Eric Harvey at Pitchfork posts a social history of the MP3. “It’s possible the past 10 years could become the first decade of pop music to be remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual music itself.” And I remember the early ’80s, when the cassette was going to change everything …
After screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, Anvil! The Story of Anvil is to go on general release in Australia in September. Yesterday there was a special screening at the Nova in Carlton followed by a chat and Q&A with Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner from the band and the film’s director Sacha Gervasi, which I attended.
Releasing their first album independently in 1981 and cited as influences by Metallica, Slayer and others who went on to great success, Anvil were in the right place at the right time to capitalise on the resurgence of Heavy Metal worldwide in the 80s. However twenty years later, despite still releasing albums, they were forgotten by all but the most diehard fans and metal rocknerds. So what went wrong? That’s what Gervasi, an old fan of the band, wanted to find out. I found the film inspirational; while there are moments in the film which could have come straight out of This Is Spinal Tap and leave one cringing, at the film’s climax (a word one is hesitant to use when discussing Lips, infamous for his lewdness) the audience cheered, because unlike Spinal Tap, Anvil is made of real people.
The Performing Right Society has produced a really nice chart of the music universe. Everyone involved is on this diagram.
… except one group. Have a close look at the chart above — if you can’t spot who’s missing, p2pnet has the answer.
Rocknerd v2 is still in the hands of a domain squatter, but the front page as of 2007 is up from archive.org. Would you like to buy this small piece of Australian music history? I need to pull some of my articles over from v2 to here.
And the domain squatter who’s got rocknerd.com tried to sell it to me for US$97, which I frankly couldn’t be bothered with.
The archive of my Perth ’80s–’90s Perth indie rock zine Party Fears has been updated, with the addition of a PDF of #11 and a more detailed list of what’s in what issue on the index page.
Dan Arndt on Wikipedia has also been working on the Australian indie rock articles, with small assistance from me, and I need to dip into the trepidation-inducing two boxes of old photos again. What I really need to do is what everyone else seems to do: pay a few hundred quid for a Nikon CoolScan on eBay, do all my photos and sell it on again a year or two later.
