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- Meet Tw1tterband, and their fan Johnny Marr
The brainchild of one unemployed Twitter devotee is a world first – a band whose members have never even met
At January's Midem music industry conference, the internet savvy singer-songwriter Imogen Heap announced plans to create a song by crowd-sourcing material from her 1.5m Twitter followers. The idea is that, on 14 March, anyone can upload clips of music or sound, which Heap will then piece together with lyrics based on ideas gathered from a web chat with fans. The song will be released two weeks later, by which point Heap will presumably have worked out how she plans to credit people for their input (something she seemed unclear about in initial interviews).
Crowd-sourcing a song via Twitter is an intriguing notion, but Heap has already been pipped to the post by Richard Newman, a Twitter devotee from Chichester who admits to having no musical ability. Around the time Heap was revealing plans for her project in a swanky Cannes hotel, Newman decided to celebrate two years on Twitter by seeing if he could use the site to form a band and record a cover of Rod Stewart's Maggie May.
Thus, Tw1tterband was born. The project was given momentum by the fact that its launch coincided with Newman being made redundant: as he put it Tw1tterband became "a distraction from the woe". Musicians and a singer were recruited from among his followers (and their followers), as was a producer to pull all of the individual parts together. Within days the track had been recorded, a video was made and the project was well on its way to raising more than £2,000 in donations for MacMillan Cancer Support. Now, the band has recorded and released its second single, a cover of the Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. Johnny Marr was impressed enough to tweet a response: "Nice job. I'm touched".
Being brutally honest, the story behind Tw1tterband is probably more interesting than the group's music: there's nothing in their two songs that you wouldn't expect to hear from covers bands playing in pubs across the UK. But the project is a fine advert for Twitter's ability to forge a real sense of shared experience among strangers. As a result of Newman's idea, several dozen people who've never met have felt the joy of playing music together; something that would, until quite recently, only have been possible if they'd been in the same room.
Now it's over to Heap to see if her crowd-sourcing experiments can achieve that same true sense of artistic community and create a genuinely worthwhile piece of music.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Justin Bieber's haircut: my brush with destiny
Stuart Heritage plots to bid for Justin Bieber's hair, extract his DNA and clone an army of Biebersaurs
There was something magical about Justin Bieber's old hairstyle. Equal parts Peter Beale, Velma Dinkley and Bobby Charlton, it almost single-handedly defined an entire generation. When people thought of Justin Bieber, they immediately thought of his hair. That doesn't happen very often. Perhaps only Jennifer Aniston and Phil Oakey from The Human League can truly understand what this feels like.
But then, last month, Bieber decided to cut his hair. It was not a popular decision by any means. An estimated 80,000 fans — equivalent to almost the entire population of Jersey — immediately stopped following Bieber on Twitter. It marked the end of a dream.
But Bieber remained a philanthropist at heart, which is why he chose to donate a lock of his shorn hair to Ellen DeGeneres on her talkshow last week. Ellen promptly listed the hair on eBay to raise money for abused farmyard animals. And that's when I decided to buy it.
Actually, that's not strictly true. Initially I didn't want to buy Justin Bieber's hair at all. The Guardian made me do it. To begin with I wasn't very keen. But the longer I thought about it, the more appealing the prospect became. I wouldn't just be buying a clump of teenage hair – I'd be buying a business opportunity. If I won I could quite easily turn a profit by turning them into, for example, incredibly prestigious hairplugs.
Or, better yet, I could extract Justin's DNA from the hair, combine it with some frog blood and open a Jurassic Park-style themepark full of marauding Biebersaurs. Or I could follow the lead of Lex Luthor in Superman IV and hold the world to ransom with an evil, nuclear-powered Justin Bieber clone that I created by firing the hair into the sun. This wasn't just a silly stunt any more. This was my destiny.
Who cares what the hair would cost? It would be a small price to pay for such a timeless piece of music memorabilia – the equivalent of Elvis Presley's jumpsuit or John Lennon's glasses or, you know, the dungarees that the bloke from Brother Beyond used to wear. Or something.
So, finally, at 4.24pm yesterday, with the fearless spirit of adventure stinging my nostrils, I placed a bid of $12,700. And that's when I had a nervous breakdown.
What the hell was I thinking? $12,700? For some hair? That's almost £8,000! I didn't have that sort of money to hurl about, especially for some hair. I prayed that someone, anyone, would outbid me. Was I ever really going to invent the Biebersaur? That was just a stupid pipe dream. I would of course be helping the abused farmyard animals, but you can't pay your rent by cheering up a pig, can you?
My agony was shortlived. Nine minutes later, at 4.35pm, I was outbid. What followed was an explosion of conflicting emotions – relief and disappointment, joy and bereavement. I wasn't stupid enough to bid again, and that meant facing up to some uncomfortable truths. Goodbye hair. Goodbye fearless spirit of adventure. Goodbye evil, nuclear-powered Justin Bieber clone. But hello common sense. And hello money. And hello knowledge that some idiot would now have to spend at least $12,800 just to own a few pieces of hair. I'd learnt my lesson. Never again would I bid on anything belonging to Justin Bieber. Unless he auctioned off his milk teeth, obviously. Who wouldn't want those?
Justin Bieber's hair auction runs out at 6pm today, UK time. If you are incredibly rich and profoundly stupid, you can buy it here. As I type, it's currently an extremely reasonable $15,000.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - La Vie En Punk
France has long been overlooked by punk historians. Thirty years on, a new documentary gives the likes of Stinky Toys and Metal Urbain their dues
The rise of Air, Daft Punk and their bastard clubland spawn Justice have changed everything, of course – but traditionally, French pop has been regarded as something of a bad joke. Received wisdom has it that in terms of popular music, the French are followers not leaders, repackaging British and American music for domestic consumption – see the preposterous degree of success afforded to the comical "French Elvis", Johnny Hallyday.
Enlightening, then, to hear a forthcoming Radio 4 documentary that takes a contrary view. In Liberty, Fraternity, Anarchy: Le Punk Français, presenter Andrew Hussey revisits Paris 30 years on to speak to some of the musicians behind the first wave of French punk – the likes of Stinky Toys, Metal Urbain and Marie et les Garçons. In doing so, he notes that France was a key influence on the intellectual language of punk rock – and argues that far from riding the coat-tails of their English and American peers, early French punk groups were applying futuristic, electronic invention to the form back when much of the fluidity and freedom of UK punk was stiffening into cliche.
Geoff Bird, producer of Liberty, Fraternity, Anarchy, argues that the chief difference displayed by early French punk artists was their approach to electronics. "Some French bands were similar to UK and US groups in terms of lineup, but the likes of Metal Urbain really did do something different. They made a conscious decision to get rid of the drum kit, even though they had a decent drummer – then they took the electric kit and ramped it up in a way nobody had done before in the name of emphasising the artificial." Around the same time in the UK, the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, the Human League and the Normal were spearheading the idea of rudimentary electronic music with punk attitude. But, says Bird, Metal Urbain's employment of synthesiser as a constituent tool of a punk lineup was distinctive.
The programme goes on to chart the way that revolutionary mid-20th century French thinkers such as Guy Debord and the Lettrists inspired some of UK punk's movers and shakers, including Malcolm McLaren, Jamie Reid and Tony Wilson – an influence already well-documented, most notably in Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. In France, the inspiration of Debord's Situationism loomed large in the riots of May 1968, and as Stinky Toys' Elli Medeiros tells Hussey, such revolutionary thought still loomed large a decade later. "I watched interviews with student demonstrators in Paris in 1976 who said they were definitely working in the tradition of the Situationists and the 1968 crowd – but that things were less hopeful, darker, which obviously fits with punk very neatly." Nor were the early French groups slouches in a visual sense: many designed their own clothes and record sleeves, while Bazooka, a "graphic commando" cell of radical French illustrators with reported ties to the Baader-Meinhof gang exerted a strong aesthetic influence.
With the arguable exception of Metal Urbain, French groups of the era never won an international audience, and even in retrospect, it's not easy to see why. Was it a xenophobic UK music press, resistant to the idea of French punk? Was it that the French language was unsuited for crafting easily communicable rock anthems? Or was it simply that French groups didn't quite cut it next to their UK and US peers? Regardless, Liberty, Fraternity, Anarchy makes a strong case for the importance of the French first-wavers. "It marked the point when for the first time in pop history, the French were involved from the very earliest days of a musical movement," says Bird. "You had bands up and running as early as the UK bands, determined to make a noise and be heard, often in their own language. There was no deference. Nobody was waiting to be told what to do."
Liberty, Fraternity, Anarchy: Le Punk Français airs on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am, 3 March 2011
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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