If Music Be The Food Of Love, The Bard Be Spoony

Final installment in the blog-post series; I’ll keep the introductory waffle to a minimum this time, promise.


5. Hope & Social

The support slot is a wonderful thing; I’ve discovered many a fantastic band because they were playing second fiddle to the act I actually bought the ticket for (the Ragamuffins, who I blogged about all those months ago, are quite possibly my ultimate example). Hope & Social, on the other hand, are a band I discovered because I happened to be in their support act.

About ten months ago, approaching the end of my degree, the folk band I play trombone in was booked to play a support slot at a cafe-cum-gig venue in Liverpool. I had deadlines to finish, and although I said I’d do it I wasn’t looking forward to it; I was stressed, I was tired and I wasn’t expecting very much at all.

I was, quite fortuitously, proven very badly wrong.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so regretful to leave a gig so soon into a band’s set (such being one of the reasons I loathe being dependent on public transport in Liverpool - but that’s another blog). I didn’t even get a chance to try one of the kazoo cookies (kazookies?) they were handing out, let alone buy any of their music; not that that was an issue, since  unless they were happy to sell their music for whatever I could afford, I couldn’t afford it - and what band would be mad enough to do that?

At this point I’d like to quote the Hope & Social website: “If you come to one of our gigs we’ll sell you a CD for whatever you want to pay.” Turns out, Hope & Social are another of those bands, like the Bedlam Six, who want to cut through all the industry bullshit that stops them from playing music and tries to criminalise people who want to share their music. In a previous iteration, as Four Day Hombre, they set up Britain’s first fan-funded label; now, everything they do is ‘pay what you want’, and various band-members are involved in projects such as UnConvention, Planzai and NMS, discussing how music and musicians can function in the terrifying, glorious age of social media and the biggest reassessment of artistic worth since Plato.

The Hope & Social boys are also unfailingly decent and helpful; I sent them an email a few days after the gig, saying how much I’d enjoyed it and how inspiring I found their ethos, and ended up having quite a lengthy correspondence with Simon and Rich (the singer and guitarist, respectively) that in turn yielded more inspiration and ideas.

Their attitude to music extends to their live shows as well as their records; they held a garden party last July, which I went along to, and it was the most awesome fun I’ve ever had on a grey Sunday in Mirfield. Quite apart from the excellent music throughout the day - culminating in a two-hour headline set from H&S, broadcast on East Leeds FM - was the fun activities (Paintball Swingball should definitely be the national sport), the excellent food (yes, including kazookies) and the efforts to make the whole thing family-friendly, in the sense of having plenty to appeal to adults as well as children. Whilst it was undoubtedly a celebration of, by and with a band in a uniquely creative stage of their career, it was also a community event, by a band who’ve made those who support them the centre of their philosophy.

And, as I said before, they’re an awesome live act - to be part of a crowd belting out the wordless refrain to ‘Looking For Answers’, for example, is a properly hair-raising experience. They are also one of the few bands I will conga to without shame, and with good reason, since they can be a phenomenal party band. Just check out their latest album, ‘Sleep Sound’.

“All music is folk music; I ain’t never heard no horse sing…” - Louis Armstrong

When talking of folk music in Britain, the image of the ‘folkie’ is never far from one’s mind. We all know the stereotype, if not the people behind it; the curly hair and scraggly beard, the Aran sweater stained with the smell of sweat and ale, the sturdy boots that may never have seen a foothill in their life, the finger in the ear that accompanies the turgid tuneless renditions of such cultural treasures as ‘English Country Garden’ and ‘Helston Floral Dance’. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like that, but even so I can still picture him sat in the corner of a country inn with three or four of his fellows, interspersing their sing-a-longs with their desire to set the world to rights in their own amalgam of High Tory regression and ultra-green radicalism.

Getting past the ‘folkie’ image is relatively easy when talking about folk – more so since the runaway success of Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons and their ilk in the past few years, but it was never much of an issue anyway. The problem is, when we talk about ‘folk music’, what are we actually talking about? It can be the music of a place, rooted in the cultural landscape of the country where it appeared, a marker of location and of history; equally, it can be the music of a people, its rhythms intertwined with their tongue and its stories those of their past and their present.

Whichever opinion you hold, what is undeniable is that folk’s strongest appeal today lies in its authenticity – by becoming a folk musician you seem to say, ‘Look! I am an intelligent person, not taken in by the obvious manufacture of popular music. Yet, also! I am not a snob, seeking refuge in impenetrable high culture. I know, in this age of rootlessness, where I come from and how I came to be.’ I play folk music, and I’ve felt those sentiments myself. Of course, that’s not to say those sentiments are pleasant ones in themselves… but more on that later.

The reason I’m sitting here expounding at length about the nature of folk music is due to the book I’ve just finished reading – Rob Young’s Electric Eden. A proper doorstop of a book (607 pages of book proper, plus an extra sixty-odd of notes, bibliographies and indexes), it seeks to serve as the definitive tome on what it terms ‘Britain’s Visionary Music’ – and, arguably, it does so.

After an opening chapter detailing the journey Vashti Bunyan made in a horse-drawn caravan to the Hebrides in 1968, the book starts with the folk revival of the early 20^th Century, spearheaded by Cecil Sharp, founder of the EFDSS and the person after who they named their North London headquarters, detailing his work to preserve the folk tradition of England (mostly through bowdlerising and gentrification, but his heart was in the right place), and covering the influence of folk upon such luminaries of British classical music as Ralph Vaughan-Williams, John Ireland, Gustav Holst and Peter Warlock (amongst others), William Morris’ novel News From Nowhere, and the industrial folk music championed by Ewan MacColl in the ‘radio ballads’, wildly ambitious documentary projects interweaving new music composed as part of a living folk tradition with accounts of the people who worked in those environments. In each case, ‘folk’ is presented as a symbol of both land and people, a force for union as outlined in News From Nowhere with its vision of ‘abolition of town and country’ – which Young presents more as ‘abolition of town by country’, setting something of a precedent for later – in the name of the greater good.

The bulk of the book covers the development of English folk-rock in the 1960s and ’70s. The broad theme of ‘going forward by going back’ continues, but within a few chapters Young has renounced the activist tradition of MacColl and his friends and successors in favour of more abstract, ‘revolution in the head’-type troubadours and collectives. From here on in, the ‘vision’ is increasingly chemically enhanced – and, almost as if to recognise this, the focus starts to wander. It starts brightly enough – the accounts of the troubadours of Les Cousins and the exploits of Pentangle are electrifying in their clarity – yet the back-to-back depictions of Nick Drake, Sandy Denny and John Martyn that mark the centre of the book are notable for how they stand out from the more workmanlike prose around them. This section becomes less and less focussed as it approaches the end until, following several pages dedicated to the Wurzels and a brief cameo by Yes, it collapses in on itself with a brief rant against punk and a bizarre, yet enjoyable, sidestep into Steeleye Span’s Rocket Cottage. It is, at this point in the narrative, 1976.

The final two chapters are a disappointment; running through the intervening 35 years at breakneck speed, detailing artists who, whilst undeniably British and certainly visionary, struggle to fit the musical narrative already established. There’s a distinct sense of obligations being fulfilled, as though having taken us to the end of civilisation (heralded, ironically enough, by a distinctly Anglo-Saxon album title), Young had to guide us through the post-apocalypse post-punk landscape and back to now even though we were much better off staying in the sepia-toned past where Old King Prog reigned in somnolent splendour. Of Billy Bragg, the Pogues, the Levellers, Rachel Unthank & the Winterset, Laura Marling or Mumford & Sons there is not a word.

The flaws do not end with the pacing and the blatant authorial bias. Despite the claim of the subtitle to be “unearthing Britain’s visionary music”, the book has a decidedly Anglocentric cant. Several Scottish musicians – Bert Jansch, the Incredible String Band, the aforementioned John Martyn – get prominent features, yet there is no real attempt to explore whether the vision changes either side of Hadrian’s wall. Despite possessing the oldest living language in Europe, the Welsh barely get a look-in; if there is Cymraeg folk music out there, this book won’t tell you a lot about it. In fact, regionalism as a whole seems absent from Electric Eden; it’s (Anglo-)British or GTFO.

Young’s decision to collate ‘folk’ and ‘visionary’ raises problems, too. ‘Folk’ is a term that relates to the collective and the common; yet the ‘visionary’ is almost always uncommon and singular in nature. Young equates the two, and does so in a narrative that traces an increasingly marginal course to the point of virtual extinction. In placing the folk tradition in the hands of unheralded visionaries, the implication is made that the people cannot be trusted with their own culture, and must instead be shepherded by their betters towards enlightenment. It’s an attitude straight out of the English countryside – Orwell’s Animal Farm, to be precise.

The most worrying implication, though, comes at the end of the main narrative. Railing against the big-city noise of punk destroying his bucolic prog Albion, Young hits out at those who reduce Britain’s native music into the ‘folkie’ stereotype I outlined at the start of this article, railing against those who condemn folk as the preserve of the conservative white middle classes, huddling behind a forged national identity as a means of staving off the multicultural 20^th century. He has every right to do so, defending the music he loves – yet the manner in which he does so, a sudden unheralded outburst at the flagging fag-end of an otherwise fine book, offers succour and credibility to those who are turning our common music into a weapon to be used against their pet ‘undesirables’. The BNP have, for many years now, been using folk music as a propaganda tool for their agenda of an ethnically pure Britain, cleansed of the influence of immigration which has in fact been our lifeline for untold centuries.

I don’t wish to accuse Rob Young of being an associate or supporter of such a vile organisation, but I do hope he chooses his words more carefully in future. It’s an unfortunate (and, I’m guessing, unintentional) side-effect that his vision of Britain returned to its rural, pre-Christian state puts me in mind of the Fascist, Saxon-revivalist England from Jared’s ‘Decades of Darkness’ saga.

To be fair to Young, his book does a fine job of exploring the development of the folk-revival through the 20^th Century, and linking the classical music of pre-WWII England to the popular music that came after. I was surprised to find that the book’s initial focus was solely on the ’60s and ’70s; the opening section is quite possibly the finest four chapters of music literature I’ve ever read (although the bias becomes clear with hindsight).

Despite its flaws, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in English folk music; for all that the final third lets it down disastrously, there is enough in there to keep one such as I coming back for a while yet. As far as definitive works go, though, this isn’t really any closer than Satchmo was all those years ago.

Unless any of you can show me a singing horse.

Hey, this thing isn’t dead!

I just thought I’d fire off a quick post in the midst of all my Exciting Projects (TM), because I wanted to talk about something exciting and didn’t really know where else to do it (this isn’t being cross-posted to the LJ account, frex, since that’s music-dedicated and this isn’t about music).

Alternate History is probably my favourite genre of fiction, taken as a whole. If you don’t know what alternate history is, the Wikipedia article offers a pretty comprehensive explanation - put laconically, it’s about worlds in which history was different. Some people just keep the history in the background, using it as a setting for the story. Others start at the moment where history changed and recount the changes as they mount up (this is called the ‘Butterfly Effect’, from the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon last month was the vital factor in the hurricane currently menacing the Japanese coast). The best - and some of them are truly remarkable - manage both, weaving the stories of the people whose times the story passes through into the grand sweep of history-anew.

By the consensus of the AH community, the very best - at least, for now - is ‘Decades Of Darkness’, a tale which begins with a heart attack in 1809. The heart in question belongs to one Thomas Jefferson, at that point still President of the United States, and his resulting death causes the secession of New England, sending the US down the path of being a slave-state superpower. By the time the story ends, in 1933, the German Empire (a behemoth stretching from Antwerp to the Adriatic) rules a shattered Europe, Russia rules Tibet and Istanbul Constantinople, and the King of Australia is ruler of the fourth most powerful state on Earth. And that’s just for starters.

The entire opus - some 200 chapters in all - can be downloaded for free from the author Jared’s website (as linked to above). I take no credit for any of it, I’m just being my usual slightly scary fanboy self.

This took… slightly longer than I intended. Suffice to say, I started writing it back in October; it’s now December. My intention of finishing this before seeing these guys on November 4th proved to be just a teensy bit optimistic…


4. Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six

I know a ludicrous amount of talented people. Quite apart from the breadth of ability demonstrated in my last few blog posts, almost everyone I call a friend has some kind of artistic endeavour which forms part of their life on a regular basis, and an overwhelming majority of them are pretty bloody good at it. Of course, this community doesn’t exist in a vacuum - my friends move in their own social circles which frequently don’t overlap with mine, and these are often just as full (if not more so) of talented people. It was through one of these extended social circles, and a fair bit of serendipity, that I found Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six.

My friend Andrew Abrahamson, known to pretty much everyone as AB, is a photographer (and a damn fine one); he’s also a man with a fine taste in music (i.e., one that coincides in large part with mine). Around a year ago, he went to Manchester to photograph his cousin’s band playing at the Dancehouse Theatre. Getting from Manchester to Liverpool after a gig can be tricky if you’re using public transport, especially on a Saturday night, so he was accompanied by another of my friends (and my sometime drummer), Felix Hagan, who owns a car.

I saw them later that evening when, having returned from Manchester, they made a brief appearance at the party I was attending; it’s one of the few times I’ve had them raving to me about a band rather than the other way around. The band in question were, of course, the Bedlam Six, and it was easy to see why the two of them were so affected - everything I was told about them made me like them more.

*Demented Victorian Swing-Punk? - What’s not to like?

*AB’s cousin is called Biff and plays the trombone? - I like him already!

*The frontman has the most impressive facial hair this side of the nineteenth century and frequently ends gigs by running into the crowd? - That’s so awesome it doesn’t need embellishment in its awesomeness!

*They’re so good as a live band they can make an all-seater venue rock out? - Very Yes!

*They’re at the centre of a creative community centred around the not-for-profit record label they’ve set up? - Wait, what?!

That last statement contained so much awesome that even now I find it difficult to communicate just how perfect an idea it is. Firstly, ‘setting up a record label’ - as you may have gathered from my last update, it’s something I consider a bit amazing (but that’s another blog…). Building a community around the label is also a fantastic notion - most of my favourite labels are those which have or had a sense of community to them, whether real or illusory (the most legendary example of this is Postcard Records, who you should really go check out anyway because Edwyn Collins. Also Roddy Frame).

(As a bit of background information I found too clunky to fit in easily anywhere but which is kind of important to understanding my thought processes: In the two years between discovering Rose Elinor Dougall and my introduction to the Bedlam Six, I’d somehow managed to form a band, and naturally my thoughts were turning towards getting songs recorded and out there for people to hear. I thought our best bet was getting signed to a reputable indie label like the ones I so revered; this viewpoint would, as a direct result of the issues discussed here, be drastically revised…)

But the real shocker was the idea of a ‘not-for-profit’ label - Debt Records. Three years of a popular music degree and twelve months in a band had given me an awareness of the problems the record industry was and is facing; not just internet piracy, but also the gross negligence and naked greed of the major labels, and the confused and confounding implications for copyright and who controlled it. My opinion on these issues was ill-considered and somewhat temperamental; it wasn’t something I engaged with as fully as others did (something which can be put partly down to the insulating bubble of university life, and partly down to my own infatuation with a certain iteration of the Rock Star Dream); nevertheless, I was aware the issues were there. Debt would give me the impetus to understand what was happening, and to do something about the gross faults and inequalities that I found.

All this is very well and good, but any sod can set up their own record label; it doesn’t mean jack squat unless the music is any good. And the Bedlam Six are pretty bloody awesome. As mentioned above, they’re a phenomenal live act - quite apart from Barabbas’ wonderfully demented frontman antics (part of me feels slightly uncomfortable constantly describing this band using terms with mental illness connotations, but it’s kind of right there in the name…), the entire band comport themselves with a joyously unhinged (that language again!) demeanour. They’re also very keen to engage with people about their music and what they do; I’ve approached them for guidance in my various endeavours, and always found them to be more than happy to help. And, of course, I’ve been evangelising them to all and sundry, because they’re awesome.

An awful lot of people seem to take a perverse glee in telling the rest of us how ‘the world has gone mad’, as though this fact alone vindicates their cause; given the evidence, though, in this Bedlam we’ve found far more fitting company for the modern world.

Sorry, give me a moment while I blow the dust off this thing… If it’s any consolation for the few spambots who might actually give an Average Wow about this place if they were actually sentient, the past two months have flown by.

Anyway, on with my Intermittent Self-Indulgent Blog Series (TM). We’re up to the Difficult Third Installment…


3. Rose Elinor Dougall

When I started this series, I made the rather egotistical boast that it was about artists you haven’t heard of. Having played in Mark Ronson’s touring band, been one-third of the most remarkable girl-group of the last decade and released music that is actually available in  HMV, Rose Elinor Dougall is probably the one you’re most likely to be aware of; but it’s her solo work which I’m interested in here, and that’s where I’m going to start.

RED (to use her acronym so I don’t feel like I’m being unwarrantedly overfamiliar by using her first name constantly) left the Pipettes early in 2008, and when I heard the news I assumed that would be the last I’d hear of her - or at the very least the point at which she ceased to be relevant to my musical interests. A solo career was what petulant rock-stars and self-obsessed indie-kids started when they got sick of having to share the royalties; ‘musical differences’ was just short-hand for ‘tired of constantly butting egos’. Maybe it would end up being like Charlotte Hatherley; a few decent tunes, a pretty girl for videos, and a nagging feeling that I’d missed the opportunity to see a band in their prime.

Before I go on, I’d like to state that quite apart from the other unsavoury opinions espoused above, such a damning verdict is altogether too harsh on Chaz; the albums she released after leaving Ash are each beautiful works, and had I been more socio-economically aware five years ago I might be discussing her in place of Ms Dougall.

Anyway - I wouldn’t even begin to understand how wrong I was until that summer, when one otherwise fruitless evening of websurfing brought me to Rose’s MySpace page (remember when MySpace was actually a usable resource for musicians? Ah, the heady days before 2010…) and demos of three tracks. Not expecting much, and slightly ashamed of how attractive I found her profile pic, I hit the ‘Play’ button.

I wasn’t hooked immediately, I’ll be honest. It was pleasant, melodious, slightly weird in that lo-fi way most home recordings are, but nothing reached out and grabbed me like ‘Little Lucy’ or ‘Recoil’. Yet, at the same time, the sound of those songs - their gentle, wistful air, tinged with melancholia but also suffused with joy - drew me, and kept drawing me back all summer. It was about this point that my life seemed to have gone entirely to pieces (I don’t mean to keep going on about this, since it’s not what I’m writing this blog about, but I feel it’s necessary to understand the story), and RED’s music provided some small respite from my isolation and misery, as well as providing an excellent emotional and musical counterbalance to my other musical saviours, the Ragamuffins (see Part 2 for when I lavished praise on them). In time, those demos would go on to have an effect on some of my own musical endeavours.

When, a few months later, those demos were taken down and replaced by RED’s first single, ‘Another Version Of Pop Song’, it came as something of a shock. Gone were the gentle lo-fi textures and shuffling drum-loops; instead this was, as the title implied, a slice of alt.pop with a danceable rhythm and a wordless chorus which resembled the Boo Radleys’ ‘Lazarus’ in ways that cannot be conveyed through dodgy analogies. The interviews she did around then revealed something else interesting - Rose had set up her own label, and was funding her album sessions herself through bar work.

Of course, people have been doing this for years - it’s a tradition that stretches back to punk, and possibly beyond - but so far as I was aware, it was hardly a viable route to ‘success’ unless you wanted to spend the rest of your career emptying slops and trying to persuade students that ‘minesweeping’ is actually a really, really bad idea. RED would do a great deal to change that over the next two years, up until the release of her album. Those two years would be characterised in part by the amount of time and money I spent travelling cross-country to the gigs she played with her band; at one such gig, I introduced myself and somehow managed to not behave like a slavering fanboy, and at most gigs I attended thereafter my inevitable imposition would be greeted with warmth and engagement. I’m not saying it’s an unbreakable bond of affinity, or that my devotion merits special treatment - the first isn’t, and the second doesn’t - but the idea that an artist of ever-increasing acclaim would continually be willing to engage with their fans was a deeply heartening surprise. Although I didn’t know it at the time, and quite possibly without knowing it herself, Rose Elinor Dougall had introduced me to two of the central tenets of the ‘New Music Industries’. These would come into play more strongly later - but that’s another blog post…

This has been by far the most difficult blog in the series to write so far, not least because it’s the one which is the most difficult to place in the continuum. The first two posts were about my mates whose activities impacted me, within the small artistic field I had back then; the last two posts will be about artists with whom my relationship is more ‘professional’ (the inverted commas are there for a reason) and who operate within a national or even global network of interdependent artists. RED falls somewhere between the two camps, and the relationship I have with her is much less equal and more tenuous - at least on an interpersonal level. Her music can be found in most HMV stores, all online retailers, and in her own online shop, if you want to check it out - and I strongly recommend you do, for it is truly singular. The rose may be without why, but the bloom is still spectacular.

It’s that time of year again - the nights are drawing in, the Go! Team are no longer seasonally appropriate listening, recent graduates are realising they actually have to get a job, and the Barclaycard Mercury Prize is due to be announced tonight.

The Mercury nominations always seem to elicit different emotions each year; sometimes excitement, sometimes disappointment. This year, though, the overriding sentiment seems to be apathy. My mate and fellow popular music graduate Paul posted this on Facebook earlier (it’s reproduced here with his permission):

“Hasn’t the Mercury music prize become terrifically boring and pointless? Really, why does it exist? Is it just so Guardian readers know which album to pick up the next time they’re in Asda?”

There’s a general feeling this year that the Mercury has, with its nomination of chart-botherers such as Adele, Katy B and James Blake alongside such perennial nominees as Elbow and PJ Harvey, succumbed to corporate shill-dom instead of being the shining haven of putting-music-above-market-bullshit and beacon of publicity for under-appreciated artists everyone (not least the Mercury’s own press) talks of it as being. While it’s probably a bit unfair (nominations for chart-pop and middle-aged rock have been a part of the Mercury since its inception, as the Wikipedia page testifies), it’s something the Mercury has brought on itself, as illustrated by my response to Paul:

“The Mercury is essentially being hoist by its own petard - the prize is for ‘the best British album’, with no precedence given to certain genres and no sales-related bias. Thing is, in order to avoid being accused of ‘niche’ and ‘irrelevant’ they have to include at least some mass-appeal artists each year (Adele this year, M People in 1994, the constant nominations for Coldplay) and a tip of the hat to the current trends in music (Katy B and James Blake this year, Hard-Fi and Speech Debelle in years past), and then in order not to alienate the broadsheet readers who constitute most of the Mercury’s cultural base you get PJ Harvey and Elbow, AND we still haven’t mentioned the Token Jazz Nomination… All in all, the politics means that there’s only three or four slots for the kind of artists we’re told the Mercury champions. Normally it’s at least easy to find someone to root for, but in a year like this one where no nominee really stands out it just becomes a bit of a drudge. (My $0.02)”

It’s worth noting that for a lot of people, me included, the real excitement of the Mercury isn’t who wins but who’s nominated - we’ll accept a disappointing winner if the nominations list is strong, because it gives us an opportunity to discover more great music (see 1994, 1997, 2005 or 2007). If the nominations are rather weak, though, as with this year (I doubt anyone would argue anyone this year is at the peak of their game with the exception of PJ Harvey, a winner ten years ago and with an album that, although great, requires more dedication than any other on the list), our interest is already lost long before we find out the winner.

There’s another problem with the Mercury - their insistence that, in order to qualify, albums must have physical distribution. It made sense when the prize was inaugurated back in 1992, and it’s probably just about justifiable now, but given the rise of streaming, downloading and online ordering along with the continued, drawn-out downfall of high street music retail and the substantial costs of physical distribution (which frankly often isn’t worth it for smaller artists and labels), the chances are that in the near future the only artists eligible for the Mercury are the ones who least want or need to win it. After all, if HMV goes under we’ll pretty much have to choose between Amazon and Asda for our music.

In any case, I’ll doubtless be watching the awards ceremony this evening. Now though, I think I’ll go listen to the Go! Team. They well should’ve won in 2005.

I brought my old laptop out of semi-retirement this afternoon, for two reasons; first, because I needed to use MS Office and haven’t yet got round to forking out for an Apple-compatible version for the new machine, and second, because I’d acquired a host of new music to add to the old lappy’s substantial library.

I haven’t actually got round to doing it yet; one of the reasons I bought a new computer was because the old lappy was exceptionally picky about what internet connections it would actually connect with, and so it’s proving now. Whilst waiting for it to stop being such a prima-donna and being productive on my Mac (note: by ‘being productive’, I mean ‘playing Angry Birds’), however, it occurred to me that, for the first time, what I was wanting to do might not actually be illegal in the nation where I reside.

A couple of weeks ago, the Government announced their plans to make format shifting - the process of ripping a CD to a hard-drive, lest you wonder - legal for personal use. It’s a sensible move, given most other nations have either legislation or some form of legal understanding to this effect (a few quick internet searches seems to indicate this is the case in Australia, the US and most of the EU at least), and the fact that most people do it anyway, regardless of (or even oblivious to) its legal status. It’s hard to fathom why it’s taken so long - I recall pretty much the same legislation being proposed by Gordon Brown’s administration a couple of years earlier, for one thing. It also has the support of pretty much all musicians everywhere, whether as a way of having their music shared more widely or a desire not to piss off their fans (the alternatives to format shifting remain piracy, which will never be legalised, or buying all the music on your CDs again in digital format, which is expensive).

The main critics have, unsurprisingly, come from those parts of the music industry which have the most to gain from making us pay for our music twice; the major record labels and their associated industries. Through bodies such as the RIAA and the BPI, they have succeeded in perpetuating (in law if nowhere else) the idea that using digital information (i.e. CD content) for your own private consumption in a way that you see fit is immoral because they can’t find a way for it to benefit their overly-inflated bank balance. Now, finally, the law might reflect the relationship people have with music and information, rather than the demands of the stock exchange.

It still is a case of ‘might’, though; the BBC article in question makes no mention of an implementation date for this legislation, and it seems clear it hasn’t gone into practice just yet. In which case my ripping my CDs is still a criminal act, and in writing this blog post I’ve just admitted to a felony. Still, I won’t tell them if you don’t.

So yes, back to my intermittent not-supposed-to-be-as-preachy-as-it-probably-is blog series on bands I think are awesome that no-one else has heard of. Except from me, and I’m not sure that really counts.

The first post (which you should definitely read if you haven’t already) was on Windmill Explosion, three mates who happened to form a great band. This one’s about a great band who happened to become mates…


2. The Ragamuffins

Of all the bands I love, there are probably only three that I can tell you exactly when and where I was when I fell in love with them. With Ash, it was in the computer suite of Huyton Library on the afternoon of July 18th 2004, the first time I ever heard ‘Orpheus’. With the Pipettes, it was in the old Virgin Megastore in Clayton Square at about lunchtime on July 31st 2006, the first time ‘Pull Shapes’ actually made sense to me.

In the case of the Ragamuffins, it was downstairs at the Zanzibar on Seel Street on a cold, damp Thursday evening in November 2007, and they weren’t even the Ragamuffins yet. Back then, they were still the Rascallies, and they were a very different band to the one that I saw for the last time in Manchester two-and-a-half years later. I hadn’t even gone to see them; I’d been up at the Guild for something, possibly a radio show, and had decided to carry on afterwards and go and see my mate’s band instead of going back to an empty room and drinking ridiculous amounts of Diet Coke until five in the morning.

From what I remember of my reaction, I found their set to be cheerfully melodic and full of jangly goodness, although in all honesty a little hard to concentrate on over the dying embers of my crush on my friend’s girlfriend. And then they played ‘Little Lucy, What’s Your Problem?’

I’ve never been to a gig, before or since, where a song I hadn’t heard by a band I didn’t know lodged itself so firmly in my head and refused to leave for days. I found myself walking around campus for days afterwards singing [I]’Little Lucy, where’s your baby? /Ain’t seen him ‘round here lately/Was he for keeps or just for practice?/ ‘Cos you’re not looking that enthusiastic’[/I] with varying degrees of intensity, no doubt earning myself some very strange looks from my coursemates and colleagues when I got a bit too carried away.

More to the point, I’d never fallen so hopelessly in love with a song before; I remember the fear I felt that, if I didn’t do something soon, this song and that band would slip out of my life forever. By the time I found it - and them - again, they had become the Ragamuffins and the bloke with the Epiphone guitar had been replaced by a short (and rather attractive) girl playing keys. But the songs were still there; ‘She’s Going To Destroy You!’, ‘Til Death Do Us Part’, ‘Jamaica Wool’ and, of course, ‘Little Lucy’ - all of them overflowing with jangling guitars, wonderfully danceable beats, the kind of melodies C86 would kill for and lyrics like Belle & Sebastian with bite. All of a sudden, I had a new favourite band - and no-one except me knew about them.

Naturally, then, I made it my business to tell everyone about them - sending links over MSN, playing songs at parties, inserting them into every available space in conversation. Some people hated it, as can only be expected and is in some ways to be preferred to anonymous ubiquity; some people didn’t feel strongly enough to care, for various reasons, most of them lost to the ether. Some people loved it, though; not many, maybe no more than a dozen people including myself from across my various social groups, but enough for it to feel like a proper communal thing. When new songs appeared on the internet, we experienced the same buzz some people must feel when Kaiser Chiefs material gets leaked three days early.

The next time the Ragamuffins played in Liverpool, several months after that road-to-Damascus moment, a minor cadre of us turned up right at the start, listened to the forgettable support acts and, when our private idols finally took the stage, plonked ourselves on the barrier for the entire set. When afterwards, I plucked up the courage to introduce myself to the singer, Jaggs, his first words to me, in a voice equal parts wonder and fear, were “You knew all the words…!”

That night sealed it for me; for the next two years, the Ragamuffins were the most important band in the world to me, and following them to various corners of the North-West became a source of joy and excitement that I sorely needed, and none more so than in the months following that second Liverpool gig. At that point, my life was coming apart around me through stress and overwork and depression, and I felt hopelessly, horrendously isolated from the people around me.  Yet even whilst all this was going on, the Ragamuffins were there, their music a brief spotlight of feeling and happiness that could still incite me into dancing around my room to ‘Halfway Between Prada & Primark’ (another glorious tune I will love forever) for hours on end, long after my parents had gone to bed and I’d had to resort to using the cheapest pair of headphones imaginable.

As time passed and their sound developed, I carried on telling anyone who’d listen how fantastic they were. Those friends I’d converted aided the cause; those I hadn’t indulged my adulation with kind-spirited mockery. I even found them a stand-in keyboard player whilst Jules, the resident synth whiz, went travelling for six months; my friend, the wondrously talented Kelsey Lindstrom, who also played on three sublime records before heading back to her native Portland to make her own utterly lovely music.

By this time, their sound had gone from the jangly indie-pop of ‘Little Lucy’ to a kind of guitar-driven synth-pop mix, something like Aberfeldy’s second album (yes, that’s as mainstream a reference as you’re getting. Do some legwork, people). With Jules’ return, their sound became more and more electro-influenced; the quality of the writing never dipped, but it never felt quite right for them, especially when the electro began dominating the setlists and the rhythm section had to play to a click in order to match the backing tracks the new stuff necessitated. Eventually, with the dilemma escalating, Jaggs and Jules decided to form an electro band separate from the Ragamuffins, called Venus In Faux (who play ‘dreamstep’ and are excellent); not long after, the Ragamuffins themselves announced they were embarking on a hiatus sparked by line-up instability and ViF’s fledgling success.

The Ragamuffins weren’t the first band I knew to be eluded by the success I felt they deserved; I’ve already talked about Windmill Explosion, for one (Unlike the Windies, however, the Ragamuffins’ music is still to be found in various corners of the internet, not least the Myspace page and several Soundcloud accounts). They were, however, the first band I properly evangelised to people, and the first band I ever used social media (MSN, Facebook, Myspace) to encourage interest in. They remain pretty much the only band whose music I’ll freely copy for others (with Jaggs’ permission, and in light of the difficulty of getting hold of it otherwise), and the only band I still evangelise about so long after I first fell in love with them (3 1/2 years and counting since that cold November night). Just as importantly, they were the first band to show me the benefits of investing the relationship artists have with audiences; I count Jaggs and Jules among my friends as well as my favourite musicians.

Jaggs insists the band isn’t kaput; he still occasionally sends the faithful new songs that aren’t officially ‘by’ anybody but are Ragamuffins to their tom-toms, and has even begun doing solo gigs under the Ragamuffins banner again (literally; he has to stick it up firmly or else it tends to fall down two songs into his set. It’s a rather fetching shade of yellow). Hopefully, it won’t be too long before the band is back on the road in one form or another; I may not need them like I once did, but that doesn’t mean no-one will.

As for ‘Little Lucy’, I now cover that song with my band. It’s the only time I’ll ever tell my egomaniac drummer a song is too good to have been written by him.


Coming Soon - Part 3: I Know More Stories Than You