You didn't need a jetpack to feel spaced out in the brave new world of free music downloads and Pod almighty, writes Aidan Smith.
WELL, we never got food in pill form or those moving walkways, and, come to think of it, where's my jetpack? The future, as mapped out by Raymond Baxter on Tomorrow's World has proved to be mostly fantasy.
But, jetpack-less, we sit on buses and tr
ains wired up to a phantasmagorical gadget which has revolutionised music. It has taken the three-dinner-courses-in-a-tablet idea and used it to condense an entire record collection, indeed an entire life, into a shiny white box the size of a cigarette packet. It has solved storage problems. It has solved conversation issues (no one talks anymore). But it was in the year of Our Lord, 2007, that downloading truly came of age.
Radiohead's In Rainbows may not have been the first free downloadable music available to buy unheard, but it was the first complete album from a top band, and as such, the marvel of www. was born anew. As the 10 tracks floated through cyberspace, they took on the glow of moon-rock specimens. As we collected them, the right-click of the computer mouse seemed as momentous as Neil Armstrong stepping from his capsule. We felt like we were actually wearing the silver suits that Tomorrow's World lied to us about all those years before.
Was the album, the band's seventh, any good? At first, this almost didn't matter. What was important was that for the first time in what seemed like aeons, and in the wake of rapidly falling sales, pop music felt like it was experiencing the beginning of something rather than the end.
Feverish debate ensued. It's the first post-album! No it's not, it's a con! It's a no-logo swipe at rockbiz hype! That's it, and a power-to-people counterblast to ponytailed corporate tyranny. Let's start a revolution!
Great idea, but how are we going to pay for placards? As the debate raged in blog-world, it was obvious that not everyone was paying for In Rainbows; the honesty-box installed for contributions contained a fair bit of the internet equivalent of pocket fluff. Oh well, as Radiohead themselves put it, on their previous album – "Hail to the thief!"
And hail the 'head, too, because whatever else In Rainbows was – and by the year's end, more than one critics' poll was positioning it as 2007's best – the ingenuity of the marketing, how it wrong-footed everyone, could not be disputed. It made us gasp in the way that you imagine the brilliant stunts of PT Barnum once induced awe. Who would have thought that the 'head's famously furrow-browed Thom Yorke would turn out to be such a crazy circus prankster?
So who else was forward-thinking in 2007? The Klaxons are often referred to as "futuristic". Google "Klaxons" and "futuristic" and you'll find mention of their "futuristic ideology", "futuristic keyboards" and how they wouldn't sound out of place at a "futuristic disco".
How can we be certain about this, now that we know our jet-packs will never arrive? Best to stick to the facts.
Fact – there was a lot of sneering about the Klaxons being proponents of a hastily-contrived fad known as nu-rave.
Fact – there was also some sneering about their poshness. But they overcame all of this to win the Mercury Music Prize with their debut album, Myths Of The Near Future.
There doesn't seem much doubt, though, that the Klaxons are keenly interested in the future. Their second album of 2007, a compilation in the Bugged Out series, included that great, old Zager & Evans prophesy of doom, 'In The Year 2525'. We don't really know for sure whether the Klaxons will last much beyond twenty-past-five next Thursday, but if you're truly futuristic you have to acknowledge the past and be respectful of it. Bugged Out, mixing Krautrock with Frankie Valli, suggested deeper-thinking popsters with a great record collection.
LCD Soundsystem made another of 2007's finest albums, Sound Of Silver, and Mark Ronson was among those who enthused about it seeming to have "come down from a spaceship". Deemed a key figure this year, Ronson remains in the shadow of LCD's burly James Murphy as a sonic wizard. He did co-produce Amy Winehouse's Back To Black, a 2006 release, and so had to spend much of 2007 answering questions about the chanteuse's fragile and often frazzled state. T in the Park was one of many gigs missed.
Rock'n'roll behaviour, that's not very futuristic – in fact it's so 1969, the year Led Zeppelin roared motorcycles along hotel hallways. In 2007, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page may have been more likely to avail themselves of the Teasmade and the extra blankets stored above the trouser-press, but they did reform "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world" and they were the hottest ticket.
Elsewhere, Arcade Fire and Arctic Monkeys made a mockery of difficult-second-album-syndrome, but the experience of Kanye West suggested the third may be more troublesome. That Britney Spears made a record at all in 2007 – after losing her kids, her knickers and her direction, so spectacularly – seemed nothing short of remarkable.
Justice suggested that dance music isn't quite dead and Battles kept the prog revival going, with the Klaxons chipping in some fabulist imagery of which King Crimson would have been proud.
If the Klaxons' disco ever opens for business then MIA will be there. She garners almost as many "futuristic" references, including one describing her album Kala as "futuristic anti-disco".
Confused? Scared? In 'In The Year 2525', Zager & Evans speculated about how in the future we: "Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife/You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too/From the bottom of a long glass tube. Whoa-oh."
As to how we will listen to music in years to come, the mind boggles. It has to, because teleportation never became part of our daily lives, as promised, and we cannot be whooshed into the future, so we are reduced to guesswork, just like Raymond Baxter
A few years ago, a rock critic rather foolishly declared: "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen." It almost killed The Boss's career overnight, but he's still with us, and his album Magic contributed to a year that wasn't quite vintage but was always fascinating and, on October 10 when In Rainbows shone its brilliant light, made music seem communal, vital and indeed magic.
CLASSICALWhile the RSNO's much-respected leader of 31 years, Edwin Paling, was the first to bid a fond farewell in April, it was the BBC SSO who made the headlines with their announcement that llan Volkov, their intermittently brilliant young Israeli conductor, would be stepping down in 2009. San Francisco Opera music director, Edinburgh-bred conductor and an international 'big man' of the orchestra pit, Donald Runnicles, will replace him, promising an exciting new dynamic for the Scottish orchestral scene.
Elsewhere too, a cliffhanger was resolved with the appointment of a new music director at Scottish Opera in July. The position had lain vacant since Sir Richard Armstrong left in 2005. Francesco Corti only made his first Scottish Opera appearance in March, conducting a revival of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Corti will inherit a company on firmer ground. Highlights of 2007 included the major role debut of Arbroath-born Karen Cargill as Rosina in Sir Thomas Allen's sprightly Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
And so to the Edinburgh International Festival, where the door opened for new director Jonathan Mills in an exciting if not devastating first festival. In the Usher Hall, Mariss Jansons, found epiphanies in even the most familiar of classics, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra astounded. But it was the the instrument-twirling Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under Gustavo Dudamel which brought the house repeatedly to its feet. These 200 young musicians from an innovative education programme, demonstrated the democratic power of classical music to raise the young and disadvantaged out of destitution. Inspiring, brilliant and very good fun.
SARAH URWIN JONESFOLKThis year, Scotland's music was the unlikely focus of major prime-time television, when accordion maestro Phil Cunningham presented a six-part autumn series exploring our native traditions. This is no surprise as roots record sales, the plethora of nationwide folk instrument workshops, the rise of the Highland Feis movement, and the inexorable rise of Glasgow's Celtic Connections winter festival reveals an ever-increasing thirst for a music that means something, and can be identified with.
Things are looking up for the home-grown record industry. Ian Green, who heads up Greentrax, the most important of the Scottish folk independents, said that although high street retailers were suffering in their battle with the supermarkets, online and mail order had rescued niche markets. "It started to pick up by the summer," Green says, "Sales on Amazon went right up; the online sales outlets like MusicScotland. Since then we've been astonishingly busy." And what albums have been the most popular? "Well, Fiona Mackenzie's Christmas double album Duan Nollaig, and the album Just For Gordon, for Gordon Duncan.
This reviewer's concert of the year was at Stornoway's Hebridean Celtic Festival, not in the big marquee with Moving Hearts, Peat Bog Faeries et al, but in the An Lanntair arts centre and an evening with Scottish bands, Nuala Kennedy's New Shoes and Lau.
The three guys in Lau (Aidan O'Rourke, singer Kris Drever and Martin Green) wield fiddle, guitar and accordion to ultra-dynamic effect. Kennedy's Irish background and beautiful singing leads a band of subtlety and delightful instrumental interplay. Testosterone vs oestrogen, and no winner but the audience.
NORMAN CHALMERSJAZZIt has not been what you might call a vintage year in jazz – at least, not for those of us with a passion for tuneful, swinging, accessible jazz that speaks to the heart more than the brain. You really have to ferret about in the memory to come up with highlights, but they are there – in among various disappointments, including the programmes for the two main cities' jazz festivals.
The first highlight of the year was a rare appearance by the Swedish Jazz Kings at the Jazz From Sweden events that took place up and down the country in February. I saw them at the Recital Room in Glasgow's newly spruced-up City Halls and was not alone in being thrilled at the impressive crowd that had turned out to hear hot, swinging, 1920s-influenced jazz.
In Glasgow the Swedish Jazz Kings paid tribute to their friend, the great American clarinettist Kenny Davern, who died unexpectedly last December. They were not the only musicians to remember Davern, who was a regular visitor to Glasgow back in the days of the Society of Musicians, Edinburgh, Arbroath and Nairn. Ken Mathieson's Classic Jazz Orchestra, whose concert was the highlight of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival for this reviewer, included in its eclectic programme a 'Blues For Kenny Davern'.
One of Davern's old Scottish stamping grounds was the Nairn Jazz Festival, and this year's top-notch proceedings featured many of his old pals – several of whom came together for a tribute to Count Basie's guitarist Freddie Green. Led by guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, the star-studded quintet included pianist John Bunch and cornettist Warren Vaché, and was the epitome of relaxed chamber jazz.
While Vaché takes Louis Armstrong as his primary influence on the trumpet, Harry Connick Jr, who brought his big band to the Clyde Auditorium in November, draws on Satchmo's gifts as an entertainer for inspiration. The one-time boy crooner has grown into a fully-fledged entertainer who sings, dances, relates anecdotes, plays swinging piano – and reminds us that jazz should be fun.
ALISON KERRWISHFUL THINKINGA T in the Park headliner who hasn't been at every other British festival that summer would be nice. Oh, and more loos. More loos!
