Julien Temple’s documentary on the Glastonbury festival is available for a free download for the upcoming two weeks at Movielink.com. ‘Glastonbury’ also includes footage of Radiohead (’Fake Plastic Trees’).
After the promotion, the Glastonbury movie and DVD bonus materials (including Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque’) will be available for $19.99 on Movielink as a permanent download or buy downloads of individual performances by artists for $1.99. An entire collection of performances from the DVD will be available for $15 on the service. Too bad Movielink doesn’t like Macs though.
The original band of Richard Ashcroft, Nick McCabe,Simon Jones and Pete Sailsbury have got together for the first time in almost a decade.
In a statement, the band have announced they were: "Getting back together for the joy of the music."
It is believed they will take a summer break and then return to the studio to complete their next album.
The band broke up in 1999, with the tumultuous relationship between Ashcroft and McCabe being well documented with the two exiting the band repeatedly since they began in 1993.
The band are set to play:
Glasgow Academy (November 2,3) Blackpool Empress Ballroom (5,6) London Roundhouse (8,9)
When it comes to British indie bands, long American tours are not for the faint of heart. You're no longer protected by the fawning aura of NME subeditors or the adoring crowds or the many summer festivals. Jet-setting between the old country's capitals and sipping Sangria in Barcelona morph into long hours in the bus and the dinner buffet at the Triple J just outside of Topeka.
For this reason, while many have tried to break America, most have ended up being broken by it. Oasis did a pretty good job. Radiohead famously got the weird "Amnesiac" to number 2 on the Billboard chart. But for every Coldplay, there's a Suede, a Manic Street Preachers, a Mansun--eccentric British acts that the American musical and geographical landscapes chewed up and spat out. So what for The Veils?
Initial signs are promising. Three years after falling apart before the American tour of their first album, "The Runaway Found", The Veils passed through Chicago promoting the infinitely more dark and complex "Nux Vomica". Confidence and spirits were running high. The venue was surprisingly full, and Finn was eager to regale them with his (newfound?) stage presence, a sort of cross between the drunken swagger of early-Libertines Pete Doherty and the manic guitar attack of Jonny Greenwood.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the set was light on tracks from "The Runaway Found". Only "The Wild Son" made it into the proper set, while the band played a revamped version of "More Heat than Light" as the encore. "Nux Vomica" songs like "Pan" and the title track impressed with their ferocity, with Finn taking violent stabs at his guitar and Henning's snare drum cracking on beat. Finn's wail on "Pan" of "You're nothing but a child!" was ripe with the sort of emotion you would expect from one of this generation's notable talents.
That's not all to say the The Veils are the well-oiled machine they'll need to be to conquer America. Songs? Check. Stage presence? Check. Harmonies? Uh, no. Normally this reviewer can do without the real heavy harmonies--give me "Paint it Black" over "God Only Knows" any day--but the issue for The Veils is that they used harmonies so effectively on "Nux Vomica". Their absence live is thus hugely disappointing. "Advice For Young Mothers to Be", the album's catchy centerpiece and first single, sounded like a tired reggae number. "One Night on Earth" was similarly empty. A small point, perhaps, but one that will surely need to be sorted out in the near future.
At the risk of sounding grandiose, I would venture to say that Finn Andrews is the natural heir to Jeff Buckley's throne. Whereas others inspired by Buckley have long since meandered down the pop cul-de-sac, Andrews has courageously led his band into intriguing and uncharted territory. Listeners will want to pay very close attention now and in the future. If America doesn't break him, that is.
During the show, which again saw spectacular pyrotechnics, fire, smoke and gymnasts suspended from giant balloons, the band blasted through a bombastic performance with hits and classics from their backcatalogue, including 'Super Massive Blackhole', which saw giant marching robots projected onto the stage's giant video screen, 'Starlight', 'Time Is Running Out', 'Hysteria', 'Stockholm Syndrome' and 'Plug In Baby'.
Midway through the set, Bellamy played three tracks on his glass top piano including 'Apocalypse Please', their Nina Simone cover 'Feeling Good' and debut album opener 'Sunburn' .
Towards the end of the show the singer changed into a black jacket and white jeans as he strapped on an acoustic guitar for 'Soldier's Poem' before he introduced 'Unintended' by telling the audience: "This is an old song and we are playing it in a new stadium".
The band rounded off their historic two day extravaganza once again with 'Take A Bow' before leaving the stage to huge applause. Drummer Dominic Howard added: "You guys fucking rule. You are unbelievable. We'll see you again soon."
Let us take a few moments to solemnly recognize the best album of all time. No, for once I'm not being sarcastic. Here are some highlights from a Melody Maker article entitled "The Making of OK Computer":
The band began recording the first bits of the album during the summer of '96 in their rehearsal studios, a converted apple shed. In September, Radiohead rented actress Jane Seymour's mansion, St. Catherine's Court, moved in all their equipment, and began recording there. Things went well. At first.
"It was heaven and hell," Yorke says. "Our first two weeks there we basically recorded the whole album. The hell came after that. The house was..."--Yorke pauses for a quarter of a minute--"oppressive. To begin with, it was curious about us. Then it got bored with us. And it started making things difficult. It started doing things like turning the studio tape machines on and off, rewinding them."
The house was haunted?
"Yeah. It was great. Plus, it was in a valley on the outskirts of Bath, in the middle of nowhere. So when we actually stopped playing music there was just this pure silence. Open the window: nothing. A completely unnatural silence--not even birds singing. It was fucking horrible. I could never sleep."
Radiohead finally finished recording and mastering in February of 1997. After they got some distance from the record, they were a little startled by it. "At the 11th hour, when we realized what we had done," Yorke admits, "we had qualms about the fact that we had created this thing that was quite revolting."
The people at Capitol Records felt the same way at first, especially since they didn't hear anything on OK Computer that sounded even remotely like a single, let alone like "Creep." But now, everyone's settled down a bit. Capitol's president Gary Gersh, when asked about Radiohead, has even said this: "We won't let up until they are the biggest band in the world."
(Spin, january 1998)
"Karma Police" on Letterman:
Q: The irony is the fact that you set out to make a straight-laced pop record.
Ed: Yeah. We were saying, "Let's do it really straight ahead, let's not fuck around and spend ages analysing the material." And we ended up doing 16 versions of 'No Surprises' and then went back to the first one. The problem is, we get bored very easily.
(Select Magazine, december 1997, Interview from late october in Florence) Q: So how do you call time on the whole thing? That must be the most difficult thing in the world.
A: Well that's exactly what we had to do. In the end we just called time. It could have gone one for another year. Jonny came in, in January, into the studio one morning and said, 'Right, that's it. We have to stop now. We have to finish what we've done and stop.' So we wrote down what we'd done, and went, 'Yeah. OK.'
Q: Does that mean there are glitches on there?
A: Oh yeah. Fuck, yeah. I'm actually amazed it got the reaction it did. None of us fucking knew any more, wether it was good or bad. What really blew my head off was the fact that people got all the things, all the textures and the sounds and the atmospheres we were trying to create. I figured that it wouldn't happen like that.
I was really amazed about the way the people described how it sounded as well. That was I really thought was great. I suppose that was the bit that was really exciting - doing something you've spent so long on and really agonized about, really having this sound in our heads, like the sound of Ed's guitar on the beginning of 'No Surprises' or the way 'Airbag' starts. One sounds like a car accident, the other sounds like a child's toy.
(Select Magazine, december 1997, Interview from late october in Florence)
"No Surprises" on Jools Holland:
"One of the satisfying things about doing OK Computer was that I felt we'd gotten to a state where I didn't have to get emotional about what I was doing. The best vocal takes I did were usually first takes where I hadn't gotten into it yet. So I wasn't trying to be emotional. It seems like the most overtly emotional things now tend to be adverts and gospel music."
(Alternative Press, april 1998)
Q: What got to you about Bitches Brew?
The first time I heard it I thought it was the most nauseating chaos. I felt sick listening to it. Then gradually something incredibly brutal about it and incredibly beautiful... you're never quite sure where you are in it, it seems to be swimming ar nd you. It has that sound of a huge empty space, like a cathedral. It wasn't jazz and it didn't sound like rock'n'roll. It was building something up and watching it fall apart, that's the beauty of it. It was at the core of what we were trying to do wit OK Computer.
(Q Magazine, october 1997, Interview from day off between Atlanta and Washington)
"I don't think it's pessimistic," Yorke says, politely defensive. "I put the stuff in the songs because I can't say it elsewhere. If you write it down on a sheet of paper it may sound like that, but it's actually the lyrics to a song so it's redemptive its own way. Anyway, it's compassionate, not condemning."
(Rolling Stone, october 1997)
Yorke said he had written a collection of songs for Radiohead's third album, the follow-up to The Bends.
He said: "I've talked to the record company and the managers and stuff and just basically said I don't think we're going to finish it until we finish it. It could take us a good year. That doesn't mean we'll spend a year in a studio, we'll probably only spend a month in the studio, but I'm not going to write anything unless it's coming out."
"The big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another moribund, miserable, morbid and negative record lyrically, but I really don't want to, at all. And I'm deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. I'm not able to put them into music yet and I don't want to just force it."
Guitarist Ed O'Brien added: "I think the third album will be celebratory and maybe not so inward-looking, that would be great. I think thinking is a good thing but there are times when you say Fuck it. We're allowed to make mistakes".
Getting into an artist, especially an established one, is no easy task. There's often a daunting amount of material to sift through, along with the possibility of being called a bandwagon jumper. With this feature, I'll try to introduce you to the best aspects of an artist, with the hope that you'll hear something you like.
1. Like a Rolling Stone (Highway 61 Revisited) As I've written previously, "'Like a Rolling Stone' is probably Dylan's crowning achievement, the sort of song you instantly recognize even if you think you've never heard it before." It's a six-minute "I told you so", as Dylan excoriates a unwitting debutante after her fall from grace. Yes, there would seem to be a sense of smugness, of misogynist satisfaction in the singer's voice, but it's really more about a generation coming to terms with its bourgeoisie dreams being shattered by reality. Oh, and the guitar and keyboard work isn't half-bad either.
2. Maggie's Farm (Bringing it all Back Home) Like its musical twin on "Bringing it all Back Home", "Subterranean Homesick Blues", "Maggie's Farm" is dripping with social satire. It takes as its context a farm run by Maggie and her megalomaniac next of kin:
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. Well, I wake in the morning, Fold my hands and pray for rain. I got a head full of ideas That are drivin' me insane. It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor. I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more...
I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more. No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more. Well, he puts his cigar Out in your face just for kicks. His bedroom window It is made out of bricks. The National Guard stands around his door. Ah, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.
An early electric version of the song ruffled feathers at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965:
3. Mama, You've Been on my Mind (Bootleg Series #2) This simple folk song, left off of "Another Side of Bob Dylan" at the last minute, is, for my money, Dylan's finest romantic moment. The sense of longing, of unrequited love, is simply unmatched. That being said, it's all filtered through that trademark Dylan cool and unwillingness to show vulnerability:
Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat An' cov'rin' the crossroads I'm standing at, Or maybe it's the weather or something like that, But mama, you been on my mind.
I don't mean trouble, please don't put me down or get upset, I am not pleadin' or sayin', "I can't forget." I do not walk the floor bowed down an' bent, but yet, Mama, you been on my mind.
Even though my mind is hazy an' my thoughts they might be narrow, Where you been don't bother me nor bring me down in sorrow. It don't even matter to me where you're wakin' up tomorrow, But mama, you're just on my mind.
Cover Note: Jeff Buckley does a notable cover version of this song, which can be found on the legacy edition of "Grace" from 2004.
4. My Back Pages (Another Side of Bob Dylan) As far as Dylan's protest songs go, it's probably between this one and "Blowin' in the Wind" for most inspiring and/or moving performance. While "Blowin' in the Wind" is equally good, I've chosen "My Back Pages" because it's less well known and a bit more world-weary: it's really about Dylan's disillusionment with being a topical "protest" singer in the first place. Dylan subverts the concepts of naiveté and experience as only he can:
In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand At the mongrel dogs who teach Fearing not that I'd become my enemy In the instant that I preach My pathway led by confusion boats Mutiny from stern to bow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
5. Masters of War (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) Dylan's most succinct indictment of the military-industrial complex and the ideologues in government that rationalize and drive it: one would have to be blind to not see the parallels between this song and current events:
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly..
You fasten the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud
6. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (Blonde on Blonde) This eleven-minute epic is the perfect summation of the fantastic "Blonde on Blonde". It's a sprawling, hypnotic piece that Dylan composed to win the heart of Sara Lownds (the song's title is a play on her name). According to accounts of those in the studio at the time, Dylan gave very rudimentary instructions and then began playing. At several points in the song, you can actually hear the band play as if they believe the song is coming to its conclusion, yet Dylan just keeps singing, verse after eloquent verse:
The kings of Tyrus with their convict list Are waiting in line for their geranium kiss, And you wouldn't know it would happen like this, But who among them really wants just to kiss you? With your childhood flames on your midnight rug, And your Spanish manners and your mother's drugs, And your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs, Who among them do you think could resist you? Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes, My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, Should I leave them by your gate, Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
Influence Note: Thom Yorke has cited this as one of his favorite songs.
7. Love Minus Zero/No Limit (Bringing it All Back Home) Easily one of the most tender moments of Dylan's middle period, yet "Love Minus Zero" never seems to get the attention it deserves. This song would lay the groundwork for many an indie ballad in the years to come: the music is a sort of breezy jingle-jangle; the lilting, circular melody is never interrupted by something so trivial as a chorus. The essence of folk rock, in other words.
8. Bob Dylan's 115th Dream (Bringing it All Back Home) Beginning with a false start and a (rare) crack-up from Dylan, this almost seven-minute absurdist fantasy is a light-hearted counterpoint to some of the heavier songs on "Bringing it all Back Home". After landing in America on the "Mayflower", the narrator gets into trouble:
Well, I rapped upon a house With the U.S. flag upon display I said, "Could you help me out I got some friends down the way" The man says, "Get out of here I'll tear you limb from limb" I said, "You know they refused Jesus, too" He said, "You're not Him"
9. If You See Her, Say Hello (Outtake Version) Although it will probably get me kicked out of the Bob Dylan fan club, I'll say that I can't stand "Blood on the Tracks", primarily for its production. A ghastly studio sheen obscures what are otherwise powerful songs. Fortunately, we have outtakes like this acoustic version of "If You See Her, Say Hello". Dylan, with more heartbreak and disappointment behind him, revisits the sentiments of "Mama You've Been on my Mind" with a tangible sense of pain in his voice:
I see a lot of people as I make the rounds And I hear her name here and there as I go from town to town And I've never gotten used to it, I've just learned to turn it off Either I'm too sensitive or else I'm gettin' soft.
10. Ballad of a Thin Man (Highway 61 Visited) A slow, lurching blues, "Thin Man" was probably Dylan's darkest recording up to that point. An act of metaphorical character assassination, not unlike "Rolling Stone", would seem to be the objective here: "Because something is happening here...But you don't know what it is...Do you, Mister Jones?"
In this tenth anniversary year of the New Labour government, the mid-1990s present themselves as a time when the champagne flute was always half-full. In Cool Britannia, London was swinging and, on the evening after Blur mimed their breakthrough hit 'Boys and Girls' on Top of the Pops, Vic Reeves and Jonathan Ross led their bass player to the Groucho Club for the first time. No one personifies that period quite like Alex James and it was in the Soho club that he did some of his best work as part of a different triumvirate leading the never-ending party.
t was supposed to be the brothers Gallagher rather than their ostensibly more fey rivals who ramped up the decadence; while it skirts around the Britpop wars, this effervescent memoir proves otherwise and also emerges as the most fascinating, as well as hilarious, document to date of those times. James cites Jeffrey Bernard as one of his idols, when des Esseintes might be more appropriate; either Huysmans's 19th-century decadent creation or, failing that, a member of Motley Crue. Put bluntly, there is an awful lot of shagging in Bit of a Blur.
On the band's first North American tour he strays from his childhood sweetheart for the third time when a journalist from Canadian Elle proffers a handjob by way of an interview; in New York he is led to bed by a model whose face he then recognises on the cover of Vogue. Later he will make a pass at Marianne Faithfull (rebuffed) and sleep with Courtney Love (recommended, apparently). 'I was an outlaw, a rebel,' he reflects. 'If I rationalised my decadence, I'd tell myself it was the duty of rock stars to indulge themselves beyond reasonable limits. If I couldn't be reckless and extreme, I wasn't doing my job properly.'
His 29th birthday ends with him soused in a balthazar of champagne, naked on his hotel bed in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with the five prettiest fans he has picked up in the lobby. 'You need five girlfriends when your bottle is that big,' he notes.
Dad was right all along – rock music really is getting louder and now recording experts have warned that the sound of chart-topping albums is making listeners feel sick.
That distortion effect running through your Oasis album is not entirely the Gallagher brothers’ invention. Record companies are using digital technology to turn the volume on CDs up to “11”.
Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars.
Britain’s leading studio engineers are starting a campaign against a widespread technique that removes the dynamic range of a recording, making everything sound “loud”.
“Peak limiting” squeezes the sound range to one level, removing the peaks and troughs that would normally separate a quieter verse from a pumping chorus.
The process takes place at mastering, the final stage before a track is prepared for release. In the days of vinyl, the needle would jump out of the groove if a track was too loud.
But today musical details, including vocals and snare drums, are lost in the blare and many CD players respond to the frequency challenge by adding a buzzing, distorted sound to tracks.
Oasis started the loudness war and recent albums by Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen have pushed the loudness needle further into the red.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, branded “unlistenable” by studio experts, is the subject of an online petition calling for it to be “remastered” without its harsh, compressed sound.
Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: “Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the ‘loudest’. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.”
Mr Mew, who joined Abbey Road in 1965 and mastered David Bowie’s classic 1970s albums, warned that modern albums now induced nausea.
What's the most annoying thing about Pete Doherty? Is it the ad nauseam coverage of his relationship with Kate Moss? The endless court appearances and attempts at drug rehabilitation? Or maybe it's that pork pie hat perched on the back of his straggle-haired bonce?
Actually, none of those things bother me. I like my rock stars to be badly behaved and even more badly dressed - that's their job. No, the thing that annoys me about Doherty is that he's bone idle. For example, earlier this month, after announcing that Babyshambles had finished writing their second album, he went on to say that all he had to do now was convince his record company, Parlophone, that it "doesn't need to be highly polished".
Really? You'd be hard pressed to find a record less polished than Babyshambles' debut album, 2005's Down In Albion. It sounded like a collection of demos. In some cases, demos of good songs - Fuck Forever and Albion - but demos nonetheless. Even the most devoted Doherty fan would have to concede that it's a scrappy, disappointing album.
Doherty's inability to finish anything is long established. His old band, the Libertines, were required to sack ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, who produced the two most coherent moments in their career, What a Waster and Don't Look Back Into the Sun, not once, but twice. The reason on both occasions: he made Doherty do things he didn't want to, such as sing in tune and play guitar properly (in fact, rumour has it that on Don't Look Back Into the Sun, Butler ended up playing Doherty's parts). On both occasions Butler was replaced with the Clash's Mick Jones, whose chief qualification seemed to be that he let Doherty do what he wanted, in other words as little as possible.
The argument advanced by Doherty apologists is that he's a bohemian and his slapdash recordings "capture the moment". And, anyway, he's the artist and if he says it's finished, then it is; if anyone thinks otherwise then they're probably the kind of square who's more comfortable listening to the Alan Parsons Project. You can hear this line of reasoning on the lips of many young bands: hotly-tipped dance rockers Foals, noisy goths the Horrors and Libertines acolytes the View all subscribe to it to some degree, as does Johnny Borrell, a man who rates his own talent so highly he thinks a record as insubstantial as the first Razorlight album entitles him to claim parity with Bob Dylan (it is no coincidence that Borrell was once a member of the Libertines).
There's nothing wrong with picking up a guitar and having a go even if you aren't Eddie Van Halen. Plenty of exciting music has happened that way. But there's a cult of amateurism among British bands that's perilously close to laziness and Pete Doherty is its guru. Now that's really annoying.
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From NME:
The Empty Bottle, Chicago, 6.17.07
Initial signs are promising. Three years after falling apart before the American tour of their first album, "The Runaway Found", The Veils passed through Chicago promoting the infinitely more dark and complex "Nux Vomica". Confidence and spirits were running high. The venue was surprisingly full, and Finn was eager to regale them with his (newfound?) stage presence, a sort of cross between the drunken swagger of early-Libertines Pete Doherty and the manic guitar attack of Jonny Greenwood. 
The rock world's princes of pretension, Muse, played Wembley this weekend. Dead Flowers yawned. The NME fawned:
Let us take a few moments to solemnly recognize the best album of all time. No, for once I'm not being sarcastic. Here are some highlights from a Melody Maker article entitled "The Making of OK Computer":
In the Guardian:
The Times (UK) reports on music so loud it's sickening:
From the Guardian:
