The Good, The Bad, and the… No.1

Welcome to our new regular blog digest, The Good, The Bad, And The… where each day (or thereabouts) we'll be picking something good, something bad and something… well, something.

So keep an eye out, and if you feel like letting us know about something good, bad or otherwise that you've seen, then don't be shy, let us know!

Widdle me this...

The Good: Something great actually, the line-up for this year's Belfast Blues festival has been announced, and the super talented, Big List favourite Rab McCullough is all over it like blue on sky. The Belfast born bluesman, hailed by Eric Clapton and gracer of the same stage as Jimi Hendrix, is a local legend and will rightly be featuring heavily in the festival's schedule.

Rab plays a free to enter gig in the Belfast Empire every Thursday night, and as well attended as it usually is, the fact that Rab never broke the big time means that NI gets to keep him for itself.

The Bad: The very wise and honourable Belfast city council. They've managed to, once again, ensure that the moral fibre of the city maintains its high standard by keeping the current restriction on bar opening times during this November's MTV Europe Music Awards.

"Cocktails?! Flip sake, just get them in love!
It's half 12!"

Far from making us the laughing stock of Europe, the decision to close the bars at every venue at 1.00am means that our continental neighbours will find a new respect for our preservation of decorum and piety. We will be the Shepherds, and they the lambs as we lead the 21st century western world to a new-found respect for the Sabbath day, to a purer future instilled with the right values and a rewarding sense of propriety.

Sure, our entertainment and tourism sector will likely lose a multi-million pound opportunity, but this is a small price to pay for Christian observance of the Sabbath and a considerable reduction in paper work. Ok, so the Sabbath is originally supposed to be Saturday, but since when did we worry about adhering to the doctrine of tradition, eh? Oh, hang, on… wait just a minute now…

"Uh, Giorgos? Man, you've got something on your...
actually, never mind..."

The Worrying: It may be all Greek to most people, but some late night radio-listening last night revealed something a bit scary about Europe's economic 'situation' (read: untethered bungee jump). Yes, apparently, according to some expert types, on Radio 4 so it must be right, Greece is going to inevitably ("There's no other option, it's simple mathematics, there's no other way") default on it humongous debts. This will mean Portugal, Ireland and eventually Spain will follow, and the end of the Eurozone. What happens after that is anyone's guess, but we're envisaging some kind of cool Mad Max style world, so start stockpiling petrol. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!

NI Gets Glastonburied

So Glastonbury is over, huh? Well, for some bands it may just be starting.

I'm of course elliptically talking about the BBC Introducing stage that featured two Northern Ireland acts (not counting Two Door Cinema Club, of course!), Rams Pocket Radio and Yes Cadets.

The sweaty performance of RPR's startlingly good track, Dieter Rams Has Got The Pocket Radios, is a striking example of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Peter McCauley's musical chops.

You can also check out an album's worth of his songs on Soundcloud by clicking on this lovely little link.

What's floated our proverbial boats here at The Big List is its rock arrangement and subtle complexity, lifting it above the plague of purge-worthy puerile pop pish and into the erstwhile exclusive, elevated and escalated echelons of excellence.

Here's some BBC footage of the song we're talking about, and you'll see stage right (your right, not her's) none other than the sassy songstress Silhouette on bass. 

Another talented singer, Silhouette, AKA Shauna Tohill, is usually seen behind the ivories in her alternate incarnation, and has made significant headway in her band's career, featuring heavily in new music radio stations and all that kind of stuff. Here's a look at her impressive ongoing efforts.

They could just combine the two bands into some sort of super group, but I suppose two different entities improves your chances of being spotted, and going by their Glastonbury selection, it's worked.

The other Northern Ireland ambassadors at the Worthy Farm festival was, as above, Yes Cadets. These indie dance pop minstrels have been going for several years and have been firm favourites with kool kidz everywhere, including those in the NI 'industry'.

Here's their stab in the Glastonbury limelight. 

I'm sure, after seeing the bulging crowds and blissful atmosphere, the rest of NI's musical upstarts will be foregoing their homework in order to, er, do their other homework, so bets are off on the 2013 representatives.

Terrible Lyrics Is Terrible...

What is it with the recent flood of pop songs with terrible lyrics? It's a new kind of terrible, the sort of terrible that has managed to go unnoticed because no one's terrible-radar is scanning that low.

And five minus one is... Nicole?

It simply must be the case that those buying Nicole Scherzinger's latest effort – Right There – either simply haven't noticed how laughably awful the lyrics are, or possibly believe the schoolyard chanting is laced with some kind of esoteric, impenetrable poetry. I fear it's more likely the latter.

"Me like the way that you hold my body

Me like the way that you touch my body

Me like the way that you kiss my yeah yeah yeah yeah me like it"

Yeah, you see the thing with good or acceptable song lyrics is that they convey more than just what's said. For a song lyric to work, it doesn’t have to provide some hugely revealing fundamental truth about the plight of humankind as we flash through the barely tangible plain that is existence with just our imperfect senses to guide us. To be of some value all it has to do is make an observation worth sharing or trigger an emotional response. "Me like the way you hold my body" just says nothing.

All it does is tell us that Ms Scherzinger loves the way some anonymous person holds her body, but that doesn't tell us anything about her, or us - everyone likes to be held a certain way. It's like me saying, "I like the way this food tastes". That doesn't tell you anything about how said food tastes, if you'd like that food, or what it says about people who do or do not like the food, all of which are the only things of any actual use to anyone.

Taken altogether, the only between-the-lines message that the lyrics do contain is that Scherzinger enjoys physical relations with the subject of the song, and enjoys oral sex. I'm not pointing that out to be opportunistically crude, but it's a barely concealed conclusion from the lyrics –

"Me like the way that you kiss my yeah yeah yeah yeah me like it"

"Me like the way he goin down down down down down"

Again, this doesn't tell us a lot about her or ourselves, just the bare and slightly discomforting fact that she likes these activities. Why she telling us these things, though, is maybe the interesting part.

And what about this lyric from the end of the song:

"Do you feel good for your let down good for you yeah...

"When you got up on that you do you right back"

I mean, I don't mean to be overly pompous, but seriously, that's barely English. 

"What? No, this is how I always stand..."

Jennifer Lopez is another who has just decided to throw any consideration for worthwhile lyrics to the proverbial wind. She even goes one step further in her much-loved classic, On The Floor:

"London to Ibiza

Straight to LA, New York

Vegas to Africa."

Firstly, she should be commended for rhyming Ibiza and Africa, but then we get to this section after being told, ad nauseam, to "get on the floor"

"Its getting ill it’s getting sick on the floor

We never quit, we never rest on the floor

If I ain’t wrong we’ll probably die on the floor"

Getting ill then sick on the floor isn't exactly the imagery I'm looking for in a fun dance tune. Plus, it would be difficult to "quit" or be at rest on any floor covered in sick.

I realise the meaning of those words has been changed by rap and afro-American culture - there's nothing wrong with that - but their use in this context is just bizarre.

Meanwhile, the last sentence, "if I 'ain't wrong, we'll probably die on the floor" is one of the strangest lyrics I've ever heard. As far as I understand it, Lopez is saying: "the music so good here that you won't stop dancing, leading in all probability to your unceremonious death in an unnamed nightclub".

I think it's time we all lowered our aforementioned radars – and fast.

Where's The Music On The TV?

After happening upon the www.fromthebasement.tv website, during a little research about our Radiohead story today, it occurred to me how little live music there is on TV.

That being said, we're just about to see the BBC's usually fantastic coverage of the Glastonbury festival slosh onto our screen this weekend, so I can't complain too much.

But it is strange there are not more specialist music TV shows anymore. At the moment we've got Jools Holland's also usually fantastic Later show, although his line-ups have been pretty shocking in the last few weeks.

The Old Grey Whistle Test - Nice...

The field has had a long history, with probably the most vaunted show of the ilk, The Old Grey Whistle Test (here's the video of Hocus Pocus' famed performance) experiencing a nostalgic renaissance. But there have been many more.

Cult 80s music show The Tube was an influential and innovative if slightly inconsistent incarnation of the format. Introduced by Jools Holland and Paula Yates, the show was commendable for forcing all acts to perform live and featured some impressive talent of the day including Madonna, Judas Priest, The jam and Tom Waits.

The show was also notable for it's on edge feel where anything could happen, inspiring shows such as The Word and TFI Friday, where common on air swearing and catastrophe led to huge audience appeal.

Jimmy Saville. Still in full cammo after
operations in Oz - the land of.

The daddy of all UK music shows is undoubtedly Top of the Pops. Although generally sterilised, family friendly, and notorious for artists miming and cringe inducing presenters, the show was more or less at the mercy of the charts, leading to some interesting performances.

Greenday's first appearance on UK Television saw them forced to mime their instruments and sing live, leading to Billie Joe's T-shirt of protest that reads "Who am I fooling anyway".

Nirvana were also forced into the same predicament, but decided to make their legendary protest a bit more audible - that being, one octave lower.

Oasis did a similar trick in 1995, during their performance of Roll With It. The introduction by Robbie [bloody] Williams is also probably one of the reasons why no one ever took the show seriously.

In fact, Top of the Pops' audience size and side-stepping of the less commercial acts went as far as incensing some bands and even television producers. Producer Mickie Most decided his reaction would be to make an ITV music based series called Revolver. Irreverent and fearless, the 1978 show, which ran for only one series, took the rising punk scene to unsuspecting audiences. Giving an early platform to bands such as Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Elvis Costello and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the show also featured a slot by chaos inspiring comedian Peter Cook, who would ridicule the acts and the audience: "Don't touch the acts, you don't know where they've been", for example.

Here's an example of Peter Cook's typical anarchism on the show.

Among the other notable shows that never quite took off was a forerunner of Dermot O'Leary's Saturday sessions, Re:Covered. Bands were asked to come play live and also perform a cover version of whatever they wanted. Although the premise was good, for some reason the show didn't quite feel right. I hope it was nothing to do with our Dermot…

So what about today? Where are the Revolvers and Old Grey Whistle Tests of the 2010s?

Well, if Jools Holland isn't careful and keeps booking chumps like those towards the end of his last series, we may see a revival. R Kelly? …that's all I'm saying.

Best Of The Music Web

Of the one hundred and fifty trillion zillion squillion websites there are in the internet, it's sad that so few are good enough to recommend, but new site www.mapofmetal.com by talented web designer Patrick Galbraith stands out.

Map of Metal - marvelous.

The site features a stylized map moving across time and the multitudinous sub genres of metal music.

Each location gives a fascinating biography of each type of metal, from Glam Metal to Djent, and a selection of the songs and bands associated with the style.

The outcome is a fascinating traipse through metal's history and evolution and explains beautifully the splinter genres and possible reasons for their emergence.

One such bio for Viking metal reads thus: "The genre of Viking metal was pioneered by the Swedish band Bathory. The band's fourth album 'Blood Fire Death' was released in 1988 and includes two early examples of Viking metal – the songs 'A Fine Day to Die' and 'Blood Fire Death'. Eduardo Rivadavia of Allmusic describes this as 'possibly the first true example of Viking metal."

The Guardian's History of Modern Music

The launch of the site comes on the heels of The Guardian's latest fantastic run of musical features, A History of Modern Music. The interactive flash site spans up to 100 years for each genre, from jazz to rock. It provides anecdotes, news stories, biographies and obituaries of the most influential musicians of the day and the most significant events in music over the last century.

Original, engaging and intuitive to use, the guide highlights moments such as the 1978 Rock Against Facism event, the infamous "Judas!" heckle at Bob Dylan and the death of John Coultrane.

If more of the internet were like these two sites, well, we'd probably spend a lot less time putting up pictures that needed de-tagging on Facebook.  

The Rise And Rise Of The Radio

What's going on with the radio? Would you think that a century from now we'll still be using Ipods? How come the radio has managed to be relevant over such a long period of time, never mind growing in popularity?

The little speaking box is so old that its job was to replace the carrier pigeon, semaphore and smoke signals as the method of mass communication (well, ok, the telegraph). Some 110 years after its invention, its use is still ubiquitous. Not only is the device found in every car, truck, bus and newsagent but also in nearly every workplace in the Western World.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico

The same technology is used in everything from your mobile phone to x-box wireless control pad. We use it to peer at the stars, to communicate with robots on Mars and even prevent the recurrence of some types of scars.

But considering the explosion in alternative entertainment media available to us all - laptops, TV, cable, handheld devices and video games - you may be surprised to know that use of the old wireless is steadily increasing.

In recent years listening to the radio overtook watching television as the main source of entertainment – the first time since the 60s - and some ear-opening trends emerged.

The relatively erudite BBC Radio 4 surpassed 10 million regular listeners in recent years after suffering a dip in popularity, while BBC Radio 2 is now the biggest station of all, almost twice as popular as BBC's Radio One.

But why?

Things in the radio world have certainly taken a wide u-turn. Radio 4's snootiness is now celebrated, Radio 2's archaisms are held with a glinting nostalgia, and while there's young mums and school kids [and generally people who hate good music] there'll be Radio One.

The commercial channels haven't found it quite as easy, but many are now doing well, especially with the rise in digital radio and the decreasing cost of bandwidth due to the imminent analogue switchover.

Finding and downloading podcasts is now much of the nation's new hobby, with programmes such as The Adam and Joe Show, Citizen Radio, In Our Time, The Infinite Monkey Cage and others all pushing much loved albums out of Ipod memories, but this only accounts for a small percentage of radio consumption.

What's surprising is that with all this free choice readily available, we're happy to listen to the programmes and scheduling decided by others, as that's probably the only unique feature of switching on the radio. Maybe that's why its audiences have grown. With the increased use of Sky Plus, BT Vision and the other self-scheduling services for TV, there's something attractive about the programming being done for us, and the joint experience of listening at the same time as everyone else.

It's an interesting phenomenon and not one anyone loudly predicted. 

It's just a pity the whole thing will fall apart come the 2014 switch over though, isn't it.

No More Safety In Numbers

Twitter is a dangerous thing, isn't it! After nearly upsetting all the internetz by briefly tweeting an embargoed (notice to not publish) story today, it has suddenly became clear how a momentary lapse in concentration or a misheard/misread instruction could have galaxy-exploding consequences. 

A galaxy exploding - yesterday.

 Today's news happens to be rife with confidentiality related stories. This story in today's Guardian  is especially jaw gape inducing. But ongoing injunction stories along with the recent Wikileaks debacle have all highlighted a threat to confidentiality and privacy that the internet currently presents.

Will we one day just have to live without secrets?

Stay with me here, but one of the main concerns about the nearing completion of the quantum computer (within the next two or three decades) is that the whole idea of encryption will become obsolete over night. Once a workable quantum computer is up and running, all the passwords and captchas and pin numbers and secret questions about your mother's maiden name in the world will be unable to offer any protection whatsoever.

What sort of world this will lead to is complicated, scary, and beyond the scope of this article (and my mind), but rest assured it will be as epochal as the printing press. 

The quantum computer will mean captchas are
useless - Well, it's something.

The current problem with privacy is just a microcosm of the impending quantum revolution. How do I know this? I know this because the problem of the future is nearly already here - information is no longer worth anything.

One of the largest resources of information on the planet, Wikipedia, is free, as is access to the majority of the internet's content. Going by today's news, the only things people are prepared to pay to find out are the contents of celebrity voice mail messages, and the reason for that is significant.

In economics terms, what sets the price for any commodity is demand (how many people want it) and supply (how easy it is to get). If loads of people want it and it's difficult to get, then the price is high – which is why celebrity phone messages get big bucks from tabloids. However, what has happened with the internet is that loads of people want information (which would make it valuable), but there is free access to most of it (that is, supply is nearly infinite) – therefore, the actual cost becomes, in effect, zero.

How is this relevant to privacy and confidentiality? Well, the game has changed. People once bought newspapers because there was no other way to find out the day's news (supply was limited). Information was worth something and keeping secrets could mean income. That no longer applies. Information is nearly free, and with it privacy and confidentiality become worthless.

One of the biggest things Twitter has done is reduce the value of secrets and information to a whimsy. Anyone with information can broadcast it far and wide for no cost, which others can receive at no cost. Is this good? Is this bad? Well, it's definitely different.

We're in the middle of a revolution. This is the first stage in a new world where real secrets could become the most valuable assets on the planet, while your private information's only refuge will be a very precarious safety in numbers.

Britains Got.. ah, who cares...

I’ve seen examples of parallel parking that possessed more skill than some of the chumps on Britain’s Got Talent over the past few weeks.
I’ve a number of issues with the show. Number one, it doesn’t differentiate between a learned talent and a latent one. The assorted magicians, standups, dancers, stunt cyclists, artists and impressionists have spent years (or, more likely, weeks considering the general standard) putting together their act and practising it.
But as if to purposefully insult them, singers and eyeball… er… protrusionists strut on stage to share their natural and relatively unpractised gift, only to sail through to the final. Not that I feel any significant sympathy - that's only a minor issue.
Secondly, Cowell’s protestations that he had not fixed the competition to promote 12-year-old singer Ronan Parke may be true in practice, but it’s not really the full story. With a production team furiously editing together sympathetic or ridiculing montages for each contestant it’s not as if he has no say in the matter. That and considering it was his hand picked jury that put young Ronan through to the finals - whilst whimpering their unbridled passion for his cover versions - there are few charges to face.
That's the problem with Cowell's breed of pay-as-you-vote shows. There's a twisted kind of genius to them. The public pays for the privilege to pick an act to be sold back to them, while Simon reaps it in at every stage of the proceedings.
Lets break it down – He gets a huge commission fee from ITV, especially for the two hour specials; he gets the money from the millions of phone-in votes; he gets the multimillion pound Moneysupermarket.com etc sponsorship; he gets exclusive contractual access to the winners and probably the losers picked by the public; he gets the majority of the record sales, performance fees, tour tickets, merchandise and sync fees from the artists he signs to his contracts; free advertising for acts signed to his label that perform on the show, and payment for the acts not signed to him – and all this while coming across as if he's doing the country a favour by bringing said chumps to their attention.
And so what if underdog ‘crazy-jaw’ Jai did win? He and wee Ronan are still going to get wrung dry.

CD Reviews

A few CDs have landed on the Big List desk this morning. We got our hands on Rise to Remain's Nothing Left, Foster The People's Torches and Innerpartysystem's Not Getting Any Better, and here's what they sound like…

Rise to Remain are a quick, technical emo-metal band boasting some impressive guitar virtuosity. However, the guitars are mixed way too loudly for this more accessible, poppy side of metal. The song wanders into power ballad territory at times and despite the excellent musicianship and strong vocals, it's difficult to imagine the sort of person who'd be very interested in technical, emotional, slightly dated metal.

Californian band Foster The People are obviously heavily influenced by the new wave indie scene, with their debut album Torches sounding like some unreleased MGMT material. Not that that's a bad thing. The songs bounce along merrily, with their dancy, off the wall synth challenging your foot into tapping.

The choruses tend to be memorable and break nicely into settled verses with interesting melodies and happy clappy percussion. Their falsetto vocals are strong and the harmonies work well. I'd prefer a heavier mixed bass to carry more of the melody and for more punch to the syncopation the band seems to love. But overall, this is an album that keeps you guessing and usually delivers with pretty and upbeat sunshine tracks.

Check out the below video for Houdini for a good example of what I'm talking about. 

Innerpartysystem's Not Getting Any Better begins in a refreshingly thumping manner, but despite the buzzes and whirrs zipping through the track at unpredictable points, the song gets quite boring well before the end of the 3.49 running time (that's the running time of the radio edit, the vid below is an alternate mix, but you get the idea...). The single from the American electronica/industrial act repeats itself somewhat and doesn't really drive in any particular direction - it just picks up some melodic passengers as it trundles along. In a huge club and under some monolithic PA system this track might come to life, but on a wet Tuesday afternoon, it's not nearly as much fun as it promises to be.