I’ve never really decided quite where the irony-balance lies in this song. After all, David Byrne is as self-consciously urban (in the pre-MTV, racially neutral sense) as anyone. Certainly, as someone who regularly chafes at British culture’s knee-jerk for a nostalgic vision of country life, I can’t help but thrill at such unabashed horror at a back-to-nature future that many people at least claim to long for.

But that line in the last verse - “as it fell apart, nobody payed much attention” - hints at a darker interpretation. After all, one of the central ironies of the modern environmental movement is that the very close-to-nature lifestyle which some of its proponents call for is probably exactly what we’ll wind up with if the kind of “civilisation” Byrne eulogises here continues to run out of control.

Anyway, it’s funky. Enjoy.

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Album of the Year: The National, Boxer

In a year when American guitar bands continued to stand head-and-shoulders above most of their British rivals, Ohio’s The National provided a urbane, mature, and deliciously dark counterpoint to the psych-folk of artists like Spoon and Iron & Wine. Taut and fiercely intelligent, Boxer captures, instead of turning away from, the brooding anxiety that has stalked American culture in recent years. Matt Berninger’s rich voice achieves an impressive emotional impact without a shred of affectation.

Listen to “Mistaken for Strangers”

Runner-up: Jamie T, Panic Prevention

Damp squib of the year: Live Earth

Let’s face it, it always sounded a bit rum. Gigantic concerts for poverty sound illogical at first, but if they raise masses of money - or even if they influence the debate - they ultimately make sense. Gigantic concerts to stop climate change just sound wrong. Yes, if it builds awareness, it’s worth the jet flights, the lighting, the fireworks, the car journeys made by the thousands in the audience. But only a genuinely passionate, political event - at least as much so as Live8 - could have made all the excess seem justified. In the end, it was anything but. From the UK concerts being hosted by Chris Moyles - a man who probably thinks climate change is for girls - to David Gray and Damien Rice’s baffling decision to sing “Que Sera Sera”, a song that seemed to encapsulate the very complacency the concert was supposed to shake us out of - the event was vacuous and soulless from the start. Without an actually-great moment along the lines of Kanye West’s appearance at the Concert for Diana, it just felt like being stuck inside one of those green adverts full of smiling children that oil companies make.

Runner-up: Playstation 3

I-don’t-see-what-all-the-fuss-is-about phenomenon of the year: Heroes

My brother loves it. Critics like it. People who liked Lost before it got all silly like it. It’s slick mainstream sci-fi, what’s not to like? And yet, I hate it. I hate the cliched Japanese character and his absurdly wide face. I hate the uptight politician’s ludicrously square chin, the central-casting blandness of the actors playing

minor characters. The villains in Lost, as baffling as the mythology has become, remain genuinely discomforting. Malcolm McDowell spewing stock evil-genius stuff about the Survival of the Strong? The pretty, evil one eating people’s brains, for god’s sake? I just don’t get it.

Funky new web thingy of the year: Tumblr

As anyone who monitors my ever-declining rate of posts to this website can tell you, it isn’t easy finding time for regular full-length blogging. And how often do you have something really new to say, anyway? More often you just want to share something cool you’ve seen on your travels around the web. Enter Tumblr: simple, in many ways quite limiting software with one killer feature: predefined templates making it one-click simple to share audio, video or photos. The result? A lot fewer posts here, maybe, but a whole new avalanche of web-highlights shared over on my “tumblelog,” Ravindr.

Love-it-or-hate-it-you-can’t-ignore-it innovation of the year: Facebook applications

2007 was, of course, when the rest of the world finally joined me and a handful of US student friends on Facebook. No sooner had they piled in that these blasted applications came along. Suddenly I was being thrown cows and zombie-zapped by people I hadn’t seen for years. This is, obviously, rubbish. And yet, buried underneath the mile-high pile of crap that has built up since applications were allowed in the Spring, are some real gems: iLike, despite its ridiculous Apple-lite name, is great for adding songs to messages and wall posts; What I’m Listening To finally puts all that last.fm information where you need it; and apps like My Blogs, Flickr Gallery and del.icio.us let you use your profile as a hub for all your web 2.0 shreds of personality spread across the web. There are plenty more needed, instant messaging being a priority, but having hundreds of companies working on the task must be better than having just one. Now, if only someone would ask me what sort of pirate I am.

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I’ve just deleted 20,362 music files from my computer. Over 1,400 hours of music, gone. I feel like a wave of liberation has washed over me, or something.

What’s going on? Simple. 25 years after I bought my first album (Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell II), I have turned my back on music ownership.

Not buying music. I stopped doing that years ago. No, I’ve given up owning music at all. From now on, with help from the apparently-good people at Napster, I’m going to be a “subscriber”. I pay a monthly fee, I listen to what I want. I stop paying, it all stops working. Simple.

But why, you ask? Why would I give up on one of the most quintessential hobbies of modern times - building a music collection? Especially one as, frankly, ludicrously large as I had built up?

I’ll tell you why. Because I felt trapped. My music collection has sucked hours, days, from my life. Not time spent listening to music, oh no. I’m talking about time spent administering music. Even before there were downloads, I spent hours at University copying my friends’ record collections onto MiniDisc. If I borrowed an album, I wouldn’t just listen to it, oh no. I’d copy it, painstakingly enter the titles on the remote control, give it back, and maybe - just maybe - listen to it a few weeks later. I have a box of over 100 minidiscs up in my mum’s loft, representing hours I could have spent studying, reading, or meeting people. And a fair few have never been listened to.

When PC music came along, it just got worse. Tom still gets nightmares, I imagine, remembering the 2 solid days and nights I spent in his room, almost without sleep, converting his entire WMA music collection (itself largely nicked) to MP3 to play with my new MP3 CD player. Again, I only listened to odd bits of it. Once I started actually owning digital music on a hard drive, it just got worse. Now I could waste hours correcting “metadata”. Adding the track number to the title. Removing it again. Correcting the year. Adding the cover art. For the first year after I moved to London, I didn’t even have a computer. Just a 80GB hard drive, full of music, and a crappy 20GB player I occasionally synced it with. I used to spend hours in an internet cafe fiddling with my music collection.

What is it about music that brings out the nerd in me? I don’t feel the need to suck up, hoover-like, people’s photographs, movies, or anything else. I think it’s partly because, unlike movies, music are something I enjoy repeatedly (I’m aware that movies work this way for other people, but not for me, generally). I need to own that album, not just borrow it, because I might want to listen to it in future. We might be having a party, and that track might be just perfect for a particular moment. So I have to have it, to keep it. And then, it’s part of the collection. And so it’s naturally got to have cover art, and to be properly sorted, and so on.

And on it’s gone, grabbing and copying and downloading and tagging as my collection has just got vaster and vaster and vaster. I’ve gone through three - three! - new hard drives in the last two years trying to keep up with it. And I’ve wasted hours just fiddling with Windows Media Player when I should be working, reading, or having fun.

Well, no more. Now, I just listen. If I like something, I download it, but it still isn’t mine. And far from being constraining, this is unbelievably liberating. And of course, though it has some annoying gaps, Napster’s catalogue also has some pleasing surprises included - a lot of comedy, for one.

Is this the future of music? I honestly don’t know. The vast amounts people seem to be happy to spend buying music from iTunes suggests no; but Napster seem to be doing OK with the subscription model, so good for them. My guess is that, just as some people insist on buying DVDs, some people will always want to own music.

But for me, I think those days are gone. It’s not just that it saves me hours of music geekery. It’s also had an unexpected benefit - it’s already widened my music horizons. No more flicking through my collection to see what to play. For me, it’s just a wide-open search box every time. So any band I’ve heard of and never listened to, or never got round to getting hold of, just gets listened to right away. It’s a little scary, but it’s also a great big adventure.

Napster to Go is £14.99 a month, with a free 1GB music player when you join for six months.

P.S.: One unfortunate side-effect of the transition to Napster is that it’s not Last.FM compatible. So you’ll notice the list on this page and on my Facebook profile disappearing. But hey, if you want to know what I’m listening to, just ask.

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First sights:

* Hostel is astonishing glow-white slab of ultramodern, and shares space with the local drama school, which is both nice and bizarre.
* McDonald’s appears to have exactly the same menu as in the UK. Bit disappointing.
* Euros aren’t as cheap as I thought.
* The hostel charges an extra 4 euros a night to the over-26’s. I feel like a paedophile just being here.
* Madrid has a serious grafitti problem (see picture). I saw a maid standing in the doorway of an upmarket-looking apartment block, but she couldn’t budge the mass of spray-paint all over the door.
* Also saw a dreadlocked white guy, early twenties, presumably homeless, shaving hastily in a car wing mirror.
* I walked behind a TV interview, and will therefore be on Spanish TV.
* Sat in a cafe eating fries with garlic mayonnaise, watching Spanish TV (not looking out for my cameo), I was struck by the tacky presentation of Spanish daytime TV, with on-screen captions and idents that could have been from the early 80’s. And the program, which seemed to be enitrely celebrity gossip (Spain invented the modern celeb mag, of course, with Hola! - which begat Hello!), didn’t feature a single American or British celeb. No Winehouse, no Beckhams, no Britney. Perhaps, I thought, all this talk of globalisation is nonsense. Perhaps TV is the great local medium, maintaining individual cultures, local obsessions. Then I noticed the background music to the feature I was watching was “Matinee” by Franz Ferdinand.

PA100166, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

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I still remember the wet Wednesday afternoon in Sheffield when, rifling in my usual way through Sparky’s CD collection, I stumbled upon the greatest hits of Nancy Sinatra. In the full flourishes of my retro-Americana phase at the time - cf. the cowskin on the floor of my second-year bedroom - I thought it sounded like kitsch fun. I wasn’t remotely ready for the psychedelic rollercoaster it turned out to be, complete with lush orchestration, bonkers greek-mythology lyrical allusions, and the ghostly presence of a mysterious male crooner. Later that day, Sparky identified the source of both the voice and the marvellous imagery: Country maverick and prolific producer Lee Hazlewood. Lee died on August 4 of cancer, and I still haven’t explored his substantial non-Nancy oeuvre properly. But perhaps now’s as good a time as any to start. In the meantime, pop over to Some Velvet Blog, named for Lee’s best-known hit, for an appropriately thorough introduction.

Lee and Nancy on my favourite (gasp!) version of “Jackson”:

“Summer Wine”:

His wonderful solo “No Train To Stockholm”. As one commenter puts it, “if only all country could be like this”:

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Ava-gab example: “Sivva-giv ovva-gorn ivva-gis
avva-ga favva-gat cavva-gow.”

Translation: “Siobhan is a fat cow.”

-Popbitch, April 2002

Rumour has it that Siobhan left the band by saying she was just off for a pee, and never returning. She denies the rumour, but it’s certainly better than that bloody story about Robbie Williams asking if he could keep the apple.

Now that Sugababes, dominated by horrendous former Atomic Kitten Heidi Range, have become bland R’n'B sultresses, Mutya has also sodded off. Siobhan claim she and Mutya are now friends, and focusses her public criticisms towards Buchanan. But it hardly seems like a bloody coincidence that her second stab at the charts (a first album in 2003 failed to break the top 100) clashes with Mutya’s first, does it?

Anyway, the fight is on. Mutya’s effort, “Real Girl,” is a catchy, but faintly bland slice of pop-soul, heavily dependent on a killer sample, a modified “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over.”

Siobhan, on the other hand, has strayed further from her pop roots. “Don’t Give It Up” combines low-key electro backing with unashamedly Kate Bush-aping vocals.

Round 1: Song

For raw melody, Mutya has a clear advantage. But the song’s so dependent on the sample that you find yourself longing for the original. It’s perfectly serviceable but entirely forgettable, disappointing for a former Sugababe. It doe.s have one exciting moment, however - when the intro bursts of sample threaten, for a second, to turn into Paul Mcartney’s “Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time.” Now that would have been interesting.

On first hearing, Siobhan’s effort seems like a pretentious, tuneless misfire. Repeat listens are rewarded, however, as the song’s floaty-light shape becomes more clear. It’s so rare nowadays to hear a slice of pop that doesn’t get progressively less interesting on repeat hears, it’s hard not to admire Siobhan’s stab at avant-garde. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel the array of interesting noises and vocal instrumentation would have been enhanced by an actual bloody chorus.

Verdict: Round 1 - Buena

Round 2: Video

If Mutya’s single betrays a certain lack of musical ambition, the video makes her look downright lazy. Lounging around a bed looking at photos! Dancing with friends! Coquettishly displaying shoulders! Excuse me while I doze off. Worst of all, it’s so utterly fraudulent. Mutya is 21, with a two-year-old daughter. But here’s, she’s portraying a 14-year-old girl’s fantasy of grown-up life: stylish drinks in mysteriously uncrowded cocktail bars, a ludicrously large swanky flat. At least in the video for “Smile,” Lily Allen’s bedroom moping took place in a space that actually resembled a teenage girl’s bedroom. Veering from breakdancing one moment, to slinky dresses in a georgian townhouse the next, Mutya’s “real world” seems anything but: a split-personality stab at grown-up style.

Siobhan, too, has clearly lost all interest in the real world. But at least she’s got the guts to embrace it, to dive into fantasy and give us some proper weirdness. It’s a shame then that, like the song, the video to “Don’t Give It Up” lacks a proper core beneath the camera-film-advert imagery. Siobhan waves pretty fabric in desert! Siobhan writhes in ruined building! Siobhan looks slutty in cheap cafe! What does it all mean? Bugger all, one suspects, unfortunately.

Verdict: Round 2 - Donaghy

Round 3: Image & Personality

Let’s assume, for the sake of fairness, that the bullying rumouts surrounding Siobhan’s departure from Sugababes are exaggerations, and that the two really are friends. Even so, it’s hard to feel good about Mutya, morals-wise. Always the group’s most woodenly stern-faced member, she obtained a sudden enthusiasm for dance when required to grind, hotpant-clad, like just another R’n'B ho in the video for the band’s (admittedly magnificent) “Push The Button.” Steely ambition is all very well, but to throw away years of hard-won credibility in a last-gasp attempt to break America seems a bit cheap (although, in fairness, Mutya can’t match stage-school product Range’s frightening ‘pick me, Nigel’ hair-tussling). Noting the breezy plainness of her first single, and the numbing blandness of her duet with George Michael, and it’s clear Mutya’s ambitious, determined, and probably destined for success - but entirely lacking the independence and personality that seemed to shine from the Sugababes in the early days.

With her embrace of art-indie stylings, Siobhan has drifted far further than Mutya from her former band in terms of music and visuals. But in spirit, she seems more in tune with what we loved the ‘babes for: confidence and kookiness. While Mutya launches her live solo career at Ronnie Scott’s, the standard record-industry bid for “serious artist” status, Siobhan is performing at Popjustice Live, suggesting a capability for irony not apparent in her video. She even DJs at Trannyshack! Nevertheless, there’s a certain heaviness of touch to Siobhan’s solo image that seems downright depressing in one so young.

Verdict: Round 2 - Donaghy

What made Sugababes special was their combination of three rare factors: the street-savvy confidence of urban British youth, the fizzing energy of the best pop, and the creative ambition and lyrical sophistication of late-90’s indie and hip-hop. At best, Mutya retains a little of the first category, and she’s clearly striving for the second; we must hope the slick stylings of R’n'B don’t get in the way. Her duet with Groove Armada, and rumours of work with Justin Timberlake and Amy Winehouse, suggest things could get much more interesting.

With her 80’s art-goth fixation (her myspace profile influences include Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil), “interesting” is clearly what Siobhan’s determined to be. But she shouldn’t stray too far from her pop roots, even if it means admitting she may need a little help on the songwriting front. We don’t need a Kate Bush wannabe, not while the original is still going so marvellously strong; but a sophisticated, intelligent young singer offering decent poetic imagery and exciting soundscapes would could find a huge market in a music scene starving for ideas after the bleak years of commercial dance.

You can make your own mind up, and vote for your favourite ex-Sugababe below. Mutya will inevitably win the commercial battle. I think I do prefer Siobhan, for all her pretension; give her a good melody, and I think she could really do something. But here’s a thought. Why should the former ‘babes be fighting amongst themselves? It’s Keisha Buchanan, with her pair of bland replacements, who really deserves a chart kicking. Let’s get Mutya and Siobhan together, mix up some interesting sounds, and pit that against Sugababes’ next bland slice of electro-soul. Now that would be a chart battle worth tuning into Scott Mills for.

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I am so doing this. Soon.

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Gossip is young + full of blood. We have existed for 5 years. We are a punk band consisting of 3. We are interested in art, change, the underground, dancing, fashion, punk history, crime and movements. We will nvr die. We are artists, poets, cooks, writers, feminists, designers, musicians & djs. This is life dedication to action, passion & drive.

- Gossipyouth.net

What’s not to like? After a long, long time of near-ideological obsession with authenticity and straightforwardness, the music scene has shown encouraging signs of flamboyance and theatre over the last couple of years. The Gossip have the heart of true soul music, with some of the wild visual flair of the 80’s (including - yes - Leigh Bowery, who I will stop going on about now). The statement above veers dangerously close to pretension, but its sheer, gormless, youthful enthusiasm sees it through. “We will nvr die” is probably as good a rallying cry for generation myspace as any.

.

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I suppose you could accuse me of jumping on the Mercury bandwagon. Although the ex-Pulp man’s croonings had floated onto my radar before his latest album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, I did take the opportunity of the nomination to give it a proper listen. For the uninitiated, Coles Corner is a richly orchestrated smoky-lounge bar album of wistful ballads that recalls Pulp’s This is Hardcore more than their more commercially successful material. It’s unashamedly retro, and unashamedly Americana.

Which got me thinking. As many of you will know, I went to university in Sheffield, and spent four mostly very happy years there. I loved the city, and I’ve always been pained by the tendency of those who don’t know it to write it off as a typical northern hellhole. While Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds have been rehabilitated in the public eye as they’ve been regenerated economically, Sheffield still seems to exist in some vague collective memory of the unpleasant 1980’s North. Weather maps, that handy barometer of city status, invariably show Leeds before Sheffield. If it wasn’t for The Full Monty, it’s easy to think people would forget the city exists at all.

And yet Sheffield boasts, amongst other things, one of the richest musical underground histories of any city. Beginning with the post-punk era, Sheffield bands have been consistently some of the most challenging and interesting, and often commercially successful: from the Human League, Heaven 17, ABC and Cabaret Voltaire in the early 80’s, to Pulp, the All-Seeing I and its offshoot Eye Monster and Moloko in the 90’s. Plus, as the home of Warp Records, Autechre and Gatecrasher, the city made a vital contribution to the club explosion of the 90’s, with Gatecrasher’s epic 24hr marathon - at which a couple of my braver friends did bar work - probably the dance scene’s most well-known Millenium Eve offering. Not to mention that one of the biggest-selling rock bands of the late 80’s, Def Leppard, and the band behind the fastest selling debut album of all time, the Arctic Monkeys, all hail from the city.

And yet, held up against Liverpool or Manchester, Sheffield is nowhere in public awareness. There are no bus tours, no elaborate BBC Easter programmes, no Mike Winterbottom films, to celebrate the scene (although there’s this reasonable documentary). How many of the bands mentioned above did you know were from the city? Indeed, the city’s attempt to recognise its and the rest of the country’s pop music acheivemetns - the National Centre for Popular Music - was a complete disaster, not in small part because the city’s people saw it as a bit silly. In Manchester, it would have had a chance.

So why this lacklustre performance, if not of the actual artists of the city, then of the idea of the city as a cultural centre? A quick listen to Hawley’s music offers an answer. Rooted in some imagined America, some time before punk and probably before the sixties, the album can’t honestly be said to represent any serious evocation of Sheffield life. And, thinking about it, the same goes for most Sheffield music. The Human League’s eyeliner-soaked energy-synth melancholy reflected the harsh landscape that created it, but sought a distant glamour with its gender-bending style. The Leppard never hid their determination to win an American audience with sounds they’d recognise. Even Pulp generally eschewed geographic specifics for a sort of universalist poor-geek solidarity (most in evidence on “Mis-Shapes”); their most obviously rooted lyrics are about London (”Mile End,” and “Common People”’s references to St. Martin’s College). While Joy Division/New Order confronted a range of apocalytic and fantasy images in their lyrics and videos, their essential misery always seemed to have seeped up from the streets of the then-beleaguered city. And the “Liverpool sound” is incredibly clearly defined, with the La’s and the Coral making no efforts to hide their debt to their Beatle forefathers.

The simple truth is there’s just not enough in Sheffield to build a mythology on. No crucial role in imperial trade; no guilt-ridden involvement in the slave trade, or proud part in abolition. A few closed-down steel factories, of course, but even the major battles of the 80’s industrial decline were fought elsewhere in Yorkshire. The empty building next to the old City Hall, that was built as the HQ of the National Union of Mineworkers but quickly abandoned, neatly summarises Sheffield’s sense of having not quite taken proper part in the industrial boom, and postindustrial decline, that drove British northern pop music for forty years or more.

Hawley’s one clear use of Sheffield detail makes the point. Coles Corner, the nominated album, is named after a meeting point in the city popular with lovers. I’ll admit to racking my brains when I heard this, as I’ll admit to not hearing of it when I was there. It turns out that it’s between two main commercial streets, and is so named because the Cole Brothers department store (the local face of John Lewis) used to be there. Now it’s a HSBC. As a point of collective memory go, it’s fairly mediocre. The Monkeys are discovering this now: in a recent interview on American radio, they blushingly batted away the interviewer’s attempts to pin down details of the “Sheffield scene.” Gatecrasher was referred to as “something our brothers told us about.” Attempts to build some sort of Madchester-style pop moment about Sheffield are doomed to fail when the live scene consists of the Leadmill, the University, and a few small pubs.

Sheffield is pulling itself up, of course, with the usual formula of designer clothes stores, lottery-funded musuems, and trendy branding. But its heart isn’t really in it. The much-heralded cultural industries quarter, designed to use the city’s creative heritage as a springboard for economic growth, was frankly a disaster. The pop museum now a student’s union, the area’s dominating business now is a Spearmint Rhino. Previous attempts at revitalisation, based around the city’s equally under-recognised sporting heritage, were equally doomed. Because Sheffield never found a really strong narrative of despair in the 1980’s, it naturally hasn’t embraced the narrative of rebirth that has captured Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds.

Instead, as always, Sheffield’s mind is on something else. Hawley’s Sinatra impersonation, like Phil Oakey’s eyeliner, shows the Sheffield spirit is still about escape and about fantasy: making something as mundane as a department store and turning it into romance. The Arctic Monkeys do boast a strong sense of place, and it’s lovely to hear the references to Hunter’s Bar and Rotherham in “Fake Tales of San Fransisco;” but let’s not start calling them anything as grand as a Sheffield Sound. The real spirit of Sheffield has one eye on the past, the future, the other side of the sea, wherever. Lying in the gutter and staring at the stars, I suppose. That’s what makes the city so invigorating. That, I think, is why I remember it so fondly: it’s a place that can’t help but encourage dreaming. That’s why it’s Hawley, and not the Monkeys, who really represents Sheffield in the Mercury shortlist. I wish him luck.

Richard Hawley website
Richard Hawley on Myspace
Listen to Richard Hawley
Watch “Cole’s Corner”:
Click here to view the embedded video.

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The music is Explosions In The Sky’s “Memorial”, from their excellent album The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. The vocals come from an interview that was recorded a few weeks ago for WAMC’s Weekly Rundown. I can’t remember the name of the interviewee, unfortunately.

Memorial (Warning)

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So what’s the big deal with this well-known example of the same thing? It’s not the video, which is a bit naff, and which I only present here because I can’t find a straight mp3 anywhere. No, it’s the song itself - it’s been eating its way into my brain. It’s something about the extent of the collage - while the BB’s gave us songs with totally sampled backing, this is one of the only records I can remember that’s entirely made of samples, vocals and all - and mostly non-musical samples, to boot. It’s so effective, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done more, but no doubt you fabulous people are all going to email and me and tell me that, actually, it has, by X and X and X.

So get telling, and enjoy the video.

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