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Posts from the ‘music’ Category

Jan 14

Keep The Faith 65′

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It all started with a song ‘Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) by Frank Wilson’.

Its upbeat tempo and passion infused lyrics are intoxicating. You can’t help but feel it. You can’t help but dance to it, and you can’t help but want more.

My parents were both born in a Northern town (Leyland, Lancashire) and lived their young adult years through the sixties and early seventies. They were heavily influenced by the movement that was Northern Soul.

When I hit 25, my Dad started revisiting many of the sounds that emerged during this time. I hadn’t realised there was such a back catalogue of soul music. Music that stemmed from the great American music scene that was Motown.

I always loved Soul music – Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin etc, but I was cautious never to play it too often. I believed that the tracks were few and the sound precious. I didn’t want to wear it out!

But here was Northern Soul. A movement consisting of 1000’s of previously released and unrealised soul records.

During one family event, the music proved so popular that my Dad and his original mod crew decided to setup a charity soul event - Soulaid. Since the turn of the century the charity has held six to ten soul nights each year, each event raising up to £1000 for a local charity.

These Soul Nights introduced me to the culture that envelopes Northern Soul – the dance, the fashion, the community, the talcum powder, and most importantly, the discovery of new sounds.

And as you get a little older, and you learn about love – love gained, love lost, the lyrics, they call out to you. In 2012, they saved me. Some call it ‘Tears on the Dance Floor’.

The tempo so fast that you sweat out the heartache, the bass so strong that you can’t help but smile, and the lyrics so heartfelt that you can’t help but shed a tear.

So here it is. I’ve put together a seperate blog dedicated to my own journey with Northern Soul – keepthefaith65.tumblr.com.

The blog is an opportunity to share this unique and special sound with friends and and anyone else out there. An opportunity to promote events in the North of England as the movement continues its resurgence the 21st Century.

I aim to post Northern Soul music that I have found and why it speaks to me, but to also highlight contemporary artists who have adopted elements of Northern Soul, for example, Plan B, Angie Stone, Jennifer Hudson, Rebecca Ferguson, Emeli Sande, Paloma Faith, Amy Winehouse, Raphael Saadiq, Noisettes and many others.

I also hope to try my hand at spinning the decks in 2013 so I’ll let you know how that particularly ambition plays out.

Wishing you all a great year ahead.

Keep The Faith.

Dec 7

Is iTunes the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

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This was a question asked by a Hi-fi supplier in Manchester City Centre yesterday.

Think about he said.

“You buy your iPhone or iPod. You buy an expensive laptop or iMac to manage your music library, you synchronise your music library, and dock your portable music player into the latest Bose, Bowers or JLB music speaker system.

And somehow it is all a little flat. It just sounds a bit rubbish.”

In my case, it often kicks out. Try transmitting your iTunes over wireless and your musical moment comes crashing down when you switch on the microwave to defrost the chicken.

2K’s worth of hard earned cash invested in the latest and greatest music technology known to man and it doesn’t even work.

But is this the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

We are all led to believe that Apple is the trailblazer for music. Buy Apple and you are at the forefront of music innovation, but it is all a big lie.

Apple has only offered us convenience. It is convenient that our music is now portable and we can carry 1000′s of album in the palm of our hand, but have we made a mistake in assuming that convenience equates to quality?

And the swindle continues. Because we have invested so much in the iTunes revolution we continue to invest and download our music from the iTunes store. But do we ever own that music? Can a parent pass on their music collection to their son or daughter? What happens to all that content once they die? It dies with them. You never truly own the music. You are just borrowing it from the cloud. You are in fact buying air.

And the air quality is thin. The files significantly compressed to save space. They are a long way from the full studio quality output often described as FLAC – lossless audio compression and decompression.

iTunes does not have a hold on this space. There are online music stores where you can purchase FLAC. You can also burn FLAC files direct from your CD.

The man in the Manchester store sat me down, he downloaded a FLAC file and networked this with losless cables to a high-fidelity sound system.

“I won’t use a CD he said, because even the turn of the CD and the laser will lower the quality of the overall result”.

And what a result. The sound filled the room. The orchestra was right there. The vocalist sat across from me. Music like nothing you had heard before. And all for significantly less than 2K!

My advice to us all. Love iTunes for the convenience – listen on the commute, listen at work, but don’t stop buying CD’s. You own them and have a tangible product in your hand. You can also share them without a complicated password and home share system.

Convenience has been a revolution, but quality should always prevail.

Demand the best media experience available.

Jan 23

Vinyl Revival

Saturday night. A good meal and a few beers to the better. I am sat in the living room of my parents house. I suggest to my Dad that we play a few LP’s.

Looking through the album covers is like looking at works of art, and then there is the experience of pulling the record from the sleeve. Pop, crackle, the needle hits the track. Fuzz, hiss and the first chord is struck.

To all in the room, it was like discovering music for the first time. The quality of the sound oscillating from the speakers tugged at every emotion. You could feel the bass and almost witness the guitarist strumming. It was media in its purest form. The crowd cried out for more, and before the end of the night the room was dancing.

Why did it sound so good? Why did it affect us so strongly? Some clues can be found in our tolerance for quality. The innovations and social pressures of the digital age has suckered us into convenience as a replacement to quality.

Listening to that Hi-Fi on Saturday night I was reminded of what it feels like to have a band playing right there in your living room and later it made me think about what we have lost in our great march towards iPods and online players?

According to the article ‘Are You Buying Pre-Ruined Music‘, the formats adopted by popular music players is about one-eleventh the size of a full resolution CD, so the quality is invetibitably far inferior. It goes onto say that that such low-resolution tracks played through an iPod docking station that feeds into a decent hi-fidelity sound system is a disaster area.

Digital was designed for convenience, carrying your music with you when travelling or out running.

“I for one live and continue to use vinyl” Daniel Ek CEO of Spotify. According to Daniel, they believe that a lot of people will dip into music first on Spotify, and if they like it, they will buy it on vinyl or CD. Spotify is not a replacement medium. The evidence seems to confirm this claim – 86% of music sold in the UK is in physical form. While sales of singles are now almost exclusively digital, albums remain physical, with just eight per cent downloaded (1).

Presumably the tech industry will respond by improving bandwidth to rival the quality found on CD or Vinyl, but will they ever replace the tacit feeling of holding a record or the sense of ownership one receives from owning that experience. Where does the pop and crackle come from?

Perhaps technology was only ever a convenience. It was never meant to replace life, simply here to help us out a little.

I suppose there will always be two camps. Those who see the convenience of the web channel as a replacement medium and those who look to technology to simply manage the data that sits around our experiences with media, possibly capturing, sharing and documenting our experiences.

I have an inclination that the model could shift back a little. Back to high-fidelity sound, pure music, where we actually listen to instrument, voice and soul. The Internet is only an add-on that we use to collect and feed data. It is just data.

As we move further into 2012 it seems that even bigger questions are being asked of technology? According to Daniel Sieberg, technology has overwhelmed our daily lives to the point of constant distraction. Many of us can no longer focus on a single task or face-to-face conversation without wanting to reach out—or retreat—to the virtual world every few minutes. This is a real and significant problem (2).

Looking to the future of technology, John Harlow writes in The Sunday Times that after a technological advance from the iPod to Twitter, the flood of true innovation seems to have dried up – “techies are running out of ways to rock our world… Apple, Google and Microsoft are now mature refiners, concerned about their environmental footprints, not radical change, and with share prices to defend” (3).

Stronger challengers take this much further. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, passionately argues that Silicon Valley is only interested in harvesting quick profits at the expense of creating truly disruptive technologies that will solve some of the world’s biggest problems, for example, famine, cancer and new social and political systems (4).

Whilst the media and technology wars will inevitably play out for how and where we access our next media hit, I think I might take a moment to sit back, source myself a record player and start putting together the components for hi-fidelity sound. Bring on the revolution. It is the vinyl revival people.

And if the tech industry can do anything for us, can they please figure out the basics like a phone that actually keeps a signal?

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1. Is this the end for your CD collection? Andy Kerr, Whathifi.com, 04-Jun-2009.

2. The Digital Diet: The 4-step Plan to Break Your Tech Addiction and Regain Balance in Your Life. Daniel Sieberg, Souvenir Press Ltd, 01-Dec-2011.

3. Out with the old, in with the … arm, any ideas anyone? John Harlow. The Sunday Times, 15-Jan-2012.

4.Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough”. Techcrunch.com. 21-Nov-2011.

May 24

Separating Ordinary from Extraordinary

According to reports Adele’s ex-boyfriend is claiming for a slice of the profits she made on debut album ‘19’ – because he feels their relationship was the inspiration for many of the lyrics put down in the record.

Given Adele’s meteoric rise to fame and the fact that she is now worth a reported six million pounds it does raise an interesting question as to what elements make up the creative whole and who owns those elements.

In this case, the story is a familiar one: boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, boy treats girl badly, a heart is broken (reverse the story dependent on sex).

What isn’t ordinary, is girl turning that heart-break into a four times platinum album. That talent remains with one individual and no matter how frustrating that must be to the young fella concerned, his claim is audacious.

I haven’t been following Adele’s career closely, and only recently came to see her on a recent broadcast of The Graham Norton Show. She was funny, extraordinarily grounded and unpretentious. Slurping back a large glass of wine she spoke of barbecues, picnics in the park and keeping out of the lime-light. An ordinary gal from the East of London.

She then picked up the mic and with effortless ease she sung in a manner that that was far from ordinary. It was nothing short of extraordinary, and worth every penny of that six million.

Feb 16

2 Comments

Nobody talks about albums anymore

I was sat with my Dad recently, rhyming nonsense over a pint or two, but I remember him saying “Nobody talks about albums anymore”.

I gave my usual, over hyped, over enthusiastic response to how digital downloads was a technology that leant itself to the track, and how much better we all are not having to spend our cash on fifteen tracks when all you want is two. The music industry recognise this, land the killer track Mr Cee Lo Green and you are at The Grammy’s and The Brits.

But what about the album? The technology that asked for a story. Two sides of musical escapism, where each track is carefully positioned before the next one. And when an album gets it right, they become (became) the must have item; the thing we all talk (talked) about. What’s The Story Morning Glory – Oasis, Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana, Bad – Michael Jackson, The Freewheelin’ – Bob Dylan. I could go on and on, but the tough question is to name a great album from the last five years.

They could well be there, but they don’t roll off the tongue. The track is more prominent, although more transient. Here today, gone tomorrow. Its value has some how been lowered, but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. With lower value comes greater variety. The album was of a time and a technology, but to the artist there is real creative potential in telling a story, bringing music together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. To the listener, there is more to absorb, to take your time over.

To my Dad, I say pick up a copy of ‘The Defamation of Strickland Banks – Plan B‘. I’ve been listening to this album over the last couple of weeks. It is an album to talk about, composed as a whole, relaying a story, and until yesterday (The Brits 2011), I had thought this was the story of Plan B or Ben Drew. It isn’t. It is only his imagination and storytelling. That now said, it might even be worth buying on vinyl, just to hear the snap, crackle and pop and to really take the time to listen to this creative whole.

Dec 25

The Fairytale of New York


This song doesn’t just encapsulate one moment in time. Instead it captures just about everything I have loved and been loved by in this world.

I love Christmas. I love that there is one day of the year that you can wake up and you know the world is at peace – no traffic, no more shopping, no rushing – just friends, good food and happiness.

The USA has also been a distinguishing flavour of my life. A child of the 80′s and a generation communicated to through TV, I was heavily influenced by American culture – Sesame Street, The A-Team, Back to the Future, Gremlins and most recently Friends. This led to many memorable experiences in the US, from all night parties in Times Square to hold-ups in L.A.

I also fell in love with an American girl. I met her in Galway and for three months we drank and danced our time away to this very soundtrack.

If I needed any further connection to Ireland we announced our engagement to friends and relatives in the small town of Castlerea.

The Fairytale Of New York is my signature sound. When those first notes on the piano play out it doesn’t matter where I am or what I am doing. For those three minutes I am in Ireland, I am with my American fiancee, I am with my family, I am dancing, and by the fire is a glass of Jameson ready to celebrate Christmas. Slainte!

Nov 10

Live from Music4.5

I’ll be live tweeting from Music4.5 throughout the day.

Content from Radio 1, BBC R1 Xtra, We7, FAC, Music Glue, Financial Times, Decon Records and many more.

Follow @martincahill and the live blog from Music4.5.

May 11

2 Comments

Who needs The Who?

Thanks to Prof Kawalek for this:

Here’s a quote from the blogosphere. It is Pete Townshend of The Who talking:

“On one of our early webcasts we sent out an invitation to the Arctic Monkeys to appear. They declined. We were confused at first. They broke over the internet. We were using the internet. Weren’t we all doing the same thing?

This month they’ve busted out a new hit with help from nobody but their fans. They never needed us. We perhaps needed them?

Suddenly, I realize that a young music fan, who wants to be in on the discovery of a new band, can do so while studying for their exams. They don’t need to travel. They don’t need to get off the couch. Online, in suburban Surrey, they can find a new band in Glasgow or Sheffield. The celebration get-together comes later at the big summer Festivals.

What has changed is not the music, or the way ‘pure’ bands need to be ‘discovered’ by a group of fans with no initial media, critics or Establishment interference. What has changed is that where the Who were discovered by a bunch of Mods in Shepherd’s Bush, and the Sex Pistols by a bunch of Punks at the 100 Club, the Arctic Monkeys were discovered in a neighbourhood that covered the entire globe. Even I sought out their demos on the internet before the press had mentioned them.

I recall another bunch of pop primates. The Monkees. Utterly manufactured, delivered by television, supported by the cream of American music creatives, good-looking, funny, personable, some good records in there somewhere. Jimi Hendrix supported them on his first major U.S. tour after Monterey Pop in 1967. Was that world more or less confusing for an emerging artist than it is today?”

Feb 16

Talking about ‘The Brits’

Have you ever asked an individual whether or not they are interested in ‘the arts’? Or discussed the importance of a nations creative capacity to the overall health and economic vitality of that nation. You would likely receive a set of varied responses. ‘The Arts’ is a term that associates itself to highbrow conversation. A luxury reserved for the academic community, perhaps. Take a small step to the left and ask them about the latest craze to hit the charts (Mika), or the surprising hit movie of the year (Little Miss Sunshine). The responses will be equally varied, but I would expect them to be informed, colourful, and often forming, quite meticulously, a stringent position.

This week saw our attentions turn to the British Music Industry. The Brits 2007 was on the telly, and it was live – or was it? All the best bits seem to be cut out. An artist’s message, although it was probably rubbish, was filtered from the world’s ears. This debate is important, especially in the world of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 prides itself on unfiltered messages and opinions. The content is unmediated. Unmediated to the extent where the community judges it to be acceptable. This, as a medium, is a lot more exciting than the mediated alternative. We can possibly replace the host – Russell Brand, with someone styled to our taste. Russell is loved by many, but loathed by a similar number. Why watch something you loath?

I am suggesting alternatives. This blog attempts to do that as often as it can, but we have to admit that The Brits, in its current format, gets the nation talking. We all have an opinion. We have our favourite artists and we would have been impressed by one or two acts on the night. We have a strong position on our likes and dislikes within ‘the arts’. For me, I was struck by the changes emerging in the music industry. There were some great acts on show – Amy Winehouse, Snow Patrol, and possibly Corrine Bailey Rae. Each very different and possibly unlike anything we have seen over the last ten years. Groups like Oasis, and even The Red Hot Chilli Peppers looked, and sounded, a bit obvious. I have always liked the Chilli Peppers, but were they offering anything new? They are just a rock group, rocking it in typical fashion. But what about Amy Winehouse? She is very difficult to define and far from any music type. The Fratellis and The Artic Monkey’s are equally difficult to define. They do not easily fit a genre.

But, there was the change. Scroll down each of the artists in the following BBC list, and ask about their background. Were they launched by a record company, or did they emerge through myspace, youtube and other Web 2.0 sites? Let me know your findings, but I would suspect that at least half of the nominations emerged from the web. Their audience came through traditional gig circuits, yes, but the viral affect was generated through the web. One web recording can reach millions. A one-off gig can only reach the few in attendance and if you are lucky a record company manager.

My proposition is that Web 2.0 enriches our entertainment experience. The industry benefits from greater variation and more challenging artists. This proposition is very difficult to prove. In the end, it is a matter of opinion. I am not sure how we judge this, but one measure might be the rate at which an artist appears on our radar and then disappears. Perhaps fame diminishes quickly in the world of web 2.0. Each artist plays to their core audience and enjoys mainstream notoriety when and if it arrives. Even when it does arrive… do they really care? The Artic Monkey’s have yet to attend the Brits, but they have won at least three awards over two consecutive years. Perhaps we don’t need big supergroups anymore? We just need good music, accessible music, challenging ideas, and variety. Web 2.0 is flexible and amenable to this. The record industry is not… but, the Brits does get us talking?

Jan 30

Science of the Soul

Narina Pallot likes hugging trees, reading The Guardian, and Freeview television. She travels on public transport, and hit the shops before gigs. Jacobs Creek fuels the set and numbs the nerves. She is, at heart, a hippy and emulates the 60’s peace movement in her style and lyric. Family is even closer to heart, and even closer to the exit door selling t-shirts and memorabilia. Love plays out in her story – love lost, love gained, and well, you know, the other stuff associated to that. The reference was made many times; 57 I counted. Narina Pallot has just been nominated for a Brit, but remarked that this is only good for selling a few records.

I learned all this yesterday evening whilst watching Narina play at the Manchester Academy. Each song was punctuated with a colourful story. It was far from scripted, and often more entertaining than the music; although I must confess this was good too – great in fact.

So, Social Computing woven into a performance?? The stories are removed from the blog and brought to life on stage. It is about life in the end, and opening up more meaningful interaction when you are with people, even an audience. Reflection allows us to paint a colourful story, computing is the messenger, and social is just that – social.

http://www.nerinapallot.com/pt/blog/

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