Category: Music

Categories
Melbourne Music

Time Since Britpop

Can it really be 10 years, since I ended a blog post on this very site with the statement

Can it really be 10 years since the day Blur and Oasis released Country House/Roll With It on the same day…

Well there’s still nothing that highlights the passing of the years to me quite like Time-Since-Britpop™. Those heady mid 90s days when any group of lads with a couple of guitars who’d been to The Good Mixer at least once could bag themselves a record deal, a Melody Maker cover and get their CD single digipack catapulted to the dizzy heights of one week at number 18 in the charts.

Today the Maker is gone, the NME is being given away, and I can’t remember the last time I bought music on CD (“Granddad? What’s a CD?”) The Good Mixer survives, apparently…

I was transported back on a wave of nostalgia last week when we went to see Blur play a predominately Greatest Hits set at Rod Laver Arena for a generally appreciative Melbourne crowd (who clearly hadn’t really listened to The Magic Whip…)

Part way through This Is A Low I suddenly had a very clear memory of listening to them being interviewed by Simon Mayo on Radio 1 in the week before Parklife came out. 1994. Gosh, doesn’t 1994 all seem like such a long time ago now? I didn’t even own my own copy of Parklife — although I did record my sister’s CD onto tape so I could listen to it without having to steal her copy from its prized spot in the 3 CD changer thingy at the top of her stereo (this of course was back in the days before home taping killed music).

I was also struck by how dated many of the references in the songs were — there’s something very late 90s about The Universal, for example. All lottery references and “satellites in every home”. Damon even introduced Trouble In The Message Centre as their “pre-internet” song (come to think of it, I’m not sure “message centre” was a particularly current reference in the 90s either…) But luckily those songs still sound as majestic as ever, dated or not.

Oh, and they played bloody Trimm Trabb again. Seriously lads, why are you doing this to me?

Categories
Getting Old Music

Oh Man. Twenty Years. Where The Hell Did That Go?

It has come to my attention that the third Manics album, The Holy Bible, was released twenty years ago today, on the 29th of August 1994. I have a clear memory of catching the bus into Southport, as a spotty 16 year old, to go and buy it from Our Price.

It was the first CD that I ever bought with my own money.

Of course I’d bought records before — so, so many embarrassing records ** — and cassettes, but I’d come to the party with CDs somewhat late. I’d only just got my first CD player the week before (a reward from my parents for doing well in my GCSEs) and The Holy Bible was the third CD in my collection, joining Definitely Maybe and His n Hers, which had both been given to me.

They were soon to be joined by hundreds more, the proceeds of my first job washing dishes at the Cathay Garden, but The Holy Bible was the one I played to death. I can still remember almost all of the lyrics, and I could probably quote you any of those little snippets of speech that play at the start of most tracks (“I wonder who you think you are? You damn well think you’re god or something? God give life and god taketh it away. Not you. I think you are the devil itself…”, “I eat too much to die, and not enough to stay alive; I’m piggy in the middle…”) For a while it was the default disc that I left in the player — this being a time when you had to get up and walk across the room, pick something out of a case and physically swap the disc if you wanted to listen to something else — and because I used it as my alarm, the opening riff of Yes still engages some kind of Pavlovian response that makes me think I should get out of bed and go and study A-Level Maths…

But now twenty years have passed and my copy of The Holy Bible is gathering dust in my parents’ house, and I’m on the other side of the world carrying round a small rectangular device that can store several thousand songs and fits in my pocket. Every now and again I experience a pang of nostalgia for mid nineties indie. I recently chucked everything I have from 1994 and 1995 back onto my pocket sized magical music device and have been enjoying rediscovering the delights of many forgotten and not so forgotten indie bands (…Gene, the Bluetones, Sleeper, Suede, The Wannadies…) I wonder what happened to all of them?

Now they’re as far in the past as Glam Rock was when I was listening to britpop. Oh man. Twenty years. This is what it feels like to get old, isn’t it?

 
 

** For reasons lost to history, the first record I ever owned was Chas n Dave’s 1987 Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup song, Hot Shot Tottenham. To this day I have no idea what possessed the nine year old me to want to own this 7 inch single — I am not and have never been a Spurs fan; I was a (clearly somewhat confused) Everton supporter even then. Perhaps I just really liked the song…

Categories
Melbourne Music

I’m Not Doing Requests

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, The Palais, St Kilda

This is a bit weird, innit? You all sitting down like that…

So says Mr Gallagher, three songs into his set, to his hitherto entirely seated audience at St Kilda’s The Palais theatre.

Do you have to sit down? I mean, have they told you that you have to sit down?

<pause>

Well stand up then…

<audience rises en masse…>

Thanks Noel. Someone had to say it. Thus began an entertaining hour and a half of old Oasis songs, stuff off his new album, and the occasional spot of banter. I was pretty happy with the mix of songs — including as it did, acoustic versions of Whatever and Supersonic, as well as a smattering of those great early B-Sides (Talk Tonight, Half The World Away, It’s Good To Be Free…), although it apparently wasn’t good enough for some of my fellow audience members, who started yelling out song titles at random in between tracks.

I’m not doing requests, says Noel. I didn’t spend 20 minutes last June working on this setlist for you lot to shout out random shit.

…Especially if you’re not wearing any merchandise, you cheap bastards…

One person who was wearing the merchandise was the kid sitting a couple of rows in front of me with his mum and dad, wearing his brand new Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds T-Shirt. He must have been about 14, and therefore wouldn’t even have been alive the first time I saw Oasis live (back in December 1994 at the Liverpool Royal Court…) Sheesh. That makes me feel old. Where did all that time go?

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, The Palais, St Kilda

Categories
Australia Music

Do You Remember The First Time?

So asked the giant green letters scrolling across the roof of Melbourne’s oddly shaped, boxing ring slash gig venue Festival Hall on Friday night, shortly before Jarvis and his reformed Pulp took to the stage to ask the same question in song form.

Well yes, Jarvis, I do actually. For me it was the 23rd February 1996 (15 years ago–gosh does that make me feel old…) half a lifetime ago on the other side of the world, in what was then the Manchester Nynex Arena, although to this day I’m not entirely sure who Nynex were, and why they were ever sponsoring a music venue in Manchester. This of course was in the days following that little incident at the Brits (Jarv was even interviewed from his dressing room before the Manchester gig by Chris Evans for TFI Friday).

Pulp are one of those bands that I really never thought I would see live again: even when they announced they were reforming to play the Isle of Wight, not to mention Wireless and that surprise Glasto set, all of which we narrowly avoided on our recent trip home, I thought I’d missed my chance.

There’s been some water under the bridge for the band as well as me in the intervening 15 years, but their set on Friday was remarkably similar to the one I saw them play in Manchester, and Jarvis was on good form, at least once he got his shoes sorted: after Do You Remember The First Time? he called back to the stage crew for a change of footwear, blaming the slippy Festival Hall stage. “They’re not orthopaedics”, he reassured us in his Sheffield deadpan as he put his new shoes on, before giving them a little try and announcing “oh yeah, you’re in for a show now…”

And we certainly were. Sadly they apparently played their last ever Australian show at Splendour last night, but I’m glad I was there for this one.

Categories
Australia Media Music TV

Having The Most Successful Show On Australian TV Must Be Such A Pain

Funny. Only the other day I was reading an interview in the weekend paper with the host of Channel Ten’s long running weekend morning music video show, Video Hits, which mentioned how profitable it is for the network:

At Ten, Video Hits is seen almost as part of the furniture, having been on-air in various guises for 25 years.

“It’s one of the most profitable shows on the network”, she says.

[The Age Life And Style, July 2, 2011]

Two days later, up pops new Ten CEO Lachlan Murdoch to cancel it.

It seems an odd decision to me, as surely it must have been a relatively cheap way of filling a lot of airtime. I wonder where the nation’s viewers will have to turn now to get their fix of music videos and sport.

Oh. That.

Even odder, though, is this quote at the end of that article from The Australian:

Mr Murdoch, who flagged the cuts earlier this year, blamed rising costs in news, the multi-channel Eleven and Ten’s hit show MasterChef Australia.

Quite. Having the single most successful reality ratings juggernaut on your books (which must surely pull in significant sponsorship revenue if the incessant product placement is anything to go by) must be such a burden. I’m sure the other free-to-air networks–who have been relentlessly throwing their own imitations at the TV wall in an attempt to make one stick–must feel your pain.