This looks fun...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2011/jun/22/glastonbury-festival...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/15/pandora-valuation-soars#star...
Now, I remember using Pandora excitedly for about 5 minutes a good few years ago before it disappeared from European shores, but hasn't it been rendered more or less redundant by more recent arrivals on the scene? Weird

So REM return. Leaving aside any artistic considerations, we can safely predict the album will sell fewer than the one before. Should they then, for purely commercial reasons, have split up long ago? After Monster for example. Let’s compare a few British bands that also enjoyed their biggest commercial success in the 90s.
Blur: last album, the lukewarmly received Think Tank in 2003. Went Gold, a far cry from the multi-platinum glory days of Parklife and Great Escape. Never split but shed a guitarist and went away a long time, regrouped, managing to briefly lure back much-loved guitarist. Result – much bigger in 2009 than 2003, just by buggering off for a little while.
Pulp: Famously their best-of reached number 71 with a rocket for one week in 2002. A precipitous descent from Different Class in 95. Split follows. 2011: they reform to huge fanfare and will soon be headlining festivals. Bigger than ever
Suede: Last album, New Morning (2002), limped to number 24. Didn’t even go Silver – sold less than 60,000. They were truly yesterday’s men. Split follows. 2010: reform and are soon headlining O2, headlining festivals, 3 nights at Brixton Academy, etc. Bigger than ever.
Supergrass: Three year gaps between albums, but they never go away, ever diminishing returns results in last album (2008) limping to number 19 to universal indifference and they slink off into the night. How huge could their 2010 comeback have been if they’d split after their self-titled album of 1999?
Teenage Fanclub: Huge gaps between albums, but they never split up or reform, just soldier on manfully. Last album Shadows (2010) affectionately received but only limps to number 30-something. How huge could their 2012 reunion be if they’d split after Songs from Northern Britain?
Charlatans: Wikipedia informs me they’ve released 11 albums and are still going – did anyone know that? If the TOOIK hitmakers had reformed twenty years after the first album even I may have been tempted to go along.
So the question is: how many nights at the O2 would a reformed REM sell out this year if they’d split after Monster when the commercial decline began? And surely any self-respecting manager should be encouraging his declining charges to sod off for a few years (remembering to announce that they’re splitting beforehand) with the promise of riches aplenty when the inevitable reformation rolls around? Maybe that’s just what the White Stripes manager did.

While wandering through the centre of Madrid with the family yesterday who should we bump into but Norman Blake and cronies from Teenage Fanclub. I’m so disconnected from these things that they’d played the night before and I didn’t even know – my favourite group! My Beatles. Bugger. Still, I managed to shake hands, several times, gibber on about the wonder that is Shadows, how Songs From Northern Britain is the greatest album ever made and say thanks for 20 years of wonderful music. Best of all my six year old met and said hello to the man who wrote and sung her favourite song – Baby Lee. And all the while they smiled happily, freed up hands for the shaking, were profuse in their thanks, and seemed genuinely touched and surprised by the attention rather than put out by having their lunch interrupted by a gibbering fool.

I am 38. Don’t we ever grow out of this sort of behaviour? Still, Teenage flipping Fanclub! Marvellous.

I’m currently reading Paul Du Noyer’s fine history of London music, In the City. One of his recommended essential London tracks is a piece of late 60s psychedelia called Nodnol (see what they did there?) by a bunch of unknowns called the Spectrum. The title tickled my fancy, I’ve had a listen and it’s rather lovely. But the fascinating thing, on digging deeper, was the subsequent career of said Spectrum’s Keith Forsey:

Spectrum existed between 1967 & 1970 releasing several singles and one album to little or no success…. apart, that is, from performing the theme tune to Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, having their costumes designed by Gerry Anderson’s wife and appearing in the Lady Penelope comic.

The story doesn’t end there. Post-Spectrum he worked with Giorgio Moroder and played drums on I Feel Love and various Boney M tracks amongst others.

He then produced Billy Idol throughout his ‘glory’ years.

He then went on to write Don’t You Forget About Me and Flashdance and produce the soundtracks Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop II and the Breakfast Club, no doubt turning himself into a multi-millionaire in the process.

From psychedelic also-ran, through game-changing innovator, to artistically questionable 80s enormo-success in 15 easy years. Can anyone beat that?

Just polished off this amazing doorstop of a book in three days in the incongruous setting of a poolside near Marbella. Know little of folk but was inspired to purchase by the recent podcast, for which many thanks. Best music book I’ve read in many a year.

Have always loved three of the artists covered in relative depth – Talk Talk/Julian Cope /Nick Drake – but most of the rest is entirely unknown to me. Have now revisited some long-ignored Fairport CDs and they’re wonderful, particularly Unhalfbricking. Have also been Spotifying – Heron, who I’d never even heard of, sound superb but others, the ISB for example, sound almost painfully of their time. Also feel I’m going to struggle with some of the more trad stuff but am excited about exploring the more prog/psych end – Trees, Forest, Comus, Kaleidoscope, etc. Plus, no idea why I’ve ignored Sandy Denny for so long – right up my street by the sound of it.

So much choice, so little time (and indeed money). What recommendations would the folking element of the Massive make for a beginner?

Very surprised to find myself poasting about the football, but hey…

Spain the country, for all its myriad charms and my profound love for the place, is not at its best right now: economically challenged, ever increasing politically-motivated regionalism, a catastrophically poor political class (at both national and regional level), endemic corruption, etc. The list goes on and the immediate future is not bright.

But last night’s game shows something which I am often loath to admit – football, despite much evidence to the contrary, can be a massive force for the good. A bunch of players from all over Spain, who all appear to get on, whether they’re Catalans, Basques, Valencians or whatever, who don’t act like prima donnas (hello England and France) and who play attractive football (a few more goals would help of course) as a team – despite containing global superstars it never feels like them with a few others to make up the numbers (hello Portugal). I live 500 metres from the Bernabeu and the noise emanating from the crowds watching on the big screens last night was truly spectacular – going by the news this morning that was repeated in the streets of Bilbao, Barcelona, A Coruña, Valencia, Pamplona and all places in between. For anyone even vaguely aware of the reality of Spain today this was quite something to behold.

Of course it changes nothing really, the future is still not the brightest, but it’s left this cricket-loving football agnostic with a warm glow inside and a new found, even if possibly temporary, love for (international) football. Just felt like sharing.

Have you got yours yet? If you haven't you should because it's bloody marvelous. Their best since Songs From Northern Britain.

ps. I have no connection to the Fannies whatsoever.

Good news for anyone interested in Julian H Cope the author.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/117668-faber-signs-three-from-rocker-c...

Not sure that Lives of the Prophets is for me but The Cope Compendium and the novel 131 look distinctly promising. But where's the third part of the autobiography? Repossessed only takes us up to 1990 and the last 20 years of Cope activity would surely result in a stonking read.

Something I’ve been pondering recently. What’s going to happen to touring abroad? Obviously not at, say, Depeche Mode level, who’ve just played two nights in a big shed here in Madrid. But at the subsistence end, the Great Lake Swimmers for example, who played round the corner not long ago. How can it be economically viable? – given that live is supposed to be the money-earning end of the business now.

I’m guessing at the figures. 500 people, if lucky, at 15 Euros a pop. 7500 Euros in total. Of which the band gets what, 2000? Which has to pay for bus/van hire, driver, the odd crew member, hotels possibly, shedloads of petrol, food, booze – share the leftovers among the 4 or 5 members of the band and what have they actually earned? Repeat 15/20 times in various European cities. Factor in the cost of flights to and from the US…

When a gig in a foreign city was a means to an end – reviews, publicity, bit of radio, possibly even telly, translating into record sales – then I suppose you could afford to break even, even take a loss. Possibly there was even a wealthy record company picking up the tab. Now that said gig is the end itself, given it will probably translate into hundreds even thousands of illegal downloads and double figure sales, how can it be done?

I suppose fairly soon the only way to see a UK/US group outside the UK/US will be festivals...

This is unbelievably good...

Anyone out there aware they’d released a new album (In the Music) a couple of months ago? Came across it by chance browsing emusic over the weekend. Not for anyone who prefers their music challenging, but it’s a lovely thing. Got Weightlifting at the same time which seems to be even lovelier.

Nearly twenty year gap since I last heard anything of theirs (bought the Only Tongue Can Tell 7 inch when I was doing my A levels if memory serves) but I’m thoroughly enjoying our renewed acquaintance.

... to the Randomizer?

Just fancied singing their praises. Think their run of fantastic films must be one of the most remarkable in all cinema history – particularly so given the conservative dreck their live action competitors have churned out over the same period. So good and so consistent it’s easy to take them for granted (and fob them off with a best animation statuette when a strong argument could be made for them walking off with the main prize every time they release a film).

The wonderful Up inspires this post. Whoever thought making the hero of, what is after all ostensibly a children’s film, a grumpy, elderly, suburban widower was a good idea? What about making the first half hour or so of a Sci-Fi film a silent comedy? Or basing an entire, multi-million dollar American film around a French rat?

Gob smacking conceits they make work against all the odds.

Up’s not perfect but if anyone claims to see a more brilliant and moving scene this year than that showing said grumpy widower's married life from beginning to end then I don’t believe them.

Go see (whatever your age).

Stuck for something to read over the weekend, tired, irritable, unable to concentrate and not fancying any of the dozens of books on the ‘to read’ shelf, I turned, yet again, to that old reliable Wodehouse. Within seconds I was laughing – ‘If he had a mind, there was something on it’- and all was well with the world and now I fancy reading again. Wodehouse is infallible like that.

Music-wise, in those increasingly common moments when excess choice and over-exposure leads to scrambled synapses and musical meltdown, the one guarantee, whatever the mood, is Gerry Love of Teenage Fanclub. A blast of Sparky’s Dream, Ain’t that Enough or Going Places works every single time. Job done, enthusiasm and love of music rediscovered.

So, what are your cultural palate cleansers?