Corporate indie.

So throw those curtains wide… it's time to write another cash cow

How do you judge when an ‘alternative’ band has really made it big? A number one album? Maybe. A sell-out tour? Possibly. Or is it when they find their cash cow? That song(s) that just keeps cropping up, especially in places that it really shouldn’t.

Advertising, TV montages, presentations, conferences – for me, these are the real indicators of when a band has made it, and by made it, I mean swapped coolness and credibility for fame and fortune. C’est la vie, but can we blame them?

Indie and guitar music dominate these mediums far more than they do the charts these days, with a handful of bands used to such levels that the royalties alone must be a significant part of their earnings.

Elbow's One Day Like This is the obvious example for me, and as we approach London 2012, yawn, we face the prospect of them releasing another, the only difference being that this song will actually have been written specifically for something as uninspiring as athletics, so will surely be worse.

You can imagine the pound signs in certain bands’ eyes as they write new songs with adverts rather than audiences in minds, but I don’t think Guy Garvey had the Olympics, a dramatic finale of Waterloo Road or Holby City, or a montage of the best bits of Big Brother 9 in mind when he wrote One Day Like This, so I doubt their Olympic song will be as inspired, but I digress.

Clearly cash cows annoy me, that much is obvious, so who should I be annoyed at?

Elbow? Like I said I don’t think this is what they had in mind when toiling away for 20 years to make it to where they are today, and everyone gotsta get paid, but they have agreed to their song being used relentlessly and degradingly. They’ve allowed something that, while not the best or worst song ever, you hope meant something to them, to be ruined, squeezed of its sentiment and left as a meaningless cliché.

I’m not just picking on Elbow, there are plenty more out there, you all know the songs I’m talking about, Florence’s You’ve Got the Love cover was an obvious cash cow from day one, Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol, anything by The Killers.

All have been milked beyond belief. And it’s not just established bands that are in on the act, PR-savvy young bands pop up all over advertising all the time, a good example being the bizarrely-popular Two Door Cinema Club, who were unavoidable in advertising throughout 2011, this list showing over 20 advertising appearances already, such as this one, apparently a Debenhams advert is what young bands aspire to now, yuck.

It all makes me think of this and, while Ricky Gervais is pushing the limits with Chris Martin here, there are people like this surely out there, if not in the bands then around them.

So, if I can't blame the bands, that are only being smart some would argue, should I be annoyed at the users? The people endlessly and mindlessly using these songs. Using a song like One Day Like This is such an obviously cheap and lazy attempt to improve something that lacks heart or feeling that it shouldn't be allowed any more. Can't they just stick to Take That or Adele?

Shouldn't we hate them for thinking a song like Elbow is appropriate to soundtrack soap actors reacting to yet another statistically-unlikely disaster in their workplace or footballers’ faces distorted with agony at failing to make the last 32 of the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy?

Or should I just be annoyed at myself? For being annoyed by this, for thinking bands on the left of mainstream should be better than cash cows, that they earn enough money without needing to whore out their songs? For writing this rambling blog?

I don’t know, but I know one thing, I’m not excited to hear Elbow’s song for the Olympics. Why they don’t just trot out the cash cow they have again is beyond me.

Summer Camp

Summer Camp brought the sounds of Condale to The Rainbow in Birmingham last night for a riot of Ferris-Bueller-leading-the-parade proportions.

Young duo Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley blasted their way through a host of songs from their debut album Welcome To Condale, as well as unveiling two new songs from a forthcoming ep.

I’ve been dying to see them since I first heard Better Off Without You, comfortably one of the best songs of recent times, in mid 2011 and this grew with the release of their excellent debut on Halloween.



With touring drummer Will in tow, they ran through a raw and energetic set of indie-pop with a retro tinge, complemented perfectly by a reel of iconic film moments playing in the background, from Condale-appropriate classics such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Footloose and Dirty Dancing, to Elvis.

The mythology they have created through their obsession with an 80s aesthetic, sustained in their live show as well, is what makes them a special band. Add to that that they are a great live band too. Everything is louder and raunchier, but polite enough to include an allotted chat break in the middle.

Elizabeth is a charismatic chameleon on stage, flitting between butter-wouldn’t-melt, dancing like the mic is her hairbrush and she’s back in her bedroom, and delivering acidic lines with looks that could kill and smacking down any overzealous shouts. Jeremy bounces along next to her, playing a variety of instruments and bringing the noise.

That said, amongst numerous highlights were the two unplugged numbers, a brave move with a noisy crowd containing more than one drunken idiot. Jeremy and Elizabeth sang latest single Losing My Mind while wandering through the crowd and closed with a heartfelt cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere. The vast majority of the crowd enjoyed it silently and appreciated the chance to hear them stripped down. See a similar performance from a previous gig below.



The gig was only the second of the current tour but will be hard to top. To find out more about the rest of their tour and for drawings and recipes courtesy of Elizabeth, check out their blog here.

Pinterest.

Music and photography have gone hand in hand for over 50 years. A beautifully taken album cover, a shot catching an artist in full flow on stage, there are thousands of images out there that have become equally as iconic as the music they relate to.

The spirit of punk captured in Paul Simonon smashing his bass on the cover of London Calling. Lou Reed’s black and white features on Transformer. Ian Curtis innocently gazing up into bright stage lights. Pete and Carl showing their Libertines tattoos. There’s an endless list, and there are also millions of great photos out there to discover. Like these.

I have begun compiling some of them on Pinterest, the new website taking the world by storm.

For the uninitiated, it’s essentially an online pin board, where you collect images you like and pin them to your boards. It’s a simple idea, which the best websites are often based on.

I signed up thinking it could be used alongside sites such as This Is My Jam and last.fm, to let interested people find out more about that most important of things, my musical taste.

Amongst others, I have boards for compiling my favourite music photography and my favourite album artwork.

It’s a great website, easy to use and aesthetically pleasing, it can soon become addictive, as the need to fill your boards and pin every picture you find takes hold. I hope it will soon become a staple for bands, alongside Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, Bandcamp etc. It would be a great tool for bands to showcase the pictures of themselves they like the most.

To see more music photography and album artwork I love, see my Pinterest page here.

In other news, I’ve just got RADIOHEAD TICKETS!!!!! To celebrate seeing my favourite band again, I urge you all to enjoy this new song, which I will be seeing in October :)



I also have a new About page on the blog, with links to my other sites and the option to Like my blog on Facebook, you know you want to.

Ben Howard & Daughter

It took its time in coming but my first gig of the year was seeing Ben Howard and Daughter at the HMV Institute on Tuesday (28th Feb). It was worth the wait.

Ben played every song bar one from his debut album Every Kingdom, bookended by B-side opener Depth Over Distance and encore song Burgh Island, a new song about an island just off the coast of Devon that is close to my heart as well as Ben’s.

It, like every song throughout the night, was played with boundless energy, even the ‘quiet’ ones, as Ben called them, were delivered with passion that matched the precision.

This was equally matched by a crowd as adoring and enthusiastic as any I’ve ever been a part of. Every song and every word from Ben was met with deafening screams and hysteria. Every quiet song was silently observed, every big chorus chanted back by a few thousand, as you can witness in this guerilla footage I found on YouTube.



It’s also worth noting that it was a mixed crowd, made up of all ages, with a slight lean towards female, plenty of whom embraced the following day’s tradition in order to shout early proposals to the 23-year-old.

“We played here last year in the room downstairs and were shown this room, we all said we would love to come back and play it and it’s amazing to have sold it out,” said Ben during his performance, a great example of the upwards trajectory he is on.

While his gig several days earlier at the Shepherd's Bush Empire is the date he will probably remember most, this whole tour has the feeling of witnessing something special, an artist on the brink of making it big. With a US tour this month and a US release of his album in April, as well as another UK tour later this year featuring larger venues still, taking the next step should be easy for such a great live act.

He certainly has the talent. Already an excellent songwriter, he also showcased his guitar prowess, easily switching between acoustic and electric during the performance proving he can wail as well as he can finger pick.

Each member of his band could be found in the dictionary under the word multi-instrumentalist, all switching between drums and strings and even playing both simultaneously at times. The four shared a great camaraderie on stage, all seeming delighted to be doing what they are doing. There were several points when Ben couldn’t even sing he was smiling or laughing so much, a great thing to see.

Highlights for me were Only Love, the first big singalong of the night, a loud and rousing extended version of The Wolves to close the first set, and the same for The Fear, which ended the gig.

Seeing Ben’s album at number 10 on Spotify’s UK Top 100 and two songs from it in their Top 100 songs, added to the recent success of (admittedly more pop-orientated) troubadour Ed Sheeran suggests Ben can have an impact on the charts as well as on the live scene. I'm convinced he is destined for great things.



I was equally excited to see support band Daughter, whose two devastating-in-a-good-way EPs became an obsession of mine in 2011. While only playing five songs, Elena Tonra and her band produced a hypnotic sound that resonated long after they had left the stage. Headline shows outside of London would be greatly appreciated.

What were they thinking?

I love Dark Side of the Moon. Not an inflammatory or unusual statement in the slightest I know. But, depending on my mood, I generally have two different experiences when I listen to it, due to certain aspects of the record.

What is it that makes this album so polarising for me? The sound effects. The clinking coins, cash registers, clicking adding machines and quotes that pepper some of the albums best songs.

Random is an overused word these days, but some of these are pretty damn random. Sometimes I love the album because of them, thinking they are meaningful and innovative, and sometimes I love it in spite of them, and I’m left asking, what is the point? Obviously it make sense to a certain point to have money sounds on a song called Money, but what is the need? We all know what money is.

And this led me to think about other songs that feature unusual, abstract or just random bits in them. Some that work, and some that don’t. Early disclaimer, I love all these bands and understand I have no right to question their genius, try to relax.

Anyway, one of the first songs that came into my head with this train of thought was Everlong by Foo Fighters, a great song no doubt, that features some inaudible whispering during the instrument break.

Apparently, the whispering heard is three different things being read on top of one another, a love letter, a technical manual and a short story.

It’s a great song, one of my favourites, and I’m loathe to criticise it, but I’m not sure what the whispering adds to it, or why they included it. Sorry Dave, it’s pointless, thanks for Nirvana though.

Which leads me on to my next revelation, that I spent my teen years painted black, listening to only rock, metal and emo, caught up in the first wave of emo before it soon lost what little credibility it had and the audience grew up. My favourite band of said era was Funeral for a Friend.

I remember being as excited for the release of their second album Hours in 2005 as I have been for any album, based on the pre-album single Streetcar, which I loved.

The song begins with the sound of someone dialling a phone, the dialling tone beeps along in the background as the guitar intro comes in and then a female voice answers Hello just before the vocal starts.

I thought it was awesome the first time I heard it and still think it gives the song a great burst to begin with. But it is utterly meaningless really, and I even read somewhere that fans used the dial tones to work out the number, which was lead singer Matt Davies’ phone, and bombarded it with calls, forcing him to change it. Meaningless and a hassle to boot.

Radiohead. They are beyond questioning in my eyes. I go all gooey-eyed fanboy at the very mention of them, and criticise them around me at your peril, apart from these two words, Fitter Happier.

The two-minute recital of slogans by an electronic voice has been described as ‘everything the album Ok Computer stands for in one song’. Personally, it’s never done it for me, and another song as perfect as the rest of the album would have been more appreciated.

Another of my favourite bands is The Kills, whose debut album Keep On Your Mean Side is a lo-fi, garage-blues classic.

They’ve (quite correctly) been held up as a throwback, a band where attitude and appearance is as important as the music and, in Alison Mosshart, have one of the coolest women alive today.

However, they may have believed their own press a little too much when including a couple of rambling monologues from Alison on this album. At the end of first song Superstition, she says a few unintelligible lines before coughing and saying Oh fuck. Rock on!

Later, as an interval, they include her telling a story about how weathermen used to draw the weather on a board and needed makeup on their hands. Hmm, ok. Still an amazing album, and I could listen to her ramble all day.

Like I said I love these bands, but feel free to defend them against my sarcasm, or to suggest any other songs that include weird effects, quotes, samples or anything really. There are plenty more out there.

Puzzling lyrics.

While I was listening to my iPod on shuffle recently, a couple of songs came on, one after the other, and caused exactly the same thought in my mind, what the hell are these lyrics about?

The two songs in question just happened to be The Kills’ Alphabet Pony and Motorcycle Emptiness by the Manics.

My thought harked back to an experience I had playing Motorcycle Emptiness to my dad quite a few years ago now, thinking he would enjoy the song’s guitar parts. Instead, he listened attentively to the six-minute song and then promptly asked ‘What is motorcycle emptiness then?’ And I had no answer. That was all he had to say about the song.

FYI, the song’s Wikipedia page says the following: The lyrics have been interpreted by the band as an attack on the hollowness of the consumer lifestyle offered by capitalism, describing how society expects young people to conform.

Oh right, that’s clears that up. Well, anyway… For me it is an example of a lyric/song title becoming a distraction, overshadowing the music with questions about meaning and rationale.

While rubbish lyrics are obviously worse, a lyric that is confusing, cryptic or bizarre is instead harder to shake off. Am I missing out on some obvious reference? Are they trying to exclude people like me? Am I just stupid?

I like both of the aforementioned songs but I don’t want to spend my time wondering what the hell an alphabet pony is. And these aren't the only songs I like that confound and confuse me.

On The Smiths’ Bigmouth Strikes Again, Morrissey sings, ‘Now I know how Joan of Arc felt, as the flames rose to her roman nose and her Walkman started to melt.’ I’ve always wondered what the hell that line was about? Any ideas? Mozza is a great lyricist and I’m sure he had some meaning when writing that, but it’s beyond me whatever it is.

Vampire Weekend are a band for cryptic lyrics, with one particular line stuck in my mind as it features in two of their songs. ‘But this feels so unnatural, Peter Gabriel too.’ is a line from the choruses of Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa (also WTF?) and Ottoman. And I have no idea what the reference to the former Genesis frontman means.

Massive Attack’s trip-hop debut album Blue Lines is one of my favourite albums, and the title track is a high point of the album. However, when looking through the lyrics, this line stands out as particularly strange and nonsensical. ‘She told me take an occupation or you lose your mind. And on a nine to five lemon, looking for the lime.’

While I can’t (or shouldn’t) really rap along with 3D and Tricky anyway, I refuse to join in on that line. ‘Take my piece of mind and sign my name across your heart.’ is one of the best last lines of any song ever though.

Do you ever find yourself confused, scared or angry by any lyrics you hear? Which ones do it for you? And if anyone has any info about the lyrics I've mentioned, feel free to share it with all of us.

This Is My Jam.

Apologies for my tardiness, January has brought to me a resolution to read rather than write and this has meant spending my time with Hemingway and Fitzgerald rather than Something for the CV.

But now it’s February, it’s time to pull my finger out.

My last blog on winter songs got some great feedback and with that in mind, I will continue to write equally short, sweet and hopefully interesting pieces.

This week I’d like to highlight a new music-based social website I’ve started using. My first interviewee on this blog, Laura Snapes (@laurasnapes) recently introduced it with a blog on NME, and if you follow me on Facebook to Twitter, you may have noticed my posts from this new service.

This Is My Jam is a website for you to namecheck the one song that you are currently loving. It’s a simple as that.

You pick a song at a time to be your Jam, which is effectively your ‘status’. Friends can listen to your song, like it and follow you so your choices appear in their feed.

The website is still in its Beta phase and you need an invite to sign up, but I think it’s great, especially for a sharer like me. You can easily post your Jams to Facebook and Twitter too if your friends are too lazy to get on the site.

As someone who frequently posts links to songs on YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify, it’s quicker and easier to manage This Is My Jam than posting links across different accounts separately, and the site finds videos and songs from these websites so I'm sharing the same source material.

You can have as many Jams as you want, I’m going for one a day as that’s easy to manage and yet enough to share the songs I’m really enjoying.

The only thing is that you can only listen to your current Jam, not your previous ones, and you can’t see a full list of your former Jams either, only your last five. I understand the only being able to play your current Jam is due to an issue with space, but just a list of all your former Jams would be great to be able to refer back to, even if you cannot listen to them. Hopefully this is something they can iron out because otherwise it’s a great and simple new site.

If you’re interested in knowing what I’m listening to, check out my This Is My Jam.

My Jam for today is Ben Howard’s Promises.