The least musical city in the UK

According to the Guardian online, Gloucester (my home town) is the least musical city in the UK. It's probably a fair comment. The city does have some promising young bands at school level, but they tend to go their separate ways to go to University. The experience of living somewhere other than Gloucester is usually enough to convince them never to return!

Read the Guardian piece here

I am in the process of setting up my own music business. I hope to help local musicians by operating in an ethical way; by putting much of the money earned back in to local music. Check it out at our myspace page

In other news, you can buy the new Matchbox 20 album 'Exile On Mainstream' on USB pen here.



Above: Matchbox 20 - Lets See How Far We've Come

Maritime

I like this...



The band are kindly giving away some free mp3s on their website

Future Is Wired mp3
I Used To Be A Singer mp3

And there are more free tracks on their myspace.

CDs are of course available to buy.

A new dawn for music

This month will be remembered as an historic turning point for music. Big name bands have finally started to ditch the record labels and go it alone. Radiohead have whipped up a media storm by releasing their album at a price decided by the buyer. Yup that's right, you get to pick the price you want to pay, even if that is £0.00!

Buy it here



Musicians make a very relatively small pecentage of their earnings from CD sales, (which incase you hadn't noticed are in freefall). By releasing tracks for free the band broaden their fan base and generate more cash from ticket sales and merchandise. The band win, the fans win. The only losers are major record labels. At last, those in the industry who refused to allow their outdated business model to be prized from their cold dead fingers, have had the lid of their self made coffins firmly slammed shut. Sorry, got a bit carried away with it all there.

The Charlatans have also decided to release free songs on the xfm website. More details on this story can be found here.

Sweden again!

I've spent a lot of time lately going on about Swedish bands and I'm not about to stop now. I've blogged about I'm From Barcelona in the past I think. We were lucky enough to finally get to see them live last Sunday at the Thekla in Bristol. I was excited all day knowing that I was going to a see 13 happy Swedes playin an upbeat gig on a boat. What a night, what a show, what a band. The quality of the songs and energy of every member, combined with showers of tickertape and balloons ensured that the atmosphere was sensational. Below are live versions of 'Treehouse' and 'We're From Barcelona'.





After the gig, the band put on a short DJ set with loads of Electro and some strange dancing. I believe this may have been my first real life experience of Jumpen (originating from Sweden and involving flailing limbs, Jumpen is to Electro what Skanking is to Ska). The video below shows jumpen at its best, as demonstrated by lego men!



On a completely different note, look out for this guy over the next few months. He's been getting loads of online attention. Below is Andy Mckee - Drifting



I'm From Barcelona Myspace
Andy McKee Myspace

Praise the drummer

I have no idea how this Cadburys advert relates to the product in any way, but it's still a great advert!



I love it and it motivated me to do a piece on drummers. Since the track on the advert was Genesis the obvious place to start is Phil Collins. Below is an amazing 6 minute duet with Chester Thompson.



Whilst researching this post I looked up a number of drummers from big bands of recent years. I tried to decide upon one to put show a video of. In the end I picked none of them and instead went for Stevie Wonder. Ok, it's not the tightest piece of drumming you will ever hear, but it's pretty damn hot, and it's STEVIE WONDER!



Below are two videos of the 1990s, who were ace at Wireless this summer. The drums are the engine of this band, which combined with some catchy rifts makes for some damn good songs.



Above: You Made Me Like It
Below: See You At The Lights (New single)



1990s Myspace

If you want more drums scroll down and check out Cerians previous piece on Danananakroyd.