Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture » Music

Thriller of Fulham Broadway (oh and Mind the Gap)

tulip — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:48:05 +0000

After I had mentioned the Bhangra Stylee version of Thriller and the Thai jail version of Thriller, we now have the London Tube Version. The thing that made me laugh was the ‘Englishness’ of it all – everyone tried not to look, then gave a polite round of applause at the end…..ah bless!

Led Zep, The Who and Hendrix T-shirts…with a difference

tulip — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:08:11 +0000

A friend of mine makes t-shirts for a living….now I know what you are thinking, there are tons of t-shirts out there for the likes of Led Zeppellin, The Who, The Rolling Stones and Hendrix, but these are slightly off the beaten track from the usual and cater to the…how can I put it….the music snob in us

These are the designs –

and if that doesn’t appeal, there is always this one…although we could never be seen to condone such a viewpoint

Would the Ramones doing the soundtrack to Spiderman 3 have made it any good?

tulip — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:30:07 +0000

They only did it ‘cos of fame – EMI

tulip — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:02:48 +0000

As I mentioned in my earlier post, EMI are getting rid of an awful lot of staff and several of their artists are getting a bit upset, claiming that they don’t know if they will get properly promoted. Radiohead and Macca have already left the label and now the likes of Kylie Mingogue and Coldplay are making similar noises. Robbie Williams is the one that is making me laugh though – his manager, Tim Clarke, was recently quoted as saying

“The question is, ‘Should Robbie deliver the new album he is due to release to EMI? We have to say the answer is ‘No’. We have no idea how EMI will market and promote the album.”

Well they do have a point, over a million copies of his last opus, ‘Rudebox’ are going to be crushed to pave Chinese roads so maybe the new promotional tool will be to have his new release pave the runway at Dubai’s new Al Maktoum International Airport?

I don’t know who to dispair of the most here. On one hand we have Robbie and his cronies who, having signed one of the most lucrative record deals ever, are now riding their luck after the commercial disaster that was Rudebox. On the other, we have EMI, blaming their misfortunes on piracy, not the fact that they managed to sign themselves around 14000 artists, over 85% of whom do not make money!!

I have written before about the fallacy of EMI’s piracy arguement, but you have to feel sorry for them as the smaller artists on the EMI roster as they will almost all be on these restrictive contracts that mean they cannot do anything that EMI do not want them to do, but will not have budget to do anything. With new business models like TuneCore coming out and the financial success of Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’, most artists are not going to want a deal, they will be far better off doing their own thing and not getting left to rot on the roster of one of the industry’s big guns.

Radiohead, Rough Trade, Free Gig….

tulip — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:30:40 +0000

…and the largest collection of anoraks ever seen on Brick Lane Last reports are that there is a line of about 400 people for the 230 capacity gig, do you get the feeling that some people are being more than a little optimistic. Still they will be broadcasting it on Radiohead.tv, but only in Windows Media Format, so for all you Mac fans out there, gofind yourself a player on CNET or similar.

I do like the fact that they have kept it in the true spirit of a geurilla gig -

“The deal is the band want to be as fair to everyone as possible. If we had the usual guest list for media, probably half the places would be taken up.”

Spencer Hickman, manager of Rough Trade East

Half the places? I know EMI are firing a load of people, but in my experience of music industry liggers, they would be able to fill Wembley with industry tickets….actually, having said that, they would be able to give away enough tickets to fill Wembley, but the number of people that turned up would be lucky to fill a phone box unless they get told the tickets are ‘cool’ and hard to get in which case they would be able to give away enough tickets to fill Belgium……

Bob Mould on BBC Radio

tulip — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:18:31 +0000

One of my musical hero types, Bob Mould, of Husker Du (minus all the accents I can’t find on my keyboard!) Sugar and er Bob Mould fame, is going to be on the Steve Lamacq show on BBC 6 Music. The good bit is, being the Beeb, even if you miss it you can hit the play it again bit and listen to is later in the week, so no excuse whatsoever for missing Bob on my fave radio show…..a months detention for anyone that doesn’t.

Thriller in an Indian, Bhangra stylee….

tulip — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:53:22 +0000

….and a moustache

If you want them to do you next corporate presentation, their contact details appear half way through, so pen and paper at the ready boys and girls!!

Live and Let Die…easy to see which happened here!

tulip — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:16:59 +0000

It seems that poor old Fergie must be part of a socialogical experiment by her management to see if she can narrate their own career suicide…

Were you curled up whincing watching that – you knaaaw ya did, ya knaaaw ya did!

Australia – Radio Ga Ga

tulip — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:34:02 +0000

While I was off and about down-under, I spent an awfully long time in my car…well actually my brother’s, but he was not around to make use of it so I thought I would make sure it was kept warm….anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, radio in Australia, is it any good? Well if you like Avril Lavigne, Snow Patrol and the Foo Fighters, then it’s pretty good as these seem to be on continual rotation. To start with I wasn’t too bothered, I mean they could have picked worse people out there and besides you can always turn over. However after a while I tried to turn over, but I couldn’t.

Each time I turned over to another station I found Snow Patrol, Avril Lavigne or Snow Patrol playing, interspersed with those radio ‘personalities’ so beloved of local radio station in the UK. They have even turfed up a Police/Snow Patrol mash-up so they can get Snow Patrol on twice an hour. Occasionally, when they had decided that Snow Patrol had earned enough for their new houses, they would put on one of those derivative Talk Radio shows, where people with no brains rang in to say nothing very much while the host made suitably outraged/sympathetic/idiotic noises depending on what the topic was. How I missed BBC’s 6Music. Fortunately for me, my brother’s car has a very nice engine noise……

Radiohead’s new album – who needs a label anyway

tulip — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:25:24 +0000

Radiohead have announced their new album will be released on October 10th from their website. They will be releasing an all-singing, all-dancing, all-moodily-staring-at-the-floor boxed set thing with some vinyl, cds, photos etc for £40 (about $80) but the most interesting bit is that they are letting people download the album for as much as they think it’s worth. Since Radiohead do not have a record deal, they can do what they like and they have realised that the old model for music has pretty much been killed off by the internet. The record labels, who are supposed to be the experts in this stuff, still haven’t realised this and still keep plugging away with the old ways of doing things and getting upset about this, or Prince giving away his new album with a newspaper. What they fail to see is that this lead to a level of exposure Prince hasn’t seen in years and allowed him to sell squillions of tickets for his recent residency in London. My prediction is that Radiohead will find many more people downloading this than previous efforts and will mean there are people getting exposed to their music that wouldn’t bother otherwise, hence there will be more people going to their gigs, buying their t-shirts etc, which is where most artists make their cash these days anyway. I mean can anyone actually remember a Rolling Stones album released since about 1982?

The recrod industry needs to do two things – firstly let aggregators have full access to all their back catalogue, secondly charge as much or as little as they want for a download. Very soon you will see a huge selection of music out there, people can get exactly what they want. Secondly you will see the recommendation engines and search tools develop hugely and people will start buying tons of music. Admittedly for a lot less than the utter rip off on iTunes, but the quantity will be vast. Quite simply the industry needs to move from a boutique store business model to a supermarket style model. You only need to look at Tesco or Wal-Mart see that this is a much better model. The other advantage is that you soon do not care who makes money from the back-catalogues as you will make your percentage regardless. Currently the labels are at the whim of the big suppliers for pricing and they have to provide the inventory, so there is risk there on over-ordering etc. Often they have to pay for shelf-space to get their new artists out on shelves, spend huge amounts on marketing….surely it’s got to be easier to let Amazon or Rhapsody do that for you?