Blogs

From Uncut, March 2009. 'Thirty years on from the beginning of Margaret Thatcher's reign of terror, Uncut revisits a tempestuous and invigorating period in British pop history. PAUL WELLER, THE SPECIALS, THE BEAT, UB40, SOUL II SOUL and THE FARM recall a time when mass unemployment energised a whole generation to learn one chord, learn another, form a band - and then make an insurrectionist statement on Cheggers Plays Pop...'

John Dwyer has the sort of discography so deep and complicated that one suspects even he must have trouble keeping up with himself. As a consequence, it might be a mistake to try and divine paths and trends in career which his encompassed Coachwhips, Pink and Brown, Landed, Yikes, Burmese, The Hospitals, Zeigenbock Kopf and Sword + Sandals (according to Wikipedia, anyway, if I can emphasise my spotty knowledge any more) as well as Thee Oh Sees.

Hopefully, you'll have seen the new edition of Uncut by now. Among many, many good things in this month's issue, there's Nick Hasted's interview with Ginger Baker.

At the end of last week, I watched the new film by Olivier Assayas, which has been called Something In The Air in England, though its original French title – Après Mai – arguably feels a little more evocative.

The IMDB lists Noah Baumbach’s credits since 2010’s Greenberg as a TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections and a co-write on Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.

Three weeks and a few hours ago, I found myself on a small plane from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington DC. Most of the other passengers were members of the Harvard baseball team, who had spent the past three hours being harassed by schoolgirls making innumerable Harlem Shake videos. I, though, was sat next to a woman from Colorado, who was studying the use of horses in Gestalt therapy.

Towards the end of the V&A’s terrific David Bowie Is… exhibition, tucked away on a wall next to the handwritten lyrics for “Heroes” and a postcard from Christopher Isherwood, are a set of door keys that have evidently seen better days.

On their fine "Light Up Gold" album from the end of last year, Parquet Courts often come across like a kind of self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipster band, allbeit one who are, of course, a) disdainful of the term 'hipster'; b) focused on a rather old-fashioned hipster sound that, until they became hip, was probably too hip, or not hip enough, for hipsters; c) snarky about self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipsters; d) probably reflexively quite snarky about themselves.

Reading about the South By Southwest festival tends to produce, in me at least, a mix of empathetic fatigue and terrible envy, and last week’s bombardment of tweets, blogs, news stories was no different.

It’s easy – and probably useful, sometimes – to lambast major labels for what looks from the outside like chronic short-termism. The climate is, understandably I guess, a neurotic one, and those days are long gone when labels would work long-term with a select group of trophy artists, whose usefulness to the company was more silvery and nebulous, more about cachet than quick profit.