No Rock And Roll Fun

BEULAH BLOW OUT OF HERE: Friends, Angel, Frasier... this year is seeing a lot of long-runners come to their final curtain. Joining them on the pile are Beulah, playing their farewell hometown gig tonight, and then doing an outdoor final show on August 5th, Battery Park, New York - the music equivalent, we guess, of a clips show followed by an hour long double edition.

The San Fran Guardian worries that the Beulah bow marks the end of something - a gentrification of indie, the genre reaching a point where it decides to put its feet up and not spend so much time hanging about in noisy bars of an evening, which is a curious perception: indie alt-rock stuff has been around for so long now surely it's easy to see this as merely a shading from one generation to the next? Alt-rock didn't die when The Damned or the House of Love stopped making records, so there's no reason to start packing away the wah-wah pedals and tambourines just because the current generation has had enough. You can't stop people arsing about with guitars - we're not sure if a "thank god" or "unfortunately" is appropriate here - and while it's sad to see a soldier down, the fight will always go on. Angel would understand.