Tag Archives: The Guardian Music Blog

Golden Rules for an Independent Band

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Tim Hall

An entertaining Guardian Music Blog piece by a band called Mazes about the 10 golden rules of being in a DIY indie band. It’s about independent bands touring the club circuit rather than “indie” as a style of music, so many of these are application to any genre. The whole thing’s worth reading (As is typical, the comments rather less so), but there are a few that jump out.

1: You probably don’t need a sound engineer
The in-house engineer at the venue invariably knows the room and sound desk better than the guy you’re paying £100 a day to drink your rider. No offence to travelling engineers, but anyone who would rather sit in a van all day for less money than they’d get for showing up to a static venue at 6pm is a sociopath

Well, perhaps not so much this one. Certainly for prog bands playing small clubs, the sound engineer is as important as anyone on stage, and can be the difference between a great gig and an unlistenable one.

I can speak from the experience having been to many gigs in small clubs, and seen people who either (a) don’t know the room or (b) don’t know the music, and screw it up very, very badly.

If your band is, to quote a musician I know, “Crash bang wallop, you’ve my Wonderwall thank you goodnight”, then it might not matter, but if the music is any more sophisticated than that…

6. Don’t slag off other bands
They will find out, or, when you bump into them buying kale in at the grocer’s and they tell you they like your new record, you will feel like dying.

Let’s not mention any names, shall we? Also don’t forget some of their fans might also be your own fans…

10. Have fun
The record industry was ruined by expense accounts and arrogance. Don’t even try to make money or think about quitting your day job. You should be doing this because you want to experience new things, to see new places, to meet like-minded people and to scratch the creative itch many of us have … the primal misguided quest to leave something when you die or for people to think you’re “cool”. Make music that you’d like to hear.

The last line needs to be engraved on the heart of everyone who wants to make great music.

Flogging a Dead Cliché

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Tim Hall

When a writer begins with the line “much has been made of the recent death of guitar music and how this year should see its glorious return“, is there really any point reading any further?

I may be missing out on some really wonderful music, but I get the feeling I probably won’t. I get the impression that any writer who uses such dreadful tired clichés as the one above thinks “three-chord indie-pop” and “guitar music” are synonyms, and genres like blues, metal or punk which centre around the sounds made by electric guitars either don’t exist or aren’t relevant. I can also safely assume the band he’s writing about are most likely to be some form of dull landfill indie and will not be worth three minutes of my time.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged Landfill Indie, The Guardian Music Blog | 2 Comments

The Guardian Needs More Dom Lawsons

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Tim Hall

The Guardian have been doing their annual rundown of the Albums of The Year (Their #1 was Frank Ocean‘s Channel Orange, if anyone reading this blog actually cares). As usual, it’s assembled from votes by individual writers. I have always thought that such aggregated lists complied by a committee are a complete waste of space. Regardless of the mechanism used to tally up votes, they end up favouring the lowest common denominator, which at the moment seems to be faux-edgy indie-rock and commercial R&B at the expense of the more diverse and interesting.

Far more interesting and illuminating is the individual critics top tens, which is a good guide to which of their critics are worth taking seriously, and which ones are not.

When comparing with my own end-of-year list, there are two in common with Dom Lawson’s list, Gojira‘s “L’Enfant Sauvage” and Marillion‘s “Sounds That Can’t Be Made“. None of my other albums of the year appear on the lists of a single Guardian writer. I recognise some of my choices are independent releases by artists without large PR budgets that might not be on the radars of those whose exposure to new music is limited to major-label freebies. But the absence of a record like Anathema‘s “Weather Systems” does make one question the depth and breadth of The Guardian’s writers’ musical horizons.

What’s very telling is just how much Dom Lawson’s albums of the year are completely out of line with the rest of The Guardian’s. A few days earlier a couple of Guardian writers were making rather arch remarks on Twitter about Guardian commenters complaining about the lack of Swans and Scott Walker on the official Guardian list. Then Dom Lawson goes and puts those two at the very top of his list.

This does give me the impression that Dom’s taste in music is more widely shared by the readership than some of their other writers seem to realise. What The Guardian really needs is far more writers like Dom Lawson, not specifically metal fans, but people with a deep knowledge and love of different non-mainstream genres. They can pension off some of the surplus superannuated NME types to make room for them.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged The Guardian Music Blog | 5 Comments

Alan McGee admits to Trolling

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

A couple of years ago, I blogged about Alan McGee’s notorious column in The Guardian Music Blog, and how it had turned into self-parody.

In this column he claimed that Oasis were the greatest band of all time, Freddy Mercury was really a punk, ELO were better than The Beatles, Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans was an absolute classic, and most notoriously of all, kept bigging up a spectacularly talentless bunch of indie no-marks called The Grants.

The comments sections soon turned into free-fire zones. Once people started recognising the extent that many of his columns were nonsense, he employed a legion of supporters in the comments to back him up. All of whom appeared to sock puppets, alleged to be Paul Brownell, an employee of McGee’s.

Now he admits the entire column was trolling

I’ve done blogs before in the past. One I used to write was for The Guardian and for four years most of the articles, and this is for the record as nobody ever prints this bit in interviews, were complete piss takes of The Guardian readers and journalists. Well, all bar Tim Jonze and Alex Needham.

I claimed to like Phil Collins, Jon Bon Jovi and Foreigner. I actually took it so far they once put me on the phone to interview Jon Bon Jovi and I had to pretend I liked his music.

I actually feel sorry for The Grants. They were just a harmless indie band, never really destined to get beyond the toilet circuit, fronted by a lead singer whose mouth was far bigger than his talent. But the way he hyped them up as the next big thing exposed them to ridicule on a large stage, which I’m not sure they really deserved.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion, Religion & Politics | Tagged Alan McGee, The Guardian Music Blog | 10 Comments

Credit Where Credit’s Due

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

For years I’ve complained about The Guardian’s woeful coverage of metal and progressive rock. Major releases are either overlooked entirely, or worse still, given a cursory dismissal by someone with no knowledge or respect for the genre. Dave Simpson’s attempt to review Yes is a prime example. Even their most positive reviews came from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in.

Which is why it’s good to see Dom Lawson, of Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Presents Prog fame reviewing Opeth’s Heritage. It’s not a long, detailed review, but it certainly doesn’t read like Tony Blackburn attempting to review The Fall.

One swallow does not necessarily make a summer, but I hope we get to read more reviews by Dom Lawson in the future.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged Dom Lawson, Opeth, The Guardian Music Blog | Leave a comment

Unblogged bits

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Tim Hall

Which is where I put random thoughts on things I’ve read which aren’t worth a full-blown blog post, but still worth more than a throwaway link on Twitter.

First, the utter beigeness of The Q Awards. Are Kasabian really the best band in the world? It does make me wonder who actually reads Q nowadays. Is it people in the 30s and 40s who no longer either buy albums or get to gigs, but like to think they’re still in touch with what’s going on in music, and don’t want to be told that they aren’t?

Next, the Guardian Music Blog post on the Japanese genre of “Visual Kei”. It seems to be a combination the worst excesses of 80s fashion disasters set to some utterly derivative power metal. It gets a lot of rotten tomatoes in the comments, some of which come from me. A commenter linked to an interview with an (unnamed) Visual Kei record executive, which lays bare the sordid sausage-factory nature of the entire scene, and how it’s cynically exploitative of both musicans and fans. And I thought the US/UK music industry was bad.

Charlie Stross has always been one of my favourite science-fiction authors, and his blog is always an excellent, thought-provoking read. Recent posts have included outlines of novels he might have written but didn’t and some wise thoughts on the bursting of the higher education bubble. His latest rant is a broadside against the Steampunk genre, which in his opinion is far from “what happens when Goths discover brown”, it is, according to Stross, all about romanticising too many bad things about the past. Like High Fantasy, only even worse, is the conclusion.

Finally, BBC’s Mark Easton is trying to work out why “Olivia” is the most popular girl’s name this year. He has one or two possibly half-baked ideas:

As for Olivia – even digitally re-mastered pictures of Olivia Newton-John wearing “those trousers” in the movie Grease cannot provide an explanation.

I am beginning to wonder whether we are witnessing one of the subconscious side-effects of a Mediterranean diet. All that olive oil and low-fat spread. Could it be that our eating habits are affecting the way we fill out birth certificates?

Now, while I’d love to think they were all named after Mostly Autumn’s new singer, somehow I think Mostly Autumn fans haven’t been breeding at that sort of rate.

Posted in Music, Science Fiction | Tagged Charlie Stross, Kasabian, Q, The Guardian Music Blog, Visual Kei | Leave a comment

Mark McGuire and the fetishising of lack of technique

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Tim Hall

I have a reputation for being opinionated and argumentative online, which is one reason I don’t post much on band forums nowadays – there are too many self-important sycophants who take offence, often on behalf of others, at what was intended as constructive criticism. So now I’m back baiting Guardian music journalists again.

Such an example is Ben Beaumont-Thomas’ Guardian Music Blog piece attempting to praise the guitar talents Mark McGuire, which starts with this opening paragraph:

Claims for the greatness of guitarists are often badly skewed. Many seem to regard guitar playing in a similar way to skateboarding, that greatness is about isolated feats of technical brilliance (an idea which Guitar Hero taps into and perhaps slyly satirises). Therefore songwriting from the likes of Dragonforce, and to a lesser extent Van Halen, Queen, and Guns’n'Roses is modular: guitar theatrics slotted into a framework, rather than folded into songs.

To which my first reaction is “Oh dear”.

Whatever you might think of Mark McGuire’s music (It sounds interesting, reminds me a bit of Matt Stevens or even very early instrumental-era Twelfth Night), I still maintain that opening with a thinly-veiled slur at Dragonforce (of whom I’m not a particular fan) is equivalent to me opening a review of someone like Panic Room with a paragraph about why I think The Libertines are rubbish. It would rightly be a distraction from the main body of the article.

After getting a few responses from the author in the comments, I realised that the thing wasn’t just about McGuire’s music at all, but was using him as a hook to hang a piece fetishising lack of technique. But far from being the iconoclastic position he implies it to be, all he’s doing is restating the orthodox position of the majority of rock critics from the past thirty years. 17-year old Dragonforce fans do not represent the establishment; that position is held by 40-something old punks. And I believe their attitude is deeply damaging to music. As commenter Troyka says:

Since the punk era it has been the norm to pretend that technique and ability don´t matter as much as enthusiasm. The result of which we can see in the uniform dullness of a lot of today´s younger guitarists (in the U.K at least).

Which is pretty much why we haven’t seen any great guitarists emerge in mainstream British music for at least 15 years. Yes, there are plenty of younger guitarists in metal, blues or prog, but they’re minority genres and largely aren’t on the BBC/NME/Guardian/Q radar screen.

Posted in Music, Music Opinion | Tagged Landfill Indie, The Guardian Music Blog | 5 Comments

The Free Reformed Church of Metal

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Tim Hall

The Guardian’s Luke Lewis isn’t impressed with Metal Hammer’s proposal that “Metal” be listed as a religion in the 2011 census.

Sadly, this will never work. Having been employed by Kerrang! magazine, I know what metalheads are like. Any attempt to show a united front would soon descend into petty, factionalist squabbling. The grindcore fans would gang up on the sludge-metal fans. The stoner fans would call everyone else “pussies”. And the average black-metal fan wouldn’t get involved at all – he’d just stand aloof, looking grim-faced and pretending he’s called Horgoth and hails from the Frozen North (Trondheim), when in reality he’s called Barry and hails from the freezing north-east (South Shields).

What? Factional squabbles and sectarianism? That will be just like real religion, then. And while we have to see Slayer fans starting literal holy wars, you could count those church-burning Norwegian black-metallers as religiously-motivated terrorists.

Indeed, there are just so many parallels between organised religion and hardcore music fandom it’s impossible not to laugh. Ever heard of a church splitting up because of musical differences? It happens. A lot. All those organists and choirmasters with rock star sized egos….

As for rock star excess, who remembers “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do.“?

Posted in Music | Tagged humour, metal, The Guardian Music Blog | Leave a comment

The Guardian Critics Poll

Posted on December 19, 2009 by Tim Hall

As I expected, The Guardian’s Critics Poll of 2009 failed to include a single album I actually own. While people keep telling me that there are genres out there other than prog, someone needs to tell The Guardian writers that there is music out there other than lo-fi indie-pop. Yes I know there’s a bit more variety in the top 50, but the top 10 comes over as very one-dimensional.

It’s probably a consequence of their final list being made up by a committee, and a voting system that favoured the lowest common denominator consensus rather than a list more interestingly varied. Not that those in the top 10 aren’t necessarily worthy albums, but the way they’re described don’t fill me with a desire to go straight to YouTube or Last.fm to check them out.

Still, I think the complete absence of anything resembling Rock is a significant failing, and The Guardian are certainly wearing their genre biases on their sleeves here. As I said in a comment

There still seems to be a bias against certain genres – whether that’s deliberate or an unintended consequence I’m not qualified to comment.

While I’m not expecting you to review every obscure self-released prog or metal album, I do notice you never seem to review artists such as Nightwish, Porcupine Tree, Within Temptation, Opeth or Marillion, all of whom sell far more albums and concert tickets than many of the indie/alternative artists you do review. Apologies if you have reviewed all these artists and I’ve missed them, but…

Do these bands or their labels not send The Guardian review copies? Note that many of them follow a fan-funded pre-order model, where the pre-orders are typically mailed out long before the official retail release. Is The Guardian not able to accommodate that model?

Or does The Guardian choose not to review such bands on the grounds that they don’t have any reviewers with enough knowledge of the genres to give them a fair review? Or they don’t reflect the perceived values of The Guardian’s brand? Or the bands themselves are afraid of being dismissed with a sneering hatchet job?

The Guardian’s Michael Hann actually responded to this:

Those acts, for whatever reason, seem not to be interested in us – we rarely get alerted to their releases, and rarely get sent the records. We did get the Opeth album in spring 2008, which narrowly missed review. But things like Isis, Sunn0))) and others in the underground metal sector have been written about very favourably in these pages. We don’t have a ton of reviewers who can deal with this stuff knowledgeably – and because budgets are tighter than ever owing to this recession thing, I am not in a position to go hunting for new writers.

I know metal/prog get short shrift in the mainstream media, but in our defence I’d say we Film&Music does more at that end than any of the other papers, and when we do so, we do it without taking the mickey.

On the other hand, if you were a publicist for an independent prog-metal band, saw The Guardian’s top 10 albums of 2009, and decided there was no point submitting their album to The Guardian for review because your band’s music didn’t seem to fit their brand image, who would blame you?

And one commenter identified the brand, and identified it as the “White Urban Metrosexual Macintosh Owner Music awards“. I couldn’t possibly comment…

Posted in Music | Tagged The Guardian Music Blog, Top Ten | Leave a comment