Yearly Archives: 2004

Three songs from the upcoming brilliant Two Cow Garage album, “The Wall Against Our Backs”:

// Alphabet City | Hillbilly | Burn in Hell.

We wrote about Eminem’s anti-Bush song last week, but now he has a video out for it as well. Watch the video here. It’s quite good.

(Eminem is also a sponsor for donewaiting.com this week, true believers.)

A friend sent me the news a couple of minutes after it was announced. I guess that he’d been listening to the radio. I sent him a four-letter word in reply and logged onto bbc.com to read the story. The news was obviously still breaking, there were only a couple of paragraphs and a link so that readers could send in their memories.

As the afternoon progressed, that list of tributes grew and grew. I called my sister to tell her and stumbled over the words.

We played ‘Teenage Kicks’ in the office.

I switched on the car radio when I left work at 5. It’s tuned to a news and speech channel. They’re talking to Jarvis Cocker on the main bulletin. I flick over to the highbrow talk channel and they’re doing much the same.

I don’t know where Radio 1 is on the dial. It used to be 1053 / 1089 when I was a kid but it’s long since moved to AM. I try and remember a station ident and decide its somewhere near 98, switch to FM, and press the up button. The digits flick through until they stop at 98.2, and Underworld starts booming out of the car stereo, followed by Pulp and followed by the Smiths, and that’s when I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut and I start to cry.

In its own unique way, Radio 1 is trying to pay a tribute to John Peel by dropping the playlist and playing the sort of thing they think he plays, but they’re only playing the safest tunes, the ones that did cross over, the ones that he’d probably stopped playing anyway. They’re reaching out, but they’re falling so far short that it serves to remind you just how unique he really was and how much of a gap he’s left behind.

I’m reminded of those knackered tapes that I’d make of Peel Sessions, of those early Strange Fruit releases with the identikit sleeves. I remember the night he played ‘Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft’ by The Wedding Present and I went out to buy it after school the following day. I remember how upset I used to get with the Festive Fifty rundown, and how he and John Waters used to talk cack for five minutes at a time, an obvious precursor to the witterings of Mark and Lard.

When I get back to Northampton, its the lead item on the 6 o’clock news. They cut over to Andy Kershaw, a close friend and former Radio 1 colleague. The presenter asks him what his favourite memory is of John and he’s close to tears when he says that there’s no way he could possibly narrow it down to one.

Switching the digital radio on, I instinctively press the button for Radio 6. As we move to a multi-channel age a lot of the post-Peel DJs have been shunted over here. You feel it’s probably his natural stomping ground but of course there’s no way that the controller of Radio 1 would try and shift him.

They’re playing ‘My Favourite Dress’ by The Wedding Present.

Kershaw, both on that news bulletin and later on on Radio 4 makes the claim that John Peel has probably been the most important figure in British rock over the last 40 years, more influential than John or Paul. Nobody challenges him. The controller of Radio 1 says on the news, ‘John really is irreplacable. I have no idea what we’re going to do.’

I can’t think of another person in this country whose passing would trigger such a wave of affection. I can’t think of another cultural figure that would lead the country’s national pop station to dump the playlist. The newsreader on Radio 4 said the response from listeners had been unprecedented. Sometimes you don’t appreciate what you have until you’ve lost it.

Six years ago, in Simon Garfield’s book, ‘The Nation’s Favourite’, John said “I’m a great believer in getting your priorities wrong, setting your sights low so that you don’t go through your whole life frustrated that you never became prime minister. Really, it’s playing and listening to records that I like.”

That’s how I’m going to remember him.

Thanks John.

John Peel was one of those people that you took for granted. You didn’t always listen to him but he’d always been there and so you assumed that would always be the case.

He was a reminder of a time before playlists, and a time when independent meant independent and although he didn’t really fit into Radio 1 any more, it would have been a brave controller who would have suggested moving him.

I don’t listen to him as much as I did fifteen years ago but his radio show was the first place I got to hear bands like the Pixies and the Wedding Present, and I’m going to miss him an awful lot.

Read about him here, here, here and here. Talk about him here.

Product Shop posted up a rumor running around about a show at the Madison Square Garden Theater featuring Wilco, Flaming Lips, and Sleater Kinney.

Oh my.

UPDATE: This is no longer a rumor. From Wilco’s official site:

As we head into a “more crucial than ever” November 2, we at Wilco HQ thought we’d take a moment to drop our own October Surprise into the mix. How about Wilco headlining a show with the Flaming Lips and Sleater-Kinney at New York’s Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve?

Internet pre-sale begins Monday, November 1 @ 10 a.m. EDT at http://wilcotickets.musictoday.com Public on sale is Friday, November 5 @ 10 a.m. via ticketmaster.

Kim has posted up a bunch of great Decemberists and Apollo Sunshine photos from last week’s show. I love this candid photo of Jenny:

View the whole gallery here. There’s some goodies.

Eminem goes on the offense against Bush and the Iraqi war in an upcoming Rolling Stone interview, as well as in “Mosh,” one of the songs on his new album.

In the Dr. Dre-produced track, the rapper denounces the war in Iraq. “Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell,” Eminem raps. “We gonna let him know/Stomp, push, shove, mush, fuck Bush!/Until they bring our troops home.” Later in the song, he adds, “Let the president answer on higher anarchy/Strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war/Let him impress daddy that way . . . No more blood for oil.” (full story)

Boing Boing found a Real Audio stream of the new song: Listen Here

Remember when Bob Geldof went from being the former singer of the Boomtown Rats and star of the film adaptation of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” to being an internationally known humanitarian who assembled a group of the hottest British-pop recording artists to record a song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”? Geldof called the project Band Aid and recorded the song, written by Midge Ure, in 1984 with the help of members of U2, Duran Duran, and Wham!. The money went to aid starving children in Ethiopa and eventually led to a Band Aid concert that featured a who’s who of famous musicians, from Phil Collins to Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin.

Twenty years later, a group of contemporary Brit-pop musicians are making plans to get together to re-record the classic relief song with the same goal in mind, raising money for starving children in Ethiopa and Sudan. Among the artists scheduled to perform on the remake (which should be recorded in mid-November and then immediately shipped out to record stores) are members of: Oasis (Noel Gallagher), Blur (Damon Albarn), Jamelia, Coldplay, and The Darkness and Travis. Geldof is hoping to get Bono in to re-record his line from the 1984 version of the song, “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” [full story]

A writer for the Guardian UK was forced to listen to every album released in October in a period of one week. He lost his mind.

But now it is the early hours of Monday morning, and I am listening to a CD reissue of The Age of Plastic, the debut album by Buggles. In case you don’t remember, Buggles were a duo featuring the famous producer Trevor Horn on vocals. They had a number one with Video Killed the Radio Star, then vanished. It isn’t so much the album itself that is the problem, although it has a song on it called Astroboy (and the Proles on Parade) and is awful beyond measure. It is the idea that someone, somewhere in a record company had bothered to reissue it. At 3am, that decision suddenly seems symbolic of everything bad that people say about the music industry: it’s wasteful, it’s stupid, it has no interest in actual music. (full story)

That’s what the papers are saying.

We’re saying those papers are a bunch of slow-pokes since we announced that Graham was chummy with the band months ago and a regroup might be in the cards!

DoneWaiting…waaaaay ahead of the news.