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- Do Björk's apps break new ground?
The singer's shows at the Manchester international festival will be accompanied by 'companion apps'. Is this the future?
It has been announced that Björk has chosen this year's Manchester international festival to unveil what a suitably breathless press release describes as her "most ambitious and exciting work to date". In six shows across June and July, everyone's favourite Icelander will premiere a multimedia project called Biophilia. Apparently it's all to do with the universe and the planets and atomic structure and whatnot. It all sounds a bit like Professor Brian Cox the Musical (in a good way).
But for all its talk of the show's "bespoke gamelan-celeste hybrid", "bespoke digitally-controlled pipe organ" and (presumably not bespoke) "30-foot pendulum that harnesses the Earth's gravitational pull to create musical patterns", what the press release seems most excited about is the "companion apps" which, we're told, will be arriving in the iTunes store soon. More than one of them, too, from the sound of it. It doesn't say what the apps will actually do, but it doesn't need to, because you don't get much more cutting edge than apps. Apps are cool.
A lot of them are also a bit rubbish. According to a study by software company Localytics published in February, 26% of all mobile phone apps are only ever opened once. That fate surely awaits many of the musicians' apps which are fast becoming an essential part of any big act's campaign.
Artist-related apps usually fall into three categories. First, the fan-rinsing money spinner (the truly appalling Robbie Williams Racing game springs to mind). Second, the box-ticking rehash of content you'd find on the artist's website via your mobile browser. And third, the genuinely clever/interesting/innovative app which you think is great when you download it, but very quickly forget about.
Notable examples of that last category include the xx's app, which allows you to recreate a concert on a table with a different member playing on each of three iPhones; the I Am T-Pain app, which lets you add your digitally-corrected warble to one of the R&B singer's tunes; and The Streets' Mike Scanner app, which offered free gifts if you scanned particular barcodes. All three of those were genuinely diverting ideas, very well realised.
But even putting aside the fact that only a small proportion of the acts' fanbases – those with the right kind of phones – can access them, none have the impact and longevity of a great piece of music or even a good video. In other words, it's hard to think of a musician's app which has had true artistic value in its own right. The implication of today's announcement seems to be that Björk's apps will achieve that – and it would be great if they did (although you do wonder why she'll need several apps, rather than just one with all the content).
Either way, musician-related apps are only going to get more ubiquitous. Not just because they still seem to lend an act an air of cutting-edge cool, but because - at a time when many listeners simply can't comprehend why you'd pay for music - people will happily shell out a few quid for an app. And if there's actually money to be made from something, the music industry simply can't afford not to throw its weight behind it.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Behind the music: Labrinth on life with Simon Cowell
The producer of Tinie Tempah's Brit single of the year Pass Out explains why he's signed to the X Factor creator's Syco
When Labrinth signed with Syco it raised a few eyebrows. Why would the producer and co-writer behind one of the most interesting breakthrough underground tracks of last year – Tinie Tempah's Brit single of the year, Pass Out – choose to get in bed with Simon Cowell's pop factory, which churns out conveyer-belt Identikit pop stars? "Syco is a machine, like X Factor is a machine, and sometimes to affect the machine you've got to get involved with it," the producer/artist explains. "We had an offer from Universal's Island Records, too, but we figured I might get lost in the shuffle there as they have quite a few artists in my genre. At Syco I'd get their full attention." I'm sure getting his own imprint, Odd Child, on the label sweetened the deal as well.
The success Labrinth has enjoyed over the last year did not happen overnight. Despite feeling ready to take on the world at the age of 15, it took another six years of passion, tenacity, enthusiasm, and an insatiable hunger for knowledge to achieve it. Along the way there were a few false starts, with the ensuing disappointment and frustration.
Growing up in a family of musicians Labrinth (real name Timothy McKenzie) spent his childhood experimenting in his older brother's home studio. When his brother moved out Labrinth, then 13, was left with a Casio keyboard and a tape recorder. Refusing to let this temper his desire to create music, he managed to blag studio time from some professional musicians he befriended, and by the time he met his manager, Marc Williams, two years later, he felt ready for success. Williams, however, had different plans for him. Bravely, he gave the young teenager the keys to his studio and instructed him to study all genres of music. "One day he played me George Benson, and it blew my mind. I got obsessed with it," Labrinth enthuses. And so he picked up a jazz guitar book to find out how Benson got where he is, learning how to "make something sound easy to do when it isn't." Perhaps surprisingly he says his current favourite artists are David Bowie (especially his 70s albums), Blondie, Coltrane, Weather Report, Parliament and numerous gospel artists.
Williams tried to teach him how to make library music – generic tracks, often similar to current hits, in different genres that are bought by companies to be used in the background for advertising and television shows – but everything the teenager came up with ended up sounding too different and unique to be used. That was not an obstacle, however, when he encountered Master Shortie at a house-warming party hosted by an aspiring artist he'd met on MySpace. It was a meeting of minds, and they spent the following day making music, with Labrinth accompanying the rapper on acoustic guitar. Soon the then 17-year-old was producing and co-writing Master Shortie's ADHD album.
"I wouldn't say it was a great or perfect album, but it was a great expression of art – and it was a very important moment in my career," says Labrinth. It brought him to the attention of Tinie Tempah. At the time, he was teaching a workshop in Hackney. "I was working with kids that were a bit ghetto, giving them another avenue instead of 'your hood is all you've got'." That's where he met Danny D (manager of Stargate) and Tim Blacksmith who offered him a deal with EMI Publishing.
"I never thought about selling music or about it being a business till I signed my publishing deal," he says. Before then it was all about expression, as he sent his tracks to pirate radio or performed them at functions. "Back then it was like, 'I've drawn this picture, can you take a look at it.'" He laments the lack of artist development among labels, saying that the reason we have so few legends is that artists are not given the room to grow. "They signed me for being different and then people asked me to be like whoever was successful at the time. I think a lot of the big boys have to be careful about what they push on new kids coming through, because sometimes that can spoil something amazing and pure. I'm from Hackney and it's an area that is not so pretty, and we have a different way of expressing ourselves than somebody from uptown that has lots of money. I understand that they [the music companies] have to be careful where they invest their money and trust what has worked already. But writing a hit song is an imprecise science – you never know when it's going to come."
Labrinth spent the following year working with a multitude of artists writing many songs that were never released. "I did feel nervous. I thought maybe I had to do what everyone else was doing," he says. It also made him quite depressed.
Meanwhile, A&R people opened their eyes to Labrinth, the artist, as his track Let the Sunshine started doing the circuit around record labels. At the time, he was producing an artist called Bluey Robinson (whom he also met through MySpace), and the labels' attention turned to Robinson instead. Suddenly, none of the labels returned his manager's phone calls. "But even though that was a frustrating time, it wasn't wasted, as I learned so much from it. 2009 helped me become stronger – it conditioned me for what was to come."
The phone remained quiet when Pass Out (which was originally meant for Robinson, who passed on it as it was a bit "too gritty" for him) was first released. That all changed when the track shot to the top of the Shazam chart – a litmus test for dance music.
As well as being excited about the success he's had since then, Labrinth says he's been feeling stressed by the pressures that come with it, He often refers back to the freedom he felt when he was just making music for the sake of it. "But I'm getting accustomed to the pressure now. I can shake hands with it and say, 'You don't bother me any more,'" he insists. So isn't he worried that his freedom will be even more stifled in the confinement of a label like Syco? How long will it be before Cowell tells him to do a cover of Unchained Melody? Labrinth maintains that Syco has taken a hands-off approach to his creative process. "All they've done is taking what we bring them and amping it up."
Squeezing in work on his music between producing for others has been difficult, but he's soon off to Sweden to work with Swedish House Mafia, and is going to Nashville to collaborate on songs that are "a combination of country and dance music" for his upcoming album. Six months ago, Williams was asked to do a library track sounding like Tinie Tempah's Pass Out. The irony wasn't lost on him and his protege.
Labrinth will appear at the MusicConnex conference, Kings Place London, on 19 April, relaying his experiences in the music industry and the studio
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Smiley Culture, Jeff Buckley – why the death of a star can leave you in tears
It's a weird and uncomfortable feeling for a journalist when a musician you have interviewed has died
When news of Smiley Culture's death during a police raid broke on Tuesday, I was as shocked as anybody. He'd only had two hits in the 80s, but his singles Police Officer and Cockney Translation pioneered a cheeky, narrative street style that reverberates through pop today. They were great, great singles and the manner of his death was shocking. But something else troubled me about his passing. Just months ago, I'd been speaking to Smiley on the phone.
For a journalist, it's a weird and uncomfortable feeling when someone you've interviewed has died. On the one hand, an interview is a short, transient, sometimes even formal process. I must have had Smiley on the phone for all of 20 minutes. But sometimes, even in short encounters like that one, artists tell you things about themselves and open up emotionally. When they subsequently die, especially in such shocking circumstances as Smiley, it's hard not to feel a personal connection, even grief.
The one that really got me was World of Twist's singer Tony Ogden, who passed away in 2006 and whose music and death affected me so much I felt compelled to go to his funeral. Although they never made it big, the Manchester band played one of the best gigs I saw in the 1990s, at Leeds Warehouse. Sons of the Stage (currently being played live by Beady Eye) is one of my favourite singles of all time, and only months before his death Ogden had been reminiscing on the phone. He sent me a CD of his new music and I promised to give him an opinion, but somehow lost his number. He left me messages – always beginning, "Dave, it's Tony O," – but never left a return number. I tried to get a message to him through his old record company, to no avail. When he died, my girlfriend found me in floods of tears. The death of someone I never even met had affected me terribly. I felt I'd let him down.
It's no easier when you've met them personally. In 1994, I interviewed Jeff Buckley for what must have been hours. There was a different connection to normal because we'd both lost fathers when we were very young, and, as a new artist, he'd never been interviewed about this before and opened up for ages. I saw him a few times after that and while it would be an exaggeration to say we were friends, I still remember how he ruffled my hair in affection before a gig in Dublin. He's been dead for 14 years – after plunging into the Mississippi river – but barely a week passes in which I don't think about him in some way.
When stars you've interviewed die, the chances are they haven't passed away happily at the end of a long life with a pint of beer in their hand. They have probably died young, often in shocking circumstances. I remember Lush's drummer Chris Acland as a cheery, easy-going guy who could talk for hours about punk rock, which doesn't square at all with his 1996 suicide. Similarly, the Michael Hutchence I spent a memorable night drinking with in 1994 just doesn't square with the troubled character who, just three years later, would die a strange and lonely death.
I suppose this tells me that whatever people tell a journalist about their deepest feelings and however much you think you've bonded, you never really know them, and it's naive to feel you do. Meanwhile, their music and articles about them continue to keep them in your memory. When I spoke to a chatty and amusing Smiley Culture last summer, I never expected to be penning his obituary this year. It feels like a bad dream you suddenly expect to wake up from. I'd love to be able to pick up the phone again and ask: "Smiley, you came across like a really happy-go-lucky guy. This week, what the hell happened?"
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Magic Bullets – Sigh the Day Away
A jangly, Smiths-like sound mixed with a drop of Orange Juice and a hint of Simon Le Bon produces breezy, carefree music
Sigh the Day Away, the closing track on Magic Bullets, the self-titled second album from the San Francisco five-piece, is the kind of hybrid of (mainly British) influences that shouldn't really work. At first, you find yourself playing spot the reference. A hint of the Smiths in the jangly guitar, a smattering of Orange Juice, a tiny bit of Simon Le Bon in the vocal (or is that just me?). But after a few listens the breezy, brilliantly carefree melodies nestle in and the song takes shape. Despite the title and general lyrical content ("It wouldn't hurt you to smile, why not try it out for a while"), the British love for melancholy doesn't hang heavy and there's a sprightly, college radio feel to it all.
Magic Bullets play SXSW at Emo's Jr in Austin on 17 March. Their album is out through Mon Amie Records on 21 March.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Jon Savage on song: The Zombies – Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914)
Colin Blunstone's first band does a great job of capturing the anti-war sentiment of the 1960s in this extraordinary song
Listen to Butcher's TaleBetween the end of the first world war and the start of the second, there was a gap of 21 years. The second world war ended in 1945, and 20 years later – during 1965 – the US greatly increased its military involvement in Vietnam, a conscription war that haunted a generation of young Americans and slowly tore the country apart.
In Britain there was no conscription after the end of national service in 1960. In the mid to late 60s, the then Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, resisted attempts by the US president, Lyndon Johnson, to involve Britain in the Vietnam war. The country's involvement in the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland was undertaken by the standing army.
This left a generation of British youth wondering about the war that hadn't come. There were plenty of alternatives, not least among them the cold war with its visions of nuclear annihilation. There was also the long shadow of the second world war – the bombsites, the violent explosions and unspoken psychological damage that lay behind the stiff upper lip which had made survival possible.
The birth of so many 60s musicians coincided with horrific events. Mick Jagger's arrival in late July 1943 occurred while the RAF was carpet-bombing Hamburg, while Pete Townshend, born in May 1945, came into the world during the last days of the Hitler regime. In recent years, Townshend has given many interviews that refer to the war, and the damage done to his parents' generation and their children.
On Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914), from 1968, the Zombies went further back. The song begins with a wheezing organ, with sound-effects like a breath from a horror movie, before a stark accordion sets up the first verse: "A butcher yes that was my trade/ But the king's shilling is now my fee/ A butcher I may as well have stayed/ For the slaughter that I see".
Colin Blunstone had one of the most smooth and sensuous voices of the period, but here it's strained and wobbly, jerking in time with the stop-start rhythm. On the shell-shocked chorus – "And I can't stop shaking/ My hands won't stop shaking/ My arms won't stop shaking/ My mind won't stop shaking" – it cracks, only resolving in the simple, heartfelt statement: "I want to go home".
Like Eric Burdon and the Animals' contemporaneous single Sky Pilot, the Zombies comment on the hypocrisy of organised religion – "And the preacher in his pulpit/ Sermon: 'Go and fight, do what is right'/ But he don't have to hear these guns/ And I'll bet he sleeps at night" – but Butcher's Tale is reined in while the Animals' song is, in their customary fine style, over the top.
The juddering rhythm – like the automatism of shock victims – is relentless, setting up the full horror of the second verse: "And I have seen a friend of mine/ Hang on the wire/ Like some rag toy/ Then in the heat the flies come down/ And cover up the boy". The accordion rises and falls, without resolution, a closed loop. There is no escape and there never will be.
This is a serious song about an extremely serious subject that succeeds because of its restraint and complete synchronicity of form with content, of music with lyric, of feeling with imagination. The Zombies did not experience the western front, but they projected themselves into a terrible event with all the considerable talent at their disposal.
Butcher's Tale is unlike anything else on Odessey and Oracle – an album of melodic British pop with contemporary psych touches. Much of it is upbeat, with a few more reflective moments such as A Rose For Emily and Care of Cell 44. But Butcher's Tale is the record's dark heart The one stark moment of experience that makes the happiness expressed elsewhere even more delightful.
The horror of the first world war is all the more intense because of the disparity between people's expectations – the pro-war euphoria that swept European cities in August 1914 – and the reality of mass slaughter. The number of dead ranked in the millions, a figure that did not recognise the many more left maimed in mind and body – the ruined men of the 1920s.
Even in 1968, the first world war still cast a powerful shadow over Britain – the memorials, the ceremonies, the still prevalent feeling of a disaster so terrible that it broke the country forever. I remember this sensation of loss very strongly from my 60s childhood/teenhood, and it is that atmosphere that the Zombies capture so accurately in this extraordinary anti-war song.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New Music: Thom Yorke, Burial and Four Tet – Ego
Time for the fans to get excited again, as the Radiohead frontman forms part of electronica supergroup
Last month, Radiohead surprised everyone by announcing a brand new album, The King Of Limbs, just days before it was released. The fact that the initial release date was bumped forward by a day and heralded by a Thom Yorke workout video only added to the excitement. Well, on Tuesday the time came for Yorke fans to get excited again, as details of a vinyl-only single with Four Tet and Burial emerged. The double A-side, Ego/Mirrors (limited to just 300 copies), will be released through Four Tet's Text label.
Above is a radio rip of Ego, a six-and-a-half minute track that builds from a fairly standard, intricately programmed opening before Yorke's plaintive croon emerges from the fog to create a surprisingly melodic centre. Strange percussive tweaks and odd keyboard lines rise and fall throughout before a beautiful piano flurry emerges around the five-minute mark. This creates a rather more warming coda to the chilly opening.
Ego/Mirrors is released on 21 March and can be pre-ordered online – although be warned that the first supply of stock has inevitably already sold out.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Smiley Culture remembered by Dennis Bovell and David Rodigan
The UK's reggae community recall their friend, the Cockney Translator
Britain's reggae community burned their illusions a long time ago but right across the spectrum there is wave of shock at the way David Emmanuel, best known as Smiley Culture, died from "self-inflicted" stab wounds during a police raid on his home in Surrey on Tuesday.
Back in 1984, Smiley Culture bounced into the nation's consciousness with Cockney Translation and its Top 20 follow up Police Officer – a graphic tale of how he was arrested for possession of "ganja", but evaded prosecution when recognised as the reggae artist who did "the Cockney Translator".
Following an appearance on Top of the Pops, doors opened for Smiley. In 1986, he made a cameo appearance alongside Sade and David Bowie in Julien Temple's film Absolute Beginners and he earned himself a TV contract to make a show called Club Mix On Channel 4. Unfortunately such momentum was to fade.
Producer Dennis Bovell, musical director of the Barbican's recent Reggae Britannia event, has no illusions when it comes to the law and black Britain. In the mid 70s, after a sound system dance in north London, he was arrested and charged under the archaic law of Riot and Affray. Dennis suffered imprisonment and a protracted Old Bailey appeal before being cleared of all charges and when I spoke to him on Tuesday night, he was clearly distressed by Smiley's demise.
"I knew Smiley Culture as a youth," he told me. "His contribution was invaluable. Smiley united the cockney with the Jamaican patois. He was a cheeky chappie and his name says it all." Dennis also voiced his disquiet over the circumstances surrounding Smiley's death.
Sound system selector David Rodigan told me: "Smiley was in the vanguard of British reggae MCs because he was one the first to use London-style toasting on Jamaican rhythms – branding British regggae music with its own identity.
"I remember taking Cockney Translation down to Jamaica and playing it on the radio and Jamaica went crazy for it. That record more than anything else epitomised what he was able to do. He reflected a new culture, a new society in which that first generation of West Indians were living. Brilliant timing and in terms of his abilities as a writer – very witty.
"Smiley was a pioneer of British reggae and he was paramount in announcing that development, that awareness, because he did it live and on record. It was completely fresh. Everything that happened in that period of 81, 82, 83 ... for the first time British reggae music had its own identity. The Jamaicans realised it: they were aware of it and they enjoyed it."
I first encountered Smiley myself, together with his sparring partner Asher Senator, back in the 80s while freelancing as a writer for the NME. As MCs they had worked their way to the peak of their profession alongside other British acts such as Tippa Irie and the inimitable Philip "Papa" Levi. Of course, they all studied the lyrical excursions of the Jamaican MCs, but they opted to address the dancehall with tales that were akin to their own inner city experiences. They reinvented their delivery, an innovation that peaked with Levi's explosive "fast style". It was a sign of their standing among the dancehall fraternity that Smiley and Asher were able to work for the long-standing sound system Sir Coxsone Outernational as well as for the fiercely radical Saxon Studio International.
Following his chart success with Police Officer, Smiley signed to a major label, Polydor, but the recordings for which he will be remembered came out on Fashion Records. The label was a spin-off from John MacGillivray's Dub Vendor record store and Chris Lane's dub-cutting facility. They operated from a subterranean studio beneath their emporium in Clapham Junction.
"Fashion was at the heart of UK MC explosion," MacGillivray also told me on Tuesday night. "We were working with Maxi Priest, Papa Face, Pato Banton, Macka B, Asher Senator and Smiley Culture. If you put Smiley in a room with all those other people he was always the star. He had the charisma. When he was doing TV work everyone wanted to know him. He could have gone along way because he had the capability, a keen sense of humour and an ability to get on with people.
"Smiley was the real deal. He had cross-over capability while being entirely street. He was genuinely representative of his community at that time. He was a cultural phenomenon … the lyrics for Cockney Translation were used in schools. If you were a reggae artist back then there was only one bite of the cherry. He was the Dizzee Rascal of his time but they were different times."
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