At Home with John and Debbie

Sooo, number three.

My first exposure to The Apples in Stereo was on the rather wonderful compilation Heroes and Villains - in which acts like Bis, Devo and Frank Black sing their way through a Powerpuff Girls storyline. The Apples in Stereo explain how the mayor contacts the girls in Signal in the Sky.

I think I made an impulse buy of their album Velocity of Sound in some arbitrary record shop while on holiday in the States. Signal in the Sky is simple but enjoyable stuff — breathless female vocals backed by fuzzy guitars. Think Shonen Knife or maybe The Primitives. Pretty much everything on Velocity of Sound is in the same vein. If you don’t listen carefully, it can seem very samey. In fact I dismissed it after the first few listens, thinking it was a good sound, repeated to monotony.

But, for this blog entry, I’ve re-evaluated it, and it’s subtler than I gave it credit for. There are clever but breezy lyrics , and while the tempo doesn’t change much, not all the rhythms are as simple as they first appear. On occasion head-man Robert Schneider takes over on lyrics, and he does a mean John Lennon (throaty rock’n'roll version).

… and that’s my Apples in Stereo CD.

The one I should own is the more recent New Magnetic Wonder.

It’s a varied masterpiece, awash with gorgeous ELO-like vocoder harmonies, and including strange interludes in a ‘non-Pythagorean’ scale devised by Robert Schneider. I mustn’t go into detail though, because this blog is only for music I own on CD.

Next week depends on whether an Amazon order arrives in time!

Last Wednesday, I told you that the credibility of the artist in this weekly alphabetical look at my CD collection would rise sharply this week, then plunge next week. Actually that was based on a mis-sorted CD shelf. Next week’s plunge was to be Bryan Adams’ Waking Up The Neighbours. Due to the mis-sorting, that plunge would have come today. However, I didn’t buy it, nor was it given to me. Debbie thinks it might be hers, but doesn’t know how it might have come into her possession. So I’m taking an executive decision to skip it.

The sticker on the front says it includes (Everything I Do) I Do It For You and Can’t Stop This Thing We Started. Bryan is shouting into a megaphone on the cover, but will have to put it down before he can play anything musical on his guitar. That’s all you or I need to know.

This week’s expected rise, actually comes next week. In fact the second artist in the list, not including Bryan Adams, is Paul Anka.

Paul Anka is on the B team of big band swing singers. Before the album Rock Swings, he was mostly famous outside swing circles for a foul mouthed rant recorded backstage, in which he is outraged that one of his band wasn’t wearing a proper shirt.

Rock Swings (2005) is Richard Cheese with a budget (you’re going to have wait a few months til we get to Richard Cheese). Anka covers ‘new’ songs - what he calls in the sleeve notes ‘the standards of the future for a large demographic of people’. Songs Paul Anka considered newfangled in 2005 include The Pet Shop Boys’ It’s a Sin from 1987 and The Cure’s Lovecats from 1983…

There’s no shortage of novelty covers in the world. What’s unusual about this album is that it is equally respectful to the songs and to the style into which they’ve been morphed. The tracks that work best - like all good covers - reveal previously undetected quality in songs you may not have appreciated before.

The standard is so high throughout that it’s hard to pick out highlights. Smells Like Teen Spirit falls a little flat, but even attempting it is worthwhile. In places the makeover is perhaps too extreme. Whistle Lovecats for me. Yes, that’s the bit I’d have whistled too. It’s not in Paul Anka’s version.

Unfortunately for me, I just not fond enough of this style of music to love the album, even though I can tell that it’s been made with love and to a high standard. I would never listen to a full album of Paul Anka performing his usual songs. As a result, I get a kick out of listening to this a couple of times: “Haha, it sounds like Sinatra, but it’s Eye of the Tiger“, but I don’t get much more from it. A few more musical jokes or gimmicks - a sneaky segue here, a borrowed countermelody there - might have added the spark I need.

Next week: very cool indie pop. At least I think so. Can you guess what it is yet?

To celebrate this week’s breakthrough, in which the open source 3D printer RepRap (currently Slashdotted, as I write) printed a copy of itself (sort of) for the first time, here’s Corey Doctrow’s short story ‘Printcrime‘.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got mentioned in The Times. I look like some kind of Eurovision nut…

One fan from Leamington Spa is so keen that he sent his notes from the semi-final. “Much gurning” was his view of the Russian entry. Of the Moldovan entry he noted, “under-used trumpet”.

They’re talking about this Flickr image.

Debbie keeps threatening to list the myths about Japan that are not true (trains are always on time, it’s punishingly expensive, you can only get scary Japanese food, etc.). Although I’ve promised to stop thinking about Eurovision for the year, I have to get these off my chest.

1. Political voting

As Ukraine gave Russia 12 points on Saturday, Terry Wogan gave a hollow laugh and said “Ukraine want to just be absolutely sure that the old electricity and the oil flow through”. And hence a nation of pub bores gets to complain that the UK can’t win any more because of ‘political voting’ or ‘bloc voting’.

(I appreciate the irony of course: nobody can bore like me on the subject of Eurovision)

But the fact is, it’s extremely unlikely that politics is affecting Eurovision scoring. For that to be true you’d have to believe:

• That powerful people truly believe that the results of a song contest might affect foreign policy
• That these same people have the ability to rig a phone vote (admittedly this second part isn’t beyond the realms of possibility)

Or, you’d have to believe that ordinary people in their millions are thinking to themselves “Well, I liked that British entry, but with Russia renegotiating their trade tariffs next month, it’s really not worth the risk. I’ll vote for them.”

No.

You don’t need conspiracies to explain the apparent reciprocal voting. There are two explanations.

The first is that of cultural similarity. Croatia and Bosnia are neighbours. Of course they’re going to have a similar taste in music. Throughout that region, the kids are going nuts for ‘Turbo Folk’, a cross between happy house and traditional Baltic folk that sounds ridiculous to Western European ears. Their taste is not like our taste. The same argument applies to other blocs. This is entirely fair and I believe the overall result is fair because of it.
The second reason is less fair, but unavoidable without going back to the eminently corruptible jury system. That reason is immigration. For example, in Greece the contest is extraordinarily popular, and the UK has a massive population of visiting Greek students who watch the show and take the opportunity to vote for their country. Hence, the UK always gives Greece a strong vote. For similar reasons, Germany always gives Turkey a good score.

Former Soviet countries were flooded with ethnic Russians by Stalin’s policies, which supports both reasons. In fact anecdotal evidence suggests that the people of former Soviet states have a great deal of resentment towards Russia. But they share a language and a cultural heritage (each country’s native culture having been all but eradicated) and it shows in their voting. These people truly are voting for the songs.

A poster on the Digital Spy forums (carnoch04) gives a compelling illustration that bloc voting isn’t as significant as it’s made out to be, by compiling the scores if we disregard votes from all the Balkan, former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries:

1. Armenia 109 (finished 4th)
2. Russia 95 (1st)
3. Norway 93 (5th)
4 Serbia 90 (6th)
5 Ukraine 86 (2nd)

A third reason is that of general prejudice. Of course it’s a factor, and the UK may well be the Millwall Town of Europe: “nobody likes us and we don’t care”. Perhaps I’m an optimist, but I don’t believe this factor is all that significant. If people liked our performance, they’d overcome their animosity.
So Wogan’s wrong. I don’t care how long he’s been involved, he’s still wrong, as are Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh. To blame our failure to win on this is sour grapes.
2. Greece and Cyprus have always given each other 12 points

In fact in 1996, Cyprus gave Greece 10 points, and in 1995 Greece gave Cyprus 8 points.

3. The UK deserved to do better this year

Every country gets to award points to 9 countries (giving each one 1,2,3,4,5,6,8,10 or 12 points) so in order to get a single point, a country has to decide that there are fewer than 9 songs better than yours.

Andy Abraham gave a solid performance of a solid song, but the competition was strong. We counted 8 songs that  prompted a spontaneous round of applause from our Leamington Spa audience, and I could name a few more that are more memorable than the UK entry.

Of the top three, I could hum you the chorus from the Greek and Ukrainian entries right now. They were streets ahead of the UK song. I didn’t rate the winning Russian song much myself, but let’s take a look at the performer’s track record (with thanks to another Digital Spy poster):

Dima Bilan - History

• Graduated from Gnesins Musical College as a classical vocal performer.
• 2003, released his debut album titled Nochnoy Huligan (Night Hooligan).
• Attempted to reach Eurovision previously with the song “Not That Simple” in 2005, finishing in second place at the Russian national selection.
• December 2005, Bilan received two golden gramophones for the song “Ty dolzjna ryadom byt’” in Saint Petersburg and Almaty.
• Voted Showbusiness Man of the Year.
• Record tracks for the musical Peter Pan in the USA
• Took part in “International Music Awards” in Kiev where he was honored as “Singer of the Year”.
• Took second place in Eurovision 2006 with the dark pop song “Never Let You Go” (1st was Lordi)
• July 2006 took part in the biggest musical event in Russia, “The Red Summer”, where he performed on stage with Shakira, The Black Eyed Peas and t.A.T.u.
• September 2006, for second year in a row, Dima Bilan won Artist of the Year and Song of the Year at MTV Russian Music Awards.
• November 2nd Bilan represented Russia at MTV EMA in Copenhagen.
• 15 November 2006 Bilan received award for Best Selling Russian Artist and performed at the World Music Awards in London along with Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Rihanna, Nelly Furtado and Bob Sinclair.
• February of 2007 started to record his first international album in English in Los Angeles, Miami and in Philadelphia in collaboration with producer Timbaland.
• First single released from new album topped the eastern European charts for 8 weeks. Video was shot in London by Trudy Bellinger (who made videos for Girls Aloud, Sugababes and Sophie Ellis Bextor).
• 4 October premiered his second single from the forthcoming album, Amnesia, at the MTV Russia Music Awards 2007, winning “Best Performer”", “Best Song” and – for the third time in three years - “Best Artist”.
• 20 February went to Miami and recorded a few tracks for his Spanish album with producer Rudy Perez, this album will include a duet with Nelly Furtado.
• Represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Believe” accompanied by Hungarian violinist Edvin Marton and Russian world champion figure skater Evgeni Plushenko (and he won).

The problem is, British people still think the whole world dances to their tune. Although a lot of Euro-pop is performed in the English language, a typical European won’t have heard of many of our celebrities, and they have megastars of their own who are popular among vast populations across multiple countries.

Not only that, but Dima Bilan toured Europe promoting his song in the weeks running up to the competition, so the voting public in many countries would have been exposed to this song — performed by an established act they already knew well — many times before the competition itself.

We sent a talent contest runner up. They send Micheal Jackson. We do badly partly because we’re unpopular. But we also do badly because we don’t take the event seriously. Every year we like to pretend that we’re taking it seriously this time — but you only have to compare our efforts with those of other countries to see that we don’t.
4. It’s a waste of license payers’ money

The BBC contributes approximately £180,000 - extraordinarily good value for money for over 8 hours of popular programming.

5. The UK should drop out

Well, it wouldn’t make the show any less entertaining for me, but it would be a sad day, and it would make us look like sore losers and killjoys. Just like those killjoy sore losers Austria and Italy.

What on earth would dropping out achieve? Even when we lose, we get to participate in something glorious and bouncy and shiny and fun.

6. It’s a load of camp old nonsense

Well, that bit’s true, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

The answer to the question in the title is — for quite a long time to come. But not necessarily forever.

These thoughts were triggered by a cluster of recent high profile blog posts.

First off, Steven Poole, Guardian columnist and author of ‘Trigger Happy’, a book about video games, wrote about giving away content.  I bought Trigger Happy when it first came out. Lately, he republished it as a free download. As an experiment, he put up a PayPal tip jar, but it didn’t get him many tips. Although he goes on to say that the exercise was worthwhile for him (it may sell paper copies, it gets him reputation that could lead to future book sales and press commissions), he argues that giving away content is not a sustainable business model.

This got the attention of David Pogue, author of the popular ‘Missing Manuals’ series of technical books. He basically cites Poole, explains why he doesn’t provide electronic copies of his books, and expresses gratitude that he’s not in the film or music business, ‘where piracy is even easier’.

Then Techdirt’s Mike Masnick got hold of it and wrote a refutation. But either he’s wrong or he’s not clear enough.

So here’s how I see things.

Right now, e-book readers aren’t quite good enough, and printing a book at home isn’t quite cheap or convenient enough, to make reading electronically distributed books a pleasant experience. That works in the book industry’s favour, since right now paying £5 for a paperback of War and Peace is a better value proposition than downloading it for free and getting a headache from reading it on a screen.

But that’s very likely to change. Clever people are working on it, and I don’t doubt that in my lifetime (to be overly conservative) there will be a means to read downloaded text that has an affordable one-off purchase price and a negligible price per document. Whether that’s an ebook reader or a fast cheap printer and binder is not relevant. So let’s put ourselves in a hypothetical future where that’s happened.

The next spanner in the works is piracy. Internet media piracy is here and most experts believe it can’t be stopped. You can construct an argument about perceived value of content around the inevitable existence of piracy (in essence - ’since you’re competing with pirates can provide the content for free, the legitimate price will be driven towards zero’). This throws up so many questions about whether piracy is really inevitable, whether most consumers will be honest if they’re given the change, whether there are technical preventatives for piracy, and so on, that I’d rather not go there. So let’s fine tune our hypothetical future and say that there is no piracy. Everyone pays what they’re asked to pay, or they decline to consume what’s on offer. We can surely agree that if piracy does exist, it’s worse for producers, right?

So, in our futuristic utopia, piracy free, where everyone has a cheap book printer, what happens to the economy of writing, according to laws of supply and demand?

Mike Masnick’s central argument is that when distribution becomes almost free, supply is almost infinite, driving the price to zero. That makes sense, but it’s oversimplified. As soon as Steven Poole finishes his final draft of Trigger Happy, there are potentially an infinite number of digital copies available. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Remember we’ve hypothesised there’s no piracy. As copyright holder, Poole can artificially limit the number he makes available, and he can price the digital copies as he sees fit. There’s only one Steven Poole, and he’s in control of his book. So far, the market cannot push the price of his book down.

But while there is only one Steven Poole, there are - I’m sure - hundreds of writers producing intelligent prose about video games. It only takes a couple to enter into a price war, and in the absence of other limiting factors such as distribution and production costs, Poole ends up with competitors selling their competing product for a negligible price, or giving it away.

Now, even if Poole’s work is of a much higher quality than his competitors, he’s competing with free. By all means, being free doesn’t make up for terrible quality, but if the price is right, people will accept second best. And so Poole is compelled by the market to reduce his price in turn, until it is either free or negligible.

There’s nothing special about Steven Poole here. I could substitute almost any author’s name.

So I believe, that in the absence of printing and distribution costs, the price of a book will be driven to zero.

Now that’s sort of unfortunate for writers, because writing a book takes time, talent and effort, and that shouldn’t go unrewarded. For some, the creative act or having an audience is reward enough; but there’s no doubt that a lot of books wouldn’t get written if the author had to do other things to feed themselves.

Fortunately, we’ve only demonstrated that the price of one transaction is reduced, and that’s a consumer exchanging money for a few hundred pages of words. There are all kinds of other business transactions that can be made, if you own a chunk of text that people want to read:

• Sell adverts. It’s tried and tested. To make a lot of money, a publication needs a lot of readers. Nobody said this would be free money!
• Get patrons. A hefty donation gets patrons a deluxe ‘keepsake’ printed copy of the book, plus their name printed in a list at the front of the book. The author would need to be the kind of writer that enough wealthy people would be proud to be seen to support. Of course a patron needn’t be an individual - it could be a charity, a club or a commercial entity.
• Go periodical. It worked for Dickens. Publish the next installment when donations hit a threshold. Offer donors a refund if publication doesn’t go ahead.
• Many other possibilities - probably great ideas I haven’t thought of.

Just like with the old model, writers are still competing for readers, and if they can’t attract enough of the right kind of readers, they won’t make a living. Advertisers will be looking for readers in a targeted demographic. Patrons will have varying reasons for their donations, but some level of readership will be required. Periodicals are closest to the old model, in that it’s the only example where the end-user pays (I also think it’s the most fragile option given, because these end-users can get their reading fix elsewhere for less).

So my belief is not that content should be free for any idealogical reason (that ideology works for certain kinds of software, but doesn’t carry through to all creative works).  I believe that we’re slowly moving towards an economy where content has to be free to compete. If writers can’t make a profit under those circumstances, they’d better stop writing, or write as a hobby.

It’s a little known fact (although people love to snort about how Israel isn’t in Europe) that the Eurovision Song Contest is not a contest for European countries, but for members of the European Broadcasting Union, which itself admits broadcasters from the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Here are the European countries which have broadcasters in the union, but which do not have entries in this year’s Song Contest:

• Austria
• Italy
• Luxembourg
• Monaco
• Slovakia
• Vatican City

… and more excitingly, here are some eligible non-European countries who don’t take part:

• Algeria
• Egypt
• Jordan
• Lebanon
• Libya
• Morocco
• Tunisia

I long for the day when Libya enters the Eurovision Song Contest.

Look at me, blogging.

Eurovision is next week, and we needed some foodstuffs from some of the trickier countries, so we took a daytrip to London by train.

It was FA Cup final day, and our train stopped at Wembley, but it was a little early, and few Cardiff or Portsmouth fans were on our train from the North. Marylebone Station, however, was full of crowds and barriers, as the police took special measures to control football hordes.

A bus from Marylebone got us to our first Eastern European food source, Jacob’s on Gloucester Road (it’s at the North end, nearest Hyde Park, if you go looking). It’s an Armenian Deli, and we stopped there for lunch. They have a mouth watering selection of salads and breads, but we elected for hot food (microwaved from the same chiller as the salad, but none the worse for that). Debbie had chicken with celery, and I had Armenian lamb cotlette, both very nice. We came away with a suitable delicacy for Eurovision.

Our next destination was Vardar in Shepherd’s Bush, which again we reached by bus. This tiny shop was a treasure trove, and a helpful Croatian lady supplied us with treats (we hope) from Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Slovenia.

We walked back to Shepherd’s Bush tube station along Uxbridge Road, which has plentiful shops selling food from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. We really only needed Albanian and Azeri goodies, which proved difficult but not impossible.

With our duties done, we got the tube to Embankment for some sightseeing. Debbie had scored some annual passes for Merlin Group tourist attractions, using Tesco loyalty card points, so we had a spin on the London Eye. They call it a ‘flight’. It was entertaining enough, and might have been even better if the weather had been clearer. I don’t think I’d have liked to have paid full price. I certainly wouldn’t have like to have paid the silly prices when it was new.

We walked to Soho, where we found Japanese food served by London Chinese waitresses. A genuine Japanese customer addressed them ’sumimasen’, and was greeted with blank incomprehension. Bento always makes me happy, and my ‘tonkatsu fantasy’ bento was no exception. Debbie had chilli beef ramen, in an attempt to shift her sore throat (it’s not worked).

A poorly planned route to Oxford Circus led us down more of horrible Oxford St. than was necessary, but we made it to Marylebone with plenty of time to spare, and had a comfortable journey home - marred only by the irritating phone calls made by the lady next to me (not Debbie), who saw fit to tell her husband every station the service would be stopping at before reaching Birmingham.

We have so much European food…

I was in  Solihull yesterday, having a followup checkup for my laser eye surgery. (You may think the laser eye surgery would be a more interesting story — but it’s really not. I had my eyes lasered, it hurt a bit that night, then it didn’t hurt and I can see without glasses. End of.

There I chanced upon a shop called “Tiger”, which is a Danish shop full of Danish things, piled high and priced to sell. It’s sort of like Ikea’s marketplace, only Danish and with a less furniture oriented angle.

Near the front, at £2 a piece, were these LP cover frames. This is absolutely brilliant. I’m sure lots of people have a cache of terrific images that they don’t see often enough. With these frames you can hang them on your wall, and when you get bored of them it’s easy to switch in a different LP cover.

As you can see, proper albums fit perfectly, while the simpler 12″ single sleeves leave a bit of spare space around the side.

Both of these are bona fide classics, by the way. The 12″ remix of “Rage Hard” - with its “tour of the 12 inch” narration is always a treat. The Paul Simon album, is the highlight of his career in my opinion. And both have great covers.

Barry Cryer (”The man who first showed Lord Reith where the photocopier was”) made an appearance on Radio 4’s The Now Show on Friday. After being funny for a few minutes, he recited a poem, with ‘Chariots of Fire’ (or a pastiche thereof) playing in the background:

Speed onward bright Olympic torch
Your flames may flicker but they scorch
your progress and illuminate
the cause we truly celebrate.

The people’s voice they loudly sing
a message: can you hear, Beijing?
We doubt you hear or even care.
The echoes from Tianemen Square
ring out. These are the real Olympic rings
you hear as each proud city sings.

So Gordon Brown stop pondering, posing.
There are two options: opening, closing.
Go to neither. A simple task.
Is this in truth too much to ask?
And so evade our withering scorn
Or were you to the manner, dithering, born?

Come join us on our chariot of fire.
Care of The Now Show; Barry Cryer