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| David Byrne, How Music Works |
In
October I attended a talk by former Talking Heads frontman David
Byrne and electronic musician Matthew Herbert at the Curzon Cinema in
Chelsea. Herbert has been churning out electronica since the
Nineties, recently made a record comprised entirely of the sounds of
a pig from birth to bacon, and was recently installed as the director
of the Radiophonic Workshop, a venerable BBC institution best known
for producing the early electronic theme music for Doctor Who. Byrne,
on the other hand, has just published a book titled How Music Works,
and this London date was part of a small global tour to promote the
book.
At
Herbert's suggestion,the Curzon debate was titled Do We Need Any
More Music?, and began with a stark statistic from a friend of
Herbert's who works at Apple that 75% of music released on iTunes has
never been downloaded once. Not once! The pair then began dissecting
music's current ease of production owing to cheap and ubiquitous
software, often including so many preset sounds, rhythms and styles
that Herbert said it was akin to 'shopping', while Byrne countered
that it was more like 'spellchecking' in the way that the software
encourages everything to sit neatly on a grid. Herbert somehow kept
steering the conversation round to the topic of food (he was clearly
hungry); in contrast, one tedious question in the audience Q&A
afterwards pondered on the fact that 'Byrne will collaborate with
anyone for a packet of Doritos'.
One
of the topics that the pair kept returning to was the economics - of
lack thereof - in music today, turning their focus on the hairy
topics of copyright, declining incomes and illegal downloading. Byrne
cited a book by someone I've never heard of, who downloaded his way
through college until an epiphany struck him at the Brooklyn coffee
shop he worked in once he'd graduated. He began to notice that many
of his customers were from local bands like Yeasayer and TV On The
Radio, much-feted bands that he'd seen on TV, in the press, heralded
as cool and whose records he'd downloaded - for free. He couldn't get
his head around why these people had no money, until someone
explained that they made no money from record sales as no-one was
really buying music, tours rarely broke even and that the financial
realities of being a musician today were pretty stark. Byrne never
managed to complete the anecdote, but Herbert said we all had a
responsibility to encourage scenes to develop.
At
some point in proceedings my mind started to race, and I came to two
conclusions:
1.
Though I write about music pretty much every day, either for my own
Documentary Evidence website or for the magazine Clash, I'm not doing
enough to support the artform I love the most; and
2.
I feel a need to expose my two children to as much varied music as
possible.
In
response to the point Herbert made around encouraging scenes to
develop, I realised that I'm already part of a small scene.
Documentary Evidence is a website devoted to the music of one label,
Mute, a label that released music by Depeche Mode, Moby, Nick Cave
and countless others, whose Blast First sub-label first brought Sonic
Youth and Dinosaur Jr. to the UK, and who played an integral role in
dance music's development via the Rhythm King and NovaMute imprints,
releasing genre-defining works by S'Express, Bomb The Bass,
Plastikman and Speedy J. My site has a small and ardent following of
like-minded fans, and so I've decided to do something within that
scene beyond writing reviews and conducting interviews.
I
haven't worked it all out yet, but it's called MuteResponse and I'll
post details soon.
As
well as curating my own site with more or less daily reviews, from
February this year I've been writing occasionally for Clash's
website, covering gig reviews and interviews. I've tended to focus on
Mute acts because it's my main interest, and that's lead to
interviewing people like Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode, Jon Spencer
from the Blues Explosion and Chris Keating from Yeasayer. My good
friend Andy put me in touch with Clash and through that connection
and the stuff I've done since for them, I think I can now
legitimately call myself a freelance music journalist, particularly
after my review of Yeasayer's gig at The Lexington made it into the
magazine edition of Clash in the summer. It doesn't pay a penny, but
it's a lot of fun getting to talk to your musical heroes and being on
guest lists, and I've learned more about the music industry this year
than I ever knew before.
Andy
and I have worked on three gigs together - Barry Adamson, Inspiral
Carpets and, at the end of October, Crime & The City Solution at
the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A few weeks back I got to interview Crime's
frontman Simon Bonney. Links to both can be found below. Hopefully it
goes some way to allay any concerns that I've simply stopped writing.
Yeasayer,
mentioned above, are masters of songs that I described to the band's
Chris Keating as being 'balanced precariously above a chasm between
joyous and miserable'. He didn't disagree, and more or less took it
as a compliment. In the last week I've found myself listening to
Robyn's 'Dancing On My Own' far more than is good for me. I'd never
heard the song before, but it was played in a particularly and
unexpectedly moving scene at the end of an episode of Girls, a
programme that I fully accept is not really designed for me and
possibly highlights that I'm far too prudish.
In
the scene, Hannah is mulling over a tweet that she intends to send
about having caught an STD from a former partner and finding out that
her ex boyfriend is gay. She sends a pithy melancholy message and
Robyn's song starts playing in the background. She begins to dance -
pretty badly, even by my standards - and her flatmate, Marnie,
returning from work, joins in. The scene has that joyous sense of
expression mixed in with a pretty depressing backdrop. Robyn's smart
song straddles that same chasm as Yeasayer in a much more overtly
display of visceral, intelligent and savagely addictive pop. It joins
the playlist I've yet to make - stuff like MGMT's 'Time To Dream' (a
song that eulogises having sex with models and shooting up smack and which
leaves you unsure whether you're celebrating that, condemning it or
regretting that you can't join in), most of Polly Scattergood's work
and loads of other bittersweet songs I seem to make a habit of
collecting.
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