Tag Archives: 2011

➤ Gary Kemp puts his neck on the block — Spandau ‘the best live British band of the Eighties’

Gary Kemp, interview, Mail on Sunday, Spandau Ballet
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“I’m going to stick my neck out and say that we were the best live British band of the Eighties. Spandau Ballet’s records are an important part of the evolution of British pop music, and I’m enormously proud of them. We were part of the golden age of pop. We were a gang who made records.”
— Gary Kemp on Spandau Ballet in their heyday
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➢ Read today’s bold interview with Spandau’s songwriter Gary Kemp in the Mail on Sunday … In the zoot-suited shadows of Le Beat Route club, student journalist Dylan Jones — today the editor of GQ magazine — watched Kemp shoot the video that would launch Spandau Ballet to stardom. Thirty years later, they meet again

Jones writes:
Kemp’s band was more than just timely – the music they made was genuinely groundbreaking. No, the critics were not kind, painting them as dim, inner-city mannequins, yet their songs resonated with a generation of young men and women who were determined to explore social mobility in much the same way that their parents did in the 60s. Their most important record from this early period was Chant No 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On), a song that mirrored Ghost Town by the Specials.

“Chant No 1 was all about urban paranoia,” says Kemp. “I wanted to make a Soho film-noir song, something that was evocative of an urban experience. Dark shadows, dark corners. A fear of living on the edge in an urban environment as a young man. The early 80s were rough for most people, and I wanted to reflect that in the song. It’s a very dark track and one that mirrored the economic plight of the time.”

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➤ The Kid’s in pink so he’s ready for the funk

Kid Creole, Coconuts, Shaka Zulu, London

In the pink: Kid Creole onstage at Shaka Zulu in London last night. © Shapersofthe80s

❚ “WHEN YOU SEE ME IN PINK, I’m ready for the funk.” Only one man can say that and keep a straight face while sporting a salmon-pink zoot-suit with its trousers right up to here, drape jacket right down to there, plus a slightly crazy hat. Bronx-born August Darnell aka Kid Creole is the next best thing to Fred Astaire in the immaculate performance stakes and despite his 60 years he was cutting as fine a figure as ever in London town last night with his blonde playmates the Coconuts, while his two yards of fine silver keychain flashed its own morse code in time with the wearer’s dance steps. His eight-piece band didn’t fluff a note during an hour-long finger-snappity set of the Kid’s turbo-charged trademark mix of latin, calypso, disco, swing, jazz and R&B dance rhythms.

[Come back for more after breakfast]

Kid Creole, Coconuts, Shaka Zulu, London

Leading the conga: Kid and his Coconuts wend their way through Shaka Zulu. © Shapersofthe80s

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➤ The Kemp Brothers cook up a mystical morsel

Karma Magnet, Gary Kemp, Martin Kemp, Raj Ghatak

Fatal consultation over a nice cup of tea: celebrity chef Joel Manners (Gary Kemp) meets his guru (Raj Ghatak) in Karma Magnet

➢ Click to view Karma Magnet at Daily Motion

❚ HERE’S A 17-MINUTE SHORT FILM called Karma Magnet, directed by Martin Kemp of Black and Blue Films (also Spandau Ballet bass player) and featuring his brother Gary and Adele Silva. It tells why the luckiest man in the world wants to kill himself for the good of humanity.

No prizes for seeing how many other members of the Kemp family you can spot in this low-budget thriller.

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➤ EMI chief confirms record company sale highly likely

Tinie Tempah, EMI, RayBan,

Tinie Tempah, south London star on the troubled EMI label: the 22-year-old rapper keeps his cool in RayBan Wayfarers

❚ AN INTERNAL STAFF MEMO from EMI chief executive Roger Faxon confirms that the historic record label of the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Queen is up for sale. Last Tuesday ownership of EMI, Britain’s oldest record company, passed to Citigroup, the US banking giant, after 114 years of British ownership. The takeover ended speculation that has marred the label’s future ever since 2007 when Guy Hands and his Terra Firma private equity firm bought the British music major for £4.2bn, widely believed to be a massive overpayment. Terra Firma was unable to keep up interest payments on the loans.

In the note sent to music staff last Tuesday, and published today by Guardian online, Faxon confirmed that “there is no doubt that in due course EMI will be up for sale – just like it has been from the day Terra Firma bought it.” But he emphasised: “Regardless of the country of origin of our owner, EMI remains a British company – both legally and spiritually.” Faxon insists that “EMI itself was never in administration”.

➢ Read Roger Faxon’s memo at Guardian online

➢ More on Shapersofthe80s: After Queen quits, who can save EMI?

“The takeover in 2007 of EMI by Guy Hands’s Terra Firma — just as the bubble in financial markets was going pop — will go down in British corporate history as one of the worst ever deals”
Robert Peston, Business editor, BBC News

Further analysis in today’s Guardian by Dan Sabbagh, head of media, is headlined: Is the music company going to go for a song? He writes: “Hands’s instincts at EMI often failed to serve him and the business well. Three-and-a-half years later, after an overambitious acquisition that left the company unable to handle £3bn of debt Hands had taken on, the barbarian at the gates was forced out by his bankers Citigroup.

“Now that Citigroup has written off £2.2bn of loans, EMI, with a manageable £1.2bn debt load, is likely to be sold within months. Out of politeness, Citigroup sources prefer to say predictably that the process is ‘not a fire sale’ and that it is possible – if unlikely – that it will be theirs in a year’s time. The rhetoric is only there to protect the bank in case something goes awry again with a company that counts Katy Perry, Swedish House Mafia and Tinie Tempah among its latter-day artists.”

Warners and BMG are tipped as potential purchasers of EMI.

➢ Read: Is the music company going to go for a song?
at Guardian online

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➤ Rivals sniffy about Murdoch’s Daily — more an iPad magazine than a newspaper

The Daily, Jemima Kiss, The Guardian, review

Jemima Kiss on The Daily: “First impressions are that this looks quite Microsoft to me which is probably not exactly what Apple were hoping for — the navigation is like a not-quite-so-good version of Cover Flow, which is how you navigate albums in the iTunes store”

➢ View video of Guardian’s Jemima Kiss scrolling us through
The Daily’s first edition (above, 3min 42sec)

❚ WITH A HUGE ROLL OF THE DICE, Rupert Murdoch has sought to put a seal on his reputation as a visionary media tycoon by launching The Daily, a digital-only news operation created from scratch and designed specifically for the iPad. Much is riding on it, not just Murdoch’s personal legacy in the twilight of his career, but, in his own description, the future of how people produce and consume journalism…

➢ Read more at Guardian online: Rupert Murdoch unveils
next step in media empire — the iPad ‘newspaper’

The Daily❚ SO WHAT DOES AN iPAD NEWSPAPER FEEL LIKE? The answer is “not much like a newspaper”. Instead, The Daily feels much more like one of the better examples of an iPad magazine, along the lines of Wired or Virgin’s Project. Despite the fact that both publications are ultimately owned by the same company, The Daily is nothing like The Times’s iPad app, as there’s little attempt to replicate much of the look, feel or tone of a traditional print newspaper. There’s plenty of video, both in stories and the ads that are strewn through The Daily. In some cases, rather than use ordinary photographs, there are 360-degree panoramic shots…

➢ Read Ian Betteridge’s review at Guardian online: The Daily offers glitzy graphics, video and live updates at low cost

❚ IT’S NOT A ‘NATIVE’ iPAD EXPERIENCE AT ALL, it’s a news magazine torn up and stuffed, page-by-page onto the iPad screen… If this is the best that journalism’s brightest brains can do, given a huge budget and input from Apple itself, then we’re in worse trouble than I thought.

➢ Read Shane Richmond at The Telegraph online:
A complete failure of imagination

Rupert Murdoch

“Not a legacy brand”: Murdoch shows off The Daily at its launch

❚ RUPERT MURDOCH SPEAKING YESTERDAY: “The iPad demands that we completely reimagine our craft… The magic of newspapers — and great blogs — lies in their serendipity and surprise, and the deft touch of a good editor. We’re going to bring that magic to The Daily. Similarly, we can and we must make the business of newsgathering and editing viable again. In the tablet era there’s room for a fresh and robust new voice.

“No paper, no multimillion dollar presses, no trucks — we’re passing on these savings to the reader for just 14 cents a day… Our target audience is the 50m Americans who are expected to own tablets next year. Success will be determined by utility and originality. The Daily is not a legacy brand moving from the print to the digital world.”

➢ Launch of The Daily — Video of live presentation at the Guggenheim Museum, presented by Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corporation, and his editorial team (42 minutes)
➢ View demo of The Daily in action at thedaily.com

❚ TECHNOLOGY BLOGGER JOHN GRUBER: “Nothing groundbreaking, but better than most such efforts to date. The carousel feature is incredibly laggy. I can’t believe they shipped it like this. Maybe they’ve hired a good staff of writers and editors, but they sure need better designers and engineers. The experience just isn’t good enough.”

➢ John Gruber’s review at Daring Fireball

The Daily❚ THE NEWS SECTION IS EXTREMELY WEAK. The first edition contains precisely two real news articles, one of which (a story about Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s global address) had been thoroughly covered by all the major news outlets the previous day; the other, about the snow storm currently hitting the US, was borrowed from the AP.

➢ Read Lauren Indvik at Mashable: It’s a second-rate iPad magazine, not a newspaper

❚ THE DAILY IS PARTNERING with the Associated Press for its content… [although] it’s been selling itself as a place to go for original content. As its website puts it: The Daily is “a tablet-native national news brand built from the ground up to publish original content exclusively for the iPad”. Apparently “original” here means “not aggregated.” Which is fair enough. But “original content” also implies “special content.” The kind of content you can’t get anywhere else.

➢ Read Megan Garber at The Nieman Journalism Lab

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