Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Received wisdom has it that the sound of Be Here Now by Oasis was caused by many hours of studio overindulgence. The reality (thanks to the demos on the new re-issue) is that it was always supposed to sound that way, note for note in some cases.
Got any more?
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Another first world problem – but this one IS music related. The shops are busy pushing an album for Father’s Day which in a wild display of imagination is called How it Works: The Dad: The Album. With a wittily ironic fake Ladybird book cover.
What irks me is the content: Foreigner, Meat Loaf, Journey, Rainbow, ZZ Top, Deep Purple, Jefferson Airplane… its all the 1970s/80s soft rock classics. I think the newest song is Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus (2000).
It’s all ok, and pretty good value if by some amazing chance you want some of these songs and don’t have them.
BUT, and you knew there was a but, the average father in the UK is 33, meaning he was born in 1983 and came of musical age in 1996. Post Nirvana, Post Grunge, post post-grunge, post Acid house.
So shouldn’t The Dad album be called the Grandad album? And more to the point, what tracks SHOULD the album have for fathers for whom the most significant era is 1990 to 2005? Oasis obviously. And Blur. What else?
(and yes I have teenagers, but lots of my contemporaries have grandkids so I’m not being ageist).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Works-Album-Various-Artists/dp/B01ERZIL6I
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Being officially self-employed and unofficially semi-retired after a career in accountancy, featuring five redundancies, I miss a good company Christmas party. When I was at the Manchester G-MEX we were always busy through December and into the new year with concerts and corporate parties. When the concerts stopped it was indoor funfairs. They all required my services so no rest for the wicked.
There was the occasional event that made it all worthwhile. Back in December 1997 we did two nights of Oasis that sold out in minutes. I was inundated with calls from people I had not heard from for years on the off chance I could get them a ticket and eventually I just stopped answering the phone. I had the added task of making sure the new-fangled website was working. We were inundated with hits from around the world when one of the shows was broadcast on MTV and also live on the radio.
Sit back and watch the full show when you have the time. Oasis were at the top of their game on this tour. As a venue we had stopped doing concerts after the recent opening of the Manchester Arena but the band » Continue Reading.
Although it’s probably over 20 years since I’ve been a regular reader I couldn’t resist buying the final edition before it gets relaunched as a freesheet. I still have some affection for the thing and I wish them well with the revamp. However, one factoid on page 10 speaks volumes about the fact that the paper has probably been stuck in a bit of a rut since 1994, where it reveals who has graced the cover of NME the most in the past 63 years. Not Mozzer, not The Beatles, not even Bowie (who comes a close 2nd with 32 covers). It is in fact those wacky funsters from Burnage, the brothers Gallagher, who have ‘graced’ the cover a whopping 78 times. It suggets the NME never really shook off Britpop, and somewhere along the line lost the confidence in putting ‘New’ on the cover in favour of remaining well in the comfort zone. Perhaps without the pressure of having to sell the thing it can get back to what it used to do and stop being a paper version of Uncut/Mojo
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I caught snooker star Ronnie O’Sullivan on the telly the other day – with the sound off, which perhaps helped the illusion – and I couldn’t help but see him as a member of Oasis.
That got me thinking. Benedict Cumberbatch clearly belongs in Sparks and Jonathan Ross in Spandau Ballet.
Any celebs strike you as having gone missing from a band?
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madfox on Britpop
AN ACCIDENTAL CONVERGENCE OF NOSTALGIA
How Suede, Blur, Oasis and Pulp came to define the UK’s youth-driven commercial music scene in the 1990s
“Britpop” is a term commonly used to group together up to a dozen musical acts which emerged in the UK in the early years of the 1990s and which would reach their creative and commercial peaks later that decade.
It’s tempting to regard these bands – chief among them Suede, Blur, Oasis and Pulp – as being part of some coherent movement. But this was not really the case: on closer inspection, there are significant differences in the musical and lyrical styles of each band, and in the social backgrounds, political interests and cultural fashions attached to them. Indeed, the key players could be seen to represent several of British popular music’s favourite genres from the past – 1960s beat, 1970s glam and pub rock, 1980s art-school pop – while a number of the also-rans dipped their toes in surf, folk rock and punk.
Britpop is a collection of divergent bands who just happened to become active or achieve recognition around the same time – when the extreme poles of grunge and rave » Continue Reading.
