white voices normalising consumer-capitalism. In the 1960s, black-owned record labels were at the vanguard of black businesses (see Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On), but the current commodity fetishism of mainstream hiphop is a massive debasement of the (already problematic) ‘Big Payback’ demanded by James Brown, referencing Martin Luther King. Is it subversive to make ‘art’ that’s so openly about making money? Or is it defeatist?

WEB DuBois

Still, there’s an underlying urge toward significance (or ‘being taken seriously as public speakers rather than entertainers’) that can be traced back to figures like Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, and MLK. White mainstream pop music has no qualms about meaninglessness in lyrics… although try telling that (as an adult or parent) to a teen or pre-teen who then complains “you just don’t understand”. I’d argue that the inanities of manufactured pop music are strangely comforting to parents who actually shell out for the stuff – contra David Cameron and others, there aren’t really all that many exhortations to flaunt your teen sexuality, spend lots of money, let alone challenge the values of your parents: just irritate them, which you’re bound to do anyway. (The day after writing that, I dug up a quote from Mick Jagger – in Doggett, 2008 – claiming that rock’n'roll was never about protest, just winding up your parents, and even that’s pointless when they listen to the same music as you; it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t being cynical, but despairing of the failure of the counter-culture.)

Finally, what about the pseudo-meaningful? Take the post-Radiohead generation of bands, who intersperse their morbid or self-regarding lyrics with the odd high-register word, and reference to modern technology – little signifiers of sophistication. Risking similar charges of pretension are the bands aping Bowie in their surrealism-lite without any real interest in psychedelic exploration, subversive sexuality, or the difficulty of navigating the modern world; it takes a certain amount of imagination to throw together all those images on records by Placebo, Bush, Pavement but a distinct lack of reflection on why they came about. Personally, I don’t buy the argument that ‘it’s only rock’n'roll – now that’s meaningless.

Does Definitely Maybe (1993) really give you more of a visceral rush than Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), with its endlessly resonant social criticism? The same goes for creative arrangers, and so on. In this series of columns, I’ll be looking at those artists who act as conduits for the avant-garde – not so much (or not often) presenting their experiments as ends in themselves, and sometimes pushing music forward by collaboration rather than personal experimentation (the Bjorks and Bowies), but in any case proving there’s no real separation. I’m specifically interested, here, in the occurrence of “meaningless sounds and words” in avant-garde music; just why do singers (and musicians armed with samplers) record sounds and lyrics that are openly gibberish, beyond what we might recognize as surrealism’s slow release of hidden meanings?

Meaningless As Avant-Garde Strategy

Sigur Ros - ( )

With its intuitive soundings and lack of “real” words, the parenthesis album by Sigur Ros – ( ) – stands out as an extraordinarily democratic gesture; its dozen (or fewer) distinct vocables sound like innumerable phrases in Western European languages. Doubtless it has emotional resonance for listeners from many other cultures, however guttural their consonants. If you want to get technical, it exploits our innate “pattern recognition” faculty the same as a Rorschach test; we’re more inclined to see meaning than meaninglessness, and in doing so, we learn about our needs and desires.

Mogwai - Young Team

This kind of ironic “meaninglessness” is also important to another post-rock band, Mogwai. Opening their debut album (Young Team, 1997) with the translation of a foreign language review, Mogwai demonstrate colossal hubris by implying they’re ever after going to live up to the claim: “If the stars had a sound, it would sound like this…” The significance of that phrase has been overloaded, with time: Yes, Mogwai strive to evoke natural forces, something beyond the human, but it’s in the use of other translations and transformations that they foreground the textural qualities of a voice, and the paralanguage that is tone and rhythm; check out the Japanese vocals on ‘I Need Horses’ (Mr Beast, 2006), the words vocodered to unintelligibility on ‘Hunted by a Freak’ (Happy Songs, 2003), the numerous backward vocals and partly submerged narratives (Young Team, 1997), and – most provocatively? – the sample of the voice saying “please hold the line” (CODY, 1999) that is a kind of metonym for failed, or endlessly thwarted communication.

Mogwai - Ten Rapid

Sometimes this is playful – see the decontextualized conversation about Marvel comic villains (Ten Rapid, 1996) that makes you wonder why someone’s laughing about “killing millions of people…!” Elsewhere – ‘Dial:Revenge’ (from Rock Action, 2000) is an endorsement of Gruff Rhys of SFA’s own project to reclaim languages that are considered beyond the purview of popular music; and by extension, the dominant Anglocentric culture. If Welsh is “un-pop”, and “exotic” (e.g. sub-Saharan) languages only titillate our ears for connoting great distance and difference, how much are we limiting ourselves?

Is “post-rock” avant-garde? Most people would say not, knowing how quickly its crowd-pleasing formula became stale. Are these strategies avant-garde?

Mogwai - Rock Action

Well, they’re not new – if that’s what you find yourself objecting to – but it’s still at the outer limits of normal practice, and I’d argue that any artist makes the choice to push themselves to re-discover old things as much as they push themselves to discover genuinely new things; whether you then consider those artists (e.g. Mogwai) avant-garde in themselves (rather than avant-garde sounding, on occasion) may simply be down to how enthusiastically they explore the legacy available to them, and/or recombine those old strategies… even if they haven’t gone so far as to devise an entirely new tonal system, or exploit the possibilities of new instruments in new ways. (There’s another potential tangent here, about what’s meant by “dated” – presumably, when a musician takes new instruments or techniques and uses them like the old ones, rather than experimenting to discover which tones fit which part of the composition…)

Faust - The Faust Tapes

From The Beatles’ White Album (under the influence of Yoko Ono), through The Faust Tapes, to DJ Shadow and then a whole generation armed with samplers, “meaninglessness” often takes the form of “decontextualized” snippets. ‘Revolution No. 9’ is composed of fragments too small to construct much of a narrative, but it’s a lullaby compared to the deliberately irritating or abrasive sonic collage by Faust. Somewhat less random, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing (1996) presents samples of varying degrees of obscurity, or various shades of meaning, diving on some putative graph towards pure sensation: the movie character protesting about his arrest… to the sample of “the clock on the wall says a quarter past midnight…” later looped and distended into a DJ’s battlecry, “a quarter past midnight… midnight… muh-muh-muh-MIDNIGHT!”, which acquires an almost mythic resonance, referring to some mysterious witching hour neither today nor tomorrow, but between the days. Other artists have made this gradual shading into meaninglessness the closest thing you’ll find to a narrative arc on their “difficult” / Wire-friendly albums: Scott Walker’s The Drift (2004) provides historical notes as clues for some of its lyrics, and other quotes on the sleeve hint at a free-association of ideas around “silver”, “horses”, and so on, but as the clues become more scarce we’re plunged into a turbulent subconscious not our own. With deep irony, Walker credits only one line to another artist (in spite of the lines marked as dialogue), ‘JA-DA / JA-DA / JA-DA, JA-DA, JING-JING-JING’ sung with a jauntiness and smoothness that suggests it’s meant to be seductive. To what species?!

Bishop Allen - Grr...

We’ve got a copy of Bishop Allen’s Grr… and a pair of tickets to see them at any of their upcoming May dates to give away to one very lucky winner.

Said album reminds us of a load of things we love: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Voxtrot, Sebadoh, hell even a bit of Pavement chucked in for extra measure. All with added universality. Yes, even more of that.

All you have to do is tell us which date you’d like to win your pair of tickets for.

Take your pick from:

May 6 Manchester @ Cafe Saki
May 7 London @ Bardens Boudoir
May 8 Cardiff @ Clwb
May 9 Reading @ Oakford
May 10 Brixton @ The Windmill

Now once you’ve done that, drop us a line via the following hovel: musosguide AT googlemail <Dottttt> COMB

Don’t forget to include your name, full postal address and even a little greeting if you like to brighten up our day.

Best of luck!

The British Music Experience

Wow! The British Music Experience is technically brilliant. No music fan visiting the O2 in Greenwich, south east London, will want to miss it. It has stacks of rock and pop memorabilia, sheet music, guitars, drumkits, dresses and interactive gadgets that play music and videos at the touch of a swipecard. You can learn a dance and get yourself filmed doing it, and then post the DVD on your own bit of the BME’s website. This will be very popular – perhaps they should have got a load of those cheap dance-mats from Argos instead so that more people can have a go without having to queue!

If you are travelling to the O2 it is worth allowing extra time for the queues and the fact that it is a vast venue. It costs £20 to park your car but there is an underground station, and also buses and a fast boat service from central London called the Thames Clippers.

The O2 Bubble is divided into small rooms, each representing a decade of British music and including some news headlines from those years to give a sort of context. There’s an idea borrowed from radio – roundtable talks by the industry’s greats on DVD, livened up with images of album covers and other memorabilia flashing onto the table top. You can click on maps to find out about the music in a particular place and there are audio commentaries for all the priceless, fascinating stuff in glass cases. Scary Spice’s tracksuit, Pete Townsend’s smashed guitar, the suit worn by the Thin White Duke – they are all here.

So what’s missing? Youth, drugs, swearing, politics, fun, fan clubs, passion, any Welsh, Scots or Irish music, any sign of a black face or voice and any mention of the role of radio DJs in discovering, promoting and nurturing music.

There are dollops of history alongside the musickabilia, but the role of world events in shaping music, and the rock stars and beat poets and lyricists who changed the world by influencing public opinion and political decision-makers are muted here.

The roundtable discussions show DVDs of music greats but of course they are all old men now, filmed in unflatteringly bright light against black backdrops so you can count the wrinkles. It would have been kinder to prop them against a bar with their gold and platinum discs in the background, or their favourite instruments. The DVDs make the ‘superfans’ around the tables look the same – old and nerdy.

Beside each exhibit is a caption explaining it, and these captions are all po-faced, ponderous and patronising. I looked hard for irony, wit and the sort of sarcastic faux-sociology that you get from Tom Baker’s voiceovers for Little Britain. There was none – they are being serious here. This is History.

Especially disappointing was the final room entitled The Future. How would the future of music look and sound? I imagined a giant MySpace with surroundsound. Or music that you carry on a microchip inside your head instead of an iPod n your collar. Or an intriguing mix of live unsigned new bands… or one of those vibrating floors like they have at Matter, the O2’s nightclub, and also at the nearby Firepower museum in Woolwich (these floors are so awesome that you can feel the noise coming up through your feet and exploding when it gets to your head). But this Future Room opens to reveal a virtual ‘curtain’ of a shelf of CDs (Mummy, what’s a CD? Is it like a book?) They part to reveal a mash-up of music videos from some historic sets and tracks – Jagger, Bowie, Beatles, etc. It is very loud, but not awesome.

 

The music is a compilation of very short excerpts hamfistedly spliced together so that most of them miss out the iconic riff or the crucial lyric (It’s all right now – in fact it’s a gas! Yes it’s all right….cross-fade into the next track of Annie Lennox, and so on.) It ends with Freddie Mercury bellowing ‘We are the Champions’ in a climax that makes me feel slightly uneasy before we are thrust out into the merch shop where everything is red, white and blue with what looks like RAF insignia but is actually the British Music Experience logo. And no, this is not ironic either as it was back in the day when the Mods wore it on their parkas. It is serious and it seems wrong, somehow.

This is the problem Joni Mitchell sang about in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’: “They took all the trees and put ‘em in a tree museum. And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see ‘em.” Music is more like a tree than an exhibit. It is more powerful than tea-dunked cakes for bringing back a Proustian rush of memories, so it can transcend time. Several times whilst walking through the British Music Experience I was moved to tears – or giggles – as a snatch of a half-forgotten song brought it all back to me and my companion. This is the reason why people will want to visit, and there should be more music and more group listening opportunities to make it succeed. The museum tries to fix the music in one place, one genre and one decade, but it won’t lie down and keeps re-inventing itself and staging comebacks.

Last year the O2 Bubble hosted the Treasure of Tutankhamun exhibition and in one respect the BME is remarkably similar. It is a set of priceless objects representing a mummified youth who was worshipped and idolised across the known world. However King Tut’s real treasures stayed in Egypt where they belong. And the crown jewels of British music are also somewhere else – in the record collections, photograph albums and memories of music lovers and in the gigs and clubs and festivals that keep it alive.

Semiotics invisible to the general public

Here’s a delightfully abrupt stream of consciousness:

Why do we keep listening to the same songs over and over again? Why is this repetition unusually innovative?

It’s because I’m self-important, that’s why. I have a high opinion of myself – I mean my music taste. But if I didn’t… if I didn’t, well… what would be the point in me liking it? Let alone writing about it. Joe Average would probably call me arrogant, but why would he be interested anyway? Or is that defeatist/hypocritical of me?

Enough rhetoric, let’s put this in context. By which I mean: let’s establish that that there isn’t one. Ok I’ve stalled.

Oh no I’m back it’s fine. So… I HATE repeating the same conversation more than once (or twice at a push, so long as there’s a different spin). It’s the crux of my hatred of ‘people’. On a broader level. Not in the sense of “come on, you know I’ve heard that story before”, but moreover the whole “we have said all that can be said, and now I’d rather go for a walk across a bridge“. This coming from someone who can’t deal with awkward silences is a pretty shocking admission, so I’ll write it in the quasi-third person.

Music is different. And that’s because of me. Yes, me. And you, if you think similar. The amount of times I’ve stalled on ‘Bright As The Beach’ when playing back the Fleet Foxes album is quite astonishing. I get halfway through, and start again. Even though it’s always going to be there. I do the same when listening back to Red House Painters’ ‘Between Days’ and I don’t know why. All I know is that I don’t feel I’m done with it or will have fully inhaled it once I’ve got to the end, so in order to justify my association with it I retrace my steps and offer it full dedication from the outset. This is so massively one-sided. But maybe that’s what conversation-repeaters do when they tell me the same things over and over again?

It’s happened with The Go-Betweens’ ‘Was There Anything I Could Do?’ on many occasions, and pretty much most of Life Without Buildings’ Any Other City. I’m not sure why it’s the case. Fair enough, they’re all amongst my very favourite things to listen to, but so is Felt’s Forever Breathes The Lonely Word. And that is an album I wouldn’t dare pause. Maybe it’s contextual? Or maybe it’s circumstantial, purely coincidental. I’ll never know.

I’ve got too specific here, let’s take it back a notch or seventeen: I’m saying that I mostly despise mainstream civilisation because I find it repetitious, inane and confining. But then I’m saying that… well I guess it’s just that I sometimes like to pause, rewind and start again. And sometimes I don’t pause, I play all the way through and then go back a little while later and REPEAT. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Music is the antithesis to what I hate about civilisation, a space where you can be alone with something inhuman and evade the rules of space and time. And those who haven’t figured this out can share the amount of time I spend overthinking between them in a utilitarian fashion.

For more of this nonsense, follow me on twitter: www.twitter.com/natalie_shaw

So here’s our final word on the meaning of soul, coming at you via this here link. It’s a link to download ‘Duk Koo Kim’ from iTunes – a track by Sun Kil Moon which for me, defines soul more than any words ever could.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading the columns as much as us! And feel free to drop us a line at musosguide AT googlemail DOT com if you feel you’ve got something to add to the breadth of opinions we’ve thrown at you.

Tomorrow’s final meaning of soul comes at you at 12 pm – in the form of a definitive mp3!

Idlewild

Our favourite “flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs”, Idlewild, have kept us and the rest of the world guessing as to what’s going to happen next. And a certain Roddy Woomble revealed a few of his thoughts to Muso’s Guide in a recent chat, so we thought it only courteous to share.

“At the minute it feels like I’m making the record for myself, but when you put it out it’s for everyone,” offered Woomble. “There’s always talk every time you do a record about what direction it’s taking and I never really understood that because it’s always going in a direction, you’re never stopping still. I think it’s a bit of an obsession in the western world with originality – everyone has to be the first to do something.

“Basically, it’s difficult for me to say.” He continues: ”To me, we’re just carrying on writing really strong songs. If it’s referencing any records, it’s probably referencing the last two that we did – Make Another World and Warnings/Promises. It’s difficult to sum it up in a few words – it’s quite poppy, I think it’s what people expect from us, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. I think it’s good.”

Full interview with Roddy Woomble to follow next week – keep tuned to read more!