Music: January 2008 Archives
I came across a simple yet imaginative little widget for iTunes today, Moody, that lets you add tags to your songs according to their mood. It’s based on a grid of colour squares ranging from calm to intense and sad to happy on the two axis. When a song is playing in iTunes you just click on the square that best represents that song’s mood. Once you’ve done this with enough songs you’re all set...
So, next time you’ve got someone special at home, you’ve whipped out the wine and things are getting just a little bit steamny, you don’t need to go fumbling around making a new playlist to ensure the moment isn’t lost. You just create a shuffle according to which colour square best represents the kind of mood you’re aiming for. The red square top left, for instance: intense and sad. Good luck with that.
Anyway, it’s a cool idea so check out the Moody site and download the application for free. And if you don't quite understand, there’s a short movie tutorial here.
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You don’t have to be over 18 to buy a new 12”. Nor do you need an iD to download a 320 from iTunes. But you’ll need a fake one if you’re under 18 and want to see up close and personal the musicians whose careers you religiously help to fund. Venues have responsibilities that make it difficult to cater for an underage audience. While some have experimented with lowering the entrance age to 16 and handing out wristbands to those not old enough to drink alcohol, problems invariably arise when those permitted to purchase the booze do so on behalf of their younger colleagues, and so the principal dilemma for young music fans remains: how to get in.
It’s a dilemma that Sam Killcoyne, still only 15, knows well. Or rather, knew well. Aged 14, he did everything he could to get into a Buzzcocks gig but to no avail. The bouncers didn’t budge and he was turned away, sad and dejected. It was a similar situation whenever he and his friends wanted to see The Horrors, a “wild, intense and psychotic” (their own words) punk band from London: "I tried to see them seven or eight times — once in a strip club in Soho,” Sam says, “and I couldn't get in. Because they sell alcohol, you have to be 18, and I look really young." He didn’t want to go to some seedy teenage night where forty year old promoters throw together a Spice Girls look-a-like act and a few thousand hormonal thirteen year olds hellbent on sharing saliva with as many people as possible. He wanted a place where he could enjoy the music he loved. So he did something about it.
The Underage Club was born. Its premise was, and still is, simple: real music for real music fans under the age of 18. It used to run on a monthly basis at The Coronet, Elephant and Castle (check out the video below of The Horrors performing there in 2006), but now it seems future locations are more closely guarded. If you can’t be bothered to find out where and when it’s happening then you’re probably not the right type. They have a myspace page (check it out here), but even that doesn’t give much away. As far as they’re concerned, the music can do the talking.
August 2007 witnessed the biggest Underage Event yet, a festival in Victoria Park, London (see below), featuring the likes of Patrick Wolf, Mystery Jets, I Was A Club Scout and Pull Tiger Tail. It was a huge success, but then it was only ever going to be. With so many disgruntled teenagers around the country it was only a matter of time before someone got on and did something about it. It works so well because it’s run by the kind of people the events are actually aimed at. For this reason, and despite corporate sponsorship from the likes of Converse - which has helped enormously with things like staging and logistics - Underage Club events are authentic and honest. That’s exactly why Sam wants to hand over his baby to someone else when he feels the time is right. He believes that when he’s no longer under 18 he won’t be well placed to lead things forward. It’ll just bee “too weird”. And besides, being so involved with something like that can take its toll: “What you don't realize when you organise these things is that it can suck all the fun out of it. I'd rather be a punter. I'd like to take Underage as far as it can go and then give it to someone who really appreciates it. Someone who's 13 or 14 and can take it to a different place.” Again, the love of the music and the quality of the offering comes first. Nothing else matters.
Beyond London, similar events are popping up. There’s Teen Culture in Birmingham and Generation in Wolverhampton. And where the Underage Club caters for a more punk-oriented audience in London, along with the currently booming All Age Concerts (myspace), Subverse at Underworld is aimed at young rockers. It was started by Julie Weir, founder of the Visible Noise label, for the same kind of reasons: "It seemed ridiculous that venue restrictions should stop a huge number of the band's supporters from seeing them. Not all kids want to go to a Steps concert at Wembley Arena with their mum." We couldn’t agree more.
So, if like Sam Killcoyne you’re a young music lover who’s tried everything from flirting with bouncers to hiding in the overcoats of bigger brothers to get into clubs, then perhaps you should check out one of these events instead. And, if you do, then let me know what it’s like - ‘cos I can’t get in.
It’s a dilemma that Sam Killcoyne, still only 15, knows well. Or rather, knew well. Aged 14, he did everything he could to get into a Buzzcocks gig but to no avail. The bouncers didn’t budge and he was turned away, sad and dejected. It was a similar situation whenever he and his friends wanted to see The Horrors, a “wild, intense and psychotic” (their own words) punk band from London: "I tried to see them seven or eight times — once in a strip club in Soho,” Sam says, “and I couldn't get in. Because they sell alcohol, you have to be 18, and I look really young." He didn’t want to go to some seedy teenage night where forty year old promoters throw together a Spice Girls look-a-like act and a few thousand hormonal thirteen year olds hellbent on sharing saliva with as many people as possible. He wanted a place where he could enjoy the music he loved. So he did something about it.
The Underage Club was born. Its premise was, and still is, simple: real music for real music fans under the age of 18. It used to run on a monthly basis at The Coronet, Elephant and Castle (check out the video below of The Horrors performing there in 2006), but now it seems future locations are more closely guarded. If you can’t be bothered to find out where and when it’s happening then you’re probably not the right type. They have a myspace page (check it out here), but even that doesn’t give much away. As far as they’re concerned, the music can do the talking.
August 2007 witnessed the biggest Underage Event yet, a festival in Victoria Park, London (see below), featuring the likes of Patrick Wolf, Mystery Jets, I Was A Club Scout and Pull Tiger Tail. It was a huge success, but then it was only ever going to be. With so many disgruntled teenagers around the country it was only a matter of time before someone got on and did something about it. It works so well because it’s run by the kind of people the events are actually aimed at. For this reason, and despite corporate sponsorship from the likes of Converse - which has helped enormously with things like staging and logistics - Underage Club events are authentic and honest. That’s exactly why Sam wants to hand over his baby to someone else when he feels the time is right. He believes that when he’s no longer under 18 he won’t be well placed to lead things forward. It’ll just bee “too weird”. And besides, being so involved with something like that can take its toll: “What you don't realize when you organise these things is that it can suck all the fun out of it. I'd rather be a punter. I'd like to take Underage as far as it can go and then give it to someone who really appreciates it. Someone who's 13 or 14 and can take it to a different place.” Again, the love of the music and the quality of the offering comes first. Nothing else matters.
Beyond London, similar events are popping up. There’s Teen Culture in Birmingham and Generation in Wolverhampton. And where the Underage Club caters for a more punk-oriented audience in London, along with the currently booming All Age Concerts (myspace), Subverse at Underworld is aimed at young rockers. It was started by Julie Weir, founder of the Visible Noise label, for the same kind of reasons: "It seemed ridiculous that venue restrictions should stop a huge number of the band's supporters from seeing them. Not all kids want to go to a Steps concert at Wembley Arena with their mum." We couldn’t agree more.
So, if like Sam Killcoyne you’re a young music lover who’s tried everything from flirting with bouncers to hiding in the overcoats of bigger brothers to get into clubs, then perhaps you should check out one of these events instead. And, if you do, then let me know what it’s like - ‘cos I can’t get in.
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Bob Dylan played by a 14 year old Afro-America? Bob Dylan played by Cate Blanchett? Strange, but true. This is Todd Haynes’ brave and inventive new Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, which opened in cinemas last week. Skimming through mostly favourable reviews beforehand, I was expecting confusion. This is a film without a coherent narrative structure in which Dylan’s life is divided up into different periods played by different actors, which are then pieced together as a seemingly incoherent whole. Oh, and neither act goes by the actual name of Bob Dylan. The brilliant Marcus Carl Franklin plays “Woody Guthrie” (a homage to one of Dylan’s great heroes), the ebullient young singer with star-studded ambition; then there is Christian Bale playing Jack Rollins (who later morphs into the devout Pastor John), the early folk singing Dylan; then comes Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark, a renowned actor created to show Dylan’s struggles with fame and, loosely, his relationship with his wife (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg); then, in the most remarkable performance of them all, we are introduced to Blanchett’s Dylan, the drug-riddled and defiant little brat who is forever at war with the press; then it’s Richard Gere, who we’ll come to later; and throughout all this, the last of the Dylans, Ben Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud, acts as a narrator of sorts and appears at various points throughout the film.
Initially I saw it as a kind of hallucinatory melange, an indistinct patchwork of beautiful pieces, each of them brilliant in their own right, but which, assembled together as a two hour biopic, I couldn’t understand entirely - much like the mysterious Dylan himself. You think you know him, you think you have a handle on one of his many sides, but then another comes along and throws you off the scent. This is particularly true of Richard Gere as Billy the Kid: he turns up as the final Dylan in the jigsaw and totally confounds what you think you’ve figured out as, confused as we are, he walks through his fantastical, Tim Burton-esque country retreat.
Dylan’s life can be split, like the film, into various parts. He reinvented himself a number of times, both musically and in appearance. You could almost say they were clearly defined periods of his career. And they are in the film, too. Just when you thought you might predict what Dylan would do next, he would do the opposite. Just ask those fans that turned up to Newport ’65 expecting to see folk Dylan, only to find electric Dylan. This moment is brilliantly and amusingly imagined in the film with Blanchett and her band gunning down the folk fans with an impressive array of tommy guns. Reinvention is a consistent thread in Haynes’ film, too. But while we can understand each stage on its own, assembled together the man on the inside becomes no more clear than when the movie started. All we know is what we knew already - that Dylan was strange, unpredictable and difficult, but no less fascinating for it. Elusive in life, elusive on film.
But perhaps the narrative is not as loose as others have said it is, or at least as loose as it first appears after watching. It seems to me that, in this film, we glimpse through each of the characters stages of his life that aren’t as incoherent as they first seem; you might almost call it a journey that takes us progressively and unknowingly closer and closer to the real Bob Dylan. There is the initial youthful intent to be famous (Franlkin); his coming of age period featuring his heartfelt folk songs delivered with acoustic panache (Bale); a period of confusion and, perhaps, inner frustration with fame (Ledger); his realisation that a song can’t change a thing and his subsequent stubbornness (Blanchett); and the sadder realisation that, even in the most rural retreat imaginable, away from the glare of the spotlight and press, there is no escaping the inherent ills of modern society. It’s as if what comes across as brashness in the Blanchett scenes - the arrogant denial of the press and his turning his back on folk traditions and its fans - is in fact vindicated by Gere’s experiences as Billy the Kid. After all, if he can’t prevent the construction of a motorway through his remote rural village in person, standing in front of the governor, what hope did he ever have of changing the world with a song? Perhaps this was not the intention - who knows - but Haynes himself has said that Gere’s Dylan most closely resembles the real Dylan, although perhaps not the one we, the public, know best: not the Blood On The Tracks era Dylan, but the quiet and family-oriented Dylan who constantly tours the U.S. and hosts a popular music radio show on satellite radio. This is the life he eventually chose, not one of the ‘mini-lives’ played out to us in I’m Not There, the lives for which he is undoubtedly more famous. Haynes himself agrees:
"I would argue that there are more albums associated with Dylan's interest in roots music, country music, American folklore and, basically, the history of the American popular song than there are albums that reflect the urban, political, '60s-era period that made him famous. It's just an essential and inescapable aspect of his imagination and creative life and sustenance."
For me, then, aside from the sheer richness of the content, the audacity of the idea, and the quality of the cinematography, the peculiarity and brilliance of this film is that where it becomes most confusing and seemingly unreal, with Gere and Billy the Kid, it in fact becomes more real than ever. And so we leave thinking we don’t know Dylan any more than we did - and yet, deep down, perhaps we do.
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I came across something yesterday that brought me cheerily into the new year. A bunch of people have been sending in pictures of themselves using record covers in place of their own body parts.
A record + a camera + a short period with nothing else to do + a little imagination = a hilarious collection of photos...
Check out more of them here.
A record + a camera + a short period with nothing else to do + a little imagination = a hilarious collection of photos...
Check out more of them here.
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