Thursday 19 July 2007

new single by The Feeling

It's called Loneliness and it's great

"loneliness - what is the point of it?"

Indeed

but it really works, being very like the best of the first album with an excellent tune and a hint of emotion

------

postscript from March 4th 2009:

This featured on The Feeling's underperforming second album but it never was a single. It should have been!

The Feeling - Loneliness (Amazon)

Wednesday 18 July 2007

Tinseltown

I saw an amazing band tonight. They are called Tinseltown. They are going to be huge - I guarantee it. I first heard about them when my girlfriend showed me a YouTube video of the singer sitting on her kitchen table, wearing the kind of hot pants/t shirt combo a teenage girl might wear in bed, playing a song on acoustic guitar. The song and vocal were both hopeless but the singer was incredibly cute and an obvious star. The video now seems to have disappeared from YouTube (let me know if you find it). Anyway, I ignored them because the music was hopeless, but then they put a track up on their MySpace site that's really good. It's called Skeletons and it's cool but incredibly commercial (that rare but precious combination). It's basically a re-write of "the hip bone's connected to the thigh bone".

Anyway, Tinseltown's frontwoman is called Romily Alice. She walked on stage tonight in what must be one of her first gigs (she is very young), and stared at the audience throughout, totally fearless and totally at home onstage. Her act is unbelievably affected, like a younger female Razorlight, but also unbelievably good. The music industry turnout was massive.

All this is causing me to have a rethink of some of the ways I approach the music industry. I'm going to have to stop ignoring obvious stars just because their music is hopeless. My rationale was that a star is no good without a hit song, but recently a large number of obvious stars with hopeless music have somehow managed to pluck some good music from somewhere. I suppose it's no coincidence.

By the way, I also saw Razorlight play live when they were unsigned. I'd previously seen Johnny Borrell do his wannabe Bob Dylan thing about a year earlier. Razorlight was many of the same songs with some Scandinavian Strokes lookalikes hired as his backing band. I really didn't like them at all. The next day I saw several people at Mercury who were about to sign them. One of them said "He's a star and his best songs are yet to come" and I thought they were (A) mad and (B) jumping on bandwagon in a really uncool way. Then, some months later, when the campaign was really struggling, I saw Johnny pull out all the stops to save it. He did Golden Touch on Parkinson, accompanied by a gospel choir. That turned the album around. But I still wasn't a total convert until I heard America (iTunes). What a song (Johnny Borrell apparently fought against it being released as a single as it was a co-write with the drummer rather than 100% his).

Having said all that, I don't think America did anything outside the UK and I don't suppose Tinseltown will either.

I then went to see unsigned band Mesh 29 who had a no. 35 hit last week with Over The Barricade (iTunes). There were absolutely no music industry people there which shows how little a top 40 "success" means to the music industry. Mesh 29 have good songs and a decent singer. In fact they probably have more of the core musical ingredients necessary for bona fide international success than Tinseltown or Razorlight. But they are inescapably naff.

Friday 13 July 2007

heard this great track on Mike Harding's Radio 2 folk show this week - Galway Girl

Joe writes: Love Steve Earle, love Sharon Shannon, love Galway Girl (iTunes)



My favourite Steve Earle track is Valentine's Day but I'm saving that.

My favourite Sharon Shannon track is The Diamond Mountain:



(update of post originally from 13/7/07)