The World After Alt-Fest

For those who don't know the crowd-funded, alternative music focused musical event, Alt-Fest, was cancelled on the 1st of August, two weeks before the event was scheduled to go ahead. In the run up to the announcement there were plenty of rumours as to the cause, and since the cancellation there have been plenty of theories as to what did or didn't cause it to go ahead. Fingers are being pointed, rumours are being circulated, lines in the sands are being drawn and tombs of truth are being written.

That is something I'm not really interested in, as however you cut it the official version of "not enough money was available for the event to go ahead" is (from all sources) the reason it got pulled. What I am interested in is what it holds for the future of the UK alternative scene and UK festivals, because that is going to be the more lasting legacy than 7,500 people having to find something else to do for a weekend.

There Will Problems With Funding
Whilst the Alt-Fest Kickstarter campaign was not the only source of funds for the event (it only raised 3.6% of the events estimated budget from 5.6% of the required audience) it was the first a lot of people heard about the event, and a key part of a lot of the 'a festival for the fans' promotion that followed it. Regardless of the validity of the campaign a lot of people are considering it a 'kickstarter event' and a 'crowdfunded festival', one of the first (and certainly the most high profile of its kind) in the UK. And it failed to provide the goods that were promised, which means that any future attempts to do something similar are now tainted with that failure. The collapse of Alt-Fest has reduced the viability of this funding method for a range of future events, Anyone now trying to go a similar path for the next couple of years is going to be meet with a cry of 'you mean like that event that got pulled a fortnight before it happened?' and a reduced willingness to put their hands in their pockets to get seed money.

It's also going to cause knock-on problems for people trying to arrange other events regardless of the funding sources. Venues, performers, and other suppliers are going to be harder to convince of the reliability of similar events, so you're looking at greater problems of putting a show together to promote as people are going to need bigger bonds (ie more costs) or just won't take the booking in the first place. This goes for the dull things as well: it is always possible to find an act to headline your show, but you try and put on a show without toilet facilities. And this is before a reduction in ticket sales from the lose in faith from the public of the show actually going ahead, especially if its on the scale of Alt-Fest.

Expect A Reduction In The Ambition Of Other Projects
One of the things that caused a buzz about Alt-Fest was it's pure audacity: a three day long event with multiple stages and headline bands that were internationally known, even by people outside of the core market. The schedule was spectacular and breath taking. It was the proverbial "too good to be true". And as that turned out to literally be the case there is going to be a decrease in people trusting in spectacular and breath taking lineups, outside of established events. I actually think you're going to see a toning down of bills at established events for a while, or at least a lack of anything outside of their established norm.

This is a shame as there was something admirable in the gutsyness of going for something so big, but at the same time it will have the benefit of encouraging people to start small and grow from there. It has, in a most brutal of fashions which I wish could have been avoided, shown that you need more than a great idea and a willingness to put in hard effort to do something like this. It has proven that you need to have multiple skills and knowledges and experiences to make these things happen, that there is a reason that many of the major festivals are run by people more worried about the money than the art. A number of people were speculating it would be the Alternative Scene's Reading, Glastonbury, or Download which was a nice idea but missed the fact that all of these started small and then got big over a number of years. It also possibly showed why people don't do such mixed up shows as Alt-Fest aimed for.

Event Bills Will Stick To Being Conservative
The principle of booking such widely divergent bands as The Dead Kennedys, Zeromancer, Arch Enemy,  Front 242, Amen and Petrol Bastard is a noble one, and reflects the variety of listening habits that a lot of people have (as well what people will put up with in a night club). However it doesn't reflect what people like when they put a lot of money into going to a music festival, as what it appears they want is a lot of variations on the same thing. When people go to events (which they do a lot, as the already quite full UK "alternative" festival calendar shows) they want to be in a more specific mind set and a more specific world, they don't want to be challenged outside of a certain safety zone. So whilst it is fair to say that Gary Numan, Arch Enemy, and Marilyn Manson can pull 5000 people each it is far harder to find 15,000 people that like all three and proven to be even harder to find that many that wanted to see them on the same bill.

This is why most major (and many, many, middle and minor) events tend to have a relatively similar band listing: it works and it gets people to turn up in the numbers needed. There are always going to be outliers (Status Quo at Download, Chas and Dave at Sonisphere, Metallica at Glastonbury), but even then there is tends to be a one-step logical link between them. "Its alternative" isn't that logical a leap, at least not in the numbers needed, as "Alternative" is a crap definition of music or scene as its what it's against rather than what its for. Additionally there isn't that much of an "alternative scene" in the UK, just a lot of smallish sized scenes that have a lot of people who are part of more than one. They are distinct tribes, they just share their population with a lot of people. That does not mean they are all going to join together under a vague banner.

With Alt-Fest having tried to put on such an eclectic spread and not getting the numbers other events are less likely to give things an honest go at a mix up. You will still have outliers, but they will be less obvious and less overt (NB Glastonbury may seem like an exception but its booking of outliers is part of its thing, mostly to give the BBC a story), and you are certainly not going to get anyone willing to put as much cash behind an event that isn't specifically targeting an identifiable and developed scene.


And thats the bad news, but there is also this:


People now know where things can go wrong
The collapse of Alt-Fest has, as said above, in a most brutal of fashions which I wish could have been avoided shown people what can go wrong with an event. But the collapse is going to be pulled apart from every direction, for every angle, and by far brighter and more informed minds than mine. Lessons will be learned, pitfalls will be highlighted, the same mistakes will not be made again, and new events will be forged from it.

It has proved that there is a taste for Alt-Fest
Selling 7500 tickets is no easy feat, and it cannot be done unless there is a demand for a new event on the UK festival calendar that fills some kind of gap that wasn't seen until now. That gap is now visible, and more importantly it's been proven that there is money around to fill that gap. Where there is money there is people who want to make money, and the Alternative scene has always proven itself to be very entrepreneurial because it's mostly founded by people going and doing things for themselves. There is no apathy in terms of festivals, things just didn't work with this one.

Which leads to this:
A different version of Alt-Fest will happen
I doubt it will start as big, or be marketed in the same way, or be as wide ranged as Alt-Fest wanted to be, but someone is going to look at everything that happened and go "I think I could make it work...". In fact I expect several someone's are going to give it a shot, regardless of the doom and gloom posted above. And it will be glorious, and people will have a great time, and it will be around for a while as these things tend to do so (or at least you don't really remember the ones that don't).

Not much solace to the organisers and ticket holders of this event, but still something positive to come out of it all.

Okay, that made me cry a bit

Further proof that Macklemore is one of the best rappers of our time, and that the Grammys can still do some good in this world (61 categories, and counting...)

The Ramones

With the death of Tommy Erdelyi we now officially live in a post Ramones world. The second Fab Four are no more, Da Bruddas are all gone, and the phrase "1,2,3,4" will never be quite the same again.

For a band that was constantly rejected and condemned they sure made an impact, essentially inventing the concept of speed that invigorated a large part of Punk and general rock, even if most of their mainstream fame happened years after they had made their boldest and most important statements. For a band that failed to succeed by the standard commercial measures (even Phil Spector couldn't get their album into the top ten) they have gained enough name checks, homages, tributes, references, and mentions to be considered one of the most influential and important bands of all time, eventually gaining the ubiquity of being one of those bands that musicians have the t-shirt of (even of they don't have anything to do with their music).

They managed to do all this with a simplicity and minimalism of style that can never be underestimated: very few profound lyrical statements (at least, in the traditional sense), no groundbreaking production techniques or technical instrument mastery was involved, no sing-along classics. Just a childlike reproduction of the first time you ever heard a rock-&-roll track, that constant speed and sound and depth and power of everything you ever wanted from everything you had heard before. Nursery-rhymes for the reprobates, pop-music without the restraints of parental control or the urge to grow-up too soon, the scream of inarticulate youth making noise because it wanted to, every you ever wanted to express but were told wasn't important enough.

When I first heard it it was like everything I'd heard before and like nothing I had heard before, the dawn of time and year zero rolled into one. I was instantly hooked & I instantly loved it like no band before or after. I am a Ramones fan (as you can guess), and I always will be. And whilst the band stopped recording and performing 18 years ago, only 7 years after I first heard them, it always gave me a happy sense that the people that had made that sound were still around. It's true that I can still turn a recording and hear it all, but it was just a bit better when i knew the person who made it, or who made it possible, was still around. So with each death (Joey 2001, DeeDee 2002, Johnny 2004) things just got a little bit sadder and now the cycle is complete. Marky, Richie, CJ and Elvis are still with us, but the originals are no more. So I'm going to crank up the stereo, listen to their glory, and be happy that they have left the world a better place. Or at least a faster and louder one, which is sometimes the same thing.

Three Reasons The Metallica Glastonbury Scandal Amuses Me

So, according to a recent survey, 4 out of 5 people who bought Glastonbury (AKA "Glasto", according to the BBC's attempts to make it sound hip to its newly cultivated audience) would like to have sold on their tickets to the big corporate hippy-fest once they found out that the one of the biggest metal bands in pop is going to headline one of the evenings. And this did make me giggle most highly, for a number of reasons, mostly including:

Because it's Metallica!

Yeah, I'm one of those bitter bastards that thinks Metallica gave up on their roots and sold out when they released the Black Album and started suing their fans for use of Napster, even thought tape trading (aka "Music Piracy") is why the band formed and (according to Lars Ulrich) how the band got big. So I'm enjoying some schadenfreude about this, which I'm sure they can't give a crap about as they are one of the biggest bands on the planet and will cry into their money and acclaim to just carry on regardless.

They are one of the most respected and loved bands in heavy metal (BASTARDS!) so I can't see them giving much of a crap about this poll. It could be 99% for all they care and they would still turn up, do their thing incredibly well, and then head off to another gig full of people that like them and not give a rats arse. Even though a lot of people, including people outside of the metal world, do like them (ref The Black Album onwards) and will be more than happy to lose their shit to Enter Sandman and "that one from Mission Impossible". A bunch of pseduo-hippy accountants are acting like one act is going to kill their buzz, even though it's going to get people moving and loving a bit of the old guitar action when they actually hear it . But even then it doesn't matter....

Because it's Glastonbury

Take a guess how many metal bands have already played Glastonbury. If your answer was more than "none, ever" then you're wrong, and you're missing the point of why they were booked. This is a wild card booking, an attempt to mix things up. They were always going to go down like a bucket of sick because this is not a metal event. But it's an event with 100+ acts (so people are reacting to one act on the bill), covering a wild range of tastes, so anyone complaining about something a bit left field turning up is missing the point. And the point is: Michael Eavis doesn't give a fuck. Never has, never will (one of the reasons I like him). The event is run like no other, mostly him going "oooh, I wonder who I want to book this year" and making a couple of phone calls. My money says he wanted to get some edge going with this booking AND he likes the band.
And when I say "like no other" I'm leading onto my key point....

The Survey Was Done By A Ticket Company

Yeah, it's all about the money. Viagogo (and others) are pissed because the Glastonbury ticket buying process is "buy on spec, and then not be able to resell your ticket once the headlines are announced". You know, like through a ticket sales company like.... Viagogo! They can't make money off of Glastonbury, and this sticks in their craw. So they get some bullshit survey done to try and make the re-selling of the tickets sound like a good plan. But that won't work, because Michael Eavis. This is a pure marketing tactic, a total money grab. There is no scandal, just a bunch of ticket scalps who want to force Glastonbury into changing its ticket policy.

So this isn't about the act (who people will enjoy) and it isn't about some weird "no one but metal heads likes one of the most accessible metal acts of the last 20 years" thing. It's about wanting to re-sell tickets and make some money. Which is totally not  a Glastonbury thing, so frankly anyone moaning about it can shut up. Unless they ask to hear something from "Kill 'Em All", in which case they should be let loose on the PA all night long.

And Man Created God - Borghesia

It's an impressive feat to be both as pissed off and laid back as Borghesia are, but they manage to pull it off with great aplomb in their latest album And Man Created God. They also manage to fix a banjo and a Hawaiian slide guitar into an EBM album, so they are quite clearly mental and more than happy to play with touches of Americana whilst keeping bits of their native Slovenia sound. Good news is that it works, it works very well.

More playful art than experimentation it's all highly accessible, if easy listening songs about the dangers of capitalism are your thing, and never gets dull through repetition or too high a concept. Nothing is heavy in here, although some of it is a little compact and demands more than one listen so you are sure you've heard everything.

Standout track goes to opener "We Don't Believe You", sounding halfway between a workers protest song and the theme tune to a 50s western, with "Shoot Out The Clocks" just behind, whilst the Most Danceable award goes to the rather fantastic "My Life Is My Message", . However those are very hard picks to make, as there isn't a duff track among the nine of them. Previews can be found here, but my advice is to get the lot of them if you are after something interesting, uplifting, and thoughtful.

Punk's Not Dead, a rebuttal to Bill Drummond

Being up to date on everything musical I recently caught this video from Bull Drummond, first posted in February, 2013.

Whilst I have nothing but respect for Mr Drummond, along with all of his assorted works of art, and I cannot discount his own personal experience, for it was his to have, his proclamation does about how Punk was dead before it even started does eark me for a variety of reasons. And whilst I appreciate that I'm saying this in the position of being a 30 something middle-class muso punk fan who never wore a spiked mohawk or who smashed the system I thought I would try and put the earking into words, because his comments encapsulate a lot of what I've been feeling about the constant proclamation that "Punk Is Dead".

Punk didn't start in 1977, and it most certainly didn't start in Liverpool or even the UK. The first track ever described as Punk was "96 tears", performed by ? & The Mysterians in 1966, over in America. The term was used to describe a visceral type of Garage Rock which can trace it's line back to bands like The Sonics, The Stooges, The Pink Fairies and a hundred other bands who harked back to the original fires of pre-bobbysock and bubblegum Rock and Roll. The UK in 1976-1977 wasn't ground zero for a new movement, it was the latest part of a saga that had been blazing away for over a decade. Given the folly of youth it may have felt like the start of something totally new, and it clearly had its own take on it, but it's pedigree was clear for all to see.

Never Mind The Bollocks may well have been overhyped, and it may not have been the ultimate punk album of all time, but it was hardly the pinnacle of punk. The Saints, The Damned, The Angelic Upstarts and countless others had already got albums out, far more filled with invention and revolution than the Sex Pistols offering. The Pistols, by the time of that release, were poster boys for an idealized scene that their masterful manager had invented. To have everything hinge on that one album was to believe the hype, it was to buy into the very pop myth that punk was working against. What else do you expect to happen but disappointment when you willfully back the wrong horse?

Regardless of the music there was a revolution happening, it was just more of action than of tunes. The DIY ethic, in the publication and distribution of records, magazines, and all other forms of art, did kick off in the UK with the movement known as Punk in the late 70's. Or, at the very least, it stepped up a gear and broke people out of the "you have to wait for someone else to give you permission/publish your work" mindset that had befallen the British youth scene since the 50's. It blasted away the idea of signing to a record label of 20 years before it and it blasted away the idea that you had to be rich to get your work made by yourself of 10 years before that. It also laid down a network and an approach that stormed through the 70, into the 80's and beyond. It was also the groundwork of the very music scene that Bill Drummond made it big in with The TimeLords, The KLF, and all his other works.

Punk is "a genre waiting to be aped by generations to come" (Paul McCartney once said "The Sex Pistols were just another band playing Chuck Berry". All forms of music are, as "It is each generations duty to invent sex, drugs, and rock & roll". Everything has been done before, but each time it has been done differently. You could hardly compare something like The Victims to X-Ray Specs to Black Flag to NOFX to My Chemical Romance and say 'oh, they sound the same', yet all are indisputably punk. Just look at what was happening at the same time in the same country with Two-Tone or Psychobilly. Even "I feel love" by Donner Summer fits into the mix of it all, as it was both an attempt to shift copy and a rebel yell from an outsider scene.

Now I wasn't there, and so most of my knowings are based on reading, watching and listening to relics of the era, so if you want to dismiss all of the above as invalid due to me not having been in the trenches at the time then feel free to do so. But all I know for sure is that it's a genre and a movement that has put a fire in my belly, a bounce in my step, and a direction to my purpose, and I'm feed up with the old timers dismissing it and declaring it dead so readily. Because it started before you and its not going to finish till way after me, so you have no right to call it dead. Your revolution didn't happen, just like it didn't for the hippies, but excuse me whilst my generation finishes having a stab at it and it fully passes on to the next to give it another go.

Start A War - Syd.31

Syd.31's debut album is out and it's focusing on the 'punk' part of electro-punk with a pair of late 70's Doc Martins and an urge to set light to anything that gets in its way. Very aggro, very energetic, and extremely bouncy, it's 5 tracks of big beats and simple, driving, loops with a lot of brazen shouting from Dr Magic and Liam-C, a bit like the if the Sub-Hum-Anz had come formed in 90's Ibiza. The fact "One Night" has stolen its chorus from Blitzkrieg Bop pretty much explains it all: few marks for fiddly complexity or bouffant subtilty but your feet are going to be too busy tapping for you to notice or give a monkeys. Title track "Start A War" is a brilliant declaration of intent, "Dieter Rams Is Dead" is a bold and straight-up bit of politi-pop, "Power" shows off some musical chops (and some sinister dubstep leanings), and "Monsters" pure dancy polemic on the topic of spousal abuse. It's may not be the fastest, densest, or most immediately explosive of sounds from the genre but it gets the job done on its own terms and with impressive impact. I look forward to hearing more of their work, and catching them live.