Thursday 28 October 2010, 11:30 | By

Ortega to stretch Thriller video to full-length movie

Artist News

Having made a heartfelt tribute to Michael Jackson with the ‘This Is It’ not-concert movie, director Kenny Ortega is set to make even more cash off the back of the deceased pop star with his next project. Um, I mean it’ll be another tribute.

In what is almost certainly the worst idea I’ve heard all week, Ortega is leading a project to make a full-length movie based on Jackson’s 1982 ‘Thriller’ music video. However, according to Deadline, talks are still underway to recruit a studio to fund the project, so it’s not actually happening yet. There is still time to stop it!

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 11:26 | By

Fela Kuti musical opens in London next week

Artist News

The previously reported and highly acclaimed musical based on the life and music of Afrobeat originator Fela Kuti, ‘Fela!’, will open at London’s National Theatre next week.

Full info on the show is available here: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/felalondon/

Backed by the likes of Jay-Z, Will Smith and ?uestlove, with musical arrangements by Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, the show first ran in Brooklyn in 2008 and moved to the Eugene O’Neill Theater on Broadway last November.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 11:25 | By

Chilly Gonzales to play UK shows next month

Gigs & Festivals

Chilly Gonzales will play two shows in the UK next month, which is brilliant news. The first, in Manchester, will be his excellent solo ‘Piano Talk Show’, while in London he’ll be playing with a full band. This is all very exciting. I’m excited. Are you excited? I am.

Gonzales will also release a new single, ‘Never Stop’ (aka ‘that one off the iPad advert’), on 5 Dec.

Here are the gig details:

15 Nov: Manchester, St Phillips Church (Piano Talk Show)
23 Nov: London, The Scala (full band show)

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 11:21 | By

Festival line-up update – 29 Oct 2010

Artist News Festival Line-Up Update Gigs & Festivals

ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES, Butlins Holiday Centre, Minehead, 13-15 May: Animal Collective have been announced as the curators of ATP’s first weekend next year. Acts already announced include Gang Gang Dance, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Broadcast and The Meat Puppets. www.atpfestival.com

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 11:15 | By

MIDEM add sync day with added Glee

Business News Education & Events

Music business conference MIDEM has announced it is adding a whole day dedicated to the crazy world of sync rights next year, with a key note from PJ Bloom, music supervisor on US TV show ‘Glee’. Bloom has also worked picking what tunes to use to soundtrack other hit American telly programmes, including ‘The Shield’, ‘Nip/Tuck’ and ‘CSI: Miami’.

A spokesman for MIDEM told CMU: “Synchronisation is a growing revenue stream for labels and publishers nowadays. To help participants better understand this trend, MIDEM has created MIDEM Sync, which will feature a keynote from PJ Bloom, a panel discussion bringing together key players in the synchronisation business, and the Music Pitch Sessions. During his keynote, PJ Bloom will describe the creative and commercial aspects of his synchronisation work on ‘Glee’ and will share his vision for future developments in the field of sync”.

MIDEM Director Dominique Leguern added: “It is fundamental today for our participants to have better access to the burgeoning music synchronisation business and I’m particularly delighted that the music supervisor from the TV phenomenon ‘Glee’, PJ Bloom, will be present for this exceptional day at MIDEM”.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:58 | By

Russia appoints body to administer new private copy levy

Business News Labels & Publishers Legal

There’s a little bit of tension in the Russian music industry today following the announcement The Russian Copyright Owners’ Union, or RSP, had been appointed to distribute a new levy that has been introduced in Russia on “recordable media and related equipment”.

The levy is similar to that applied in many European countries (though not the UK) on blank cassettes and CDRs and, more recently, in some territories, on digital recording devices to compensate copyright owners for the private copies of their work consumers inevitably make. The levy is usually distributed back to the music industry via a collecting society.

With that in mind, Russian collecting society ROUPI hoped to administer the new levy, but the country’s government announced yesterday the RSP had been handed the responsibility, even though that organisation was only established last year and is not currently operational.

A spokesman for ROUPI claimed that the RSP had been handed the levy role simply because it had a celebrity boss – veteran film director Nikita Mikhalkov – adding that they would appeal the ruling on the grounds the Russian government didn’t follow the correct procedure in appointing their rivals.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:56 | By

ACM launch new franchise teaching programme

Business News Education & Events

The Academy Of Contemporary Music has announced the launch of three music education ‘franchises’, which basically means the Guildford-based music school will equip and accredit other organisations and individuals to teach rock and pop based music courses for young people around the UK.

Each of the three franchises will focus on a different age group, 5-10, 10-16 and 16+. In doing so it will expand the ACM’s age range reach considerably. Courses at the Academy itself are in the main focused on students that are sixteen or over.

Confirming the new programme, ACM’s Julia Leggett told CMU: “The new franchises will offer parents a new way of educating their children through music in a fun and engaging way, which has benefits that extend beyond musical development”.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:55 | By

Denmark considering three strikes

Business News Legal

According to TorrentFreak, Denmark could be the next country to introduce a three-strikes style system for combating illegal file-sharing. The website says the country’s Ministry Of Culture is currently in talks with both content owners and internet service providers with a view to pushing new laws through the country’s parliament.

They add: “At the moment there are two models on the table. Rightsholders will almost certainly do all the monitoring of file-sharers, but in one model ISPs send out warning letters and in the other the task is handled by a public body. In both models, an independent body assesses the evidence”.

Denmark would join the UK, France, New Zealand and South Korea in introducing laws where persistent file-sharers can have their net connections suspended or disconnected if they fail to heed written warnings.

According to TechDirt, in South Korea, the first country to properly launch a three-strikes system, some persistent file-sharers are only actually getting one warning letter before net suspension proceedings begin, which I guess equals two strikes then your out.

Meanwhile, Music Week reported earlier this week that in France, where the three-strikes system only recently got properly under way, up to 25,000 warning letters are currently being sent out every single day. Also Free, the French ISP who had previously refused to pass on said warning letters to their customers (they argued that technically speaking they didn’t have to because of the way the French three-strikes law was worded), are now doing so.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:49 | By

New look MySpace launches in the US

Digital

So, MySpace has relaunched in the US with a new design, a more entertainment-centric approach and that logo. Most commentators are positioning this as the one time king of social networking’s last chance at long-term survival as it continues to lose users left, right and centre to Facebook and other content sharing and social networking sites that actually work.

The UK re-launch will follow next month alongside a major marketing push. The company’s UK sales team are already in media buying agencies bigging up the new look site to potential advertisers. The screen grabs they’re showing off look lovely, though I’m sure once you get inside the new site it’s probably shit. It is MySpace after all.

Music will be at the heart of the new proposition, especially in the UK, and not just in terms of the content MySpace itself publishes, but also in the service’s new social networking functionality.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:30 | By

MUZU announce chart widget

Business News Digital

Music video service MUZU has announced a new partnership with the Official Charts Company which involves a new widget carrying the latest singles chart in video form which anyone can place on their website, meaning website owners can have an automatically updating chart feature on their sites.

The widget, called the ‘video lightbox’ by MUZU, plays clicked-on videos in an overlay screen, so users aren’t taken away from the host website. And the website hosting the chart can earn a revenue share on advertising also serviced. 

MUZU co-founder Mark French told CMU: “We’re really excited about the launch of our partnership with The Official Charts. The new widget is a simple solution for any website to present the best of the Official Charts music videos, together with access to MUZU’s full catalogue of over 80,000 videos and the chance to earn additional revenue streams”.

While the Chart Company’s Business Development Manager Luke Whalley added: “Our new partnership with MUZU enables us to strengthen our consumer offering with high quality video content, whilst expanding the reach of the Official Charts across new and existing online publishers”.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:28 | By

Have a RAJAR round up on us

Media

You might think I just sit down of a morning and write this shit off the top of my head, but no, I do research.

And what I discovered is that my mum and dad don’t dig Chris Evans in the morning, but returned to Radio 2 recently when Richard Madeley filled in on the BBC station’s breakfast show. Whereas the noisy women on my train back from Manchester the other week didn’t like Richard, and prefer it when Evans is on air. There were three of them, whereas my mum and dad number two, so Evans attracts more listeners than he loses as host of the Radio 2 breakfast show. Here ends my in-depth analysis of British radio listening.

Though I do have to admit that my findings do not concur with that other in-depth analysis of British radio listening, the all important RAJAR listening figures, which arguably aren’t all that much more reliable than my approach to research, but which have a lot more credibility in the broadcasting industry. Because, according to the latest set of RAJAR figures, released today, Evans puts off as many listeners as he attracts. 

That is to say, for each of the 1.5 million new listeners Evans brought in when he took over Radio 2 breakfast earlier this year, he’s caused an existing Radio 2 breakfast listener to turn off. So whereas Evans initially took the Radio 2 breakfast audience to record levels at the start of the year, he now has more or less the same number of listeners that his predecessor Terry Wogan had this time last year (actually, slightly less). Still, at 8.14 million listeners, he still has by far the biggest radio audience in the UK. Chris Moyles lags behind on 7.1 million, a figure down over half a million on the previous quarter but up slightly year on year.

Radio 2 remains the UK’s most popular radio station overall, with a weekly reach of over 13.5 million, while Radio 1, in second place, reaches just over 11.5 million. Over in commercial radio, TalkSport had a very good quarter with audience up 19.6% year on year to 2.96 million. Absolute Radio also saw audience growth, by 4.2% year on year, to 1.65 million. But the biggest commercial station remains Classic FM which, while seeing a slight drop in weekly audience, is still pulling in 5.68 million listeners a week.

Digital radio listening grew again, albeit slightly, in the last quarter, with 24.8% of all radio listening being done via a digital platform, up from 24.6% in the last quarter and 21.1% this time last year. That said, the growth was really in the number of people listening to radio through their telly (which counts as a digital platform), listening via the DAB digital network and via the internet were both down.

In the digital domain, it was another good RAJAR report for 6music which, thanks to being very nearly shut down earlier this year, now has almost twice as many listeners compared to this time last year, at 1.12 million. On the commercial side of digital, Planet Rock saw its audience rise 10.5% year on year to its highest ever level of 783,000.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:27 | By

Boy George soaks chatty fan

And Finally

I’ve written variously about how I’d like it very much if everyone would stop talking all the way through gigs, but I’m in two minds about Boy George’s reaction to a woman he caught talking at a recent charity gig in aid of The Meningitis Trust.

According to The Sun, a woman in the front row of the show at the Embassy Club in Mayfair was left soaked and sobbing when George threw a glass of water over her, shouting: “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you rude cunt!” A “club source” told the tabloid that people had started talking amongst themselves at the show because the singer was a bit rubbish: “He wasn’t playing his hits and people were losing interest. It was a shocking lapse of judgment because people had paid to support the Trust”.

Like I say, I’m in two minds about this incident. Still, as a general rule of thumb, if a band is playing, shut the fuck up you rude cunts.

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:24 | By

Q&A: The Hundred In The Hands

Artist Interviews

The Hundred In The Hands

Following a tour with their former band, The Boggs, in 2007, Jason Friedman and Eleanore Everdell decided to get together and play some music on their own. Over a couple of days, they wrote and recorded the song ‘Dressed In Dresden’, and then got on with their lives. A year later, The Boggs had disbanded and the pair decided to brush off that song, using it as the basis for a new project, The Hundred In The Hands.

The duo released their debut album through Warp Records last month and begin a UK tour with !!! later this week. We caught up with Jason and Eleanore to find out more.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
Jason: My dad brought home an old, very heavy, electric guitar from a garage sale, sat me down in the living room and taught me to play ‘Pipeline’ by The Chantays. After that I became obsessed with guitar. I’d come home from school and play along to records. But, right from the start I didn’t have much interest in learning songs, I just wanted to write my own and used tape to tape recorders to overdub parts in my feeble first attempts. Later I got into four tracks and would spend hours bouncing down tracks to add layers, slow things down and reverse guitars. Good fun.

Eleanore: My dad had this beautiful old Martin guitar and he would bring it down to the living room and play folk songs. He taught me Elizabeth Cotton’s way of finger picking which I sat around for hours practicing and at the same time I was spending a lot of time in school choirs and I just loved singing the harmonies. I went to a high school that had a neo-gothic cathedral. Every morning we had to sing these hymns and I would try and learn to read the harmony lines in the middle. I always loved rock n roll but it took me a while to figure out I could make it myself.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Jason: One thing we were excited by was using a lot of R&B or hip hop production and combining it with our live bits with the guitars and vocals. Lyrically, most of the songs are basically just love songs. But they’re a bit tweaked or off. And they’re not A B C stories. It’s more impressionistic or like flipping through a book of film stills. But really it’s just a mix of some fictional things and personal lines but all playing off each other to make it interesting.

Eleanore: It’s also a lot about youth in the city. And cities themselves; how they develop and grow but can also get crippled and die, and so every now and then it drifts into post-war or apocalyptic stuff.

Jason: We made our album kind of in seclusion. Like we just disappeared into the bunker for a few months and worked on everything night and day, so in a sense the songs were inspiring themselves.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
Jason: We start by each of us writing on our own. We’ll work separately and each write lyrics and sketches and then we get back together and we start recording and writing together, each adding and changing what the other brought in. For a while when we were in the first phase of writing we would go over to Jacques Renault’s home studio and work on a kind of weekly basis. We did that for months on two album tracks ‘Young Aren’t Young’ and ‘Dead Ending’ and a couple of EP tracks. In the end we had those and a stack of about 20 demos or first drafts of tracks.

Eleanore: From the beginning we really wanted to work with great producers so we could take things further than we were capable of on our own. So after we had our demos, we took the stems and pushed them further with three different producers in Richard X, Eric Broucek and Chris Zane. With them we added and replaced the bits that weren’t working and cleaned things up.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Eleanore: J Dilla, Norma Fraser, The Kinks, Diana Ross, Elliot Smith, Gorgio Moroder, Daft Punk, The Beatles, The Cure, Young Marble Giants, The Smiths, Fela, Dinosaur Jr, Ride…

Jason: We were listening to a lot of old ska and dub, 80s hip hop, post-punk and early mod and beat is pretty much in the blood. At Jacques’ we were constantly pulling out all his old mutant disco records and classic house twelve-inches. All pretty inspirational.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Jason: Best if played loud.

Eleanore: This… will change your life.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Jason: I just want to keep working hard and getting better at being a band. We both love touring and so we’re loving the way things are going.

Eleanore: And after that, I can’t wait to start working on the next album! We learned a lot making this one and from playing the songs live. It’s all pretty exciting, I just want to see where it goes.

MORE>> thehundredinthehands.com

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Thursday 28 October 2010, 10:13 | By

Approved: Rökkurró

CMU Approved

Formed in 2006, one of Rökkurró’s earliest influences was (apparently) the sunlight which came in through the windows of the attic where they rehearsed. Which sounds kind of unlikely, but their music does go some way to representing that image in sound, complete with the cold landscape of Iceland outside; because the Reykjavik residents create that equally grand and delicate sound that, for some reason, only Nordic bands seem capable of pulling off.

The band released their second album, ‘Í Annan Heim’, in Iceland and Japan earlier this year. Nine tracks of rolling guitars and swirling strings, which peak, trough and occasionally crash, are all topped off with the soft, fragile vocals of Hildur Stefánsdóttir. The band recently played their first ever UK shows, which will hopefully lead at some point to a release for the album over here.

www.myspace.com/rokkurro

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 13:02 | By

Eddy Says: Once more unto the breach dear friends

Eddy Says

John Cage

Some ideas are so simple, it’s amazing they’ve not been tried before. Last year a massive online campaign got a huge rush of noise into the Christmas number one spot, with Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’. How about this year we fill that position with silence? John Cage’s silent piece ‘4’33”’, to be precise. That’s what Eddy is hoping to help to do, and in the process raise some serious money for charity.

This time last year, Tracy Morter, a photographer, Xfm listener and mother from Essex, had a stroke of inspiration. The idea was to sabotage Simon Cowell’s assumption that his ‘X-Factor’ winner would automatically get Christmas number one, and to replace that inevitably turgid piece of pop at the top of the festive chart with something that meant a lot to people who truly love music.

The campaign became legendary, and proof that ‘the underground’, when galvanized through a great idea, could beat ‘the mainstream’. It’s a warming thought, and together we did it last Christmas, when Rage Against The Machine topped the chart.

Fast forward to the start of October this year, a week before Charlie from Ou Est Le Swimming Pool’s incredible wake, Chazzstock, and I was speaking on Facebook with my esteemed colleague Nathan J Whitey, from the band Whitey. We were marvelling at the beautifully Dadaist idea that somebody on Facebook had conjured up: Cage Against The Machine for Christmas number one. Aside from the obviously brilliant rhyme, the idea was to encourage people to buy one of the most famous creations of John Cage – the genius avante garde, American, composer – ‘4’33″‘, and effectively beat ‘X-Factor’ with copyrighted silence.

If you’re unaware of this piece, it involves an orchestra being silent for four minutes and 33 seconds, leaving the audience to absorb the sounds around them and appreciate them in a way they have never done before. The idea is powerful. Think of a one minute silence and how emotive that can be.

Of course, the pure schadenfreude of beating Cowell with ‘nothing’ is exquisite, and got Nathan and me chatting about the possiblities – this simple idea turned out to be rather inspiring! What if we were to organise a cover version of ‘4’33″‘ especially for this campaign, we wondered? What about a Band Aid-style cover where we get a stack of notable musicians, may-be a few celebrity rock stars to contribute a little silence, which we blend together into one all-star version of the track?

A couple of days earlier, when I’d first seen the Cage Against The Machine page, I’d started tweeting about it. Within a day or two, my colleagues like Hadouken! and Does It Offend You, Yeah? were tweeting about it too. Then before we knew it, the page had swelled from having 18,000 members to almost 40,000! It’s now climbing slowly but steadily.

While having my public conversation with Nathan, it occurred to me that whenever Cage’s piece drops, and you’re supposed to appreciate the sounds around you, that one in ten people in the UK – including me, Adam F, Rocky from X-Press 2, and countless others – would only be able to hear their own tinnitus. Because, as I keep saying, sufferers of this awful condition will NEVER HEAR SILENCE AGAIN.

A week later it was Chazzstock at Koko, a very emotional night. In the course of meeting up with Joe Hutchinson from Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, who was organising that event, I had discovered that the biggest killer of young people in this country is what killed Charlie – suicide following depression. I also learned that, of those young people who commit suicide, three times more are male. (Read my full piece on that subject here). Again, it occured to me that, for those who suffer like Charlie did, enforced silence may also be a painful experience.

Joe had, through this painful process, discovered and become a board member of CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), a charity directly involved with addressing this terrible issue. I soon discovered that they have something in common with the BTA (British Tinnitus Association) of which I’m ambassador: funding. Or rather, under-funding.

The sad fact is that people fall into what I call ‘The Charity Trap’: If you’re walking down the street and you are faced with a cute puppy, or somebody going out of their mind with tinnitus, who would you give your pocketful of change to? If you were faced with a dewy-eyed, chubby cheeked little urchin with their hand out, or a miserable looking teenager, whose palm would you cross with silver? It’s obvious. 99 times out of 100, the cute one gets it, the cuddy one, the fluffy one, the one with the cutest face.

Children’s charities are well funded compared to ones like CALM and The BTA. Animal charities get fantastic contributions from individuals and companies alike. But CALM and The BTA are unsexy, unfluffy, and therefore unloved. They are the ugly little puppy at the back of the Battersea Dogs Home cage that gets ignored by every pair of eyes, except the clever old lady, who really thinks about which one is most in need of help. The BTA can barely fund one phoneline 24 hours a day to deal with tinnitus sufferers at the end of their tether. We don’t even know what tinnitus is, so cannot find a cure, because there is no money from government, business or individuals, to speak of, for research.

With all this in mind, Joe and I vowed to do something special to help raise money for the two under-funded causes we were now supporting. And so my mind again returned to the Cage Against The Machine venture. Could that be used to raise money for a great cause as well as annoying ‘X-Factor’ bosses?

By this time our ideas for CATM spin offs had gained momentum, and moved beyond Nathan’s Band Aid pisstake proposal.

What about a live performance, we thought? Performances of Cage’s ‘4’33″‘ always sell out. People want to be there to experience it for themselves. Remember what I said about the groups of people we are supporting, and how four minutes and 33 seconds could be a pretty grueling experience for some of these people? Well, less so, surely, if we could experience it together as a group? And at an event raising money for our two charities.

Or, we mused, what about a remix project? Play to your strengths, as they say! Even if we recorded a new version of ‘4’33″‘ where proceeds were going to our charities, that’s 79 pence per person. But what if people wanted to be more generous? Remixes, of course! What if we were to get famous remixers to remix, or cover, silence? An interesting thought no?

Then I got talking to Tinashe at the Lake Of Stars festival in Malawi about all this, and we developed that idea further still. Not remixes of silence, we thought, but reworks of ambience. Cage’s piece was about what you heard during the silence, not the silence itself. What if we got producers to record the atmosphere around them – background noise, like when you get a ‘pocket call’ left on your voicemail – and then remix that? Might that be worth another 79p? Just in case, we got Tinashe to record 4 minutes and 33 seconds of sound from the wonderful Lake Of Stars.

But we were getting ahead of ourselves. Cage Against The Machine wasn’t our idea, and we needed to hook up with the people who originally came up with this inspired project. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but we managed to track three of them down – Dave, Julie and John – and last week we finally got round to meeting up with them.

It was clear they weren’t so keen on the more celebrity-based ideas we’d come up with, and with hindsight, rightly so. Those proposals weren’t really in the spirit of the project and Cage, I’m sure, would have hated them. And anyway, Chris Martin hadn’t returned my call! But some sort of collaboration on a new recording of ‘4’33″‘ to be sold in aid of a selection of great charities, that they liked.

So, where are we at?

Well, the ideas are still flowing and we’re all busy talking to the sorts of people we could do with having on board. The CATM guys are choosing charities to support (actually, they’ve thrown that open to members of the CATM group, so if you’re a follower you can vote). We’ve been in touch with Air Studios about using their amazing live room for any recording. And I’m talking to Infectious Records about releasing what we create, while Dave, Julie and John follow up some other leads they’d already got together before our meeting.

So, things are moving along rapidly, though there is still lots to confirm. As we do so, I’ll update you here and on Twitter. But for now, know this: a) It’s HAPPENING! and b) It cannot succeed without your help. So get tweeting, get on Facebook, spread the word, get people onto the Cage page, press the ‘Like’ button, and please help us raise as much as we can for what I’m sure will be five great charities, including the two pitifully under-funded organisations both Joe and myself feel so passionate about. We can do so much good here and have a right fucking laugh at the same time.

For what it’s worth, I like Simon Cowell. Well, I don’t know him, but I respect him hugely. You might not like the acts he signs or records he releases, but he thinks differently and speaks honestly, and has made a very successful living out of doing so. But, despite all that, I cannot wait to see his face if his ‘X-Factor’ winner is beaten by, erm, nothing.

It would be a blow against mediocrity, a two fingers up at the popular music establishment, and all the mind numbing media that contribute to the dumbing down of our country: The Sun, Chris Moyles, ITV and so on. If ignorance is bliss then these are fountains of happiness. Let’s show them who really has the balance of power here, if we all link up, then, like the Rage campaign, we will be unstoppable.

Tracy Morter was my first call on this, way back at the start of the month. She loved it.

So, thanks Tracy for the inspiration, Dave, Julie and John for the brilliant idea, Nathan for the spark and Joe for keeping the fire burning. Let’s DO THIS!

www.catm.co.uk
facebook.com/cageagainstthemachine
twitter.com/johncagexmas

Eddy x

 

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:48 | By

Single Review: Klaxons – Twin Flames (Universal/Polydor)

Single Reviews

Klaxons

And in a flash of neon and bad taste, it was gone. A happy ending to the plastic jewellery sporting, east London plaguing, glowstick touting new rave scene. And, thankfully, Klaxons have also moved on. Their latest single ‘Twin Flames’ shows a far more melodic, airwave-friendly direction to their whiz-bang-pow past, perhaps more representational of the ‘morning after’ than the ‘night before’ of much of their previous oeuvre.

Marching in with skew-whiff, space-age guitars, muted drumbeats and synths, it’s undoubtedly catchy, and follows the psychedelic, shimmering leanings of the rest of their sophomore album. However, ‘Twin Flames’ is a decidedly cyclical offering with no real climax – despite the insistent percussive rhythms and looping chorus.

Hinting at being almost a love song, the lyrics are (hopefully) a wry exercise in self-parody: “Twin flames in our hearts / As we move towards our very start / Twin flames in our minds / When we move emotions multiply”.

The new Barry White they are not (phew); but this catchy slab of melodic and decidedly indie-pysch weirdness marks a more mature, if slightly less exciting direction for the band. EG

Buy from iTunes
Buy from Amazon

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:39 | By

US court orders LimeWire P2P service to shut down

Business News Digital Labels & Publishers Legal Top Stories

Is this the end of LimeWire as we know it? Yesterday, a US judge awarded the record industry the injunction they’ve been waiting ten years to get, ordering the owners of the Lime Group to shut down their P2P file-sharing network or, at least, to stop the distribution and support of their file-sharing software, and step up filtering activity so that the millions of users who already have LimeWire installed on their machines will find it harder to use it to share unlicensed content.

As previously reported, in May the US courts ruled once and for all that the LimeWire company and its founder Mark Gorton were liable for the copyright infringement their P2P technology enabled, despite them having delivered the usual defense about how they never actually hosted infringing content and that their technology had legitimate as well as illegitimate uses. As the major record and music publishing companies started to put together their damages claims against the Lime Group, the Recording Industry Association Of America also called on the courts to force the LimeWire P2P service offline, arguing that as the service had been basically declared illegal it shouldn’t be allowed to continue to operate.

When a judge did exactly that yesterday the Lime Group, which would once have probably died fighting to keep its P2P service online, basically agreed to abide by the court ruling, vowing to “use our best efforts to cease support and distribution of the file-sharing software, along with increased filtering”. Of course, because of the nature of P2P networks, LimeWire can’t just close the file-sharing community it created overnight, but for the last big conventional file-sharing service to be going offline is a symbolic win for the record industry.

LimeWire, of course, has been much less hostile to the record industry in recent years as it tries to persuade the majors to license their music to the subscription-based service it has been developing and which it still hopes to up-sell to its vast database of file-sharers. According to Billboard, which has seen a demo, that service is rather good and could be a useful new revenue stream for the record industry. Though whether the major record companies, who, according to some reports, will now push for multi-billion dollar damages from LimeWire, will ever play ball with the new legit LimeWire, remains to be seen.

Certainly the RIAA didn’t sound too consolatory yesterday when it told the press: “For the better part of the last decade, LimeWire and Gorton have violated the law. The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely”.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:38 | By

Terra Firma v Citigroup: I have no independent recollection

Business News EMI Sale Timeline Labels & Publishers Legal Top Stories

Officially Citigroup is resolute that its top man David ‘The Worm’ Wormsley did not, under any circumstances, make three phone calls to Terra Firma chief Guy Hands in the two days before his audacious bid to buy EMI in 2007 telling the equity man, incorrectly, that a rival bidder was about to make an offer, so he should bid quick and bid high.

Though on the witness stand yesterday The Worm admitted that his memory of that weekend was a bit hazy, but he certainly had no recollection of speaking to Hands about rival bidders or such like. He told the court: “I have spent a large part of the last ten months trying to remember that call, but I cannot. I have no independent recollection”.

It seems both he and Hands can’t remember much about those crucial two days, the latter admitting in court last week that other than the phone calls with The Worm and a plate of lovely chocolate biscuits, he couldn’t remember much either. Then again, if I was about to screw over and screw up one of the world’s greatest record companies, I’d probably block out those events. This is presumably how City types like Hands and Wormsley manage to sleep at night.

Yesterday was the first full day of questioning of Wormsley, the British banker who led Citigroup’s involvement in the disastrous 2007 EMI deal. As much previously reported, Terra Firma and Gary ‘The Guy’ Hands are suing the US bank claiming it misled the equity group into bidding too soon and too high for EMI.

They hold the bank responsible for the big buckets of cash that Team Terra Firma has since pissed up a wall in trying to make EMI work while servicing the music firm’s three billion pound debt to Citi, which provided the bulk of the funding for the acquisition and which has since refused to restructure that debt.

The main aim of Terra Firma’s lawyers yesterday seemed to be to embarrass The Worm in any way possible, mainly by pulling out a string of emails he had written at the time of the EMI deal. It wasn’t entirely clear if this was about convincing the jury of Citigroup’s guilt, or just an effort to embarrass the bank while the world is watching, possibly recognising that Hands’ performance in court last week wasn’t great and that many commentators reckon this trial will ultimately go in the bank’s favour.

That said, there was some logic to the Terra Firma legal team’s approach.

Basically, they showed how pissed off Wormsley had been when EMI, a long term client of Citigroup, brought in a rival City firm called Greenhill to help advise on the plans to sell the company. With Greenhill installed, in order to get an invite to the EMI big sale party that he believed should be his to host, The Worm needed to be the man who found the buyer.

Enter Terra Firma. Following this logic, the accusation is basically that The Worm sold his old friend Gary and his team of Terra Firma dudes down the river to ensure that he and his bank got a cut of the EMI sale action. Once again Terra Firma’s lawyers showed that, while assuring Hands he was operating 100% in his favour, The Worm was sidling up to the EMI top guard and telling them he could “deliver serious added value to any discussion”.

It is thought that today Terra Firma’s lawyers will try to show what The Worm himself had to gain in ensuring he engineered the EMI takeover, mainly by persuading the judge to let them reveal to the jury the banker’s 2007 pay packet, including bonuses. Yesterday the banker said that his bonus that year did not include a payment directly linked to the EMI deal, though he conceded that he could not be certain the transaction “did not form any of the basis for my compensation”.

Citigroup continues to assert that its man Wormsley did not mislead Guy Hands, that the phone calls crucial to Terra Firma’s case never took place, and that The Worm’s words did not cause the equity group to bid too soon and too high. Pursuing that line, Wormsley yesterday told the court that his role in the deal was primarily in putting together that infamous three billion pound loan rather than providing in-depth advice to Gary on how and when he should bid, though he did admit telling the equity man not to “play games” on price when making his offer for EMI.

The case continues.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:37 | By

BBC admits Mark Thomas three-strikes report inaccurate

Business News Legal Media Top Stories

Those crazy motherfuckers at the BBC have admitted that parts of a feature made by that Mark Thomas dude about the copyright section of the controversial Digital Economy Act that aired on ‘The Culture Show’ earlier this year were “inaccurate”. However, they deny the item was “biased and prejudicial”. Or, rather, it was biased and prejudicial, but they say that viewers should have realised this was the case and treated the feature in that context.

Thomas’ feature aired in February as the then Digital Economy Bill was working its way through parliament, and dealt mainly with the three-strikes elements of the new legislation.

According to trade body UK Music, which submitted the official complaint about the feature, the ten minute item gave less than two minutes to those who supported the new laws, and over eight to those who opposed them. After BBC management gave UK Music’s initial complaint short shrift, its boss man Feargal Sharkey took his moans to the BBC Trust.

In his feature, Thomas claimed that if the DEB became law – which it subsequently did, of course – that film and music companies could order people’s internet be cut off on the “bare minimum of evidence”. The process for net suspensions is actually still being worked out, though the Digital Economy Act does put some obligations in place on content owners to ensure they can’t cut off people on whim.

The Beeb’s Editorial Standards Committee admitted yesterday: “The section of the report on the likely effects of the new bill had given the audience an inaccurate description of how the process of disconnection would work. In attempting to paraphrase the legal complexities of the bill the report had not been sufficiently precise and had been inaccurate”.

The Committee also admitted that Thomas’ use of the word “criminalise” – ie that the Digital Economy Act would “criminalise” file-sharers – was inappropriate, though it stressed that the use of that word in this context had been discussed elsewhere in the programme.

With regards to bias, while it was clear Thomas had an agenda in the piece, the BBC argued that it was so blatantly obvious that viewers were unlikely to take the feature as a piece of independent BBC reporting, and therefore strict bias rules had not been broken. Though the organisatoin admitted that the programme’s producers could have better signposted that Thomas’ opinion piece was an opinion piece and was just his opinion etc etc.

The BBC’s standards people concluded that while Thomas’ piece might not have been 100% fair to the music industry, it didn’t really matter because only seventeen people watch ‘The Culture Show’. No, not really. But I bet they thought it.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:36 | By

Michael Jackson tops dead rich list

Artist News

Forbes has released its annual ranking of the earnings brought in by dead celebrities, which is always fun. And it’s no big surprise that sitting atop this list this year is Michael Jackson. The singer, whose legacy has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues since his death in June 2009, came in at number three last year, despite having been dead for less than four months at the time.

The American magazine puts Jacko’s earnings from licensing and sales at $275 million, noting that he brought in more than “Lady Gaga, Madonna and Jay-Z combined” over the last twelve months, thanks to the numerous deals done in the wake of his death by his estate. Elvis Presley, who last year dropped to number four on the list, is this year back up to number two, though he still only managed to pull in a meagre $60 million.

Jackson is likely to continue to pull in the cash, in the short term at least, thanks in part to a planned programme of record and DVD releases through Sony Music over the next seven years, due to begin with a new album next month. However, there is still disagreement over whether of not the king of pop can keep this up in the long term in the same way as Presley.

Music biz commentator Bob Lefsetz wrote earlier this year: “It’s not like Elvis. There’s not much music. There’s one and a half albums there, somewhere between ‘Off The Wall’ and ‘Bad,’ [but] I think it ultimately fades out”.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:35 | By

Lady Gaga passes a billion views on YouTube

Artist News Digital

So, she’s done it people. Lady Gaga has now had over a billion views on YouTube, the first artist to pass such a landmark. Though those stats do include views on the YouTube-powered US-based music video service Vevo, half owned by Gaga’s record company Universal, but don’t let that spoil the “Gaga passed a billion views on YouTube” party, will you? The Gaga thanked her “little monsters” on Twitter after she passed the one billion point earlier this week.

Justin Bieber is lagging embarrassingly behind in this race with only 965 million views on the video sharing website. Oh Justin, people clearly just don’t like you and your tedious warbling. Although behind Gaga overall, the Biebster is currently getting well over 3 million video views a day on YouTube so should pass the billion mark himself in about a month and could pass the Gaga in total numbers of views by the end of the year.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:33 | By

Esben And The Witch announce debut album

Releases

Esben And The Witch have announced details about their debut album, ‘Violet Cries’, which will come out through Matador on 31 Jan.

For a taste of what’s to come on the album, Matador have made a track from it, ‘Warpath’, available to download for free here.

You can also catch the band playing various dates in the UK next month.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:32 | By

Paris Suit Yourself debut album gets release date

Releases

Paris Suit Yourself’s previously reported debut album, ‘My Main Shitstain’, will be release through Big Dada on 31 Jan, it has been announced. Ahead of that, they will release a new single, ‘Lost My Girl’, on 22 Nov, the follow-up to their excellent debut, ‘Craig Machinsky’.

You can catch the band supporting The Fall in the UK next month. And, look, here’s the tracklist for the album:

Intro
Craig Machinsky
Rolling On
Sometimes
John’s Angels
Brainwashed
Surprise
Lost My Girl
Decadanse
Sophie Scholl
Yesterday Will Make You Cry
Father
Solliloque

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:15 | By

Beach Boys deny lip sync allegations

Gigs & Festivals

Those most Beach of Boys have hit out at reports that they lip synced at a recent concert in Australia staged alongside the Gold Coast 600 motor racing event.

As previously reported, Sky News claimed fans quickly drifted away from the gig because frontman and founding member Mike Love was miming to his songs, and rather badly that. They quoted one gig-goer as saying: “The Beach Boys were a fraud, they were miming everything. You could tell they weren’t even singing, he [Love] was barely even moving”. However, Sky News has subsequently removed the report from its website.

Tom Bonhomme, keyboard player and tour manager with the current incarnation of The Beach Boys has insisted nothing was mimed at the gig, or any gig for that matter. He told WENN: “We do not lip sync. I want to make it 100% clear that The Beach Boys do not and never have lip-synced their concerts. They have been touring since 1961 and generally have performed in more than a hundred cities a year since the beginning. I guess we should take it as a compliment that it sounded so good”.

Promoters of the gig say that there might have been a slight delay between on-stage action and what was projected on screens at the event, which is why it might have appeared to some of the 20,000 crowd that Mike Love’s lips were out of sync with the soundtrack. 

Love himself has also issued a statement denying the show had been badly received. He told reporters: “Throughout the duration of my stay in Australia I heard nothing but positive feedback on our show. We pride ourselves on providing a great live show to our millions of fans around the world and spent time that day soundchecking our vocals to ensure a great live mix. In our almost 50 years of performing The Beach Boys have never lip-synced and we are not about to start”.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:13 | By

Foo Fighters announce 2011 UK shows

Gigs & Festivals

Those Foo Fighters will be back in the UK for two shows next summer. The band will play two nights at the Milton Keynes Bowl in July. Support will variously come from Biffy Clyro, Jimmy Eat World, Death Cab For Cutie, Tame Impala and The Hot Rats, while Bob Mould will DJ at both shows.

Speaking to Zane Lowe on Radio 1, Dave Grohl said that fans could expect the band’s new album, which they are currently recording, to be released before they play, too: “It’s weird to put the biggest show we’ve pretty much ever played on sale when we’re halfway done. But I promise you the record will be done. We’re seven songs in with five or six more we’re gonna do. The last month and a half we’ve been recording in my garage, totally old school analogue”.

He added: “Each song is full on, the whole record is full on. In the fourteen songs there’s not one acoustic guitar, there’s not even one in the house”.

The album will also feature two people from Grohl’s past. Butch Vig, who produced Grohl’s former band Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ album, is producing, and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic also guests on one track. The sense of occasion, Grohl said, has inspired the band to make a documentary about the recording process.

Grohl said: “This whole project has been really cool. I haven’t made a record with Butch for 20 years. We’re making a movie about this whole experience too. We have a director. Basically 2011 you’re not gonna be able to get us out of your hair, that’s what we’re planning. I’m excited”.

Tickets for the shows go on sale on 5 Nov. Here are the support acts and dates:

2 Jul: Biffy Clyro, Death Cab For Cutie and Tame Impala, plus Bob Mould DJ set
3 Jul: Biffy Clyro, Jimmy Eat World and The Hot Rat, plus Bob Mould DJ set

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:11 | By

Iron & Wine to tour in March

Gigs & Festivals

Iron & Wine, aka Sam Beam, has announced that he and his live band will be over this way in March to perform some gigs in support of the previously reported new album, ‘Kiss Each Other Clean’, which will be released by 4AD in January.

Tickets for the gigs go on sale on Thursday, except those for the Manchester date which go on sale on Friday, just to be difficult.

Tour dates:

8 Mar: London, Roundhouse
9 Mar: Brighton, Corn Exchange
10 Mar: Birmingham, Town Hall
11 Mar: Edinburgh, Picturehouse
12 Mar: Liverpool, Philharmonic Hall
14 Mar: Dublin, Olympia
15 Mar: Manchester, Academy 2
16 Mar: Gateshead, Sage
17 Mar: Leeds, Metropolitan University

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:08 | By

MEN begin UK tour this week

Gigs & Festivals

Brooklyn trio MEN, fronted by Le Tigre’s JD Samson, will kick off a UK tour tomorrow in Edinburgh. The band are due to release a new single, ‘Off Our Backs’ on 1 Nov, ahead of their debut album, which is due out via Sony/Columbia in January.

Tour dates:

28 Oct: Edinburgh, Sneaky Pete’s
29 Oct: Glasgow, Captain’s Rest
30 Oct: Nottingham, Stealth
2 Nov: Cardiff, Buffalo Bar
3 Nov: Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
4 Nov: Brighton, Prince Albert
5 Nov: London, Electrowerks
6 Nov: Manchester, Kraak Gallery
11 Nov: Bristol, Thekla
13 Nov: London, The Garage

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:06 | By

YOUROPE announces new festival safety training initiative

Business News Education & Events Live Business

Pan-European festivals organisation YOUROPE has teamed up with Buckinghamshire New University to launch a new training course and professional certificate in Event Safety & Security Management. The new course is aimed at everyone working in the operational management of music festivals, and covers, amongst other things, legalities, risk evaluation, emergency planning, financial controls and other logistics stuff.

The course will be run at Bucks New University, but will also be made available to other organisations who want to train their own staff internally – ie other people can be trained to deliver the course too, with Bucks and YOUROPE making teaching materials available to festival companies who want to train up their own teams in this way. Forty YOUROPE members have already been trained to deliver the course.

The aim, YOUROPE say, is to provide a cost effective way to share this important information that can help ensure crowd safety at major music events across Europe.

For more info on this initiative contact: pbrown01@bucks.ac.uk

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:04 | By

Spotify bosses not in talks to sell to Apple, OK?

Digital

Spotify has denied rumours that it is in takeover talks with Apple after TechCrunch claimed the Swedish streaming music service had been involved in “on-again, off-again discussions” with the IT giant. The IT website added that last year Spotify nearly sold out to Google.

But when asked about the rumours by the Music Ally guys last night, Team Spot said this: “We have absolutely no intention of selling Spotify. We’re working hard to build the best music service we can and are in this for the long haul”. That probably means they’ll be sold to Apple by lunchtime. Only joking.

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Wednesday 27 October 2010, 11:03 | By

Last.fm turns off subscriber-only stations

Digital

Last.fm has announced that it is discontinuing some of the ‘radio station’ services it offers paid-up subscribers, namely those which play a user’s own ‘loved’ tracks and personally tagged playlists.

Announcing that these services would go offline from 17 Nov, the website said: “Licensing music is a complex and labour intensive process. By discontinuing a few stations, we’re able to focus our energy on improving our most popular features, developing new and innovative stations, and offering the best music discovery service to our global audience”.

It added: “We’ll be announcing new features and even better ways for you to enjoy listening to Last.fm very soon, including a brand new station that we know you’ll love”.

In April this year the website dropped the on-demand streaming part of its service, instead linking users to other streaming services that ‘scrobble’, such as Spotify and the Hype Machine.

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