peteb

It depends on not only how well they look after their voice, but also on the type of voice they have. Your Steve Perry type of vocalist are always going to struggle as they get older, where Sting, as good a singer as he is, hasn't got that kind of range and power that he has to maintain. A great singer like Tony Bennett didn't retire until just after his 95th birthday, whereas Steve Perry has done very little since his late 40s, but Tony didn't have to move the air and hit the notes that a high tenor like Perry does.

We're all getting older (including the audience), but there's many of us who will keep going as long as we can make it onto a stage! It is undoubtedly more of an issue for vocalists, especially the ones blessed with an outstanding voice. A couple of years ago we had to replace a singer in his late 50s because he realised that he just couldn't do it consistently anymore. We replaced him with a guy who is only a year younger, but still has the range and power that he always had (even though we are tuning down one at his request). There is no sign that he is struggling at all, but will he still be able to do it in ten years time? I'm sure that I will still be gigging, same with the guitarist, but will the singer still be out there?

Now that's a surprise! However, the masses have spoken and you appear to be in a minority (albeit a very vocal one).

Doesn't matter - we all know that Oasis are derivative. However, to millions of people they were the songs of their youth / a better time. Hence the reaction from an audience that you see whenever some pub band plays one of those songs. Here's Live Forever - knock yourself out...

I think that you are right there. After Live Aid, the industry started to see everything in terms of major events, where the event was more important than the music. As streaming started to destroy income streams from releasing albums, there was a move to make more money from huge concerts with high ticket prices, rather than long tours of smaller gigs to promote the new album. As albums were not making much money, why invest in developing a band? You can always find a stream of unremarkable, low maintenance, marionette type singers, put them with a tame producer and get a greater part of the publishing revenues and so on.

That's because Supergrass never wrote Live Forever, Don't Look Back In Anger or Half The World Away! But that's the way that it used to work back then. A band would slog around unnoticed for ages and then the industry would suddenly decide they were the next big thing and there would be a feeding frenzy as none of the industry players / labels would want to miss out. Many bands would then disappear just as quickly as they suddenly appeared. Oasis were packing out gigs like the Duchess in Leeds, as well as many other northern venues before the industry hype started.

I'm not too bothered about whether you're a fan or not, more about the context and the reaction that some people have to Oasis and certain other bands. A lot of my friends love Rush, but I don't like their music at all. However, I don't hate them! I'm a 60 yo Van Halen / Led Zep fan who plays in classic rock tributes and a few blues type bands. I am not your typical Oasis fan at all and my favourite music tends to come from the late 70s / early 80s rather than Britpop. However, I can appreciate that they were one of the last big rock and roll bands, that they made it all happen coming from a council estate in Manchester rather than some stage school or being a public schoolboy whose Dad knew someone who worked for a record company, and that they had some genuinely great tunes that really caught the public's imagination! They also came from a time when the country was in a far better state, so there is the inevitable nostalgia thing kicking in!

I don't agree. For me, music of that period was part of a climate when the economy was booming, ordinary people had money in their pocket and grass root small music venues / pubs were packed. It was also the last time that you genuine rock and roll bands in the charts (as well as the new electronic stuff) that reflected the genuine optimism of the time.

Why would it be an 'unfair restraint of trade'? If companies are manipulating the market or utilising unfair business practices to disadvantage the customer, then surely they should be regulated. Part of the many issues we have in this country is that government has been reluctant to regulate when it should, which partly has led to a lower standard of living for ordinary citizens while giving inflated dividends to shareholders (look at the water companies and the water / sewage issues we are currently having). This doesn't happen in most other countries in Europe (or at least to nowhere near the same extent) to the advantage to the lives of normal people.

Yes, absolutely! Whether this legitimate is another thing and the inevitable kerfuffle about Oasis tickets and the press attention this has achieved has been the trigger for government to look at whether this should be regulated. I would note that there was no dynamic pricing in place when I bought Mr Big / Living Colour tickets a few months ago, where you could still have got in on the night. As I said in an earlier post, dynamic pricing can work in the customer's favour on flights, holidays, etc where there are lots of choices and you could weigh up whether it is worth it to get a later flight or go a day earlier, etc to save a few quid. This isn't the case with the Oasis tickets, where supply is limited and only Ticketmaster has all of the information. There isn't any real choice for the punter other than to not buy the tickets at the inflated price, having built up the excitement and then wasted the whole day in a virtual queue!

I'm not saying that it is new, but it a way of influencing a market and it is inherently dodgy, to the extent that the government is now looking at ways that it can be regulated. No, it won't happen. There are two two things that will improve the lot of artists playing smaller level gigs: 1) an improvement in the economy that translate to an increase in disposable income for working people, so that they can afford to go out regularly to support live music and still be able to pay the mortgage; and 2) a restructure of the music industry that encourages labels, etc to invest in and develop bands rather than disposable solo artists who are less work to promote and cheaper in A&R / tour support costs, etc. Perhaps if the Oasis tour is such a huge success that stimulates a demand / leads to the media talking about 'are bands coming back' or whatever for a prolonged period, then who knows but I'm not betting on it happening!

I think that you might be missing the point. I have no objection at all to the tickets having a face value of £150 / £300 or whatever - people have the choice to decide whether it is worth that to them or not and if they can afford it. However, I do have a problem of people hanging on a website for several hours in order to buy a ticket at the advertised price only to find that they are now being asked to pay three times that amount or more. It is not as if they can invoice someone for the time that they have wasted trying to buy a ticket. The whole process is designed to put undue pressure on punters o pay more than they intended to. How much bands get paid is down to the demand for their services. The demand for this tour is down to a certain set of circumstances, a massively loved band that, for many people, were representative of their youth / a better period. This isn't the same scenario for lower profile pro musicians, who are gigging in venues struggling to break even. The only way that it will benefit smaller bands are if the enthusiasm for Oasis playing out again somehow creates an interest for punters to go out and watch bands again, rather than the packaged solo or R&B acts currently dominating the music industry.

The obvious thing to point out that Ticketmaster have sewn up the market to the extent where there is no viable alternative to using them, allowing them to dictate terms, prices, etc. Pearl Jam tried to challenge this while at the height of their popularity / powers and lost pretty badly.

The Zep tribute was back at one of our favourite gigs on Saturday - The Cluny in Newcastle. It was packed as usual with a great audience and treated as well as ever by the staff and tech crew. There were a few technical difficulties, mainly the singer's rack (see on the right in the picture below) containing the receivers for his IEM and mic falling off the two stools it was balanced on at the start of the encore, meaning that his mic stopped working and the sound engineer had to bound across the venue with a new mic so that we could start Misty Mountain Hop again! But apart from that, a brilliant night...

The trouble is that you could argue that the supply side is being manipulated in the face of high demand, in a way that is not in the customer's interest. The difference with train and airline tickets (you can add hotel rooms as well) is that it is genuinely reflecting changes in demand and is more often than not in the punter's favour. The Government would be quite justified in intervening if they feel that it would be worthwhile. It is a bit unfair to expect Oasis to police all of this dynamic pricing malarky. They can have an influence on what the face value of the ticket should be, but beyond that they will have little control. Look what happened when Pearl Jam tried to take on Ticketmaster many years ago!

I always liked Live Forever. Apparently, Noel was a big Nirvana fan but he couldn't understand the negativity behind 'I Hate Myself and Want to Die'. As far as he was concerned, he had f*** all at the time, but he still had things to do and couldn't wait to wake up the next morning to live his life. He wrote LF as a positive response to the Nirvana song. https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20240827-why-oasis-defined-the-spirit-of-90s-britain

Basically when 'rock' became a thing in the mid-sixties, it grew out of not only rock n'roll and pop, but also blues and jazz. These forms of music generally incorporated an instrumental interlude that gave featured soloists a chance to shine. As this new genre was predominantly guitar based, this generally meant a guitar solo. Seeing as the first big stars of this new 'rock' music included Jimi Hendrix and Cream, the solos were sometimes more important than the actual song (especially live). This established the idea of rock songs generally having a default position of there being a guitar solo. This was reinforced by a succession of bands, from Free to Van Halen to Pearl Jam (and many others).

Doesn't the same apply for anyone who becomes successful in the music business, or life in general?

Let's be realistic, Oasis was always first and foremost about the Gallagher brothers. Sure, it would be great to see Bonehead get a payday out of it and it's always good to see people looking after their mates. But, it is about the brothers and always has been.

When it comes down to it, Oasis (and the bands that they influenced coming just after) were the last to come through and get record deals on the back of playing live, selling out clubs and building a big following. If nothing else, I think that it is great that the whole country is talking about a band from a working class background who play guitars and wrote songs that mean a lot to people of a certain age. Also, those songs were massive hits but didn't have autotune, five producers and seven people getting songwriting credits. It's a lot different to most of the stuff dominating the charts today and that's all good in my opinion.

Not to anywhere near the same extent that they used to, although I do take your points about venues not having recovered from the pandemic and the problem of developers building residential stock next to established venues. In the mid to late 80s, I played in an originals hard rock band that picked up a bit of a following but no more than that. Wherever we played in rock clubs, the place would be near enough full (even mid-week). We played at a club in Birmingham on a Friday night once with a not particularly big band from the NWOBHM era. There were 900 people crammed in, all paying to be there. A similar event these days would be very lucky to get anywhere near 100 punters. Just before Covid, I did an album with a band that had previously sold a respectable amount of CDs a few years before, mainly in Europe. There was no serious talk of going out to play live in this country - it just would not have been worthwhile.

A decent summary from Andy Edwards, the West Midlands' answer to Rick Beato and Robert Plant's former drummer. He describes them as a 90s version of Slade and how they represented a big part the lives of people who grew up in the 90s, not to mention that Wonderwall is apparently the biggest song on Spotify!

I've just been informed that the missus is going to be trying to get tickets on Saturday morning...!

...or the Beatles...

What these venues really need is for some guitar based band to break into the mainstream and create the buzz that Oasis did back in the 90s. Preferably with imitator bands following in their wake, also capturing the public's imagination. Then people might start getting back in the habit of going out to watch smaller bands live, like they did in the 90s / 00s