Hard Work

By Paul Flower on Aug 14, 09 09:53 AM

What's the world coming to? I go away for 7 days and there's a riot on the streets of Birmingham, Renato dies, Birmingham City went up for sale (again) and the football season started way too early. Surely it's still the summer; the variable weather conditions are proof enough of that.

There were also a couple of blogs and assorted news pieces which appeared to confirm my thoughts of the last few blogs. They can be found here and here

Then Thom Yorke weighed into the debate on albums and digital music, which is fair enough since Radiohead have placed themselves at the vanguard of this revolution.

Thom is someone I admire, his band remains one of the best and most inventive groups still playing today, but there are flaws in his argument. The CD was not solely responsible for killing the music industry, or at least not in the way he describes. It didn't really prop up the industry as sales of new material continued to boom for a long time.

Labels may have got slightly lazy in re-packaging and re-selling material on the new format instead of investing in new talent but, in a sense, they were only reflecting what was going on in the marketplace - the dance-music boom turned people away from thinking about bands and the labels just followed the money, as they always will.

The long-form-album is not to blame for all music's ills. The advent of the album, proper, in the late sixties was as a representation of a band's creative ability and their yearning not to be trapped in a short format. Bands have a choice - albums made sense in a commercial world, if the world changes then they're free to adapt and find bunches of single songs that work individually. I suspect record labels would prefer a bunch of hits to having to release albums with just one or two great songs and a bunch of fillers.

What I had intended to write, and will get around to in the next few wks, is a rhetorical question about whether musicians have only themselves to blame. All we hear of them is whinging, slagging off their labels or moaning about how much work they have to do. Whilst I was lying in the sun in Egypt I was reading a biog of Keith Moon , and became quite amazed by how much work bands used to do in the sixties.

Bands like The Beatles and The Who cut their teeth on the live circuit, playing night after night - sometimes multiple times in single days. Malcolm Gladwell's recent book makes much of the 10,000 hours theory - that only by doing something for that length of time will you become expert at it.

That's what it took to break through back then - lots of playing and lots of recording too - many singles and an album every year. Look at The Beatles discography and wonder at how they managed to release all those albums in under a decade. Perhaps bands will get back to this format of multiple releases now that they will have fewer industry-related-hoops to jump through. In the meantime could they spare us the whinging and get back to entertaining us?

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