Tag Archives: The Guardian Music Blog

Alan McGee admits to Trolling

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Tim Hall

A couple of years ago, I blogged about Alan McGee’s notorious column in The Guardian Music Blog, and how it had turned into self-parody.

In this column he claimed that Oasis were the greatest band of all time, Freddy Mercury was really a punk, ELO were better than The Beatles, Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans was an absolute classic, and most notoriously of all, kept bigging up a spectacularly talentless bunch of indie no-marks called The Grants.

The comments sections soon turned into free-fire zones. Once people started recognising the extent that many of his columns were nonsense, he employed a legion of supporters in the comments to back him up. All of whom appeared to sock puppets, alleged to be Paul Brownell, an employee of McGee’s.

Now he admits the entire column was trolling

I’ve done blogs before in the past. One I used to write was for The Guardian and for four years most of the articles, and this is for the record as nobody ever prints this bit in interviews, were complete piss takes of The Guardian readers and journalists. Well, all bar Tim Jonze and Alex Needham.

I claimed to like Phil Collins, Jon Bon Jovi and Foreigner. I actually took it so far they once put me on the phone to interview Jon Bon Jovi and I had to pretend I liked his music.

I actually feel sorry for The Grants. They were just a harmless indie band, never really destined to get beyond the toilet circuit, fronted by a lead singer whose mouth was far bigger than his talent. But the way he hyped them up as the next big thing exposed them to ridicule on a large stage, which I’m not sure they really deserved.

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Credit Where Credit’s Due

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

For years I’ve complained about The Guardian’s woeful coverage of metal and progressive rock. Major releases are either overlooked entirely, or worse still, given a cursory dismissal by someone with no knowledge or respect for the genre. Dave Simpson’s attempt to review Yes is a prime example. Even their most positive reviews came from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in.

Which is why it’s good to see Dom Lawson, of Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Presents Prog fame reviewing Opeth’s Heritage. It’s not a long, detailed review, but it certainly doesn’t read like Tony Blackburn attempting to review The Fall.

One swallow does not necessarily make a summer, but I hope we get to read more reviews by Dom Lawson in the future.

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Unblogged bits

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Tim Hall

Which is where I put random thoughts on things I’ve read which aren’t worth a full-blown blog post, but still worth more than a throwaway link on Twitter.

First, the utter beigeness of The Q Awards. Are Kasabian really the best band in the world? It does make me wonder who actually reads Q nowadays. Is it people in the 30s and 40s who no longer either buy albums or get to gigs, but like to think they’re still in touch with what’s going on in music, and don’t want to be told that they aren’t?

Next, the Guardian Music Blog post on the Japanese genre of “Visual Kei”. It seems to be a combination the worst excesses of 80s fashion disasters set to some utterly derivative power metal. It gets a lot of rotten tomatoes in the comments, some of which come from me. A commenter linked to an interview with an (unnamed) Visual Kei record executive, which lays bare the sordid sausage-factory nature of the entire scene, and how it’s cynically exploitative of both musicans and fans. And I thought the US/UK music industry was bad.

Charlie Stross has always been one of my favourite science-fiction authors, and his blog is always an excellent, thought-provoking read. Recent posts have included outlines of novels he might have written but didn’t and some wise thoughts on the bursting of the higher education bubble. His latest rant is a broadside against the Steampunk genre, which in his opinion is far from “what happens when Goths discover brown”, it is, according to Stross, all about romanticising too many bad things about the past. Like High Fantasy, only even worse, is the conclusion.

Finally, BBC’s Mark Easton is trying to work out why “Olivia” is the most popular girl’s name this year. He has one or two possibly half-baked ideas:

As for Olivia - even digitally re-mastered pictures of Olivia Newton-John wearing “those trousers” in the movie Grease cannot provide an explanation.

I am beginning to wonder whether we are witnessing one of the subconscious side-effects of a Mediterranean diet. All that olive oil and low-fat spread. Could it be that our eating habits are affecting the way we fill out birth certificates?

Now, while I’d love to think they were all named after Mostly Autumn’s new singer, somehow I think Mostly Autumn fans haven’t been breeding at that sort of rate.

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Mark McGuire and the fetishising of lack of technique

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Tim Hall

I have a reputation for being opinionated and argumentative online, which is one reason I don’t post much on band forums nowadays - there are too many self-important sycophants who take offence, often on behalf of others, at what was intended as constructive criticism. So now I’m back baiting Guardian music journalists again.

Such an example is Ben Beaumont-Thomas’ Guardian Music Blog piece attempting to praise the guitar talents Mark McGuire, which starts with this opening paragraph:

Claims for the greatness of guitarists are often badly skewed. Many seem to regard guitar playing in a similar way to skateboarding, that greatness is about isolated feats of technical brilliance (an idea which Guitar Hero taps into and perhaps slyly satirises). Therefore songwriting from the likes of Dragonforce, and to a lesser extent Van Halen, Queen, and Guns’n'Roses is modular: guitar theatrics slotted into a framework, rather than folded into songs.

To which my first reaction is “Oh dear”.

Whatever you might think of Mark McGuire’s music (It sounds interesting, reminds me a bit of Matt Stevens or even very early instrumental-era Twelfth Night), I still maintain that opening with a thinly-veiled slur at Dragonforce (of whom I’m not a particular fan) is equivalent to me opening a review of someone like Panic Room with a paragraph about why I think The Libertines are rubbish. It would rightly be a distraction from the main body of the article.

After getting a few responses from the author in the comments, I realised that the thing wasn’t just about McGuire’s music at all, but was using him as a hook to hang a piece fetishising lack of technique. But far from being the iconoclastic position he implies it to be, all he’s doing is restating the orthodox position of the majority of rock critics from the past thirty years. 17-year old Dragonforce fans do not represent the establishment; that position is held by 40-something old punks. And I believe their attitude is deeply damaging to music. As commenter Troyka says:

Since the punk era it has been the norm to pretend that technique and ability don´t matter as much as enthusiasm. The result of which we can see in the uniform dullness of a lot of today´s younger guitarists (in the U.K at least).

Which is pretty much why we haven’t seen any great guitarists emerge in mainstream British music for at least 15 years. Yes, there are plenty of younger guitarists in metal, blues or prog, but they’re minority genres and largely aren’t on the BBC/NME/Guardian/Q radar screen.

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Rock Stars. Who Needs ‘em?

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Tim Hall

This rather silly post in The Guardian Music Blog claims that “we are in danger of destroying rock-star mystique because the web is less in thrall to image than traditional media“.

The suggestion is that blogs and social media makes musicians more accessible to fans, and this is somehow a bad thing. I think his real beef is the increasing redundancy of the music journalist as middle-man.

Anyway, I think the whole concept of the “rock star” is overrated. Some of the most sublime music I’ve heard over the past decade has been made by those who, when I’ve got to meet them have turned out to be quite down-to-earth people. The trouble for music journalists, of course, is that they’re less interesting to write about than to listen to. Unfortunately the ‘rock star’ myth is all to often an excuse to justify the sorts of behaviour that no ‘normal’ person would get away with, and ends up with the glorification of sleazy figures like Pete Doherty.

As I’ve said before, in recent years we’ve seen an wider gap between the creative artist and the showbiz celebrity, so it’s the largely talent-free slebs whose antics fill the gossip pages of the tabloids, while musicians are left in peace to do what they’re good at, which is create great music.

And I really don’t have a problem with that.

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The Free Reformed Church of Metal

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Tim Hall

The Guardian’s Luke Lewis isn’t impressed with Metal Hammer’s proposal that “Metal” be listed as a religion in the 2011 census.

Sadly, this will never work. Having been employed by Kerrang! magazine, I know what metalheads are like. Any attempt to show a united front would soon descend into petty, factionalist squabbling. The grindcore fans would gang up on the sludge-metal fans. The stoner fans would call everyone else “pussies”. And the average black-metal fan wouldn’t get involved at all – he’d just stand aloof, looking grim-faced and pretending he’s called Horgoth and hails from the Frozen North (Trondheim), when in reality he’s called Barry and hails from the freezing north-east (South Shields).

What? Factional squabbles and sectarianism? That will be just like real religion, then. And while we have to see Slayer fans starting literal holy wars, you could count those church-burning Norwegian black-metallers as religiously-motivated terrorists.

Indeed, there are just so many parallels between organised religion and hardcore music fandom it’s impossible not to laugh. Ever heard of a church splitting up because of musical differences? It happens. A lot. All those organists and choirmasters with rock star sized egos….

As for rock star excess, who remembers “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do.“?

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The Guardian Critics Poll

Posted on December 19, 2009 by Tim Hall

As I expected, The Guardian’s Critics Poll of 2009 failed to include a single album I actually own. While people keep telling me that there are genres out there other than prog, someone needs to tell The Guardian writers that there is music out there other than lo-fi indie-pop. Yes I know there’s a bit more variety in the top 50, but the top 10 comes over as very one-dimensional.

It’s probably a consequence of their final list being made up by a committee, and a voting system that favoured the lowest common denominator consensus rather than a list more interestingly varied. Not that those in the top 10 aren’t necessarily worthy albums, but the way they’re described don’t fill me with a desire to go straight to YouTube or Last.fm to check them out.

Still, I think the complete absence of anything resembling Rock is a significant failing, and The Guardian are certainly wearing their genre biases on their sleeves here. As I said in a comment

There still seems to be a bias against certain genres - whether that’s deliberate or an unintended consequence I’m not qualified to comment.

While I’m not expecting you to review every obscure self-released prog or metal album, I do notice you never seem to review artists such as Nightwish, Porcupine Tree, Within Temptation, Opeth or Marillion, all of whom sell far more albums and concert tickets than many of the indie/alternative artists you do review. Apologies if you have reviewed all these artists and I’ve missed them, but…

Do these bands or their labels not send The Guardian review copies? Note that many of them follow a fan-funded pre-order model, where the pre-orders are typically mailed out long before the official retail release. Is The Guardian not able to accommodate that model?

Or does The Guardian choose not to review such bands on the grounds that they don’t have any reviewers with enough knowledge of the genres to give them a fair review? Or they don’t reflect the perceived values of The Guardian’s brand? Or the bands themselves are afraid of being dismissed with a sneering hatchet job?

The Guardian’s Michael Hann actually responded to this:

Those acts, for whatever reason, seem not to be interested in us - we rarely get alerted to their releases, and rarely get sent the records. We did get the Opeth album in spring 2008, which narrowly missed review. But things like Isis, Sunn0))) and others in the underground metal sector have been written about very favourably in these pages. We don’t have a ton of reviewers who can deal with this stuff knowledgeably - and because budgets are tighter than ever owing to this recession thing, I am not in a position to go hunting for new writers.

I know metal/prog get short shrift in the mainstream media, but in our defence I’d say we Film&Music does more at that end than any of the other papers, and when we do so, we do it without taking the mickey.

On the other hand, if you were a publicist for an independent prog-metal band, saw The Guardian’s top 10 albums of 2009, and decided there was no point submitting their album to The Guardian for review because your band’s music didn’t seem to fit their brand image, who would blame you?

And one commenter identified the brand, and identified it as the “White Urban Metrosexual Macintosh Owner Music awards“. I couldn’t possibly comment…

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Alan McGee - My part in his Downfall

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Tim Hall

I sometimes wonder why I bother with The Guardian Music Blog. While Readers Recommend is always fun, and there is the occasional good article, they also publish an awful lot of complete drivel. And in response to this drivel, the comment section all-too-often turns into Usenet on a bad day; the fact that far too many ‘articles’ are little more than trolls doesn’t exactly help.

Alan McGee’s weekly column is one of the worst offenders. Very occasionally he’ll come up with a meaningful re-evaluation of a neglected artist from the 60s or 70s, but all too often he spoils what might have been an interesting article with provocative hyperbole - “ELO were better than The Beatles” was an infamous one. Far more often he’d go on about some mediocre landfill indie band with hype turned up to 11. His lastest is a ridiculous puff piece bigging up Oasis (yet again), which naturally gets shredded by the commentators.

Of course, he will never respond to any comments, failing to recognise the essential two-way nature of blogging. Instead, he comes up with pearls of wisdom like this twitter,

i mean you work in the fields i live in the mansion that’s the way it rolls guardian blog readers.xoxoxoo

Oh yes, that really epitomises The Guardian’s left-of-centre ethos, doesn’t it.

Four pages into the comment thread, a commenter calling himself “Kingspark” comes up with this:

On “Twitter” you invite people to apply to clean the toilets in your mansion. Is that the best you can come up with? Look through the comments. Apart from Paul Brownell’s myriad of aliases - avatthecat, heavytrash, marycigarettes, DoubleDeuceDalton - you’ve only got one fan, Elaine S. She seems like a nice lady. And at least Paul Brownell will always back you up, he’s your employee, isn’t he? He helps you write the blogs and tells you about groups you’ve never heard of and tries his best to make it seem like you’re not completely out of touch.

And I ought to mention that several of those sock puppets have made repeated often unprovoked ad-hominem attacks on myself and others, often in completely unrelated threads (which to The Guardian’s credit have always been removed by the moderators for violating the rule against personal abuse). I consider sending an employee to post under multiple aliases to make it look as if he’s got some supporters isn’t exactly professional behaviour. Using those sock puppets for personal abuse is simply beyond the pale.

Assuming “Kingspark” is correct about those usernames he mentions (and the similarity in writing styles for those aliases he mentions gives me no reason to doubt him), then I don’t think McGee has an awful lot of credibility left. If I was the Guardian Online editor, I would definitely think twice about continuing to employ this man as a contributor.

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