You know you’re getting old when… all pop sounds the same. Of course, it may be that your hearing’s going – according to the WHO (er, that’s the World Health Organisation, not Daltrey and chums…) a billion people are at risk of hearing damage due to over-loud music.
Of course, modern music’s homogeneity may be a little more sinister. An Austrian study found that the more popular the tunes, the more similar their timbre and acoustics. So it’s not surprising record labels are using data gathering techniques to predict which song might be the next hit, as pop becomes as distinctive as flat pack furniture.
Case in point: a quarter of the tunes to make the US Top 100 last year were produced by Swedish producer Max Martin. It’s a name you may not recognise, unless you read the small print – the 44-year-old Stockholmer is credited on 10 Katy Perry songs as well as seven of the 13 tracks on Taylor Swift’s smash album ‘1989’. It’s Martin’s pop nous that has seen the country songwriter make the breakthrough into the pop market.
This is nothing new. Hit factories have existed for aeons, including most famously the Brill Building and Tamla Motown (never mind Nile Rogers). And the UK isn’t immune to the curse of songwriters, and never has been. Right on cue, the Bay City Rollers are back. The original boy band had lofty ideas about playing their own instruments and (gasp!) writing their own songs, driving songwriting duo Bill Martin and Phil Counter to despair. That didn’t stop Rollermania sweeping the USA and the Edinburgh act’s ambition was matched by financial canniness with the royalties for half the tracks going to the band. Sadly the Rollers were less astute in their choice of management – hence the hard-up quintet’s recent reformation.
It may be part of our X Factor culture that sees modern popsters unashamed about not writing or even singing on their own records, the thirst for fame overriding all else. In days of yore – the 60s and 70s – even manufactured bands like the Rollers saw themselves as ‘proper’ musicians rather than puppets, contemporaries like Slade, as well as Bolan and Bowie in their sights. The biggest hitmakers in those days were Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who gave us Mud and Suzi Quatro, as well as The Sweet, who cunningly paired their own heavy metal-tinged B-sides with Chinn-Chapman’s ‘Ballroom Blitz and ‘Blockbuster’ before graduating to penning their own top 5 hits like ‘Fox On The Run’ and ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’.
Because self-sufficiency is the only way ahead. Write and produce your own songs, and manage yourself to boot (better start your own publishing company as well). Whatever you do, avoid cover versions, like Father John Misty’s take on Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ – done in the style of the Velvet Underground. Much to Misty’s surprise, Lou Reed appeared to the alt.country icon in a dream and asked him to delete them – which he duly did. Maybe Lou’s career break in a songwriting factory for Pickwick Records told him that there’s only room for one hitmaker.
Inspector Tapehead
So Solar
(Glint)
In these days of manufactured pop and pressure to shift ‘units’, it’s always refreshing to hear a record which doesn’t care one iota about the charts. And yet, the second long-player from this Edinburgh-based trio is all the better for that freedom of expression. The ten tracks here are unencumbered by traditional song structures, but the ideas thrown at the metaphorical wall somehow form themselves into three-minute pop gems. Closest comparisons might be Django Django on the title track, or Can gone semi-acoustic on ‘Cold Slipstream’ but ‘Weather Rapport’ sounds more like a sea shanty recorded by Californian weirdos The Residents on an 8-bit computer, and is all the better for it. If pop is dead, Inspector Tapehead’s dancing on its grave. ****
