Tim’s music blog

Today’s Mail on Sunday in the UK has McFly’s new CD, Radio:Active, as a free insert. Free CDs and DVDs are like confetti in the weekend press these days; but this one is distinctive in that it is new material and comes from a band not yet in the twilight of its career – insofar as these things can be predicted.

The band has its own label, called Super Records, which gives them the freedom for this kind of experiment.

Not so long ago, the CD was itself the upsell – music companies would give away other stuff in order to promote the CD. Now that’s changed; free exchange of digital music has undermined the value of CDs, and McFly has figured out that promoting the band is more important.

But what is the new upsell? Performances, tat, ringtones, digital audio and video downloads. Trouble is, it’s not going to sum to as much as CD sales did in the old days.

Oh well, there’s always the deluxe CD and DVD package, with four extra tracks and a booklet, coming in September. Perhaps not so much has changed after all (except it has).

And the music? Lightweight pop, compressed to hell. No complaints about the lightweight pop; but the sound quality is much worse than on the first and second CDs, Room on the Third Floor and Wonderland.

Yesterday I attended the Bob Dylan – Drawn Blank exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery in London. This is a smart gallery near Bond Street; the exhibition is free but this is also a highly successful commercial enterprise.

I really enjoyed the exhibition and recommend it highly. It is open in London for a few more weeks; following which I gather there will be a world tour.

The origin of the pictures is unusual. Dylan drew some sketches while on tour (then again, he is always on tour) between 1989 and 1992. These were published by Random House under the title Drawn Blank. A museum curator called Ingrid Mössinger picked up on them in 2006 and got Dylan to agree to reworking them for an exhibition and for sale as originals and limited edition prints.

The original drawings were scanned, enlarged, and printed. Dylan then added colour by painting on them, mainly over a period of 8 months in 2007. Some, possibly most, of the drawings were painted several times; Dylan being Dylan, he used different colours each time.

This means that what you can buy is either an unique painted print, for sums of £25,000 and upwards, or a limited edition coloured print, for sums of around £2000 upwards. Note the “upwards”: the prices I saw were several times larger on many of the pictures. I also noticed that most of the paintings were already sold.

The exhibition is on several floors, with the paintings on the lower floors and the prints above. I spent a happy hour or two looking at them. I have no idea how they rate as art; I cannot separate them in my mind from the Bob Dylan I know as a singer and songwriter. The pictures have a certain naivety; but I found them rich in meaning as well.

He gets perspectives slightly wrong at times, but in a charming manner. For example, there is an image showing a timber porch and stairway beyond which you can see cars driving up a hill. They are like toy cars and one is at an especially odd angle, but it is quaint and humorous. Dylan seems interested in angles; he draws a car parallel to the banister of the stairway; we see pillars and telegraph poles leaning this way and that.

There are several images of train tracks which are highly evocative; there is also a rather sensual picture of two sisters which brings to mind Ballad in plain D “Of the two sisters, I loved the young…”

In a memorable quote on one of the walls Dylan recalls visiting an office and seeing a “blazing secretary”; who else would put together those two words? For me it evoked a woman with deep passions who keeps them constrained and hidden during her humdrum working day – though who knows if that was what Dylan meant?

If the prints had been a few hundred rather than a few thousand pounds I might have scraped together the money to buy one or two. As it was, I contented myself with the books. The hardback exhibition book is a well produced collection with nearly 300 pages in large format; at £39.95 it struck me as pretty good value. There is also a cheaper paperback which just has the prints. Being a fan, I bought one of each.

Is the rebel Dylan of the Sixties now totally owned by the establishment? I fear so; but it is a compliment as well.

In the late sixties we lived in a small village in Oxfordshire (then Berkshire). I have a few musical memories. One is a song covered by Tom Jones, The Green Green Grass of Home. We had a television, and there must have been some programme we watched that followed Top of the Pops. As a result, we always caught the last song, which was the number one, and in my memory it was always Tom Jones and The Green Green Grass of Home. I see that according to wikipedia it was number one for just seven weeks in 1966; but it was possibly an entire school holiday. I had no idea what a sad tale the song told, about a man awaiting execution. Still, that wasn’t my favourite tune at the time. That would have been the theme tune to Thunderbirds, a TV puppet show about rescuing people with fabulous machines.

We had a record player, a green one-box affair, mono of course, but with an auto-changer. My dad bought a record of Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge, and another with someone crooning Sullivan’s The Lost Chord. The tale of perfection found fleetingly but lost forever appealed to him; bear in mind that he was an artist too (a writer):

It linked all perplexéd meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

I remember musicals too. A great Saturday treat was to go to the cinema and see the latest: The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Doctor Doolittle, Mary Poppins, Thoroughly Modern Millie. We bought some of these soundtracks (like everyone else) and the songs will stay with me forever. I still enjoy My Fair Lady and its extreme political incorrectness.

My brother managed to come home one day with a job lot of secondhand singles. I think we bought one or two as well. There was treasure here, though I didn’t know it. The Carnival is Over by The Seekers makes my eyes prick whenever I hear it. Windmills of my mind sung by Noel Harrison, with its clever words by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand:

Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own
down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone
like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream
like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind

There was also Goodbye my love, by the Searchers, which we thought was hilarious (goodbyyy-yy-yy-yy-yyee my love); and a single by the Rolling Stones, As Tears go By which we quite liked, but had 19th Nervous Breakdown on the other side which we considered very silly (actually it was the A side and, I realised later, a great song).

The next event was going away to school and getting a portable radio. Yes, a tranny (transitor radio). That’s the next post.

I am going to write about my life as a music fan, for no other reason than that I want to. The story starts in late 1963. I was 4, nearly 5. We lived in a big old farmhouse in Cheshire in north-west England; there was not a record player in the house. There was, however, a radio or two; and I recall this song being played.

She loves you yeah yeah yeah she loves you yeah yeah yeah she loves you …

I don’t know why I remember it, except that it is catchy as hell, and my dad complained about the lyrics. Unfortunately I don’t recall exactly what he said about them, but I can imagine … simplistic, repetitive, brainless, something like that. He was a lover of words and a published poet; his opinion was worth listening to.

In dad’s defence, I am sure it was not at all obvious that this is a great song. Somehow it captures universal human emotions in a way that almost anyone can relate to. Being a bit annoying to a man of my dad’s generation (he was 52) was part of the appeal as well.

As for me, at the time I didn’t have any opinion about the song. I recognized it though, and it is my first musical memory. It’s good to have one that has withstood the passing years so well.

She Love You by The Beatles (1963)

Today’s Mail on Sunday has a giveaway CD with “David Bowie’s own choice of the 12 greatest tracks of his career.”

I couldn’t resist this even though I have pretty much everything already. It turned out to be worth it, if only for the two pages of new notes by the man himself within the paper. Completists will also want the CD for the reworked “Time will crawl”:

I’ve replaced the drum machine with true drums and added some crickety strings and remixed.

Any revelations here? Not really, though there are some touches of detail. Like how Life on Mars came together. He was sitting on the steps of a bandstand in a park in South London when the riff came to him “Sailors bap-bap-bap-bap-baaa-bap”, couldn’t get it out of his head and rushed to work it up into a song at Haddon Hall in Southend Road.

Of the song Bewlay Brothers, which sounds autobiographical, Bowie says:

…this wasn’t just a song about brotherhood, so I didn’t want to misrepresent it by using my true name. Having said that, I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within it.

Bowie says that the aforementioned Time will Crawl was inspired by the Chernobyl, when a nuclear power station exploded:

A complicated crucible of impressions collected in my head, prompted by this insanity, any one of which could have become a song. I stuck them all in Time Will Crawl.

This echoes what Dylan said about his (incomparably greater) song A Hard Rain’s a-gonna fall, which is also associated with nuclear threat. In the sleeve notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Nat Hentoff recalls Dylan saying that Hard Rain was written during the Cuban missile crisis, and adding:

Every line in it is actually the start of a while song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.

Bowie says he chose “songs that I don’t seem to tire of”. There’s nothing from his iconic album Ziggy Stardust (unless you count the live Hang on to yourself); draw your own conclusions. Here is what he chose:

1. Life on Mars
2. Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)
3. The Bewlay Brothers
4. Lady Grinning Soul
5. Win
6. Some Are
7. Teenage Wildlife
8. Repetition
9. Fantastic Voyage
10. Loving the Alien
11. Time will crawl (MM Remix)
12. Hang on to yourself (Live Santa Monica ‘72)

The full article is here.

As voted by the fine people at Steve Hoffman’s forum.

The Village Green Preservation Society
Something Else
Arthur
Face to Face
Muswell Hillbillies
Lola versus Powerman and the moneygoround
Kontroversy
Misfits

I asked the question because I’ve pretty much missed out on the Kinks, aside from their very well known singles (Waterloo Sunset, Apeman, Lola, You really got me etc). I’ve excluded greatest hits packages (of which there are a bewildering number).

Well worth exploring.

Tim Bray writes about discovering Mixed Up, a CD of remixed Cure 12″ singles.

I like it too, though not as much as the original vinyl. The Cure’s 12″ singles sound great and feature extended mixes that in many cases are not available elsewhere, even on Mixed Up. Love Cats, Close to me, Let’s go to bed, Charlotte Sometimes. Just fantastic.

Many millions, in my opinion. The reason is that I’ve been ripping CDs to FLAC for a slimserver installation. I came across quite a few CDs showing signs of corrosion, the notorious “CD rot”. Almost all are made by PDO. The problem seems to strike the outer rim of the label side first, which goes golden brown. The brown gradually spreads across the whole side, eventually being clearly visible on both sides of the CD. The affected CDs seem to cover quite a wide time span in date of manufacturer, roughly 1989 - 1994 according to my impressions. Wikipedia says 1988-1993 in a rather good article on the subject - however, it has no estimate of how many CDs were affected.
The good news is that so far all my bronzing CDs still play. Now that they are ripped to a lossless format, at least I have a backup. I presume at some point they will become unplayable.
In a way, I guess PDO has got away with it. Yes, they are faulty CDs, but even a 15 year life is not that bad. By the time they fail in their millions, probably most people will be playing music from files rather than CDs.

Here’s something odd. After my efforts researching the loudness wars, I’ve become more aware of which CDs are mastered for loudness at the expense of dynamic range, and sometimes sought out older masterings of favourite recordings. Yesterday I received a copy of Bowie’s Let’s Dance in its earliest CD release (made in Japan for Europe, often a sign of an early CD). It is far less compressed than the nineties issue I had before. Comparing the two I noticed an odd effect. When playing them, I used the volume control to find a comfortable level. That level was actually quieter, in an absolute sense, on the CD that was mastered louder.

I am not just saying that I turned down the louder mastering to match the volume output by the quieter mastering. Rather, I went beyond that and played it more quietly, because otherwise it did not sound good.

It’s ironic that, for me, the loudness wars have the opposite of their intended effect.

I took a look at the CD swapping site hitflip.co.uk, after seeing it recommended in The Independent newspaper.

Here’s the deal:

Disposing of CDs

You list all your unwanted CDs (DVDs, games, etc). Each one is assigned a value in “flips”, the currency of hitflip. Currently a flip is worth £2.30; CDs tend to be assigned from 2 flips up. If someone wants a CD, they request it, and you send it off to them. You get the value in flips credited to your account. You can’t cash in your flips; you have to use them to acquire other items.

Acquiring CDs

You browse the library for an item you want. When you find one, you request it. If it is immediately available, it is posted to you. You pay the value in flips, plus a cash fee to hitflip, currently £0.79 for a low value item, increasing for more valuable items.

My Hitflip review

I don’t much like it. Main problem: there’s not much immediately available that you are likely to want. The obvious risk is that you merrily post off all your best items, then find there is nothing you want that is actually available. You get stuck with a pile of useless flips.

The problem is that you are not really swapping. Instead, you are selling for virtual money. That’s more flexible than real swapping, but lacks the advantage of a real swap, where you do not approve the trade unless you get something you want in return.

There seem to be several flaws in the hitflip system:

• You can’t set your own price in flips, you have to accept what the system assigns.
• There’s no way I can see to describe your item, its condition, special features etc. Everything is just meant to be in good condition.
• You can run a wish list, but you can’t add items of your own description, only select from the hitflip library which is not remotely comprehensive.
• Privacy: it appears that you can get anyone’s address by offering an item on their wishlist. I realise that you need someone’s address in order to send them something (duh!). But I’d have thought there should be an approval step. X is offering the item, do you want to accept? If X is new, or has a bad community rating, you might want to decline.
• Bugs: The system originated in Germany, and I found German language messages popping up now and again.
• User interface: browsing the library is laborious and the UI overall is not great.

It’s not all bad. It all hinges on finding items you want. If you succeed, you get them in return for your unwanted items at the cost of the fee.

Overall though, I find it hard to recommend.