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Friday 9 January 2009

Truffling around

Marcus Berkmann on hunting down new music

If you have very mainstream tastes, of course, you’re fine. The major record labels, although collapsing in a heap around us, persist in launching new artists who they hope will appeal to millions and millions of people. Almost everyone in the world who sounds a bit like Amy Winehouse has been signed up and is currently in the studio ‘laying down tracks’. But this is ‘new’ music only in the Radio One sense of the word, in that it’s absolutely up-to-the-minute and it will have been superseded by something else entirely in a few months. (Rumour has it that unsold Robbie Williams CDs are creating landfill challenges on more than one continent.) And because the majors are now geared to short-term profits — as they’re not sure there will be a long term — they tend more than ever to follow trends rather than anticipate them. Which makes for some dreadfully boring music. Not for nothing is ‘James Blunt’ the most widely used new term in rhyming slang.

Thus is the Radio Two daytime playlist dealt with. Even though I listen to them all the time, I can’t remember the last time I heard a new song on Ken Bruce or Chris Evans and thought, aw, I must get that. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Instead, we end up truffling around in the musical margins. For me, Mike Harding’s folk show and Bob Harris’s country hour are particularly fruitful, even though I wouldn’t particularly consider myself a folk or country fan. Radcliffe and Maconie are good for bloke-rock and Vashti Bunyan. I also like Stuart Maconie’s Freakzone show on BBC 6 Music on Sundays. You’ll hear nothing else like it on radio — weird jazz and unlistenable prog rock and dismal late-1960s noodling and most of it is unspeakable...and then, every few weeks, he plays something astonishing, and a whole new musical vista opens up. That’s what we all want: whole new musical vistas opening up, and our minds well and truly blown, regularly, legally and inexpensively. It seems a modest enough request.

So the search continues, never ending. I’m delighted to say that James Delingpole has put me on to a couple of great things lately — the English folktronicists Tunng, whose Good Arrows was James’s album of 2007, and Robert Gomez, a Texan singer/songwriter whose Brand New Towns (Bella Union) evokes Elliott Smith vocally, Grandaddy in melody and Mercury Rev in texture, which isn’t bad for an album I think he recorded at home. But I have to admit, almost with shame, that the most consistently useful sources of new music for me are the CDs that come free with most monthly music magazines.

(Well, obviously they are not free. The magazines are far more expensive than they would be if they didn’t have a 70-minute CD glued to the front. Maybe it’s more useful to think of them as cheap CDs with free magazines stuck on the back.)

My own favourite is the one on Word magazine. Every month there’s at least one track that forces me to go out and buy the artist’s CD, and one expensive month there were five. None of this stuff is played on mainstream radio — well, maybe one track in 20 — but none of it would frighten the horses. The CDs simply become an alternative, virtual radio station to join those other alternative, virtual radio stations to be found on the internet. Last week last.fm announced a licensing deal that allows you to play any of the millions of songs stored on its vast mainframes three times for free. Try before you buy. Look for something new. It’s there if you have the time and energy to look hard enough.

But who does? I do, because, as I say, I’m obsessed. But most people don’t, and too many just give up and go back to their old Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin albums. In other words, why should we have to look? Why isn’t it just coming to us? And does anyone in the music business ever wonder why the audience is fleeing in droves?

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