Where Worlds Collide

As regular readers of this blog will know, Parade is the project put together by York-based singer-songwriter and musician Chris Johnson, who has played at various points with Fish and Mostly Autumn, as well as fronting a number of local York bands over the years. Parade also involves vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Anne-Marie Helder and drummer Gavin Griffiths, both members of the current Panic Room and Mostly Autumn lineups, and is completed with a couple of Chris’ long-term York associates, Patrick Berry on bass and on this tour, Chris Farrel on lead guitar.

Their one album to date, The Fabric, sounded like on the surface like indie with it’s sparse chiming guitars and clattering drums; but repeated listens reveal some real musical depth, especially with the multi-layered vocal harmonies. With it’s depth and sonic experimentalism it still (to me) falls within the broad spectrum of progressive rock while managing to avoid all the musical clichés of the genre.

I’ve seen Chris Johnson playing material from The Fabric in solo acoustic form quite a few times as a support act, but because different band members have so many other commitments, full band live appearances by Parade are extremely rare. This was why I was prepared to make the 400 mile round trip to see them play in their home town of York. Although the band have been in existence for over a year, this is only their sixth gig, and the three-date tour for which this gig marked the finale were their very first headline appearances. The Stereo, just outside the medieval city walls, is a cozy little venue with a capacity of just a hundred or so. It was pretty much full, if not quote sold out, with quite a few familiar faces in the crowd.

The setlist naturally drew very heavily from The Fabric; in fact I think they played the entire album. The five-piece band managed to translate the multi-layered arrangements from the record extremely well in a live setting, albeit with a lot more energy, with Gavin giving it some serious welly on the drums at times. Of the non-Fabric songs, the semi-acoustic country and western arrangement of one of Chris’ solo songs, “The Luckiest Man Alive”, featuring Patrick on stand-up double bass, was an unexpected highlight of the evening.

Compared with her lead role in Panic Room the previous weekend, Anne-Marie Helder is content to play a supporting role, playing keys and singing harmony lines, leaving the spotlight for Chris. Although when she does take the lead, such as the wordless eastern-sounding closing section of “High Life”, the result is mesmerising.

After a powerful rendition of the album closer, “Ending”, which left me wondering how on earth two vocalists could reproduce those rich vocal harmonies live, they encored with a brand new number, “Monochrome”, before ending the evening with a muscular version of “Science and Machinery”, a song Chris originally performed with Mostly Autumn back in 2007. I thought it sounded out of place in MA’s set. Here, enhanced by Chris Farrel’s E-Bow, it fitted Parade’s set perfectly.

This is the seventh time I’ve seen Panic Room in 2010. I’d previously seen them twice on their March tour, a couple of support gigs in April/May, a festival date in August, and at the O2 Academy in Islington two days before this gig. The latter saw a strong performance by the band, but was marred by a poor venue, and a disinterested crowd containing some really loud chatterers right down the front, and the oblivious drunk who kept barging into to people. What is it about O2 Academies that suck the rock and roll out of a gig?

Sunday’s gig at The Robin was a very different affair. The Robin 2 is one of Britain’s premier rock clubs, with a gig diary that reads like a who’s who of classic rock, prog and blues. With great lighting and acoustics they always attract decent-sized crowds, even on a Sunday night; indeed I thought there were more people than at Islington on the Friday. And naturally there were many, many familiar faces in the crowd.

Tonight the venue gave us one of the best sound mixes I’ve ever heard for Panic Room. Like many bands they’re often only as good as the soundman lets them be, and tonight he did them proud. Everyone was loud and clear, especially Paul Davies who’s shredding lead guitar has sometimes got buried in the mix in the past.

When I saw Panic Room at The Cambridge Rock Festival back in August I thought they’d raised their game for a showcase festival set. Seeing them again at a regular gig made it clear to me that the festival performance was no one-off. What’s happened is the propulsive playing of new bass player Yatim Halimi has raised the live energy of the band to a whole new level.

I know I’ve said this before, but if you’ve only ever encountered Anne-Marie Helder playing a supporting role with Mostly Autumn, or much earlier with Karnataka, seeing her front her own band is a revelation. As a vocalist she’s easily in the same league as the lead singers of those bands, with a voice of huge power, range and emotional depth. And as a frontwoman she simply dominates the stage.

The setlist consisted of pretty much the whole of their second album “Satellite”, including a couple of songs from the bonus EP included with the limited edition, about half the first album, plus their cover of the ELP’s “Bitches Crystal”, a song they’d recorded for a Classic Rock Presents cover disk that never saw the light of day due to party-pooping corporate lawyers. They’ve dropped the sprawling epics from the first album in favour of an entire shorter, punchier songs, hard rockers like “Electra City” and “5th Amendment”, the gentle acoustic “Sunshine”, and the plain bonkers “I Am A Cat”, a paean to mad cat ladies everywhere. High spot was a truly monstrous “Dark Star” with it’s Hammer House of Horror organ riff from Jon Edwards underpinned by a powerful bass groove from Yatim. They finished with a soaring rendition of the second album’s title track, in which Yatim got a round of applause for the bass solo. When was the last time you saw that happen outside of a jazz gig?

On The Guardian website Miranda Sawyer campaigns for a return of Top of the Pops. Unfortunately she spoils a good argument with the mistaken opinion that The Mercury Music Prize represents the sole valid alternative to Simon Cowell’s X-Factor, and they are the only two games in town.

I’m not sure if the Top of the Pops format will work today, but we desperately need something to reverse the situation in the past decade whereby the general music-buying population is more or less completely cut out of the loop in determining which records and artists become successful.

With records played to death on the radio before they’re even released, we’ve reached the point where everything mainstream audiences get to hear is decided in advance by a very small number of elite tastemakers from the record companies and the media. The Mercury Music prize gives every appearance of being run by this same clique.

What was great about TOTP was the way it used a strict formula based on chart position to decide who appeared on it - nobody got vetoed because a clique of cloth-eared idiots from BBC light entertainment thought they didn’t fit the show’s format. If enough fans went out and bought the record, they got on. So we had Mötorhead on prime-time TV playing “Ace of Spades”, something which would be unthinkable now.

What’s very notable is the way the BBC marginalises genres like metal, jazz, blues or folk, despite their popularity up and down the country, in favour of various flavours of ‘indie’, which is all they think exists as an alternative to X-Factor pop. Yes, they might do the odd BBC3 documentary, but they tend to be very nostalgia-orientated, and don’t feature up and coming acts. Look at their festival coverage. For example, there was an eclectic mix of artists at Glastonbury this year, but you’d never have known it from the bands shown on TV.

Maybe genres have become so fragmented in today’s net-connected multi channel world that a crossover hit like “Ace of Spades” simply isn’t possible any more. But surely the best music of all genres deserves better than being trapped in separate musical ghettos?

What is the point of The Mercury Music Prize?

I’m not going to comment on the merits or otherwise of winners The XX - they’re so far removed from my own tastes in music that I’m simply not qualified to judge them. But I think it is fair to comment on the very obvious exclusion of entire genres from Mercury shortlists.

Apart from the token jazz and folk entries, it does seem dominated by various sub-genres of indie plus the odd hip-hop record. Far from being as broad as it’s apologies claim, it’s pretty much restricted to the sorts of artists that Apple Macintosh-owning urban metrosexuals might have heard of. I recognise that prog is too niche, but it’s unthinkable, for example, for a metal band to make the shortlist. Admittedly a lot of cutting-edge metal seems to be Scandinavian these days, and The Mercury is restricted to British and Irish acts. But why have Iron Maiden never got nominated? And when was the last time an out-and-our pop album got nominated? Surely Simon Cowell’s karaoke drivel hasn’t killed pop completely?

Alexis Petridis’s Guardian Article gives the game away - he doesn’t quite come and out and say it, but I think the subtext and inference is pretty clear. The main purpose of The Mercury Music Prize is indeed not to celebrate the best of British music in all it’s diversity, but is merely a cynical ploy to sell records to the demographic that doesn’t know much about music, but wants to think of itself as cool and sophisticated.

Which is a perfect justifcation of why, despite the genre’s eternal popularity, you’re never going to get a Metal band in Mercury shortlist. Metal just isn’t a genre you can sell to people like David Cameron or William Hague.

A while ago, I started work on a Fudge-based RPG using my science-fantasy Kalyr setting. It got to the point where I had most of the first draft written, and got as far as playtesting it. But there were one of two elements I’ve was never quite 100% happy with. Things have gone so quiet you’re either wondering what happened to it, or else you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Over the past couple of years, Fate has really taken off in a way I hadn’t anticipated when I started work on the game. While Spirit of the Century justifiably won awards back in 2005, the more recent success of games like Diaspora and more recently The Dresden Files RPG have made me realise that what I’ve been trying to do is insufficiently different from an implementation of Fate to be able to justify the game not being a Fate game.

So it’s back to the drawing board. Well, not quite, the setting material doesn’t change, and there are certainly significant parts of the rules chapters I can salvage and rework. The challenge is to find a way to streamline Fate so that it works well in a PBeM context with a much simplified and compressed turn sequence. I’ve got some ideas, so watch this space.

I’ve been using mFlow for several months now (you can see my profile here). I’ve described it as “the bastard offspring of Spotify, iTunes and Twitter. It combines Twitter-style social networking, online music streaming and mp3 sales. It’s actually great fun, and has exposed me to a number of artists whose music I’d never have heard otherwise.

The way it works is people “flow” tunes to their followers, who can then listen to the complete song. Following works like it does on Twitter - it’s completely asymmetric, in that there’s no obligation to follow someone back if they choose to follow you. Follow friends, or follow random people who have great taste in music, it’s up to you. If you really like a song, you can reflow it to your own followers, or purchase it as a DRM-free mp3 download, And when someone buys a track, whoever flowed it gets a 20% commission on the sale.

It has two big drawbacks at the moment. Firstly, their catalogue is nothing like as comprehensive as I’d like it to be - while they have three of the four majors and many of the larger indies on board, it gets very spotty once you get down to smaller labels and independent artists. There is practically nothing from female-fronted prog scene I follow; currently there’s a single song by The Reasoning taken from a compilation, and one cover by Magenta, and that’s it. Not even Fish’s post-EMI releases are there. These are precisely the sort of artists I’d love to be able to use mFlow to spread the word about.

Secondly, it’s currently UK only, and my online friends network isn’t constrained by geographical boundaries; I’ve got online friends in America and continental Europe who share my tastes in music, and can’t use mFlow yet.

Now iTunes have introduced something called “Ping” which seems to do much of the same thing, there are fears that it could damage mFlow. iTunes is the 800lb gorilla in the downloading market, keen to lock everyone in their closed proprietary ecosystem, and are quite likely to stomp on a startup who’s established a niche that they want for themselves. Let’s hope mFlow survives.

I’ve recently started submitting reviews to Soundlust.com, a new music review site started by someone I knew back in the days when I was a contributor to Blogcritics. There’s already an amended version of my Cambridge Rock Festival review online there now.

As readers of this site will probably have noticed, the vast majority of my reviews are strongly positive, simply because I am first and foremost a music fan, and tend buy tickets and albums by bands I actually like in the first place. I’m a complete failure at the sort of jaded cynicism that seems to be the default setting for too many professional critics.

And since the British prog scene is quite small and very incestuous, and I get to a lot of gigs, I’ve got to be on first-name terms with a quite a few members of several bands, and one or two have even become personal friends. I simply won’t write strongly negative reviews of those bands. In the rare cases of gigs being shockingly bad, such as one or two in the declining years of Crewe Limelight, I find it better to say nothing at all. Saying that, I do try to be as honest as I can; writing a glowing review of what was actually a rather mediocre gig does the artist a disservice. Sychophancy just leads to Axl Rose…