This post makes me doubly happy.
First, it allows me to encourage everybody to subscribe to the utterly wonderful The Word magazine: which is the only music magazine I bother to read these days. Given that it is produced for my demographic, that’s wholly unsurprising.
Buy a copy of it on your way home tonight. Then subscribe here. Only 42 quid for 12 issues, and you get a decent compo CD with each copy.
Secondly, this. I am pretty fixated on the Smiths: I admit it. But I do accept that they were not the only great British band of my lifetime. Had I been born a few years earlier, I would have been devoted to Echo and the Bunnymen. A few years later, and it would certainly have been Radiohead whose songs would have saved my life.
So it is nice to read the following in this month’s Word:
“I talked to Radiohead one member at a time, over a period of weeks,” says Andrew [Harrison], “and it was surprising to see that the intense persona of the band is sustained by a shared sense of humour and sometimes pretty frank disagreement among its individual members.
“We talked about TV comedy, football, the way the band’s politics aren’t as cut and dried as you might think, and why Thom will sometimes hear himself talking and think ‘For God’s sake just shut up’. They have an insight into what makes their music work that’s rare among any bands, let alone the biggest.”
And specifically:
Then [Colin Greenwood] tells me how interested he’s become in the books of Nick Cohen, Oliver Kamm and Andrew Anthony, the blogger Norman Geras and the blog/website Harry’s Place, all of which look at how the liberal left has lost its way and which have been vilified by the Stop The War wing of the left as rebranded neoconservatives. Colin considers himself mildly addicted to the new world of information. “I’m the old curmudgeon in front of my computer,” Colin says. “It’s the new version of shouting at News At Ten.”
From Wikipedia:
Greenwood, whose father served in the Army, lived in Germany as a child for enough time to become fluent in the language. The family historically had ties to both the British Communist Party and the Fabian Society.
Yup. That’s pretty much Harry’s Place’s demographic.
UPDATE
Radiohead cover The Smiths’ The Headmaster Ritual
