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IN SEARCH OF THE LOST BUZZ

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’ve done it and I bet you have too. You buy that ‘must have’ CD, get it home, put it on and flick through the tracks, pressing the “next” button after 30 seconds of each one, waiting to hear that knockout song that will give you ‘The Buzz.’. Remember that line in the film Almost Famous?

I’ll confess I have missed some great tracks doing this. Let’s face it, you couldn’t do that with a vinyl album, could you? I’m a musician. I have a CD out. I would be horrified if I thought people were doing that to my album, but I bet they do.

But here’s the thing. Has easy access to music made us complacent in our listening habits?

What happened to getting into an album? When I started buying music, you would buy an album because you saw the band live, or you heard a track you liked, or the word was out that this was the hip album to have. Once you got it home you would take it from its sleeve and place it carefully on the turntable and listen. That’s listen! No skipping through the tracks. And whilst giving it your full attention you would scour the sleeve to see what guitars these guys played , study the lyrics and take in the other mysteries on offer. Remember those weird messages scratched onto the runout groove of the vinyl itself?                        

Sometimes it would take time to get into the music, but boy, oh boy was it worth it! That memory is so potent I can actually remember how those albums smelt.

Fast forward to the digital age with dwindling album sales. There is a huge argument about ‘the value of music.’ People don’t want to pay for albums and singles and somehow, who can blame them? I have bought songs from iTunes, but what exactly have I bought? A computer file, a collection of numbers that unscrambled play music: no sleeve, nothing that I can hold and look at or look after, and you certainly can’t sniff a download. There’s a law against that here in the UK!  So, it’s no wonder that music buyers with no other music buying experience want their music for free! 

I do find it odd that, here in London on any given day, people can hand over £10 for two Starbucks coffees, a couple of muffins (mine’s a skinny blueberry), not get a lot of change and think nothing of it. But ask them to pay around the same price for a collection of songs that has taken time and some skill to put together and they get quite indignant. Okay, I don’t want to upset purveyors of fine coffee and I may be verging into ‘old fart’ territory here, but I do fear we may be becoming institutionalised into a world where music is totally undervalued as a result of new technology, corporate business and a general malaise.

Let’s go back to ‘Almost Famous.’  During an interview, the lead singer of Stillwater says: “What it all comes down to is that thing, the indefinable thing when people catch something from your music. What I’m talking about is... The Buzz!”  Okay, so the film depicts a time when rock music had both an innocence and an over-inflated opinion of itself, but hey, wouldn’t it be great to have that passion and magic back?  I want the ‘buzz’ and I suspect you do too!

So here is your mission, should you choose to accept it: bring back the buzz. I guess we can start by not using that fast forward button to skip through CDs.  Perhaps we can start to reject buying those endless re-releases of stuff that we already have. I started going through my old vinyl about a year ago and thought, “Why on earth did I ever buy this again on CD?” The old vinyl sounds great and contained in those grooves is that original magic. Check it out. It’s there. My good friend, ex-XTC guitarist Dave Gregory, has been advocating this for ages now. His devotion to finding the original vinyl is almost fanatical but he’ll tell you with complete conviction that this is the real thing. A ‘Class A’ rock ‘n’ roll drug. I’ve heard his early Rolling Stones records and they swing along with more clout than any MP3 can offer.

But let’s not turn our backs on the new technology. The Internet, MySpace, and YouTube have been great tools for me to get my music out in the world and that in turn has attracted some independent record interest. I have been knocked out by some of the music and musicians I have discovered on the Internet, out there doing their own thing.

So here I am writing this to the sound of Baby Shambles’ album Shotters Nation, blasting from my speakers. Produced by Stephen Street, recorded at Olympic Studios, where all those great Stones records were cut, it’s a blistering slice of Great British Rock ‘n’ Roll, mixing elements from the Sixties to the present day. There are bits of this record that take me back to why I first picked up a guitar. Damn it, I’m getting THE BUZZ! I’m going to stop writing and turn this up to eleven. Now, no excuses! Go find yours!

Go to: The Shadow Kabinet