Damon Allbran tries not to dip his toe in the water

[muzzer]

“ The longer in the tooth I get, the more I gravitate towards Radio 3.” https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...e_iOSApp_Other

To be fair his work is more eclectic than most of his (my) generation but where to start? I remember competing with him to get served in the Good Mixer c1994 but I’m not bitter ;)

[french frank]

“ The longer in the tooth I get, the more I gravitate towards Radio 3.” https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...e_iOSApp_Other

To be fair his work is more eclectic than most of his (my) generation but where to start? I remember competing with him to get served in the Good Mixer c1994 but I’m not bitter ;)

But he's talking here about jazz, isn't he? (Had to look up the Good Mixer ) Was going to add that he was a Classic FM presenter but I was confusing him with Alex James.

[muzzer]

It’s not clear if he means jazz on R3 or either/or. Which amounts to a pass. V poor imho. He’s not talented he’s just persistent. And Alex James is just cheesy ;). My only slightly more serous point is what have my generation of popsters added to real music? I was at the Barbican last week and heard riches these people couldn’t create of writing. Eno, Cale etc, those now reproached ‘boomers’, have a corpus.

[Serial_Apologist]

It’s not clear if he means jazz on R3 or either/or. Which amounts to a pass. V poor imho. He’s not talented he’s just persistent. And Alex James is just cheesy ;). My only slightly more serous point is what have my generation of popsters added to real music? I was at the Barbican last week and heard riches these people couldn’t create of writing. Eno, Cale etc, those now reproached ‘boomers’, have a corpus.

I've just listened to the last of the 4-part series on 1980s Pop on BBC2. I always liked the Two-Toners - UB40, The Selector, Specials; their music was a natural renewal of 1960s and 1970s Ska and Reggae, respectively, with good added attitude - and the music morphed into the new Black jazz from the 1980s to now. However I am no more adjusted to most of the 1980s styles of Pop than I am to the "humour" of The Young Ones, not even the Indie bands of the time. For all the on-stage energy and visual flamboyance little of interest or surprise was really happening in the music, with the techological options tending to the robotic tendencies so brilliantly satirised in the brilliant video for Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" of 1984 - signifiers of the de-skilling of labour that helped transform Britain into a "service economy" with the all-to-apparent consequences we see today.

I think I must have qualified as a Grumpy Old Man before my time!

[jayne lee wilson]

That BBC2 80s Series is excellent isn't it? Great Part One rockumentary with very intelligent commentary/interviews by Dylan Jones (Arena, The Face, and GQ editor back in the day), almost impossibly comprehensive in its coverage of everything from Adam to Sting, Duran to Boy George to Annie Lennox and Bananarama. I was a part of that hilarious glamour-on-the-social of the Liverpool dole queues back then. We'd take a taxi to sign on, with Echo and the Bunnymen or or Julian Cope blazing out of the car... World, Shut Your Mouth!.... Then hot chocolate and bacon butties in the greasy spoon across the road....

Great selections in the other three episodes too. Just been watching the one about Ska and two-tone.... the legendary Specials and Ghost Town! How great was that?

Why would anyone hold Albarn's recent attraction to Radio 3 against him? Let him enjoy and explore.
For me he created some of the most tuneful, memorable, original and socially insightful Pop of the 90s and after with both Blur and Gorillaz, several of whose albums I bought. They really cracked the hit single, and the played-up competition with the more stadium-filling-inclined anthemic Oasis was great fun.

So many great lyrics and great tunes...!
I grew up with 60s pop, but I think the 80s renewal was just as much joy and fun... and MTV tied in brilliantly with Cinema of the time like Mad Max or BladeRunner...

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

There was a late BBC play for the day based around Coventry and Two tone..."Three minute heroes", second generation mods, "romance", reggae, and the National Front. It's on YouTube.
After watching I nosed around and came upon this, "Rat Race" by the Specials...if only for the wonderful line,
"I've just seen your CV, you've got a PhD,
I've got one art O level, it did nothing for me!"

http://youtu.be/AmkMEoVb6rA

[french frank]

I am no more adjusted to most of the 1980s styles of Pop than I am to the "humour" of The Young Ones […]

Not just me then. I began being unamused with the Goons, followed by Monty Python (mostly), The Goodies - all those middleaged-middle youth bands of galloping madcaps.

[jayne lee wilson]

Not just me then. I began being unamused with the Goons, followed by Monty Python (mostly), The Goodies - all those middleaged-middle youth bands of galloping madcaps.

They haven't dated well, have they? Unlike the music...still very alive!

[french frank]

They haven't dated well, have they? Unlike the music...still very alive!

Not those particular, cultish shows, no. Other, more middlebrow homely formulas can probably be rolled out now and again more successfully. As for music, there came a point - I'd put it in the early to mid 60s (full on Beatles!) - when my feeling was that there was just Too Much Music and I blotted out what didn't have an immediate appeal, whether good or bad I have no idea. You could say I was left behind, but my inclination was to narrow my interests to the point where I would infinitely rather hear a range of 'second-rate classical music' than any popular music at all - however, or by whomever, it was lauded. I wonder if everyone has an analogous point in their lives when the here-and-now of popular music no longer appeals? [Or is it just me?]

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I gave up on it after the sixties, which was after all, my teenage years. One which did seem to FULLY open up to black music from so many sources. I worked with the guy in the early 80s who designed a lot of the very first Coventry two tone album sleeves etc so I heard a lot of that but it made no real impression. The thing however that strikes me listening now is it's "attitude", that seems a million miles away from contemporary bathwater "pop".

[cloughie]

I gave up on it after the sixties, which was after all, my teenage years. One which did seem to FULLY open up to black music from so many sources. I worked with the guy in the early 80s who designed a lot of the very first Coventry two tone album sleeves etc so I heard a lot of that but it made no real impression. The thing however that strikes me listening now is it's "attitude", that seems a million miles away from contemporary bathwater "pop".

I don’t think we’ll ever see again the phenomenal development of popular music that we saw in the 60s.

[Serial_Apologist]

I don’t think we’ll ever see again the phenomenal development of popular music that we saw in the 60s.

Oh we will - I think we will - when the upcoming generation see hope in a better future. Maybe we'll still be here to witness that - in the way Marcuse was in the late 60s. Whether or not any prectically realizable visions will be reflected in, and share the aesthetic adventurousness and curiosity that characterised most of the best of the rock music and jazz, rather than the pop, of that era, is more doubtful, given the preparatory challenge then offered by the new "high art", "serious" music and radical social theories then buzzing, and emblemised by the faces on the "Sergent Pepper" album. As "western culture" has increasingly lost its nerve, the absence of comparable central figures of example and leadership around today is inescapable. The ideas that will save a habitable world for humanity really are there waiting to be practically linked together into an impregnable chain - one does ones best to draw attention to them with ones friends and in places such as this. Greta Thunberg, much as we love her, cannot do it alone; she needs bigger, more comprehensively informed people coming in her wake.