November 2009 Archives

Barely a week goes by without another prophecy of how the music business is going to die a tragic and horrible death, probably alone in a room with Vera Lynn spinning at 78rpm on the gramophone player with feral cats on stand-by to feast on its rotting carcass.

In all fairness I've even written some of this stuff myself, and I continue to struggle with the absurdity that there is no universal, worldwide solution to the problem of illegal downloading/file-sharing. It beggars belief that the industry as a whole can't even standardise the streaming market. Countless competitors continue to fight it out in the States while those of us with a free Spotify account rejoice that we are the 'chosen ones', until the artists start to revolt of course.

The fact may be that the recorded music industry is on its deathbed, but there is still one sure-fire way to guarantee selling product in the UK: get on X Factor.

Few people speak ill of the dead, it seems that simply by dying you can absolve the bulk of your mortal sins - or perhaps only the memory of your minor faults. Is this the one thing to look forward to from death? These are not the questions I'm about to answer, I'll simply post them and walk away leaving them to be discussed by greater philosophers (of which there must be many).

It seems also to be true that some people only achieve the recognition they deserve in their obituaries. I'm saddened to think that we can only herald someone's achievements after they've gone. I noted this with the passing last week of one of my former bosses, the legendary promoter Maurice Jones.

Maurice - remembered here and here, was one of the originals, one of the people who built the UK live music industry. He was around as it moved from the clubs to the theatres, from the theatres to the arenas and from the arenas to the stadia and beyond.

My friends and colleagues at Absolute Radio have recently launched a campaign to find the best songs of the last decade, 2000-2009. It's one of those impossible questions that at first seems to be beyond calculation, until you start looking into it and realise that it is even worse than that.

Luckily they put together a web-site to assist those of us with short, or no, memories. It lists other people's picks, the most popular choices of the last 24 hours and allows you to search by act. The latter function has been invaluable to people like me who can't remember one decade from the next or the last, or even what period a decade is meant to cover.

My first thought was not to over-think my choice, to be decisive - pick one and move on. Consequently I went with 'Hey Ya' by Outkast. It was an easy choice because it is one of the few songs that always makes me smile, it never outlasted its welcome. I can still play it today and when it comes on I often press repeat to immediately hear it again. It's a real impact song that I knew was a huge hit as soon as I heard it. I also remember where I was when that moment occurred - in the car listening to the album on CD and thinking that it generally wasn't that great. Then POW 'Hey Ya' came on and everything changed.

I've been in Dublin, shaking the family tree. This odyssey began earlier in the year when my mother became reacquainted with two of her brothers, and met some family she didn't realise she had back in the emerald isle.

Within these meetings and subsequent conversations the story was repeated that my mother might have been adopted. It was a story she was aware of but had been unable to prove its veracity, and over the years it'd been put at the back of her mind.

Now resurrected by her wider family it became something we decided to look into. Unfortunately we discovered that it's not quite as easy as they make it look on TV; the key problems being that adoption wasn't legal in Ireland at the time of my mother's birth (1942) and my mother had become estranged from her 'parents' long-before their eventual deaths.