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The trouble with the constant now is the sudden reunions of bands which you'd assumed understood that dying of shame was meant to be a once-and-for-all deal. Good god, Ugly Kid Joe have just released a new album. It's 2015, people. 2015. Ugly Kid Joe.
Before 1972, recorded music in America wasn't "protected" by copyright. Some streaming services have been taking advantage of this to stream vintage tracks without feeling the need to pay for the rights.
The RIAA wasn't happy about this, and so threatened Pandora with court to demand payment.
Before it came to this, Pandora was bullish:
In response, Pandora issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter: "Pandora is confident in its legal position and looks forward to a quick resolution of this matter."The resolution was pretty quick, but, erm not in Pandora's favour:
Pandora Media Inc. will pay $90 million to record labels to settle a dispute over oldies, the Internet radio giant said Thursday.So, are Pandora upset? Apparently not. Oh, no. This is, honestly, the outcome they were hoping for:
The agreement with the group of labels -- composed of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Capitol Records and ABKCO Music & Records -- resolves yet another major battle over royalties for recordings made before 1972.
Pandora Chief Executive Brian McAndrews, in statement, said the company was "excited" to have the dispute resolved. "We pursued this settlement in order to move the conversation forward and continue to foster a better, collaborative relationship with the labels," he said.Yeah. Thank god, eh? All they wanted to was make a massive payment and knock a fifth off their share price. That was all Pandora ever wanted. All they asked for. They're excited. Real excited.
Joe Moss, manager of Marion, has died.
Alright, he managed The Smiths too. That might be more culturally significant.
As recorded in The Severed Alliance - Johnny Rogan's Smiths bio; the one which had Morrissey wishing death upon the author - Moss decided to call it a day after The Smiths appeared on Top Of The Pops and did a frenzied date at the Haçienda on the same day:
Joe Moss was also entranced by The Smiths' performance, but a flash of self-awareness prompted him to ponder some searching questions. "I always thought Top Of The Pops was diabolical and there I was jumping for joy because we were on it. What had happened to my standards? And what would happen later?"Managing The Smiths wasn't always fun, it turns out:
[...]
For Joe Moss, 24 November was also an epoch, but one in which he could no longer be a participant. Having promised to remain with The Smiths until they "made it", he realized that his bargain had been fulfilled. "The commitment I could offer them was short-term. I'd already said to Johnny 'when I do go, if any questions are asked I'll say I had to get out for personal reasons.' He said 'no, say a little more than that, otherwise they'll think it's personal between you and the band.'
"It might be exciting being in a band, but it's not exciting to manage them. When I left, I left on what was an absolute high. It was the only way to go. I ran down the street shouting 'it's too late to stop now.'"Moss was 72; he was brought down by cancer.
Russell Simmons' post Def Jam career has seen him running a debit card service for people who can't access ordinary banks, Rushcard. The cards already have a faint whiff of exploitation about them - Time in 2013 pointed out that the fees piled up really quickly for users - and now the cards have locked themselves up. Users have found themselves unable to access any of the cash locked into the card for over a week.
Yes, that's right. The sort of people whose hand-to-mouth existence means they can't open everyday bank accounts have been unable to access their money for eight days.
They're blaming a problem with an upgrade to a computer system, which everyone believes because there's no way that they'd have been able to roll that back, right?
Russell Simmons, to be fair, hasn't vanished. But he's... well, he's not exactly helping, either:
Praying for this who have been and those who still are affected by the tech change at Rushcard
— Russell Simmons (@UncleRUSH) October 17, 2015
Gene Simmons took time out from shouting at clouds to have a little rage at file sharing for killing rock. Let's hear him out, shall we?:
"The next KISS of the next BEATLES or whoever it is is not gonna come along, because there is no infrastructure. Here… Let's play a game. From 1958 until 1988 is thirty years. What have we got? Well, let's see… We have Elvis Presley, THE BEATLES, THE [ROLLING] STONES, Jimi Hendrix… the biggest bands of all time. And then in disco, you had Madonna, Donna Summer… all that. The biggest of all. And then in pop, you had Michael Jackson, THE JACKSON 5… all that stuff… and U2. And in heavy metal, you had METALLICA and IRON MAIDEN and all that stuff. Okay. And Prince and all that… From 1988 until today… give me the new BEATLES and the new STONES. Give me just one. You can't. Rock is dead. And the reason for that? Downloading and filesharing. When you stop charging for things, it becomes worthless. And there's gonna have to be a business model that's gonna have to change.I suppose it's hard to argue that if you don't charge for something, it becomes worthless in a strict financial sense, but I'd have really liked to have heard from Simmons how filesharing stopped bands generating during the 1990s, before it became a thing. Maybe it's just such an evil force that it travels out in time in all directions.
'Cause there are great bands out there, but there's no support system." He continued: "You know, there's a ten-thousand-hour principle [the principle which holds that 10,000 hours of 'deliberate practice' are needed to become world-class in any field]. There's a book about that. Before THE BEATLES went into the studio to become THE BEATLES, they played clubs for ten thousand hours. That's years. You have to do something for thousands and thousands of hours before you get any good on it.You're right, Gene, there is a book about the 10,000 hours theory. There's also - far more significantly - a study into it. It's bollocks.
Nowadays, instant gratification means you can hum in your shower, then wind up on 'The X Factor' and you're on television and you get a recording contract. But almost none of these singers who get recording contracts become huge. And that's because the taller the tree, the deeper the root that needs to be in the ground to hold up all that weight. So if you have a tree with no roots [makes falling hand motion]." Simmons added: "I love the new pop singers. I love Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. I've met them both. They're all great and talented… What's gonna happen when you're 40 and 50? Will it still work? That's the test of time."What's beautiful here is Simmons suddenly realising that he's completely undermined his own argument by remembering Taylor Swift, so decides that she doesn't count as we don't known what she'll be doing in twenty years. Swift has been a jobbing musician for eleven years already, which means she's already been going for a year longer than The Beatles managed. Despite her career having happened entirely post-Napster.
Queensryche, if they are anything, are surely uncompromising. Why, look at their new-ish album. It's called Condition Human and has tracks like Toxic Remedy on it. This isn't some hugging-and-learning operation, right?
Well... up to a point. The album, and current iteration of the band, hasn't really been embraced by fans, and that's given Todd La Torre so many feels:
"Everyone evolves, and tastes change, and no one should be faulted for that. So, in Geoff's defense — again, I don't know him personally — but I feel bad that our side and his side and anybody's side has had the harsh criticism… I mean, there's a difference between constructive criticism and unwavering, relentless bashing. I'm a human being, he's a human being… We're all just people at the end of the day, and we do have feelings. And I wish people would just exercise a little more altruism and compassion. Because people just say things with no filter and no regard, without thinking of the recipient on the other side. And at the end of the day, we just wanna write great music for people, and so does he. And, look, if the QUEENSRŸCHE fan base feels they have double the pleasure of music to listen to, then stop bitching and enjoy everybody's music."This is pretty much the Wizard saying "actually, please do pay attention to the man behind the curtain. He's doing his best, right. Why can't the people of Oz just cut him some slack."
The most-read October stories, from any October:
1. RIP: Paul Walters
2. RIP: John Peel
3. RIP: Taylor Mitchell
4. Edith Bowman sheds clothes in the name of charity
5. When everyone believed Ronnie Hazelhurst wrote S Club 7 songs
6. RIP: Dainton Connell
7. Depeche Mode reunited. Let's hope it's not awkward
8. Brandon Flowers thought American Idiot was unpatriotic or something
9. People moaning about people moaning about people moaning about the Glastonbury ticket system
10. Pop papers: NME on Brody Dalle, Friendster & Pele.
This week's interesting releases:
Penetration - Resolution
Download Resolution
Tori Amos - The Light Princess
Download The Light Princess
Reverend & The Makers - Mirrors
Download Mirrors
The Mercury Prize shortlist has been announced, which we'll get to a moment. But first, to celebrate the now-defunct communications company who give the name to the prize, here's a lovely video showing how they cared for their customers until they flogged them to Deutsche Telekom for about seven million quid:
So, here's the shortlist in the year that is already being called "sorry, Wolf Alice, we think it's time for one of those years the outsiders win in order to keep it exciting":
Aphex Twin: SyroThe Vaccines haven't been nominated, you'll note, but they're not bothered at all, oh no. No. Not. Remotely. Bothered. In fact, they're so not bothered, they're making sure everyone knows how unbothered they are:
Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool
Roisin Murphy: Hairless Toys
C Duncan: Architect
ESKA: Eska
Florence + the Machine: How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
Ghostpoet: Shedding Skin
Benjamin Clementine: At Least for Now
Jamie xx: In Colour
Soak: Before We Forgot How to Dream
Gaz Coombes: Matador
Slaves: Are You Satisfied?
Speaking to NME, [Justin Hayward] Young said: "We've never been nominated so we never expect to be."To be frank, I'm not sure there's anything more Kentish Town/Pizza East than describing your fans as "our demographic", but let's set that aside.
He added: "The cafetiere-drinking, Kentish Town-dwelling, Pizza East, 6 Music listener; that's not our demographic."
Kanye West - the character out of the Kim Cardigan show - has already made noises about perhaps running for president in 2020. I think we're all assuming he's using the phrase "running for president" in the sense that Donald Trump uses it, as in "mugging for the cameras".
Now, a second name drawn from the "I think they used to make records, didn't they?" file has announced her intention to run. Step forward, Lindsay Lohan. No, really, step forward, I struggle to remember which one is you and which one is Hilary Duff.
Lohan is already constructing her platform:
The first thing I would like to do as president of 🇺🇸 is take care of all of the children suffering in the world.🎹💜🌎🌏👊🏻👊🏾👊🏼👊🏽🙏🏻💋🙌 #queenELIZABETH showed me how by having me in her country 🇬🇧Just as a side note, this is the first emoji-strewn post in over a decade of No Rock and Roll Fun, and I couldn't be more proud. I'm using "proud" in the sense that Jeb Bush uses when he says positive things about Donald Trump, as in "jesus, this is still a thing?"
Oh, good. They're turning Michael Jackson's death into a jolly television drama.
(Given it was played out on TV in real time, strictly speaking this is a remake, surely?)
Warner Bros said in a statement that the biography will "examine the soaring highs and deep lows faced by the late popstar - his constant hunt for privacy in a life that was more public than almost any other, and the pressures he endured as someone whose fame made him socially fragile and almost unable to live".There's a couple of things here, Warner Bros - first, he dies in the end so there's no "almost" required; just "unable to live" will suffice.
To be fair to Bieber, you should be able to do what you like in what should be a private place, with your private places, but this just sounds wrong:
Now, Bieber has told Access Hollywood that he felt "violated" by the incident. "My first thing was like…how can they do this?" he said. "Like, I feel super violated. Like, I feel like I can't step outside and feel like I can go outside naked. Like, you should feel comfortable in your own space… especially that far away"."I don't feel I can go outside naked" doesn't sound like a problem - indeed, "I feel I can go outside naked" is the sort of thing your Uncle said just before he stopped being invited around for Christmas. It's not the small penis, it's the long lens that's the problem, surely, and that remains a problem even if you were swaddled like a new born in a snowstorm, Justin.
Camera Obscura keyboardist and singer Carey Lander has died. The band issued a statement via Facebook:
It is with the greatest sadness, that we must share the news that Carey passed away peacefully this morning after her illness with cancer. We have lost our friend and band mate, and our deepest sympathy goes out to her partner Kenny, and to all her family and friends.The next part of the statement is important - Carey's fundraising goes on:
She was touched by the way you all got behind her campaign for Sarcoma UK and you can still donate here: https://www.justgiving.com/Carey-LanderThat URL again? https://www.justgiving.com/Carey-Lander. Go give something.
We shall be continuing to help promote the campaign on her behalf.
She was left in no doubt how much you all loved and appreciated her, and we'd like to thank you all for the support and kind words you have been sending to us and her. The band, our music, and all of you who have enjoyed it over the years, meant so much to her.
Thank you all, Tracyanne, Gavin, Kenny and Lee x
So Annie Clark's sister has got a Mexican restaurant in Dallas. And because Mexican restaurants are best if they're family businesses, Annie's been helping out:
The chef for Resident Taqueria confirmed Clark’s employment to Pitchfork, saying she’s been taking food orders, refilling napkin dispensers, and clearing tables, among other restaurant responsibilities.It's unclear if the chef will repay the favour by doing food orders at the next St Vincent date.
Demi Lovato has been sharing stories of her mental health with Senators in the hope they might try and sort out the messy US healthcare system's approach to similar patients.
Texan Republican John Cornyn did some research:
“I was very impressed by Miss Lovato,” he said. “I don’t necessarily follow her music very closely but I did Google her and pulled up a YouTube video of some of her performances. She’s had an incredible story.”He obviously wanted that on the public record in case anyone ever wondered why this would be in his search history:
Robbin Thompson, singer with Steel Mill (which also featured a young Bruce Springsteen), has died.
He'd been leading his own band, Mercy Flight, when Bruce approached him:
"One day, out of the blue, Bruce said, 'I'm thinking about adding another singer that can play a little guitar. Do you want to try out?'" Thompson told the Port Folio Weekly in 2008. "I went up to Jersey, spent a weekend, and the next thing I know I'm up there playing. I really never could figure out why they needed me in the band! That was the summer of 1970, and I was in it for close to a year."He also composed the official popular state song of Virginia. This one:
There's an excellent piece about Terence Trent D'Arby at the New Statesman website. Interviewed by Kate Mossman, he's by turns self-aggrandising - claiming he was debated about in the House of Lords, something Hansard doesn't appear to record; charming; alarming; disarming and even - and this isn't something I've ever come across in a few decades of reading TTD interviews - like a human:
I press him about the lyrics to “Giraffe”, a likeable, child-friendly melody that contains the lines: “Giraffe/can I have your autograph?/Please sign it to Sananda”. When I suggest that it sounds like a song from Sesame Street he brightens. For the past five years he has been listening almost exclusively to children’s music with his two sons, aged three and five. Joe Raposo, who wrote many of the programme’s best-loved songs, including “It’s Not Easy Being Green”, is one of his favourite composers. His husky voice swells into a perfect, sparkly croon: Can you tell me how to get – how to get to Sesame Street! “You know,” he says, “I think Elvis Costello was also influenced by some of Raposo’s stuff. You’re not supposed to say that, as an angry young writer, ‘Oh yeah, I listen to Sesame Street,’ but I can hear certain devices of his that sound like that whole Electric Company style of songwriting.”
His boys love “Giraffe”, but he can’t be around while they are listening to it; his wife later tells me she has to wait until he’s out of the house to play it to them. He talks touchingly about love being “something you have to work on – it doesn’t just come to you”. As a young man, he scythed his way through women, partly because of his mother issues, he thinks: then one day he decided to stop, “because you’re only going to wind up looking for the same thing anyway”.
Ten years ago this week:
Ricky Wilson and Mark Radcliffe swap jobs. As if Wilson would end up a presenter, eh?
Melissa Etheridge was happy talking about self-medicating with dope
Rachel Stevens made a bid to be a Bond girl and Madonna was trying to make a Kabbala kids TV show
I don't think anyone ever really understood they Boy George/sex worker/cocaine story
Tatu tried to fight back against Charlotte Church
Radio One tried a night in memory of John Peel, anchored by, erm, Colin Murray
Prince needed a hip replacement, and the Stones toured with a defribulator
... and Corey Taylor had a screaming teacher
Last week's new releases:
Lucy Ward - I Dreamt I Was A Bird
Download I Dreamt I Was A Bird
The Close Lobster - Firestation Towers
Download Firestation Towers
Swim Deep - Mothers
Download The Light In You
Mercury Rev - The Light In You
Download The Light In You
Squeeze - Cradle To The Grave
Download Cradle To The Grave
BBC News is reporting that Jim Diamond has died.
Diamond's breakthrough came as part of PhD, formed with some offcuts of the Jeff Beck Band - Beck even turning up to guest on one track. This one:
PhD split in 1984, and Jim went on to a degree of solo success, most notably with I Should Have Known Better - a million-plus seller, despite Diamond's attempt to get people to buy a different record:
I'm delighted to be number one, but next week I don't want them to buy my record, I want them to buy Band Aid instead.People did do that. It's unclear how many purchases were transferred from Jim to Bob, though.
He's still got it. 'One of our great underestimated talents,' as the great Keith Altham describes him. Yet another of rock's unsung heroes, the voices that got away. Voices that should have soared all the way to Coutts and beyond the international space station, but never quite did. He's still Jim. Unshakably rooted in the Scottish homeland he eulogises as he remembers his Daddy, the late fireman whom he adored. He acknowledges the song that 'bought the house.' He dedicates songs to his friends, his children, his beautiful wife Chrissie – 'the one thing that is always there, that has always been there, constant, no matter what.' We all have that, Jim? No, we don't. We'd all like that.Jim Diamond was 63; the cause of death has not been shared with the public.
Here's something that I don't think anyone was expecting to be reading a couple of years back: HMV is thriving.
Yes, HMV.
Yes, it's doing quite well:
The UK music retailer has opened 14 new stores this year, with another three planned before Christmas. This is in stark contrast to early 2013 when the business collapsed under £176m of debt and 80 of its 223 shops were shut. It was rescued by the retail turnaround firm Hilco, which took on 141 high street stores and 2,600 employees.And turn around it has - mostly by not making the mistakes of the past, and admitting it's not a technology shop, or a cinema, or a youth club. It's been helped by the vinyl revival - which it may be hoping isn't just a fad - and there's this, too:
HMV has made a rapid comeback on the high street, wresting the title of the UK’s biggest music and DVD retailer back from Amazon in January.I suspect the Guardian actually means physical retailer there, and it's a bit of a double-edged honour; it's not that it's suddenly become a more powerful retailer, just that online, people are streaming or downloading a lot more, so why would you buy a CD from Amazon?
Here's what Bucks Fizz (or the remnants thereof) are legally trading as these days:
It's Paris Fashion Week - you don't need me to tell you that. Our eye is caught by a line in Wonderland Magazine:
Acne Studio’s Creative Director, Jonny Johansson, pays the ultimate homage to the world of music. A binding of everything he has known and loved about music in the present and past, the collection works a reoccurring motif of coloured CD prints in green, purple, blue and red. Dominating Perspex guitar badges are attached to the backs and fronts of tops and the classic 80’s shoulder padded blazer.Let's just stop there. If you're having trouble imagining what that's like... well, it's like this:
Somebody called out a proposal during Chvrches in London. Lauren didn't fan herself and say yes:
"Come on! What's the hit rate on that? When you go into public places and ask women you don't know if they want to wed you. Does that work out well for you, sir?" Lauren lightheartedly enquired.It's probable that the guy wasn't actually expecting his proposal to be considered seriously - although it's lovely to think that maybe he did, and the wings had been a small mariachi band, a sommelier carrying champagne, and a dog with gift-wrapped ring in his mouth, all waiting for a signal from the guy to come in when Lauren said 'yes'. Seconds after the proposal flopped, all these people would have been milling about mumbling "we better still be paid for this".
She went on: "Also, I assume because you're here that you know a bit about our band. I'm very grumpy. I don't want that shit.
"Thank you everybody else and sorry for shaming that one person - but if nobody tells you, you're never going to know."
So, apparently, Russia is going to stamp down on piracy by shaming advertisers:
The Russian government has vowed to crack down on the top 100 copyright-infringing sites, in order to shame the Top 100 brands into pulling their advertising from the pirate operations, Russia's Deputy Communications Minister Alexei Volin said this week.We know that nothing upsets Putin like the sight of something where it has, legally, no place being - you know, like a Russian army brigade in Ukraine.
"People need to come to their senses about this issue. Major brands are proud of being white-and-fluffy; so let's publish a list of all those brands that advertise on pirate sites." Wolin said this is the first step, with blacklisting sites also on the agenda.
Week three of the car-crash that is Free NME looking for an identity, and it manages to make last week's Robert Pattinson cover look like a wise choice. For staring out of the front page this time round, it's Chris Moyles.
Now, a Chris Moyles cover by itself doesn't have to be bad, if it was leading into a piece about Chris Moyles written out of curiosity. Instead, it just waves off four pages of fawning.
Moyles kicks off by announcing he's a feminist; he underpins this by listing the women he works with and muttering about tax on sanitary products. They ask about the whole "offering to fuck Charlotte Church now she's 16" thing - Moyles' defence is that he "said it once. I moved on." And how does NME counter this? Er, by just moving on to the next thing.
The next thing is his homophobia and racism. Unbelievably, Moyles uses the human shield defence - "one of my best friends is transgender".
Does the NME point out that this justification - don't judge me on what I do, judge me on who I know - is incredibly weak? No. Just write it down, type it up, print it out, move it on.
His continuing beef with Radio 1 is given paragraphs of space - which could have made for some interesting commentary; Moyles at Radio X suggests a man who's still obsessed with his Radio Ex, using the platform to try and convince Radio 1 that he's having a great time and he's really glad that they split up. Is there any attempt to quiz him on his obsession with Ben Cooper? Nope.
His tax arrangements? Mentioned just to allow Moyles to trot out a "I didn't break the law, and I paid it anyway" line before moving on. Yes, given the chance to ask him about his second hand car business, the NME blinks. Any opportunity to explore the question is gone.
Even on the reformatting of XFM as Radio X, which you think the NME would have once cared about, is treated in a way that will have Global Radio PR purring:
Don't expect to come to Moyles to find obscure new grime artists or cutting-edge psych-rock bands. Radio X has retained new-music champion John Kennedy's late-night X-Posure show for that. Moyles is here for the express purpose of entertaining people as they battle hangovers, get ready for another mind-numbing day in the office or peel out of bed before going to college.That radio station which was supposed to be the home of alternative music on British radio? Don't worry, they've kept a tiny rump of that late at night - presumably when the 'real' audience is out building up those hangovers for the morning.
Bruce Dickinson has shared how he sees his role knocking out old Iron Maiden songs for ageing rock fans:
"I feel like that sometimes on stage, that you are an intermediary between one world and another — the audience are in one world, the band are in their world, and as the singer, frontman, whatever, your job is to kind of bring the two worlds together, but not get them tangled up. Keep it under control without people realizing that, actually, they're in a safe place. Keep the audience in a safe place, but let everybody feel out of control. And so that's the way I feel often on stage.If they turn up and expect to be told what to do, how are they actually brutal? Unless you tell them to kill you for staring at your shoes? And why would you do that?
"Standing there looking beautiful is not performing. Performing comes from engaging. And it's hard work; you've gotta work to do that. Audiences are brutal — I mean, they will eat you alive — because they all paid good money to be entertained, and they turn up expecting to be told what to do. They may disagree with that, but actually they do. They turn up to a show, and they go, 'I came here to be…' you know. 'This is gonna be good. This is gonna be good. What do I do now?' And the band guide them; you guide them, you guide them, you guide them to a great place, where they go, 'Wow! What a great experience. Wasn't that cool? And we did this. And we all sang, and we all chanted.' But if the guy comes up on stage and goes, 'I'm gonna stare at my shoes and it's all about me,' they're gonna kill you. 'Cause it's not all about you, dude — it's about the music, and it's about them; it's about the audience."
Apparently, Harry Styles gets sent so many loads of designer clothes, he just drops them straight off at charity shops. Apparently:
A source shared: ''Harry was casually talking about all the free stuff he gets sent and how he can't keep up with all of it.I'm hoping shrewd charity shops up and down the country are exploiting this news, selling polyester trousers to starstruck preteens by saying "no, a man with extravagant hair dropped these off here earlier today. He also handed over this collection of Midsomer Murders on slightly damaged VHS tapes."
''He said he gives a lot of it away to friends and family but also drives up to charity shops and drops bin bags of designer clothes at a time.''
Most-read September stories:
1. Emily Ratajkowski's blurred lines
2. Pop papers: First free NME
3. David Cassidy won't be coming back to the UK
4. Bruce Dickinson doesn't get the modern world with all its Tweetering and Facebookies
5. The Robert Forster album is streaming at The Guardian
These were the new releases:
Robert Forster - Songs To Play
Download Songs To Play
Metric - Pagans In Vegas
Download Songs To Play
Meg Myers - Sorry
Download Meg Meyers
Battles - La Di Da Di
Download La Di Da Di
Lana Del Ray - Honeymoon
Download Honeymoon
Phases - For Life
Download For Life
