Any more slicethepie?

It's not a new idea, but the involvement of Steve Pankhurst has helped generate some interest in Bandstocks.

Pankhurst was a founder of Friends Reunited, the service which lets you find out where the people you went to school with are now ("on Facebook", normally) and he's put some of the cash he got offloading the site to ITV into the new scheme. It's another one of those places where bands can appeal to fans to pay the costs of producing an album up front:

Bandstocks will let the public buy a stake in an artist in £10 increments. Once funding reaches a preordained level, for example £100,000, the money will be released for the act to record an album.

Investors will get a copy of the album, a credit on the CD sleeve and a percentage of the profits from its sale and licensing. They will also get priority ticket booking and the opportunity to buy limited edition releases. For the artist, founder Andrew Lewis claimed that Bandstocks would offer a better return than a major-label deal, as well as more freedom and control over copyright.

It's a great idea, but we're still puzzling over how a 100 grand album, paid for in ten quid chunks, would find space to squeeze in the names of ten thousand sponsors on the CD box.

Still, it's an idea that does work - and, effectively, puts 'funding an album' on a par with 'sponsoring a lemur at Chester Zoo' - although if you sponsor a lemur you get free tickets to see him do his thing. But not a free record.

Bandstocks has apparently got Martin Carr lined up to raise funds through its service, and - the crucial difference with similar services - it looks like the idea is to exert a quality control-cum-artistic judgement criteria on who will be able to apply for funding this way, rather than just providing the tools and inviting everyone to wade in. That, then, should help tempt cautious investors by building up a more positive track record of success.

Alan McGee: he really does see Oasis as his legacy

In the latest Guardian Music blog, Alan McGee sounds a deathly warning against hype. "Would you put your life in the hands of these rock and roll bands?", he asks, a not-very-subtle reminder of the band he put his pension scheme in the hands of, before kicking off a list of some of the much ballyhooed acts who flopped - Sigue Sigue Sputnik, The Roaring Boys, Orlando. That sort of thing. There's no room, oddly, for references to Baby Amphetamine, or the other bands that he pushed himself despite their lack of saleability; nor the Ozymadiantics of post-Definitely Maybe Oasis - Knebworth, surely, being a working example of what happens when you over-inflate the myth.

What really marks out the piece, though, is the opening, where McGee kicks the shit out of two of his own acts - two of the bands whose presence on the Creation roster made it impossible to dismiss the label as simply the packaging of nutritionally questionable fayre it had become by the time it ended:

Highlights of my hyping skills include talking up Kevin Shields to be a Brian Eno-like genius (when in fact you could put a monkey in the studio with Alan Moulder and make it sonically interesting), and the Boo Radleys, who were signed to demonstrate to Kevin that I could take anybody doing "his" music and make it a number one.

Although, of course, the Boo Radleys never had a number one single, and their number one album was the least Valentines-esque collection they ever turned in. Still, it's nice that McGee is keen to distance himself from the records which we used to have admit gave him a grudging claim to care about music - and it answers the question of how he could have put out Be Here Now with a straight face. It's the sound of calculators.

And his view of the current music scene is equally odd:

Now the internet is such well-trodden territory, death by blog-hype is becoming de rigueur. Both Beirut and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah had been called the indie second coming, and enforced an A&R policy of "Sign anything above an eight in Pitchfork" that caused certain bands to be picked up and dispensed with very quickly. Beirut's poor live performances were his death knell while Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's second album was (perhaps unfairly) dismissed.

Beirut, surely, is something of an acquired taste - Zach was never going to be a David Hamilton hotshot or play the lottery show, and it seems a little odd for McGee to be sniffly dismissing him after one album - not to mention that 4AD hardly oversold that one.

And who called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah "the indie second coming" anyway? Not to mention that per McGee's opening gambit, I might not put my life in their hands, but I'd certainly bet on them giving me a better evening or two than anything on Poptones.

The comments box on the blog has been overflowing with responses, but the sweetest of them all is a simple link to this, on YouTube. We're not entirely certain, but we think it might proves that Creation records was founded on the income McGee generated from his time as the Hofmeister bear:



[Thanks to Oliver Keens]

Boo Radleys Weekend: It's Lulu

In at, erm, 25 with a bullet, it's Boos and It's Lulu:



Full weekend listing

Boo Radleys Weekend: Snub end

Continuing our weekend Boofest, here's Happens To Us All from the much-missed Snub TV:



Full weekend listing

Boo Radleys Weekend: Glasto 1995

More Boos action, with three tracks from the 1995 Glastonbury appearance: It's Lulu, Stuck On Amber, and Reaching Out From Here:



Main Boo Radleys weekend post

Embed and breakfast man: Boo Radleys weekend

This weekend, a mini-festival of Boo Radleys performances. We have a more than soft spot for the Boos, having seen them a surpising number of times before they got good, due to their habit of popping up supporting every second band to play at Liverpool's Planet X, Poly or Cosmos. It's fair to say their skill at getting bookings ran a little ahead of their talents - Sice was, at this time, widely believed in the city to be miming his guitar parts. But all that gigging paid off, and slowly, the Do Badleys surprised all of us by getting good. And then essential, buoyed by a contract with Creation at the time when the label was both in a position to, and of a mind to, sign off on some experimental mucking about which resulted in a couple of the greatest, if most-overlooked, albums of what we have to call the Britpop era. If Oasis were Creation's cash cow, and the Primals the stud pony, the Boo Radleys were the label's clever chameleons.

So, across this weekend, some posts featuring the best of the You Radleys from BooTube. First, with the sort of bad-punning inevitably you've come to know and love, we disinter the band with their Glastonbury 1994 performance of Lazarus:



Also this weekend
Glastonbury 1995
Happens To Us All from Snub TV
It's Lulu on Top of the Pops

Buy Radleys:
A somewhat low-key Best Of released through Camden last month
Learning To Walk in 2003's re-issue of Rough Trade's 1992 compilation of their early stuff, including the debut ep which was released through a semi-obscure label based in Preston
Everything's Alright Forever and Giant Steps - that'd be those two albums we were talking about up there.