Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Music

Gratuitous Girls Aloud references

  • Girls Aloud, Fat Oasis and making music when you’re ancient

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    Rock music is a young person’s game. With a few exceptions – scene lynchpins with modest but faithful followings; him or her from That Band, now solo; utterly deluded Oasis-a-likes still waiting for Alan McGee to sign them, because what the world really needs now is Fat Oasis – if you haven’t carved out a musical career by the time you exit your twenties and early thirties then you either get out of music altogether, become a covers band or go corporate, playing for businessmen and brides.

    (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. “Real” musicians like to mock wedding bands and corporate gigs, but the best of them are masters of music, people who’ve managed to turn what they love doing into a career. That’s something to celebrate, surely.)

    There are lots of reasons for the exit. The big one is that young people will put up with a lot of shite. They’ll take a day off work to get their gear into the venue and then sit doing nothing for four hours. They’ll jump in a van and drive 300 miles to play in front of three people. They’ll put up with arseholes and bullshitters and fantasists. And they’ll genuinely believe that playing a battle of the bands on a wet tuesday night will make them the next Radiohead. You get fed up with that shit long before you reach middle age.

    There are other reasons too. You start to feel ridiculous sharing stages when you’re as old as the other bands’ fathers. You worry that you’re as bad as the utterly deluded Oasis-a-likes. You have a demanding job, maybe a family, and if you have spare money it goes on the house rather than on three days of studio time. Your spine doesn’t like carrying Marshall stacks up fire escapes any more. You’re not going to be patronised by pricks. And music just isn’t the all-consuming passion it is when you’re seventeen.

    So you stop.

    I think that’s a shame, because you don’t need to do all the young-people things to enjoy making music. Thanks to technology, you can have all the good bits without any of the bad – and you might just make better music as a result.

    Write, rehearse, perform, repeat

    Looking back on the 26-odd-years I’ve been involved with music, a lot of it was fairly typical of younger musicians: you’d bash out something half-decent, write a lyric, rehearse it to a reasonably acceptable standard and then play it through a PA louder than war. It sounded okay, but that didn’t mean it was any good.

    I’ve mentioned this before, I’m sure, but one of my earlier – and at the time, better – late teenage efforts went like this:

    I hate this town
    I hate this town
    I hate this town
    I hate this town

    I think we can agree that the world doesn’t really need that kind of thing. Or this:

    I could point my car at the city
    Let it drive me there
    Keep the windows down
    Let the rain wash this town
    Out of my hair
    I wouldn’t know where I was going
    Until I got there
    Sounds perfect

    Sounds BOLLOCKS, more like.

    As a young man the lyrics I wrote fell into three categories:

    Please have sex with me.
    I think bad things are bad. Please have sex with me.
    I am really fucking deep. Please have sex with me.

    There’s nothing particularly wrong with that – “please have sex with me” is the theme of some of the best pop music ever made – but for many young songwriters it’s the only real experience they’re actually singing about (And for many of them the experience isn’t of having sex. It’s of wanting sex.) For the generation that came after mine there was a second topic, their parents’ divorces and how it like totally messed them up and stuff.

    The result? Lots of songs about wanting to have sex, or about how bad things are really bad, often couched in language that you’ll look back on ten years later and go “Jesus! I was such a tit!” If like me you grew up in the stadium rock era, there was also a definite tendency to go for big-sounding stuff that doesn’t actually mean anything. For example, in one of mine:

    So sad today
    You never could act
    Your eyes give the game away
    The same tomorrow
    You’re talking up a storm
    But you’re fooling no-one
    Sometimes you don’t need wings to fly away
    I’ll be waiting here with open arms
    Open arms

    That, as you’ve no doubt noticed, doesn’t make any fucking sense and doesn’t fucking rhyme either. But that’s okay, because if you do it in a SUPER YEARNING VOICE over BIG CHIMING GUITARS it works. U2 made a career out of it, and I’m re-recording that one with bigger guitars because I still like it, even though the lyrics are bollocks. These days I find that kind of thing funny.

    I realise that this isn’t necessarily a reflection on all young songwriters. Maybe I was, and still am, shite. But if I was, I fooled a lot of people: at no point have other musicians or reviewers said about that song, “hang on! That doesn’t make any fucking sense, or even rhyme!” I remember letting my then-bandmates see it, and they thought it was amazing.

    Older, not wiser

    As you go on, you probably get better. You try harder, you get more experience (so you can actually write about real things instead of made-up things or things you’ve read in books), you listen to more music, and the stuff you come up with gets more interesting. You’ve probably learned some lessons too, so for example you don’t affect a whiskey growl that sounds patently ridiculous just because your bandmates think you need to sound more rocky. And if you’re lucky, you hook up with musicians that are better than you, people who can sprinkle magic dust on your songs.

    What you probably don’t do is give the songs the time and attention they need.

    I certainly didn’t. For many years there was a treadmill: you’d write a song, take it to rehearsal, get it into something approaching a finished shape and then you’d play it live. Once you’d done that it was more or less carved into stone: after the gig you’d have more ideas, so your attention would turn to them. With hindsight, that means a lot of songs were stopped at the “has potential” stage: they weren’t finished, but I thought they were.

    The other problem with the gig treadmill is that you end up painting from a very limited palette. I think technology has changed that for current musicians, but for me there was no point in trying anything that wasn’t guitar/bass/drums because we wouldn’t be able to play it live.

    That focus on sticking to what we could actually play was particularly limiting for me, because I’m not a very accomplished musician – and thanks to RSI and later, hand surgery, I’m even less accomplished; for example, I can’t hold a plectrum for a whole gig.

    I can bash away on a guitar reasonably well and even knock out a few things on a drum kit, but keyboards and other instruments are a mystery to me. I’ve tried, but I can’t get my head around them. Singing the praises of Girls Aloud, Robyn, Sugababes, Pet Shop Boys et al, something I’ve done for years, was never an ironic pose – I went to see Girls Aloud again last night, and they were superb – but that music didn’t inform the music I was making because I couldn’t bloody play it. As endless indie bands have proved with their annoying “let us show you that a pop song is actually good!” covers, some of the best pop songs have a certain something you can’t replicate on a guitar.

    The third problem for me was that I didn’t have the ability to engineer recordings or the budget to get it done properly, so any studio time was a rushed “we have two days! Let’s record 700 songs!” experience. That can work for some bands – a tight live band recreating the live experience can easily do a really good set in a day – but equally it can mean making recordings that aren’t as good as they can be.

    No matter how talented the musicians you’re working with, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really talented people, if your songs aren’t finished and the recordings are rushed then you’re not going to produce something you’re really proud of.

    I climbed off that particular treadmill in 2004 and haven’t released anything or played a gig since.

    And now we’re back! Back! BACK!

    Sort of.

    This is the new shit 

    Since 2007 I’ve been messing around on various Macs, putting ideas into Logic Pro and generally faffing around. I’ve produced a lot of unlistenable nonsense but since my brother David got involved last year it’s started to turn into something more interesting – and while there are guitars, basses and drums involved, the guitars aren’t the focus any more.

    Thanks to technology, I’m no longer limited to what I can play (or what instruments I can afford), or what I can do live, or how much studio time I can afford, or rushing to get something finished so it can be performed live. Some of the songs we’re working on have been kicking around since 2007. Others are even older. One of them, You Don’t Have To Be Alone, has gone from an overlong and fairly dirgey bit of guitar music to short, sharp, sparkly electronic pop, which suits it much better. Most of the songs are completely new and owe as much to Pet Shop Boys and Girls Aloud as they do to U2, REM and Radiohead – and none of the lyrics are about hoping to have sex or pretending to be deep in the hope that people will want to have sex with me.

    It’s quite possible that when we finally let people hear what we’ve been up to – and it’ll be a while yet, because while we’ve got a shortlist of around a dozen near-finished songs there’s still a lot more to do to them – they’ll think it’s all shite and that the lyrics don’t make any fucking sense, but that’s fine: I’m too old to go back to the live circuit, overcoming crippling stage fright to serenade three drunks and a murderer for gig after soul-destroying gig.

    And anyway, we can’t play any of it live.

  • If your iPhone 5 is too quiet, here’s how to make it louder

    My iPhone 5 is much quieter than previous iPhones, and that’s a problem: a lot of the music I listen to is quiet, or unmixed and uncompressed, and that means it isn’t loud enough when I’m on the bus. If you’re suffering from the same problem, there is an easy and free way to solve it.

    Step one: download Denon Audio from the App Store and use it instead of the default Music app.

    Step two: in the EQ view (shown here), click on the settings icon in the top right hand corner.

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    Step three: choose the Flat EQ option.

    Step four: you should now see a single straight line with two points, one on either side. Drag one of them upwards, then drag the other one up to the same point.That boosts the volume of everything without changing the sound, although of course you can create a custom EQ if you want to do that. If the limiter option is on (it’s in the Settings screen, and enabled by default) then even if you turn it up too loud you won’t get horrible clipping distortion.

    Step five: there is no step five. Hurrah!

    [You can only do so much with EQ. If the app doesn’t improve things enough, you might want to do what I did and buy a little headphone amp.]

  • One for the Mac musos: a really annoying thing in Logic Pro

    I’ve been spending a lot of time in Logic Pro, Apple’s music production software, recently. It’s a wonderful, powerful program with some odd ways of doing things, and one of those odd things is driving me bloody insane. If anybody knows the solution I’d be delighted to hear it.

    It’s a drag and drop thing. When I move something in the arrange window or trim it, it snaps into place – so for example if I drag to the beginning of a bar, it snaps to the beginning of the bar.

    Except when it doesn’t.

    It looks like it’s snapped, but when you zoom in again and again and again it’s snapped slightly to the right of the marker, enough to send it noticeably out of time.

    The same problem affects loops, so I set the edge to what should be the end of a bar, but it’s snapping slightly to the left or right, throwing the loop out of time.

    Here’s an exaggerated image showing what happens:

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    The black line to the left of the vocals is the beginning of the bar, the bit where I drag/trim to, but on some tracks Logic won’t let me: unless I go to insane zoom levels, it moves to the left or to the right of the line, but won’t let me move or trim to the line.

    I’ve clicked pretty much everything, including the “snap” options (“smart”, “bar”, “beat”, “ticks” and so on), and nothing seems to work.

    It only affects some songs, and I can’t for the life of me see any differences between the ones that work properly and the ones that don’t.

    Am I missing something really obvious?

  • Don’t stare at the sun

    I went to see Richard Hawley play Glasgow’s Barrowland last night. I’m not a huge fan – I like a lot of what I’ve heard, but I haven’t heard a lot – but last night’s performance of Don’t Stare At The Sun was one of those rare goosebumps-on-goosebumps moments. Beautiful.

    Here’s the same song on the Later… TV programme.

  • “Session musicians and computer experts produce a near-exact imitation of the original after hearing it on the radio”

    I’d never heard of this: artists being covered before they release their records. From The Telegraph:

    Copycat versions of popular songs have been widely available since digital downloads took off a decade ago.

    The practice sees session musicians and computer experts produce a near-exact imitation of the original after hearing it on the radio. The copies are sold on websites such as iTunes and Amazon, typically for 79p a track.

    Previously, however, the copies have only been released after the original version became popular.

  • If nobody is willing to pay you to do something, then it isn’t as valuable to the world as it is to you

    David Lowery of Cracker has been getting lots of attention for his long verbal kicking of an idiot. The short version: a girl boasted about never paying for music, and Lowery basically told her that when you download, you’re forcing musicians to kill themselves.

    I think both sides are rather overwrought here, so hurrah for legendary producer Steve Albini, who takes issue with the idea that musicians – almost uniquely among artistic fields – somehow deserve to be paid lots of money for what they do:

    If nobody is willing to pay you to do something, then it isn’t as valuable to the world as it is to you. You then decide if it’s worth doing for its own sake. If it isn’t, quit. If it is, carry on and who knows, maybe people will see value in it later and reward you. If not, you’re still doing something you want to do.

    Albini’s argument is that the war on free is over, and free won. No amount of arguing on the internet is going to change that, so you either need to adapt to the new realities or get out.

    my point is that there’s no return in trying to enforce these rights once they die a natural death, but there’s plenty of return in building a new paradigm that embraces the free sharing of music. The old way of monetizing recordings is over, and an industry still clinging to it is doomed.

    Albini isn’t saying that’s a good thing (or a bad thing). It’s just a a thing:

    Why is there no booming sculpture industry? Why are there no help wanted ads for mimes? Some creative work is valued more than the rest, and which art is so beknighted changes over time. In the near future you’ll see a lot of work for phone ap design, much less for magazine layout.

    Creative work is not primarily work, it’s primarily creative, and people do it because that’s how they want to spend their time. Its a rare confluence of circumstances that makes money change hands for it, and players in the game need to have quick feet.

    One of the arguments used in these debates is that it’s all very well saying artists need to tour, but what if they can’t or won’t?

    If your music/art is not making money in the commercial sphere and you’re not willing to perform live, then the only ways you can make a living would be through the generosity of a patron, academia or grantsmanship. Those avenues are unaffected by content being available for free on the internet.

    Downloads have changed the industry. Of course they have. But the truth about music is, like most creative arts, the overwhelming majority of people who do it aren’t financially rewarded for doing it. Even the really successful artists were a minority. Creative industries are famously low-paid: the majority of novelists, for example, earn a pittance – and those are the supposedly successful ones. Most don’t earn anything at all.

    As Mick Jagger put it back in 2010:

    people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

    Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

    So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

    This is not unique to music. Technology destroys industries. Check out the Yellow Pages next time it falls through your letter box, reduced from A4 to A5, hundreds of pages to a handful. Check out the state of high street retail, or travel agents, or Blockbuster video, or anything else whose business model disappeared overnight.

    The boom in recorded music was due to control and scarcity: the only way to get music was to buy it on a physical disc or cassette, and the people who made the discs and cassettes controlled supply. That’s gone, and you can mourn its departure all you like, but no amount of online censorship or tracking is going to make it come back again. The kids value videogames and internet connections and iPhones more than they do music.

    Recorded music is no longer special. The money has moved, and if your motivation is money then you need to move with it.

  • Where’s the bass?

    If any of you have been to arena gigs recently, you might be able to answer my question: where’s the bass?

    It’s a genuine question: bass guitars are good, but unless you’ve actually got your chin on the stage it’s pretty much impossible to hear them at arena gigs. The rockier the band, the worse the problem gets – and if you’re not a huge fan, in some cases entire songs go by and you’ve absolutely no idea what they were or whether they were any good.

    Is there something about those suspended PA rigs that means there aren’t enough bass bins sitting on the ground any more, or are soundmen and women just mixing things to make the kick drum as loud as possible at the expense of everything else?

  • Here’s a song about robots

    Sometimes I think there just aren’t enough songs about robots, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Maple Leaves’ new song is about… robots! But also, it’s about people!

    Damned clever, these pop types.

    If you’re in or around Glasgow, the EP launch is on Saturday (26 May) at Stereo. I’m gutted that I can’t make it. If you can go, you should.

  • Music, books and other media: meet the new boss, worse than the old boss

    Most of the debate over digital music business models is about the record companies and their digital successors, but what about the musicians? David Lowery of Cracker argues that for them, things are much worse: at least some pre-digital musicians actually got paid.

    The full thing is long but worth your time:

     Things are worse.  This was not really what I was expecting.  I’d be very happy to be proved wrong.  I mean it’s hard for me to sing the praises of the major labels. I’ve been in legal disputes with two of the three remaining major labels.   But sadly I think I’m right.   And the reason is quite unexpected.  It’s seems the Bad Old Major Record Labels “accidentally” shared  too much  revenue and capital through their system of advances.  Also the labels  ”accidentally” assumed most of the risk.   This is contrasted with the new digital distribution system where some of the biggest players assume almost no risk and share zero capital.

    I don’t agree with everything he writes, but that bit there makes sense to me – and it’s being replicated in ebooks. What looks like empowerment can also be evisceration: the Apples and Amazons of the world aren’t getting rid of middlemen, but becoming them by getting writers to do all the work (editing, promotion, etc) that traditional publishers do. They still get a cut, but they don’t have to risk any of their money.

    In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates.  And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.

    There’s a wider angle to this too, which I’m sure I’ll come back to in a proper post: the way in which the new titans are organised in such a way that they can destroy their foreign rivals without paying foreign taxes. By routing ebook sales and music downloads through Luxembourg and putting UK earnings through Irish subsidiaries – something that, as public companies, they arguably have to do; their responsibility is to maximise their share prices, not to be good corporate citizens – the new bosses get yet another advantage: not only are they largely free from the need to invest in content creation, but they’re freed from some of the main costs of doing business too.

    Lowery:

    Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry.  They do not value content.  They only see THEIR services as valuable.  They are the Masters of the Universe.  They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks.

    As I say, I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s hard to argue against that one.

  • Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a £500 copyright licensing fee

    From time to time I get a wee panic about Coffin Dodgers and I have to go and check that I took the U2 lyrics out: there’s a scene that revolves around a U2 song, and in the first few drafts of the book I quoted a couple of lines from it. That’s a no-no, as Blake Morrison explains:

    For one line of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: £500. For one line of Oasis’s “Wonderwall”: £535. For one line of “When I’m Sixty-four”: £735. For two lines of “I Shot the Sheriff” (words and music by Bob Marley, though in my head it was the Eric Clapton version): £1,000. Plus several more, of which only George Michael’s “Fastlove” came in under £200. Plus VAT. Total cost: £4,401.75. A typical advance for a literary novel by a first-time author would barely meet the cost.

    The linked article is two years old. I very much doubt the fees have gone down since then.

    [Via Lexi Revellian]