Category: [Music]

A hand-me-down dress from who knows where

Found this via Twitter. Someone’s taken the various attempts at “All Tomorrow’s Parties” from the 1965 Velvet Underground home demo and synced them up. Kind of like how, when the band recorded “What Goes On” for the third record, they used all of Lou Reed’s different guitar solos together, but also… not. The remarkable thing is that the different takes actually come together more than they don’t (third verse is a little wobbly where they haven’t quite decided on the lyrics), they’re actually remarkably consistent, and brought together in stereo like this they sound pretty big. And John Cale probably benefits even more than Lou does; the mix kind of embiggens them both in a really nice way.

Did you see the frightened ones?

So a while ago I posted a picture of 1970-era King Crimson about which I said Andy McCulloch and Gordon Haskell were pretending to be happy to be there just before that version of the band disintegrated. This picture of Wall “tour”-era Pink Floyd is even sadder when you know the state they were in at the time. This looks like a band trying to pretend they haven’t already disintegrated. Rick Wright wasn’t actually a member of the band by this point, with Roger Waters having booted him during the recording sessions, but with hindsight it looks like Wright’s being kind of cocky cos he knows he’s the only one of the four who’ll make money from the tour because he’s on a salary now, and the remaining trio are putting on a collective brave face at the fact they’re about to lose nearly half a million pounds between them.

Not so live wire?

There was some fuss at the Glastonbury festival over the last few days about a performer called Billy Nomates, who I’d never heard of before, cos her manner of performing is basically her doing live vocals with pre-recorded electronics. The bit I saw sounded good enough, not a bad song, crowd were apparently quite into it from the reports I read, but the performance attracted a lot of pissbabies on the BBC website bitching about it not being “real” or something.

A propos of nothing, here’s “real” rock band Motley Crue apparently miming at a recent festival appearance.

This is not the first time they’ve been accused of this. Lars Ulrich from Metallica charged them in the 90s with having mimed at an awards show, and Mick Mars has also levelled the same charge at them in a lawsuit against the band:

“During much of the band’s recent tenure, Sixx continually ‘gaslighted’ Mars by telling him that he (Mars) had some sort of cognitive dysfunction, and that his guitar playing was sub-par, claiming that Mars forgot chords, and sometimes started playing the wrong songs.
“Astonishingly, Sixx made these claims about Mars‘s playing while he (Sixx) did not play a single note on bass during the entire U.S. tour. Ironically, 100% of Sixx‘s bass parts were nothing but recordings. Sixx was seen fist pumping in the air with his strumming hand, while the bass part was playing. In fact, a significant portion of (Vince) Neil‘s vocals were also pre-recorded. Even some of (Tommy) Lee‘s drum parts were recordings. Some fans actually noticed that Lee was walking toward his drum set as they heard his drum part begin.”

Considering that both Lars and Mars have beef with Motley Crue (the former’s going back to the birth of both bands, the latter’s because they allegedly kicked him out of his), perhaps both could be seen as questionable witnesses here, but the video in the first article is, frankly, kind of damning. It’s an audience-shot clip, but the view is good enough that, yeah, you can indeed hear Vince Neil’s voice continuing past the point where he pulls the mic away from his face. Indeed, during the chorus it sounds like there’s more than one voice singing, like it’s been double-tracked. Unless Tommy Lee’s on backup and you just can’t see him, Vince is the only one singing (I feel somehow that the hot chick writhing at back of stage was doing it even if she did have a microphone in hand). And guest Machine Gun Kelly was visibly not rapping all of his part (though I did rather enjoy the crowd booing as they realised who he was).

So there you go, “real” live music for you. At least Tor Maries from Billy Nomates brought her own voice with her.

Happy 75th, vinyl

The Guardian digs back into its archive for this kind of delightful notice:

New York, 20 June
A symphony lasting 45 minutes was played on two sides of a 12-inch gramophone record at a demonstration here. The average 12-inch record plays for only eight minutes.
The record is known as the “Columbia LP (long playing) Microgroove.” It is also being made in the 10-inch size with a playing time of 27 minutes. The material from which the records are made is unbreakable.

I love this cos that’s the entirety of the original news about the birth of the vinyl record, just this casual acknowledgement that you could now fit a lot more music on a record and you couldn’t break them like you could with shellac discs. A revolution of sorts that clearly went underappreciated (at least by the Graun, apparently journalists at the demonstration were a lot more impressed). I also rather like the photo accompanying it…

…the engineer on the left looking faintly aghast at the way his boss is holding the record (“by the EDGES, you clown!”)

The rest of the article is a 1950 article on the somewhat belated introduction of the LP to Britain, which is quite amusing itself, mocking the way the American market agonised over the Columbia LP vs the RCA 45rpm single and what to do with 78s, and rather smugly proclaiming the 45rpm record “is probably doomed for serious music” and that certain forms of music, individual songs and other short items, don’t really gain anything from the LP format so the old 78s probably wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry. The author was one Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who clearly did not foresee the record industry’s later propensity for repackaging and reissuing; just a couple of decades he would in fact be involved in a company devoted to just that…

Anyway, I bring this up cos it’s obviously timely and interesting—though as I’ve said elsewhere I’ve no particular love for vinyl per se—but also because I saw something on Tumblr the other day, which I now wish I’d saved cos I can’t remember where it was… anyway, it was a picture of a sign with the words “SAVE THE CULTURE” and something about vinyl… and I just thought, the culture? I just found something slightly ludicrous about that, cos the “culture” is officially only 75 years old. It has quite literally just passed that milestone. You can date the beginning of the “culture” quite precisely. Were there shellac enthusiasts in the 1950s lamenting the disappearance of 78s? Sorry, but I just find the fetishisation of vinyl irritating…

Murdoch changes everything

Oof. You may, however, be surprised that Lord Webber didn’t actually say that. I did a quick bit of research when I saw this posted on Facebook, cos I wanted some actual context… and the actual context was a minor part of a discussion near the end of a podcast called I Never Thought It Would Happen, fronted by Chris Difford from the band Squeeze and produced by a charity called Help Musicians (have a look at the list of guests so far) devoted to helping professional musicians. We’ll overlook the fact that ALW hardly needs any such help, he’s actually not a bad interviewee here.

But the bit about him struggling to write another musical was just a small part of the conversation near the end of a 40-odd minute chat, and it also wasn’t really related to “political correctness”, indeed I don’t think I even heard him use those words. He did piss and moan a bit about people telling him he couldn’t write certain things any more like Evita cos him and Tim Rice aren’t Argentinian, which… you know, conservative lord with a life peerage, what else would they say, but no, that’s still not really ALW’s problem… which is just that there’s a bit of a creative blockage and he hasn’t been able to find a story he wants to make a musical from. Said he could write any amount of music but doesn’t know what to write about.

This is somewhat different from “wah, PC is killing my career” and I can’t imagine why TalkTV would be spinning the conversation this way. *does quick check* Oh, that’s why. They’re Rupert Murdoch’s “news” TV station in the UK after he had to sell Sky. Looking at the list of talent I see Jeremy Kyle, Piers Morgan, a former political editor at The Scum and at least four right-wing politicians, two of them being the current leader and deputy leader of Reform UK, which was the party Nigel Farage founded after UKIP outlived its usefulness for him. Yeah, I really can’t imagine why such an evident shower of cunts might want to blow ALW’s actual words quite so far out of proportion into yet another culture war talking point…

Who’s got the Fear?

Fear Factory are active again, apparently, and by “Fear Factory” I mean Dino Cazares and three other ringers. Cos they’re not a band any more, and if any band has ever disappointed me by being, you know, kind of naked about how being in a band is as much if not more about business as it is art, it’s these pricks. (Kiss are far more obvious about it, I know, but I was never a fan so they couldn’t disappoint me in the same way.)

FF’s somewhat complicated history is summed up on Wiki, so read that. Suffice to say I was a big admirer of Demanufacture and Obsolete at the end of the 90s, and was a bit taken aback by their breakup in 2002 and the revelation that Dino Cazares was apparently a bit of a cunt. They came back as a trio without him (adding Byron Stroud on bass) and muddled on for a few more years, until apparently something like this happened:

Burton C. Bell: I don’t want to make horrible music like this any more.
Christian Olde Wolbers/Raymond Herrera: Whatever. We’ll form a new band without you.
Bell: Hey me and Dino are friends again for some reason and we’re forming a new band.
W/H: That’s nice.
Bell: And we’re making more of that horrible music I allegedly didn’t want to make.
W/H: That’s… nice.
Bell: And we’ve got Gene Hoglan!
W/H: Damn, that’s not bad at all.
Cazares: And we’re calling it Fear Factory and neither of you two cunts are invited.
W/H: Hmm. Excuse us, we have lawyers we need to speak to…

This is what B. and C. had to say to Metal Hammer at the time:

Weird how that rapport with Byron Stroud never extended to actually letting him play on any of the records the band made when he was part of it. As for Dino asking how anyone could pass up playing with Gene Hoglan, Dino did precisely that himself on their 2012 album The Industrialist, where he replaced one of metal’s most acclaimed drummers with a drum machine and apparently didn’t even tell him the band was making the album (Hoglan claimed he knew nothing about it until news of its completion came out). No wonder both of them quit the band after that…

Anyway, Wolbers’ lawyers eventually managed to throw some spanners into the works, and things got complicated with B. & C. and friends recording a new album during the legal strife, then Bell declaring the album was ready to come out and Cazares declaring there was no new album at all, then that it did exist and would be coming out in 2021, whereupon Bell decided “fuck the fucking lot of you” and quit the band, by which time he apparently hadn’t spoken to Cazares in years. Whereupon, ironically, Wolbers gave Cazares his blessing to carry on the band.

Honestly, FUCK these guys. Like I said, I liked those second and third albums quite a lot back in the day, they were a big part of me getting into more extreme metal at that time (I didn’t actually listen to a lot of the stuff then), so FF were kind of important to me. And they’ve let me down terribly as people almost ever since. I mean, I’ve heard at least some of the stuff they made after the initial 2002 breakup, indeed I quite liked some of the songs on Archetype, but I can’t get excited about them any more. They’ve been too obvious about being a business rather than a band. Which, really, is what most bands become once they pass a certain point. Most bands aren’t really bands, they don’t actually form and perform as organically and naturally as we the listener and fan might like to think. They become businesses.

But generally they don’t make that overly obvious. I suppose it’s like a sort of kayfabe, trying to act like the music outweighs other considerations like money and fame and the possibility that the band members don’t actually want to be in the same room as each other but they have to keep the money machine going… and Fear Factory have spent at least the last fifteen years shitting on that illusion and themselves in the process. I mean, I don’t need my favourite artists to all be charming and delightful sweethearts—some of them are fucking terrible people whose art I nonetheless enjoy—but FF have been too transparent over the years for me to still give a shit.

Anyway, Dino’s found a new singer, who has one of the least enviable tasks in heavy music; Burton’s voice was nothing if not a signature part of the band’s sound that won’t be replaced easily. Got a new drummer, too; the guy who replaced Gene Hoglan rather mysteriously disappeared from their latest tour due to “scheduling conflicts” and his fill-in is now the permanent drummer. Good luck to messrs Silvestro & Webber in their new roles, cos I feel like they may be lucky to hold onto them…

Heavy!

Fucking stunning. This has always been one of my Fabs favourites, and I’ve always thought Paul’s bass on this was good, lovely fills and so forth… but fucking hell, listening to the isolated bass track has given me an entirely new understanding of just how good, and now I’m hearing the full song again with a different appreciation… I think because the bass gets a little lost in the mix during THE RIFF in the last three minutes or so, it’s a bit overwhelmed by the guitars and the white noise, it’s hard to actually hear what he’s doing, so hearing Paul by himself is just… oh my. Obviously what he’s doing during THE RIFF is repetitive cos that’s the point of that section, but he finds so much room for variation in that repetition even so; and in the earlier part of the song where he’s more easily audible, you can hear how much work he’s doing to make the bassline melodic. Amazing. I think “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is now even more of a favourite of mine…