Music Banter

So, ageing president-botherer and shades-wearer Bono has gone and hurt his back, forcing the rescheduling of a huge swathe of U2 tour dates whilst he undergoes rehabilitation. It sounds like it was a pretty harrowing injury, from all accounts: the doctor who treated him is quoted as saying that the injury was a herniated disc, which caused a partial paralysis of the lower leg. Other details which came out suggest that there was some kind of fall during rehearsal, and that he was immediately rushed to hospital.

Now, you might be expecting a bit of a dig at wrinkled rock stars and bad backs, but as it happens I’m in slightly charitable mood. I’m also recovering from a very minor back injury myself (an unfortunate accident involving my fiance and a trampoline, which sounds fantastically salacious when I type it down, so it’s staying unexplained!) so I can quite imagine the pain poor old Bono’s in.

Still, it does serve as one of those strange reminders of mortality, and the passing of time. When someone you remember as the rock and roll firebrands of your youth is sidelined with an injury like this, it does make you think about how time claims us all.

Bono, in his younger days, was a classic rock and roll show-off, running about the place, diving into the audience and generally doing whatever he could to grab everyone’s attention.

Here’s U2 live in 1983: check how Bono climbs up onto the camera boom. Whether or not you like U2 or see them as blustering rock dinosaurs, you have to admit that seeing someone do something like this would be a pretty cool thing to see a singer do at a gig:

You see, live music’s about seeing something unusual, some crazy unexpected event that isn’t in the script. The best frontmen are always doing things that mean you can’t tear your eyes away. Maybe in future, this might just mean that Bono won’t be quite so keen to do something like that. That’d be perhaps the moment in a rock star’s life where they maybe accept that they’re growing old.

In some ways, I’d like to see that- ‘Get On Your Boots’ was just embarrassing, like seeing your dad dance at a wedding. Whilst I do think rock stars have the right to grow old disgracefully, there is something to be said for self-knowledge. If this marked the moment that Bono stopped trying to be a rock and roll wild child and matured into something different, well, that might be very interesting.

Get well soon, Bono. And don’t be afraid to act your age.

I was going to post something about the shitty state of the music industry, how not even Lady Gaga makes money out of Spotify and the way that the whole damn edifice is crumbling around our ears, but you know what, I’m not going to write about business. Not today. I’m going to write about genius. Sheer, wonderful, genius. And excitement. That kind of wonderful exuberance that music can plant in your soul and make the day worth struggling on through.

What does genius look like?

Tonight, Matthew, genius looks like this;

Thom Yorke cares not for my long rambling piece about the music industry

See, I was browsing idly on my laptop this morning, trying not to think about the fact that I had to be at my real job soon, when I stumbled across something fantastic.

Thom Yorke has a band. They’re called Radiohead. You might have heard of them. These days, however, he has another one. They’re called Atoms for Peace, and they include Yorke, Nigel Godrich (long-time Radiohead engineer and then producer), Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (Seriously, I really don’t understand how that musical relationship works!), and Joey Waronker, who is the guy who replaced Bill Berry in REM after his departure. Not a bad line-up, that.

Anyway, they’ve been playing shows. And at one of those shows, they did this:

It’s fantastic, utterly fantastic. Sat in bed I felt something I haven’t for a long time. No, not the touch of a women, a sense of real excitement. The hair actually standing up on the back of my neck, my arms and everywhere else. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

Thom Yorke, thank you for reminding me of how great music can be.

Much as it may seem unlikely, I actually do sometimes venture outside from time to time, beyond the comforting boundaries of my flat, forsaking coffee, blankets and easily available Spotify access to see real music.

This Sunday was one of those days, and was very well spent indeed, enjoying the sights and sounds of The Hidden Door Festival, a weekend-long event held in Edinburgh’s Roxy Art House, an old church situated in the middle of Scotland’s fair capital and one of Edinburgh’s best kept secrets.

It was a remarkably adventurous event, blending artists’ installation spaces and traditional artwork, within a sort of strange maze which led this way and that, and was like a gallery, but not so. My fiancé, with her Art History background, was really fascinated by the standard of art on display, and the concepts in everything. Me, I just thought it was pretty.

What’s this got to do with music? Well, there were bands performing there too- mainly bands associated with the innovative Ten Tracks project, who I really should tell you more about. I didn’t catch everyone, but bands like The Leg, The Pineapple Chunks and Action Group were apparently very good, as indeed they always are. But we knew that already, or at least I did.

What I didn’t know a THING about was the wonderful sound of lipsync for a lullaby, a wonderful four-piece who consist of drums, cello, violin and double-bass. As one might expect in this post-Godspeed world, they sound like apocalypse itself.

What marks them out from a lot of these post-rock bands is that they have a singer, Atzi, whose voice recalls someone like Matt Bellamy of Muse in its acrobatic scaling of the heights of melody. I personally find Muse a little overblown, but that kind of vocal styling works really well with the grand sweepings of a string- based band. Overall, the effect is impressive, expansive, grand and sweeping. You allow the histrionics, because it’s good histrionics, which succeed in making you feel the visceral blast of emotions they’re depicting. They even just about get away with their last song, ‘tiger tiger’ which is a re-telling of ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake. A bit pretentious, maybe, but that’s the sort of atmosphere they’re going for- a sort of heightened, almost hysteric sense of emotion, wild storms of mood. To my mind, that was a little bit much, but the rest of their set was so good I can forgive them this.

I loved them. I suspect that if you’re any kind of decent human being, you will too.