Ryan Jarman defends Courtney Love

Ryan Jarman launches into a spirited defence of Courtney Love in a blog for the NME freesheet.

There are a lot of grounds to call out people who attack Love - some are motivated by sexism; some forget that she has had a stack of challenges to deal with; just waving Celebrity Skin should be enough. Jarman's case, though, seems to rest on her being a chum:

I stayed at her place for a bit and it was such a fun time because Courtney is a total star and when you live with her she absolutely shows you that proper side of being famous. It's kind of trippy and amazing. To a newer generation of people, she still wields a lot of power because of who she was when they were growing up. She still conducts herself in the same way - she hasn't mellowed in any way. Absolutely, she is exactly as you'd expect and the way she presents herself in the public eye is not put on whatsoever.

That's lovely, but... it's not really a defence, is it? 'Don't slag her off because she's the same behind closed doors' would only work if the Love-Haters suggested she was fake, and I don't think even Courtney's strongest detractor has ever accused her of putting on an act. Indeed, many pops at her are motivated by concern that she doesn't change her behaviour when she's in public. Courtney Love has never been a woman with an Outdoor Voice.

The trouble with Jarman's defence of Courtney is that it simply ignores the missteps Love has made. Those - the throwing of bottles; the battles with Courtney Love the band; beating up David Gedge at Reading because he'd worked with Albini; tussling through the courts with the rest of Nirvana; the list goes on - are fair grounds to question some of her decisions. And those fair grounds have, over the years, become fairgrounds on which more extreme whack-a-Hole games have been established.

If you want to say 'it's gone too far' or 'she doesn't deserve all this', that's fine. But to do that effectively, you have to understand where it began.

If you love Courtney Love for who she is, and what she is, you have to understand that she's always been uncompromising.

And you have to understand that not being willing to compromise isn't going to endear you to a lot of people.

Ryan Jarman knows Courtney Love. I'm not convinced he knows people, though.

What the pop papers say: Indie in peril

Perhaps the NME is having a little joke, slapping yet another Libertines cover on the front of an issue in which is frets over the future of indie music.

It's thinky-piece is inspired by another in Music Week, which ran some statistics suggesting "sales of rock and indie [singles] have nosedived" while urban and pop have increased. Nicky Wire's theatrical yawning over the current state of music - a tradition as old and regular as The Queen's Christmas Speech - has also been stirred into the mix.

Naturally, any subscriber to Music Week would simply shrug here; music goes through cyclical boom-and-busts; sometimes Abba does well; sometimes the sales go to Oasis.

In fact, any subscriber to Music Week would not even bother shrugging; telling the music industry that pop and urban are doing better than rock is like telling a baker demand for macaroons is up while eccles cakes are struggling; for them, it's nuances on the total sales, not really a matter of great concern.

The conflation of 'rock' and 'indie' into one great supersegment perhaps suggests part of the reason why guitars are struggling a bit down at the sales floor - they shouldn't be the same thing at all, and yet who can really argue there's a reason to treat Guns N Roses, Kings Of Leon and The Cribs as if they were different beasts? The product line has been shrunk way too far; why wouldn't you expect people to turn away?

Indie doesn't really have any useful meaning any more, except perhaps when paired with a sneering 'schmindie'; if a genre has lost any distinctiveness, of course it will look dead.

Mind you, judging the health of any type of music simply by looking at chart positions and singles sales is a bit dodgy; it's like counting the number of horseshoes sold to try and work out how many people are making journeys in the UK. The loose correlation might have meant something once, but by now, it's frankly worthless as a measure.

Look at how the NME tries to take The Cribs as a test of indie-health:

The Cribs are a case in point - up until Cheat On Me in 2009, their previous singles had all cracked the Top 40. Cheat On Me entered the charts at number 80. Their next single, this year's Housewife, debuted at 105.

There's a few things here - firstly, it assumes that all Cribs singles are equal and equally good.

Secondly, with singles sales quite low, the difference between 105 and 80 - and probably 80 and 40 - is only going to be a handful of sales.

More importantly, Housewife was a "surprise download-only single", so its relatively low sales don't really count. Oh, and none of the singles taken from the first album even troubled the Top 40. And last year's album, Ignore The Ignorant, reached number 8 and went silver, the best performance by a Cribs record yet. So the proof cited here is simply wrong, and even if it was accurate, it wouldn't prove anything anyway.

To be fair, Barry Nicholson does eventually rally his piece, quoting The Wild Beasts' Tom Fleming suggesting Music Week might be a bit irrelevant, and pointing to the buoyant live sales (albeit of The Courteeners), but he still concludes that "indie isn't dead, but it is hurting". But indie is dead, Barry. Interesting music on the margins isn't, and we should be celebrating that the plodding constraints of the mangled indie brandings are finally slipping away.

A little box suggests there's a bright future, and includes The Kings Of Leon in there. Perhaps the NME is having a little joke, like suggesting tumours might be a cure for cancer.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Karen Ablaze

There's been some excellent stuff in the Guardian this week. First up, Karen Ablaze was invited by The Cribs to write about fanzines, which gave me the same excited chill I used to get when the A4 stamped, self-addressed envelope arrived from Leeds with the latest Ablaze in it:

Claire Circuit, the scene queen of Leeds electronica, sums up why the internet hasn't killed the fanzine star: "Good, meaty, enjoyable music writing never translates well to the screen. Sometimes it's just the way the lines scan on the big screen, or maybe it's the links littered through the text, always tempting you away from the page you're on." As the co-ordinator of Cops And Robbers, a long-running listings 'zine and website serving Leeds' legendary DIY gig scene, she utilises both paper pamphlets and a strong online forum. "People pick it up in the pub, read it, discuss it, pass it around," while last minute changes can be posted to the site any time. "There's still room for the tangible and the physical," she argues. "I like the idea of all of us leaving behind evidence of the great things we are creating now. I'd rather not leave a legacy solely consisting of Facebook photo albums and 404 'Page not found' messages."

Yes, yes, the cruel jibe occured to us, too

Gary Jarman has been left unable to talk for two weeks following an operation to save his voice and, by implication, The Cribs:

"You may have noticed that my once youthful sounding cherub-like voice from the first album has, over the course of three records, degenerated into the grizzled, bitter old man voice of today. Well, no more! I am currently mute, unable to speak for the next couple of weeks, and on a heady mixture of Vicodin and Throat Coat tea."

To be honest, I'd thought it was just late onset puberty doing that, but it turns out it was the old nodules on the vocal chords. Which have now been removed.

Naked and unconscious: Ryan Jarman barely makes it

Only the brave and the foolish leave the safety of the stage to wade into the audience.

We're not sure which The Cribs' Ryan Jarman is, but he sure is lucky.

NME reports on the Birmingham Acadmey show from Friday night:

Jarman lost consciousness near the end of the set, after he hurled himself into the crowd where he was mobbed. He was hauled from the crowd unconscious by a security guard, with most of his clothes ripped off him by fans. He regained consciousness after being shaken by another security guard. Jarman was unconscious for around 20 seconds in total.

Medical opinion suggests he was dehydrated and exhausted. Apparently he returned to the stage "shirtless" and with his jeans in tatters. Let's hope he didn't have anything important in his pockets.

Cribs decry lack of 'ethics'

The Cribs are worried that the UK music scene is about to go the way of Britpop - although without the huge-selling acts and Louise Wener, obviously. It's all gone to pot, they wail:

"I think there's a couple of good bands. But I mean just that; a couple of good bands. I'm not gonna mention any names - in a good or bad way - and I'm not going to call anyone out by name. But music is rubbish right now.”

"There aren't any bands with ethics. Things have got how Britpop was a few years ago, with people identifying something that is popular, and just doing the same and jumping on the bandwagon."

We're not sure it's entirely unethical to play music that sound slike other people's music - after all, The Cribs wouldn't last long in a moot court if that was the charge against them - but we know what he means.

Planet's needs, Al Gore's needs, whatever

We're a little puzzled by the claims that The Cribs have been "forced" to apologise for making a mild joke onstage at Glastonbury.

The joke - actually, mild might be over-stating it a bit - was this:

"They want us to speak out about global warming, but the biggest problem is the attitude of some indie bands. Isn't that a bigger problem?"

Since then, Ryan Jarman has issued a clarification:

At no point was I meaning to criticise the festival's climate campaign, I was just making a flippant remark about, how in my opinion, the mainstream mindset of most "indie" bands these days is the real scourge we should be against."

But as far as we can tell, nobody even noticed the original remark, much less took it seriously; certainly, the only reason we can think of for Jarman making this semi-retraction would be an Uncle Ken moment. Everyone has an Uncle Ken, who makes lame puns at family gatherings and - mistaking people pretending not to have heard for people who didn't hear - will repeat the joke, with worse timing and the wrong inflection.

Attempt to generate publicity succeeds shocker

Attempts to get themselves a few column inches here and there by making a video with splashes of needless violence in have paid off for The Cribs, with the promo for Mens Needs being reportedly "banned" by MTV2.

Although, actually, it's just being restricted to post-watershed slots, and that's because Ofcom reminded MTV of the terms of its licence. Which isn't exactly the same as being banned.

Indie crime wave: Now it hits the UK

After one of The Dears had all his stuff pinched yesterday comes news that The Cribs have been relieved of a drum kit and a microphone at the Glasgow Admiral:

We don't care about the mic, although it's still not cool to nick stuff like that off a band touring on a really small budget, but we are really bummed out about the snare drum. It has a lot of sentimental value.

"We know that it went missing from inside the venue after the club checked the CCTV, and there was only 200 people in the club, so someone must know something about it."

Well, someone must know something about it on account of how they currently have a drumkit ("a Rogers vintage snare drum in a 2-tone blue burst finish") that doesn't belong to them. All information to ensure a happy reunion of band and kit to be dropped off at The Cribs MySpace page.

Keep 'em peeled.