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”
Download audio file (the%20national-mistaken%20for%20strangers.mp3)

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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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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This Christmas, 2006, I am boycotting “Fairytale of New York.”

I told you you’d be shocked. Allow me to make myself very clear: I take this action not through boredom, sickness or dislike of said heart-of-gold drunken yuletide anthem. Quite the opposite. I’m doing this because I like it far too much to see it meet the fate of every other Christmas song: overplayed, irritating, redolent of tired, forced fun.

I remember when “Fairytale” first came out. The first time I heard it, I hated it. I was eight, for heaven’s sake; I wanted synths, beats, and preferably a little mini-rap for the middle eight. I really wasn’t ready for MacGowan’s lazily anguished snarl, or MacColl’s lilt for that matter. And yet, after my first listen, something stayed with me. By the next day I’d listened to it several times, learned the words, and put it on a tape I was making for a friend (along, if I remember correctly, with “Pump Up The Volume” by M/A/R/R/S, which must imply something).

For a long time, “Fairytale” remained, if not a secret passion, at least a pretty cliquey one. In the oh-so-ironic 90s, unashamed party ‘classics’ like Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody!” went down better than dark old “Fairytale.” I heard that it was kept from video appearances on Christmas Top of the Pops specials by the word “faggot,” but I’ve no idea if that’s true. Certainly, it was a badge of honour to admire the song over the array of Christmas crap out there. This, after all, was the decade when the coveted slot of Christmas number one was competed for almost entirely by novelty acts - from Mr. Blobby to Bob the Builder. I’m not saying that liking “Fairytale” made you some sort of musical guru, but it was a marker of discrimination. Like Radiohead, nobody who was really interested in music would dismiss it, and nobody who was basically more interested in football could really enjoy it.

I remember exactly when I realised that things had started to change: when, in 2000, I heard that likeable-but-dull Irish warbler Ronan Keating* was recording the song as a B-side to his single “The Way You Make Me Feel” - not, regrettably, a Michael Jackson cover, but a cliche with lyrics so mind-meltingly clichéd I’ve often wondered if they were the product of some drunken songwriter dare. Although I’ve never heard Keating’s actual version (with Clannad harp-n-vocalist** Maire Brennan), just the news of its existence made me sad to my core. The one genuinely meaningful Christmas record - the only one that portrays the contrived optimism of the festival in its true context, the misery and bitterness of winter - softened, made saccharine, safe, granny-friendly. Never mind that it’s about an elderly, drug-addicted couple whose dreams have been crushed into dust. It’s about Christmas! Let’s turn the violins up in the mix!

Then, even as Ronan’s cover was bothering the charts - and the ears of Radio 2 listeners - Kirsty MacColl died. Amidst the heartfelt (and well-deserved) tributes that flooded in from fans who’d long loved Kirsty for her tragic sensibility, unique voice, and sometimes biting wit, there were many who talked as if all she’d ever done was “Fairytale” (I’m talking about you, Duncan Connors). From that moment, the song began a quick ascent towards national treasure status. It topped a VH1 poll of the greatest Christmas song in 2004, and has done so every year since. When a colleague in my office recently started a poll on a popular gay networking website about the best Christmas song, it shot to the top. It’s just been re-released for the second time, and is currently at no. 10 in the charts. There are 64 versions of the song on YouTube, ranging from the official video (starring, incredibly, Matt Dillon) to a version by the parents of someone called Sam.

Perhaps I should be happy to see such a great song so popular. But I’m not. “Fairytale” was an aquired taste for a reason: it’s dark. It’s difficult; it contains a vision of Christmas that isn’t dominated by food and things.

He’s an alcoholic shambles, who spends Christmas Eve in a police station. She’s a bedridden junkie. The only hope on the horizon comes from his recent gambling victory (”Got on a lucky one / Came in eighteen to one / I’ve got a feeling / This year’s for me and you”). We all know he’s going to piss it away; that his cheerful Christmas optimism (”I can see a better time / when all our dreams come true”) is a grotesque annual ritual. And the song’s final verse, while it initially seems to bring resolution, in fact offers the protagonists only a weary resignation:

I could have been someone
(Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you)
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you

In the end, their complete dependence on each other is all that holds them together: their dreams may be dead, but they huddle, shivering, warming themselves over the ashes.

This is an odd candidate for a feel-good Christmas anthem. And yet, in the words of one EMI staffer,

Fairytale Of New York is an adult answer to Jingle Bells. It’s difficult to remember a Christmas party without a drunken singalong with The Pogues.

Is it too elitist to suspect the millions of people who round off every Christmas party with a “drunken singalong” haven’t fully appreciated the dark bitterness of the story? And of course, there’s the depressing irony of watching drunk people imitate MacGowan’s alcoholic drawl.

And the Pogues aren’t helping, cheerfully performing the song with any passing female singer, not to mention Shane’s mum. And, of course, re-releasing the song any time they’re short of beer money. Think I’m being harsh? Note that Warner encouraged the single’s current re-release “because a whole new generation of fans have heard Shane through his association with Kate Moss and Pete Doherty.”

Now look, I’m not unrealistic. I understand that when fine things become hugely popular, a little of their meaning is inevitably lost; and to stand in the way of it is not only Canute-style arrogance, but pretty close to snobbishness. But that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, and it doesn’t mean I have to take part. Hence, the boycott. Before I’ve heard it once too many; before it conjures up images, not of postwar Manhattan with its dazzling lights and freezing tenements, but of work colleagues puking on my shoes; before I learn to associate it with that heady mix of plastic packaging, junk food, cheap wine and lazy nostalgia that is Christmas for childless adults. Before I see it on a bloody advert for holidays in New York, I’m having this Christmas without “Fairytale.”

It hasn’t been easy so far. It was mercifully forgotten at the work Christmas party, but when we had people round for an early festive dinner on Sunday, I had to smilingly ignore several requests. Several times, when Christmas shopping on Saturday, I felt myself bolting a shop without my planned purchases when I sensed the festive soundtrack CD was drifting Pogues-wards. Just today, a colleague put it on on his computer towards the end of the day, minus headphones, so the whole office could enjoy it crackling out of tinny, tiny speakers. I quickly stuck in my earphones and shoved on anything else.

I don’t, to be honest, know how much longer I can last. But I’m going to keep trying. “Fairytale” is a disarming, mature, evocative story, a real adult Christmas song, not to mention one of the most eloquent ever portrayals by an Anglo-Irish writer of the Irish-American urban immigrant experience. It deserves better than to be a drunken singalong, an afterthought, “even better than Slade.”

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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”:

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