Why is UK country so lame?

Blues music in this country has traditionally failed to live up to the standards of the original black blues singers, which is understandable because we don't have that heritage over here. However, country music has always been the preserve of red neck white guys living in isolated rural areas, so why can't we replicate that in the UK? In particular, why is the festival featured on Ceol Country on BBC Alba so unfailingly poor? I know it's only a small Scottish festival, but even the members of the bands looked like they wouldn't pay to see their performance, and the liveliest thing we saw over the entire series was the octagenarian line dance troupe who stamped away with a graceless vigour that suggested the music was secondary to the fact that there was something to do in their remote part of Scotland which they would not miss come hell or high water. Good on them I say - the views of the audience make that show.

Good gig, bad gig

Good gigs that might not have been : Guy Clarke when he didn't play the only song we knew of his but turned out to be generally awesome anyway; Tony Joe White at spyderfest when he was announced about 5 minutes before he actually found his way through the incredibly thick fog into the tent, but was still wearing sunglasses when he did appear. Gigs that should have been good: Tony Joe White and Mavis Staples and the Muscle Shoals Rythym Section, where they showboated and vamped their way through the whole performance and didn't really bring the funk; Dr John in Amsterdam when the fuckin saxophonist played way too much; when we went to see BB King and super ugly guitarist Gary Moore was his support and overran with his shitty widdly guitar solos so that BB King had to cut his set short to finish on time

People I used to think were tits, but have had to re-think my opinion to a certain extent

I like to think that I am quite open-minded and willing to change my views on things given a compelling argument to do so. I also know that whilst I can hold a grudge on someone else's behalf (there are people who have upset the Boy Wonder who I have never even met, and lucky for them because I would smack them in the teeth if I did), I am possibly even a little too forgiving of people who have pissed me off on the grounds that I often can't remember what it was that they did, or I can't be bothered to maintain a frosty silence and want all the confrontation over with. So there exists a surprisingly long list of people who I had thought were idiots, who have made inroads into their idiot rating in my book, and although some of them will never really get out of the mire, I give them credit for jobs well done. The richest vein to plumb for people fitting this category are those who appeared in 'Extras', the Ricky Gervais series, and the most notable of those was Chris Martin purely for the line about having to get home as Gwyneth was making him fish fingers for his tea. One of the main reasons I had placed him firmly in the 'twat' category (apart from the obviously wrist-slitting dullness of his 'music') was the ongoing childlike refusal to talk about his relationship with a woman who is more famous than everyone in his band put together, and the fact that he broke this cock-ended rule so that he could be in 'Extras' for 30 seconds made me think he must have some secret sense of humour which I had previously believed to have withered from lack of use over the time since he started looming around as a professional misery. Also benefiting from their appearance on 'Extras' were Ross Kemp, who's affability in the face of being portrayed as a total dick-bag made him all the more likable, and Shaun Williams who I had never really given much thought to but becomes increasingly endearing as 'Barry from Eastenders' in the show. Never Mind the Buzzcocks is also responsible for quite a few radical changes in my opinion of people - Mark Ronson always comes across as such a stroker when he's talking about music, but was surprisingly funny and self-deprecating on Buzzcocks, making him almost as annoying for not being as annoying as I thought he was as he was for being annoying in the first place. There is one person who has managed to plumb such low depths of my esteem that his redempion really only took him up to the level of utter twatishness - James Blunt. There is a very good reason that he will always be rhyming slang in our house, but his apperance on Sesame Street singing 'My Triangle' to the tune of one of his whiny little ditties about how hard life is officially rescinded the requirement to spit whenever his name is uttered, upgrading him to qualify for derision and scorn rather than disgust and horror.

Inflicting your music on the public

Further to my post about the annoying tendency of people to be oblivious to the impact their overly loud conversation has on those around them at gigs, I feel I should also condemn a practice which is borne of a similar lack of courtesy but with the opposite effect. I went to an event in London last week, and on the way there I was treated to the sound of some child, around 10 or 11 I’d guess, with his mother, who was definitely old enough to know better, playing some kind of MP3 player out loud on the train! I was gob smacked – I am aware that the yout’ love to whip out an MP3 player loaded with crappy R ‘n’ B, lame guitar bands and the latest ring-tones, but I have never seen one with parents in tow. Do they really think that everyone in the train carriage wanted to listen to their choice of music? Are they the only people who are unaware of fact that all those other people would have brought their own MP3 player had they wanted to listen to music on the train? Is it legal to kill someone for inflicting some warbling half-wit on me while I’m trying to read? I remember when the Sony Walkman was the height of sophistication, and there used to be signs on public transport asking people to ensure that they weren’t listening to their music at such an ear-splitting level that the leak from the headphones would disturb other passengers. It didn’t occur to me that one day, I would be held to mental ransom by a child deciding that what they want is more important that anyone else’s desire for a quiet ride. I am well aware that my main problem is really a public lack of consideration – they could have been playing music I love, and I would still have felt that it was an inappropriate place and time to share it. I also feel very hard done-by that I am considerate to the point of stupidity and if others aren’t going to play fair then the system doesn’t work. I recently spent a frustrating five minutes walking behind a man who was dithering his way to the station because there wasn’t quite enough room for me to pass him without (in my mind) implying that he was slow. I once ended up crying because I had gone round the corner to buy croissants for breakfast, and then I let someone go first at the bread display because I didn’t want to reach across him (even though I had been there before him), only to then watch him take every last croissant in the shop. In the latter case, it was more the rudeness of him that upset me – I am not that pathetic that I get croissant withdrawal – because I was trying to be nice, and he went a ruined it and made me feel like an idiot for doing so. And what’s the point? If I am nice to someone who not only doesn’t appreciate that I have been nice to them, but also breaks the chain of niceness, then it all stops working. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, I was brought up too well to stop saying thank-you to surly sales assistants, holding doors open for people and helping old ladies get their shopping off buses. But one day I really will snap, and if you are the twat with the box of shit music forcing it on me in a public space, then expect pain to rain down upon you, or at least a couple of warning stares, a discontented huff and then a polite request to turn it down.

Is it acceptable to have a genre of music in existence named after the only venue in which you can fit enough people to absorb the appalling blandness

This refers of course to the horror that is ‘stadium rock’. Pretty much every band I want to see comes under the heading of ‘the smaller the venue the better’ in my book. I don’t want to watch Tony Joe White on a screen on a stage from half a mile back, and even the Corn Exchange here seems a little cavernous for some bands, so why you would pay £50 a head to stand amongst 65,000 other people being distracted by the fact that the music and the images don’t synch up because it’s all happening SO far away? It’s not that I haven’t been to gigs in these venues – when I was 12 my Mum took the unprecedented decision (probably based on lies that I told) to allow me to go to see Metallica at the Milton Keynes Bowl, supported by Megadeth and Diamond Head. But my friend Annabel and I were right at the front, in an area presumably reserved for blindingly underage pre-teen girls who would otherwise have been crushed in the melee, so there was no need to watch the screens. The Boy Wonder and I did also see BB King at Wembley arena, and whilst we were really glad to be there as it was his last gig in this country, it was all seated and we weren’t that close (which was a blessing when Gary Moore was parading his unfathomably ugly mug around, playing for too long so that BB King had to cut his set short – a desperately poor show for a support act and something for which he will never be forgiven), and we were in no doubt that if we could see him in the US in a smaller venue, the atmosphere would be awesome more on its own merits rather than the pleasure we personally got from seeing him at all. Thinking about it though, I think I can understand the appeal of going to see a band like U2 in a stadium as it reduces the chances that the crushingly identical sound of every song won’t actually embed itself into your very pores like skunk stink. If I was forced to go and see U2, I would be grateful for every extra yard that I could be away from the stage, and I can’t think of a better use for a U2 fan than a human shield. I know that stadium rock originated with bands like Boston, Foreigner and Journey, who have now reached the point of almost cult status amongst people who accept that ‘More than a Feeling’ is a classic of its time but wouldn’t really buy a Boston album. But I am talking about the middle-of-the-road aural fluff that now bears the name as though there needs to be no other information about the music than that thousands of people are stupid enough to like it. Throughout the years genres of music have been named to give some idea of what you can expect – the blues was the blues before it even became synonymous with a musical style, country and western needs no explanation, and if you can’t form a rough idea of what to expect from a death metal band, then you probably shouldn’t listen to any. But ‘Stadium’ or ‘Arena’ rock seems such a low standard to reach for musically – the idea that a genre exists because the music buying public are too lazy to really listen to music and make up their own minds, a music buying public who can tell you their favourite song (a test I always find separates those who really have an interest in music from those who only own albums by top 40 artists), and those who buy the output of an artist they like indiscriminately and will like whatever they get. The very notion of classifying an act based on the kind of venue they play is ridiculous and surely shows that those who enjoy that kind of music are by nature crowd followers. (Please note, this does not apply to circuits – they are genres within genres, and should be considered separately). This is not to say that I think that the kind of music I like is the ‘right’ kind – for a start there is a very wide gap between some of the genres that I would choose as my favourites – just that if you like music, you should like it for more than the fact that everyone you know likes it, for more than the dreaded ‘you should see their stage-show’ lameness, it should be about making you feel something, not involving you in conspicuous displays of success on the part of that band. Whenever I have said that I don’t like U2, I am met with incredulity: ‘How can you not like U2 – everybody likes U2’ but nobody has ever come up with any real reason why they like them. When the Boy Wonder expounds his thoughts on The Grateful Dead, he can give you a million reasons why he likes them, with no minor reference to the fact that a lot of their output was toot as well, and then, if you’re still awake he will give you a million more, and then play you some of their songs, and if you don’t like the first one he plays, he will find another one which might be more your thing and so on until one of you falls asleep usually. But we, and most of our friends have reasons for liking every song, not necessarily logical reasons, but if someone can’t understand what you mean by ‘it’s so funky it hurts’ then the chances are you need to move on. In conclusion, I am mostly annoyed by the identikit blandness of the music available at the moment; I would like to be able to go to one good gig in my local area a month, rather than having to fork out to go to London every so often just to see someone half decent; I would like to have conversations with people about music that don’t end up with me saying ‘You can’t say Guy Clarke’s * crap just because you haven’t heard of him’; I would like to see an episode of Jools Holland where the acts are actually new and talented and interesting and not just a hideous preview of what we can expect from every ‘new’ band we’ll hear in the next 18 months. Is that too much to ask? Possibly… *Insert suitable alternative here