Part One.
Part Two.
Part Three.
Part Four.
Part Five.
Part Six.
Part Seven.
Part Eight.
Part Nine.
Part Ten.
Split band members’ solo albums are a well-worn cliché for awfulness. On the other hand, after ABBA folded, Frida made an album of synth pop and it’s rather good. As is Robin Gibb’s solo album.
And then there’s that difficult second album...
There is always a moment failure begins. A single decision that starts everything lumbering down the wrong path, speeding up, careering wildly, before lurching to a terrible stop in a place where nobody is interested in hearing your songs any more. (Jon Ronson, who spent two years in a band)
I was a jazz musician playing with the best players but making $5 bucks a set for a crowd of about 5 people. Something was wrong with that picture and needed to change. (Mike Garson, who joined David Bowie's band)
Pink Floyd were worth listening to for the first three years of their recording career. After that it was just a rich man moaning tunelessly. (@paulwhitelaw)
Watched Searching for Sugarman last night. Superb doc about the strange second act in the life of a forgotten musical talent. (@louistheroux, 2012)
There’s a moment when you realize that bands aren’t a spontaneous expression of youth, but “acts” on a bill like the Flying Wallendas.
Man wants to write songs, but has zero music lessons and doesn’t even listen to songs. He can afford to hire an arranger, and writes inept musicals as showcases which are performed to critical indifference. On the side he writes amusingly about his awful family.
Man can play the folk violin, but wants to write and perform an oratorio about his life. Despite his gifts for melody and poetry, he can’t hear harmony, and won’t take advice. Nobody hears of him again.
Woman writes an oratorio about her life and recruits amateur singers to form a community choir so that she can cherry-pick the talented to perform her life work.
Singer is known for her long-held climactic high notes. Eventually her songs are ALL long–held climactic high notes.
Moshe Koussevitsky created a style based upon vocal acrobatics. Because he possessed an enormous voice that had a nearly limitless range and flexibility, he created and adapted compositions that would show off the brilliance of his voice and technique. Every cantor today would like to sound like Koussevitsky. Unfortunately, the road is littered with the corpses of the ruined voices of Koussevitsky wannabees. (Moshe Schulhoff, paraphrase)
Every night before I dropped off to sleep I used to turn over and over in my mind the dream that one day I might be singing Isolde on a real stage... I am sure there can be nothing more soul-destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing that you want desperately to do well, and to know you are at the best second-rate... So I put wishful thinking aside. (Agatha Christie, An Autobiography. In one of her straight novels, Giant's Bread, a singer loses her voice by pushing herself to perform an operatic role that’s beyond her.)
How to become a pop star: go to stage school and learn your craft, including presentation, movement, stage presence. You could even study a repertoire. Middle-class kids can’t do this because they can’t go to stage schools even if they know such things exist.
Like a firework, Geri Halliwell’s solo career started brightly but quickly faded. Before the Spice Girls, she presented a quiz show on Turkish TV.
Singer Lotte Mullan has seen friends win huge record deals but fail to break through, going from headlining solo tours to working as caterers and estate agents. (Daily Telegraph, 2011. In her hearing, male music executives asked each other if she was pretty enough to make it.)
The three groups, which had sunk to various levels of musical irrelevance since their respective heyday, agree to the reunion performance. (Wikipedia on A Mighty Wind. The “American folk revival” mainly wasn’t a revival but a new style of music, which is now justly forgotten, though pop borrowed it for songs like Feelin’ Groovy.)
How to survive in popular music: turn your 60s soul hits into mainstream, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road pap (Petula Clark), or your mod hits into rock anthems, or your 30s jazz into 50s jazz; or book the Palladium and turn your early hits into bellowed travesties (Judy Garland) or your Berlin cabaret songs into campathons (Marlene Dietrich), or declaim your lyrics instead of singing them—the audience will love it (Dolly Parton). It’s called grandstanding.
Long-established stars ruin their hit by “doing something different with it” (always in a particular way. Going a bit indy, a bit singer-songwriter, with more winces and gasps. And departing from the tune – we’re back to “declaiming” again.) “Doing something different with” klezmer is always modern jazz. And as for “doing something different” with Henry Purcell, puh-lease!
To sell more records, you adulterate your country/folk music and add dollops of sentimentality. You have a band wearing matching satin shirts and tell corny jokes between numbers. Just before you die, you’re rediscovered by Rick Rubin, who “strips away decades of accumulated schmaltz” and everybody realises how brilliant you are.
You force your musical friends to listen to recordings of Van Morrison, Billy Bragg or anyone who sings slightly out of tune – like you do.
English people love singing, there are groups to choose from wherever you live, but if people sing off the cuff everyone will go “Oh, shut that ghastly row!” however good they are. Meanwhile some Brits become pop stars.
A generation only heard Jewish music as “send-ups” by the likes of Mickey Katz.
Pop star Tommy Steele wanted to be an “all-round entertainer” – this translated as “broad humour and slapstick”.
Charlie Watts really wanted to be a jazz drummer.
In Eastern Europe, you invent a new kind of pop music and the ethnomusicologists turn up their noses at you. They ignore anything played in clubs by bands in satin shirts – it’s probably too skilled.
Saw the Nightingales last night. Has any other reformed 2nd division band so outperformed their young selves? (@jonjonhorne)
Take That’s hits – none of which come from their dreary “mature” phase. (@paulwhitelaw)
Alt.country has become little more than a series of stock gestures and pseudo-rustic postures. (Wired, 2009)
A conservatoire trains pupils in a style of jazz that’s 50 years out of date and was always a niche taste with a tiny following.
And by now, that sound has gotten pretty old. There’s not much difference between a screechy performance by avant-garde saxophonist Peter Brötzmann from 1974 and one from 2014. (The Washington Post on “new music” and jazz.)
Where did prog rock progress to? Where did it go? Thankfully, “away”.
It's the most boring thing to be known as a musician, because those guys eventually wind up playing Holiday Inns. (Gene Simmons)
Toyah Wilcox used to sing: "I'm going to turn suburbia upside down." Now she was doing voices for the Tellytubbies. (John O'Farrell, Things Can Only Get Better)
Tom Jones and his band go to London for an audition. The company likes them, hurrah! But they only want Tom, and the boys get the train back to Cardiff.
You have a career as a pop star, then become a… cheesemaker. Or catalogue standing stones in Europe. Or you finish your PhD. Or you go back to your career as a particle physicist. (Well done, Alex James, Julian Cope, Brian May and Brian Cox.)
Abba (pictured) have trumped everybody by putting on a show with animatronic avatars of their younger selves... or something. And audiences love it.
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