A Pocketful of Mumbles: Abbey Road

With no new music or exciting happenings in the music world of late, it has been difficult to muster an interesting new topic to mumble on about. I’m aware that it would be incredibly dull to repeatedly harp on about the joys of losing oneself in an ever-expanding vinyl collection, or to talk about how great ‘Abbey Road’ sounds through the needle of a record player; as everyone knows this already.

To see the back of 2011, on a musical level, is no bad thing. The Brit Awards ceremony – which is coming up over the next month – is a painful reminder of exactly how little this year had to offer us in the creative stakes. Once at the forefront of exciting new music; supporting emerging bands and seizing the opportunity to promote a musical movement from the get-go, The Brits are now as beige as the musical landscape that Adele and Ed Sheeran so drearily cast with their every note. While this year sees Noel Gallagher and Blur return to the stage, their presence merely helps to highlight that we are no longer in the creative golden age that they were once a part of. In the 1990s alone, The Brit Awards offered such memorable moments as Jarvis Cocker vs. Michael Jackson, Brett Anderson’s effeminate swagger into the imagination of the nation, not to mention Geri Halliwell in that dress. So then why is it there's not a single memorable or scandalous tale surrounding the whole event in the last ten years? Surely accruing all of our musical talent – rock star egos and drug addictions included – into one big room together is enough to cause some kind of outrageous outcome? Or perhaps the slow roll of the tumbleweed speaks more evidently of the unimaginative, in-bed-before-10pm nature of our successful musicians today.

The Horrors album ‘Skying’ seems to offer the only promising glimmer of hope in terms of the output of new young bands (however, I use the term ‘new’ loosely, due to this being their third release – but with little else currently emerging they are comparatively fresh, with everyone else of note having been around for at least ten years now). The Horrors’ throwback to a cobweb infested corner of the 80s reminds us of a time when musicians actually had personality and more interesting topics to sing about than lego or pavements.

Ed Sheeran : The face of new music?

While one despairs at the lack of music shows on television in 2012, or perhaps more upsettingly – an absence of demand for them – it remains to be asked how exactly we would fill a thirty minute episode of Top of the Pops each week, if that was even a possibility. Short of giving David Guetta a guest DJ spot or having Lady Gaga and Rihanna’s videos on constant loop, I don’t think there would be a lot else on offer. Resultantly, nostalgia for the Top of the Pops of yesteryear, along with The Tube and The Old Grey Whistle Test now cuts deeper than ever… a longing for a time when there was an actual vested interest in new music and fresh talent, and people yearned to see a more personal side to their idols than what can be read in a ten minute scan of Wikipedia. At least Jools Holland does his bit with the only credible music show on television; the performances on which are often truly breath-taking; but destined to forever take the graveyard shift on BBC2, it is never going to recapture the lost audience of the Friday at 7.30pm slot.

To further fuel the fire of musical depreciation, whilst spending a brief ten minutes in Topshop yesterday, I noticed that they are currently selling a big grey jumper with the ‘Abbey Road’ cover photo printed on to the front. This angers me, in much the same way as it does to see David Bowie or Bob Dylan’s most ‘career defining’ image printed across cheap cotton and being sold by highstreet chains to an audience who probably know nothing about said artists, but just wish to appear as the more interesting one at a party who really ‘digs music’. Such statements I say with confidence, as I know full well that anyone who was truly a fan of their music would avoid these garments by a country mile.

Meanwhile, the festival headliners circuit is restricted to a select ten bands or so who find themselves on heavy rotation across the multitude of festivals that now lace our summer months. While great and financially rewarding for those bands who have reached the inner loop, it does mean a bit of a drag for anyone who chooses to go to more than one festival per season, and begs the question as to how or when any new bands will find themselves ascending far enough up the ranks to be deemed worthy of entering this honorary club of untouchables. By the age of twenty-three, I presumed I would be watching on as my peers were the ones taking the musical world by storm, headlining festivals and leading a new hype or movement within the business, however it is now incredibly rare for anyone under the age of thirty, or any band who has been around for less than ten years, to really cause a stir in what has now become a largely middle-aged business.

One thing is for sure; at a time when society is in turmoil and creativity finds itself suffering a devastating drought, nostalgia’s hypnotic lure is at its most powerful. While a longing for the 60s and 70s has for a long time been prevalent, in 2012 one even looks back on the contagious vigour and comparative optimism of the 1990s as something incredibly enviable. Watching Pulp’s energetic performance of Common People on Top of the Pops from 1995, it is hard not to wish that we could be back there, when the Britpop movement was instilling a sense of national pride and there was a widespread belief within youth culture that we were on the brink of once again ruling the world in a contemporary reworking of the 60s British invasion.

To further demonstrate this point, HMV have recently announced that while they are enduring losses in the sale of new music and DVDs, they will now be placing a heavier focus on stocking a wider variety of vinyl across many of their stores, as this is now the medium that people are choosing to spend their money on in an attempt to recapture the magic of the bygone era that vinyl so wonderfully provided the soundtrack to.

I am aware that this entry has been particularly scornful and perhaps places a little too much emphasis on negative aspects of the music industry; it is purely because I find the present state of affairs to be so damn frustrating. Perhaps the most irritating thing of all, is that when someone exciting or genuinely unique does emerge on the scene, appreciation for them is somewhat non-existent as the public now are more eager to spend their money on sampled, generic dance tunes which seem to tick a box on first listen and don’t ask any more of their audience. The zest for music or something new and stimulating to treat our ears and minds with, was clearly lacking in 2011, and all I can hope for is that once we’ve got the bitter reminder that is the Brit Awards out of the way, 2012 can get busy with producing something for young people in Britain to actually get excited about. And maybe then, I can stop with the bitchin’ blog posts.

Here is Jarvis Cocker sorting it out for a generation of hungry music fans in 1995, when people actually used to care :

Sometimes it is hard to deny that the old ways are the best. While this may be true of many things, there is a definite romanticism of a time gone by when - while it may or may not have been the case – there was a sense of quality, truth and simplistic beauty in the way people lived and the way that things were produced. This is certainly the way I feel about music, and while it may be a bit of a cliché to declare that the greatest albums were made prior to the turn of the 21^st century, if not long before, what I am mainly talking about here is the evolution of the physical (and digital) musical format and subsequent loss of album artwork.

The cover of a great album has shown itself to have the capacity to become as iconic as the music itself, with images such as The Dark Side of the Moon prism and the Abbey Road zebra crossing being forever etched on public conciseness – perhaps in these cases, even identifiable by those few who have not listened to the albums themselves. This is why I believe one of the most distressing things about the rise of the mp3 to be, aside from the ease at which we evade honouring an album by playing it in its entirety, that there is no longer the appreciation of album artwork.

Long have I fantasised about what it must have been like in the golden-age of vinyl, at which time you would leave your front door with enough money in your pocket to head down to the local music shop to purchase the latest album release by your favourite band. Racing down the aisles to the new release section and gripping that glorious physical 12 inch square piece of art in your hands for the first time, before racing home and devouring it with your eyes and ears as you pour over the sleeve and inserts within. Call me nostalgic, but that’s got to be better than a click of the mouse as £8.99 is removed from your bank account in exchange for an invisible musical concept.

While the ipod is a fantastic thing and fabulous in many ways, it is hard not to overlook the fact that all the wonderful artwork, new and old, is now being forgotten and overlooked thanks to the confides of a thumbnail image. Not only this, but it marks the death of the back cover (the qualities of which were often found in its ability to portray a brilliant photograph or image which never quite made the cut of the front). It is a real shame that album artwork isn’t getting the appreciation that it deserves these days, both in terms of the fantastic pieces that are still being produced, and also for those people who are currently discovering the wonderful music of the past fifty years, but yet not getting the whole sensory experience.

It might be worth arguing that at least with albums of the vinyl, and even CD eras, they have had their time and appreciation in larger formats, and the real crime is that brilliant new pieces are never escaping out of the confides of a 2.5 cm square. I was reminded of this most recently when I purchased Florence and The Machine’s album Lungs on vinyl, and was blown away by the richness and detail of an album cover which I already knew to be beautiful, but had never been able to appreciate it for its true splendour. Formatted in a gatefold, filled with stunning imagery and plentiful sleeve notes, it really takes a generous amount of time to take it all in - the only shame being that it won’t reach a wider audience.

As is the case with Lungs, it is great to see that artists and record companies are still producing vinyl copies of their albums, and this is due in part to the resurgence in popularity of old formats. I’m incredibly pleased that there is still a great passion and interest in these things, and that even those brought up in the digital age are keen to appreciate music as it was intended, and I really hope this trend continues.

Below I have included eight album covers; four pre-digital and four post, yet all equally brilliant and worthy of attention. Feel free to click on each of them to appreciate them in high resolution.