Three kings for Christmas 2009

The three that I am talking about are, of course, Elvis, Michael... and Orson. Elvis is enjoying his usual festive attention, with an upcoming night of television shows and celebrations on January 8th of what would have been his 75th birthday. Michael Jackson's name has been prominent on TV schedules too, with retrospectives and concert re-runs. Finally, BBC 4 have been having an Orson Welles season.So what do the Kings of rock'n'roll, pop and film have in common? I will start with Welles, the portly genius whose kingly presence both fascinated and scared Hollywood. It is clear from the documentaries that his downfall was his obsession with control. Perhaps because he began his career as an actor who got into directing, his interests extended into over-seeing the whole process of film making....

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The end of the noughties

The BBC recently published its portrait of the decade. As the first segment of the new millennium draws to a close, what is interesting about such retrospective bouts of listmania is how little individual music performers or acts figure in the discussions. It is as if the likes of the Kaiser Cheifs never existed. They have disappeared because the notion of popular music being homogenized "content" to be squeezed down the cyber-pipeline is truely with us. Sure, rock acts still have their magic, but much more praise in the noughties has gone to the consumer technologies that deliver them: iPods, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify.The means to digitally replay and manipulate music have now been 'democratized' more than ever. These means help us feel that popular music is almost all the same, available...

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Public Image Limited - Manchester Academy, 19th December 2009

Well, I guess it all began in '78 when Johnny Rotten morphed back into John Lydon and decided that he would stick true to the artistic values of romanticism: pushing the musical envelope and staying true to your spirit. The result was Public Image Limited, and the music became a challenging brew of post-punk influences. Johnny, however, could never be post-punk like, say, The Pop Group, or even like Howard Devoto; Johnny would forever be Johnny Rotten. That was his albatross. As for PIL: how could they be anything more than an indulgence?? Would an unknown act have been allowed to release what they did? If Johnny was using his name to float something edgy and different then that was great, but how useful was the difference that PIL made? Albums in metal boxes? Okay. Chugging guitars? Passable....

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Mark's posts on Geography

The Tragically Hip (Canada's house band link fandom and nationhood)Don Cherry: Canadian Patriot (The hockey commentator who has become a national ic...

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New York Dolls - Liverool Academy, 9th December 2009

The New York Dolls are living (off their) legends as the most depraved specimens to terrorize early 1970s New York. Somewhere in the evolutionary chart between Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler, there was their lead singer, David Johansen. Johansen had an inauspicious beginning as the son of an insurance salesman and a librarian, but that doesn't matter here. For He was a creature of the Grand Guignol, a phantom of the rock opera who piloted his ill-fated Dolls into a welter of drugs and lipstick. The Dolls main crime was that they had the bottle to slap on make-up. Their white trash performance aesthetic and r'n'b protopunk legacy lived on in everything from Iggy to Morrissey to Michael Stipe, to long forgotten 1980s metal glamsters like Hanio Rocks, Poison and the Quireboys. Yet the Dolls faded...

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The The Tragically Hip - Manchester Academy 3, 2nd December 2009

You've got to love the Canadians. They say, "aboot" instead of "about", love ice hockey, have names like "Gord" and drink Molson's beer, so that we don't have to, but - as I found out from doing my masters degree at UBC in 1991 - they get a bum deal from their cousins south of the border. In the music industry that translates into a lack of international recognition. Delighted I was, then, that Canadian rock veterans, The Tragically Hip, got squeezed into the tiny Academy 3 last night and bought the house down. Every ex-pat in the North must have been there, knowing that they would have to have had lined up for days just to get the chance of a ticket to see these guys back home. I'd first seen the Hip play Vancouver as part of my studies in the early 1990s, a decade after they had formed (check...

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