Heard on the radio earlier today the controller of Radio 3, being told off for declining audience figures. One of the questions was “so as the audience for European classical music declines, you’re happy for your audience to decline?”

The guy’s in an impossible position, between conservative classical fans and market-led demands for a more popular approach. One says: “how dare you play that pop classic rubbish”, the other: “how dare you play that tuneless modern rubbish”. But both of those miss why Radio 3 is important.

The charge laid against classical music is usually that it’s elitist, but that’s doesn’t apply to Radio 3. It costs you nothing to listen to full-length works, that’s equality of access to anyone with a radio. Curious about the appeal of Wagner, Stockhausen, Beethoven but can’t afford to buy? Catch Radio 3 at the right time and you can satisfy your ears. That’s what is important about Radio 3 and it doesn’t apply only to “classical” but also “difficult” (i.e. pretty wild) modern composition, jazz of various stripes, “world” (yuk) music (a multitude of sins, some very pleasurable) and most everything else.

You hear things on Radio 3 that would never get near a commercial radio station and that’s what people who love music should value above all else, whether it’s their thing or not. We don’t have John Peel any more and you can’t stumble upon musical genius online. What we can do is celebrate radio stations that still have space for music for its own sake. Give Radio 3 the credit it deserves.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh1yY-QrRiw[/youtube]

Proof that Brian Jonestown Massacre aren’t the only band in LA still livin’ like it’s 1968, here are The Quarter After, who have just released their second album Changes Near. Yes, yes, you’ve heard this sound before, many times. But is anything really new any more? And isn’t it the case that there’s something about the jangling, hazy West Coast psychedelic sounds of bands like Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds that will never cease to please, especially when it’s pulled off with this degree of finesse and authenticity? Changes Near takes its lead from those bands, and mixes in a heady cloud of mid-period Ride squall, which for me brings it out in front of sheeny mid-80s psych revivalists like Rain Parade or Plasticland into a stranger, darker place – and psychedelia always works better with an undercurrent of anxiety. Not that this is a hellish trip – anything but. The darkness is balanced with twangy country-style jaunts, and as a whole the album is good enough to be more than the sum of its influences. It’s an album that could only, realistically, have come out of LA. Pass the patchouli.

I reprinted all my posters:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157594212951999/

and did some limited prints of some of the illustrations I’ve done for Plan B.

Slight price increase to £5 each for the posters or any 3 for £12 (Plus postage)

Exciting news everyone – the one and only Wil Forbis has published a book! diskant oldsters will remember Wil who wrote a hilarious series of review columns for the now-defunct diskant zine on the bargain bins of the USA and also did a great interview with comic artist James Olsen which you can read here. He also runs the awesome Acid Logic webzine which kept me entertained through a number of boring jobs.

Anyway, you can go purchase Acid Logic: A Decade of Humorous Writing on Pop Culture, Trash Cinema and Rebel Music on Amazon for remarkably cheap prices so get on it. Hopefully some of Wil’s columns will make it into the exciting diskant 10 year FUN we are currently planning. More news on that SOON.

Enjoying the spectacle of Michel Houellebecq’s Ma giving him a well-deserved literary smacking over his treatment of her in his over-rated softcore whinefest Atomised. (Though it’s unfortunate that the interview ends with the same cod-psychoanalytic drivel that characterises H’s work…)

In Standard Grade English classes, we had to put together a portfolio of creative writing. All the teenage boys included a story set in the future with an introduction that talked about the present but written in the past tense. I was amazed, on picking up this well-reviewed French literary sensation, to find that it began with the exact same “trick”. How come when we did it was clumsy and adolescent but this guy was acclaimed for his stylistic conceit?

But his work is thoroughly adolescent. Consider the novel’s main features: a relentless nihilism and a contempt for women based on almost complete ignorance of them as people. I don’t anyone who hasn’t grown out of that. (But then the number of successful novelists I know is low…)

Your man makes a fortune from middle-aged, middle-class angst on the back of a generalised backlash against feminism, sexual liberation and other concrete gains of the 1960s. Goes on to cement his reactionary politics and market niche by fulminating against Islam (this turns out to also be a way of lashing out at his mother).

In summary, Houellebecq’s book is good for nothing but wallowing in masturbatory self-loathing; his celebrity was his fortunate tapping into now-rising political trends; and a plague on all middle-aged, middle-class Brit lit-critics for fawning over poorly-written reactionary bile with the appearance of daring.

40 years after the near-revolution of May 68 we have an entrenched liberal elite repainting the Paris evenements (‘scuse spelling) as being solely about sex (cf. The Dreamers) versus a reactionary right happy to take advantage of the social gains while snarling (a la Sarkozy) about it being the source of all evil in the world.

I’m with the Situationists on this one. All power to the imagination!

The task of the various branches of knowledge that are in the process of developing spectacular thought is to justify an unjustifable society and to establish a general science of false consciousness. This thought is totally conditioned by the fact that it cannot recognise, and does not want to recognise, its own material dependence on the spectacular system.

Further to our cynical Triptych post below, the successor – Tennents Mutual – has now been launched. Providing you are of alcohol drinking age*, you can help “devise and programme a series of live shows in Scotland in October / November this year”; from what bands get to play, which venues (presumably only ones that sell Tennents) and even which bank gets to sponsor the event. Hasn’t this been done already (ATP etc.) with increasingly obvious choices? The fact that Belle and Sebastian are ruling the board at present is so inevitable, it’s almost funny. Anyway, if you sign up before 30 June, you too can add your votes and suggest new bands for everyone else to vote for. Get to it!

*If you’re under 18 you can’t even LOOK at the website, lest you be driven to underage drinking. Let alone go to any of the gigs. Exactly why is sponsorship of live music by makers of alcohol a good thing?

I like this Muxtape lark. Here’s a new one I did for knuckling down to work to with some obvious choices and even some Eric Clapton: http://sumlin.muxtape.com

Toots & The Maytals – Pressure Drop

Althea & Donna – Uptown Top Ranking

Dave & Ansel Collins – Double Barrel

The Meters – Cissy Strut

Talking Heads –  Once In A Lifetime

ZZ Top – Snappy Kakkie

Muddy Waters – Mannish Boy (Electric Mud version)

John Lee Hooker – I’m Leaving

Bo Diddley – Hey! Bo Diddley (live)

Koko Taylor – Wang Dang Doodle

Blind Faith – Had To Cry Today

Dr John – Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya

I”m baffled by the praise lavished on pish-merchants Tenants and their soon-to-be-forgotten Triptych festival recently. Lots of ill-advised adjectives like “innovative” and “avantgarde”. One Stockhausen gig doesn’t make for an avant garde festival, and all that’s innovative about Tenant’s music sponsorship is their opportunism.

From a corporate eyeball whore point-of-view, they were there first. Other overpriced pint-size poisoners are still playing catch-up in Glasgow. Fair play for that.

Musically, though, they were always second, never innovating. As soon as any independent promoters demonstrated a musical appetite, there’d be Tenants the next year with a less adventurous music bill and much increased ticket price.

Case 1: Planet Pop in August in Edinburgh. After years of the Edinburgh Festival as a musical desert, Planet Pop brought a full bill of indie goodness to scuzzy venues like the Cas Rock and some legendary gigs were had. The Fall in a bar the size of your living room. Sleater-Kinney and Prolapse: were they on the same bill? I can’t remember, but I know they were the best show I’d seen up to that time.

Then what? Tenants think “ooh we’ll have some of that” and bring us T on the Fringe. More mainstream acts, with a nod towards “indie” tastes and a trebling of ticket prices. Cue lots of publicity claiming that there had been no music before Tenants and PlanetPop is written out of music history.

Case 2: Le Weekend in Stirling launches with a proper avant-garde line-up, in the 2nd half of April. That’ll never work. Oh, it did? Here comes Triptych. Less of the avant-garde though, let’s go for hipster. What are young “creatives” listening to? Ticket prices leap again. Beer company praised for innovation and bringing music to cities that never had it so good. Like, er Glasgow. Stuart B of Mogwai takes the piss out of Tenants onstage at STAR, finds himself the subject of a peeved letter from a Tenant PR hack for his ingratitude. (As we know, no-one knew who Mogwai were before Tenants gave them a gig).

It goes on. T-Break. Tenants invents the battle of the bands. Like  X-Factor, but your prize is to be bottled off of a foot-high stage in a derelict army base at the arse-end of Scotland. In front of your schoolmates.

T in the Park! Tenants invents the music festival. Let’s take 50,000 Scots out of their cities to get shit-faced, bleary-eyed and aggresive in the countryside. Take our Buckfast away at the gate, make us drink Tenants at £3 a pint. Like Glasgow Green without the fresh air and sense of space.

It’s all about market segmentation and demographics. T in the Park is your buy-it-by-the-crate lager and Triptych was their attempt to launch an upmarket “aspirational” brand. They actually did use Triptych to launch a new beer but I’m buggered if I can remember what it was called. Epic Fail.

…and coincidentally, the next year, Triptych is canned. Funny that.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tommm_sykes/2436782237/

http://www.myspace.com/summerlin 

“Pride”, Phosphorescent’s most recent recorded work, isn’t buried under thick swathes of overproduction, but there is a certain? wooziness to it.? The mournful country-tinged songs are complimented rather than smothered by this, but in the cramped and sweaty confines of the Captain’s Rest, overlooked by the slightly sinister waxwork of the eponymous Captain himself, the atmosphere is very different.? The crowd are sympathetic enough, but I’m sure any musician would like to keep a little more distance between themselves and a Glasgow audience given the chance, no matter how confident they may be feeling about their abilities or the goodwill present.?? Stripped of any backing save that which he builds himself with a loop pedal, the quality of Matthew Houk’s songs and the fragile ache of his voice are laid bare, and prove themselves, thankfully, up to the task.? Much of “Pride” is just as effective in this simpler format, his guitar and vocals loops providing texture when necessary.? Words tumble and fall over one another, lines accomodating far too many syllables than they rightfully should be able to, TARDIS-like, suggesting an off-the-cuff ramble that’s also effortlessly poetic.? He even manages to find some beauty in mawkish Dire Straits number “Close To Me”.

I used to live just along the road from the Captain’s Rest.? I never went inside until tonight.? It appeared to be your typical Glasgow “old man’s” pub, and I must admit that the nautical theme didn’t exactly appeal.? I was surprised when I heard that Phosphorescent were playing there, but this appears not to be a random aberration but the first of many forthcoming shows at the ‘Rest.? Certainly Phosphorescent were a welcome and appropriate debut act for this tiniest of venues that could actually become a favourite if the quality of booking remains as high.