Another disco kingpin gone on to the dancefloor in the sky: Bee Gee Robin Gibb died yesterday aged 62 after a long battle against cancer. Guardian obituary here and a lovely piece by St Etienne’s Bob Stanley on his favourite Bee Gee here.
Disco diva Donna Summer has died at the age of 63 after a long battle with cancer. Let’s remember her with tunes like this one.
Very sad news to report about Beastie Boy Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch who died earlier today. He was 47 years of age and had been diagnosed with cancer in 2009.
Very sad news about the death of great drummer and key member of The Band, Levon Helm. He was 71 years of age. The man born Mark Lavon Helm had a chequered, illustrious career, as these obituaries from The Guardian and New York Times outline.
You’ll find my piece in today’s paper on the closure of the POD complex here. In the feature, I’ve had a look back at the venue’s nearly 20 year run in the entertainment game, with a focus on how the venues went from premier league dance clubs to live music venues. I also mentioned a couple of gigs which happened in the venue over the last 12 months such as shows by Janelle Monae, PiL and Lykke Li. I know there are plenty of other fantastic gigs (Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem and Jurrasic 5 to name three) and clubs (a crazy night with Carl Cox and POGO’s reign of giddy glee come to mind) which happened at the top of Harcourt Street over the years so feel free to list your memories in the comments below. Two footnotes: (i) the Django Django gig scheduled for Crawdaddy on February 23 has now moved to the Grand Social and (ii) the closure of the venues does not effect POD’s festival interests in the Electric Picnic, Body & Soul or Forbidden Fruit and the company will continue to promote live shows in other venues.
R’n'b diva, pop star and actress Whitney Houston was found dead in her hotel room in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon. She was 48 years of age. Guardian obituary here, excellent piece by Anne Marie Hourihane here. While her last appearance in Dublin in April 2010 proved to be highly controversial, let’s remember her this way.
Don Cornelius, the founder and host of the legendary Soul Train TV show, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 75. The show, which first aired in Chicago in 1970, introduced television audiences to a host of r’n'b, soul, and hip hop acts and produced many memorable performances. Indeed, the show still lives on in many guises: ?uestlove from the Roots runs a fantastic Thursday night hop called Bowl Train at the Broolyn Bowl in New York where classic vintage Soul Train videos are aired.
Sad news from Los Angeles with the sudden death of New York rapper and old-school great Heavy D. Aside from a lengthy series of quality releases back in the day with Heavy D & the Boyz, he was also a regular on the big screen (you can see him in Tower Heist at the moment).
The thousands of obituaries which will be written over the next few days about Steve Jobs, who died yesterday aged 56, will remember him for many things. He was a technology visionary, a man who transformed a niche company called Apple into one of the most recognisable brands in the world. When it came to products which were beautifully designed, innovative and easy to use, Jobs and Apple led the field: the Apple II, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Others may have been first to the punch with digital music players, smartphones and tablet computers, but it was Apple products which were the gamechangers because they caught the public mood.
When Jobs came in contact with the music business via the iPod and the iTunes store, he found an industry which didn’t know its arse from its elbow at that stage. We’ve written before here many, many times about how Jobs, a white knight in a black poloneck, came riding to the rescue of a belgeaured business. Remember that before the iTunes store came along, the industry had made several attempts to roll out its own legal digital download store, all of which came to nothing. As Steve Knopper, the author of “Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry in the Digital Age”, noted when I interviewed him in 2009, the only way to get music online during the period from 1998 to 2002, from the beginning of Napster to the beginning of iTunes, was to pirate it.
What Jobs did with iTunes was what the industry itself had failed to do – come up with a simple, easy-to-use interface for people to buy MP3s. Sure, Jobs was doing it to flog his iPods, but his iTunes succeeded because the industry had dithered, prevaricated and procrastinated for so long and came up with nothing. Sure, the industry has often grumbled since that they sold the farm to Jobs with the iTunes deal, but the upside is that they’re now making cash they never were before. Sure, it may have been the end of the CD industry, but that was on the cards anyway.
More than anything else, Jobs and Apple reinforced the importance of music. Music is now at the heart of technology marketing, pitches and plays and it’s up to the business to leverage that. Even the name of Jobs’ company was a nod and a wink to his favourite band. That he revolutionised the business may not have been on the cards when he was starting out to change the world with Apple, but there’s no doubt that the music business today is a much different beast to the one which existed a decade ago thanks to Jobs.
Sad news from the music obituaries department. The great folk guitarist and founding member of Pentangle Bert Jansch has died at the age of 67 in London. His last Irish show was the @ the Park event with Joanna Newsom in Dublin’s Marlay Park in July.
The death has also occured of the great Motown songwriter and guitarist Marv Tarplin. He worked with Smokey Robinson and The Miracles and was involved in writing such hits as “Tracks Of My Tears” and “Going to a Go-Go”, as well as “Ain’t That Peculiar” for Marvin Gaye. Tarplin continued to tour with Robinson and played with him at Dublin’s Vicar Street in July 2007.
Producer and Sugarhill record label boss Sylvia Robinson, the woman who put the Sugarhill Gang and “Rappers Delight” together, died yesterday. One more tune…
The surprise statement from REM that they are calling it a day naturally enough dominates the music agenda as OTR goes back to work. It’s big news when a band as successful and influential as REM head for the hills. Acts who’ve lasted 31 years together don’t usually let the stuff and nonsense which comes with being in a successful band get in the way of being in that band as the years go on, as we’ve seen from the likes of U2. Success usually keeps an act together because success means you can tick off the boxes and achieve the stuff you set out to do when you and your bandmates were callow youths in Athens, Georgia. After all, very few of REM’s peers from the early 1980s are still in the game because the rate of attrition is greater on the lower rungs of the ladder.
REM had an unsurpassable golden age when every album, every track, every video was worth observing and experiencing. As the band developed musically with early albums like “Murmur” and “Lifes Rich Pageant”, they became a band you kept the faith with and the bond between them and their fans was always an intense one. Even when mainstream success arrived with “Green” and “Out of Time” – the move from IRS to Warner Bros giving them the marketing and promotional muscle they had lacked in their early days – that bond with the believers continued through the strength and quality of the music.
But it was during the later years of the 1990s, as REM firmly established themselves as the stadium rock band it was OK to like, that quality control problems set in with material. You could chalk this down to internal problems – the departure of drummer Bill Berry due to serious health concerns and a parting of the ways with original manager Jefferson Holt – but REM’s music no longer reached beyond the band’s heartland. Of course, given the size of that fanbase, it was more than enough to keep the band in clover, but as every new REM album which promised to be a return to form failed to live up to its billing, those outside that tent began to lose interest and find other acts to champion.
The spin behind albums like “Around the Sun” and “Reveal” just didn’t convince you when you listened to the tracks. The band themselves sounded like they were going through the motions, trying to show to themselves and others that they were still making music as vital and essential and life-affirming as had been the case decades earlier. As with so many heritage acts, though, it was just not as convincing, exciting, revealing or good as that earlier material. Ironically, given the events of yesterday, this year’s “Collapse Into Now” was probably the best of their recent vintage, an album which had a snap and a crackle to it which previous releases lacked.
There will be a lengthy mourning period following REM’s demise. They had a huge fanbase, ranging from people who had them as the soundtrack to their teenage years in the 1980s (they were a staple on the Dave Fanning radio shows which took me through that decade) to those who fell in love with them when “Out of Time” became a massive worldwide best-seller. They could still fill the big rooms and REM coming to town for a show was always an occasion to savour for many. They were a band many people genuinely loved and admired.
But all good things do come to an end and REM leave the pitch in a very dignified manner with standing ovations from all sides. It’s true to say that we’ll probably never see their likes again. There are very few bands of a similar ilk left in the game and, given the changes we see in the music business with every passing week, it’s becoming harder and harder to see how a band like REM can rise from indie roots to worldwide acclaim and success. They were one of the last remaining relics of music’s old world order. Whatever about any reunion tour which might come down the line when tempting offers are despatched to Athens or any solo albums to inevitably come (a Michael Stipe solo album could well be better than anything they’ve released in years), they leave behind a well stocked back-catalogue and memories of superb shows at venues like Dublin’s SFX, RDS, Olympia and Lansdowne Road. You couldn’t ask for anything more.
It may have been inevitable, but that still doesn’t make it any easier to believe: Amy Winehouse died on Saturday afternoon at the age of 27. Talented and tormented, Winehouse leaves behind a fantastic album (“Frank”), a magnificent album (“Back to Black”) and a lot of sighs and thoughts from those who were touched by that talent about what-might-have-been. What might have been a long, chequered career, full of superb songs and new standards. What might have been a new musical star shining brighter and bolder and better than the others in the firmament. What might have been something other than what it was.
But it wasn’t to be – and it was probably never going to be – anything like that. Instead of leaving us with a huge catalogue of great music, Winehouse leaves behind just tabloid headlines and those photos of a woman who looked old and wasted and lost beyond her years. It’s the chaotic Winehouse of the drink and drugs, Winehouse of the gigs which she should never have done because she was in no fit state to do them, Winehouse of the heartaches and heartbreaks. It would probably have made a great song or songs, but it was quickly apparent after “Back to Black” that she was never going to get it together to release another album (no doubt, demos of that third album will be on release schedules within 12 months to cash in on another young musical death). The fantastic talent had been lost to the self-inflicted troubles.
There has been a lot of tired, silly chatter over the weekend about this mythical 27 club which she’s now joined alongside Joplin, Jones, Hendrix, Morrison and Cobain, other artists who died at the age of 27. That sort of deluded romanticism around great artists dying young is a part of rock’n'roll lore which leaves me cold and angry. Anyone dying young is not something to be celebrated, yet artists who die at 27 are often more highly lauded than some who don’t clock out early. It may sound cynical, but the music industry often prefers dealing with the estate of a deceased artist than the real thing because there’s fewer rows over creative control and artistic direction. The industry also prefers to pitch and project the rebels and their bad-boy or bad-girl allure because it all feeds into this awful, cliched, mythical charade about what we’re supposed to want from our larger-than-life rock’n'roll characters.
Winehouse was a hugely talented artist, but she was also hugely messed up with drink and drugs taking their toll on her. In the end, though, it was success as much as anything else which probably accelerated her journey towards an early demise as she found herself surrounded by yes-men and enablers, those who regarded her as their meal ticket, who leeched off her talent and waywardness. Sure, she was an adult and well capable of making her own decisions when it came to wanton binges and appetites, but it’s hard to see if anything was done to protect her from herself.
I watched YouTube footage of that last gig in Belgrade last night for the first time and it was horrific car-crash viewing. Winehouse was not in any condition to play that show or do an European tour, yet agents, promoters and managers, people who she hired to help her make business decisions, thought otherwise. There just didn’t appear to be anyone who was thinking about the person rather than the pay-cheque. You may think that the crowd were cruel to boo her offstage at that gig in Serbia, but they probably wanted a show rather than the spectacle which always went with Winehouse. Some, of course, went to a Winehouse live show hoping that she and her beehive and tattoos would come a-cropper on those high heels and provide some voyeurism into a damaged, reckless, sad life, but there were just as many who willed her to overcome those demons. Sadly, the demons won in the end and that great potential, that amazing singer with that cracked, gravely roar of a voice, never came to pass. Let’s remember her this way instead:
Very sad news about the death of Amy Winehouse at her London home this afternoon. She was just 27. Whatever about those drink and drug demons which dominated coverage after the success of “Back to Black”, Winehouse was a hugely talented soul with an incredible voice and some superb songs. Interview with her first published in The Ticket in 2006 below.
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Very sad news to report about the great saxophone player Clarence Clemons, who has died at the age of 69 at his Florida home, less than a week after he suffered a stroke. A member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band since day one, Clarence was the heart and soul of that incredible band thanks to performances like this:
TV On the Radio bass-player Gerard Smith has died. The 34 year old had been battling lung cancer for the last couple of months.
DIsco diva supreme Loleatta Holloway has died after a short illness. The 64 year old is probably best known for tracks like “Love Sensation” and a collaboration with Fire Island on a stunning version of The Style Council’s “Shout to the Top”.
John Caddell presents Key Cuts on Phantom 105.2 every weekday night. On Tuesdays before I do The Far Side, the two of us shoot the breeze about the musical news and views of the day. This usually involves semi-coherent rants, anti-Morrissey jibes, references to Marillion, smart alec comments about what I’ll be playing on the Far Side and anything else which catches our eye.
Last week, John was talking about the late, great Gary Moore and this brought us onto the issue of dead rock stars. John was fairly aghast to hear me point out that we can probably expect to see a rash of repackaged Gary Moore Greatest Hits albums as those who own the rights to his back-catalogue cash in on his death. The record shops would soon be full of these albums, I predicted, as the rights-owner sought to make a fast buck. John remembered walking into a record shop after Stevie Ray Vaughan’s death and having a row with the spotty herbert behind the counter about the prominent display of Vaughan’s back-catalogue. The clerk shrugged his shoulders. That’s business.
A few nights later, John emailed me a photo. Seems he may have to go to the HMV store in London’s Piccadilly Circus to have a few words with some lad behind the counter. The shop must have run out of Gary Moore albums.
Sad news from Spain as former Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore is found dead in his hotel room. The Belfast native was 58 years of age. Short obituary here and lovely piece by Stuart Bailie here.
The soundtrack composer who scored “Midnight Cowboy”, “Born Free”, “Goldfinger”, “From Russia With Love” and many other classic films has died. Obituary here.
