Sunday 30 June 2019

Elbow Bristol Canons Marsh Amphitheatre June 29th 2019


Elbow have been touring festivals around Europe and have been playing mostly fairly short sets of fan favourites. The weather turned out kind for this outdoor show, part of the Bristol Sounds series being held on the waterfront in the city centre, probably to the relief of bands, promoters and audience.

Elbow are one of the best current mainstream live bands, the songs take on new dimensions in performance compared to their sometimes slightly antiseptic studio albums. The three songs from the Little Fictions album are good examples. The title song and ‘Kindling’ particularly have matured nicely over the last couple of years in concert, compared to their (to me) occasionally disappointing original recordings.This was a fan pleasing set with nearly all their best audience participation numbers as well as a new song that appears to be called Empires. Guy Garvey is the supreme frontman of his generation, holding the audience, not all of whom seemed to be regular concertgoers, in the songs and through a tale of a band night out involving bass player Pete Turner and copious amounts of beer. The fact that despite conspicuous success and doubtless its trappings he remains firmly connected to his audience speaks volumes for the man and his band.  

The set list is published here, and built to the three big "joining in" songs, ‘Lippy Kids’ (my personal favourite Elbow song), the inevitable ‘One Day Like This’ and ‘Grounds For Divorce’. And then they were gone, the 11pm curfew meant no encore, but we got what we came for, the songs, which are of such a consistent high quality that they can still step back fifteen years and find songs worthy of an airing.So why did the people to my right have to keep chatting through the quiet bits? My Sad Captains was particuarly affected. Surely they paid the same ticket price we did, so why not LISTEN!

Support was from Another Sky who were not helped by the usual bottom of the bill sound problems. A Google of their appearances at SXSW and on Later suggests this was not their best night. Villagers are never going to be my new favourite band, they just seem to lack bite, and frankly the Flugelhorn moments had me diving for the beer bus. Anyway we were there to see Elbow who delivered as they always do. A new song suggests a new album, and they have recorded shows on the last few tours so hopefully a nice CD/DVD live box set will appear at some point.


Sunday 23 June 2019

The price for your cheap streaming is...


  On Saturday Anil Prasad of Innerviews, a long standing online music magazine that is always worth reading, posted a series of tweets about streaming. I have banged on about this before here but you can't overstate the problem that moving to streaming is causing for the production of new music. These are the basic figures given by Innerviews, that are easily verifiable elsewhere online.

1 Stream on YouTube = $0.00069 1 Stream on Spotify = $0.00437 1 Stream on Apple Music = $0.00735 1 Stream on Tidal = $0.01250 1 Stream on Amazon Music = $0.00402

And it is all in dollars so for those with currency transactions to worry about the net income is even lower. 

As Prasad points out this explains why the gaps between albums and tours get ever longer. They can't afford it. Elvis may very well be working down the chip shop in fact. An established artist of my acquaintance with 5 gold and platinum discs on his wall spends most of his time working in his wife's craft supplies business as he can make better money packing candles than he can playing music.

Music is more available than at any time due to the internet and mobile phones, but the drive to having a streaming app on every phone and unlimited usage for £10 a month or less will affect the ability to produce new music. You may shrug your shoulders and say so what I only listen to the old stuff, and far too many people do. But to have a sustainable model for creative growth, we need new music coming along, if nothing else to draw new listeners into the back catalogue. People will always want to make music, and the opportunity to do so is greater than ever thanks to the same technology that is restricting the ability to make a career out of it. 

Music as a business is imperiled more than at any other time. Recorded music came along and took over from sheet music as the primary source of income, sheet music replaced performance and patronage and we have now come to the point where the sale of recorded music needs to be replaced as the primary income generator. For a while it looked like patronage was back thanks to crowd funding, but the recent Pledge music debacle (if you don't know about that google Pledge Music Danny Vaughn) has made the customers wary of committing to that. Live music? venues are shutting all over the country, The Borderline in London is only the most high profile, and with ticket prices moving slowly out of reach of regular attendance who knows what will happen to that.

The much reported "end of iTunes" , which is in fact anything but, will drive more people to streaming services which helps the dominant companies of the internet age but at the expense of pretty much everyone else. So if you want to support an artist buy their physical product (CD, LP) or at least their download, but don't think that by streaming their music you are helping.



Tuesday 11 June 2019

More reviews and a radio show



  I was lucky enough to review two really good albums recently over at Americana UK.

W.C.Beck's "First Flight" is fairly standard Alt.Country fare at first listen but reveals it self over time as a properly good album, no filler.

The star turn though is The Alvarez Theory's debut album. If this doesn't crop up on my end of year best of then there will be some truly great albums coming soon. Also the first LP record I have played in about 25 years. The Alvarez Theory, by the way, explains why the Dinosuars died out...

Lastly but by no means leastly Blairs Blues is a roots music show, Americana, Blues and the like, recorded twice a month in Bristol for a Canadian station. You can hear it on Mixcloud here. Blair Chadwick is a good chap to chat to about music as well so please support him.

With all this listening to Americana, I'm confronted by a truth about my music habits. I can't stick to any one thing for long, but the main theme of all this is tunes. I like a decent tune and at the moment roots music seems  to be providing that. The Prog I like is mostly of the shorter more song based variety (can't do ELP), so my new  comment if someone asks what music I like is "anything with a decent tune".

And then a friend persuaded me to try Tom Waits...