lefreeakblog

It's 25 years since Blur's Country House and Oasis' Roll With It went head to head in the UK Singles Chart on 14th August 1995, a battle fuelled by differences in taste, personal opinions, geography even class. It was engineered by Blur's label Food Records who intentionally moved the release date for Country House - the lead single from Blur's fourth LP The Great Escape - to the same date as the new Oasis single Roll With It, itself the second lead single from the new yet unreleased album (What's The Story?) Morning Glory . Of course the ploy worked wonders as the story captured the zeitgeist of the mid-nineties, as Britpop peaked in popularity with the story making the front pages of magazines, newspapers the world over. It even made the 10 o'clock news - see above - which is extraordinary because no one had died (why the arts can't have more of a place and replace the sensational oddities lower down the news stories I'll never know). Of course th

            A few months ago it was the 40th anniversary of Joy Division's seminal post-punk masterpiece Closer and then last month the 30th anniversary of New Order's great World Cup Italia '90 song World In Motion, which got me thinking....has there ever been a better 10 year musical arc than this? In 1980, on the eve of the release of  Closer,  Joy Division's second and final album on 18th July 1980,  it would have been inconceivable that the same band - for that is what Joy Division and New Order effectively are - would have written a bright catchy pop song with a house beat and a rap less than a decade later but that is exactly what happened when  World In Motion, was released on 21st May 1990:        Closer is just about as far away from World In Motion as you can get, a melancholic and powerful thought-provoking album. It proved to be their swansong but of course they didn't know it at the time; nine great songs, the first five, written and debuted live in

So Q Magazine is no more, it's legs pulled from underneath it by the vicious and unprecedented Corona virus which has devastated the Entertainment industry as a whole. In my estimation, this premier glossy music magazine relied a lot on petrol stations and airport lounges and the like, and now people are not driving and not flying, sales have unsurprisingly plummeted.       It also sheds a light on its market position which like Select, Melody Maker and The Word before it all fell by the sword trying to cater for one and all. The equivalent in the film industry I imagine would be Empire Magazine but it has few rivals as most seem particularly niche (Sight And Sound for example) whereas Q had Mojo and Uncut. Or did it? These two magazines are relatively niche along with several others such as Classic Rock and Mixmag - I think it is fair to say that, though smaller, they know their target audience better and as such are able to pitch better to them and are rewarded with a higher pe