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I was thinking the other day about artists – particularly in music – who were better off together than they were apart. For example, Lennon and McCartney. Both fine songwriters separately, but when put together they really came up with something amazing. In fact, the Beatles as a band seemed to pull together to form something more than the sum of its parts.

I once heard a story that summed it up. Paul McCartney is a relentless optimist, and I think John Lennon was very cynical. In the song “Getting Better” (from Sergeant Pepper), Paul McCartney was singing it through and got to the line “It’s getting better all the time”. John Lennon walked in, having never heard the song before, and sung “Can’t get no worse” in perfect time to it.

It got me wondering whether truly great art comes from a tension – such as the tension between Lennon and McCartney, between optimism and pessimism. As with many things in life, the truth often lies somewhere in between two extremes.

The other example I thought of was The Smiths: the songs were written by Morrissey and Jonny Marr. Neither of them, to my mind, have done anything quite as good since. Certainly I haven’t really liked Morrissey’s albums so much. Why is that? I think part of the reason is, Morrissey on his own would be too depressing – it was the genius of Jonny Marr’s guitar parts that made it listenable and generally great music.

I wondered if anyone had any other thoughts on great partnerships like that?

Yesterday evening I was listening to music on Spotify. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, basically it’s a program which lets you listen to any one of its huge archive of songs – for free. The thing is, you don’t download any of the songs to your computer: it’s all done by streaming.

The upside is that you can listen to pretty much any song or album you want, without having to pay. (You do have to listen to an advert every few songs, but if you can deal with that it’s fine). The downside is that you must be at a computer to listen to music – which is no good if you want to listen to music on the go.

But it did get me round to thinking though: are we moving to a model where (eventually) no-one owns their own music – i.e. people pay a subscription fee and then can listen to it whenever they like? There is something in me which rebels against that notion – I still buy CDs because I like having a physical product. Buying an MP3 seems a bit wrong somehow, because MP3s are so… ephemeral. It just doesn’t seem right to pay for something which could be gone in a second (i.e. a hard drive crash or something like that).

This problem wouldn’t exist with Spotify (or something similar) though – if your hard drive crashed, you could presumably just re-install and get back onto Spotify and it would be as if nothing had changed. Functionally, if Spotify were available wirelessly (on, say, a portable music player like my iPod) then would there be any difference at all between buying music and leasing it? As long as it’s available wherever you want to listen to it, what difference does it make?

The other thing is, there is waaaaaay too much music out there for me to actually own. I was listening to a couple of bands on Spotify last night who I like, and would quite like to get the albums… but if I bought every album I heard and liked from there, it would bankrupt me in short order! So actually having a Spotify style model is useful – they can provide far more music than I would ever be able to afford.

But this led me onto another related subject: is the concept of ownership in general going the same way? – for certain things at least. Apparently it’s quite popular these days to lease a car: the lease company is responsible for servicing the car, and you pay a monthly fee and drive it. I haven’t looked into pricing but that actually sounds like quite an attractive prospect – having a car is expensive, and it may actually work out cheaper to lease a car.

I don’t think the concept of ownership is going to go away any time soon – obviously a lease model is only going to work for a certain subset of things – but it did make me ponder how much we’re going to move in that direction. And whether we’re going to lose anything because of it. There is some satisfaction in having your own car … but at the same time, would I be prepared to sacrifice that for the convenience of having someone else look after it? I think I just might.

Recently on Absolute Radio they’ve been playing some really good new music. One of the songs they’ve been playing is called “Close to Midnight” by The Airborne Toxic Event. I liked it so much that I went out and bought the album, which arrived just over a week ago. I’ve had the chance to listen to it a couple of times now.

The album is basically in the Indie style, although some songs (such as the aforementioned Close to Midnight) contain soaring strings and are a bit more pop-friendly.

In general I was impressed by the album. Some of the songs are more memorable than others, and the lead singer can be a bit ’shouty’ at times, but they’ve written some really solid tunes. Close to Midnight is my favourite of the album, but the first two tunes (Wishing Well and Papillon) I really like as well. Although of course all is subject to change as I listen to the album more ;)

So, I’ve been thinking about this a bit recently. At Uni, a friend of mine (Phil P) used to contend that secular music was better than Christian music. To prove this, we listened to a few Christian songs which sounded vaguely like their secular counterparts. Guess which ones were better (in our opinion)?

I came across another example of this a few weeks ago. ‘Blessed Be Your Name’ by Matt Redman uses pretty much the same chord sequence all the way through the song. I discovered that ‘With or Without You’ also uses the same chord sequence all the way through the song – it’s in a different key, but the same chord sequence.

Out of those two songs, ‘With or Without You’ is a clear winner – at least in terms of the arrangement. Why can’t more Christian music be like that?

I admit that I’ve probably picked a bad example, because ‘Blessed Be Your Name’ is really a worship style song, designed to be sung by a congregation of worshippers. ‘With or Without You’ is designed to be performed by U2, and as such they don’t have to worry about the average Joe’s limited vocal range (or the average skill of a worship band guitarist, which – to be fair – is probably less than The Edge’s guitar playing skills).

The other thing is, I often find that Christian bands are… well, too Christian. U2 are actually a good example in some ways – I believe that three out of four of the band members are Christian, and a lot of their songs reflect that. Why define yourself as a ‘Christian’ band?

What we need is some good music by Christian people, some of which is about Christian things. But not in a “three point sermon” kind of way.

Do any such bands exist? If I was any good I would form a band like that, but unfortunately I am both a pretty rubbish musician and a rubbish song writer. So I wouldn’t exactly be a great advert for “Christian” music ;-)

“There’s more evil in the charts than an Al-Qaeda suggestion box”
– Bill Bailey, ‘Part Troll’

I can confirm that this is, in fact, completely true.

I’ve just listened through Now 70, and the second half of the second CD was actually painful for me to listen to. It’s just so vapid, so devoid of anything original or even any particular message, it’s like having your soul sucked out by a … soul sucking machine (it also sucks our your decent metaphors).

It was so bad I had to listen to ‘Blackbird’ by the Beatles just to clear my head. Now I’m listening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Oh yeah. Absolute Radio have got this slogan – “Discover real music”. I didn’t realise how bad the alternative was :-/

Still, on the plus side there are a few good songs on there – I like (well, that’s perhaps too strong a word, but ‘find quite tolerable’ perhaps is better) a lot of the rocky stuff they have (The Hoosiers, The Kooks, The Feeling) and they also have some songs which I have in my collection (Coldplay – Violet Hill and, bizarrely enough, Pendulum – Propane Nightmares). So the album wasn’t all bad news at least!

And the reason I’m listening to this? Well, I will explain that in a subsequent blog posting! :-)

Well, it’s that time of the year again! Those of you with long memories may remember I posted a rant up about Eurovision last year.

So I was thinking about what I didn’t like about Eurovision last year, and after searching around on the internet a bit I found an interesting article on the BBC website about Block Voting.

There are apparently two camps with regards to “block voting” — one camp is that it’s purely a cultural thing, i.e. neighbouring countries vote for each other because the culture is similar, and they would like similar music. The other camp is that the countries are voting for each other for purely political reasons.

I’m not sure which is correct at the moment, although I do suspect that it is at least partially political. But I did see one interesting comment on another article though:

“I would understand this barrage of criticism if “the four greats (UK, France, Germany and Spain)”, who are great only for political and financial reasons irrespective of what sub-standard musical effort they send to Eurovision, had tried a bit harder and sent a good song sung by talented singers.
“Eastern countries” try much harder as they do not view this competition as a kitschfest … It is the Western countries that should try to shake off this ridiculous cliche and start treating Eurovision with a bit of creativity and open-mindedness …
The Serbian ballad [last year's winner] is strong and does not depend on trollies and outdated gimmicks to conceal the performers lack of talent. Serbia has brought back music to this contest. [-- Zeljko, London, UK, on this article]

I can’t speak for other countries, but perhaps if the UK did start to take the competition a bit more… well, seriously, and didn’t submit the same old utter crap which we do year on year, we might have more of a chance of getting a little bit higher than second from last place?

I for one would welcome a competition where people actually cared about the music, and we didn’t just watch it to get a few cheap laughs at some ridiculous lyrics. (It can’t just be me – when I watch Eurovision sometimes I feel like I’m laughing at a kid with a disability!)

Aaaaanyway. I think we should get together and form a Eurovision 2009 entry… that’ll show ‘em!

Now excuse me while I don my pipe and slippers and reminisce about how much better everything was “in my day”.

Edit: I should probably mention that due to a wedding I won’t actually be watching this year. Lucky escape, huh?