foals

All posts tagged foals

Along with the usual crop of interesting new bands, we had the welcome return of a few old favourites in the shortlist for my Album of the Year 2013, one or two of whom have been away for too long.

aoty13

I suppose it is only to be expected in this world of instantly-downloadable individual tracks that back-catalogues are being visited by new generations of music-lovers, but it is still interesting to see the age-spread in the crowd for a gig by any big names of the previous century, when they make their return to the stage after a long absence. Such as when we visited the O2 back in June to see a band I hadn’t seen live for over 45 years – The Who. They came to Bath several times in the ‘sixties, and my main memory is of a cold November night in 1965 when hundreds of us, parka-clad, packed cheek-by jowell into The Pavilion, a venue only designed for half our numbers, in the hope of hearing something discernable come out of the crap PA. It didn’t, and nobody cared, but was it any wonder the band smashed-up all their kit at the end? Continue Reading

2010 seemed to be a somewhat slow year on the music scene, reflected in the fact that my album purchases were probably the lowest they have been this century; in fact quite a lot of the output seemed to have somewhat of a retrospective air about it, including the influences that inspired possibly half of this year’s selections.

AOTY10
Of course, recession years often mean that quality album output is somewhat sparse, because the music industry tends to put what investment it can into singles releases to ensure a quick return.  The promotional effort goes into creating singles-artist trends that are aimed to keep particularly popular songs at the top of the charts for many weeks.  However, even that failed in 2010, with just two tracks managing the maximum-stay for the year of just three weeks, and only two artists managing to have more than one individual number-one during the year. Continue Reading