Which Celebrity has let me down the most? Bono.

(This is a copy and paste of what I wrote on Reddit:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U2_21081983_01_800b.jpg

 I'm 49. I was a U2 fan before Joshua Tree came out. U2's music in the 80s was very different from the mainstream pop. They sang about important things. Bono used his position to fight issues like racism, hunger and war. Then, when the 90s came around, they effectively re-invented their musical style. They also poked fun at themselves.

 I have the U2 Time magazine in a box somewhere, along with newspaper articles and vinyl records and singles from the time. They were my favourite band.

But there were three things which made me lose my respect from Bono and U2. This has resulted in me no longer listening to them and feeling very let down.

The first was the Iraq War.

U2 wrote a song called "Bullet the Blue Sky" in which they criticised US involvement in Nicaragua in the 1980s. The song even got banned from US radio. But by the time of the Iraq War, U2 were reaping considerable rewards from being a mainstream musical act. They could have used their power and influence to oppose the war. It would have lost them fans and money, and the right wing media would have excoriated them, but it would have meant that they were consistent to their principles. But what happened? They remained silent. Bono even went to the White House and shook hands with Bush. Meanwhile The Dixie Chicks stood up for what was right and were the musicians that took the brunt of right wing anger. And then when it came out that the US was torturing people in CIA secret prisons and in Abu Ghraib prison, did U2, supporter of Amnesty International and writer of "Mothers of the Disappeared" do anything? No. For me, this was the loss of U2's moral authority.

The second thing that happened was the U2 Tower.

Yeah, you read that right. Property developers in Dublin approached U2 with plans to create the tallest skyscraper in Ireland. At the top of the building would be a "pod" where U2 would live and record music. Of course the building was never built - the global financial crisis killed off those plans. But U2 acquiesced to the original plans and provided some investment.

The third thing was their failure to pay taxes.

After the GFC Ireland was in a mess. Unemployment was massive and the government had a huge budget deficit. The government decided to cut spending on welfare and thus the people who were hit the worst were the poor. U2 had stashed a lot of its earnings in overseas accounts and investments - completely legal but it was the sort of thing that a lot of rich people had done. As a result, U2 were not paying in tax what they should've been paying. Of course Ireland's fiscal nightmare wouldn't have been solved by U2 paying more tax, but it was the ethics of the situation that mattered. By keeping their earnings away from the taxman, U2 were part of the problem rather than being a solution - and the people who suffered from this problem were the poor, the very people that U2 had spent its life publicly championing. U2's manager, Paul McGuinness, defended the actions of the band, first arguing that it was legal (which it was, but that's not the point), before then launching into what I call the "CEO defence", namely that he spent time saying how wonderful U2 was to the economy and how many people were employed by them over the years, which was just another way of saying "you peasants should be grateful".

Most Irish people think U2 are a bunch of prats. I agree. They, especially Bono, are hypocrites, the worst sort of self-serving celebrity social champions.

20 Albums of my life

I've decided to do something personal here. I'm going to look at each decade of my life and which five albums were the most important.

Decade 1: 1970s

1. The Beatles - The Essential Beatles - 1972

The first musical memory I have, apart from my mum singing to me, is being enthralled by Yellow Submarine by the Beatles. I would listen to it all the time when I was around 4 or 5. As I got older and began to learn how to use the record player in our lounge room in Cheltenham, NSW. I naturally picked up this album and listened to it a lot. It was the only Beatles album we had and although it didn't contain Yellow Submarine almost all the songs on the album are stuck in the part of my mind that I have filed under childhood memories. The album itself was an Australia-only compilation. In the last ten years or so I have managed to buy about two-thirds of the Beatles official releases, purchased in their release order more or less. The next Beatles album I am due to buy is "The White Album".

2. Abba - Arrival - 1976

Abba were like the Justin Bieber of the 1970s. They were immensely popular yet there was a groundswell of hate towards them. In Australia Abba were hugely popular, with Fernando staying at the top of the charts for what seemed like months. I remember being in 2nd grade at Beecroft Primary School and being asked whether I liked Abba or not, only for the person asking me to say they didn't like them when I said I did. The album itself is full of songs that I remember. When I Kissed the Teacher seemed an odd song for an 8-year-old boy but I just ignored the problems posed by the song and kept going. There was something sad about My Love My Life that I felt but couldn't understand, and Tiger seemed to be a great song about a Tiger. In the 80s I grabbed my copy of Abba Arrival and defaced it with nails saying "Abba is dead", ashamed as I was to own it. These days I'm more tolerant towards "other" music but I don't listen to Abba. At all.

3. Hey Hey It's Daryl & Ossie - 1975

Daryl and Ossie were the stars of a 1970s Australian children's show called "Hey Hey It's Saturday" which eventually turned into a Saturday night entertainment program in the 1980s. I used to watch Hey Hey on Saturday mornings on TV. The first memory I have of watching colour TV for the first time was being entranced by the fact that Ossie's fur was pink. The songs I remember from the album include a song about purple people eaters, I Love Micky Mouse (but Donald Duck's so hard to find) and Puff the Magic Dragon. There was a song where Ossie became really sad and cried so Daryl cheered him up. The Micky Mouse song, if I remember, seemed to be a wistful reflection of lost childhood, something like Puff the Magic Dragon (and the end of Toy Story 3 for anyone who remembers).

4. Kraftwerk - Autobahn - 1974

My Dad was an engineer and probably a nerd in his day. For whatever reason he and one of my brothers began listening to electronic music. I remember listening to this album a lot when I was a kid - mainly side one, which was very much a song about a car driving along a German highway called an autobahn. I remember as a kid hearing the sounds of the car go by along with the catchy "autobahn" refrain and being hooked by the synth-riff. I was also interested in the fact that someone would make a 23 minute song that covered the first side of an LP. I bought this album as a CD about 8-9 years ago, and I also have "The Man Machine".

5. Aunty Jack Sings Wollongong - 1974

My Dad was a big fan of Aunty Jack, an ABC TV comedy in the early 70s. I was never allowed to watch the show because its contents were "A.O." as my mum used to say (short for "Adults Only", a 1970s TV rating used in Australia a lot). I was able to listen to this record though and remember songs about Fish milkshakes, some song about two people trying not to rhyme, with the winner being congratulated by someone who says "congratulations Errol, you're free and you're happy", with the loser then singing about how desperately he wants to be happy (whose name, appropriately, was Neil). I might end up getting this album again one day as a CD was released in 2005.

Decade 2: 1980s

6. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - 1973

I never listened to the radio when I was a kid. I still don't, although there was a brief period in the late 1980s when I listened to 2MMM and early 1990s when I was a 2JJJ listener. In the early 80s, though, I spent hours upon hours poring over 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons books. The soundtrack for this period of life was Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". I had no idea who the band were or what other records they released. I listened to it because my brother was a huge fan of the album. I also remember Mr Jones, my hippy guitar-playing 3rd Grade teacher at Beecroft Primary School ("in knowledge we grow"), having a Pink Floyd poster up in his classroom in the 1970s. While it was released in 1973, I was experiencing it most intensely around 1981-1982 (12-13 years old). For me, DSOTM was a journey. It was a confusing story told through music. It evoked images of people running through streets, or crazy people mumbling incoherent phrases; of a room full of clocks all going off at once and then, at the end, a song about heads exploding. Almost every time I listen to this album it reminds me of hunching over in my bedroom, rolling 20 sided dice, reading descriptions of monsters and paladins.

7. Keith Green - No Compromise - 1978

I became a Christian in 1982 and, as I grew older, I began to listen to Christian music. I still have a huge soft spot in my heart for this album by Keith Green. It's an album full of black and white, of anger, of cries of sadness and despair. Keith Green's best album in his short life (he died in a plane crash) he was not afraid of using his songs to cut into the lazy spiritual life of himself or others. Asleep in the Light was just as pertinent to me then as it is now. Much of my early theological understanding came from Keith Green lyrics, and infused both emotion and Bible passages together. Although one of the few Christian albums in my collection (Steve Taylor's I Predict 1990 being a notable other) I still listen to it and meditate upon the zealous knowledge it contains.

8. Petra - Beat The System - 1985

The 1980s was full of synthesizers, mullets and pastel colours. Petra, a 1970s Christian-hippy rock band, re-badged themselves for a younger audience more in tune with New Romanticism. I often describe the 1980s as "the decade that music died" and am very much convinced that popular music reached a real nadir during that period. Christian music, which reaches embarrassing nadirs pretty much every year, was no different in the 1980s - same style of music as the non-Christian world, same dress as the non-Christian world, same lack of creativity as the non-Christian world, significantly lower standard of musical ability than the non-Christian world. For about 1-2 years in the mid-1980s, I was ready to embrace Christian music and Petra's Beat The System was the best example of this. The opening track was nothing I'd ever heard of before, though, to be honest, I hadn't really heard much up to that point. BTS was big on living a Christian life in rejection of the world - an important belief that meshed with Keith Green's entry (above). Yet there was something shallow about it that I didn't know at the time. The LP is sitting somewhere in my garage, unlistened to for a long time.

I remember going to a Petra concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre sometime in the 1980s (one of a few Christian music gigs I went to, including Randy Stonehill and Leon Patillo with his bevy of white women unbelievers as his backing band) and being very disappointed that they had a new singer who sounded nothing like Greg X. Voltz. They had a few jokes about backmasking which went down well.

9. U2 - The Unforgettable Fire - 1984

I became a huge fan of U2 in 1985 when Greg, a Christian friend of mine at school introduced me to them via a cassette of "The Unforgettable Fire". U2, I was told, were a Christian band who were making it in the non-Christian world. I remember poring over lyrics and seeing the huge influence that Christianity had over Bono's writing and thinking. Bono eventually became my hero and I grew a mullet because he looked so cool. For a while I wore tight black jeans and motorcycle boots (obviously because I had a motorbike but because it was so cool). I wrote poetry and songs and Greg and I began a writing partnership that grew into an interesting collaboration, even though no one bought the albums. Since then I've reassessed my views on whether Bono is really a Christian or not and, if he is, he's not the sort of Christian that I want to become.

The Unforgettable Fire hit me with its mellowness and lack of focus. It was like looking at a soundscape with blurred vision. Eno and Lanois put a lot of effort into creating a wall of sound filled not with loudness but with subtlety. Synth was present but not dominant, neither in the good 1970s Who-like way or the bad 1980s New Romantic sort of way. Edge's guitar echoed everywhere. How many guitars was he playing? This was the first Compact Disc I bought and is still in my collection. The original 1987 Compact Disc was what I copied onto my hard drive, so I'm not listening to any hopped up victim of the loudness war. This remains my favourite U2 album.

I saw U2 three times in 1989 during their "Lovetown tour" in Sydney. They remain the only U2 concerts I have been to.

10. Led Zeppelin - I - 1969

After leaving school in 1987 I began working as a purchasing officer for Ausonics, an Australian manufacturer of medical ultrasound devices (sadly now gone). One of my jobs was in goods inwards, where I would enter parts sent to us by suppliers onto the computer. It was a tedious job and so I began listening to 2JJJ. I also had a portable cassette player and headphones, so I began to put my LPs onto cassettes. People at work encouraged me to check out Led Zeppelin and so I did. I bought IV first and I second. While I could've included IV here (along with the songs Stairway to Heaven and When The Levee Breaks, the latter my favourite Led Zeppelin song), I include I instead because it represented everything I was trying to explore in my journey away from 80s music. Like many Christians I had been warned away from Heavy Metal and the backmasking craze convinced me for a while that Satan was using Led Zeppelin songs. God gave me a clearer head, though, and I eventually saw through this hyper-spiritual garbage enough to actually buy Led Zeppelin music myself.

Jimmy Page began I with Good Times, Bad Times, a song devoid of 80s cynicism and populated with honestly, joy and brutal guitar licks. Suddenly I no longer cared about John Farnham, INXS, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins and other 80s staples. What I needed was guitars. Loud ones. Loud guitars played by maestros. Loud guitars played by punks. Loud guitars played by weedy nerds. Loud guitars was what the world needed. Little did I realise at the time that others around my age were thinking the same thing and creating a musical revolution.

In the late 80s I saw Eric Clapton and walked away bored stiff. A few weeks later I saw Midnight Oil and realised that energy was what the Oils had and Clapton didn't.

Decade 3 - 1990s

11. The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses - 1989

It was in 1990 that I left home after my parents decided to take a year off and live in Scotland. I moved in with a bunch of guys from my church in Carlingford, NSW. It was an interesting time, as I had not yet mastered the ability to cook properly or look after myself. Pete and Simmo were the two guys I remember most. They climbed cliffs, took me to Pogues concerts, cooked curries, made me drink me  flaming sambucca with coffee beans and, above all, introduced me to The Stone Roses. At the same time I had dumped 2MMM and began listening to 2JJJ as both the guys I lived with and the guys at work listened to it. Those were the glorious pre-national days of 2JJJ, when it was a Sydney only station and had not been taken over by more corporate minded individuals.

I have to say at this point that I did not like dance music. Yet here was a band that played music you could dance to. Fool's Gold - all 10 minutes of it - should've been a song for me to dislike. But I didn't. Other songs on the album had loud guitars, notably I am the Resurrection and You are the One, so I was happy. Yet Fool's Gold intrigued me. Why did a song that was so obviously intended as a dance song become a song that I liked? I suppose it had something to do with the fact that the band were actually playing the instruments, that there was no 80s synth, and that you could pretty much vibe out to it.

Like Shaun from Shaun of the Dead, I liked "Second Coming". I thought the guitars were brutal on that album.

12. Pixies - Doolittle - 1989

Living with Pete and Simmo in Carlingford also exposed me to some bands I'd never thought of listening to. One day after work I walked into a record store and, on a whim, purchased Doolittle by the Pixies. I don't remember listening to them before that point, but I knew they were an indy band worth having. Joey Santiago's guitars made this loud guitar lover very happy, and Pete and Simmo took every chance they could get playing the CD at our Carlingford house. But there was something I found disturbing, namely the lyrics. Black Francis was no Bono. Instead of singing about El Salvador or Irish massacres or whatever the feck Bono sang about, Black Francis sung songs about... what exactly? Wave of Mutiliation was not about mutilating anything; Monkey's gone to Heaven was not about a monkey who managed to attain eternal salvation. Suddenly I was exposed to songs which didn't actually mean anything. Since then I've developed a theory that Black Francis simply threw a whole bunch of themes together to form songs, so that a song might contain multiple themes or ideas rather than a single theme or idea. A song might have elements of Black Francis' Pentecostal experiences, UFO experiences, university experiences, relationship experiences, the Spanish language and others. Another song may have the same experiences but using different phrases. Whatever it was, Black Francis created music that was simultaneously meaningful and meaningless that touched me a way that mainstream pop songs simply didn't. He also screamed and played a mean guitar. That helped.

In 1991 I travelled to Scotland to spend a few weeks with my parents. On the way there I stopped off at LA and managed to see the Pixies at the Universal Amphitheater. They weren't too good (they were in the about-to-break-up phase of their existence) but at least I can say that I saw them live. The auditorium was only half full and the LA people I spoke to seemed fairly ambivalent about them. When I reached Scotland the first young adults I met were enthusing about the Pixies. This experience was interesting because, as Pixies fans know, they were much loved in the UK but ignored in the US.

13. Soundgarden - Superunknown - 1994

It was during Bible College in 1992 that I discovered that music was going through a radical change. Suddenly Metallica had a hit single. How did that happen? Nirvana had Smells Like Teen Spirit which I loved too. 2JJJ also began playing a song called You Can't Touch This by MC Hammer which I surprisingly enjoyed, along with Mr Dobalina. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Give It Away. Musicians were no longer constrained by their genres and were making new ones. Grunge, especially, had a huge impact on me. As I pointed out before, I loved loud guitars. What I didn't say was that I hated Glam metal. On my visit to LA I picked up a free music newspaper and discovered that every second band in LA had big hair and spandex, with ads even promoting hair extensions for metalheads. When Nirvana came along, they were basically a bunch of "weedy nerds playing heavy metal". They punished their guitars like Pete Townshend while poking fun at the establishment like Johnny Rotten. In 1994, just after I got married, a friend named Pete from church (not the same Pete that I lived with, but a Pete with really long hair and a dedicated metalhead) lent me Superunknown by Soundgarden. He assured me that they were just as good as Nirvana. I listened to it and was hooked. I had heard some of their songs on 2JJJ and especially liked Spoonman. I was already a Zeppelin fan so hearing the screams of Chris Cornell was fine in the light of Robert Plant. This was the first grunge band and album I really liked. For a few years Soundgarden had replaced U2 as my favourite band.

14. Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral - 1994

I have an interesting tale about meeting Trent Reznor from the band Nine Inch Nails. Back in the early 90s my girlfriend (she's now my wife by the way) introduced me to some friends at a party in Sydney's North Shore. Among them was a musician by the name of Trent Reznor. Reznor had taken a break from recording after his first album (this was probably around 1992 or 1993) and spent a bit of time in Sydney resting. While there he had attended a Gospel meeting by a Christian mission and had been converted to Christianity. At the party we were all listening to "Pretty Hate Machine", quite a BIT different from the Christian music most of the people have been listening to. When asked about the lyrics (especially the ones pertaining to God), he replied that that was basically him questioning God at the time, and that he was different now that he had become a Christian. He started going out with a Christian girl as well. Then one day Trent disappeared. He had stolen some goods from a friend of ours. His girlfriend was beside herself. Together this friend and the girlfriend contacted the US record company to find out what was going on. The record company pretty much told them that Reznor was not just in America, but had been in America the whole time. When asked about whether Reznor had maybe gone back to New Zealand, his birthplace, the record company replied that Reznor was not from New Zealand but from Ohio. Moreover, he was not of Maori descent either. In short, we had all been duped by some New Zealand guy who claimed to be Trent Reznor and who faked being converted to Christianity in order to mess with the people he was with. It was obviously horrible for the people involved, but I was secretly amused by it all.

Based upon that experience I purchased CDs from Nine Inch Nails. It was full of loud guitars and electronic music that I had heard from my days as a child listening to Kraftwerk. I loved it. At the time that it was released, "The Downward Spiral" was probably not the sort of album that good Christians should be buying, but I did anyway. After ignoring those terrible, horrible, no good cuss words from the song Closer, I discovered that Reznor was pretty much using a persona to write from which, as a poetry/song writer myself, was an interesting technique. The album is full of self-loathing and anger. Reznor subverted the 80s synth and meshed it with sampling and recreated Industrial music. It subverted the whole dance song by having danceable synth beats alongside dark lyrics, angry singing and of course, loud guitar. Nine Inch Nails remains my second favourite band to this day.


15. Ride - Going Blank Again - 1992

While working at Ausonics in the late 80s and early 90s I subscribed to the Australian edition of Rolling Stone magazine. For a while I was enamored with an Australian band called Ratcat who sold a huge amount of EPs entitled Tingles, which were full of proto-grunge fuzzy-pop songs. In Rolling Stone magazine one day I read of a Perth concert in which Ratcat had been supported by a British band called Ride. The RS commentator spoke disparagingly of the crowd of mainly teenagers who were enthused about Ratcat but had no idea that they had been supported by a band that was two or three times better than them. The RS writer had obviously been infected by the British press' assessment of Ride at the time, which was that they were the next big thing. A few years later I read another Rolling Stone article lamenting the band's breakup and their awful final album.

One day in 1994 in Merrylands I passed a second hand record store and purchased my first Ride CD: "Smile" I found out later that this was a compilation of the first two Ride EPs from 1990. Like a lot of new music in the early 90s, Ride was confusing and compelling. On the one hand they seemed to be playing guitar-laden rock heavy with feedback and wah wah pedals, but mixing it with a very muted, almost submerged, vocal track. It was like listening to Ian Brown from the Stone Roses singing for a grunge band. In fact I was simply convinced that Ride were a British grunge band. I lent "Smile" to Pete my long haired friend from church and he returned it saying that it was great.

I moved on to buy a second hand copy of the album "Going Blank Again". The opening synth beat of the song Leave Them All Behind was more like The Who and nothing like Duran Duran. then the rhythm section came in - drums and bass playing along with the synth beat. You could almost hear the fingers being hit against the strings. Then the twin guitars come in. Not like Jimmy Page. Not like Grunge. These guitars come in like blurry angels, drowning out the rhythm section with so much feedback and distortion that you can't work out whether there are two guitars, or just one, or ten thousand, being played. The song went for over 8 minutes.

It was only in the late 1990s when I got the internet connected that I discovered that Ride were at a forefront of a short-lived musical genre called Shoegazing, and had more in common with Britpop than Grunge, while predating both. Ride remain my favourite band and Leave Them All Behind is my favourite song of all time. I even made a music video using images from Stanley Kubrick films. I run the Last.fm Ride group and have published an interview at this blog with the bass player. I have never seen Ride live, one of my disappointments.

Decade 4: 2000s - today

16. The Charlatans - The Charlatans - 1995

Back in the early 90s I saw the music video for The Only One I know. The Charlatans appeared to be The Stone Roses plus a Hammond Organ. I bought their first album and then for about ten years pretty much ignored The Charlatans. Then one day on Rage in about 2000 I saw a music video showing very much that the band was alive and well. Over the next few years I bought albums and discovered that their original organ player had died.

It was in about 2005 when I bought the self-titled album The Charlatans. Bought ten years after it was released I became aware very quickly the reason why the album went to number one in the UK. The only song that stands out to me is the opening Nine Acre Court (and remains my favourite Charlatans song with Toothache) but the whole album just seems to mesh together really well. The guitars aren't loud but every song just seems to have a place in the order. My brain was often filled with earworms from the album. In the mid-late 2000s I would sometimes play the album in its entirety to my annoyed family.

17. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Methodrone - 1995

Another album I got myself into long after its release, Methodrone introduced me to the work of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and its eclectic founder Anton Newcombe. I discovered this album in around 2007, soon after I joined last.fm. After spending the early 2000s bereft of any knowledge of what was going on in the world of music, last.fm gave me the opportunity to discover old and new music. Intrigued by the Shoegazing genre and its link to Ride, I was able to download the entire album for free from Anton's website. I loved it enough to eventually buy the CD.

The BJM don't have the loud guitars but Anton does use shoegazing often in his songs. Post-Methodrone albums are more like listening to what the Rolling Stones could've achieved if they decided to follow their path of psychedelic rock instead of the path they ended up choosing. I have quite a few BJM albums but none of them hit me as hard as Methodrone, and only Ride's song Leave Them All Behind hits me harder than the BJM's Wisdom, which is a most enjoyable earworm to have when you're driving around Tasmania and is one of the greatest songs in the history of the universe.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre have inspired a huge amount of creative talent over the years with bands like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Warlocks and The Lovetones being created by former members. Other bands to have their work inspired by BJM/Anton are Dead Meadow, Singapore Sling, Darker My Love and, of course, The Black Angels...


18. The Black Angels - Passover - 2006

I can thank Last.fm for this one. Last.fm allows subscribers to listen to music online, and one of their features is to type in the name of the artist and see what sort of music comes out, the idea being that not only do you have your own unique streaming radio station playing you music from the band you selected but music that is closely associated with the music you selected. So one day I selected "Black Rebel Motorcycle Club" to see what would come out. Two bands immediately hit me. One was The Warlocks, the other was The Black Angels.

Let me say this now - The Black Angels sounds like a darker version of The Doors. This is helped especially by the lead singer Alex Maas who sounds very much like Jim Morrison. If you transported yourself back to 1970 and armed with the Passover LP by The Black Angels and presented it to some pirate radio stations at the time, they would probably be convinced that Jim Morrison had joined an acid rock band. In other words, the album sounds like it could've been released in 1970, not 2006.

This is one of those bands whose career is not as great as I hoped it would be. They definitely need recognition. Here is a video of them playing on the roof.

19. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures - 1979

Put simply I became a Joy Division fan in 2007. Wonderful music. Again thanks to Last.fm because I heard She's Lost Control for the first time and I was hooked. I'd heard Love Will Tear us Apart so many times (I was a 2JJJ listener after all) that I had been inoculated against Joy Division, but Last.fm again changed my mind.

And watch Control. Brilliant movie with some of the best acting I have ever seen from three individuals (Sam Riley, Samantha Morton and Toby Kebbell).

20. The Eagles of Death Metal - Peace, Love, Death Metal - 2004

This album surprised me. The Eagles of Death Metal are neither a Death Metal band nor do they sound like The Eagles. Instead it is a combination of inane, adolescent lyrics, an unashamed pop beat, high pitch singing and a fuzzy garage guitar. It works somehow. The drums are played by Josh Homme, who is the guitarist for Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures and about a dozen other bands. Homme is credited with being a pioneer of Stoner Rock and yet the EODM do not play Stoner Rock. The other dude in EODM (it's a two man band) is a bearded nobody named Jesse Hughes who plays guitar, sings and is a rabid Obama-hating Republican.

Every song on their debut album was crafted perfrectly. The two musicians, especially Hughes, interject in the songs with funny lines: in one song Jesse Hughes begs Homme to slow down because he's finding it hard to keep up, while in another song he sings the same refrain so many times that he loses breath and states that he's lost his breath and needs to sit down for a while, all while the song continues around him. There's a real playfulness and fun being projected by the two musicians. They don't take themselves seriously, or their songs seriously, and yet they come up with an album that is enjoyable to listen to and which is quirky enough to remain out of touch with the mainstream. Watch I Only Want You.

The Man in Me

Bob Dylan - The Man in Me - Lebowski from 43hk0804c26qsi8w on Vimeo.

My Favourite Song

Ride - Leave Them All Behind from 43hk0804c26qsi8w on Vimeo.

Replay Gain sounds good

Just recently I converted all my music files to include Replay Gain. This now means that my music has been made "equal".

But allow me to explain just what is going on.

Have you ever noticed that one band/CD sounds "louder" than another? And that the "louder" music is actually newer? Well, welcome to the Loudness War.

Over the many years of the recording industry, bands and producers have had to make judgments over how loud music should be. Since increased volume comes at the expense of quality, earlier musicians tended to record their music at lower volume - even musicians and bands known for creating "loud" music. In the early 90s, however, the music industry discovered that albums/songs mixed at a higher volume stood out more on the radio and were more likely to sell. With the secret out of the bag, recorded music was released at higher and higher volume as the industry competed against each other to sound "better".

And those "remastered" CDs of classic albums from long past? They were simply made louder. That's all.

It occurred to me that something was up when one day I was listening to "Buy Me a Pony" by Spiderbait some years ago. The song is 1 minute and 36 seconds of searing, flammable rock'n'roll and was one of my more favourite JJJ songs back in the day. Following this song (on a compilation CD I had made of my own music collection) came "Anarachy in the UK" by The Sex Pistols. Back in 1976 this was an incendiary punk song but after listening to "Buy Me a Pony" it sounded pedestrian. More than that, it was soft. I knew that something was wrong. The same thing afflicted my Midnight Oil collection when played in comparison to Rage Against The Machine.

Numerous thoughts appeared in my head as to the explanation. One was that the recording techniques of newer bands were far superior to those from the past. Another was that the older music simply sucked more and the newer music was better. It came to a head when I bought Psychocandy by The Jesus and Mary Chain. I had heard that this was a seminal album, responsible for influencing all sorts of 90s grunge and alternative rock music. When I first began listening I was convinced that I had purchased a dud CD. The music was so soft that it sounded as though the band were playing underwater. I searched the internet, first to see if anyone else had bought a dud CD, then (once convinced that the CD was not a dud) anyone complaining of the bad mix. Nothing.

It was then I discovered the facts behind the loudness war, and I felt cheated. Increasing the volume on tracks made music unequal and made it appear "better" than what it was. Newer bands and musicians were "cheating" by not allowing their music to be listened equally to older music (though, to be fair, it was obviously record companies that were pushing this).

The workaround for this is simple: Turn it up. If I want to listen to Spiderbait and The Sex Pistols equally, then I turn down Spiderbait and turn up The Sex Pistols. If I want to listen to The Jesus and Mary Chain properly then I turn it up in comparison to other music. But of course this requires manual control - something not at all commendable in this day of digital music players. So. I thought. Surely there is a way for computer software to determine how loud a track should be and to simply add tags to the files, and have your music player adjust accordingly? Yes. Someone had thought it up years ago.

The first thing to do is to have software capable of analyzing the music files and then applying the Replay Gain tag to it. I have done this with easyMP3Gain, a free open source gui program that uses a variety of other programs with it to work (mp3gain, aacgain and vorbisgain). All I did was add the folders and tracks of my CD collection, analyze them and change them accordingly - a process that took quite a few hours but is now complete. Here's a screenshot of three tracks  I've already mentioned:

As you can see, "Buy Me A Pony" has a track gain of -10.10, which means that in order to make the track equal, the program has lowered the volume by 10 dB. This is not a "permanent" change to the sound - all it does is add a small tag to the file. If you listen to the file on equipment that uses Replay Gain, it will automatically lower the volume. If you turn Replay Gain off, or if your media player does not support Replay Gain, the song's volume will be unchanged. You can also see there that "Anarchy In The UK" and especially the song by "The Jesus and Mary Chain" have very low track gains, which mean that they would've sounded "soft" in comparison to "louder" tracks.

Of course if you're going to try this out you also need a media player capable of Replay Gain. I use Amarok on my PC and use Rockbox on my Sansa Fuze and both have Replay Gain. If your media player does not have this feature then, as I've pointed out, the sound of your media files will be unchanged even after having the tags added to the file.

So what's it like to listen to? It's great. Suddenly Bob Dylan is competing with Them Crooked Vultures and The Rolling Stones are competing with The Eagles of Death Metal. Dylan especially is doing well in grabbing my attention - something he always struggled to do.

At this point in time I have no desire to go back to what it was like before. I am enjoying very much the experience of listening to music that has been adjusted by Replay Gain.

Note: easyMP3Gain has a number of annoying bugs which I was able to work around. The key to using it is to never "scroll down". And that guy with the bass is Steve Queralt.

Listen to The Black Angels

When I returned to listening to new music a few years ago I was hooked by The Black Angels. With their name based upon the song name by The Velvet Underground and featuring the image of Nico on the drum kit, the Black Angels were one of the first bands that I was impressed by when listening to Last.fm's "sounds like" stream. Basically it goes like this:

1. I was a fan of Ride.
2. In the early 2000s, I discovered that Black Rebel Motorcycle Club were fans of Ride, so I became a fan of BRMC.
   
3. After subscribing to Last.fm, I played the streaming channel for bands that "sound like" Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
4. I then became a fan of the following bands: The Black Angels, The Warlocks, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Dead Meadow.
   

Of course as I searched backwards I discovered that Anton Newcombe founded the Brian Jonestown Massacre (BJM) partly upon the influence of British Shoegazing music, of which Ride was a major contributor. One member of BJM was Peter Hayes who left the band and formed BRMC. Another member of BJM was Bobby Hecksher who ended up forming the Warlocks. The Black Angels were influenced by BRMC and Dead Meadow were influenced by BJM. To top it all off, Mark Gardener, one of the members of Ride, wrote and performed on one of BJM's recent albums.

So essentially it goes back to Ride and The Brian Jonestown Massacre - although both bands owe their existence to The Velvet Underground as well.

Anyway, The Black Angels' star has been rising recently and they have appeared on David Letterman. Here is a song from their latest album. Please listen to it and buy the album.

Great band, bad album cover #1

The Who - Who's Next

You have to hand it to The Who. In an age which worshipped guitar gods like Hendrix and Clapton, The Who produced a Rhinomegaloid guitarist whose speciality was to smash his hands against guitar strings in a "windmill fashion" - a process which involved shredding... of his fingers. The Who also produced the archetypical unconcerned and bored Bass player, the archetypical crazy drummer and the archetypical muscled blond looks of a Robert Plant lookalike. In short, the Who were neither popular pretty boys like the Beatles or dark and mysterious like the Rolling Stones. Instead they were, well, just ugly blokes who played energetic music (as opposed to Pink Floyd, who were ugly blokes playing progressive rock).

There's much we can thank The Who for in this album. Without this album we wouldn't have Baba O'Reilly synthesizing over our airwaves or David Caruso putting his glasses on while Roger Daltrey screams during "Won't Get Fooled Again" (one of my favourite songs ten years ago).

But just look at this cover. A seemingly abandoned freeway pillar aka monolith from 2001 stands upright in a barren landscape, its concrete vertical presence in stark contrast to the teenage wasteland around it. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the monolith acted as a turning point in the evolutionary history of mankind: The apes discover the black monolith sent by the unseen aliens and learn to use tools and weapons; the astronauts discover a monolith buried in a crater in the moon, which sends a radio signal to Jupiter and to a gigantic portal that Dave Bowman enters and suddenly everyone begins tripping on LSD. But what are the members of The Who doing? What are those wet patches on the concrete monolith? Yes, the band urinated on it - see, they are even doing up their flies. Forget the question of why the band didn't just wee in hole somewhere and implicitly looked for a vertical object to pee against like the proverbial dog looking for a tree and instead delve into the symbolism of it all. Yes - the Who were implicitly telling the aliens, telling the future of mankind, that they not only refuse to evolve and better themselves but will actively fight against it. The symbolic act of urination is like a defiance of a potential future, as though the embrace of Rock and Roll would lead to a devolutionary human future which, of course, became reality when the Duran Duran started dominating the airwaves.

So the cover is, on the surface, a picture of four guys who've urinated against a concrete block and, below the surface and behind blue eyes, a defiant rejection of human progress.

U2 - October

Look at the poise of the four lads from Ireland. Bono, at the back, stares vacantly into the distance, probably at an industrial smoke stack and wonders how the feck they got it stay upright; Adam, at the front, carefully examining the inside of his blond fringe; Edge, on the right, staring daggers at the roadie chatting up some groupies behind the photographer; and Larry, the drummer, blaming you, the viewer, for his diarrhoea. In the background we have, well, some sort of boat, a dock, a bit of water, the side of a warehouse and a residential tower block in the distance.

If there is a phrase that describes this cover it would be "We haven't the time of money to indulge in anything artistic - I'll just get me camera and I'll take a picture of you all in that place where the garda found that dead body last week. And don't argue - I'm your manager and I know what I'm doing." Of course, like the ugly duckling that eventually grew up to be a deformed, genetically inferior swan, so too does this bland and amateurish album cover hide bland and unfocussed music within.

The Stooges - The Stooges

Without the Stooges the world wouldn't have had the Sex Pistols singing about their chronic lack of enjoyment. Within the album there are some classic songs about wanting to become someone's pet dog, about accidentally falling over, about the effects of cold changes on average temperature, about their unease of something or other, and of miniature toys for young girls (amongst others). The songs are actually pretty good ("We will fall" is actually a proto-post-punk song).

So when the band members got together to pose for the album cover, you can imagine what went through their minds, namely "Let's scare people into buying this album!'. Iggy is at the front, his mop wig covering his cranium like a Wermacht helmet yet not long enough to hide the contemptuous "I am going to vivisection you" look. Behind him and facing the opposite direction, is guitarist Ron Asheton, silently pleading with you to run, run, RUN before Iggy captures you while simultaneously expressing his own hopelessness at being trapped inside this evil band. Behind Asheton is Dave Alexander, whose cruel eyes indicate that he is Iggy's gimp, responsible for capturing and subduing you and having his own fun before handing things over to Iggy for the torture and eventual coup de grâce. Behind Alexander is drummer Scott Asheton, Ron's brother, whose crazed eyes and hint of a smile show that he will be the one who dances around, covered in your blood and entrails, once Iggy has had his way with you.

The Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

What is going on here? We have a zombie Elizabeth Bennet emerging from a transdimensional portal located in the centre of a flat gold star floating in a stylized solar system. What is she doing? Well as a Zombie Elizabeth Bennet she is undoubtedly looking for the handsome, rugged and financially secure brain of Mr Darcy, who, of course, represents D'arcy Wretzky, the female bass player of The Smashing Pumpkins. How did Billy Corgan manage to successfully bully the band members into creating such a travesty of an album cover? Simple, he paid them lots of money.

Mellon Collie is obviously a play on the word melancholy, which is quite depressing really. Infinite Sadness obviously means being sad forever, or at least being as sad as anyone can get. Yet despite all their wage the band is just a bat on a lathe because, after all, Elizabeth Bennet didn't end up infinitely sad after marrying Mr Darcy did she? Yet the Pumpkins and the fans became quite sad when Wretzky left, subverting Austen's work by replacing her with Melinda Auf der Maur, who put out more and turned the wholesome 19th century romantic tale into a sordid 1980s sex and violence video nasty involving the severed trunk of an undead woman flying around on stars. Thus the woman on the cover represents the feminine purity of Elizabeth Bennet whose relationship with Mr Darcy / D'arcy Wretzky has been severed, killing both the relationship and the band's creative output as Auf der Maur takes over. Think of replacing Liz and Mr Bennet's wedding scene with the music video of The Everlasting Gaze, except with more blood and more crying, and you will see what I mean.

But then again I could be wrong. I mean, a chick on gold star flying through space can mean an infinite amount of melancholy things. What it doesn't mean is a good album cover.

Beastie Boys / Battlestar Galactica Mashup

This is probably the best mash-up I have seen. Someone has taken the time to create a Battlestar Galactica music video parody, using the music video "Sabotage" by the Beasties Boys. It is best viewed directly after, or if possible alongside, the original 1994 Spike Jonze music video. Virtually every scene in the mash-up is edited not necessarily exactly, but certainly thematically consistent with, the original music video, using scenes from the Battlestar Galactica (reimagined) TV series.

Here's the original.

And here's the mash-up.

Wisdom - The Brian Jonestown Massacre

My sixth favourite song.

Them Crooked Vultures

Them Crooked Vultures is a supergroup. Over the least few months the internet has been raving about this band and their upcoming new album, which is due very soon.

The band, knowing just how to appeal to the world's internet citizens, has uploaded their entire album onto Youtube so anyone can hear it for free. Will this hurt their CD sales? I very much doubt it.

The three people who make up the supergroup are a who's who of musical talent. In the picture you see here on the page (better version here) you can see the three members. The guy at the top is Dave Grohl and he is the drummer. He is playing a guitar in the picture because he is a multi-instrumentalist. Grohl is known for being the drummer for Nirvana and the guitarist / lead vocalist for the Foo Fighters. The ordinary looking bloke in the middle is Josh Homme, the guitarist for the band and also a multi-instrumentalist. Homme is known as the guitarist for Kyuss (one of my favourite bands) and for Queens of the Stone Age (who Grohl used to drum for once), and as the drummer for The Eagles of Death Metal (which is neither a death metal band nor an Eagles-sounding band).

But it is the third person in the picture who is the real star - John Paul Jones, the former bass player for Led Zeppelin. Jones is 63 frigging years old but still rocks like a youth. By comparison, Grohl is 40 and Homme is 36, so Jones is almost as old as the other two guys put together. To put it in even more perspective, when Homme was born, Stairway to Heaven had been out nearly two years. Jones, in other words, is old enough to be Grohl's and Homme's father. I've seen live footage of Them Crooked Vultures of the band in action (see here) and Jones looks like he is enjoying himself greatly.

Anyway, I haven't been this excited by a new band since, um, the last time I was.

John Paul Jones here. Josh Who? Josh from? Josh from where? The Queen of what?

Pigs will fly

Don't believe it.

I can't believe it when they say
everything's going to be okay.
I can't believe it when they say
it's better to spend than to pray.

I don't believe it when I hear
that life all ends here.
I don't believe it when I hear
that things are all so clear.

Call me a cynic and tell me I'm wrong
But won't someone please tell me what's going on?

I don't believe it when I see
a perfect TV community.
I don't believe it when I see
people happy and free.
I won't believe it until I see
society consumed with pity,
the outcast receiving care,
and swine flying through the air.

© 1997 Neil Cameron / Greg Dixon

This is nice

Where the streets have Dutch names:

Protesters have demonstrated outside the Department of Finance against U2’s decision to move their tax affairs to the Netherlands to avoid paying tax on their royalties in Ireland.

The protest was organised by the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI) which campaigns on issues related to the developing world. The coalition contains such organisations as, Trócaire, Oxfam and various Catholic missionary orders.

U2 moved their publishing arm to the Netherlands in 2006 after the Government capped tax-free earnings for artists at €250,000. Previously, U2 had been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Ireland's tax-free status for artist royalties.

The coalition met Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan who pointed out that the Government had abolished the Cinderella rule where people could say they had not spent a day in Ireland if they left by midnight.

“We have tax treaties with other countries that regulate where you pay tax. There is a problem with smaller countries that have to set up deliberate tax havens. We are raising that at EU level,” the Minister said though he did not address the specific issue of U2’s tax affairs. The band are resident in Ireland for tax purposes.

Accounts for 2007 for U2 Ltd show the band paid out more than €21 million in wages in 2007 in a relatively quiet year where they were not touring or releasing new material.

Bono impersonator Paul O’Toole reworked the lyrics of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For to mock the band’s decision. “I know avoiding tax ain’t fair/it’s just because I’m a millionaire, I don’t need to pay like you, no, I won’t pay like you/because I still haven’t learned about democracy.”

Mr O’Toole said: “Their music does not bother me. It is their policy of avoiding tax that bothers me. Bono talks about dead kids, but he won’t pay a penny towards it.”

Mr O’Toole posed with a mock-up of a donation to the world's poor in one hand and a large sack of unpaid tax in the other.

The DDCI is following it up with the launch of an “international song contest” inviting re-worded versions of U2 classics to highlight the band’s stance on tax.

It is timed to coincide with the release of U2's new album No Line on the Horizon which goes on sale at midnight on Friday.

DDCI co-ordinator Nessa ní Chasaíde said the decision to holding the protest outside the department of Finance was to highlight the fact that U2’s tax avoidance measures deprives the Irish exchequer of taxation revenue that could be spent on development aid.

“Bono has championed the call for increases in aid to impoverished countries, yet in his personal life he is engaged in tax avoidance issues and it is tax avoidance that is undermining the possibility of developing countries fighting their way out of poverty,” she said.

“The practice of being able to move your finances around easily and without high levels of transparency is extremely problematic for developing countries. The kind of practice that U2 is engaging in is part of that problem.”

Nobody from U2 was available for comment, but the band will defend their tax measures in an extensive interview to be published in this newspaper on Friday.

I always preferred it when they were parodying the whole "rich rock band" thing, not actually being it.

A critical analysis of Beatles lyrics

Fun is the one thing that money can't buy - She's leaving home.

Considered one the Beatles' more "mature" songs, "She's Leaving Home" outlines the story of a young woman moving out of home without her parents' knowledge. There's certainly an interesting juxtaposition between the eager resolve of the young woman and the grief and pain of her parents. Yet all this is undone by this inane line in the final stanza. Has the young woman learned self respect? Has she learned the importance of controlling her own life? No. She's having fun and, despite empirical evidence suggesting that currency can be utilized to procure fun inducing goods and services, it is not because of money.

And in my hour of darkness, She is standing right in front of me. - Let it Be.

People have tried to interpret this song theologically, assuming that McCartney is a closet Catholic who has visions of the Virgin Mary. ("She" in this line being "Mother Mary") The reality is that Paul McCartney was speaking about his mother, who is named Mary and was in the habit of appearing in front of McCartney in the darkness. The problem is, of course, how does McCartney see his dead Mum standing in front of him when everything is dark? I suppose she could be glowing, but then it wouldn't be dark any more would it? Didn't think of that did you Paul? That's why Wings folded (ha ha.... wings folded... sorry).

You keep all your money in a big brown bag inside a zoo. - Baby You're a Rich Man.

There's all sorts of things wrong with this song. Who are Lennon/McCartney talking to? A literal baby? Yet if it was a literal baby then why call it a "rich man"? And if not a literal baby, why not a symbolic baby - a babe, woman? Yet why call the woman a "rich man"? And if not a woman then why not a man? And why would you call a man "baby?" And why does writing this remind me of Phil Spector and firearms? All terribly confusing. Yet this rich genderless and ageless person keeps his/her money where? In a big brown bag, and not just any brown bag, a BIG brown bag, and not just any coloured big bag, a big BROWN bag to boot. And yet despite the fact that inflation in Britain during the sixties was getting out of control, this genderless and ageless person keeps the money not under the bed, but in a zoo. Is this a metaphor for the city... the high world of finance existing in a concrete jungle that is totally unlike a zoo? Either that or he/she/it thinks he can hide his cash in the elephant enclosure.

Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC. Didn't get to bed last night. On the way the paper bag was on my knee. Man I had a dreadful flight. I'm back in the U.S.S.R. - Back in the U.S.S.R.

For the record, the British Overseas Airways Corporation never had direct flights from Miami to anywhere in the Soviet Union. And what about Georgia? Is this some veiled referential support for Stalin? Or was it a secret desire to escape the shackles of godless communism and return to the deep south of the USA? Too confusing Paul. That's why Wings folded (ha h... oh).

You say it's your birthday. It's my birthday too, yeah. - Birthday.

The chances of randomly discovering that a stranger you met has the same birthday as you do is somewhere in the region of 4 in 1461. I can imagine the sheer oddity of this occurrence being memorable to some. But to write a song about it?

She's a prick teaser, she took me half the way there. - Day Tripper.

This is about as Spinal Tap as you get with Beatles Lyrics. "Sex farm woman...".

Hope you need my love babe, Just like I need you. - Eight Days a Week.

Surprise surprise, we might think that Robert Plant was the first to substitute "Love" for something a little bit more base but, as usual, the Beatles got there first. Maybe McCartney could sue Zeppelin for publishing rights?

And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong, I'm right. Where I belong I'm right. - Fixing a Hole.

I can't understand why so many redneck Americans got so uptight and angry over the Beatles back in the sixties. The idea that one can have a strong opinion about something they know little about should've made them and The Beatles get along fine. After all, the mass of the four human beings who made up The Beatles would've been larger than the mass of the physical body of Jesus.

And when I feel my finger on your trigger I know nobody can do me no harm. Because happiness is a warm gun, momma. - Happiness is a Warm Gun.

Momma? The addition of that final word turns the line from being sleazy into being rather disturbing. But just as the Beatles pre-empted Zeppelin's redefinition of "love", so too do they delve into the deep and dark morass of Freudian interpretations of Oedipus and thus pre-empt The Doors. Jim Morrison wasn't so original after all was he?

Tell me, tell me, tell me your answer, You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer. - Helter Skelter.

The addition of the double negative "You ain't no" ensures that the line fits rhythmically but not grammatically. He's literally saying "You may be a lover but are not no dancer", meaning the woman (I assume it is a woman) may be a lover but is also a dancer. The most logical explanation of these lines is that one of the Beatles had a sexual relationship with one skilled in the arts of choreography in an amusement park somewhere. Either that or it was a secret code ordering us to follow Charles Manson.

There are places I remember all my life though some have changed. Some forever not for better, Some have gone and some remain. - In My Life.

The key to understanding this line (and thus the whole song) is not that the places have changed, but his memory of them have! Hence "There are places I remember all my life, though some (memories) have changed." Early onset dementia is a terrible thing to experience and John Lennon's experience of it (which resulted in him being permanently beer-goggled, hence Yoko) is a lesson for us all to remember. If we can.

When I get older losing my hair, Many years from now, Will you still be sending me a valentine, Birthday greetings bottle of wine? - When I'm Sixty Four.

Sadly the odds are that either the love of your life has died, or else is taking legal action against you. Or maybe both.

Neo-psych: Beards and Chicks

Neo-psychedelia is the sort of music I'm getting into these days. What seems common amongst these bands is beards and women:

Black Mountain. Beards: 2. Chicks 1.


Dead Meadow. Beards: 2. Chicks 0.



The Black Angels. Beards: 2. Chicks 2.


The Warlocks. Beards: 0. Chicks 2.

1969 - The Stooges

Steve Queralt Interview

Steve Queralt is the Bass Player for Ride. Over the last few months I have been able to email him questions about his time in the band, as well as some personal history.

OSO
Steve, can you tell us where and when you were born; family life (brothers, sisters); what your parents did to earn money.

STEVE QUERALT
I was born in Oxford in 1968 which makes me 40, yey!! Dad is still an electrician and Mum has always worked various part time jobs. Darren my younger Brother is an actor although spends most of his time bringing up his 2 sons. My own son is about to start the 6th form at Cheney School where Andy, Mark and I met. He is planning to become an actor as well.

What sort of musical instruments did you play when you were young (child/teen)?

My Dad brought home an electric guitar one day which he claimed he found in a skip. I was listening to a lot of reggae at the time after growing up with Two Tone so was thrilled that it turned out to be a bass guitar. I managed to amplify it through my music centre and jammed along to the the records I had at the time. Over the next few years I built a very primitive 4-track studio in my bedroom buying some Roland and Casio keyboards, a Yamaha drum machine and a Westone guitar. When Ride was first formed we managed to squeeze the whole band in to record some demos which we later sold. I'm pretty sure the version of Chelsea Girl on Firing Blanks was also recorded in my room.

Did you have any musical encouragement at school?

No

Why did you choose the Bass guitar?

It was destiny, I had no choice - See above

There's some musicians out there who would probably like to know what sort of gear you used for recording and for touring. What sort of guitars did you use? What about effects/amps?

I started off with a Westone Concorde, Peavey Amp and cheap Yamaha distortion pedal.

My first grown up bass was a Fender Precision which I bought from a music shop in Banbury. I had it re-sprayed white with a tortoise shell scratch board and it looked beautiful. We eventually sold it to Paul Weller after he used it to demo some songs one Xmas which I regret as I would love to have it today.

The first album was recorded through a Trace Elliot which at the time everyone seemed to be using. It was around this time I bought my first Musicman Stingray which I used pretty much all the time from then on. For live shows I also used my Westone when we played Nowhere. For Going Blank and beyond I moved onto a Hartke system which worked both in the studio and for live shows. We all had some custom made effects pedals produced although I forget the guy's name but he had an impressive pedigree having worked with Hendrix blah blah. This is where I got my beloved bass distortion which appeared whenever I got the chance. This Musicman/Hartke set up saw me through to the end with the odd exception when the Fender came out oh, and the double bass on Carnival of light which I really struggled with.

Before joining Ride, were you in any other bands?

Only small time local stuff. I joined a band called Dubwiser after Ride which I really enjoyed.

When most bands begin playing, their song list is usually lots of covers before they begin writing anything decent. What were the sort of cover songs Ride was playing in its first year?

Only the Stooges "I wanna be your dog" and "Taxman" by the Beatles although we did a couple of special shows in Oxford where we performed a set of Madonna covers and another one of Blondie. We also produced a Blondie giveaway demo but other than the Stooges and Beatles covers we pretty much kept to our own stuff.

I think it was Andy who said that Ride's studio sound was influenced enormously by My Bloody Valentine, but when it came to playing live it was about Sonic Youth. Would you agree with this? Would you care to comment on this definition?

I absolutely agree. At the time MBV could be pretty awful live whilst Sonic Youth were always incredible especially around Daydream Nation time.

I'm pretty certain that it was you who said that Ride had two different directions it could take and chose the wrong one (I'm assuming that's in light of Carnival of Light and Tarantula). Could you expand on this comment?

In my view we took the retro route instead of exploring the freedom we'd earned with Going Blank. I'm not saying we were groundbreaking by any stretch but we certainly didn't sound like too many other bands at the time. Carnival was too backward looking - Led Zep, Pink Floyd, too mid tempo. I think we tried to mature way too quickly and started to take ourselves a bit too seriously. I would much rather have seen us continue along the Going Blank vein, working as a true foursome at least for one more album. I just feel we lost a bit of freedom and with it the courage to take our time creating something interesting and contemporary.

Nowhere is one of the albums on the list of Robert Dimery's "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". In that book it says that some Poll Tax riots occurred outside the studio during production and some of these protest sounds made it onto the song Paralyzed. What are your recollections of that event?

Only that we were mixing in Soho and witnessed some of the crowds running along the streets below us. I don't think we realised the magnitude of the event and the importance of the day until later that day. But, it was an exciting day to be in London nonetheless.

Alan Moulder produced both Nowhere and Going Blank Again and is today a highly respected music producer. What was it like working with him? Andy said that Alan taught him how to bend strings - do you remember that?

Yes I do. Overnight Andy turned into Hendrix and could do the "bit" in smells like teen spirit all of a sudden. The sessions with Alan are amongst my fondest memories. It was during this period I felt we had established ourselves as a proper band and could do whatever we liked, choir, keyboards, lesley speakers. It felt like anyone could suggest anything, nothing would get laughed at or dismissed at least until we'd given it a good go first. Alan would always encourage this and always take our ideas seriously despite knowing that sometimes they would be a waste of time. Alan had great Depeche Mode stories and always knew what to order from the studios T/A menus.

During the GBA sessions I understand that the band managed to procure a copy of Nirvana's Nevermind. What was it like listening to it the first time? Did it affect the production of GBA in any way?

I don't remember that. I'm sure we heard it on MTV first. We did obtain 20 pre-mixes of MBV's Soon which we played to death on tour. From what I can remember the 20 test versions were supposed to be variations but despite what the others might claim they all sounded identical. Still incredible but identical.

What was the rationale behind releasing 4-track EPs to start with? Was there some marketing theory behind it?

No, It just felt big and clever. I always admired New Order's approach to releases, no compromise, 12" only releases, loss making artwork, remaining anonymous, no band pictures. At the time, Indie bands seemed to be doing everything possible to get in to the top 40, sign with a major label, release a single on every conceivable format, it just didn't feel like correct route to me.

Okay, the obligatory break-up questions - at what point did you start to think "Geez, something's seriously wrong here"?

Second American Tour.

From your perspective, what was the whole Andy/Mark feud about? How did it affect their approach to the studio and to touring?

It wasnt really a feud as such. Both decided to remove themselves from the band dynamic which was really strong for the first 2 albums. Boundaries seemed to pop up overnight and became progressively tighter as we progressed through Carnival and the final album.

Do you remember your tour to Australia? (I'm an Aussie but I didn't get to see you in those days) I vaguely remember you were supporting a popular Australian band at the time called Ratcat - what are your recollections?

Sydney was a great town which I'd visit again but I live in London now so will never need to. Highlights include staying in King's Cross where you could buy baked beans on toast. Lowpoints were slaughtering David Bowie's Heroes in Melbourne.

Was there any point during Ride's existence when you moved from being a struggling, poor musician to reaping the financial rewards for your work? When would that have been?

It all happened really quickly. I don't think we ever felt we were struggling, the transit van tours were an adventure and before we new it we'd progressed to sleeper buses and full on catering. It didn't happen overnight but we always felt we were moving forward. Each step was bigger and better than the previous, from sleeping on fans floors to sharing 4 to a b&b room and then onto our own hotel rooms. It never got repetitive and was always exciting.

Are royalties from your time with Ride going up or down these days?

Down, way down.

What's your current status?

Today I live in London having left Oxford 12 months ago. I have a kid although he is now 16. Thankfully I do not have to rely solely on our royalties.

Okay, the obligatory questions about reforming the band - When Ride reformed back in 2001 for the Coming up for Air sessions, what was the "magic" like? How did it compare to the days when the band was touring?

It was incredibly easy to play with the band again. It sounds cliche but we just picked up where we left off, it felt really natural. But it wasn't until weeks later that I suddenly realised where I'd nicked the bassline from.

Both Andy and Mark have said that because the "magic" would obviously not be there, the band should not reform. Would it be possible for Ride to reform and produce a "different" kind of "magic" (excuse the Queen
reference)? (I know that's a confusing question so let me just explain it further: Coming up for Air was a pretty good Ride production but occurred after the band broke up. Surely there is a chance of Ride creating some great music in the future, even though it won't compare to what happened between 1988 and 1996. Wouldn't that be a good reason to reform?)

There are 2 trains of thought. Reform and cash in playing the back catalogue again. Reform, but as a working band writing new songs. The camp is divided on this one.

I understand that all four members of Ride turned up to watch My Bloody Valentine recently. What was MBV like? Did it give you all the chance to rethink reforming?

I don't think so. The show itself was one of the best I'd ever seen. MBV made perfect sense, not at all just the nostalgia trip I was expecting. They were truly incredible, for once I was proud to be considered a shoegazer.

There's been a lot of bands recently that have released CDs free to download over the internet (Radiohead - In Rainbows; Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV and The Slip; The Charlatans - You Cross my Path). What do you think about this new practice - is it a fad or is it where the music industry is heading?

No idea where it is all heading. I still buy CDs but am often disappointed. It bothers me that the concept of albums seems to be dying, that consumers choose specific tracks to download and as a result could easily be missing out on some of the gems that might not instantly grab you during a 30 second preview.

There are people out there who have downloaded Ride albums. Given that many people think that this is where the industry is headed, what are your thoughts about these people?

As above really. It's great that the albums are easily accessible but for me Chrome Waves is one of our best songs but I can't imagine anyone downloading it in isolation.

Would Ride ever consider releasing their back catalogue (and more) free to download?

Would you consider working in a supermarket for free? The greed the record companies are accused of are little to do with the artists. We received such a small percentage of the rrp goodness knows where the rest went.

Are you playing in a band at the moment? If no, how often do you pick up a bass or a guitar?

No, I miss it. I'd love to play again but have so little free time.




© 2008 Neil McKenzie Cameron, http://one-salient-oversight.blogspot.com/

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Message from a Butterfly

Love Will Tear Us Apart

This new BBC music video of Joy Division playing Love Will Tear Us Apart is a real winner:

I'm also a big fan of Anton Corbijn's film Control (a biopic about Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division):

I have to admit that I have cried - twice - watching the end of the film. Curtis was a brilliant man. A brilliant, stupid, creative and destructive man.

Radiohead vs The Smiths

About 20 years too late, The Smiths have become one of my favourite bands. Here's Radiohead playing a version of The Headmaster Ritual. Highlights include Thom Yorke's bobble-head, Jonny Greenwood's pink shirt and lack of head, and Phil Selway's rather unique drumming style (and bald head).

NSW Politicians cynically create media storm

From the department of look at the evil painting:

The Premier and the Prime Minister are again appalled, but a young girl photographed nude by her mother says the image, on the cover of the latest Arts Monthly Australia, is her favourite.

In the latest row over the depiction of nude children, Morris Iemma and the state Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, are so offended by the nude pictures of a young girl they want the magazine that published them stripped of federal funding. Kevin Rudd said he could not stand them.

But the girl says the picture is her favourite image and still hangs in the house.

"She just enjoys it. It's acting. She just loves it," said the 11-year-old girl's father, Robert Nelson. "Poli [Polixeni Papapetrou, the girl's mother] wrote a doctoral thesis on this. It's a highly researched body of work."

The images, part of a practice in which Papapetrou works with her daughter, were reproduced in an edition of the magazine that explores the storm over the Bill Henson photographs that were to be shown in Sydney in May.

Here is the offending painting:

That picture is NOT a form of paedophilic pornography. It's just a painting of a kid at the beach. It has nothing remotely to do with the Bill Henson photographs. The state government, so embroiled in other more worthy scandals, has basically created this media storm to deflect people's attention from them to the dirty paedophile elitist artistic community.

If that painting is pornographic, then this album cover is as well:

Time to burn our Led Zeppelin albums... 35 years after they came out onto the shelf.

Update:
The 1st picture above was sourced from The Sydney Morning Herald. It is different to the one that is actually on the front cover of the magazine. Here is the original:

So it's a picture of a child on a painted background, rather than a painting. Nevertheless there is nothing terribly offensive about this picture.