I've been intending to do a post about Nick Grimshaw's breakfast show for some time now, the problem being that until now i hadn't reached a conclusion.
There is no denying that Grimshaw was going to have a massive challenge to take over from arguably Radio 1's most successful breakfast show and the cracks started appearing very quickly. The decision to only have Nick's voice on air most of the time was quickly overturned when it became clear he needed somebody to bounce off. It is difficult to actually sound like you're having fun on the air when you're alone and regardless of how much Ben Cooper wanted to get shot of the zoo format, we soon found that nothing sounds as lonely as a socialite with no friends. The result is that we now regularly hear the voices of the producer and broadcast assistant, which aids things greatly.
One thing i liked about Chris Moyles was his ability to admit when he'd changed his opinion on something. Quite often he'd criticise records on their first play, but would then openly admit it had grown on him. Compare this to Grimshaw who heavily criticised Swedish House Mafia's "Don't You Worry Child" on his first play and declared he was "never going to play that again", yet did several times before the end of the week without further comment. If you're going to have opinions, they need some weight to make them mean anything.
Anyway, i hadn't intended for this to be a complete hatchet job. The 08:45 quiz Showquizness is quite entertaining, although does wear thin when it becomes clear that they've got a very limited number of clips of the Showbot, a robotic voice that theoretically poses the questions in the quiz. It is effectively a pale immitation of Car Park Catchphrase with a recorded voice interacting with the DJ, except that the interaction isn't as well planned and feels a lot more clunky.
The show branding has been completely changed to fall in with the general station imaging and spoken jingles stating "Radio One's Breakfast Show with Nick Grimshaw" which suggest that he is pretty much interchangeable with any other name they wish to put in there. It doesn't scream longevity to me.
Another factor that doesn't endear the new show to the higher aged demographic is the fact that we've had three excruciating weeks of hype about the Teen Awards which seems to require One Direction to be mentioned at least every three seconds. To be honest, i've been able to put up with these short term distractions (Teen Awards, Brits Week, Big Weekends) because they're only there for a little while before being forgotten about again.
In truth, i'd been a bit meh about the whole thing and had neither found anything to really like or dislike about the whole package. That came to an end this morning when i decided to switch off. The ignorant fashionista twat came out when Grimshaw declared Television Centre (where he's hosting an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks) to be "like an 80s hospital" and complain because he couldn't get a phone signal in there, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the building has been there for a lot longer than him and is arguably the second most important building in British television after Alexandra Palace.
I could quite easily bang on for hours about TVC being the field of dreams, the blank canvas on to which artists paint pictures and bring them to life or a portal to another world where anything is possible... but i won't. But then again, i won't cluelessly dismiss it as "something off of the eighties". I want to be entertained by people who either amuse me, broaden my horizons or both. Grimshaw does neither, so after getting on for nine years i'm looking for a new breakfast frequency.
Tuesday 9 October 2012
Tuesday 2 October 2012
Strange faced Ellie Goulding
I do try not to comment on the appearances of pop stars where i can help it, but every so often i have to make an exception and as i've always referred to her as "Strange faced Ellie Goulding", i see no reason to change now. I do think she looks odd. Her new asymetric mullet hair doesn't help matters either.
I can't get my head around Ms Goulding's latest song and lead track from her second album. She's taken a cut in the tempo of her original material from her first album and Anything Could Happen sits at the sort of pace of a Moombahton track. Whilst i quite like the composition of the song, there is far too much reliance on a stupid earworm of vocal loops created by studio trickery, particularly as this forms the main chorus of the song. Just as it feels the song is going to some sort of epic climax, it slumps back down again.
The other interesting development in her sound has been the appearance of a far more raspy quality to her voice when she's really going for it which has never sounded quite so pronounced before. Quite where it sits with her hiccupy toddler voice the rest of the time, i don't know.
So overall, i really don't know what to think. I find it interesting, but i'm not sure i actually like it and having had a love/hate relationship with Goulding's music in the past (mostly hate if i'm honest), i almost feel as if i should have more of a reaction to it.
I can't get my head around Ms Goulding's latest song and lead track from her second album. She's taken a cut in the tempo of her original material from her first album and Anything Could Happen sits at the sort of pace of a Moombahton track. Whilst i quite like the composition of the song, there is far too much reliance on a stupid earworm of vocal loops created by studio trickery, particularly as this forms the main chorus of the song. Just as it feels the song is going to some sort of epic climax, it slumps back down again.
The other interesting development in her sound has been the appearance of a far more raspy quality to her voice when she's really going for it which has never sounded quite so pronounced before. Quite where it sits with her hiccupy toddler voice the rest of the time, i don't know.
So overall, i really don't know what to think. I find it interesting, but i'm not sure i actually like it and having had a love/hate relationship with Goulding's music in the past (mostly hate if i'm honest), i almost feel as if i should have more of a reaction to it.
A very rickety bandwagon
Its easy to mock, but after getting on for 20 years hammering away at it, the wheels finally appear to have fallen off the bandwagon that is Scooter. Their success in the UK has been a rather hit and miss affair, with two periods of relatively decent success punctuated by long periods of being ignored. In their homeland of Germany, the success has been pretty consistent until now.
The warning signs were there after the 2007 Jumping All Over The World album. Scooter went away for a longer hiatus than they had ever previously taken. Having produced albums roughly annually since 1995, there was silence from the band after a long tour which had seen them sell out venues the likes of which they hadn't even attempted before. The album backed in the UK by a Greatest Hits CD took the top spot in the album chart, which raised many eyebrows and remains something of a thorn in the side of those always claiming the album chart is the one for grown ups. Unusually for Scooter, this album spawned five singles rather than the usual two or three and all went top twenty in Germany.
They returned in 2009 with Under The Radar, Over The Top which acheived reasonable home success, with two of the four singles lifted from it going top twenty. The sound had reverted from the stadium jumpstyle of the previous album to a ragtag mixture of their previous styles that didn't really have any cohesion. Worse was to come with 2011's The Big Mash Up, an alarmingly weak range of lifted samples and rip offs of other tracks in a vague attempt to catch up on the already tired fashion for mashups. Opening single The Only One was (broadly speaking) a cover of the Charlatans' similarly named song and it just sneaked into the German top 50 despite heavy promotion across mainstream TV. Three more singles were dragged off the album, but none inspired the public to reach the top half of the top 100.
Which brings us to 2012 and new album Music For A Big Night Out which is a pissweak title even by Scooter's standards. Lead single 4 AM is a thinly veiled mixture of Otto Knows' Europewide club hit Million Voices, amended just enough to put off the copyright lawyers and the opening couple of lines from Beverley Craven's Promise Me sung by someone who sounds like Rihanna with a cold. Really. Again, this isn't anything that hasn't already been done to death - the Bingo Players had a minor hit with a similarly looped couple of lines from Brenda Russell's Piano In The Dark (1988) the ethos of which has now been "brought to a larger audience" (ripped off) by Flo Rida who has practically made a career out of such works. The 4 AM single limped into the German charts at number 96 on the first week of release and is their worst performing single ever aside from their instrumental xylophone heavy debut Vallee des Larmes.
So where do Scooter go from here? It is difficult seeing any future in copying what the market already has an overload of - identikit dance covers looping a couple of lines of something from the Heart Time Tunnel playlist. They'll doubtlessly find a new direction in the near future and i wouldn't rule out them making a dubstep album.
Seriously.
The warning signs were there after the 2007 Jumping All Over The World album. Scooter went away for a longer hiatus than they had ever previously taken. Having produced albums roughly annually since 1995, there was silence from the band after a long tour which had seen them sell out venues the likes of which they hadn't even attempted before. The album backed in the UK by a Greatest Hits CD took the top spot in the album chart, which raised many eyebrows and remains something of a thorn in the side of those always claiming the album chart is the one for grown ups. Unusually for Scooter, this album spawned five singles rather than the usual two or three and all went top twenty in Germany.
They returned in 2009 with Under The Radar, Over The Top which acheived reasonable home success, with two of the four singles lifted from it going top twenty. The sound had reverted from the stadium jumpstyle of the previous album to a ragtag mixture of their previous styles that didn't really have any cohesion. Worse was to come with 2011's The Big Mash Up, an alarmingly weak range of lifted samples and rip offs of other tracks in a vague attempt to catch up on the already tired fashion for mashups. Opening single The Only One was (broadly speaking) a cover of the Charlatans' similarly named song and it just sneaked into the German top 50 despite heavy promotion across mainstream TV. Three more singles were dragged off the album, but none inspired the public to reach the top half of the top 100.
Which brings us to 2012 and new album Music For A Big Night Out which is a pissweak title even by Scooter's standards. Lead single 4 AM is a thinly veiled mixture of Otto Knows' Europewide club hit Million Voices, amended just enough to put off the copyright lawyers and the opening couple of lines from Beverley Craven's Promise Me sung by someone who sounds like Rihanna with a cold. Really. Again, this isn't anything that hasn't already been done to death - the Bingo Players had a minor hit with a similarly looped couple of lines from Brenda Russell's Piano In The Dark (1988) the ethos of which has now been "brought to a larger audience" (ripped off) by Flo Rida who has practically made a career out of such works. The 4 AM single limped into the German charts at number 96 on the first week of release and is their worst performing single ever aside from their instrumental xylophone heavy debut Vallee des Larmes.
So where do Scooter go from here? It is difficult seeing any future in copying what the market already has an overload of - identikit dance covers looping a couple of lines of something from the Heart Time Tunnel playlist. They'll doubtlessly find a new direction in the near future and i wouldn't rule out them making a dubstep album.
Seriously.
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