My night with the Sex Pistols

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Fifty years ago, the Sex Pistols shocked the establishment, generated salacious media headlines, shook up the music industry, and scared local authorities into banning their concerts. They were even celebrated as “Young Businessmen of the Year” for managing to extract large amounts of money from clueless/gutless record labels – these labels effectively paid the band to simply go away and leave them alone. I would recommend watching “The Filth and The Fury” documentary to get a better understanding of this startling episode in music history.

Unfortunately, the Sex Pistols imploded within two years – so I didn’t have a chance to see them in their heyday. But fast forward 20 years, and the band brought their Filthy Lucre tour to Japan. I was living in Hong Kong then, and thanks to my old mate and celebrated author, David Quantick, I ended up spending a night in Tokyo with the Sex Pistols.

At the time, David was a writer for leading UK music magazines, and he’d come to Japan to cover some live gigs. When I met him at his Tokyo hotel, his first words were: “We can either go and see this Welsh indie band, or we can see the Sex Pistols at Budokan.” With apologies to Super Furry Animals, it was no contest, and the Pistols won hands down.

The gig itself was mainly memorable for the sight of a crowd of Japanese fans singing along to “I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist” – many of them wouldn’t have been born when the Sex Pistols were in their prime.

After the show, we went to a back stage area, where a rather desultory “after party” was happening – a few beers in a cavernous loading bay. If I recall correctly, The Sex Pistols (minus John Lydon) made a brief appearance, but it was clear they didn’t really want to be there. We soon got word that there was an “after after party” being hosted in a venue “nearby”, so with address in hand, we went in search of further adventures.

Although I’d been to Tokyo before, I’d forgotten that distances within the megatropolis can be deceptive, and “nearby” was somewhat misleading. Also, street addresses in Japan can be very confusing for visitors, and it was obvious we were never going to find the location unaided. Thanks to our taxi driver and some friendly strangers, we made it to the venue, which turned out to be a subterranean night club, occupying several floors.

Before I knew it, I was sitting next to Sex Pistols bass player, Glen Matlock. Next to him were guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook. (Lydon, not surprisingly, was a no-show). I got into a long conversation with Glen, mainly about the Filthy Lucre tour, and  also about the band’s “reunion”. I was curious how they got on, given the acrimony that had seen Glen leave the original band in early 1977.

I soon realised that the drinks kept appearing at our table, but the bar staff didn’t ask for payment – so we were drinking on the Sex Pistols’ tab (or the Japanese promoter’s). I wish I’d taken a photo of me sitting alongside the three band members (“for one night only, John Lydon was replaced by an unknown singer…”) but selfie culture was not a thing back then.

A few hours later, the band and their immediate entourage had left. The club manager came over and politely explained that from now on, we would have to pay for our own drinks. Similar Japanese reserve and restraint was on display the next day. I had crashed at David’s hotel room in the early hours of the morning, but he had to depart soon after dawn to catch his flight home. I slept on, but around 10am or 11am, the phone rang. It was the hotel reception politely but firmly suggesting I should vacate the room as soon as possible. I can’t imagine such tolerance and patience being shown in many other places.

Fast forward another 14 years, and I was walking along Melbourne’s Collins Street on my way to work. I spotted a vaguely familiar face having a coffee at a pavement cafe.

“Are you Glen Matlock?”

“Who wants to know?”

Having quickly established my bona fides (and Glen corrected me as to the exact date of our previous encounter), it turned out that he was in town as part of Robert Gordon’s  backing band – an almost surreal supergroup that not even AI could have dreamt up. The Robert Gordon gig that weekend at Richmond’s Corner Hotel was something of a frustrating experience. It felt like the singer was simply going through the motions – his performance was more showbiz posture, and less musical substance. Anyway, it’s nice to see that Glen has found a new home as a member of Blondie (and a reputation for being an amiable grand old man of rock).

Next week: My night with the Buzzcocks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music, music everywhere…. and none of it very memorable

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This past weekend I experienced a couple of musical events that were poles apart, but which also underlined how so much contemporary music is totally forgettable, due to both ubiquity and overabundance.

The first event was the Independent Music Exchange held in Melbourne. Here, a collection of small independent labels, distributors and retailers came together to promote their current catalogues. Most of the music was on vinyl, but there were also CDs and lots of cassettes. (Melbourne is allegedly the vinyl capital of the world…) Releases on sale included new product, plus swathes of back catalogue and archival reissues – some of which have only become well-known long after their initial release, or are only available again thanks to these independent companies because the original labels (often one of the big global players) have chosen not to keep them in print. I can’t pretend to have been very familiar with many of the items on display; but it was nevertheless gratifying to see the range and diversity, and to know that there is an audience for these types of music (judging by the number of punters attending the event), which is largely overlooked by broadcast radio and major streaming platforms.

The second event was an evening of Karaoke with friends, which largely featured music from the 80s and 90s (reflecting the age group), but which also included a reasonable selection of more recent tracks. I have to admit that any of the latter that I did recognise were songs I have heard as background music in public places, rather than as a conscious decision to listen to them. I’m also woefully ignorant of most of the artists behind these latest songs, and if they have reached my consciousness it’s probably as a result of a news story or social media campaign. Admittedly, I’m probably not the target audience for most of this newer music, so my ignorance can be forgiven!

The latest IFPI annual report reveals that nearly 70% of global music revenue comes from streaming platforms, around 17% from physical sales (of which vinyl is increasingly taking a bigger share), and just 3% from downloads and other digital formats. The remaining 10% is derived from performance rights and associated syndication licensing.

If streaming platforms have done one thing well, it is to help create an over abundance of “new” music. This is because they have reduced the costs of distribution, and in many cases, this new music is being self-released and directly uploaded by the artists themselves, rather than via record labels or music publishers. This applies to both the big brands like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube and Pandora, as well as the smaller players like Bandcamp and SoundCloud. However, easier and cheaper distribution has not reduced the costs of marketing and promotion; and thanks to certain algorithms, a lot of new music is being created just to get “discovered” via streaming and social media, based on listeners’ habits and/or preferences. There is also a debate about whether AI-generated music, artists or promotion should be allowed to co-exist on these streaming platforms; and if so, should they come with associated disclosures so listeners can choose to block AI-content? In some ways, it’s rather like the Enhanced Games competing with the Olympics, or consumers preferring to exclude GMO crops from the food chain – the boundaries are blurred, and once the content is in the system, everything else becomes tainted or infected.

I recently read a blog by an independent recording artist and curator who was bemoaning the current state of the music industry – specifically, the noise and hype around so much current music – the main conclusion being that thanks to the algorithms and the repetition, it was dulling his appetite to engage with new music. I can certainly empathise with this perspective – often, the announcement of this or that new album or a “sneak peak” (i.e., co-ordinated leak) of a carefully stage-managed artist collaboration is more significant than the music itself. It feels like the amount of promotion thrown at a song or a music video is in inverse proportion to the quality of the release.

The ubiquity of highly homogenised popular music is down to three main factors:

  1. The tech (streaming, AI, algorithms)
  2. Record labels (guilty of pushing “fast fashion”-type music)
  3. TV talent shows (Eurovision, X-factor, The Voice, Pop Idol) that push a very narrow agenda, and are guilty of form over substance

BUT at the end of the day, I can’t help also thinking that the public gets what the public wants (to quote Paul Weller): “You are what you listen to”. So choosing to engage with this type of content only perpetuates its creation and existence – and “helped” by this ubiquity and overabundance, most of this new music is ultimately disposable and totally forgettable.

Next week: My night with the Sex Pistols

The cost of AI

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A variant on Moore’s law is the observation that the financial capital required to launch a new business decreases exponentially as technology gets cheaper.

Pre-internet, and using a notional geometric scale for the purposes of illustration, you might have needed $5m to found and build a new venture. The World Wide Web probably reduced that to $500k, while cloud computing brought it down to $50k. With the expansion of SaaS and API solutions, that cost might have been $5k to get going. Now, vibe coding and $500 of AI prompts can probably launch a new website, build a back end database, implement an e-commerce solution and deploy agentic AI bots to go and find your first customers.

This is a great outcome if measured by a lower barrier to market entry. It also enables founders to “fail fast, fail cheap”, and incentivises innovation by financially de-risking the process.

But even though the cost of AI tools is extraordinarily cheap in terms of the computing and processing power they deliver, there is a huge cost to our rapid adoption of AI that needs to be accounted for.

First, we are seeing corporate lay-offs among tech firms and parts of the service industry that no longer need as many human bodies and minds to operate at scale. So there is a human, economic and societal cost of increased un(der)employment.

Second, traditional skills and expertise are being hugely reduced in perceived value – why pay a graphic artist to design an image when I can use dall-e for free?

Third, as more and more creative tasks are being outsourced or delegated to AI (“create a short story about an F1 race in the style of Ernest Hemingway”) we risk losing our own innate creativity (that comes with experimentation, curiosity, play and reflection). This in turn devalues the creative process itself (thanks to cheaper, AI-enabled production).

Fourth, AI (and the Large Language Models on which it is trained) has no great respect for intellectual property. It doesn’t recognise boundaries between copyright material, content that is subject to creative commons, content that is in the public domain, and content which is publicly available. Again, if copyright owners and original content creators are not recognised or compensated for their work, why would anyone aspire to creating anything original?

Finally, there is the cost of resources (energy, water, rare earth metals) needed to maintain huge AI processing plants and data centres. (But at least this demand is accelerating the development of renewable energy.)

A few years ago, I posted a blog about the importance of the human factor, in the face of technological progress brought by automation and AI. I still remain cautiously optimistic that AI will bring huge benefits, despite the rampant growth of AI in the three years since I wrote that piece. But we are currently in an awkward and comfortable transition phase. If more jobs are lost to AI, and if human-led output is increasingly devalued, perhaps we will need to revisit the debate about Universal Basic Income and other policies to facilitate this transition.

Next week: Music, music everywhere…. and none of it very memorable 

Time for age limits on religion?

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As more countries consider following Australia’s lead in banning or restricting children and young people from accessing social media, I wonder why we don’t similarly consider a ban on religion for anyone under 16? Surely, if we want to protect our children from the potential harm caused by social media, we should include religious faith as having similar harmful effects on young minds.

I appreciate this may sound deliberately contentious, but bear with me. I come to this suggestion from a number of perspectives.

First, my own position on “god” and faith-based beliefs sits somewhere between agnosticism and atheism. For those who say “you’re just sitting on the fence” or “you’re hedging your bets”, I would reply I simply don’t have that die-hard certainty in theological beliefs or conviction of faith that is usually required (if not enforced) by most religions and cults. I have no problem with people practising or adhering to their own faiths. But in liberal, progressive, pluralistic and democratic societies the right to “freedom of religion” is balanced with the right to “freedom from religion”. Meaning I shouldn’t be disadvantaged or persecuted solely for my choice of a specific religion, or my choice of no religion. I would also side with the humanists and secularists who argue that your freedom to exercise your religion should not cause any harm to others, especially not to those who do not follow your particular persuasion. And your religious practices and preferences certainly shouldn’t curb my individual rights to things like legal birth control, divorce, gender equality etc. I would also argue that an individual’s freedom to choose their own religion (not have it imposed at birth as if it formed part of our DNA) should be based on an informed, independent and personal decision. Just as we have age limits for voting, driving, marriage and sexual relations, I think we should have minimum age limits for religious membership and participation.

Second, many of my ancestors were subjected to religious persecution. My French ancestors were protestants (Huguenots) and were effectively driven out of France; my Irish ancestors were catholics, and endured the strictures of British colonialism. Both suffered due to religious sectarianism – so I have little time for religious practices that foster discrimination, forced conversion or violence born of intolerance, fanaticism, extremism and fundamentalism. I certainly don’t want to live under theocratic rule!

Third, I spent much of my A-Level History course studying the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. From a political and cultural perspective, it is an extremely important period, and many of the key events and outcomes are echoed in today’s geo-political landscape. For example, Henry VIII’s break with Rome can be seen as the first Brexit; while vernacular translations of the bible and other religious texts (rather than the Latin versions imposed by the Catholic Church) were important for helping to spread literacy, and they have helped to inform notions of self-determination by nation states and ethnic minorities.

Fourth, those A-Level studies also exposed much of the nonsense that is spouted in the name of religion, for example: theological disputes around predestination and transubstantiation, and debates about how many angels can fit on the head of a needle. Much earlier in my life, I was a member of a church choir. I recall, aged 7 or 8, having to read out aloud during Sunday services some passages from the bible which I just didn’t understand (and which no-one in church could rationally explain). Yet, because they represented the “word of god”, they had to be true, and I was required to believe them, otherwise I was going to burn in hell. That’s surely not how we should be educating children, is it?

If we do want to teach ideas about religion to children under the age of 16, perhaps we need a different approach. While schools may offer classes in comparative religion, it’s largely under the auspices of religious education or religious instruction (or maybe social studies). Whereas, I think sacred texts should be taught as literature (fiction or poetry), and open to the same level of critical analysis applied to Shakespeare, Jane Austen or George Orwell. Maybe these texts could be studied and critiqued in philosophy classes, but certainly not taught as part of science or history subjects!

The current public debate around “religious freedom” is often tied up in torturous arguments about protected beliefs, freedom of speech, and the “right” to cause offence against someone’s personal beliefs. Increasingly, taking a secular or non-sectarian stance against religious overbearance (whether in the form of Islamic Jihadism, Christian Nationalism, Zionism, Hindu Nationalism or Buddhist ethno-nationalism) is dismissed and even prosecuted as evidence of racism, xenophobia, religious discrimination or incitement to violence. And as for the Federal government’s back-flip on launching a Royal Commission in the aftermath of the Bondi massacre, I think the Prime Minister was probably right to change his mind about holding an enquiry, but got it totally wrong by framing it in the context of only one form of religion. Instead, he should have made it a broader examination of religious extremism and sectarian intolerance of all kinds, and the harm this is having on society and our personal freedoms.

Next week: The cost of AI