The whole RotD team has been thinking a lot this week about the live music sector and when things might return to some sort of normality. The problem is none of us can figure out what ‘normality’ will mean in the future. In much the same way that the new normal was far from the old normal for all airline passengers going through security in the aftermath of 9/11, we wonder just how we’ll have to adapt when attending our first live shows after lockdown’s lifted. Realistically, we’re unsure just how comfortable we’re going to feel being in a room full of strangers, any one of which may be a virus carrier, until there’s some sort of effective vaccine. And we know that could be at least a year away. Of course, the industry wants to get back on its feet at the earliest possible opportunity. As do music fans. People boldly claim on social media that they cannot wait to sink their first pint again with a group of mates, get out and have a great time at a live show, and feel part of a hot, sweaty mass of people, which is only natural after being isolated for the past month, but we sense some of that is bravado and cabin fever doing the talking. When you have people like the prominent US health policy expert Dr Zeke Emanuel predicting that Autumn 2021 would be the soonest that large gatherings are likely to be permitted, you quickly wake up to the fact that not only has this year’s international festivals season been wiped out, but things look damn shaky even for next summer too. As an industry, Mongrel wonders just how prepared we really are for that damaging scenario, one that was unthinkable just weeks ago.
With all of that in mind, and whilst we applaud him for the amazing gesture of course,
Liam Gallagher’s
Free Concert for NHS staff and care workers at the O2 in London on October 29 would no doubt be a very strange affair indeed. Yes, it’s six months away and none of us know what sort of world we’ll be living in by then. But 15,000+ key workers all herded together under one roof? We’re not so sure it’ll even take place. Denmark, for example, hasn’t been affected anywhere near as badly as the UK, but they’ve just announced that a ban on events involving more than a thousand people will stay in place until at least September, another five months from now. Some experts predict that it’ll be another year before gatherings of even one hundred people of more are allowed by the Government here, let alone 1,000. Then, if the Liam show does happen, will social distancing guidelines still be enforced? If so, that’ll severely reduce the audience capacity. And maybe we’ll witness an entire crowd wearing face masks for the first time in our lives. Maybe that’s the new norm we should start to plan for around the world once we feel confident that our global leaders have everything in control.
An amusing
tweet that we spotted from someone called @sleezsisters during the week: “Just had a mild nervous breakdown picturing the inevitable John Lewis Christmas advert featuring a family having a Zoom Christmas dinner to an acoustic cover of Kanye West’s
Love Lockdown”.
One of the most noteworthy quotes of the week (and certainly food for thought) came from Pieter van Rijn of industry tech and services company
FUGA who said “if you don’t get hung up on how it used to be, your business has a great shot at emerging stronger than ever before”.
Another week, and a second
rant from the Daily Mail's Richard Littlejohn about
Tom Watson and his appointment as Chair of
UK Music. We suspect he won't be letting it lie any time soon either. Who's feeding Littlejohn information? We don't know, but Mike Batt, well known to be a Tory supporter, would be one guess, judging by his
blog post. A spokesperson for UK Music emphasised to us this week: "UK Music's member organisations were actively involved in the extensive and widely advertised recruitment process for the new Chair which culminated in the appointment last month of Tom Watson. The appointment was ratified by the UK Music Board and widely welcomed across the music industry". The forthcoming appointment of CEO feels like it has taken on an extra importance now. The last thing we need this year is an internal battle where everyone loses.
CMU summed up the story to date well.
Do please take a few minutes to fill in UK Music's annual music industry
survey. The important questionnaire includes some questions to gauge the impact of Covid-19 on the industry.
Another
Great British Singalong on Thursday morning across the BBC’s pop networks delivered five more interesting themed selections, all of which worked well, and were dedicated this week to delivery drivers across the land. Radio 1’s pick was Five’s
Keep On Movin’ which is simply a great radio track, expertly made, and stands up so well more than two decades on (incidentally, this is one of those oldies we come across from time to time on Spotify where a producer – in this case Steve Mac – or sometimes even a mix engineer is credited as primary artist alongside Five – why?). Even older is
I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers, which first charted 32 years ago, but again it has a timeless quality, and takes us back to those heady days at T In The Park when a mass singalong in the King Tut’s tent would breakout as soon as the opening chords began whenever it was played it in between acts. 6Music’s choice of Primal Scream
Movin’ On Up was a solid winner. And it was nice to hear again Bhangra Knights’ track
Husan from the Asian Network, familiar on a mainstream level after its use in that Peugeot car ad back in the early ‘00s. Finally, we’d forgotten all about Always On Time (ha, if only DHL really were) by Ja Rule and Ashanti, so thanks to 1Xtra for the two-fold-reminder that firstly, Ashanti had a great voice and could really carry off some big R&B pop tunes back in the day, and secondly just how horribly limited Ja Rule’s talent as a rapper really was. Thank goodness that Ashanti-sung chorus was so strong. More next week, please.
Mongrel’s wondering what’s going to happen with the latest
RAJAR radio listening survey, due to be made public on May 14. The fieldwork period was due to be December 30 right though to March 29, so that’ll mean it takes in the first two weeks of UK lockdown listening. However, we’re hearing that they may have been a problem collecting data in recently, let alone processing that info for a credible quarterly snapshot. Let’s hope it does still happen four weeks from now. It would be unlikely to show the full upswing in listening to radio that many observers believe is taking place whilst we spend so much time self-isolating at present. But the Q2 numbers should reflect that.
On the subject of how radio is handling things during the virus crisis,
David Lloyd’s excellent blog piece
here is a very good five-minute read for you this week. But we’d argue against his assertion that the 13 million people in their 60s and 70s aren’t being served anywhere by the BBC at present with their music policy.
Music Week recently wrote about “The songwriting secrets behind
It Wasn't Me”.
“When
Shaggy wrote It Wasn’t Me after watching an Eddie Murphy show, he thought it was dynamite”, begins their piece.
Shaggy’s A&R at MCA Hans Haedelt told us a different story soon after the song became a worldwide hit – that Shaggy hated the song and Hans had to enlist his head of A&R Gary Ashley had to beseech him to include it on the album.
The BPI’s
What the UK Streamed in 2019 report got a lot of press coverage, although
the Telegraph did somewhat make it sound like Toploader’s cover
Dancing In The Moonlight is the biggest track of all-time, which might have raised a few eyebrows amongst the music cognoscenti.
We got an advance copy earlier this week of a very good new book (out next week) from ECW Publishing in Toronto titled
A Platinum Producer’s Life In Music by
Ted Templeman, the Grammy-winning US music exec who signed and produced many great acts during the ‘70s and beyond. One interesting chapter on our quick initial skim through it all is seeing his honesty about Van Halen, and how nobody at Warners could be bothered with the band in 1978 when they were starting out. Ted talks of the various favours he had to pull in with his social circle of fellow execs, just to get people internally at the label to give them a shot. He talks about how that often holds true even today. Every new act needs someone banging the drum for them at a major label, or they don’t start a chance of cutting through. There’s also a great revelation about Madonna in 1984. Ted was riding high at the time with Van Halen’s
Jump turning into a global hit, so he met with Madge to chat about the strategy for her next album, following on from her breakthrough success around that same time with the single
Holiday. Templeman was tasked by Sire Records to push for
Material Girl to be the album’s first single, as the marketing team there were convinced
Like A Virgin was ‘too edgy for MTV’ and they feared radio would shun it as a result. She apparently listened thoughtfully and said to him “Well, what do you think I should do?” Ted replied “To be honest, I don’t care. I’m just delivering the message from the company. You’re the artist, you probably know best.” Seems like she did. She pushed Sire to change their minds, and the rest is pop history.
Both
Mabel and
Selena Gomez have “I want a boyfriend” as the hook and theme of their current singles. Coincidence? Almost certainly, yes – very often we hear an unreleased song, then someone else comes out with the lyric idea, simply because that idea’s time has come. So then it’s a case of who gets their song out first (in this case Mabel – if it had been the other way around we suspect Mabel’s single might have been pulled).
Much as we’re loving many of the
listening parties of great albums taking place on social media in lockdown most evenings right now, we’ve lost count of some of the suggested titles that we really couldn’t bear in full, even at the time of release, let alone decades later.
Rene Symonds pointed out on Facebook that there are seven artists called
Lil on the last
New Music Friday US playlist. Is no-one Big anymore?
