The Great British music industry has a reputation for taking a "quiet time" during the first few months of the year. In reality, it varies quite a bit. Some years are deathly quiet until May, whilst others have a burbling scene still going on from New Year. 2009 seems to be falling somewhere in the middle; there are some songs hanging around on playlists and download lists for people with no imagination - you know the sort, they're still paying to download "Run" by Leona Lewis. Honestly. Why would you do such a thing?
Anyway, in the chart with a bullet (we can only hope) at the moment are some of the following acts...
Eminem ft Dr Dre & Fiddly Tent - Crack A Bottle.
This song is conclusive proof that Eminem should take more time off as he's clearly not ready to come back. This boring, repetitive and overlong track burbles on for what seems like an eternity and Marshall's lyrics are the blandest they've ever been. Love or hate Eminem, his previous work has always been interesting, but this is just wallpaper. It wouldn't have been an album track on his previous releases. The inclusion of Dre is a partial bonus, but even his input fails to save it and the inclusion of lumbering goon 50 Cent is just painful.
Shontelle - T-Shirt
Really. You don't spell "Chantelle" like that. Ever. Even if you're a 14 year old mother with zero education and nobody to give you a sensible idea of how to spell your child's name. Aside from the stupid name, the record is a karaoke version of Jordin Sparks' "Tattoo" with horrendous materialistic lyrics about how Shunt is "sick of her dress and Jimmy Choos". Just to make it even worse, she's apparently the new Rihanna.
Katy Perry - Hot & Cold
Don't get me wrong, i quite like Katy Perry's off-beat spunky approach to pop, but the blanket coverage of every playlist in the country soon makes you sick of anything and this is one song which is suffering from massive over-exposure. Along with about a dozen other records, this is something that needs to be dropped from playlists right now and allowed to rest.
Chase & Status ft Kano - Against All Odds
Thankfully not a drum and bass cover version of Phil Collins, Chase & Status' hyperactive commercial D&B benefits from some excellent, well paced wordplay from Kano. Perviously i haven't found either act particularly enthralling, but this vaguely biographical track is inventive and far more interesting than Eminem's latest outpouring. If D&B and British Hip Hop can be happy bedfellows and the result this listenable then i'm all for it. Anything to free us from the American mass-produced dirge that our airwaves so often suffer from.
Kelly Clarkson - My Life Would Suck Without You
My life sucks every time i hear this record, but i'm not complaining about it.
The Ting Tings - We Walk
It doesn't matter if you re-record a track from your atrocious and rushed album, the song still sucks big monkey balls. The first three singles were the only thing worth listening to on their album and trying to flog it for as many singles this is just taking the piss.
And now, some things that you probably won't hear on the radio:
A-Brand - The Bubbles
They're Belgian, so thats a good start. You're unlikely to hear this record anywhere on British radio, but it is utter brilliance. It starts slowly and builds over four minutes to a crescendo the likes of which just don't seem to be fashionable in the UK at the moment, which is a shame because electronic powerpop is supposed to be all the rage. If they were fronted by a 20 year old girl with blonde hair, the music press would be pissing themselves with excitement, but i doubt it would sound as good.
Kate Nash - Don't You Want To Share The Guilt
This is actually a b-side to one of the 7" singles of Nash's final offering from her debut album, Made of Bricks and by the look of YouTube is a favourite live song. I don't think i've ever heard anyone so brilliantly try to paint a picture of the mental state of somebody trying not to think about the state a failing relationship and Nash's trail-of-thought lyrics are often beautiful and tearjerking at the same time. I just hope that Nash is working on developing her distinctive sound and flow over pressures to make a commercially successful second album with all the cliches that a lot of modern pop suffers from.
Friday 13 February 2009
Sunday 1 February 2009
Listen Carefully.
Despite my eternal grumpiness, not everything is terrible. Despite having hands tied behind their backs, many radio stations continue to entertain me. Here is my guide to what to listen to at the moment.
BBC Radio 1 - The Lie-In with Chappers & Dave (Sundays 10h-13h)
For what most be the least hyped radio show ever, Mark "Chappers" Chapman and "Comedy" Dave Vitty (sidekicks to Scott Mills and Chris Moyles respectively) have found an excellent conduit for their talents on Sunday mornings. The format of the Lie-In show has been the same for some years, two hours of "classic" music from the past 15-20 years, followed by an hour back on the main playlists at midday. This suits Chappers and Dave perfectly, as they sound as if they're really enjoying themselves most of the time and their gentle self-deprocating humour is infectious and uplifting. The show doesn't feel like the overproduced and prerecorded (or pre-programmed) guff that many stations feel forced to shove out on weekends.
The benefit of being on air on a Sunday morning is that broadcasters won't be desperately chasing ratings and the show can be more relaxed. Sadly it looks as if Chappers & Dave will be replaced by Sara Cox when her current tenure as maternity leave for Jo Whiley comes to an end which will make Sunday mornings unlistenable, so enjoy radio’s smallest egos while you can because radio doesn't get much better than this.
BBC Radio 1 - The Chris Moyles Show (Mon-Fri 6h30-10h)
Ignore all the abuse that gets hurled at Moyles by practically the entire mainstream media, the Radio 1 Breakfast show is in good shape. Moyles is a headstrong personality who can be quite offensive if you don’t take the show as being produced with the tongue-in-cheek nature with which it is. Much gets made on the Digital Spy forums of how little music is played, but as you have the rest of the day to hear the Radio 1 A-playlist three or four times over, why do you need to hear it while you’re waking up as well? I’m quite happy to be entertained in the morning and Moyles does a sterling job of this.
The features on the breakfast show are very strong, with regulars such as the Monday Night Pub Quiz (on a Tuesday morning) and Friday’s Golden Hour being superb radio. New daily quiz feature (featuring a pre-taped Keith Chegwin) Cheggers Pop Quiz is one of the most instantly familiar features introduced on Radio 1 over recent years. There has also been careful attention paid to the new jingle packages, which have subtle and not-so-subtle jokes running through them, a particular favourite of mine being the intro for Comedy Dave’s tedious link, in which the jingle singer spends most of his time singing “Dave’s tedious!”.
Given how much effort has been put into refreshing the presentation of the show and the preparation the new Pop Quiz feature must take (considering the content of the intro, questions and clips), it should hopefully put to bed any snide accusations that Moyles and his team of being lazy broadcasters resting on their laurels to bed.
BBC Radio Bristol & BBC Somerset – Steve Yabsley (Mon-Fri 12h-14h)
Steve Yabsley has been working for Radio Bristol for as long as I’ve been a listener conscious of what i’m listening to. His Saturday morning show (for a period with Chris Morris) was a brilliant listen, with a superb collection of madcap sketches, lightning quick quips and puns, and a seemingly endless collection of odd and banal phone-in topics. His star always seemed to shine very brightly to me, in contrast with much of the wallpaper which is passed as BBC local radio.
Yabsley has since moved to weekday lunchtimes, to start with co-hosting with a female presenter and a severely toned-down sense of humour, in keeping with a more mainstream timeslot. Quite by chance during November 2008, I found myself driving a coach with a radio which would seemingly only receive Radio Bristol and BBC Cymru and made the delightful discovery that Yabsley had been properly unleashed back on to the airwaves, offering the same high spirited humour that had formerly been part of his Saturday morning show but now five days a week.
Having listened to the show several times since that happy rediscovery, the quality control is kept very high. Yabsley clearly puts in a lot of effort into sketching out the antics of the week and the show benefits from being consistently well put together, including the contributions from several regular listeners. Steve Yabsley deserves a much wider stage for his brilliant, broadly appealing humour, but given that he hasn’t received one in the past two decades, a youth-obsessed media is unlikely to give this consistently excellent broadcaster the huge audience he should be getting.
Studio Brussel (Entire station output)
The other entries listed here have been for particular shows, but if I was left with one radio station, it would probably be the delightful Flemish music broadcaster Studio Brussel, or StuBru to its friends. It probably shouldn’t be of any interest to anybody outside Vlaanderen (Flemish Belgium), but StuBru delivers the eclectic playlist that is completely lacking on any British station.
Broadly, the station plays a mixture of accessible indie, electronic and leftfield music, staying away from the inanity of standard pop playlists. Unlike most stations broadcasting current music, the variety of music has to be heard to be believed, mixing the likes of current indie bands, film soundtracks, new wave, Britpop, homegrown Belgian pop, folk, acoustic pop, alternative classics and Simple Minds. Nothing else i’ve ever heard even comes close to StuBru in terms of musical variety and that’s what makes it such a good listen. Even carrying advertising, StuBru still manages to do this subtly, usually having 2-3 minutes of adverts before news bulletins around the hour, something many British commercial stations could learn massively from.
I should also mention the commercial arm of the station, which compiles various compilation CDs, the highlight of which is the superb Switch series (not to be confused with the BBC’s ill advised yoof strand). Friday and Saturday nights on StuBru are given over to electronic, leftfield and experimental sounds under the Switch banner. For those of us who struggle to stay awake until 4am, compilation CDs are helpfully released every six months of so with the highlights of recent releases. Even with the pound being so weak against the Euro at the moment, they’re still essential purchases.
Honourable mentions:
BBC Radio 4 – Old Harry’s Game (Currently off-air)
Andy Hamilton’s brilliant story of the afterlife, set primarily in Hell is an absolute stormer with strong characters playing out excellently constructed storylines. It is also very funny, with many topical jokes being included throughout. Standout performances include Hamilton himself as Satan, Jimmy Mulville as the repugnant Thomas Crimp and Robert Duncan as Satan’s right-hand Demon, Scumspawn. The series was in danger of losing momentum when James Grout left the series (due to ill health), but series 6 was reassuringly back on form, establishing Annette Crosbie as new arrival Edith in a comfortably familiar role to that of Grout’s Proffessor Richard Wittingham.
BBC Five Live – Fighting Talk (Saturdays 11h-12h)
Colin Murray presides over this weekly peacock-like display of sports punditry one-upmanship, formerly hosted by Johnny Vaughan and Christian o’Connell. The format is simple – Murray introduces a number of topics on which the four pundits have to offer opinions avoiding the usual traps of clichés and easy answers to gain points. Even for somebody like me who doesn’t have a huge interest in sport, the show is consistently entertaining and very funny.
BBC Radio 1 – Scott Mills (Mon-Fri 16h-19h)
Scott Mills took over the ‘drivetime’ slot when Chris Moyles moved to breakfast five years ago and has developed a well organised and reliably entertaining show. In line with many shows I’m a fan of, the preparation for each show must be immense, with several topics being raised during the course of a normal show and the likes of the comic guessing game “Oh, Whats Occuring?”.
BBC Radio 1 – Zane Lowe (Mon-Thu 19h-21h)
Zane Lowe’s unstoppable enthusiasm knows no bounds. When the rest of us are winding down for the day, Lowe is just getting started on his Duracell-bunny-on-Red-Bull version of the old Evening Session show. Considering how few of the DJs on Radio 1 seem to have any genuine passion for music these days, Lowe is consistently enthusing over new music, a depressingly small quantity of which makes it over on to the main playlists, which are apparently reserved for tedious mass-produced American acts.
GWR Bristol – Bush & Troy (Mon-Fri Breakfast)
Kiss 101 – Matt & Caroline (Mon-Fri Breakfast)
Sadly, all of Bristol’s radio talent seems to be on air at the same time. Both GWR’s Bush & Troy and the Kiss breakfast gang headed by Matt & Caroline are entertaining acts offering great morning radio. The only downside to both shows in my opinion is the huge quantities of advertising material both stations broadcast which, in these days of reduced revenue from commercials, never seems to get any smaller, unlike the pool of advertisers who are paying for their 30 seconds of fame every five minutes. I appreciate that breakfast is the biggest paying time of the day, but the proliferation of adverts distracts from what are otherwise two entertaining radio shows.
BBC Radio 1 - The Lie-In with Chappers & Dave (Sundays 10h-13h)
For what most be the least hyped radio show ever, Mark "Chappers" Chapman and "Comedy" Dave Vitty (sidekicks to Scott Mills and Chris Moyles respectively) have found an excellent conduit for their talents on Sunday mornings. The format of the Lie-In show has been the same for some years, two hours of "classic" music from the past 15-20 years, followed by an hour back on the main playlists at midday. This suits Chappers and Dave perfectly, as they sound as if they're really enjoying themselves most of the time and their gentle self-deprocating humour is infectious and uplifting. The show doesn't feel like the overproduced and prerecorded (or pre-programmed) guff that many stations feel forced to shove out on weekends.
The benefit of being on air on a Sunday morning is that broadcasters won't be desperately chasing ratings and the show can be more relaxed. Sadly it looks as if Chappers & Dave will be replaced by Sara Cox when her current tenure as maternity leave for Jo Whiley comes to an end which will make Sunday mornings unlistenable, so enjoy radio’s smallest egos while you can because radio doesn't get much better than this.
BBC Radio 1 - The Chris Moyles Show (Mon-Fri 6h30-10h)
Ignore all the abuse that gets hurled at Moyles by practically the entire mainstream media, the Radio 1 Breakfast show is in good shape. Moyles is a headstrong personality who can be quite offensive if you don’t take the show as being produced with the tongue-in-cheek nature with which it is. Much gets made on the Digital Spy forums of how little music is played, but as you have the rest of the day to hear the Radio 1 A-playlist three or four times over, why do you need to hear it while you’re waking up as well? I’m quite happy to be entertained in the morning and Moyles does a sterling job of this.
The features on the breakfast show are very strong, with regulars such as the Monday Night Pub Quiz (on a Tuesday morning) and Friday’s Golden Hour being superb radio. New daily quiz feature (featuring a pre-taped Keith Chegwin) Cheggers Pop Quiz is one of the most instantly familiar features introduced on Radio 1 over recent years. There has also been careful attention paid to the new jingle packages, which have subtle and not-so-subtle jokes running through them, a particular favourite of mine being the intro for Comedy Dave’s tedious link, in which the jingle singer spends most of his time singing “Dave’s tedious!”.
Given how much effort has been put into refreshing the presentation of the show and the preparation the new Pop Quiz feature must take (considering the content of the intro, questions and clips), it should hopefully put to bed any snide accusations that Moyles and his team of being lazy broadcasters resting on their laurels to bed.
BBC Radio Bristol & BBC Somerset – Steve Yabsley (Mon-Fri 12h-14h)
Steve Yabsley has been working for Radio Bristol for as long as I’ve been a listener conscious of what i’m listening to. His Saturday morning show (for a period with Chris Morris) was a brilliant listen, with a superb collection of madcap sketches, lightning quick quips and puns, and a seemingly endless collection of odd and banal phone-in topics. His star always seemed to shine very brightly to me, in contrast with much of the wallpaper which is passed as BBC local radio.
Yabsley has since moved to weekday lunchtimes, to start with co-hosting with a female presenter and a severely toned-down sense of humour, in keeping with a more mainstream timeslot. Quite by chance during November 2008, I found myself driving a coach with a radio which would seemingly only receive Radio Bristol and BBC Cymru and made the delightful discovery that Yabsley had been properly unleashed back on to the airwaves, offering the same high spirited humour that had formerly been part of his Saturday morning show but now five days a week.
Having listened to the show several times since that happy rediscovery, the quality control is kept very high. Yabsley clearly puts in a lot of effort into sketching out the antics of the week and the show benefits from being consistently well put together, including the contributions from several regular listeners. Steve Yabsley deserves a much wider stage for his brilliant, broadly appealing humour, but given that he hasn’t received one in the past two decades, a youth-obsessed media is unlikely to give this consistently excellent broadcaster the huge audience he should be getting.
Studio Brussel (Entire station output)
The other entries listed here have been for particular shows, but if I was left with one radio station, it would probably be the delightful Flemish music broadcaster Studio Brussel, or StuBru to its friends. It probably shouldn’t be of any interest to anybody outside Vlaanderen (Flemish Belgium), but StuBru delivers the eclectic playlist that is completely lacking on any British station.
Broadly, the station plays a mixture of accessible indie, electronic and leftfield music, staying away from the inanity of standard pop playlists. Unlike most stations broadcasting current music, the variety of music has to be heard to be believed, mixing the likes of current indie bands, film soundtracks, new wave, Britpop, homegrown Belgian pop, folk, acoustic pop, alternative classics and Simple Minds. Nothing else i’ve ever heard even comes close to StuBru in terms of musical variety and that’s what makes it such a good listen. Even carrying advertising, StuBru still manages to do this subtly, usually having 2-3 minutes of adverts before news bulletins around the hour, something many British commercial stations could learn massively from.
I should also mention the commercial arm of the station, which compiles various compilation CDs, the highlight of which is the superb Switch series (not to be confused with the BBC’s ill advised yoof strand). Friday and Saturday nights on StuBru are given over to electronic, leftfield and experimental sounds under the Switch banner. For those of us who struggle to stay awake until 4am, compilation CDs are helpfully released every six months of so with the highlights of recent releases. Even with the pound being so weak against the Euro at the moment, they’re still essential purchases.
Honourable mentions:
BBC Radio 4 – Old Harry’s Game (Currently off-air)
Andy Hamilton’s brilliant story of the afterlife, set primarily in Hell is an absolute stormer with strong characters playing out excellently constructed storylines. It is also very funny, with many topical jokes being included throughout. Standout performances include Hamilton himself as Satan, Jimmy Mulville as the repugnant Thomas Crimp and Robert Duncan as Satan’s right-hand Demon, Scumspawn. The series was in danger of losing momentum when James Grout left the series (due to ill health), but series 6 was reassuringly back on form, establishing Annette Crosbie as new arrival Edith in a comfortably familiar role to that of Grout’s Proffessor Richard Wittingham.
BBC Five Live – Fighting Talk (Saturdays 11h-12h)
Colin Murray presides over this weekly peacock-like display of sports punditry one-upmanship, formerly hosted by Johnny Vaughan and Christian o’Connell. The format is simple – Murray introduces a number of topics on which the four pundits have to offer opinions avoiding the usual traps of clichés and easy answers to gain points. Even for somebody like me who doesn’t have a huge interest in sport, the show is consistently entertaining and very funny.
BBC Radio 1 – Scott Mills (Mon-Fri 16h-19h)
Scott Mills took over the ‘drivetime’ slot when Chris Moyles moved to breakfast five years ago and has developed a well organised and reliably entertaining show. In line with many shows I’m a fan of, the preparation for each show must be immense, with several topics being raised during the course of a normal show and the likes of the comic guessing game “Oh, Whats Occuring?”.
BBC Radio 1 – Zane Lowe (Mon-Thu 19h-21h)
Zane Lowe’s unstoppable enthusiasm knows no bounds. When the rest of us are winding down for the day, Lowe is just getting started on his Duracell-bunny-on-Red-Bull version of the old Evening Session show. Considering how few of the DJs on Radio 1 seem to have any genuine passion for music these days, Lowe is consistently enthusing over new music, a depressingly small quantity of which makes it over on to the main playlists, which are apparently reserved for tedious mass-produced American acts.
GWR Bristol – Bush & Troy (Mon-Fri Breakfast)
Kiss 101 – Matt & Caroline (Mon-Fri Breakfast)
Sadly, all of Bristol’s radio talent seems to be on air at the same time. Both GWR’s Bush & Troy and the Kiss breakfast gang headed by Matt & Caroline are entertaining acts offering great morning radio. The only downside to both shows in my opinion is the huge quantities of advertising material both stations broadcast which, in these days of reduced revenue from commercials, never seems to get any smaller, unlike the pool of advertisers who are paying for their 30 seconds of fame every five minutes. I appreciate that breakfast is the biggest paying time of the day, but the proliferation of adverts distracts from what are otherwise two entertaining radio shows.
Boring Girl Gone Irritating
The season of tedious back-slapping awards ceremonies for film is upon us and as usual i'm not excited. I've only seen one film which has been nominated for any awards and most of the ones that have been nominated really don't excite me, much like the annual music award festivities which are just as dull, celebrating braindead mainstream toss.
This year, the awards celebrating the achievements of the past twelve months are probably all going to be about Rihanna and her dire album "Good Girl Gone Bad". There have been so many singles milked off this album that i've lost count and yet the airplay they are blindly awarded by British radio stations is bewildering, particularly as her turgid, nasal whine isn't even a pleasant experience to listen to.
I'll admit that playground nursery rhyme anthem "Umbrella" was a well constructed pop song, and get that out of the way. Follow up "Shut Up and Drive" was entirely tedium-by-numbers, using paper thin innuendo in an attempt to stimulate the automotive industry. Fellow R&B boredom merchant Ne-Yo was drafted in to warble on "Hate That I Love You", which nobody would be able to sing now, despite it being thrashed for months by every commercial radio station in the country.
"Don't Stop The Music" was the fourth single to be lifted from the album, i presume an ironic preview of the following year of musical misery. This was followed by the mocking ballad "Take A Bow" and utter dross festival "Disturbia", a song which basically eschews any need for song writing for the most part by replacing lyrics with "Bam-bam-de-dam-bam-bam-de-baaam-bam". Its enough to make you want to punch babies. Seventh and please-God-let-it-be-Final release from the album was "Rehab", where Rihanna doesn't wanna smoke on dem cigarettes no mo-o-ooore", a rewrite of album filler track "Breakin' Dishes".
So in total, eighteen months of a-list radio airplay derived from one thrice released and repackaged album. If that wasn't bad enough, we had to have another dose of Rihanna's grating vocals as she guested on rapper T.I's comedy cover version of O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei", now retitled "Live Your Life". Complete with ao-ao-ao refrain and rewriting of O-Zone's original Euro-friendly "ma-i-a-hiiii" to warble on about "fancy cars", just to prove that the American black music industry can't make a mainstream record that isn't materialistic and completely bling based.
TI and Rihanna's donation to future landfill has got to be musical hell. The only possible saving grace of this tripe is the hilarious comedy verse about two thirds of the way through the song where Rihanna tries to rap, which is so bad i almost soiled myself the first time i heard it. Its almost worth listening to the song all the way through once just to hear it.
So there you have it, Rihanna is awful. End of story. Lets hope that 2009 finds a new act that the mainstream radio stations of the UK can wet their pants over every time they belch.
This year, the awards celebrating the achievements of the past twelve months are probably all going to be about Rihanna and her dire album "Good Girl Gone Bad". There have been so many singles milked off this album that i've lost count and yet the airplay they are blindly awarded by British radio stations is bewildering, particularly as her turgid, nasal whine isn't even a pleasant experience to listen to.
I'll admit that playground nursery rhyme anthem "Umbrella" was a well constructed pop song, and get that out of the way. Follow up "Shut Up and Drive" was entirely tedium-by-numbers, using paper thin innuendo in an attempt to stimulate the automotive industry. Fellow R&B boredom merchant Ne-Yo was drafted in to warble on "Hate That I Love You", which nobody would be able to sing now, despite it being thrashed for months by every commercial radio station in the country.
"Don't Stop The Music" was the fourth single to be lifted from the album, i presume an ironic preview of the following year of musical misery. This was followed by the mocking ballad "Take A Bow" and utter dross festival "Disturbia", a song which basically eschews any need for song writing for the most part by replacing lyrics with "Bam-bam-de-dam-bam-bam-de-baaam-bam". Its enough to make you want to punch babies. Seventh and please-God-let-it-be-Final release from the album was "Rehab", where Rihanna doesn't wanna smoke on dem cigarettes no mo-o-ooore", a rewrite of album filler track "Breakin' Dishes".
So in total, eighteen months of a-list radio airplay derived from one thrice released and repackaged album. If that wasn't bad enough, we had to have another dose of Rihanna's grating vocals as she guested on rapper T.I's comedy cover version of O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei", now retitled "Live Your Life". Complete with ao-ao-ao refrain and rewriting of O-Zone's original Euro-friendly "ma-i-a-hiiii" to warble on about "fancy cars", just to prove that the American black music industry can't make a mainstream record that isn't materialistic and completely bling based.
TI and Rihanna's donation to future landfill has got to be musical hell. The only possible saving grace of this tripe is the hilarious comedy verse about two thirds of the way through the song where Rihanna tries to rap, which is so bad i almost soiled myself the first time i heard it. Its almost worth listening to the song all the way through once just to hear it.
So there you have it, Rihanna is awful. End of story. Lets hope that 2009 finds a new act that the mainstream radio stations of the UK can wet their pants over every time they belch.
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