Lick Online - Rants

Saturday, 7th July

It was almost inevitable, wasn't it? As scientists bang on about how climate change and global warming is becoming an increasingly more worrying issue and people are stripping down from their big bulky winter clothes to their bikinis and swim shorts as early as febuary, scottish weather takes a vicious turn and says "fuck the lot of you!".

Here we are, standing in the giant field in Balado that every year plays host to the thousands of people who have ventured out to see many of the worlds top bands or simply just to encounter the biggest piss up of the year. And it's muddy. It's very, very muddy. We hadn't been able to travel up till the Saturday and, although we'd heard all the news on the radio and on the tv about how muddy it was, we just didn't believe it. So in we strolled, Stu in cowboy boots ("they're just like fancy wellies!") and Stoke in white trainers ("I don't know why i wore these...") into mud that would pretty much engulf your entire body were you to stop moving for even just a second.

Mud aside, it was amazing to be back up there. You can't beat standing in a massive field, completely disorientated, having lost everyone you know, surrounded by a bunch of overly excited drunks, some even dressed, oddly enough, as super heroes.

We really didn't have an easy task at T, being on stage directly after Sergeant, a band clearly destined to be Scotlands next big indie band. Their crowd went wild! They were one massive, loud, melodic monster! Nonetheless, we're brave beasts (well...not really, it's just that we knew there was no way we could back out at that point) so we dived up on stage and gave it what we could. And it was amazing! People actually showed up and sang! I think T in the Park 2007 saw the best rendition of "Lower Your Pieces" yet, not because of us but because of the crowd! They were incredibly vocal and just generally a pleasure to be playing to. Definitely made it one of the more memorable points in our bands history, while the rest of the show was maybe our most enjoyable yet.

Colin Keenan

>> Rant #1

I’m not quite sure where it went wrong. I have suspicions, and many half baked theories, but the one which, at least in my own mind, holds more sway is that it’s all Kurt Cobain’s fault. You all hate me already. That’s good.

Anyways, this particular train of thought got me round to questioning the real legacy of Nirvana. Sure, they left two fucking amazing studio records behind(let’s face it Bleach is pretty shite), but what else? At the time, it seemed that all the cobwebs of the late eighties were being blown away and, thank the lord, bands like Poison and the like were obliterated from the face of our green earth. For that, my ears and my children’s ears will be forever grateful. However, for all the bloatedness and hyberbole of folks such as William Axl Rose and latter day Prince etc etc, it’s hard to dispute the idea that they were among the last of the real pop or rock or whatever the fuck stars. Since then, who? And it’s all Kurt Cobain’s fault.

Almost overnight it became uncool to be in your face, with opinions that would cause controversy and appearances that looked like you gave a fuck. Sure, this was all pantomine, but it was more fucking entertaining than the lame shite we have dominating the charts and popular culture these days. I’m 26 now, and I’m glad that in my youth I witnessed people and bands like Guns N Roses, Prince, Michael Jackson. What do kids now have? Are there really any untouchable stars left? So we now have the faux working class rhetoric of Arctic Monkeys, the lame shite dancing of Northern tossers , the whiney, emo inflected chart bothering of Coldplay, and people like Andre 3000 and Jake Shears making a very reserved, half hearted attempt to cast themselves in the mould of classic PERFORMERS.

That’s right, performers. Surely that was half the point. It’s all very commendable for someone like Ricky Wilson to dress up in ill-fitting school blazers and espouse meaningless bollocks about predicting riots, but c’mon to fuck. If we’re producing people like him and James Blunt, then we really fucking need a riot. Scratch that actually, what we need is violent revolution. I mean even the cunts name- Ricky Wilson? He should be a fucking darts player, not a pop star, the fat fuck. I hereby call on anyone with a vested interest in the future of popular music and culture to a) kick fuck out the Kaiser Chiefs, and b) to storm every major label office in the country, occupy it and, erm, smash it up. Maybe not exactly constructive, but at least it’s making a point.

There are maybe a couple of folk left flying the flag for rock n roll and the art of performance , but none of them are getting any younger: Prince’s new record is great; a return to form and wonderfully sleazy to boot. It’s a tailor made soundtrack to heterosexual sodomy. Keith Richards is till flying the flag of chemical meltdown , bless him, while Bobby Gillespie and his merry men are possibly the only band left in the mainstream who make records that possess any kind of leftist political vitriol. For that we should be thankful. Beyond these three and the beautiful old curmudgeon that is Lou Reed, who is there? Even Bowie looks like a content suburban grandfather these days.
I’m not for a moment advocating a campaign of style over substance, lest we end up with a million Girls Aloud clones, but I’m merely bored with reading about and hearing boring people who could just as easily be supermarket assistants as pop stars.

For a while everything seemed counter cultural and cyclical and that was great. From Elvis to the Beatles to the Velvet Underground to disco to Punk Rock and onto Nirvana and Grunge, the history of 20th Century popular music would throw up a new movement to identify with. Nirvana was fifteen years ago, and there hasn’t been a single mass movement since. It’s frustrating. Worse than frustrating, it’s hard to see where the next one is going to come from. I watched Dirty Pretty Things on Saturday past and was deeply unimpressed, but kids were going mental for it. A famous person I was talking to later in the day about them put it quite succinctly-“ There is nothing for kids to get into and hold onto the way there was when I was growing up through the stones and punk, but they’ve gotta get into something, and that’s the best of a bad bunch.” He was right, and that’s fucking sad.

Hail Hail Rock N Roll.

>> Otis B. Driftwood