Monday, January 2, 2012

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #13

“The thing about music today is a lot of it is about reorganising the past: going back, plundering – which this technology allows you to do – it, reworking it… It’s a bit like those people who spend their evenings on Flickr naming photographs; there’s a sort of managerialism to the culture of our time, from people who want to preserve it to people who then want to rework it… and there is a sense that culture is like a terminus at a railway station now. Endlessly, railway trains from the past keep on coming in with stuff from the past, which is then reworked, and we’re stuck with that and we’re not moving forward. It could be a reflection, not of the technology, but of the fact that we’ve run out of ideas”

-- Adam Curtis, interview on 6 Music

2 comments:

clique said...

hi Simon

just thought i'd post this here as there's nowhere esle it can really go!

the first band to do a whole non-contemporary album live goes a bit further back than Cheap Trick in '98. the first (big) band i was aware of who did it was REM who in '89 on the final night of their world tour did all of the first album 'Murmur' in song order, then all of their then-current album 'Green' to follow.
they followed this with an encore of fan faves/covers etc as has become the norm today.

i suppose the key difference is they didn't advertise it in advance. here's a quote from the first edition of
It Crawled From The South by Marcus Gray (Guinness books, 1991)

"When discussing GREEN Micheal had often said ' i think GREEN is very similar to MURMUR and that irony is not lost on me..
with the intention of making this point musically, bringing the tour to a memorable finish and celebrating its upcoming
10th anniversary, the band decided to perform both albums in their entirety, all tracks in sequence"


setlist here: http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/rem/1989/fox-theater-atlanta-ga-73d68ead.html


thanks Simon!

x Damien from CLIQUE club, Manchester.

Carl Morris said...

It's a bit like those people who spend their evenings on Flickr naming photographs. Or, say, an Adam Curtis documentary.