And, of course, the 7:30 Report. Now, I remember Hamish Fitzsimmons as my mate the Perth bass player who I swapped my 6-UVS T-shirt for a Mustang! Beer Makes You Smart shirt … just the man you want on this story.

Focussing on the explosion of Blues-based Rock from 1963-1970, “The Birth Of Rock” was a rocknerd’s delight, featuring rare performance footage, new and archive interviews with Keith Richards, Roger Daltrey, Ginger Baker etc. and insights from British rock writers including Charles Shaar Murray. I look forward to watching the rest of the series.

• Isis would be that girl who was amazing in bed until she started insisting on listening to nothing but Tool while you banged
• Explosions in the Sky would be that girl who’s great in bed, sure, but it’s EXACTLY THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER FOREVER
• Future of the Left would just donkeypunch you and then post video of it on the internet
• Sepultura would be a guy who completely ignores all erogenous zones other than the vag because they “get in the way”
• Coheed & Cambria would be a guy who you initially wanna fuck but he keeps you up all night talking about HIS FEELINGS instead …

Update: And more.

The stamps were launched on the 7th of January by Jimmy Page, and Led Zeppelin’s “IV” is included in the ten chosen from thousands by Royal Mail for the imagery of their covers rather than the music on the albums themselves.

The 2000s were the decade of falling record sales, plummeting profits for the six five four major labels, a number one single requiring only a few thousand downloads as opposed to a hundred thousand physical records twenty-five years earlier and a race to the bottom by the music industry to come up with something, anything, so horrifyingly insipid and stupid as to destroy instantly the mind of anyone exposed to it, like a saccharine Cthulhu, in the quest to find a sufficiently common lowest denominator.

(Read more …)

With SkullCandy Ink’d headphones. Apparently these are “hep” with the “kids.” They just happen to be pretty good for ten quid (seven on Amazon). Left and right aren’t marked, as is apparently the fashion these days (telling left and right isn’t “fab” or “bling” or whatever the “emo” term is). But if you’re too cheap for Sennheisers or Etymotics, they’ll do very nicely, thank you.

‘Pod is filled with This Kind Of Punishment, ’80s New Zealand indie on Xpressway. 1, 2, 3. Never say I never give you anything.

Redcountess blessed me with What Would Keith Richards Do? (”Everything.”)

Oh, and my mother gave me Christian Rock. I don’t dare play this thing in case it causes a vortex of suck consuming all in its wake.

So. How was your haul?

Anthrax and Slayer are also confirmed for the UK Sonisphere festival, but with the headliners already announced as being Iron Maiden and Rammstein it is unlikely that the “Big Four” pioneers of Thrash will all play at Knebworth. However earlybird ticket buyers for the UK festival will get a free ticket for the Poland show.

Titled Lucy, the song is about Lennon’s childhood friend Lucy Vodden, the alleged inspiration for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, who suffered from Lupus for many years before dying in September this year. Cook had a grandmother, also called Lucy, who also died from Lupus.

If you feel so inclined you can send Ronnie a get well card or email to help him throw the horns at the big C.

Fuck. Who can answer a question like that? I HAVE FUCKING THOUSANDS OF ALBUMS, MOTHERFUCKER. IF YOU CAN FIND THE COMMONALITY OTHER THAN “THEY’RE IN THE SAME HOUSE,” YOU’VE JUST PRODUCED A NEW GRAND UNIFIED FUCKING THEORY OF MUSIC AND THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER CAN JUST FUCKING GIVE UP AND GO HOME LIKE THE N00B IT IS.

(And pissed off at myself that I haven’t come up with a glib small-talk answer to that question that I wouldn’t choke on saying out loud.)

What makes you RAAAGE so hard you want to throw the record player out the window?

A buncha MP3s just really doesn’t cut it. Who has time, for one thing?

The answer? Digital Personal Property! Which is certainly not Digital Rights Management or Digital Consumer Enhancement, no no. It’s an entirely different wrapper for physically and mathematically impossible snake oil.

As Penny Arcade put it about similar schemes elsewhere: “Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.”

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.

… except one group. Have a close look at the chart above — if you can’t spot who’s missing, p2pnet has the answer.

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.

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.

He does note that “only by avoiding actual Deadheads was I able to become a Deadhead” and that his latent Deadheadism “causes my girlfriend to worry that at a certain point of saturation, she’ll come home from work to find me reeking of patchouli oil, clad in vibrant pajama bottoms and a tank top decorated with capering bears, my dilated pupils being the only reason I haven’t yet found something to juggle.” A deeply frightening cautionary tale.

Now, that’s journalism.

However, a new UK law firm, ACS Law, appears to be doing the same things: sending out legal threat letters demanding between £400 and £700, but disappearing with no further response when questioned more closely. TorrentFreak details the unearthly similarities and gives a nice list of questions you can send if they ever contact you.

You might be suffering from Artist’s Shit if:

• you’ve bought a box set of anything ever, particularly ten or more live recordings by one band.

• you have MP3s of twenty remixes of any single song.
• you have over twenty gigabytes of MP3s you haven’t listened to yet, and if you do it’ll be once in your life and probably never again.
• you bought all the Damage Manual remix albums Martyn Atkins is pushing on eMusic.
• you bought the supar l33t everything edition of Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails.
• you have a copy of “The Laughing Gnome” for any reason other than to sell it on.

Recovery involves realising (a) you cannot buy souls on a record (b) you wouldn’t want to if you could.

Some music was much more fun to make than it will ever be to listen to. “Oh no, the Tombliboos are under the delusion they’re Miles Davis or equivalent!” You are not Miles Davis and nor are these people.

p.s.: the NWW list contains vast vistas of suction by any sane measure.

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Meanwhile, Nokia’s only-a-wafer-thin-slice-of-DRM Comes With Music service is all but dead, with 23,000 users total in the UK. Gosh, etc.

Now culture is preserved endemically. I see records on Australian indie MP3 blogs with thousands of downloads — the original was a pressing of 500, twenty copies even leaving that city.

To sell records, you need to (1) compete with every record ever made; (2) convince people who can get your music free to want to give you money; (3) after they’ve already listened to your record repeatedly (“try before you buy” can be assumed). If you can make people want to give you money for a record they’ve heard lots of times that competes with every record ever made … then you can sell a record.

The scarce commodity is people’s attention. The only telly I watch is YouTube to amuse my baby daughter, and even that has a hard time keeping my attention more than sixty seconds. I load my MP3 player with fresh stuff and dispose of the weak links daily.

Which catches your attention, a rock journalism blog or an MP3 blog? Industry news gets readers, before the bitterness becomes terminal. Live performance can be written about, but you never see that linked from the MP3 blogs. And I’d have to leave the house.

Where’s room for the modern Lester Bangs? Does good rock journalism require music to be hard to get for dancing about architecture to substitute? Or just never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width bloody-mindedness?

Where have you gone, Byron Coley? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

The film, produced by  Sam Dunn, a metal fan and anthropologist, and Scott McFadyen who made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, covers the band on the first leg of their “Somewhere Back In Time” tour in 2008, and the first concert of the tour was in Mumbai, India. A guy sitting next to me in the cinema leant over as the film was starting and told me that he’d been at that concert and that he wondered if he ended up in the film. Tashi, as I later learnt his name to be, indeed ended up in the film in several audience shots and also in footage from their press conference in Mumbai.

The amazing cinematography, not just in the concert sequences but in aerial shots of Flight 666 (Iron Maiden bought their own Boeing 757 for the tour which carried the band, crew and all their equipment, captained by their singer Bruce Dickinson who has a commercial pilot’s licence), and almost access all areas to the band, their crew and the fans, make this worthwhile viewing even for those who are not fans of the band.

But for those that are, some of Iron Maiden’s most popular songs in DTS, combined with the concert and backstage scenes, makes the film as exhilarating as seeing them live. By the end of the film all the fans in the audience were singing along and clapped when the credits rolled.

Film site: http://www.ironmaiden.com/flight666/

I wanted rocknerd kicks all through the night and didn’t get them. This film gets worse the more you think about it afterwards. Emotional manipulation and the comedy of embarrassment. All a bit Richard Curtis.

I wonder who the DJs were supposed to be. The Tony Blackburn character’s obvious. But no John Peel character is an unspeakable omission. Bill Nighy is perfect as the station owner. I also wonder how well they did on the Prime Minister and Cabinet. (The minister of technology at the time was Tony Benn, who I can’t see behaving quite like that.)

The most stirring scene is (highlight for spoiler) the abandoned records floating underwater. Because they’re the character I’m most interested by. Way too mainstream though.

One to watch on DVD if you happen to be in the room at the time.

The furore started when the PRS demanded that YouTube pay them more money or remove their members’ videos, and YouTube removed their members’ videos. “It is clear they are too powerful,” said Feargal Sharkey, whose bank account died before he got old, “because they were actually able to just tell us to bog off. I am sick and tired of bogus outsiders who spout unworkable utopian visions. Instead, they should give us money because we want it. Just like the record companies used to … er, hold on, I’ll start again.”

(Read more)

I work in media. The future of television is YouTube or similar. We know this. It’ll take a few years before the Internet is a better television than television, i.e. when your connection is a better delivery mechanism than DVB-T over the air. On the other hand, convenience beats quality every time.

We each sit comfortably in the lounge on our own laptop, watching videos as the whim takes us. The younger teenager uses YouTube as her personal jukebox. Even broadcast television (BBC Cbeebies for the toddler) is streamed live over the net. I have a television, and proudly pay my licence fee. I can’t remember when I last switched it on.

This involves (a) a lot of ripping vinyl to digital (b) getting rid of the physical objects.

Quite a lot of it is indie rock which literally exists in the world only on a thousand pieces of vinyl, so the right place would probably be a library who cared, which would mean in Australia, with me donating the shipping as well. Anything in the vinyl pile that exists on CD can bugger off. A few things (not more than a few crates) I’ll want to keep.

There’s a lotta cassettes to rip too.

The CDs, of course, go to FLAC then get used for, I dunno, skeet shooting.

That takes care of most of it, I think. I’m sure I’ll get all this done before I die.

Update: In lab tests, this album really, really annoys Lady Gaga-loving teenagers when you put it on as housecleaning music.

“Oh dear God, kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé’s a car crash, I wish I could be laid off, Google won’t call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I’m the walking dead, man. The walking dead.”

So his family are selling his coffin. A 16-gauge steel casket. On eBay.

Now, that’s industrial.

“Most remarkably, his thick brown hair was still perfectly coiffed in his familiar, 1950s flat-top.” Phew!

Never mind. How about a few rounds of Guitar Praise? Shred with the sounds of Contemporary Christian Music! All praise!

So here’s a nice thing: the demos for Gold Afternoon Fix. Found on a cassette thrown in the studio bin. Remember when the Church wrote singles?

(A Box Of Birds from 1999 is also good. Because it’s all covers. They still play songs really well, they’ve just given up writing them.)

(The relentless negativity of “music industry terminally stupid, BitTorrent at 11″ wears me down too. I’ll try to talk about actual music more often.)

“Pay, er, PlayNow Plus is completely unlimited, covers all major labels, no DRM, get all you want any time you like,” said spokesdroid Mobile Salestwat. “This is the biggest deal in mobile music ever! Of course, it’ll only play on your phone, for the duration of the contract, all songs then disappearing. Well, just a little DRM. Honest.”

(more at the other site)

And the customers despise it: Macrovision, DVD regions, non-CDs, iTunes, HDMI, hifi systems that won’t let you use the digital SACD or DVD-A output. They got screwed over by Liquid Audio, then Microsoft PlaysForSure, then Yahoo Music shutting down. And Apple is getting distinctly weird lately.

But the industry lust for control is so overwhelming that, burnt and burnt again, they’ll keep trying. Offer stupid amounts of money for a physical impossibility and someone will claim to be able to do it for you. Ladeez gemmun, I give you the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. Formerly known as Open Content, this one will work for sure. (Even if the press embargo failed.) This time. No unpaid copies or downloads ever again. You betcha.

(No Nokia, Samsung or LG in this everyone-but-Apple list. No movies on mobiles? Epic fail.)

Keith Cameron wrote earlier this year in the Grauniad of all places about the re-release after twenty years of “My Pal” a much loved Australian indie single by God whose members went on to work with Spencer P. Jones and Bored and form Hoss and Powder Monkeys.

I know that the original single got a fair bit of air play on campus radio in the USA, but didn’t know it was known in the UK, unless John Peel played it!

[Update] I’ve just been advised that John Peel played “My Pal” on his show in 1988 and it was taped by a friend that still remembers it, thanks Marge!

Of course, it’ll probably help if you’re not a dickhead.

(KaZaA is so 2001, darling.)

From the same company that brought you the Black Velvet Wesley Crusher.

Thanks to Joel Silbersher for the heads up.

The only problem is that no trace of the case’s existence can be found. Several posters to the Open Rights Group mailing list have failed to find any mention of such a case in court lists. Neil Dunbar of the list notes that the Patents County Court Diary will publish all cases as of October 2007. The Patent Courts Diary (PDF) “has no listing for this trial, although it does reference other trials for 22 July, when DL claim the judgment was handed down.”

A mysterious missing judgement, and a press release reprinted without the faintest nod to fact-checking? It’s August.

Update: Actual journalism found in the Daily Mail! (Warning: Daily Mail.) It appears to be a default judgement against an unemployed single mother, Isabella Barwinska, who didn’t show up to court (despite BBC report to the contrary). Lotsa luck collecting.

The hard part is photos of entertainers. Bad live shots, fan snapshots and so forth under a proper free content licence always supersede something that isn’t free content. (Looking pretty isn’t the mission — reusable and remixable content is. So we’re hardarses about it.)

I’m wondering a useful way to reliably get entertainment industry promo photos to flock to us. The third-best shot of the shoot, say. I suspect the worst fan snaps would be an incentive. So where and how do we publicise this? (I’ve asked this before.)

(If you’ve taken decent photos of someone with a Wikipedia article but no good pic, we’d love ‘em. I’m slowly going through my own twenty years’ photos. CC by-sa is fine, and requires your name staying attached to the image details page. Follow in the steps of Joichi Ito.)

(Mind you, I still so so so want one of these.)

Bonus: The earliest known sound recording — 1860, seventeen years before Edison.

(1944 Marxist sociology is often indistinguishable from rock journalism. Or how-tos.)

(Bonus link: a magnetic thing that actually does something useful.)

(My current yak shaving is reripping all my CDs as FLAC. Disk is so cheap.)

(spotted by Jed)

Someone must be making a packet convincing executives that customers will buy what you tell them to, not what they want to. What’s the killer feature on the Blu-Ray release of Sleeping Beauty? Chat, messaging to and from phones, video greeting cards and quizzes for loyalty programme points! ‘Cos there’s vast untapped consumer demand for expensive stuff that’s like the Internet except shit.

At least Pixar’s been allowed to tell the rest of Disney that if you make a sequel, it’s gotta, y’know, not suck.

Update: Yahoo has said it will compensate both its customers.