Dog’s Breakfast: 11.4.09

1.  “‘The Underdog’ has a million chords,” says Daniel. “A lot of songs on this record are just one or two chords. There’s a lot more droning.”

Britt Daniel, on the rawer new Spoon record, to Spinner (also).

2. “’Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,’ says Partridge, ‘and there were all sorts of bad color separations and misspellings and wrong track listings. It was really heartbreaking. They’ve actually fumbled the ball, radically, twice in recent years. During the whole Britpop thing, they didn’t promote our back catalog despite all these bands like Blur, Pulp, and countless others that, to me, were shamelessly attempting to sounds rather like us. Then it came around again a few years later with another wave of bands like Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Hot Hot Heat, Franz Ferdinand, Maxïmo Park, the Futureheads, and Bloc Party. Everybody would come up to me in the street and say, ‘Hey Andy, that band blah blah sounds just like what you did in 1979!’ So Virgin fumbled it yet again, when they should have been promoting our back catalog there.”

Andy Partridge, acerbic as ever, to Wolfgang’s Vault.  A lot of good stuff here for XTC fans. And the good news: XTC reissues soon!  Maybe! (Vinyl plz.)

3. “I have nothing against one person sending a track to another person saying, ‘Hey, check this track out; it’s great!’ That’s like a fan-to-fan thing. But these big websites like Pirate Bay are just another corporation. It’s the future Clear Channel. They have nothing to do with good. They are just evil. It’s the worst. They take our music and put it out for free before we have released it to our record label. There’s no fanfare, there’s nothing, it’s just like ‘Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence. Click Here.’ There’s no sense of jubilation.”

Erlend Øye’s take on filesharing from this Prefixmag interview with Kings of Convenience.

4. “‘From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,’ he wrote. ‘And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.’

John Philip Sousa, railing against those confounded music machines.  Part of a neat little Arstechnica piece about copyright holders’ fears of new technologies. (Further reading: Mark Rose)

Filed under: Andy Partridge  copyright  downloading  fandom  Kings of Convenience  Mark Rose  piracy  Pirate Bay  selling culture  Sousa  Spoon  XTC