Where Worlds Collide

Yes, it’s the time where all the model railway manufacturers announce their releases for the forthcoming year.

1zu160 lists the new releases from a lot of continental European manufacturers - although the text is in German, you can tell what things are by the pictures, and the class numbers and the alphabet soup of wagon codes are equally comprehensible (or incomprehensible) in any language.

I’m interested in Swiss-outline, and Fleischmann are doing three new versions of the SBB Ae6/6; the early green livery with the chrome stripes as fitted to the first 25 locos, the later red livery without the chrome stripes, and the most recent red and blue “SBB Cargo” colours which to my eyes doesn’t suit this classic traction at all.

On the intermodal front, Fleischmann are doing the six-axle articulated Sggnos intermodal flat, which duplicates the existing Hobbytrain model. I’m not really keen on duplication where so many intermodal types are yet to be modelled, but given the patchy availability of Hobbytrain’s models, at least the Fleischmann model should be easier to get hold of. Minitrix meanwhile are doing a 5-wagon set carrying Hangartner swapbodies and semi-trailers. This is a bit of a compromise - the wagons are the now obselete Sdkms piggyback wagons, where the prototypes are, ironically, Sggnos’s. Fleischmann are also doing a 3-wagon set of SBB Cargo’s newish high-capacity 2-axle vans.

Minitrix are also doing another run of GM Nohabs, in Belgian, Hungarian and epoch III Danish maroon. With an all-new Hobbytrain model of this iconic locomotive on the horizon, I’m not sure who really wants to buy this long-in-the-tooth model any more. Perhaps it will be a budget price model, but you never know with them.

Given the current state of the economy, it’s anyone’s guess when (or even if) all these models will eventually appear. But provided I still have the money to spend by then, I can see myself getting at least some of the above over the course of the year.

This is prompted by some comments deep within the comments thread of a rather silly Alan McGee post on The Guardian Music Blog by Jasonaparkes and Jforbes, which speculated as to which half-forgotten or critically maligned acts deserve a non-ironic critical rehabilitation.

Not that I’m talking about mainstream critical opinion here, not the opinion of actual rock fans.

• Dire Straits: If you don’t come from Britain you’ll probably be amazed at the way Dire Straits have acquired the critical pariah status they have. They tend to get lumped in with Phil Collins as the music people who bought two or three albums a year listened to, while all the self-described cool people were busy listening to jangly indie. While it’s true that, at least around the time of the mega-selling “Brothers in Arms” that they did attract the attention of very large numbers of annoying people called ‘Kevin’, that’s not a fair way to judge the actual music. While their music suffered from the occasional lapse of taste, a distressing proportion of which got released as singles to be lapped up by the Kevins, most of their albums, especially “Love Over Gold” stand up well; some very witty lyrics and fantastic guitar playing.
• Supertramp: I have to confess all-but forgetting this band until I recently picked up their live double “Paris” a few months back. Seventies soft-rock has never been the most fashionable of genres, but I’d forgotten just how good they were. Another band for which their commercial singles don’t really represent what they were about; it’s the prog epics like “Crime of the Century” and “Fools Overture” where they shine.
• Styx: Another band I had to completely reassess recently. When I saw them supporting Deep Purple a couple of years back their barnstorming live performance completely blew the headliners away. Sometimes big vocal harmonies and hard rock guitars go together well. The 70s production values of their albums sound a bit tame now, but as they showed live, the songs themselves stand up.
• Journey: Yes, I’m talking about the 80s commercial version of the band rather than the early 70s jazz/prog outfit. Yes, some of their power ballads descended deep into Camembert territory, but they could also be a great hard rock band when they want to, another case of listen to the albums, not just the single. And Neil Schon is an incredible guitarist - his jazz-metal shredding sound like no-one else.

I’ve finally got fed up with the increasing levels of crud on MySpace, and decided to investigate Facebook after being prompted by Scott, along with semi-regular nagging from members the #Freaks crowd who had already abandoned MySpace in favour of it months ago.

Facebook does allow you to search for people before you actually sign up, and I found a whole load of people I know are already members. Not just the same crowd that I had as friends on MySpace, but loads of past work colleagues, and members of my old gaming group who I’d really lost touch with since moving to Manchester.

So far I’ve got 36 friends in less that 24 hours since signing up, which doesn’t seem like bad going. And that’s all people I know, either face-to-face or online, not random strangers.

I won’t be deleting my MySpace profile quite yet, but I can’t see myself spending much time on that site except to check band’s sites for song samples and gig dates.

Matthew hill says rude things about Stockport

See, Stockport’s the bit that missed the toilet — bounced off the rim, the M60, the Manchester ringroad that is — and settled into the carpet halfway between the Pennines and the Cheshire set.

For those of us who live within the borough of Stockport, that’s fighting talk. On the other hand, perhaps he’s got a point. Stockport town centre is a bit rubbish. And he’s dead right about the most significant landmark, the railway viaduct.

(Photo by Chris Walkden)

So it’s farewall to The Astoria in Charing Cross Road, which closed last week to make way for a new station as part of Crossrail.

It was grungy, it smelled of sweat and stale beer, some of the door staff were knuckle-draggers, the beer was overpriced and rented rather than bought, and the toilets were hideous. But it was rock and roll, and we all loved it anyway.

The Guardian Music Blog has a lengthy comment thread in which people share their memories of the place. Since I’ve been living in Manchester during the period while I’ve been going to lots of gigs, I haven’t been there as often as some. My fondest memory of the place was the Mostly Autumn album launch back in 2007. Blue Öyster Cult was a great one back in 2002.

One hopes there will be a decent replacement - I’m confident that if there is a market for an Astoria-sized venue somewhere in central London that one will appear. I’m sure the capital could manage with one fewer venue for Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals. Not that it would replace the Astoria overnight - it takes years for a venue to acquire character, and decades to acquire a history. But it will happen.

Electric Nose takes a diversion from trains, and posts his top ten album list for 2008

His comments on the current state of the mainstream make my most acidic comments look mild by comparison.

I hear a lot of talk about the woefully plastic nature of modern music. The crass commercialism of X-Factor and similar chav-fests. The lowest common denominator boybands and ten-a-penny corporate-indie ensembles with NME-compliant haircuts. The cheap-to-run ‘Interchangeable Emmas’ of the karaoke diva world. All true. All stereotypes, of course, but all true. Yet this is just one part of the world of music. In fact, I’d suggest, this is more the world of television than the world of music. I’ve no doubt the big money comes from folk tapping out premium-rate voting numbers on their phones while revenue from people actually buying ’20 Menstrual Greats’ from Asda probably barely covers the ‘fruit and flowers’ these days.

Electric Nose doesn’t allow comments (Bah!) so I’ll have to use my own blog instead. Nice to see four of my own top ten in the list, including The Reasoning’s wonderful “Dark Angel”. More significantly, all but one of the others are albums I’ve not actually heard; some of them are almost certainly going to be worth checking out.

Demains I realise I have actually seen live - they supported Anathema back in November. Due to a combination of Northern Rail playing silly buggers and the most slow-moving queue to enter a venue I’ve ever seen, I didn’t get to see the start of their set, but I don’t remember being blown away by them live. But a lot of other people whose views I respect like the album.

There’s been a lot of talk on the interweb tubes recently about The Long Tail advocated by Chris Anderson, which suggests that businesses can be profitable serving niche markets rather than concentrating on big hits. Since my musical tastes are well outside the commercial mainstream, I’ve got a vested interest in the long tail - I’d much rather listen to someone like Panic Room than Leona Lewis.

Helienne Lindvall, writing in the Guardian, cites a survey that appears to question the existence of the long tail, but on closer examination appears to show that’s she hasn’t really understood what the long tail theory says; you’ll get no understanding of the length or width of the tail when you’re not looking below the neck. Quite a few commenters have pointed this out, although you should ignore the twit who equates going to a gig where a member of the band greets you by name with ‘giving money to buskers’.

The Jinni Blog makes a very imporatant point, that the real importance of the Long Tail is not economic, but cultural. If you’re only interested in the size of Simon Cowell’s bank balance or which corporate indie clone bands get playlisted on Radio One, then you might not care about the long tail. But as far as I’m concerned, the long tail is where most of the worthwhile music can be found. More importantly, it’s where the mainstream will be getting it’s new ideas from.

Just about all the music I love lies deep within the long tail. Of my top ten albums of 2008, no less than seven were purchased directly from the band, either from their websites or from merchandise stands at gigs. And four of those were pre-orders, where fans pay for an album before it’s recorded, instead of the band getting an advance from a record company.

Long live the tail.

The BBC has a list of so-called “tastemakers” who tell us the music that we’re going to be force-fed with over the next twelve months. Their 15 pundits are the A-list of all the people responsible for the utter crapness of the mainstream music scene with it’s wall-to-wall landfill indie and Asda-pop - the controller of Radio One, the appalling editor of the NME, the producer of “Later with Jools Holland”, they’re all there.

I wonder if the people who’s annual record purchases consist of 2 or 3 CDs a year from Asda don’t realise that all the music the mainstream will hear is pre-selected by such a small clique of people, and how cosy the relationship between the BBC, the major record companies and the music press has become. Do they know they’re sheep, or do they just not care?

Personally I think BBC radio and TV is failing to satisfy the public service remit of the BBC charter by it’s marginalisation of all but a narrow range of genres of popular music, and I find it hard to justify the existence of some BBC radio channels in their present form.