Billy Bragg delivered the second annual John Peel Lecture earlier today (November 12) at the Radio Festival 2012 at The Lowry in Salford.
Bragg's speech saw him rallying against the decline of state educated musicians in the UK Top 40, highlighting a magazine study which revealed that 80% of artists in the charts in 1990 were state educated, as compared to the charts in 2010 which were dominated by those who had been privately educated.
He said – via The Guardian: "A decent education in the arts will only be available to those able to pay for it."
Led Zeppelin clashed with journalists at a press conference in New York yesterday (October 9) when asked if the release of their concert DVD Celebration Day could lead to another reunion.
Anyway, with the release of Bob Dylan’s Tempest looming, I was thinking the other morning about a time when albums just, you know, came out. What seemed to happen was pretty straightforward. There’d be a story in Melody Maker announcing a new album by one of your favourite bands that usually gave the record a title, track listing and release date. The week the album came out, there’d be a review, maybe an interview and perhaps a full-page ad somewhere in MM, often with tour dates attached.
On the day the album came out, you went to your local record shop – in my case, Derek’s in Water Street in Port Talbot – and you bought it. How simple it all seemed.
Of course, when I actually started working for Melody Maker in 1974, I found there was a bit more to it, although not much more usually than a launch party. This was basically an excuse for the band, their mates and assorted journalists to have a bit of a piss-up and could hardly be described as an integral part of a carefully-plotted promotional campaign, unless you were Led Zeppelin and the party was a debauched affair in Chislehurst Caves involving naked nuns and the like, in which case the event would get a bit of a write-up in the red tops.
As part of our Nick Cave cover story in the current issue of Uncut, I spoke to film maker John Hillcoat. Hillcoat and Cave’s friendship stretches back to Melbourne in the late 1970s, while their first professional collaboration came in 1981, when Hillcoat edited the promo video for The Birthday Party single, “Nick The Stripper”.
