Paul Morley

There's lots of Morleystuff out there in stray corners of the www, mostly from the NME, but it's not collected anywhere, and until Barney Hoskins persuades him to sign up for http://www.rocksbackpages.com your best bet is to spend half an hour on google.

found some stuff

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/presenters/andrew_collins/

roundtable is a show for an hour where new singles are discussed. There is also a live interactive chat room for listeners, see roundtable section on above webpage.

My freeview box has just paid for itself.

You can listen to it online here.

It might be put in the 'listen again' archives, I don't know. It's repeated tomorrow morning, anyway.

Of course, it may be that the fault lies in the show's editorial policy. It may be that pop is actually vital and interesting just now, but that this show simply chose to ignore those areas where growth is occurring and focus on dull, retrograde stufff. Why? Because people out there buy dull, retrograde stuff. Because it sells. Yet in selecting interesting critics to discuss dull music, the show exhibits a schizophrenic dilemma typical of British culture in general, and of the BBC in particular: the desire to be both populist and educational at the same time, or rather, the wish to put the administration of the idiotic into the hands of the highly intelligent.

(yummmy)

I think this is down to the fact that the words and the music on this show are curated by different people. Essentially the music heard is curated by A&R men at major labels, whereas the panellists discussing it are curated by the show's producer. The A&R man is accountable to public taste and has to shift units, whereas the show's producer just has to fill in space between the records. (In the UK, their cultures are different too. The producer is probably Oxbridge, the A&R man isn't.)

The A&R man basically is a commercial animal whereas the producer is more like a patron, more able to indulge his whims and slip in a bit of experiment. He can take more risks because at the end of the day he's getting paid by the BBC's weird, arcane licensing system rather than by schlepping moronspaying punters at the Virgin Megastore of a Saturday.

I should add to this an alternative result, the kind more practised by Collins: a kind of desperate irony.

I'm also, of course, complaining about nearly all the artists featured on this show -- including Kevin Shields -- for being below par in their ambition for the medium of pop music itself.

It was interesting to hear how the NME was being discussed throughout this show (by two ex-NME journalists) as part of the problem -- a paper which 'prints the legend' rather than the disappointing reality of bands like The Strokes, and fails to demand of both its writers and the artists considered the kind of creativity exemplified by Morley, for instance, in his every public utterance. (But actually, I think Morley probably demands that originality of himself, despite a certain lack of demand from editors, producers, his public or anyone else for such high standards of originality. That lonely self-exigent vigilance is the essence of what makes things great. I wish there were more of it in the world, in industry, on radio, whatever.)

6 Music is run by people with NME tucked under the right arm, and Q tucked under the left arm - they employ a team of newshounds that to f-all research apart from recycle what is in on NME.com.

their playlist is too limited and restictive - and far to reliant on singles.
their selection of 60s/ 70s/ 80s/ 90s music is far too predictable and tracks the most obvious.
there are DJs on the station - that obviously don't deserve to be there or have rotten music taste.
they repeat certain shows - instead of free-ing up this space to be more radical/ and risk taking/ and diverse.
they play inappropriate music that is already covered on Radio 1 or Radio 2 or Virgin.
they cover token selections of music e.g msinstream hip hop and R N B - when there is an overwhelming objection from the listeners - and this music is covered elsewhere !

they under estimate what their audience/ potential audience would like.

they ignore/ or misundertand/ lack knowledge/ or offer token coverage at best of:

ambient/ space music
art rock /post rock/ avant prog
electronic jazz
gothic/ darkwave
industrial
Avant/ free Jazz, Jazz rock/fusion and julio approved free improv
synth pop/ future pop / ebm
Terrorizer magazine Extreme Metal [black/ death/ metalcore/ noisecore etc]
IDM/ experimental electronics ala Boomkat and Grooves magazine

So really I'd recommend, in order not to have your pop music mediated to you with this particular flavour, that you just buy records. Or move to Berlin or Toyko or somewhere. You'd be surprised at the fresh feeling, the sudden sense of suggestive possibity, you get when records don't have Steve Lamacq at either end.

Where are all the cool places with the scarey goths and digital hardcore ppl?

'It's funny that public sector/ voluntary sector organisations - teachers, social workers, arts workers, civil servants, etc - are, in my experience, the ones most amenable to introducing experiment, simulation (and the potential failures it brings) into their daily professional practice. That slight cushion from the marketplace allows for ways to cultivate wrongness - or what amounts to the same thing these days, indeterminate outcomes - in ways that are indeed gloriously innovative. At their best, they don't "get it wrong", but they do "make meaning" our of their strivings.'

Now I think this relates to what we were talking about above, if we see A&R mean as 'private sector' people unwilling to take risks, to play, to risk getting things wrong, and the BBC producers as 'public sector' people cushioned somewhat from the brutal realities of the marketplace and therefore free to play, to err, to innovate.

Of course, there are what Pat calls 'indeterminate outcomes' in both the act of putting together a Texas single and the act of choosing Paul Morley as a guest on your show. Both decisions will be judged, one on sales, the other on ratings. But the BBC's public status, its unique, taxlike way of financing its activities, means that it has a kind of 'license to fail', a right to play.

If only it would use it to take more risks!

Words and Music is pretty bloody good. It's quite close to being ILM - the novel, and namechecks Tom E and Marcello as sort of PM's children. Many lists, lots of great oneliners.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/presenters/andrew_collins/roundtable.shtml

Sunday
2200-0100

Mr Morley will be sitting in for Bruce as he tours the world, and bringing his own records and opinions to The Freak Zone.

[Reminder, this show will be available to listen to anytime for 7 days after broadcast]

Um, look again!

Last weekend: Post-punk nostalgia again
this week: Rockism

What next?

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/Juror8/SheridanMorley.jpg

^^^Does this ever get old?

That Daily Mirror political guy reminds me of Morley - Kevin Maguire?

I stood behind him in Urban Outfitters in Covent Garden once. Scruffy fucker. I suspect he would've smelt a bit if I'd got closer.

strange to think that that video is from closer to, like, the cuban missile crisis in time than it is to us.

Tonight on Radio 2, 11:30:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/musicclub/doc_musicalgenres.shtml

Paul Morley is both fascinated and confused by the number of different musical genres that exist today.

In this four-part series, he sets off to find out where all of these new genres have come from and what, if anything, do they mean to music fans today.

Each programme finds Paul talking to current champions of a new music style and the artists that have influenced them.

Tune in to find out everything you ever wanted to know about psych-folk, glitch, twee, post-rock, emo and perfect pop in the company of Lou Reed, Billy Bragg and Bernard Butler amongst others.

Momus: "But I must say I'm constantly disappointed by the public. (They seem to feel the same way about me.)"

Tonight!

11.00pm Newsnight Review

Kirsty Wark hosts a special extended programme looking back at the cultural highlights of 2008, with guests Michael Gove, Paul Morley, Julie Myerson and Ekow Eshun.

There's also an interview or something with him on Quietus, about ZTT . Haven't read it.

you need to really love morley to put up with the other four participants there.

That's very true.

I read the Quietus bit. I think the important thing about Paul Morley is that he's much better when he's not talking about himself. The Quietus thing is mostly him banging on for the millionth time about how fantastic he was with ZzzzzzzzzzTT (he's worse than Paul McCartney at inserting his genius into works that are obviously the product of other people's labour, notwithstanding his coy self-awareness of this tactic) with a heavy dose of his "conceptualist" musings, which I don't think are convincing in this case. eg:

As the kind of writer who really does consider Frankie Goes to Hollywood and indeed Zang Tuum Tumb itself to be pieces of writing, I consider it to be ONE of my greatest pieces of writing, but there other writings I would, given the chance, point to, including my book Words and Music, which was like the sleeve notes to both Kylie's ‘Can't Get You Out Of My Head’ and Alvin Lucier's ‘I Am Sittting In A Room’ if they had been ZTT releases, and to me they sort of were - but Frankie was a kind of book, a sort of novel, perhaps a screenplay, definitely theatre, well, a musical - and I suppose I did write the story, and indeed illustrate it, as it was going along, even if it was all totally out of my control. I suppose I wrote a first sentence, the kind of sentence Philip K. Dick might have written about fame and information and music and image, and that then set all the other sentences that were to come into motion, some of which I would later claim I had written.

I mean there's barely a phrase there that isn't either deluded or a laughably contrived attempt at self-glorification.

Paulie's demented for sure, but I can usually overlook that.

i was too tired to keep watching newsnight but i did want to slap ekow and the MP at various points.

I think a lot of lazy readers miss the relentless self-ironizing implicit in the Morley vainglory.

The relentless self-ironizing is unmissable but it's a bore.

And he obviously hopes that a significant portion of the vainglorious mud will stick.

http://msp140.photobucket.com/albums/r9/futurefaith17/get_out_of_jail_free.jpg

http://www.drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4136550

massive
fucken
lolz

He He He

i think my fave morley on tv moment was when he was praising that new lars von trier film on newsnight review, saying that it was 'making a mockery of the entire canne system!', and safraz manzoor said 'like what youre doing?!' funny to see him stretch a few comments (which he kept repeating, all very pleased with himself) on newsnight last week into a full blown guardian article on MJ.

i think my fave morley on tv moment was when he was praising that new lars von trier film on newsnight review, saying that it was 'making a mockery of the entire canne system!'

this is why he's a fucking idiot.

everyone knows cannes is a bullshit hype machine that produced no-talent zeros like wong kar wai and michael haneke and lars von triers.

lvt biting the hand that feeds by making the exact kind of 'transgressive' bollocks that always gets feeble-minded journalists and art-house fans hard isn't making a mockery of cannes, it's feeding the machine.

even if it were, bfd, what kind of nimrod cares about cannes?

Praising a Lars von Trier film is indefensible, at the best of times

I imagine if I had have been at Glastonbury that year, I would have just seen Björk, which would have moistened the mind, and then chosen Orbital rather than Paul Weller, for reasons to do with the future, recent history, Kraftwerk, post-minimalism, Star Trek and their post-space age, techno-fantasy Orbital 2 album which I was quite partial to at the time. (Not enough obviously to have decided "I am going to see them play their first show at Glastonbury", although if you'd have said 1993 Orbital were playing on the Moon with 1957 Edgard Varèse, 1964 La Monte Young, 1965 Sun Ra, 1969 Lothar and the Hand People, 1971 Cluster, 1972 Neu!, 1973 Tangerine Dream, 1974 Kraftwerk, 1975 Fripp and Eno, 1977 Charlemagne Palestine, 1978 Harold Budd, 1983 Arthur Russell, 1985 Mantronix, 1988 A Guy Called Gerald, 1989 Kevin Saunderson and 1991 808 State then I would have made the trip and camped out for as long as necessary in whatever way required. I suppose those were my kind of festivals – the ones I was throwing in my head, the ones that took a lot of personal throwing.)

what a horribly formed 'parenthesis'

just a lil wanky namedropping yall

wonder if he's even heard orbital. anyway, this is much better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhVU8RKRaTY

Not read "Words and Music" then? It's got stuff like that on practically every page.

yeah. he's said you shouldn't write abt music after the age of 25 and i don't think his heart's really in it.

I really don't believe he's much of a music fan. Or at least any more of a fan than an average person. He is far more enthusiastic in riffing about the culture and meaning of music and various facets of that than he is in actually enjoying music for it's own sake. But I think he's always been a bit like that. Maybe that's why he's good (in my opinion) when writing about Metal Machine Music or whatever - stuff that is not particularly enjoyable but has some cultural meaning.

MMM IS 'enjoyable', particularly or otherwise!

And of course he is a music fan but its clear he is no fan of festivals as a format: in a festival you are there as much to see stuff you don't know about as stuff you are interested in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2010/dec/24/paul-morley-christmas-songs

i can't think of anything that would induce me to click on a url like that

I just find him unreadable. Everything he does is a list.

Fabulous subject. Marvelous infighting. Do continue, Marcello and friends.

Morley talks about classical music on Radio 3 - you can listen here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000n04v