by Harry
A decade, eh? It’s too long to even think about. A review of the year is hard enough, a whole decade is ludicrous. Summing up 29% of my life in a series of snappy soundbites, with mildly amusing links, comments and the odd youtube video is a massive piece of work. I know Jordan releases a new autobiography every 8 months, but she’s a massive pro, and I’m not.
However, that’s not to say that I haven’t noticed certain things (at a rate of 1 every 2.5 years), which I could write in list form below, complete with supporting arguments and questionable grammar…
1. Things keep getting smaller.
Oh, we used to have lovely big records, which became nasty little CDs, which briefly threatened to become even tinier and less loveable minidiscs, and now we have mp3s which are so small that YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.
My first iPod was the size of a shirehorse, and if I wanted to take it out with me I would have to strap it to my back and attach counterbalancing weights to my chest to stop me from falling backwards. But then came the itty-bitty Nano and the even smaller Shuffle. And all the time the standard iPod kept shrinking. Now they can put them in phones, which means that they are so small that YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.
TV’s used to be massive. Do you remember massive TVs? Do you? You do? Weren’t they huge? Not the screens obviously – they were little bulbous affairs that made your eyes septic – but all of the gubbins round the back. TVs were so mind-thumpingly futuristic that they had to carry a big, hot, glowing box of science behind them to power their magic. If you wanted one with teletext, you had to buy one that was so enormous due to the many wires, valves and pulleys that powered it, that the screen ended up looking like the sticker off an apple, stuck onto a car-park.
But now the clever bits have been crushed down to the size of nothing, and even though the screens are massive, if you stand to the side and look at them from the wrong angle, YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.
And this unarguable point can be observed throughout our daily lives. In the 90’s we all used to live in castles and eat whole pigs for breakfast, whereas now we live in individual life-pods and subsist for a month on a spoonful of macrobiotic yoghurt.
In the 90’s we all had hair that was massive and we drove lorries, now we’re all slapheads in Nissan Micras.
If the march of technology continues unabated, soon we’ll all be commuting in tiny, one-man trains to an office which is too small for us to get into, where we think up marketing campaigns for billboards that are invisible to the naked eye, for products that we keep losing because YOU CAN’T SEE THEM AT ALL.
In my view, that would be a bad thing.
2. The Demise Of The Record Shop.
In the 90’s, independent record shops were living the dream – Nirvana and Pearl Jam created a new generation of rock fans, Oasis v Blur made the evening news, Echobelly v Shed Seven made page 12 of the Stockport Gazette, and people couldn’t stop going out and buying their records.
And there were a bunch of big record stores too – Our Price, HMV, Virgin, MVC – a savvy record buyer could shop around, maybe getting 30p off the recommended retail price of a single, a free Roxette keyring, or an exclusive papier-mache replica of Morrissey’s chin with their copy of Bona Drag.
Nowadays, we all steal music online and the record shops are dying. 93% of the independent stores have been closed down and turned into Pound Shops. Our Price, MVC and Virgin are long gone, and asking for something non-chart from the music section in HMV (usually hidden away at the back of the store behind a wall of Michael McIntyre DVDs) is like going into Anne Summers and asking for a lifesize blow-up Alsatian, such is the look of disdain you’re likely to get from the shop assistant.
So support your independent stores while you can, for they may not be around for much longer.
Remember, without record stores there would be no High Fidelity. Instead we’d have a film solely about a guy downloading Annie Lennox b-sides from a file-sharing service, for 93 minutes. Booooring.
3. Excessive and Unfair Guilt by Association.
A handful of bankers make a few piffling blunders and wreck the world economy, and we all get the blame for it.
It’s just not fair.
Telling people that you work in a bank these days is like telling people that you’re the guy who tests perfume by dripping it into the eyeballs of live toddlers. It’s dinner party hell, and you can’t even get a decent bonus anymore to pay for protection.
Luckily, as I’m now unemployed, I no longer get invited to dinner parties, as potential hosts fear that I’ll eat them out of house and home, nick their cutlery and start living rough in their front garden.
So why did everyone in the banking industry get tarred with the same brush? I mean, just because Gary Glitter was found guilty of all that stuff, it doesn’t mean you’d instantly point the finger at other figures from pop in the 70’s like Jonathan King and that bloke out of the Bay City Rollers, does it?
OK, bad example, but you get my drift.
4. Aren’t gigs expensive these days?
As ways of acquiring music got cheaper, so gigs became ever more expensive.
Once a cheap way to see a band to find out whether or not you liked them, gigs are fast becoming for the devout fan only, with casual punters unlikely to shell out £23 plus booking fee, plus delivery fee, plus paper & ink fee to see a bunch of chippy blokes with 3 good songs who got a mention in the NME six months ago.
And because gigs are packed with happy-clapping fans, there’s no-one available to pipe up and heckle if the band is rubbish. Have we really moved forward as a species if no-one is prepared to throw a Doc Marten full of warm piss at a moody bass player anymore?
I saw some great shows in the noughties though. Radiohead in South Park, Oxford in 2001. The Night Marchers at San Diego’s Casbah in 2008. The Strokes at the Hard Rock Café in Las Vegas in 2006. The Bellrays, The Dirtbombs and Rocket From the Crypt on the same bill at Bristol’s short-lived Essential Festival in 2002.
The best one was probably Foo Fighters in the tiny 400-capacity Dingwalls in Camden in 2007. Having found out from someone at work that there was a fans-only gig going down that night, I decided to mobilise the full force of The Steve Show, with notoriously crazy producer Jude putting in some calls and getting Steve and I on the guestlist.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgkYhQqpyfc
I should point out that this was pretty much the only time that working on the show got us a juicy bonus like this.
Even so, I know what you’re thinking – it’s a sad indictment of the record industry when a fan-only gig is gatecrashed by a pair of corporate shills like us (especially as the fans didn’t get to go to the pre-show reception where Dave talked about the new album while we munched on canapés and necked free beer).
But in fairness, I had always been a massive fan of the Food Fighters, ever since lead singer David Gray left his old band New Order following the death of their drummer, Bernard Bresslaw.
So, erm, in summary, aren’t gigs expensive these days? Ahem.
Conclusion.
In the 2010’s, the Teenies, the Tweenies, the Tenties, whatever you want to call them, I think we can all now agree that we’d like to see
- things get bigger, or at least maintain their current size;
- an environment where record shops prosper and flourish again;
- people, like, you know, calming down a bit;
- gigs becoming more affordable for bladder-challenged boot-hurlers.
This is my manifesto, and I look forward to receiving your vote in May.
Steve Show Posse 