I arrived back from Germany yesterday and received a text-message from one of my friends, informing me that they’d found rough copies of some tracks from our as-yet-unreleased album on a torrent site, available for download to anyone with the audacity and know-how.

Part of me was mystified, as we’ve allowed only a very select group of people hear our new album, and I would trust each of them not to give the game away by uploading any of the songs, and I believe that our label would be even less inclined than ourselves to leak the material, so I cannot understand how they came to be available on the internet.

We’re not a moralistic or judgemental band, and this is not a Lars Ulrich-style anti-downloading rant. The internet has been the most important development for popular music since the invention of the electric guitar and so we’ll suffer the rough with the smooth. In any case, perhaps we’ve brought it upon ourselves. We finished the album in early-February yet, for one reason or another, the album and accompanying singles are not to be released until the end of summer, so perhaps this was bound to happen. I think I’m just a little irked that some of you will hear our new sounds in a compromised form. The torrents available are very rough mixes of only some of the songs. We’ve since spent literally hundreds of hours mixing the tracks, getting them mastered then re-mastered, deciding on the best track-listing, and commissioning the right cover artwork, all in order that people can enjoy our new sounds in the best possible way.

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One other, not unrelated, point... I hadn’t listened to the new album in months, pretty much since we had it mastered (it’s really not cool to sit around listening to yourself!) when recently I decided that I wanted to hear it again. I had borrowed my Uncle Jake’s car, which is so old that it has only a tape-deck, so I decided to copy the album to one side of an old C90 so that I could listen to it while driving up to Loch Lomond. I had it blasting out at pretty much maximum volume and I thought to myself that it sounded better than I remembered- the vocals and drums sounded warm and the guitars were like a punch in the face- then it occurred to me that part of this was down to the tape itself! It’s years since I used to go and buy albums on tape and vinyl- my first purchases were simultaneously the Now17 compilation and Thriller, I think- and I always thought that tapes were just an inconvenience, as you had to fast-forward and rewind to hear your favourite tracks, and after you’d played an album hundreds of times it would wear out to a phased garble, but I’d forgotten how lovely and warm they can sound, compared with CDs or MP3s. Side B of the tape already had most of Blonde on Blonde copied on it, so the return journey was fairly special also.

If there is a point to this diatribe then it is this... if any of you kids out there are impatient enough to seek out ill-gotten versions of our songs, then please at least have the good grace to listen to them on a tape!

Look after each other,

Larry  x

“This Machine Kills Cynicism” (part two)

I complained to my Dad when I was a teenager that there was no longer anything to write songs about. It was the late 1990s and the world seemed to me to be in a stasis of moderation and there was no valid direction for me to thrust my lyrical-foil. I’m half-ashamed now that I rain-danced nightly, in the hope of soliciting a tempest of social injustice to protest against. A global economic crisis catalysed by the greed of some middle-class white people would have been a dream come true.

Much more recently, and with the world now in despair, I was told that I no longer write enough protest songs. I thought I was being very cool when I responded that “I just want to write songs about girls.” Quite apart from being a contrary sod, I think I found the idea of mounting a soap-box just too passé. I arrived at university some years ago with vague ideas to change the world, only to be met with ridicule. In my first conversation with an academic I was told that I was very pretentious and that I would soon have this too-noble streak pressed out of me. My old flat-mate used to meet my boasts with his best God-speaking-to-Moses voice, jesting “the world is broken... Larry, can you fix it?”

It seemed only right at that point to put my didactic intentions away, along with the Che beret and leftist poetry, but I wonder now whether I took the easy option in retreating at their taunts. That old lecturer will have seen upstarts like me come and go over the decades, and he is bound to have been made cynical by the withering of the years, and I’m certain now that my flat-mate was simply jealous that I was a markedly better guitarist that he was, is or ever shall be.

I’m still wary, though, of the latest “band of the people” who cynically attempt to use street-politics to create a brand and sell records. In Britain, soft-handed, effete musicians have been trying to synthesise class-jihads for as long as impressionable kids have been buying records. There are exceptions, of course, but bands generally don’t get to sit around all day, writing songs and playing Fender guitars through Vox amps, without the good grace of some very understanding, very middle-class parents. “We’ll live and dies in these towns”, apparently. Well, no, I dare say we probably will not.

Outright protest songs are just too crude for my taste, but songs that deal with issues in a tender, personal way can be very moving. Strange Fruit, San Quentin, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Ohio, Straight to Hell, Biko and even Sunday Bloody Sunday.  The bleeding-hearts behind the latter are a strange breed indeed. It seems to be infinitely easier to criticise African and Middle-American dictators, for example, than it is to point your moral ray-gun at the domestic and foreign policies of your biggest market. Don’t shit where you eat, seems to be the mantra of the protest singer with dollar-signs beside the heart on their sleeves.

Moral crusades aren’t important, but people are. I hope that the New Music Business Model grows some arms, legs and testicles soon, so that you all get the chance to hear our new album before the world falls apart completely, because I feel that we tried to lay ourselves bare and write songs as honestly as we could. If it doesn’t work out then perhaps we’ll just rehash Eve of Destruction and Universal Soldier...

Larry

“This Machine Kills Cynicism” (part one)

Musicians have lost the ability or desire to say anything. Where pop music once gave voice to and defined the values of youth-culture, it is now generally as feeble as the lonely-hearts messages on a toilet wall.