Tag Archive: coldplay


WHEN SHOULD ROCK BANDS QUIT?

Filed under: Music, Television — Leave a comment
July 11, 2012

Remember them this way – Roxy Music on the gatefold sleeve to For Your Pleasure.

Rock bands are like TV sit-coms, they usually go on for too long and become tired or formularic.

Roxy Music are a prime example.

In a review of the 10 cd box set of the band’s complete studio recordings in this month’s Wire magazine, Mark Fisher sagely notes that  “if they had stopped after the first two albums, their career would have been immaculate”.

Their self titled debut and For Your Pleasure were and are amazing records which they never bettered in their post-Eno years.

I got to thinking which other long running bands would have benefited from quitting while they were ahead.

For instance, REM should have called it a day after Automatic For The People and wouldn’t it have been better if the Stones had parted company after Exile On Main Street or if The Who had ended on a genuine high with Quadrophenia.

Did punk bands like The Ramones, The Damned and Gang Of Four really need to make any more records after their trailblazing debuts?

I’m sure you can think of your own examples.

There is of course another category of bands such as The Cranberries and Coldplay that ought to have been strangled at birth, but that’s another story!

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THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF TRAVIS

Filed under: Music, Parenting — Leave a comment
February 11, 2011

My teenage daughter’s musical education has its ups and downs.

While I have been able to turn her on to noise bands like Yellow Swans and the Warped techno/electro of Aphex Twin she’ll still wind me up by putting on a CD of Coldplay for the school run and yesterday she was smitten by the song ‘Sing’ by Travis.

My work is not complete!

I had to confess that I too, in a moment of weakness (and swayed by rave reviews) I bought a CD of The Man Who (which precedes Sing) soon after it was released in 1999.

I have always maintained that Coldplay are the poor man’s Radiohead (which probably makes Travis the poor man’s Coldplay). Still, out of curiosity I was moved to listen to the album again to see if I had mellowed with age and was able to appreciate the serene grace and haunting melodies other humans seem able to detect.

Needless to say, it still struck me as a vapid set of tunes with the same brain numbing effect that hits me whenever I enter a large DIY store. But there is one exception.

But a few minutes after the final chords of the closing track (Slide Show) have faded into oblivion comes a hidden track with a fierce energy and fire conspicuous by its absence in the rest of their material. After the lame tracks that precede it, this track (Blue Flashing Light) is a breath of fresh air.

See what you think:

Do you know any great tracks (hidden or otherwise) by bands you generally hate?

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AN ATHEIST IN A GOSPEL CHOIR

Filed under: Atheism, Music — Leave a comment
January 17, 2010

Good interview with Brian Eno in today’s Observer by Paul Morley. He talks about how he combines an interest in abstract experimental art with his work on results driven pop with mainstream acts like Coldplay and U2.  These apparent contradictions never bother him too much. In the same spirit,  he reveals that  he is in a local gospel choir despite being an atheist.

In talking about his invention of Ambient Music, I like what he says about giving genre labels to music:

“All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real. Names are very important.”

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COLDPLAY’S vaporous f-ing drivel

Filed under: Humour, Music — Leave a comment
February 15, 2009

Coldplay won three awards at the Grammys:
– Song Of The Year (Viva La Vida)
– Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals (Viva La Vida)
– Best Rock Album.

Occasion to celebrate? I think not!

Here’s the last word on the band courtesy of an inspired piece by Mr Agreeable in The Quietus:

Finally, Coldplay have released their latest album, Viva La Vida, to some laudatory reviews. Is it time, perhaps, that we get past his celebrity marriage and fruit-based policy of child naming and recognise the towering genius of our age that is Chris Martin? Yeah, well, it’s been some fing decade! Let’s go back. The Fifties brought us rock’n’roll. The Sixties brought us The Beatles, flower power, the countercultural revolution. The Seventies brought us punk, the Eighties post-punk, Acid and Techno, the Nineties grunge, jungle, triphop. And what has this fing decade given us? Kids with their trousers half way down their fing arses and fing Coldplay, in that order of fing merit! A handwringing guppyfaced, snivelling streak of fing cock all like Martin would have been laughed out any other fing decade! Coldplay are fing homeopathic music a gnat’s kneecap-sized particle of fing substance diluted to the fing power of 10 zillion gazillion! Fretting vaguely about the fing environment over a fing piano tinkling like water dripping from a piece of fing ten year old wet lettuce, then blasting your own China-sized hole in the fing ozone player with your private jet? Arsehole! And those fing lyrics! “Those who are dead, are not dead, they’re just living in my head.” What, that’s where we fing go after we peg it? I tell you this, I’d rather be griddled by Satan’s most malicious minions for all fing eternity than spend it in the vaporous fing drivel generator that is fing Chris Martin’s head! Truly, the c to end all c*s!

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