Indieobit: Gerard Smith

A few weeks after the band revealed he was ill, sad to report the death of TV On The Radio bassist Gerard Smith.

Smith joined the band as a full-time member in 2005, sliding in for the Return to Cookie Mountain album sessions. He was 34; his death was down to lung cancer.

There's a brief statement from the band:

We are very sad to announce the death of our beloved friend and bandmate, Gerard Smith, following a courageous fight against lung cancer. Gerard passed away the morning of April 20th, 2011. We will miss him terribly.

The following shows will be cancelled:

April 20 St. Andrew Halls, Detroit MI
April 22 Metro, Chicago IL
April 23 First Ave, Minneapolis MN
April 24 First Ave, Minneapolis MN
April 26 Ogden, Denver CO

There will be more information as it becomes available.

There's been too many good people dying too young from cancer recently.

Here's the band on Letterman in 2006:

T In The Park: TV On The Radio on the slide?

After Pete Doherty played the King Tuts tent at T in the Park, on came TV on the Radio. About half the audience made their excuses and left, which I think tells us something a bit grim about festival audiences.

NME are still doing their cool list

For reasons that can only be self-destructive, the NME is pushing ahead with its Cool List. Seven years they've been doing this now, and still not learning from their mistakes - which Stereogum helpfully point out: the NME is useless as separating 'cool' from 'notorious':

Before talking about NME's seventh annual cool list, it's kind of cool to look quickly at the 2007 Top 10 to see who's still ... cool. Lethal Bizzle? Barely. Amy Winehouse? Lucky to be alive. Ditto Keith Richards. Beth Ditto? No. Last year one, two, and three went, respectively, to Gallows' Frank Carter, Klaxons' Jamie Reynolds and CSS's Lovefoxx. This year they're all far from the top 10 and the coolest three folks didn't make the list at all 12 months ago.

Apparently, Liam Gallagher is cool again - number nine - while Noel isn't. Has nobody at the NME seen Liam's promo pictures, with his hair and attempts at soulful eyes making him look like Playmobil have licensed Snoopy? Alice Glass from Crystal Castles is at number one - because this is the one time a year when NME pretends it likes Gurls - and Jay-Z is at number two. He wasn't in the list last year; we're awaiting delivery of a full explanation as to why Jay-Z in the last twelve months was cool whereas Jay-Z between October 2006 and October 2007 wasn't even fiftieth coolest.

The only thing the cool list proves, year-in, year-out, is that the NME approaches music like a confused thirty-nine year old, trying to draw up some sort of list that will try and give it some sort of purchase on making sense of it all. Johnny Marr is slightly less cool than Dave from TV On The Radio, who in turn is slightly less cool than Lil Wayne. At least the Sunday Times Rich List shows the made-up numbers it uses in drawing up its equally pointless annual chart.

TV fans switched off

Bit of a snarl-up at the Concrete And Glass Festival, apparently, with NME.com reporting that "hundreds" of TV On The Radio fans were "shut out" of their gig last night. The report is a little sketchy on the detail - hundreds? really? And what happened to them? Were they ticket holders? - as instead the NME went inside to watch the gig rather than cover the story.

The problem seems to be a change in venue - NME says the switch came the day before, although actually the announcement the gig was moving indoors came on Wednesday; Hackney Council had imposed impossible licence conditions for the Hearne Street Car Park venue and so the whole thing had to be shifted to Cargo. It appears that you can fit less people in a Cargo hold than in a Car Park, then.

Tv On The Radio On The Internet

Just released (more or less): TV On The Radio's Dancing Choose video, off of Dear Science:

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Drowned In Sound have had a first listen to the new TV On The Radio album, Dear Science:

High, jangly guitars, bouncy bass and a relentless snare-heavy beat whisk you swiftly from stillness into a heady, sinister danse macabre. There are dark allusions to “the ploughshare and the sword” and an invitation, or maybe a demand, to “come pay witness to the whore of Babylon”. Horns, marimbas, cowbells and all manner of jungly squawks and clatters fill the air like mosquitoes, only to be cleared away by a kick-ass cymbal clash straight out of Kool & the Gang.

Scarlett Johansson prepares TV work

We're not sure the world entirely needs a Scarlett Johansson album, but it looks like we're going to get one anyway, produced by TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek. What's it going to sound like?

The actress's sound is "avant garde" and "very Marilyn Monroe" says Dockside Studio owner Steve Nails, and he reckons it could even go on to win a Grammy.

Uh... yes, because Marilyn Monroe was known for her avant garde musical work. She was like Yoko Ono or something. And we all know how much the Grammy judges love something away from the mainstream.

Shrigley's friends make time for music

The lyrics-without-music book Worried Noodles is set to get some music after all, as a stellar team of pop people provide musical settings for David Shrigley's words:

Christopher Francis - ‘One’
Grizzly Bear – ‘Blackcurant Jam’
R. Stevie Moore – ‘Live In Fear’
Phil Elvrum & Nick Krgovich - ‘Watcha Doin’'
Scarlett’s Well - ‘Maybe’
Psapp – ‘Sad Song’
Aidan Moffat & The Best Of’s - ‘Your Hands Are Cold’
Yacht – ‘I Saw You’
Simon Bookish – ‘Prince Of Wales’
Deerhoof – ‘You, Dog’
Hank – ‘Baby’s Bible’
Marriot 1262 (TV On The Radio Portland Chapter) - ‘Sweet, Sweet, Sweet Potato’
David Byrne – ‘For You’
James Chadwick – The Wooden Floor’
Islands - ‘Joy’
Cotton Candy – ‘A Sentimental Song’
Franz Ferdinand - ‘No’
Alig Fodder – ‘The Hole’
Cibelle – ‘Elaine’
Dirty Projectors – ‘Come Forward’
The Curtains - ‘Show Me The Way Things Work’
Max Tundra – ‘A Truce’
Munch Munch – ‘A Squirrel’
Liars – ‘Panic Button’
Tussle (ft. David Shrigley) - ‘A Clash Of Heads’
Trans Am – ‘The Film’
John Shankie – ‘A Song’
Scout Niblett – ‘The Bell’
Final Fantasy - ‘Joys’
Mt. Eerie – ‘A Sentimental Song’
The Dead Science - ‘Once I Found A Diamond’
Lord Cut Glass - ‘Maybe’
Per Francine – ‘Another Song’
Hot Chip - ‘No’
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - ‘The Pretty Girl’
Mitch Friedman - ‘Awesome’
Pyrolator & Stoya - ‘Elaine’
Les Georges Leningrad - ‘Manager And Coordinater Of Prostitutes’

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Stylus give you the basics to get by in sophsti-pop:

The Style Council – “My Ever Changing Moods” (1984) An inexplicable #29 hit in the US (Paul Weller’s first-ever taste of American chart glory—and his last), the Style Council’s definitive moment may be sophisti-pop’s, as well.

Seattle Trademark Lawyer breaksdown what happened when The Brokedown got a cease and desist from the The Brokedowns:

With 1,000 copies of their debut album already pressed, they went into “panic mode” and changed their name to The Broken West.

Village Voice meet up with Dean and Britta: once from Luna, now from, erm, Dean and Britta:

Another major change: Midway through the recording process, the longtime couple finally got hitched. I tell them that most couples like having that separation of work and home life; they reassure me that creatively, there's never any static. "I like that feedback," Britta says, looking at Dean. "There aren't that many people that if they said, 'I like it' or 'I don't like it', I would trust that."

Hour talks racism, music industry and intelligence with TV On The Radio's Kyp Malone:

"And I don't feel like being signed to a major is a prize," he continues. "The business end of music, it's ugly no matter what. Music and art is a social space that exists, and has existed, where black people helped create it - did most of the heavy lifting as far as rock'n'roll [is concerned]."

MP3Hugger provides a musically-illustrated guide to what happened to Slowdive after Slowdive:

Simon Scott played drums on most of Slowdive’s recordings from 1990 to 1994. On leaving the band he became a session drummer working with the likes of Chapterhouse and St. Etienne. His own band Inner Sleeve enjoyed a short existence on the Fierce Panda label after which Scott played drums with the much undervalued Lowgold. He currently heads up a shoegaze band named Televise who were formed in 2003 on foot of a brief sighting of Syd Barrett.

TV On The Radio raze Voice

TV On The Radio are fuming with Village Voice after they were depicted being driven over by Bob Dylan for a cover. TVOTR's Martín Perna suggests that drawing a white man (even Dylan) driving over a black man is insensitive:

Nowhere in the consciousness of Voice editors or illustrator David O'Keefe can we find memories of James Byrd, a black man who was dragged behind a truck to his death by white racists in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, or Arthur "J.R." Warren, who was run over four times and killed for being black and gay in West Virginia in 2000, and all the other lynchings that happened in the U.S. before and since. These events are still fresh in the minds of black people, as well as in the hearts and minds of the rest of us who may not be directly victimized by these particular lynchings but who are nonetheless endangered by racism and committed to social justice and healing America of its sick racist condition.

O'Keefe and his colleagues may not have meant to intentionally be racist. They probably meant to be funny, like the University of Texas law students, Clemson University undergrads, or white college students nationwide who plan and publicize their blackface or "ghetto parties," then act surprised that people find their actions offensive and unacceptable. That this picture could be drawn and not questioned or vetoed by any of the people who saw it prior to publication shows the level of ignorance and racism that persists in leftist institutions like the Voice that continue to posture as hip and progressive. It reveals that among decision-makers at the paper there is not one single person with any sort of racial consciousness or sensitivity who had the power or courage to send that picture back to the drawing board.

The Voice responds by, erm, blogging about it, or at least reproducing his letter, sucking their teeth and going "well... what do you think." Regardless of if you think Perna is seeing offence where there was none or not, that the Voice dealt with the issue by just opening a comments section on its website suggests a spot of cowardice on the editors' parts.

Still, at least some of the comments manage to focus on a more important question hanging over the drawing:

It's not the racist part of it; it doesn't always have to be race when there's a white guy doing something to a person of color. Instead, it's just violent. We get enough of that shoved down our throats daily.