Recently in The arts Category

A lot of people of my generation revered the late John Peel as a kind of deity. His genuine, unparalleled enthusiasm for new music was indeed a wonder to behold and his personal charisma and laid-back style inspired legions of fans and bands over many decades.

We miss him for those reasons, and I think we also miss him because we no longer know who to go to for musical advice. There were always scores of pretenders and imitators (some might say I was one myself), but with John there was rarely any b.s. If he said he liked something, he liked it - not because it was what his programme controller, head of music or station manager wanted to hear.

I am listless, but it is not for a lack of lists.

It is that time of year, a time when newspapers and all associated media are clogged with a catalogue of pointless point-scoring, usually notated in a point by point rating such as the top ten most pointless points I've already made this year at various points but insist upon doing so again, and you will love me for it, pointedly.

I'm possibly somewhat jealous, never having been organised enough to keep adequate notes that could form the basis of such a list. Now, of course, my memory cannot be trusted with such things. It was probably always this way. Once upon a time I was often asked my opinion about the best albums and singles of the year; I could barely remember them at the time. Now I'm no longer asked - partly because I'm not relevant enough, partly because I probably didn't do a good job of it in the past and partly because I no longer listen to enough music to make an educated stab at it.

To the victor the spoils, I think that's how it goes. If in this case the spoils are a self-satisfied-smug-grin then I won. We won - we took control of the Christmas number one. In truth we always had control; we always had the choice (to an extent) of what singles we bought but we lacked the motivation and the organisation to give a damn. This year, something changed.

Perhaps it was about social media, the galvanising effect of noticing that others think in the same way and were prepared to take action. Few people want to take a stand on their own, none of us wants to stand and piss into the wind - which is what this campaign would've looked like without Facebook.

Ignoring the faceless corporation behind both the RATM single and Joe McElderry's effort, because it's covered elsewhere and is irrelevant, this was a victory for those of us who were tired of being force-fed this diet of pop-pap. It was a reaction to the tyranny of televised karaoke, the monopoly of one TV programme over the charts.

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.

Summer is over. I know this because the TV channels have rolled out their autumn/winter season - and I know that because the amount of TV programmes I actually want to watch has quadrupled in the last three weeks.

Amongst those progs are included some completely new shows - True Blood & Flash Forward. Both have been fairly engaging so far, but I fear the worst. Based on my past viewing history at least one of three things tends to happen to any major American series I begin to watch:

1. The storyline becomes so ridiculous that I feel guilty watching it, and eventually I'll abandon it - but not before wasting countless hours of my life, hours that I'll never get back.
2. The series (or season as they call them stateside, I refuse to do so) becomes so engaging and popular that subsequent episodes are bought up by satellite networks that I don't subscribe to. I'll thus have wasted countless hours of my life, hours that I'll never get back.
3. I'll accidentally miss an episode or two due to work, other commitments or memory loss and as I don't subscribe to networks like SKY+ . I'll subsequently lose the thread because they'll have put in some random plot twists involving time-shifts, alien spacecraft or polar bears, and I'll have wasted countless, etc.

Some things never change.

Some 40 weeks ago I wrote about the Sony Reader (tech it or leave it - I would link to it but can't remember how), in which my main gripe was that the damn thing costs too much and that digital books or e-books are stupidly overpriced.

This week Amazon released its successful Kindle E-reader (for want of a better term) in the UK. Actually it didn't - it allowed us to import them from the U.S. - but that's a different (and more tiresome and expensive) story.

"Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks."

In their other similarity with arseholes most people's opinions should be kept quiet and out of sight. Sadly, we live in an age where most people share their thoughts on an all too regular basis. Who do you trust, who do you look up to, where and who is the voice of reason?

Currently the volume - in both senses of the word - of opinion is overwhelming. It'd be virtually impossible to read everything on a given subject, even if you had nothing else to do with your life. Over the past few months I've regularly returned to the issue of file-sharing/downloading or recorded-music-theft; however you wish to refer to it there is no doubt that it is an issue of vital importance to the music industry as a whole, musicians in particular and those of us who work in the peripheries.

The problem is that there is a mass of opinion and no real consensus. The ridiculous point is that you can't even get everyone to agree on the simple issue that 'file-sharing' is bad, because many people will jump on the alternate opinion that it's a valuable way to publicise a new band.

I was intending to avoid writing about The Beatles, but this week it would appear that they're very hard to avoid. In some respects this should probably make us sad, the fact that we're still talking about a band who split up almost forty years ago, but it also gives us an opportunity to reappraise them.

I am no Beatles aficionado, I am unaware of the minutiae around their existence, break-up and recording sessions. Indeed - as a perfect example of this - until watching a BBC documentary earlier this week I had no idea that the album Abbey Road was recorded after Let It Be. They were, of course, released the other way around.

The one outstanding thing about The Beatles, for me at least, is something that has always amazed me dating back to my earliest interest in music (let's call that 30 years). In fact it's two outstanding things - their progression and their productivity. They are two things that seem to remain un-matched throughout popular music.