Thursday, April 20, 2006
Cliff Richard, how very dare you
Ancient, granny pleasing rocker, Cliff Richard, made the BBC news yesterday with his continuing whinge about copyright expiry. Apparently 50 years of royalties are insufficient for Sir Cliff, and he wants more. Whilst the USA has gone crazy and now grants stupidly long copyright periods, we in the UK have retained a sensible, pragmatic approach and granted a limited period of exclusive profits to the copyright holder.
Lets move this away from music for a moment and imagine if drug companies were given 50 or 100 years on patents rather than the 15 to 25 years they get at the moment. Whilst this would make shareholders happy in the short term it wouldn’t drive innovation – why innovate when you have a long monopoly. Well for me the copyright argument is the same; a copyright should reward the artist for their work, but shouldn’t make them lazy and stop them innovating.
So Sir Cliff, if you want future royalties you need to keep writing new songs rather than worrying about songs you wrote 50 years ago and that have paid you handsomely over this time.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Primal Scream, still rocking
Due to crap buses and friends who had to work late we just made the unusually early stage time of 8:30. So we arrive just in time for the first run through of the new single Country Girl, which is Primal Scream going gospal. In fact, most of the new stuff has a gospal feel, which is a relief as I'd heard the new sound was Give Up But Don't Give Up style blues.
Another change is to the line up - Throb has gone, but this is a case of less is more. With just two guitarists, the blitzkreig from the stage is cut and the songs all have room to breath. Of course, Kill All Hippies and Swastika Eyes are still massive blasts of noise, but you can now hear everything without your ears hurting.
Crowd favourties, as always, are Rocks, Kowalski and Moving On Up, but for me Kill All Hippies is the definative Scream track.
