Britpop legends Blur received a lack of interest at Coachella, while the rest of the world has gone nuts over Tay-tay's latest offerings. IA's music maestro, David Kowalski, reports.
Blur not so sharp at Coachella
One of the big news stories of late is the lukewarm reception that Britpop legends Blur received at the American mega-festival Coachella recently. The festival runs for two consecutive weekends, and this year the headliners were Doja Cat, Tyler the Creator and Lana Del Rey.
The story was that the crowd at the front of the stage was waiting all day to see Tyler and probably couldn’t have cared less for Blur. However, the entire amassed crowd just wasn’t having a bar of the vibes being laid out by one of Britain’s finest bands. Frontman Damon Albarn excoriated the crowd with expletives during their 1994 hit ‘Girls and Boys’ with “You’ll never see us again, so you may as well ****ing sing it!”
Blur fans on Twitter were aghast. ‘This Coachella crowd doesn’t deserve Blur,’ wrote one user.
What we are seeing manifest here is an issue that I would call the “transatlantic culture clash”. Even though America has its heritage stemming from Britain and shares the same language, a lot of the music, movies and general humour of the UK doesn’t translate well with Americans. Any British act before The Beatles bombed in the U.S. (Cliff Richard is a great example) and many other later ones like The Jam and Slade just couldn’t get a foothold in the country.
Blur only had one well-known track in the States and that was designed as a parody of American grunge — the 1997 single, ‘Song 2’. ‘Girls and Boys’, for example, was a massive hit in the UK, hitting the top five there. It received some airplay in Australia and hit a peak of number 19, but it scraped in at a peak of number 59 in America.
Even then, that was Blur's biggest single placement in the country. There was hardly a following or a legacy left over from the '90s for the crowd to draw on and as such, they were probably never going to go over well. Most of the crowd was probably never even born when Blur was at its imperial peak.
From where I sit, this was always going to be a recipe for disaster.
Albarn has since said that Coachella will probably be the band’s last show, potentially for good. Not a great way to go out, but probably a wise move.
Swift’s sanctimonious soliloquies
Last week, Taylor Swift dropped a new album by the name of The Tortured Poets Department and it is epic. Dropping the album right in the middle of the school holidays here in Australia was a good idea, with the record going live to streaming platforms at 2pm AEST.
From the accounts of those in my social circle, fans were organising listening parties to take in the new record and because there were no single releases ahead of the album’s launch, nobody had any clue as to what the album would sound like.
It’s a good thing they did take time out from life to listen to it as there’s a lot to take in here. The standard album has 16 tracks in 65 minutes. That’s a long record in anyone’s language. Too long for a single LP.
Then there were four different varieties of the vinyl, each on a different coloured wax with a different bonus track. If you go to Spotify or whatever your streaming platform of choice is, the Anthology edition of the album has a whopping 31 songs and clocks in at over two hours.
With all the touring she has done this year and the re-recording of all her old albums – the rights are still owned by her previous manager, Scooter Braun (identified as “Taylor’s Version”) – I’m surprised she even had time to write and record 31 new tracks at all. She clearly is the hardest working person in showbiz.
So is it any good?
It's a fairly heavy, synth-based indie-sounding pop record with lots of dance music flavours and some really dark and complex lyrics in it.
Lyrics like “God wants the most judgemental creeps, who say they want the best for me, sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see” show Swift deep into her soul to exorcise some very painful feelings. It’s an emotionally raw and mature statement of a record, but it certainly isn’t the joyous fluffy pop music she has created on previous records, a fact she admits herself:
There’s certainly some very good and interesting music within this. The question must be asked though: are all 31 tracks worth releasing all at once? Does it need editing? You’ll have to listen for yourself and tell me in the comments. The reaction from fans around the interwebs suggests it’s a classic and that’s all that matters.
Bon Jovi hanging up his boots
Jon Bon Jovi has announced in the lead-up to the June release of a new Bon Jovi album and documentary called Forever that he may never be able to tour and play live on stage again. According to Forbes magazine, Bon Jovi says he is still recovering from major surgery (about which he did not elaborate) and is not match fit yet to go back on the road.
The band last toured in 2022 and time will tell as to whether Jon is able to tread the boards again. Watch this space...
Gravel Samwidge worth a bite
Australian indie band Gravel Samwidge has had a colourful career, starting in Sydney in the late 1980s before splitting up for a few years after the passing of their drummer, Jay Doherty. The band reformed a few years later and won a regional heat of the Triple J Unearthed competition in 1995 and then continued labouring away under the radar for many years.
The band has just dropped a brand new split 7” vinyl single with American band The Art Grey Noizz Quintet (featuring ex-members of Sydney madmen Lubricated Goat), which is available on its Bandcamp site.
The Gravel Samwidge track Don’t Go There is a classic punk stomper in the tradition of its very finest work — noisy and ragged and threatening to fall apart at any minute. It’s a band worth further investigation.
Until next time…
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David Kowalski is a writer, musician, educator, sound engineer and podcaster. His podcasts 'The Sound and the Fury Podcast' and 'Audio Cumulus' can be heard exclusively here. You can follow David on Twitter @sound_fury_pod.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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