It has come to my attention that there is a whole continent of people who have never listened to Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds. This is a crime against humanity.

The War of the Worlds is the very pinnacle of that mountain of great concept albums that defined the 70s and it’s the best of the rock operas. The opening chords – Dun dun daaaaa – still give me chills 30 years later and I can’t read a EULA without looking over my shoulder for the Martian in a giant tripod trying to kill me with a death ray.

For those who have not yet had the pleasure, War of the Worlds begins with Richard Burton’s sombre narration, reading the opening lines of HG Wells’s masterpiece.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century
that human affairs were being watched
from the timeless worlds of space
No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized
as someone with a microscope studies creatures
that swarm and multiply in a drop of water
Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets
and yet across the gulf of space
minds immeasurably superior to ours
regarded this Earth with envious eyes
and slowly and surely
they drew their plans against us.

Then the overture introduces the haunting theme of the album.

When the Martians arrive on Horsell Common, we journey with the narrator as he meets a series of unlikely characters – David Essex’s artilleryman, Phil Lynot’s parson and his wife, played by Julie Covington – and each character tells their story with a song.

My favourite is Spirit of Man, a duet in which the parson’s wife tries to persuade her now-crazed husband that humanity will find some reason to survive.

There must be something worth living for!
There must be something worth trying for!
Even some things worth dying for!
And if one man can stand tall
There must be some hope for us all.
Somewhere, in the spirit of man.

Your music collection is but an empty shell if it doesn’t include this album. Fix that now (don’t get the abridged version).

Do yourself a favour though. This is not background music. It needs your full attention. You need to sit alone with headphones in the almost dark, peering at the album’s gorgeous artwork, let the story wash over you and imagine those Martians in their fighting machines bringing civilization to an untimely end.

The chances of anything coming from a Mars are a million to one.

But still, they come.

…it’s OK.

But like every other music app I have ever tried it doesn’t do one the thing I want a music player to do.

I want to listen to music that I like.

Spotify excels at playlist management but I don’t want to manage playlists. I want to listen to music.

Here’s a reminder of why playlists suck:

Playlists are very seductive at first. You think Oh yes. I’ll build me a playlist with all my favourite songs. But then, after the third time you play it. You start thinking Oh man! This again!? I’m gonna build me another playlist. Then I’ll have two.

Before you know it, you have hundreds of playlists called things like Early English Folk (I) and Early English Folk (II) and you are spending all your time managing your playlists which, by the way, is exactly what the people who make the playlist managers want you to be doing.

I had a go at writing my own Rhapsody client a couple of years back but dropped that when a) Rhapsody started suing everyone who used their API to build apps and b) Rhapsody made an iPhone client that didn’t suck.

My dream didn’t die though and I am still in the market for an app that will play music I like. Here’s how it will work.

I search for some music, say, Gogol Bordello and play some “Top Tracks”.

I hit the button “Play more stuff like this” and it’ll find some Firewater or The Pogues.

After a while, I get bored with gypsy punk and play some Mediæval Bæbes instead. When it gets to Gaudete, I’ll tell it to play more like this and it’ll drift over into some Steeleye Span or some Fairport Convention.

When I use the app a few days later, I won’t need to tell it what to play because it will already know what I like. But, if I want to hear 23 versions of John Barleycorn I can do that too (this is where Pandora falls short).

Is there an app out there like this? Maybe someone has done something on top of the Spotify API? Don’t make me write it myself!

We always knew you were shit. But we never knew you were this shit.

It says here that the unions will never learn
It says here that the economy is on the upturn
And it says here we should be proud
That we are free
And our free press reflects our democracy

Those braying voices on the right of the house
Are echoed down the street of shame
Where politics mix with bingo and tits
In a strictly money and numbers game.

Billy Bragg. Poet.

I get funny looks sometimes when I ask about fair use of stock photo images that I have bought (bought!) … and why would anyone pay $10 per month for Rhapsody when all the songs in the world are just sitting there for free on the internet waiting to be taken? The whole population of Malta (and China? and India?) thinks it a sign of mental illness to pay for anything that can be stolen for free.

As someone who makes a living from intellectual property, I feel a certain solidarity with people whose livelihoods are slowly leaching away into the pirate-infested deeps of the Internet. A couple of deep blemishes tarnish my otherwise squeaky-clean self-image though and I need the world to change a little to help me restore my faith in myself.

Firstly, don’t make it so damn difficult to comply with your rights and regulations. I’m not too good at dealing with bureaucracy. Make it easier for me to do the right thing. Maybe y’all could embed urls or licenses in digital images. Blogging software and browsers could do something smart with them like show attribution info and link back to the copyright owner.

Secondly, and this is the biggie, someone needs to clean up the cesspool in which sheet music swirls – and I am talking about the so-called legitimate sellers here, not the tab sites.

The tab sites are a soggy morass of pirated content with their gossamer-thin chemise of this is for private study only covering their shame.

And my shame.

But they are not the real criminals.

Every now and again, I decide I would feel so much better to pay for a piece of music  rather than download it for free but each time I see the price tag I conclude that the merchants are bigger pirates than the pirates are.

Five bucks for I Just Can’t Help Believing! How can they possibly justify that?

It reminds me of those third world markets where the shops have an outrageously marked-up price for locally-crafted kitsch when the exact same crap is on sale out in the street for a twentieth of the price. They can dismiss the vast majority of the market because one sucker keeps them in rice and beans for a month.

The market for sheet music is a sucker’s market. But, just as iTunes – despite the best efforts of the music industry sharks – made it easier to be moral than to sin, maybe someone out there can bring some sanity to the sheet music business.

Steve? Larry and Sergey? Jeff?

I read, the other day, that, compared to the software industry, the entire music business is relatively tiny. One of the tech titans could buy up the whole thing with spare change the way Russian billionaires buy up English football teams.

How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu, Amazon etc. – jointly bought the entire music industry, and promised to license its content to anyone on a non-discriminatory basis?

Google Should Buy up the Music Industry

Sheet music on my Kindle or iPad? How awesome would that be? I’d be sending you 99c every couple of hours, Jeff. Just make it easy for me to do the right thing. I’ll pay.

Ride a White Swan

Trivia

This was T-Rex’s first successful single.

It was the first single released after they changed their name from Tyrannasaurus Rex (which no one could spell).

It was released in 1970.

They didn’t have a drummer when they made Ride a White Swan.

Marc Bolan and Co over-dubbed five guitar tracks (I only did four).

It was kept out of the Number One spot by Clive Dunn’s Grandad which will be my next recording.

I have the single (don’t tell Carol).

Badada Bomp

It’s pretty good but VERY frustrating. There are tons of bugs and it’s a  little too slow to keep up with any kind of complex strumming. I lost my whole guitar track once and, by the end of the session, the sequencer view thingie was about a bar and a half out of step with the sound. You can see from the screenshot that the bars don’t really line up with anything.

I wanted to fix up some stuff but I decided I should quit while I was ahead. Here’s my first attempt at making music.

Ride A White Swan

Ride A White Swan (iPad version)

I can’t figure out how to create a fade. Anyone?

I’ve been practicing Ride a White Swan on guitar and meaning to record it for a while. It’s a simple song but the chord change is pretty tricky. It’s easier to play when you just have to tap the iPad but it doesn’t sound as good as the real thing. I’ll need to record it on GarageBand proper for comparison.

Liner Notes

For the drums and bass, I used the auto-play thingie. TIP: if you use any drum set except the rock kit, it’ll mess you up and you’ll never be able to keep time with it. Keep it simple. Same with the bass. I started with a fancy bass riff but it sounded silly and overwhelmed everything else.

There are three guitar tracks. For the riff, I used the auto-chord selector and then just picked out notes from the chords. For the rhythm guitar, I just banged on the chord name like a chimpanzee. I tried picking out an arpeggio on individual strings but my poor iPad was too slow to keep up.

I played the lead part on the single note setting. This is really well done. You can do slides and hammer-ons and hammer-offs and really nice bends. I couldn’t figure out how to get further up the neck so if your solo has any high notes, I guess you are screwed. Birthday’s coming up so maybe I’ll get the plug-your-guitar-into-your-ipad connector but there is plenty of fun to be had with the so-called smart guitar.

I recorded the vocals with the dreamy effect. Sounds just like Marc Bolan, don’t you think? That’s probably my bronchitis.

I added the keyboards because it seemed a shame not to.

Alison

Thanks to Tom for teaching it to me (I hope he doesn’t mind that I recorded it – there is a story about Bob Dylan recording House of the Rising Sun and Dave Van Ronk never spoke to him again). Thanks to my children for tolerating a song they dislike so much and thanks to Elvis Costello for giving us a song that still gives me the shivers even when _I_ sing it.

Recording Notes:

I recorded the rhythm guitar twice to give it more depth. I recorded the lead parts in micro-takes because my memory is crap and I can’t remember more than one measure at a time but the rest I recorded in a single take or, at most, two.

The drum track is a loop from Garage Band but the fills are me as is the bass which I played on a keyboard.

I flubbed the opening “oh” because the intro is about half a beat late and it was throwing off my timing. I tried to re-record it but it just got worse and worse so I just went with the first take.

I got a bit carried away with the overdubs but it was fun. I got most of the parts in a couple of takes – except the last two lines of the second verse. I sang the second verse about 20 times before I realized that I had played the wrong chord at the end. After I re-recorded the guitar part, it was easy.

I didn’t know the solo part in the middle so I made shit up. I fired the drummer.