We went to see Cast tonight, one of Fi’s favourite bands, and they were very good indeed. I was expecting them to be good, what with having been doing the music thing for 20-odd years, but they exceeded my expectations. Really impressive stuff.
What really interested me, though, was the support bands. Not for their quality, which was good, but for the nature of their tunes. I expect bands on the support circuit (what used to be called “unsigned” before that term became meaningless) to sound like whatever the current trend is and be somewhat mediocre – you don’t get chosen for support slots if you’re all weird and experimental, on the whole. And I appreciate my tastes have changed. Back in 2000 I remember being delighted by the prospect of a bunch of blokes with guitars making a racket on stage regardless of what they sounded like – I just needed the power of that amplified noise in my face. Now, having been to more gigs than I can count, I’m a lot more critical. If I never see another sub-Oasis atrocity I’ll die a happy man.
These support bands weren’t bad. I enjoyed what they did. It was perfunctory rock’n'roll with spirit and verve and very much did the job well. It was their songs, all of which were original but which felt like they were stitched together from loads of other songs.
That’s not to say this is a new thing. All popular music is a reinvention of older popular music. There are no new ideas under the sun. It just felt really raw and unapologetic, a subconscious admission that this is how things are now in rock. There’s no attempt to pretend that originality is possible – we just rearrange and repackage what came before. The everything-is-remix mashup culture that we assumed was internet/digital in nature has leaked into the mainstream. Which isn’t a surprise really, since there’s nothing subcultural about internet/digital culture anymore.
Again, it’s not a new thing. It’s more that it seemed normalised. Maybe it’s bloody Noel Gallagher’s fault with his tedious refactoring of Beatles riffs that lead to this. Maybe it’s come from the electronic sampling culture mixing with rock through bands like The Prodigy. I see Internet, but that’s my bias. It’s probably all sorts of things.
I’m not saying all music is like this and I’m not saying the tunes I heard tonight were bad. If anything they were quite sophisticated in places, mixing up some rather disparate elements at times. And if their roots were showing it’s because they haven’t found their unique voices yet, which is to be expected from support bands of this ilk.
It’s like Paton Oswalt’s Everything That Ever Was — Available Forever being performed on stage in front of me. I called it “every song ever over and over again and again” which could be taken as a criticism, but it’s also a summary of popular music, especially rock’n'roll.
Those who rise above it are those who add something of their own, something unique, and that’s what John Power and Cast did. Those who don’t are just regurgitating the past. And that’s fine.
I dunno what my point is. Maybe I just went to my first normal (as in non-Capsule) gig for a while and was taken aback at how normal it was. Maybe normal is weird to me now. Better get back to growing that beard again.
