A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Khalid Mallassi takes a stand against our favourite keepers off the peace, bouncers…

Bouncers. The name suggests hilarity; big rotund men in brightly coloured dungarees literally bouncing around, high on good intentions and glee. The reality is perhaps the exact polar opposite. They seem to fit the same cookie-cutter profile. Dressed in black? Check. Cropped hair? Check. The air of barely-controlled violence? Check. And here lies the problem.

In music events bouncers are an inescapable evil, they are meant to be the sober, objective buffer between the public or the punters and the venue or establishment. But, how many times do they end up ruining the vibe of an event with their heavy-handed tactics, using a sledgehammer to squash ants when a delicate touch is what is called for.

Nowhere is this more evident than now as we come to the end of another festival season. Festivals live and die by their vibe, they present a lifestyle choice, from the choice of music to the choice of location; everything is carefully chosen to create a certain ‘vibe’ and attract a certain kind of festival goer. So shouldn’t the conduct of bouncers be equal to the festival?

How many times has over-eager security staff destroyed the atmosphere of a festivals? From ‘jobsworth’ policing of an event: “Sorry, you have to go all the way up the hill and down again before you can go round this barrier right in front of you, mate?” To downright ludicrous over-policing: “Throw all your alcohol in the bin over there. You’re not allowed to bring any booze in.” Basically, their attitude is in sharp relief to the laid-back attitude of the festival and festival goers. If I’m trying to bumrush some recreational substances, fine I expect a game of wits with security, I know the score. But, no beer! Fuck that!

Now, as I said before, bouncers are a necessary evil, they are needed to make sure there is no trouble and to guarantee the safety of everyone in attendance. But, do they need to be such ‘assholes’ about how they go about it? Some festivals get it right. Big Chill is known for the fact that it employs volunteers to assist with security. These volunteers are drawn from the same people that attend the festival and often they work in return for free entry to the festival. The attitude of the volunteers rubs off on the hired security who are a pleasure to deal with and almost seem as ‘wasted’ as the people the are charged with protecting. Thus, it’s a case of treating others as you would like to be treated and it shows in the way that the festival has a glowing reputation for safety and fun.

Not all bouncers are bad, of course. We’ve all met the nice bouncer who was a breathe of fresh air , but, lets be honest, do they stand out only because all the other bouncers are so bad? If all bouncers were trained to be social animals rather than social throwbacks they wouldn’t even be an issue at all. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In the words of John Lennon: Imagine there’s no wanker bouncers… it’s easy if you try.

A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This issue Thomas H Green froths at the mouth about good old-fashioned cultural conservatism

There was a feature in UK broadsheet The Guardian lately entitled ‘Meet The Future Of Pop Music’. The idea it put forward was that there is no longer futurism in pop but that everyone harks back to older styles, pointing towards Mika’s Freddie Mercury fetish and (the most excellent) Amy Winehouse’s borrowing of Motown tics. The article bizarrely holds up Simple Kid as one of the only artists who dares to stare innovation in the eye and queries whether it is still possible to create original music today after all that heritage since 1955.

Well, fuck ‘em, I say, of course it is. You know who’s to blame for any retro streaks? It’s nothing to do with Mika and Amy and all to do with the endless shite bands that sound like guitar music has sounded for about 40 years, the ones that get touted by every broadsheet and the NME week after teeth-grindingly predictable week. You know them – a bunch of dressed-down lads with nothing original to say. The people responsible for keeping the true futurists down, of course, are the very media themselves, the ones asking where they are. Most successful journos are just career professionals. As in any branch of work, those who toe the line and kiss arse succeed. Like every tier-system profession, journalism is innately conservative, ruled by those above who have worked their way gradually to the top with their tired old perspectives. What these top dogs are looking for is a comfortable relationship between PR, publication, advertisers, editor and journo. They may want to discover the latest thing but only as long as it’s easily digestible and fits the marketplace. From the none-more-angry thrashcore of Watchmaker, the most interesting interviewee I’ve encounted in a year or two, to the supremely delicious rustic chillage of Nathan Fake, it simply doesn’t come wearing a tie that says ‘sexy’ to those that run the show. The truly good original music might get a paragraph or two upon release but there s a denaturing conspiracy that eventually falls back on traditional formats that mentally middle-aged editors love – the likes of Razorlight, the Kooks, even better gear like Arcade Fire or Rufus Wainwright who have nothing in common with the last mentioned bands.

We live in the most exciting times for music in years but you’d not know it from the high turnover media. Writers, including me, have blamed the record labels for the firework bands that burn bright and burn out, but it’s not only the record company’s fault, I’ve realised, it’s the media. They’ve always loved it when a new band arrives before quickly moving onto the next thing but now, as the broadsheets stick their snouts in the rock’n’roll trough, it’s a day by day rather than year by year process. Take the example of Gotan Project. Their second album was OK rather than fab, but their two compilations ‘Inspiracion Espiracion’ and ‘Ya Basta’ are impeccable and they remain a band doing something rather different. But as far as the media is concerned there’s nothing going on – “Are they still doing that tango thing? God, they were doing that five years ago – where’s the story?” One wishes they’d look at the opera and say, “Are they still doing that Wagner thing? How two centuries ago.”

The truth is that the media will always love a traditional band over something that’s harder to recognise and pin down. I know what it’s like trying to interview some studio-bound electronica weirdo who doesn’t have anything to say for themselves but is creating some of the most exiting music around. Does it have a readily marketable label? Does it have an easy definition we can squeeze in to a headline? No? Then forget it. No! Fuck them in their guitar-centric ivory towers. Even now they’re sitting there pretending the 1990s was about Oasis, Pulp, Blur, et-fucking-cetera because they and their innately conservative predecessors a decade back hyped up some retro ‘60s tiredness while the rest of Britain raved on to faceless DJs and groups such as Orbital, Underworld and The Prodigy, music that was sci-fi innovative by comparison and also contained the vital spirit of punk. Ah, who cares. The internet is gradually rendering them all irrelevant anyway. In any case, there’s always been something cool about preferring more offbeat music to their cyclically peddled generic crap. I like to think so at least, in my own Ivory Tower full of twisted drugs and weird bleeping.

A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Guy Oddy looks at the phenomenon of the band reunion, when getting back together isn’t the hardest thing…

What do the Stooges, the New York Dolls and the Doors have in common? They were all significant bands whose careers were dead and buried thirty years ago? They all had something worthwhile to say about the human condition? They all lost members to the grim reaper, largely sacrificed on the altar of substance misuse? They all wrote pretty good tunes that proved to be an influence on generations of musicians and punters alike?

Well, yes and no. The answer, in these circumstances, is that after a natural lifespan of seven years or so, a fair few stellar gigs and a handful of truly great records, they decided to call it a day. Various members pursued solo careers with limited success. Then, they got old. At this point, they realised, like so many of us, that their pension provision was somewhat inadequate.

“What to do? What to do? I know, no one gives a shit about our solo stuff and record sales are drying up from our illustrious past. Let’s reform our revered band and MAKE SOME MONEY.”

At this point, I imagine that someone pointed out that there were some empty chairs at the table.

The camera switches to Detroit, sometime in the early 21st Century. Iggy Pop, Ron and Scott Ashton are having a beer together. “So, the pension plan is cool on paper, but what are we going to do about Dave Alexander (the Stooges’ original bass player), he’s been dead for years? I guess we could get James Williamson in and play the Raw Power stuff too, but he’s a wanker and we all hate him. Mmmm. I know, let’s call up some uberfan from a similarly well-loved band from the past, who could also do with a few bob to keep the bailiffs from the door. Mr Mike Watt, come on down!”

And if that was happening with the once-mighty Stooges, what on earth was going through the minds of bands like the New York Dolls, where session men now out-number original members? It must be like watching little kids playing dressing up or touring ‘Stars In Their Eyes’. Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be Johnny Thunders, indeed.

After a few turns around the festival circuit and maybe a triumphant tour taking in the major cities of Europe and the USA, it’s then time to decide whether they are going to remain a very cool cabaret act, or write some new tunes. Some, like the Pixies are happy to remain a cabaret act, pumping out the well-loved tunes from their significant albums, spiced up with the odd cover version. Others feel their muses waking up and record new albums. Or in the Stooges case, spice up a mediocre Iggy Pop solo album (Skull Ring) with a handful of new songs, written and recorded by the band. Some of these were rather good but the forthcoming new Stooges album, ‘The Weirdness’, is something to be dreaded.

Unfortunately, with the possible exception of Jane’s Addiction, the new, (frequently) drug-free version is nothing more than a gang of old men (and sometimes women) trading on past glories.

So what, though? Really, so what? Everyone is due a reasonably comfortable old age, if it’s within their reach, surely? Of course they are. Being elderly in modern western society is no fun. Everyone knows that. So, if you can get some cash together to make things a little bit easier, that’s cool, isn’t it?

It’s fine and it isn’t something that I’d begrudge anyone. However, to sell these reunion tours and subsequent albums as great cultural events is insulting and offensive. Much as I love all of the bands mentioned in this piece, I have now had to accept that their legacies are now tarnished with substandard, cash-in records and shows which suggest that Disco Dad has stopped bothering women young enough to be their kids, in nightclubs across the world, and has got on stage. Yes, the bands that I spent much of my adolescence bouncing around to have become part of some surreal karaoke world, and ultimately, part of the heritage industry. How long before a National Trust-sponsored Kinks reunion? Or perhaps, Nirvana get back together with Mark Arm taking over Kurt Cobain’s role? Wait a minute, isn’t he already playing for the recently reformed MC5?

A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Thomas H Green rips into ageing music journalists like himself.

Let me start by saying I’m 39 years old. Such a statement is blasphemy in music journo circles. Music journos are afraid of their age. You can make jokes about anything in their company but start jesting that they don’t understand a song because they’re too old and they look very uncomfortable. The reason for this is that commenting on music, once undoubtedly their hobby, has become their income, a situation best summed up by a quote from Martin Schmidt of Matmos: “If you make a living from your art, that starts to poison it. You can’t help thinking, ‘How can I change this art to make a better living?’ The obvious answer is that you make it more palatable to more people.” This perceptive analysis affects both music writers and those they write about. However, whereas we constantly view musicians and watch them age, so that the process of pretending to be younger, should they choose to do so, is visually mediated, music journos are able to hide their age. We read them as they desperately rationalise their situation as still hip, touting statements of the “Gardening is the new rock’n’roll” variety. At the more subtle end of the scale there are multiple journos whose kids are screaming in the next room and really can’t be bothered to listen to an album by a wildly innovative Japanese noise band, when there’s the latest Damien Rice to declare amenable.

At the moment, a lot of the music press are in their 30s. We’re in a peculiar situation because the NME opinion dominates UK music culture and, although NME journos tend to be younger, in their early twenties, they side with the aged oldies in a conservative guitar-centric hegemony.

There is another aspect to all this that’s seldom acknowledged, most especially by the terrified 43 year old broadsheet staff pop writer. This is that the brain changes as humans age. Where once new information was embraced as useful, exciting and invigorating, over time mental routines develop – it’s how we organize ourselves. Even without our culpability, our brain has a tendency to find new information more threatening as we grow older. We’ve developed a balance and such things threaten to upset it. A music journo’s job is to fight this tendency with all his or her passion, but the amount of them that do so is minimal.

Music that comes along and sounds completely alien, say Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’, is to be embraced. We may not even understand it at first, let alone especially like it, but it’s unhinged, different, exciting and, with repeated listening, we find out whether it’s any good or not. I found the same with The Klaxons. The kids at their gigs understood The Klaxons frenetic avant-punk racket immediately but once you’ve been into music as long as most journos, you’ve heard most things and are likely to miss that which sounds fresh to younger ears. Even the Pistols, to a sussed 40 year old in 1977 might have generated thoughts such as, “Primitive glam guitar meets-Stooges attitude.” Techno, similarly, could just have been regarded as an extension of Kraftwerk and Cabaret Voltaire.

The Klaxons burst onto my ears and caused my brain to muse, “Buzzgun-indie-meets-Psychik TV-with-Eno-trimmings,” but I realised I was just being old. Essentially, they’re a blast but it remains to be seen how much staying power they have. It’s fun to enjoy it rather than stand outside with ones critical guard on full shields. It’s invigorating to take a few big gulps of whatever’s going down, letting ones more brutal and experienced critical faculties remain relaxed. In fact, it’s the only way to enjoy vibrant new music that will undoubtedly be derivative of music one already likes.

I hope next year’s boom in bandtronic ‘nu-rave’ sci-fi music, from Kitsune to Relish to Klaxons to Enter Shikari, blows sky high. It’s easy to say that it mostly just sounds like indie-meets-punk-funk-with-electronic-trimmings but who wants to hear that? Isn’t it time for another kicking out of the jams? Get your gob round some laughing gas, start a band that sounds like a 1991 hardcore anthem being murdered by a bunch of fourteen year olds who can’t play guitar, and laugh at the old folks in the music press who don’t understand it.

Lily Allen’s saying she’s “through the worst” at 21. She’s talking about hedonism, drugs, late nights and misbehaviour. What is she on about? She’s 21, for heaven’s sake. She should be just getting started. She’s not the only one – there’s a list of them longer than the arms of that guy in the Fantastic Four. From Kerry Katona to Keane’s Tom Chaplin, celeb culture has reached a stage where young stars have to receive media absolution for their sins before they’ve even learnt how to sin heavily in the first place. Part of the modern celeb myth is falling foul of ‘evil’ drug’n’party culture – which they supposedly only use ‘addictively’ or to ‘mask the pain’ of being famous in the first place – , and then see the error of their ways. The rest of their lives is spent talking endlessly in bland magazines about nothing because there’s nothing left for them to talk about. They’ve dropped off the interesting meter before they’ve even lived.

It all makes me recall Menswear, a long forgotten Britpop-era London media fad band. Their first interview with Select pop mag contained rampant egotism and obvious drug madness and made for an amusing read. Their second interview a few months later for the same magazine and they were on the verge of breaking up, most of them were on the wagon, and they all advised against taking the path they’d taken. IN THE SPACE OF A FEW MONTHS! Fucking fluff-merchants. Whatever happened to rock star spirit? Most ‘60s rockers put their back to the wheel for at least a decade, usually two, before giving up, and even then it was done with quiet dignity rather than fanfare. Iggy Pop gradually wound down his ‘partying’ but you’d never know it, and still occasionally dips a finger in the pond when he fancies, as do Keith Richards and the rest. Who said absolutism, complete sobriety, was the best path? Someone like Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue stopped because he was headed towards the grave, but he’d already accumulated about eight lifetimes worth of crazy adventure stories by the time he did. All biographies of classic rock stars have a great narrative arc that usually ends when they clean up. Even if that was years ago, the book almost always captures the mot recent years in just a couple of chapters. This isn’t because that’s what people want to read (although it is) but because once life had grown ordinary, comfortable, there’s no story left to tell. Check out the fantastic ‘My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize’, the story of Creation Records by David Cavanagh – not only is it one of the best books ever written about popular music, but it has the classic narrative arc. For the first two thirds of it Creation boss Alan McGee lives a party lifestyle to match 1970s Aerosmith, then he cleans up and the book becomes a catalogue (albeit quite an interesting one) of his financial deals with major labels in the wake of Oasis’ success.

People are built differently, some are born to be raving addicts and some just roll with the opportunities life throws their way. Most people have a bit of both aspects to their character. No-one, for instance, could claim that the story of Daniella Westbrook was a rock’n’roll lark. Instead it was a real life ‘Christiane F’, a horrifying descent into a chemical abyss of wrongness from which she had to escape. But she’s an extreme case. She isn’t every-celeb. There are decades of stars who have dabbled if an when they fancied, and stopped when it felt right. What I object to is the accepted norm within mainstream media circles that caning is ‘bad’ and people need to excuse it later on. Bollocks. The human desire to get high, to party and socialize, is an imperative that’s up there with food and sex. Whacked out strangeness should be celebrated and often makes for great art. There’s a difference between the caners with vision and the boring little shits whose only ten minutes in the spotlight are the result of the coked up spotlight-hogging they did for a year. Then, unfortunately they invariably stay in the Heat’s pages due to their physical looks and profile but are, in fact , utterly tedious. Some of these figures were only ever interesting in the first place because of their bawdy, drink’n’drug-induced bad behaviour. Take busty Brit glamour model Jordan, by way of example. When she was falling out of taxis, showcasing her sex toy collection and frightening bourgeois sensibilities on chat-shows, she was great, a gaudy threatening force of lewd manic womanhood. Now that she’s pastel-clad soft-spoken Katie Price on the cover of Hello with yawnsome Peter Andre, however, she’s duller than a two hour lecture on economics.

No, let’s have a bit of class. Imagine if Dean Martin had given up drinking in 1948 and appeared on TV programmes talking about it. I know I’m being trite and that there are bigger issues, people’s personal problems and issues at stake but, please, can’t we have a little more blasting hedonism celebrated for its own sake and a little less mealy-mouthed post-‘addiction’ sanctity. Gawd bless Kate Moss and let’s chant along to Amy Winehouse instead: “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, ‘No, no, no.’.”

In fact, why not let that sharp-mouthed king of lumpen prole guitar, Noel Gallagher, have the last word: “I had a good laugh in the 1990s taking coke in Supernova Heights, but when it all got a bit much, and I got bored of it, I didn’t go into any poncey rehab unit; I just stopped doing it. I mean, that’s just fucking common sense, isn’t it?”

Rehab is for quitters.

The British media is full of shit. Hell, its our raison d’etre. But, every now and again, an outstanding piece of shit happens along that stinks so bad, it redefines the entire arena of shitness.

Some of you may have seen The Observer Magazine, dated July 2nd 2006. If so, you may well have been bemused, amazed and downright disgusted by their cover ‘story’. Subtitled ‘An extraordinary and moving story of one woman’s longing to start a family’, it featured an anonymous Sloane bemoaning her failure to ‘have it all’. She had money, top career, tastefully expensive home, health, her own teeth, floppy blonde hair, and the means to spend years in endless therapy and what the navel-gazing bourgeois like to call ‘self-actualisation’. Yes, this woman had been to paradise, but she’d never been to her. Because life had not given her a likkle baybee of her own. She wanted a bloke to agree upfront to impregnate her and be her partner, because she wants to, because she wants to. And our biggest-selling left-liberal Sunday broadsheet gave her a magazine cover and a six-page feature – including a styled lingerie shot that may as well have included a neon sign pointing to her bits – to advertise herself to prospective (wealthy, professional) baby fathers, right down to her email address at the end of the piece.

I’m still stunned by the existence of this low-point in broadsheet ‘journalism’. At first, the horror was obvious. 1) Surely there must be some actual news to print. 2) The woman was so shallow and self-obsessed it could have been a Chris Morris parody. 3) Getting pregnant is easy. The working-class do it all the time. Occasionally, they even keep their partners. All she had to do is go round to the local council estate and explain her awful problem to one of those happy-go-lucky teen ladies desperately trying to bring up children and survive a country that spends half the time ignoring their existence and the other half making anti-chav documentaries about them, and I’m sure they would have told her exactly where to go.

But after a bit of sinking-in, it was the subtext that began to appal. The piece was, of course, written by a woman. The majority of editorial staff on the mag are female. Yet this piece was one of the most foul pieces of misogyny I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. Not only did it smack its female readers repeatedly round the head with the Victorian notion that unless a woman has had a child she is essentially worthless; not only did it make the woman herself seem utterly pathetic and powerless, because she couldn‘t get a man; not only did it ooze a contempt for single mothers and any woman who couldn’t afford a dream home in West London. Because all that was before you get to her class, colour and body-shape, and realise that, of all the thousands of women who are in a similar situation, they’ve chosen a woman who is thin, white and middle-class, overtly suggesting that this is the kind of woman who deserves to have it all. In short, any woman reading this would be made to feel inadequate. If you’re one of the few women who could relate to her, the piece was telling you that time was running out, that failure was imminent, that your only worth lay in catching a man to breed with. If you were one of the vast majority who couldn’t relate to her, then the piece was telling you that your looks, income, sexuality, and decisions to have your children already (and risk an interrupted career and those saggy breasts and stretch-marks!) or not have children at all (you can’t be a real woman at all!) were second-rate, unfeminine, or – God help you! – uncool.

Times have changed. We used to know where we stood in the gender war. Men, guarding their social and economic superiority, wrote thundering pieces about hairy-arsed lesbians or ugly women or ball-busters or hysterical female weaklings. But women ignored them, discovered feminism, fought for freedoms women now take for granted. Now, in the never-ending post-feminist backlash, its women who do their masters’ dirty work; obsessing about women’s body shapes; criticising each other for having kids too early or not at all; taking an almost sadistic pleasure in the imagined eating disorders of famous women; queuing up to justify cosmetic surgery, the ultimate symbol of stupefied woman surrendering to the male woman-hater’s desire to literally cut her to pieces.

The reasons? Class conformity and fear of career failure overwhelm loyalty to the sisterhood. Women may have become editors (middle-managers) and star columnists (freelancers with no workers’ rights) but the means of media production is owned and controlled by men. If women want to keep their jobs and their status, then refusing to throw an endless stream of anti-female propaganda about parenting, fat, fashion and conventional sexual attractiveness and availability ain’t no way to curry favour with Daddy.

The results? Women’s docile acceptance of hardcore porn in the corner shop. The ladette, which is what happens when women take on the male hard-sell that feminist women don’t have a sense of humour, and decide that joining ‘em’s easier than beating ‘em. A stream of terrifying surveys which show that young women would rather sell their bodies in the modern job market than study for a career where they know they’ll never be allowed to earn as much or shine as hard as a man, and the latest, conducted by pensions firm Scottish Widows, which found that 39% of women aspire – that’s aspire – to being financially dependent on a male partner. Young British women have eaten the media’s misogynist spinnage, and believe that prostitution, in various forms, is an easier way to make it through life than… ahem… self-actualisation.

So – what’s this got to do with music? People… it has everything to do with everything. Non-conformist female musicians still struggle for media exposure, just as they did way back before punk supposedly changed everything. Women journalists who sell-out on a daily basis do not want to be reminded of their lack of fight by women like Kathryn Williams, Patti Smith, Sleater-Kinney, Le Tigre, Peaches et al. So of course they chase around after various pneumatic barbettes, floaty folky totty, and stick thin corporate wannabes. The success of the soul-less and vapid makes them feel justified in their surrender to misogyny.

Women who are reading this… I hope you don’t fell patronised by a male writer who thinks feminism was one of the single greatest achievements of the 20th century, and who is increasingly horrified by its absence in the 21st. But if you do, no problem. Let me finish my rant by paraphrasing the Patron Saint of women who hate women. As Margaret Thatcher once put it – she was talking about workers who fought for their jobs and their pride, if I recall – there is an enemy within. Nowadays, that applies beautifully to the deluge of female media professionals who would sell their own sisters to conform to the male agenda.
What are you going to do about it?

This month editor Thomas H Green, one year into Beatmag’s existence, defends its raison d’etre.

One year into Beatmag’s existence it’s time to set the record straight. Some of you have noticed that Beatmag is affiliated to Beathut, the independent music download website, and also to the record label Catskills. Some have also assumed with reasonable logic that Beatmag is then simply a rather high-fallutin’ promotional device or press release for anything involved with Beathut and Catskills. Fair enough but far from true.

I was approached a year ago to edit Beatmag on the basis that I could do what I wanted editorially. Having worked alongside corporate publishing marketing departments, this sounded (and still sounds) ideal. In practice, it means I can make Shooter Jennings’ latest CD, ‘Electric Rodeo’ Beatmag Album of the Month and no-one hauls me into a meeting to discuss the demographic breakdown of Beatmag-reading country & western fans. It’s a great album that doesn’t fit into any current niche perceived as hip in the curiously passionless corridors of London media-land – so it’s been generally ignored. Beatmag, on the other hand, can rave about it beside visceral electro, ‘60s pop and whatever else we fancy.

Shooter Jennings

“That’s all very well,” I hear the perceptive amongst you challenge, “but why was the February issue jam-packed with Catskills band Hardkandy.” Well, here’s the thing. I like Catskills Records. I like their attitude, I like what they stand for, I like some of their music. I would hardly have agreed to longterm involvement with them otherwise. They do what record companies should do and locate solid quality bands and follow their career arc, rather than sign them for one flash-in-the-pan single, one season of NME hype, then drop them. Primal Scream only started to hit form on their third album. They’d never have reached that point on most contemporary labels – but they would on Catskills. Since they ceased riding the ‘90s dance boom, Catskills also represent eclecticism and originality fired with pop spirit. As far as I’m concerned Black Grass’s self-titled 2003 debut album is up there with anything Basement Jaxx have mustered, and the latest from Hardkandy is phenomenal modern soul music that doesn’t kowtow to any tired sub-Timbaland template. As one who watches underground sounds filter excruciatingly slowly through to the mainstream, hoping all the time that some of the original innovators are still on board when there’s cash to be made, I’m proud to work alongside Catskills and obviously, from time to time, I’ll be recommending their music. The same applies to all the Beathut labels. Ninja Tune may well be the biggest of these and receive a fair amount of Beatmag coverage. For a long time Ninja Tune seemed to have drifted into an alternate universe where breakbeat jazz was considered the only form of pop worth acknowledging. Now, however, they’re back on form with some startling music from the likes of Coldcut, Fink, Supernumeri, Daedelus, etc, not to mention all the Big Dada stuff, so they’re back in our pages.

Beatmag acts as a financially, creatively and editorially independent engine that runs parallel to Beathut and, by implication, Catskills. Hopefully some of you will bounce between us, like a broadminded soul going to two high quality but completely different films in the same cinema complex. These days the process of accessing music is either technological to the point of characterless or, alternately, loaded with predetermined media-filtered music industry perspectives that appear to have been decided at some secret meeting I never get invited to. Our hope is that Beatmag’d contents say loudly and clearly, “Screw all that!”. At Beatmag, if the latest album from the Aphex Twin is a dog, we’ll say so in a brief Cribsheet assessment, and if ageing folk-popster Al Stewart’s latest is great we’ll say that too (we did!). I like to think Beatmag is so red-blooded and far from the emotionally distanced New York/London school of cool, we may even be truly cool. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I.

Moniker Monitor

Ah, Snow Patrol, let me count the ways I loathe thee. Now you return with a new album, ‘Eyes Open’, relentlessly touting the post-millennial rock star mantra of “I can’t believe how lucky we are, I’m so grateful we’re just normal blokes” guff.

Even bloody Embrace, once a bullishly arrogant bunch of Yorkshiremen, have joined the ‘I can’t believe how lucky we are’ brigade. True, they did go through what looked like a terminal commercial slump, but that’s no excuse.

Oasis, bless ‘em, muster a sneering insouciance, even when their music is turgid rubbish that Status Quo would hesitate to release.

I did not, however, put fingers to keyboard for a furious rant about the post-Travis nice-boy-band syndrome – I already did that back in the Christmas issue – it’s the subject of band names that has tantalized my jaded palate.

The other day a band with whom I have a very tenuous connection asked me what I thought of them. They’re called Urbanspacelab and my first response was, “Junk the name.” ‘Urbanspacelab’ is so ’90s that it hinders the band from the start. There’s nothing wrong with the 1990s, of course, but it’s bizarre the way a band’s name can influence people before they’ve even heard a note. ‘Urbanspacelab’ is redolent of Radical Dance Faction, Asian Dub Foundation, Active Loop Zone and various other festival staples of that decade. It makes one think of Megadog events and crusties in fluoro gear largin’ it on E. Now, I adored those days with their utopian electronic futurism but still don’t think such a name gives out the right message for a fresh band dealing in catchy drum&bass jazz-pop (check ‘em out).

All of which raises the question of what kind of name is hot now. What sort of name will make everyone from industry bods to potential gig-goers intrigued. Going for something immediate and over-the-top doesn’t necessarily breed interest, and in any case Pop Will Eat Itself, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction et al, pinpointed such frivolity twenty years ago. Meanwhile, the opposite, the snappy meaningless single word approach takes us straight back to the 1990s again with Oasis, Embrace, Blur, Pulp, etc.

There is a chunky academic book to be written about how the semantics of band names reflect the culture and society that bore them. Why do Asia, Journey, Sky, Rush, etc all have a similar ring to their names? Is it just hindsight and musical knowledge that makes this seem so? Humble Pie, Badfinger, Lynyrd Skynrd… it’s a blokey pub debate that would go on for hours and send every woman within earshot into a deep sleep.

Instead, suffice to say that for the moment a band would do well not to have the prefix ‘The’ as the post-millennial, post-Strokes and Libertines era has seen an overdose of this – The Paddingtons, The Editors, The Rakes, and on and on. History, I hope, will recall the era of the ‘The’-prefixed NME-endorsed identikit indie band with little affection. This is all totally nebulous, of course, but it seems to me that the type of band name that’s coming up is personified by the likes of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Get Cape Wear Cape Fly. Do you see what I’m getting at? I’m not referring even slightly to the music (I haven’t the faintest what Get Cape Wear Cape Fly sound like) but simply the relative zeitgeist-friendliness of the names. I know, I know, it’s all drifting into the realms of the preposterous, writing frantically about forty seconds before Beatmag’s final, final deadline…

…but …a couple of my friends once had a band called The Dada Christ Society – I rather liked that, although it’s entirely redolent of the Jesus And Mary Chain/SWANS axis to which the members aspired. It is, in any case, a damn sight better than Snow Patrol, as were the three wall-of-noise ‘songs’ that were The Dada Christ Society’s repertoire. Perhaps my favourite band name, though, is The Butthole Surfers, for sheer pugnacity, but maybe I’m influenced again by the fact they were once creators of totally ace music. For the purity of this ludicrous premise, then, I will then have to plumb for American hardcore punk act Art Fag. I couldn’t name a single song of theirs, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard them – but what a great name. All of which is undoubtedly of no use or interest to Nottingham’s Urbanspacelab who will, in all probability, retain their name and have No.1 hit singles in France, Japan and Malaysia.