Category Archives: Pop music

2011 ➤ What happens when retromania exhausts our pop past

Posted on 2 Jun 2011 | Leave a comment

Spot the difference: Annie Lennox in 1983 and La Roux in 2009. Photograph: WireImage/Redferns, Guardian composite

From synth pop to Hollywood remakes to collecting manual typewriters, we’re busy plundering the past. But why the fatal attraction? Today’s Guardian runs an extract from a new book by music writer Simon Reynolds. Here’s a taste…

❚ “THERE’S NO SINGLE THING that made me suddenly think, Hey, there’s a book to be written about pop culture’s chronic addiction to its own past… But if I could point to just one release that tipped me over the edge into bemused fascination with retromania, it would be 2006’s Love, the Beatles remix project. Executed by George Martin and his son Giles to accompany the Cirque du Soleil spectacular in Las Vegas, the album’s 26 songs incorporated elements from 130 individual recordings, both releases and demos, by the Fab Four.

Simon Reynolds,books, Retromania “Hyped as a radical reworking, Love was way more interesting to think about than to listen to (the album mostly just sounds off, similar to the way restored paintings look too bright and sharp). Love raised all kinds of questions about our compulsion to relive and reconsume pop history, about the ways we use digital technology to rearrange the past and create effects of novelty. And like Scorsese’s Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Love was yet more proof of the long shadow cast by the 60s, that decade where everything seemed brand-new and ever-changing. We’re unable to escape the era’s reproaches (why aren’t things moving as fast as they did back then?) even as the music’s adventurousness and innocence make it so tempting to revisit and replicate.”

➢ Continue reading the extract from Retromania at Guardian online

➢ Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, by Simon Reynolds (496 pages, £10.79 at Waterstone’s online)

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Tagged 2011, Beatles, Books, Retromania, Simon Reynolds, Tipping points

➤ Up close and cool — Paradise Point’s first official video

Posted on 1 Jun 2011 | Leave a comment

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❚ THIS SIZZLINGLY COOL STUDIO VIDEO of the single Run In Circles is launched today at YouTube by Paradise Point, London’s teen livepop band who’ve been together now for six months. PP’s first concert review at Shapersofthe80s said of their debut: “Paradise Point are in the wide-eyed realm of Romeo and Juliet. They are great romancers, who cast the vocalist Cam as Romeo putting his heart through the Magimix for his Juliet.” Since then talent-spotter Callofthewyld has added: “Paradise Point are a 2011 take on classic boy bands such as Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and even ABC. They surely must have been made in some manager’s laboratory … This lot are sex on legs and even if they weren’t actually any good they would still find it hard to walk on stage without being shrieked at. Fortunately their music is excellent too.”

This hot and elegant new video for Run In Circles was directed by the bass player Roman Kemp, who studied film at sixth-form college. It was shot in the family “studio” — “My games room,” insists Roman’s dad, Martin — and the camera lingers so intensely on the singer Cameron’s lips that Boy George is said to have tweeted the sort of compliment we couldn’t possibly repeat here. Compare and contrast the new vid with their live debut before an audience at London’s Punk club last November, shot by Shapersofthe80s, below…

➢ Paradise Point’s next show will be filmed at the O2 Academy Islington, Wednesday, June 29 at 7pm, tickets £5 from Ticketweb

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Posted in London, Media, Pop music, Youth culture

Tagged 2011, Adam Saunderson, Callofthewyld, Cam Jones, Concert, Interview, Johnnie Shinner, Paradise Point, review, Roman Kemp, Run In Circles, Video, YouTube

➤ Taste Masters from oop North aim to put passion back into pop

Posted on 30 May 2011 | Leave a comment

Super 8 Cynics, Taste Masters, Laboratory Project, downloads,

“Anthemic pop” from Burnley: Super8 Cynics were session musicians assembled by vocalist Ady Hall

❚ HERE IS “A UTOPIAN VISION” as an antidote to the reign of Simon Cowell’s production-line X-Factor performers. The Preston-based Laboratory Project makes enormous claims about “supporting artists with integrity, skill and soul to break into the music industry”, backed by studio space and its production and engineering team, plus expertise in marketing and independent brand development. The project was founded in 2008 by Tony Rigg, a hospitality entrepreneur who previously spent 18 months as operations director at the Ministry of Sound.

Taste Masters, Laboratory Project, downloads, Tony Rigg,

Tony Rigg: “integrity, skill and soul”

The Lab is concerned to return both creatively and commercially to the roots of a band-led scene and to rekindle passion in the music-making that it promotes. The creative division claims to deliver “unparalleled music and multimedia experiences via a record label which represents a coalition of artists as a complete rethink of what a label should be for today”.

Rigg has said: “It has become more important how music looks than how it sounds. The X Factor is an extremely effective, headline grabbing, money-making machine. For many artists it is incredibly difficult to get original music heard. The Laboratory Project exists for the people who want something more from music.”

This weekend the label launched Taste Masters 2, its second eclectic compilation CD with 11 tracks of music “derived from human performance, solo artists and collaborations” — 80 musicians who include The Salford Jets, Jimmy Docherty and Antistar, as well as bands who had not previously released their work commercially such as Super 8 Cynics, Straightlaces, China White and Dresden. The original 14-track Taste Masters compilation album has been available for download since October and included Drama King, Evenhand, Fez, The Horn Brothers, Our Day Remains, Helvelyn 2 and Osiris.

➢ The Laboratory Project record label and store where
Taste Masters 2 is available as CD and download

Taste Masters, Laboratory Project, downloads, Our Day Remains ,alt rock,

Alternative rock from Bolton: Our Day Remains showcased their single Break Down the Bridge on the first Taste Masters album

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Posted in Media, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

Tagged downloads, Laboratory Project, Lancashire, Our Day Remains, record labels, Super8 Cynics, Taste Masters, Tony Rigg

➤ Brett on the love that created “a Suede landscape” in the tribal 80s

Posted on 19 May 2011 | Leave a comment

Brett Anderson, Suede, 2011, concerts, interview, beat magazine

Brett Anderson: “emulating people shouldn’t be about wanting to sound like them”

STRICTLY SPEAKING, Suede were a supercool guitar band of the 80s, having come together in 1989, though admittedly their hits followed in the 90s. Having reformed last year, alas without guitarist Bernard Butler, they released The Best Of Suede in November and tonight they play Suede’s music in sequence at the first of three gigs at London’s O2 Academy in Brixton May 19–21, plus Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, May 24–26. An interview with the current issue of BEAT magazine has singer Brett Anderson (“the lost boy of Britpop”) reflecting on the climate in which the band formed…

“As a teenager in the early 80s it was an incredibly tribal time, everyone at school was either a mod or a punk or a skinhead or a headbanger. Which gang you belonged to said who you were as a person. This was when I was thirteen or fourteen, when I first started buying records and I suppose that influenced the sort of band I wanted Suede to be, I wanted them to be the sort of band people would get tattooed. I wasn’t particularly interested in Suede just being liked; I was only really interested in Suede being loved.

Best of Suede, 2011, Brett Anderson “Suede was about the intense passion of being loved as a band and constructing a universe for people to dive into and that was all part of the iconography of the sleeves and the worlds I sang about and possibly the over-use of lots of the imagery was all part of it. Maybe it was all part of my need to belong somewhere. We established a Suede landscape, and I always loved those bands that did that. Maybe it’s a very much over-used reference point but I did grow up loving The Smiths records and loving what they did and the kind of tribalism they created.

“I never wanted to be The Smiths, emulating people shouldn’t be about wanting to sound like them. I was talking to Jamie from Klaxons and he said he was a huge Suede fan when he was growing up and that Suede were the reason he wanted to be in a band. You listen to Klaxons, and they don’t sound anything like Suede and that’s the biggest compliment. That they took something of the spirit of Suede, they didn’t rip off the cord sequences, they didn’t rip off the words and they didn’t dress like Suede.

➢ Read Brett’s full interview with
Daryoush Haj Najafi in BEAT

“They just took something of the spirit and sense of aiming to achieve something that was meant to be a little bit unachievable. And they created this incredible very original band. I’m really proud of that sort of influence. It’s the same with Bloc Party. There’s all these bands, that have told me that Suede have been incredibly influential, but they don’t sound like Suede, that’s almost like a double compliment for me.”

❏ Brett also deals with drugs, androgyny, Justine and Bernard — “I actually put an advert in the NME, that’s how I met Bernard. It read, ‘Must like Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths, David Bowie and Lloyd Cole and The Commotions. No musos, no beginners, some things are more important than ability’.”

➢ Suede headline July’s Latitude Festival in Suffolk

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Tagged 2011, Brett Anderson, Interview, Suede

2011 ➤ Duran’s round-the-world adventure reaches the UK

Posted on 17 May 2011 | Leave a comment

SXSW, interview, John Norris, Duran Duran

Duran interviewed at SXSW in March: Simon Le Bon checks a runaway thought before the audience jumps to the wrong conclusion (SXSW video grab)

❚ UPDATE, JULY 1: Following the postponement of Duran Duran’s European arena tour owing to singer Simon Le Bon’s vocal problems, consult the band’s website for news… DD have rescheduled all eleven UK concerts to run from Nov 30 Brighton to Dec 17 Newcastle.

❚ UPDATE, MAY 29: Duran Duran now offer a fulsome apology for having to cancel their current UK tour dates — not, as sceptics suspected, because of unsold tickets but because of singer Simon Le Bon’s continuing “laryngeal problems”. Their website today reports: “Following a consultation with both a vocal coach and his team of ENT specialists today, Simon Le Bon has been advised that he needs to continue to rest his voice… Devastated by the news that they will not be able to resume the tour as planned on Tuesday, Simon said ‘We’ve been postponing shows with very little notice, in the hope each day that the improvement would have been significant enough for me to sing again without risking any long-term damage’.”

View John and Nick’s special video apology at YouTube . . . Today too, Roger Taylor blogs on the DD website on the horrible irony of Woody Allen’s famous quotation “If you want make God laugh, tell him about your plans” and he makes the promise: “I know that all the shows are very close to being re-scheduled later in the year.” . . . Read Simon Le Bon’s blog at DD’s website on June 1: “I reckon I got 6 semi-tones wiped off the top of my range and … it’s very difficult not to worry about it.”

❏ Here’s a sparky interview with the band just released by the SXSW festival, recorded in March. With former MTV reporter John Norris in the chair, Nick Rhodes says he still sees Duran as an art-school band and John Taylor reflects on the golden era of MTV. Stills from this interview have been posted at Flickr

Duran Duran, L'Uomo Vogue,Pierpaolo Ferrari
❏ This stylish tuxedoed shot by Pierpaolo Ferrari comes from the current “Long Live the 80s” issue of L’Uomo Vogue, with a feature on DD by former Wag club host Chris Sullivan, translated for the Italian edition.

HERE’S A CATCH-UP ON PREVIOUSLY POSTED
DURAN NEWS FROM THE YEAR SO FAR

❏ It was 30 years in March since the 80s supergroup’s debut single Planet Earth peaked at No 12 in the UK chart… This year their 14-track CD of AYNIN spent five weeks on the UK album chart.

❏ View highlights from Duran Duran’s Unstaged online concert March 23 at the Mayan theatre, Los Angeles, in 1080p HD at the band’s Vevo channel on YouTube /DuranDuranVEVO. Click here to find which global regions are licensed to view highlights at YouTube. The four DD Unstaged concert tracks most viewed via Vevo in the first three weeks after the live webcast drew more than 1.5m views — these are All You Need is Now with 700,930 views, then Notorious 298,505, Planet Earth 290,477, and Friends of Mine 274,935 way out ahead of all other tracks, most of which pulled only four-figure audiences.

John Taylor, Nick Rhodes, Duran, Facebook Live, interview, thequietus, SXSW ❏ Rhodes and Taylor give a 30-minute video interview on Billboard.com including live Q&A (right) on March 30, 2011.

❏ Rhodes and Le Bon give a seven-minute video history of DD for ABC News, Jan 2011 — “Rio was the album that made us the biggest band in the world. It made us big in America”

❏ Duran have been blessed by an interview at Quietus, its holiness the online magazine whose touchstone is “reverence” and claims “we’re not afraid of surprising our readers”. Writer Simon Price delivers two surprises. Plus this list of post-80s albums the band think most deserve to be listened to: The Wedding Album (1993) … Pop Trash (2000) … Medazzaland (1997) … Astronaut (2004).

❏ On the current AYNIN tour Duran Duran played North America and Mexico March 16–April 27, just before their 11-date UK tour from Newcastle to Sheffield May 18–June 4. They take in Berlin on May 26 and continue across Europe, Paris to Bergen June 10–Aug 28. [Update — These were the original plans, which were substantially cancelled in May and June.] In between they return to the UK for the V Festival on both Aug 20 and 21.

Duran Duran, All You Need Is Now, video, Nick Egan
♫ View Nick Egan’s Bacofoil video for All You Need Is Now, DD’s comeback single at Yahoo Music — available worldwide on iTunes. A 14-track CD package of the same name was released in March for most of Europe, Australia, Far East and North America with South America following in April.