2007 - The 90's revival starts here

2007, it would appear, has been the year of the musical reformation. Led Zeppelin creaked back onstage in a hail of primal riffage. The Police kickstarted a reunion tour with a performance at the Grammy Awards. Take That and The Spice Girls also returned, the latter insulting our intelligence as well as our eardrums by claiming avarice wasn’t a factor.

However, the resurrection of disbanded groups, often splitting in acrimonious circumstances long ago, wasn’t limited to commercial colossi. Britpop also-rans Shed Seven and Kula Shaker started touring again whereas East 17 and Five attempted comebacks that limped hatefully into 2007 before they lost their tenuous grip on the bandwagon altogether.

From the worthy to the execrable, it seems that there is a big market for nostalgia, particularly for 1990’s bands. Why is this I wonder? Are we late-twentysomethings the first generation unable to cope with adult life, forever looking back to an innocent age before debt and proper jobs loomed like omnipresent spectres above the minutiae of our daily existence? With the prospects of marriage and children pushed ever further into our thirties and the bottom rung of the property ladder whisked upwards beyond the reach of many, an entire generation appears to be suffering from arrested development (this would have given me a nice link if Mr Wendell’s hip-hoppers had reformed this year but they had the prescience to reform in 2000.)

Indeed, at my age my forebears sweated in the factories, mills and shipyards of the North-East by necessity with families to support, yet I live like a student in rented accommodation. Perhaps we’re too soft, spoiled by a nanny state that puts cotton-wool over life’s rough edges or perhaps we should be grateful for this cultural shift towards self-fulfilment and keeping the real world at arm’s length. Whatever, it just pains me that the Spice Girls are back from the dead.

Brits, Brats and Godlike Geniuses

The New Year will see both the Brit and NME awards poised to reward the great and good of the music scene but ultimately, aren’t award ceremonies by their very nature quite ridiculous? Music is subjective and the idea that an album is better or worse due to an award or lack thereof is fatuous. It’s less about art/music and more about industry backslapping, careerism and a ticket to celebrity-ville. To quote Morrissey, “award ceremonies in pop music are dreadful to witness and are simply a way of the industry warning the artist ‘see how much you need us.’”

Apparently the Manic Street Preachers are in line to receive the NME’s Godlike Genius award in 2008. Speaking to NME, bassist Nicky Wire said: “We’ve won four Brit Awards, Ivor Novellos, but it’s vindication. It feels like the best one because the NME is what I grew up with and for all its faults it still means a lot to me. It’s so fucking brilliant, honestly. It’s really made me feel fantastic.””

This from a man who once said “if we ever get a Brit award, I'm gonna get my dick out, piss on it and tell them to shove it up their arse.” I realise that this refers to a different award ceremony and the NME’s Brat Awards has traditionally offered an alternative to the mainstream, but tellingly it’s now called the Shockwaves NME Awards. Of course, people are entitled to change their minds as they age and mellow but I’d love to see a band adopt the latter stance and not play the industry game (simply refusing to turn up would suffice rather than actioning Nicky’s rather more graphic threat.) Plenty of bands claim to be “just about the music” – prove it then.

Touts must be stopped, not taxed

I read today of the proposed move, backed by such luminaries as Arctic Monkeys, Robbie Williams and Radiohead, to apply a tax to the resale of gig tickets on eBay and suchlike, the argument being that excess money raised is then directed back towards the industry instead of into the pockets of touts.

What rot. This is merely the greed of a desperate music industry. As touts tend to sell at such hugely inflated prices anyway, such a tax (unless huge) is unlikely to deter these parasitic slatterns. How about disallowing the resale of tickets completely? The key issue here is that genuine fans should be able to see their favourite bands, without touts buying as many as they can get their hateful hands on and selling them on the web for exorbitant prices.

While I’m at it, let me reserve some bile for the people who actually pay inflated ticket prices; without this unprincipled, frenzied desperation there would be no problem in the first place. This merely supports the touts’ argument that this is a simple supply and demand situation and perpetuates their fetid existence.

However, it’s true that genuine fans unable to make the gig would be unfairly penalised if forced to pay a levy or legally prevented from reselling their ticket. This being the case, why not establish a decent refund policy so that these people are covered without the need for third parties? Or how about staggering ticket sales as practiced in Sweden? This way the majority of the tickets are sold as normal, but some are withheld until a week or two before the gig. As such, the availability of tickets at normal price thwarts the black market resale efforts.

This is an eminently solvable problem that will not be addressed by toothless “I demand my slice of the pie” levies, ostensibly in the interests of fans but achieving nothing.

http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2222013,00.html