vastar iner
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I am the poster on your wall
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Post by vastar iner on May 3, 2015 19:56:04 GMT 1
Just working out how to fit yet more books into the vaspad, and I found a decade-old copy of the NME. I have absolutely no idea why I bought it at this remove, perhaps for the free CD. Anyway, it's worth a shufti just to see how in ten little years everything, or nothing, has changed. (Cover price: £1.90.)
To orient ourselves, top of the charts that week was Tony Christie, who was also topping the album charts, with Mario climbing from 94 to 2 with a song I don't remember at all. Also in the top 10 were McFly, 50 Cent (highest new entry), Elvis (odious cash-in), Will Smith, Gwen Stefani, Natalie Imbruglia, Sunset Strippers (about to rob Art Brut of a top 40) and Nelly. In at 13 were The Faders, the best track in the charts was at 25 ("Oh Yeah" by The Subways) and at 75 was Tweet, just before his/her/its name was about to become global.
The issue came out in the wake of the SXSW Festival so was suffused with its acts. Front cover was Kasabian. The issue proclaimed that it would include the best new bands of 2005, which it named as Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park, The Kills, LCD Soundsystem, The Cribs, The Music and Willy Mason, who isn't a band.
It's a bit like the stoning in Life Of Brian.
Also getting front page mentions are The Tears (which turned out to be half of Suede; I don't remember that one iota) and an Oasis "exclusive", which, continuing with the anti-gyny, quotes Noel as saying Liam is like a woman with PMT. Oh, the wit.
Inside is the listing for the free CD - ostensibly hanging on the SXSW Festival - and it features those "best new bands", plus Hot Chip, The Blueskins, VHS Or Beta (anyone?), Radio 4 (ditto), The Longcut (tritto) and Punish The Atom (quitto). Again, there are fewer women than at a monastery. Other than Ellie Meadows, who is the title of The Blueskins' cut.
The inside headline is "The British Empire Strikes Back!", about the British invasion at SXSW. Graham Coxon (whatever happened to him?) and Goldie Lookin' Chain to the forefront. Also The Futureheads and The Bravery. Page 7 has our first woman; Jemina from Be Your Own Pet in a rather sweaty picture and a mini-pic of MIA. The NME, finger on the pulse, picked BYOP and Smoosh as ones to watch, plus Every Move A Picture, We Are Scientists, Stag Party, Two Gallants, Giant Drag, Wolfmother, The Red Walls and Supersystem.
Zane Lowe contributed a spacefiller diary; he missed out on Dogs Die In Hot Cars because the queue was so big. There were rumours of a Blur reunification. Prescient.
Noel's interview proclaimed that Oasis' new album - Don't Believe The Truth - was their best since Definitely Maybe. How strange. Coldplay were wrestling with last-minute track changes for X&Y, although unfortunately they decided to have some.
The letters page started with the sentence "I hate The Bravery with every f***ing bone in my body." Thanks for that, Caroline Davis. Although Ms Davis' hypothesis that The Killers were better does not match up with her conclusion. She says The Bravery only played "to get women in minuscule skirts to give them blowjobs", but two paragraphs above waxes lyrical about the magnitude Mick Killer's genital area. Other bands getting pelters are Towers Of London, Kaiser Chiefs and Queens Of Noize.
The competition prize was a Ministry Of Sound Stickax, which appeared to be some sort of trigger-shaped MP3 mixer, straight out of Nathan Barley. On page 21 we get the first female band - The Priscillas - who are squeezed between the Dave Matthews Band's tour bus dropping excreta over a tourist boat and ODB's mum paying tribute to her dead son.
Gig reviews include The Raveonettes and Trail Of Dead, and the lead album review is Open Season by British Sea Power. 8 out of 10. All the big reviews get between 6 and 8, which suggests that the reviews are a) next to useless and b) payola-ed; those scoring 8 are Fischerspooner and Dead Meadow. There are some bitsa reviews but only an Aaliyah retrospective gets under 6, with the deathless comment "presumably taking less time to compile than her embalmer spent recompiling her". I suppose she couldn't sue.
The MTV2 chart in the back had Beck at no. 1 with E-Pro, dethroning Razorlight (dear sweet God), whom the NME nominated for track of the week (dear sweet f***ing God on a barbed wire dildo). Runner-up was Lady Sovereign, presumably because they didn't realize she was a lesbian.
Adverts included Universal looking for a new pop-punk band ("Blink, Green Day"), which, in the wake of Busted and McFly, just shows how vacuous the industry really is. Individuals only. Hardmonic Music were looking for a singer with "original voice". Placebo's managers were looking for an Irish guitarist (not for Placebo). And there was a half a page advert for hydroponics. Er, what? Is the NME readership that high up with horticul...oh, I see.
Anyway. That was a depressing experience. Nearly everything in it was crap.
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TheThorne
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*Hillside, slip and slide, feel the pain, it's no surprise!*
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Post by TheThorne on May 3, 2015 20:16:07 GMT 1
I know Radio 4 and The Longcut both had two very good singles and pretty good debut albums before they disappeared back into obscurity although think The Longcut are still going.
Wont say anything else as its just a trolly post anyway as you know so many of us loved/love the bands mentioned here. 2005 was a bloody good year for music probably the last great year of the 00s before indie started descending into landfill and then the great rock purge of 2009 onwards started.
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Post by suedehead on May 3, 2015 20:29:59 GMT 1
Rather obviously, I remember The Tears. I even went to one of their few gigs.
I remember the names Radio 4 and VHS or Beta, although i couldn't name any of their songs.
Interestingly (ish), I saw two of the first three bands in the list of best new bands of 2005 (plus Futureheads, also mentioned, and Hard-Fi) in a single night in Paris.
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vastar iner
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I am the poster on your wall
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Post by vastar iner on May 3, 2015 20:57:25 GMT 1
Wont say anything else as its just a trolly post anyway as you know so many of us loved/love the bands mentioned here. Wasn't meant to be trolly. Plus I like British Sea Power. But what astounded me looking through it was that so many of the bands were pretty much the same thing with slight variations. I never realized just how narrow the NME's outlook actually was. No idea if it still is. It was all bloke guitar bands with roughly the same bpm, same appearance and same approach. Even to the extent that Willy Mason was about the only soloist mentioned. My playlist of this year is somewhat sparse, but it does include Of Montreal, Neutral Milk Hotel, Camera Obscura, Colleen, Sigur Ros, Schla La Las and Bearsuit, who were all a little bit different to the NME pap. Yet not a hint that any of these was active. And not a hint of the explosion that was about to break of all sorts of acts starting to break through via myspace. We don't follow fashion, that'd be a joke,
You know we're going to set them, set them
So everyone can take note, take note...No wonder the NME hated Ant. He had them sussed. |
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Post by Earl Purple on May 3, 2015 22:25:08 GMT 1
When I've listened back to my old charts from 2005 I haven't been that impressed on the whole and couldn't remember large parts of it. I think the fact I was still not owning an mp3 player yet which meant I was listening only on a computer at home or CDs in the car meant I wasn't getting to hear the songs perhaps as much.
There was more indie making the chart back then. I particularly remember Hard-Fi got to #2 in my chart 3 times. The Magic Numbers appeared that year and Rilo Kiley had two NM #1s. As did The Wedding Present but that wasn't really unexpected. Aside from those there was a #1 in my chart for the Rakes and a band like Young Offenders Institute and my #1 of the decade by Without Gravity.
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TheThorne
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*Hillside, slip and slide, feel the pain, it's no surprise!*
Posts: 27,534
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Post by TheThorne on May 3, 2015 23:40:11 GMT 1
When I've listened back to my old charts from 2005 I haven't been that impressed on the whole That's because all the good stuff was in my chart  My Top 20 of 2005 at the time and I stand by it although maybe not in this order 1 Louis XIV - Finding Out True Love Is Blind 2 Hard-Fi - Hard To Beat 3 Maximo Park – Going Missing 4 Gorillaz - DARE 5 Jimmy Eat World - Work 6 The Killers - All These Things I Have Done 7 Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc 8 Editors – Bullets 9 Arcade Fire - Rebellion Lies 10 Chemical Brothers - Believe 11 Kaiser Chiefs - Oh My God 12 Bloc Party - Banquet 13 Futureheads - Hounds Of Love 14 Green Day - Wake Me Up When September Ends 15 Foo Fighters - Best Of You 16 Maximo Park - Apply Some Pressure 17 Interpol - Slow Hands 18 Coldplay - Talk 19 Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot 20 Editors – Munich Oh no women in my top 20 what a travesty,its no sexism its if they had made a song I liked it enough it would be there, oh I guess my number one is very sexist though hehe |
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Post by Earl Purple on May 4, 2015 10:19:57 GMT 1
"All These Things I Have Done" was 2004.
And Jenny Lewis did make great music with Rilo Kiley in 2005.
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Post by thehitparade on May 4, 2015 15:19:50 GMT 1
Wont say anything else as its just a trolly post anyway as you know so many of us loved/love the bands mentioned here. Wasn't meant to be trolly. Plus I like British Sea Power. But what astounded me looking through it was that so many of the bands were pretty much the same thing with slight variations. I never realized just how narrow the NME's outlook actually was. No idea if it still is. It was all bloke guitar bands with roughly the same bpm, same appearance and same approach. Even to the extent that Willy Mason was about the only soloist mentioned. My playlist of this year is somewhat sparse, but it does include Of Montreal, Neutral Milk Hotel, Camera Obscura, Colleen, Sigur Ros, Schla La Las and Bearsuit, who were all a little bit different to the NME pap. Yet not a hint that any of these was active. And not a hint of the explosion that was about to break of all sorts of acts starting to break through via myspace. And yet weirdly, I'd have thought of all of those as being very NME bands (apart from the one I haven't heard of but then I wasn't reading the NME in 2005). I didn't buy a Camera Obscura album because I'd heard them on Capital FM. I do entirely remember Radio 4 (who were named after the PiL song, rather than the the broadcaster). I quite liked 'Dance To The Underground' but everything else I heard from them sounded like a weaker version of the same song. Oh, and I can't believe the Elvis single was profitable enough to count as a cash-in. Meanwhile, in 2015 the hot, exciting new act on the front of the NME are... The Prodigy. Which is an advance on Keith Richards last week. |
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TheThorne
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*Hillside, slip and slide, feel the pain, it's no surprise!*
Posts: 27,534
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Post by TheThorne on May 4, 2015 16:37:25 GMT 1
"All These Things I Have Done" was 2004. And Jenny Lewis did make great music with Rilo Kiley in 2005. This was my year end at the time so it must have still been hit in my chart in January |
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