When he was asked a related q Pete Townshend said and I paraphrase, you fvckers who complain you missed Hendrix. Fvkc off, I missed Charlie Parker. So. Go see musicians. There really are few other people apart from actors who can make a difference to your lives. God help us.
In related news there was a guy whose act was doing songs by dead dudes. He was an Elvis impersonator who’d branched out. From Belfast iirc. No idea if he himself is still extant.
I saw the Cranberries at one of their first gigs in Limerick when they were "The Cranberry Saw Us". They were supporting "The Hitchers" who were being bigged up by the Irish music press as the next U2... so the drummer from The Cranberries left and joined The Hitchers... he has regretted that since.
The day after the gig, I was speaking with Dolores and she asked me to get my guitar and join them up in Xeric Studios where they were recording the demo for Linger... I thought about it for a second and then declined her invite.
I wish i’d seen George Michael, too. Watched the documentary about him the other week on the Beeb. Fell into a GM music rabbit hole. God, he was so, so talented.
I saw Amy in Brighton at the gig at the end of the Back to Black tour where she was 2 hours late and was pulled off after I think three songs, a very sad evening.
Not that many artists I remember seeing have died I don't think. Bowie, Jeff Buckley. Saw Pantera at the Marquee and a few of them are now dead. Man, that show was ferocious.
Of the people mentioned so far, I have only seen Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed
And the Lou Reed concert was at the Virgin Megastore in Paris in connection with the release of the Set the Twilight Reeling album. His heart wasn't in it, the material wasn't that good and it wasn't a good concert
Rolling Stones and the Who (they must all be dead surely?). Pretty sure that when the Stones played Glastonbury that Keith Richards played a 15 min guitar solo just so Mick could go and have a lie down in his coffin (with earth from his homeland), or to get a blood transfusion before carrying on.
Smithy's wiki isn't bad. The first quote below is wonderful. Unconventional by normal standards of course, but of course, a pure punk attitude which was entirely normal in punk and new wave circles when I was growing up ("muso" was a term of abuse). Sadly, much misunderstood by today’s pop-pickers, with their regressive adulation and pedestalling tendencies.
“Smith's approach to music was unconventional and he did not have high regard for musicianship, stating that "rock & roll isn't even music really. It's a mistreating of instruments to get feelings over."”
“… defiantly Northern English in outlook. Brix said that he carried "a chip on both shoulders. I remember him talking about fooking southern bastards a lot and not wanting to come to London. He hated London intensely.”
“Fall songs written in this style are often not concerned with character or story development, establishing a sense of place and atmosphere instead.”
“… asked during a mid-1980s interview with Smash Hits as to what policies he would adopt if he became Prime Minister, he said: "I'd halve the price of cigarettes, double the tax on health food, then I'd declare war on France.”
[Despite being a Man City fan], “He admired mavericks such as George Best, whom he met and drank with …”
“He would fire musicians for seemingly trivial reasons; he once dismissed a sound engineer for eating a salad, later explaining that "the salad was the last straw”.”
I played some Fall tunes recently, to my long-suffering better half. I think I played "Spectre vs Rector", "Prole Art Threat" and "Impression of J Temperance".
She said she had never heard worse. Described it like walking past a jackhammer or something you'd naturally put your fingers in your ears to avoid : )
See below for why I love The Fall. The chippy youth culture of my youth exists in opposition to the modern elitism of musical talent:
" ... the refusal, indeed the sabotage, of virtuosity that defined the group’s sound from its earliest recordings and drove its many radical line-up changes ..."
As good a summary of punk as you'll get. That principle mostly has been lost. It's not that musicianship was inimical to punk. Rather, as with eloquence, musical proficiency - if thoughtlessly-deployed - is an artifice, a convention, which stupefies and obscures. You become smooth, not authentic.
Josef Bloch, in Peter Handke's novel, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, "... had to keep his guard up against words that transformed what he wanted to say into some kind of statement" .
I remember decades ago the Stranglers being interviewed, and how they saw punk as not dissimilar in intent to Fauvism.
As the above article notes:
"... as the musicians in each successive line-up became more conventionally competent, Smith’s quest for the ‘magic’ of the first take, as Brix Smith put it, took ever more desperate and obnoxious forms."
Shades of Beckett's "Not I"; of Wordsworth's describing our second nature as " shades of the prison-house".
As in the intro to one of the songs on the 1984 Fall album "Grotesque" :
‘I always have to say to myself It has nothing to do with me He has nothing He is not me.’
"It’s impossible to explain his appeal to anyone (let alone someone like me, a suburban Texas kid), other than to say that you either get it or you don’t. It’s why Fall fans are notoriously tribal; merely “getting it,” a nigh-biological response to Smith’s voice in your ear, grants automatic passage to its cult ..."
And please do check out the few minutes of interview at start here - if only to see Mark before he was wrecked with speed and booze - fav quote: "I always thought accessibility was something to be spat on": https://youtu.be/_gAEAHS89EM
Escaped - it was in Budapest. I think 2003. Summer. It was in a park.
The performance itself was, in retrospect now I think about it, probably going through the motions, but it was a perfect summer evening, and Mrs K and I had only been an item for a few weeks. I suspect Lou Reed was incidental to the fond memory rather than the cause.
And it's a tough choice but think Pavarotti is the best.
I was in Rome with Mrs Face when he threw a seven and while I respect him as an artist it was comical how there were literally no restaurants anywhere we went to that night that DIDN’T have a picture of him eating there with a smile on his generously proportioned chops.
Not one of the greats but one of the last gigs I went to in the UK was Viola Beach circa 2015. A friend got some last minute tickets and I had no idea who they were. I thought they were pretty good and have always wondered what would have happened if they hadn't met that Bridge in Sweden
I have a friend/acquaintance (I didnt want to presume) who plays the bass in Jools’ Holland’s big band. I talked to him about Amy Winehouse over a drink once. We both agreed she was the best of the best and when on the slide in the closing months of her life she put in a mix if the best and the worst shifts. There is a session she did at one of the NYE things where she just mumbled the words but seemed still to cast a spell and produce a breathtaking performance, yet she was clearly absolutely all c vnted out. He said she was a nightmare. At rehearsals she turned up with good and bad angel in full fight and teased with bursts of excellence and wandered about and didnt really engage in the detail, left everyone shitting themselves but saying well that’s Amy and hoping it would be alright later, which it was until suddenly and finally it wasnt. Addiction kills people eventually. I am still sad she has gone. A true once a century talent.
Forgive a nervous out of tune Paul Weller, he gets it right later. Marvel at the slippery gooey honey sax solo - so accomplished because it compliments rather than one-ups the voices.
Absolutely staggering performance from Amy right down to owning the camera. She is singing it to you.
Shit I just rewatched that. When she holds that endless knowwww on a vibrato you know you’re watching snd hearing something special and it gets better from there.
0
1
Bert Jansch
0
0
Freddie Mercury
0
1
Iggy Pop
0
1
top marks for Sven so far
0
1
Uh
0
0
Spring time promises all come true Octoman.
0
1
Leonard Cohen
0
0
Dame Edna.
1
1
The full lineup of both Prodigy and Faithless. In separate gigs, obviously.
Amy Winehouse (three times)
0
2
Curtis Mayfield
Bowie
Alex Chilton
0
1
Guy you are responsible for a persistent Leonard Cohen ear worm.
0
1
I regret missing LC and Prince, but the o2 is a barn
0
1
Prince in Manchester BY A DISTANCE
0
0
Not the best live act but the Moody Blues tick the dead box.
0
0
the mighty fall, now that I think of it
as peel once said, unleash the tonsils of burnished gold
0
1
Victoria Wood
0
1
the only acts I can think of that I’ve seen live and any of whose members are now dead are
Roxette
and
The Prodigy
Roxette were the better
0
0
BB King
0
1
being too young to have seen nirvana live is sad max
1
0
George Michael
0
1
I miss George tbh
0
1
Bo Diddley
0
0
Good call. Muddy Waters.
When he was asked a related q Pete Townshend said and I paraphrase, you fvckers who complain you missed Hendrix. Fvkc off, I missed Charlie Parker. So. Go see musicians. There really are few other people apart from actors who can make a difference to your lives. God help us.
0
1
yeah tbf Ali Farka was a lot more memorable than Nirvana
0
1
In related news there was a guy whose act was doing songs by dead dudes. He was an Elvis impersonator who’d branched out. From Belfast iirc. No idea if he himself is still extant.
0
1
not going to Mali before the Islamowhackjobs got going is one of my big life regrets
1
0
Lolo Ferrari.
0
1
Michael Jackson
Prodigy
George Michael
6
0
Amy Winehouse (the first time I saw her) was second time was the worst/saddest gig I have ever been to.
0
1
Meatloaf
Cranberries
Wish I’d seen Roxette - big fan.
0
0
I did not know Nanci Griffith was dead...
I saw the Cranberries at one of their first gigs in Limerick when they were "The Cranberry Saw Us". They were supporting "The Hitchers" who were being bigged up by the Irish music press as the next U2... so the drummer from The Cranberries left and joined The Hitchers... he has regretted that since.
The day after the gig, I was speaking with Dolores and she asked me to get my guitar and join them up in Xeric Studios where they were recording the demo for Linger... I thought about it for a second and then declined her invite.
0
1
Even the box set doesn’t really lay the ghost, everyone will enjoy, amazing setlist.
0
1
Bob Monkhouse
0
1
Dude from linking park - Chester
0
0
Also Leonard Cohen for me.
What a towering genius that guy was.
1
0
Nina Simone
Prince
1
0
God I wish I'd seen George Michael. If I could choose, at one of his MTV Unplugged sessions.
I miss him.
0
1
Probably Elliott Smith
0
1
I didn't know that Iggy Pop had died ...
0
1
He's on the radio every Sunday.
1
1
He hasn’t; he just looks like he has
0
1
Cranberries, BB King, David Bowie, Victoria Wood.
Bowie wins.
0
1
Yehudi Menuhin
0
1
Meatloaf
1
0
I wish i’d seen George Michael, too. Watched the documentary about him the other week on the Beeb. Fell into a GM music rabbit hole. God, he was so, so talented.
0
1
Am not really a Queen fan but Freddie at Wembley Stadium was an amazing performance.
Tina Turner was awesome on the Private Dancer Tour.
Does Charlie Watts counter a performer?
0
1
Lou Reed
Amy Winehouse
Prince
0
1
Joe Strummer was good too.
I saw Amy in Brighton at the gig at the end of the Back to Black tour where she was 2 hours late and was pulled off after I think three songs, a very sad evening.
0
1
It's probably me in denial of my age and I was never a fan, but I still can't quite believe George Michael died.
0
1
+1 for Bowie (the Hammersmith Odeon show was the best one)
also - Brett Smiley on a very bowieish tip, he was awesome (stream him today folks)
@kaulbach - which Lou Reed show did you see? describe, pls
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I saw Lou Reed at The Town Hall in Birmingham, he sat on a stool and performed I think Magic and Loss and Songs for Drella.
It was a good gig but mainly because of the dude who played the electric double bass.
Lou was good but the performance hardly rated as "best".
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1
The Pogues. Predictably it was f*cking mayhem.
0
1
The Cramps, amazing some of them lasted as long as they did. They looked half dead in 1983 when I saw them.
0
1
remembered a triple this morning - Shane McGowan, Joe Strummer and Kirsty McColl on stage together at the Town &Country in 1987 (I think ..)
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1
Not that many artists I remember seeing have died I don't think. Bowie, Jeff Buckley. Saw Pantera at the Marquee and a few of them are now dead. Man, that show was ferocious.
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1
Donny Darko's Soundrack09 Feb 24 04:51
Reply|
Report
Vote up!
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Amy Winehouse (the first time I saw her) was second time was the worst/saddest gig I have ever been to.
***
Was that second gig in the sandpit?
If so.. I was there too. It was TRAGIC
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0
Shortlist includes Prince, Faithless and Queen. And it's a tough choice but think Pavarotti is the best.
0
0
Of the people mentioned so far, I have only seen Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed
And the Lou Reed concert was at the Virgin Megastore in Paris in connection with the release of the Set the Twilight Reeling album. His heart wasn't in it, the material wasn't that good and it wasn't a good concert
0
1
LR was a grumpy fvcker at the best of times. Btw did anyone see his cameo in the Marina Abramovic show at the RA?
0
1
Also Leonard Cohen for me Clive. He was a force of nature in his final tour.
Also lucky enough to have seen John Prine and Guy Clark.
0
1
Prodigy
Rolling Stones and the Who (they must all be dead surely?). Pretty sure that when the Stones played Glastonbury that Keith Richards played a 15 min guitar solo just so Mick could go and have a lie down in his coffin (with earth from his homeland), or to get a blood transfusion before carrying on.
Biggest regret is not seeing Queen play live.
0
0
The Fall, of course.
Smithy's wiki isn't bad. The first quote below is wonderful.
Unconventional by normal standards of course, but of course, a pure
punk attitude which was entirely normal in punk and new wave circles
when I was growing up ("muso" was a term of abuse). Sadly, much
misunderstood by today’s pop-pickers, with their regressive adulation
and pedestalling tendencies.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Smith's approach to music was unconventional and he did not have high
regard for musicianship, stating that "rock & roll isn't even music
really. It's a mistreating of instruments to get feelings over."”
“… defiantly Northern English in outlook. Brix said that he carried "a
chip on both shoulders. I remember him talking about fooking southern
bastards a lot and not wanting to come to London. He hated London
intensely.”
“Fall songs written in this style are often not concerned with
character or story development, establishing a sense of place and
atmosphere instead.”
“… asked during a mid-1980s interview with Smash Hits as to what
policies he would adopt if he became Prime Minister, he said: "I'd
halve the price of cigarettes, double the tax on health food, then I'd
declare war on France.”
[Despite being a Man City fan], “He admired mavericks such as George
Best, whom he met and drank with …”
“He would fire musicians for seemingly trivial reasons; he once
dismissed a sound engineer for eating a salad, later explaining that
"the salad was the last straw”.”
0
1
I played some Fall tunes recently, to my long-suffering better half. I think I played "Spectre vs Rector", "Prole Art Threat" and "Impression of J Temperance".
She said she had never heard worse. Described it like walking past a jackhammer or something you'd naturally put your fingers in your ears to avoid : )
See below for why I love The Fall. The chippy youth culture of my youth exists in opposition to the modern elitism of musical talent:
" ... the refusal, indeed the sabotage, of virtuosity that defined the group’s sound from its earliest recordings and drove its many radical line-up changes ..."
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/mark-e-smith-1957-2018
As good a summary of punk as you'll get. That principle mostly has been lost. It's not that musicianship was inimical to punk. Rather, as with eloquence, musical proficiency - if thoughtlessly-deployed - is an artifice, a convention, which stupefies and obscures. You become smooth, not authentic.
Josef Bloch, in Peter Handke's novel, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, "... had to keep his guard up against words that transformed what he wanted to say into some kind of statement" .
I remember decades ago the Stranglers being interviewed, and how they saw punk as not dissimilar in intent to Fauvism.
As the above article notes:
"... as the musicians in each successive line-up became more conventionally competent, Smith’s quest for the ‘magic’ of the first take, as Brix Smith put it, took ever more desperate and obnoxious forms."
Shades of Beckett's "Not I"; of Wordsworth's describing our second nature as " shades of the prison-house".
As in the intro to one of the songs on the 1984 Fall album "Grotesque" :
‘I always have to say to myself
It has nothing to do with me
He has nothing
He is not me.’
0
1
In other news, Brix Smith remembers the glamour of getting married to M.E.S.:
" ... we had a reception at the Eagle and Child pub, which was arranged by his dad. We had sausage rolls, pickled onions, crisps and beer."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/mark-e-smith…
And closing the circle, the wake was held in his fav pub, and, fittingly, a fight broke out:
"... funeral was just like a Fall gig, some strange people there, it was unpredictable and it kicked off."
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5535896/mark-e-smith-laid-to-rest-as-braw…
0
1
"It’s impossible to explain his appeal to anyone (let alone someone
like me, a suburban Texas kid), other than to say that you either get
it or you don’t. It’s why Fall fans are notoriously tribal; merely
“getting it,” a nigh-biological response to Smith’s voice in your ear,
grants automatic passage to its cult ..."
Please do read:
https://www.avclub.com/remembering-the-falls-mark-e-smith-rocks-most-un…
They were for so long the soundtrack to my life, in a way that went
beyond entertainment!
And please do check out the few minutes of interview at start here -
if only to see Mark before he was wrecked with speed and booze - fav
quote: "I always thought accessibility was something to be spat on":
https://youtu.be/_gAEAHS89EM
0
1
which suburb papercuts m88, i will lol if we grew up in the same place
University Park, Dallas here ...
0
1
Ooooh Brix x
0
1
i actually saw the Fall at Hammersmith Palais around that time, but i think it was '87/88 ish
0
1
Escaped - it was in Budapest. I think 2003. Summer. It was in a park.
The performance itself was, in retrospect now I think about it, probably going through the motions, but it was a perfect summer evening, and Mrs K and I had only been an item for a few weeks. I suspect Lou Reed was incidental to the fond memory rather than the cause.
0
1
Are you sure you weren’t lead guitar but didn’t know it?
0
1
And it's a tough choice but think Pavarotti is the best.
I was in Rome with Mrs Face when he threw a seven and while I respect him as an artist it was comical how there were literally no restaurants anywhere we went to that night that DIDN’T have a picture of him eating there with a smile on his generously proportioned chops.
0
0
Warren Zevon
Bowie
Tom Petty
Bruce Guthro (with Runrig)
Glenn Frey (with the Eagles)
Walter Becker (with Steely Dan)
Paul Cotton/Rusty Young (with Poco)
Nanci Griffith
Lowell George (with Little Feat)
David Crosby
John Prine
1
1
I saw The Fall in 1980 /81 somewhere in Cardiff. It was the first gig I went to. I remember them being very loud and not at all melodic.
0
1
Amy Winehouse
Not one of the greats but one of the last gigs I went to in the UK was Viola Beach circa 2015. A friend got some last minute tickets and I had no idea who they were. I thought they were pretty good and have always wondered what would have happened if they hadn't met that Bridge in Sweden
0
1
I have a friend/acquaintance (I didnt want to presume) who plays the bass in Jools’ Holland’s big band. I talked to him about Amy Winehouse over a drink once. We both agreed she was the best of the best and when on the slide in the closing months of her life she put in a mix if the best and the worst shifts. There is a session she did at one of the NYE things where she just mumbled the words but seemed still to cast a spell and produce a breathtaking performance, yet she was clearly absolutely all c vnted out. He said she was a nightmare. At rehearsals she turned up with good and bad angel in full fight and teased with bursts of excellence and wandered about and didnt really engage in the detail, left everyone shitting themselves but saying well that’s Amy and hoping it would be alright later, which it was until suddenly and finally it wasnt. Addiction kills people eventually. I am still sad she has gone. A true once a century talent.
0
1
Don’t go to strangers
Forgive a nervous out of tune Paul Weller, he gets it right later.
Marvel at the slippery gooey honey sax solo - so accomplished because it compliments rather than one-ups the voices.
Absolutely staggering performance from Amy right down to owning the camera. She is singing it to you.
https://youtu.be/H4xYTspgC4M?si=iIQRdkwkzZIWIIE9
0
0
Shit I just rewatched that. When she holds that endless knowwww on a vibrato you know you’re watching snd hearing something special and it gets better from there.
0
1
Ken Dodd
Bob Monkhouse
0
1
Amy Winehouse.
A DJ called Marcus Intalex.
0
1
Scott Weiland (STP)
Chris Cornell (Soundgarden)
Prince
Chester Bennington (LP)
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