Screaming Down The Hall: The Curious Case of Subtonix

There are some things that man is clearly not meant to wot of. Subtonix were clearly one such thing. Jessie Panic (vocals, bass, drums) met fellow miscreant Cookie (vocals, drums) at the Arkham convent, an all-girls institution that specialized in adolescents with ‘difficult’ behaviour, shortly before both were kicked out by the puritanical staff on suspicion of dark occult practices. Headstrong and with scant respect for authority, the girls rasied money through petty thievery and drug dealing to fund their escape to San Fransisco, picking up Jessie Trashed (vocals, saxophone, bass) on the way, solely because she was tall enough to drive the beaten-up hearse they had stolen from the local undertaker. Arriving in San Francisco in 1999, the girls found themselves penniless. Rather then take up prostitution, they decided to pay their way by forming a band and playing in the local nightclubs. Thus the Subtonix were formed, the guitar-free line up due to the fact that, the girls claim, it is far easier to steal bass guitars and saxophones then it is guitars. None of them had ever so much as touched a musical instrument before, but with the group’s wild stage show, a truly brutal mess of heavy makeup, leather miniskirts, fake blood, alcohol and bizarre antics, the band built up a local following. After months of being heckled by rough and sexist SF audiences and not being taken seriously by anyone, the band decided to expand their lineup to include keyboard player Brandy Oblivious (came with her own keyboards), who bonded with Panic over a shared fascination with Aleister Crowley. In early 2000 they finally found a guitarist in Jenny Hoyston, and this line-up was musically together enough to venture for the first time into a studio and, in a rainy afternoon, record Subtonix’s first single, Trophy b/w Today’s Modern Women. Sounding like X Ray Spex having a violent premonition of The Horrors, Panic out-Banshees Siouxsie herself over deranged saxophone and dirty guitar. The lyrics were a mixture of Hammer horror and savvy post-riot grrrrl politics, and it sounded like nothing else around at the time. The single received enthusiastic praise from the NME, although many were confused by the contrast between the band’s overtly gothic image and their post punk/garage band sound. Local indie label Troubleman Unlimited were impressed enough to offer the group the funding for an album, but the band jeopardized the deal by insisting that it be signed in their own blood under a full moon on the evening of Halloween. Fortunately the confused label concurred, but by the designated date the band was back to a three-piece, Hoyston having left to spend more time with her other band, Erase Errata, who had just been offered support dates for Le Tigre, and Brandy disappearing under mysterious circumstances which were to dog the band throughout the rest of their short career. On the 5th of June 2000, Brandy retired to her room alone, never to be seen again. The press went into overload, fuelled by the band’s flirtations with black magick and with numerous bizarre rumours surrounding the disappearance. Band friend Adrienne was quickly recruited for keyboard duties. Jessie Panic appeared more and more agitated in interviews and gigs became even more intense, with as much real blood spilt as fake.
Nevertheless, in August 2001 the band managed to take time out from their exhausting touring regime to record their only album. Recorded in only 3 weeks, ‘Tarantism’ is dark, disturbing and intense. Panic was, by this stage, too exhausted and strung out to sing on all the songs, so Trashed and Cookie took up the lead vocal duties on some of the songs they had written. The whole record is suffused with a dank darkness, sounding as if the band were trapped in the bottom of a well. The cartoon horror of the band’s songs are twisted into caricatures of adolescent trauma, from the portrait of the bled and spent ‘Ashtray Girl’ to ‘X Rated’’s sardonic look at post-feminist sexual politics. The band sound like they are playing for their lives, songs sprinting for the safety of silence and often collapsing violently in on themselves, only to re-emerge in a deathly crawl. All the girls’ vocal performances are shrill and harsh, sounding both haunted and hunted. However the intensity is offset by the band’s cartoonish sense of humour. It was great, it was a breath of fresh air, it was the end.
Hype around the band had reached fever pitch, with rumours of occult rituals being carried out by the band prior to going onstage, linked by the press to the unfortunate disappearance of goats in every town the band toured in. Subtonix soon found it impossible to tour in the south due to church groups picketing the venues they were scheduled to play at. The release of ‘Tarantism’ was delayed to May 2002 due to a large number of large chain stores refusing to stock it. All this, combined with a disastrous February European tour during which Panic was hospitalized twice, caused internal pressures in the band to combust. Jessie Trashed quit the band to form goth-punks The Vanishing, followed by Adrienne, who complained of being unable to sleep at night anymore due to an ‘unholy presence’ that followed her from hotel room to hotel room, and to which she attributed the curious scratches that had started appearing on her back. Panic and Cookie tried a number of dates with various roadies and friends, but none would play for more then one show, deserting the next morning. They continued as a two-piece for two more gigs before Panic had a nervous breakdown and fled back to Arkham. Subtonix were over and their only album had yet to be released.
Troubleman Unlimited finally released ‘Tarantism’ in May, and the album received a warm response, especially from the British music press, but, without a touring band to promote it, the album quickly sank. A second single, Too Cool For School b/w Rich Boys, recorded during the album sessions, was released in 2002 by the Italian label Vida Loca later in 2002, but, despite being vintage Subtonix material, unsurprisingly failed to chart. Sadly, that was it. All of Subtonix’s material quickly went out of print, and, as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, to be largely forgotten by the press and public alike. However, Subtonix should be remembered fondly: they helped kick-start the post punk revival by sonically referencing the goth-punk music of that era, they added a much-needed sense of fun, darkness and diversity to a po-faced and derivative indie scene, and they left behind them a legacy of a couple of singles and one fantastic album, plus some of the wildest live shows and one of the most curious stories in pop history.










By the way, none of the above is remotely true, apart from the fact that the records exist and are marvelous. I have tried as much as possible to keep the chronological details of releases and line-up changes correct, but, names aside, any resemblances between characters in the above review and persons living, dead or undead is purely coincidental and probably extremely unlikely.

Reformation! (Arbeit Mit Uns)

What do Van Halen, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Smashing Pumpkins, The House of Love, The Police, Gang Of Four and Slint have in common? (If you said they all suck apart from the Mary Chain, The House Of Love, Gang Of Four and Slint, have a banana.) The answer is, or course, that recently, all of the above bands have put aside their differences, ideological objections and last remaining shreds of integrity for the sake of the money and reformed. Mere years ago, the idea of the disparate personalities in these bands getting together again seemed utterly laughable – as we all know, pop music survives on a diet of daft overblown legends. The greatest hates, like the greatest loves, are meant to last forever, and no one ever expected to see the Reid brothers reunited after years of not speaking to each other, or Guy Chadwick and Terry Bickers in the same room as each other after the former chucked the latter out of his band – literally, out the back of the tour bus. There is inevitably something anticlimactic to the modern ending to these stories – instead of living unhappily ever after or resulting in bloody murder, the main characters have settled into a marriage of convenience in order to make a living on the nostalgia circuit. Not the stuff legends are made of. Perhaps more heartbreakingly, Gang Of Four, one-time Marxists who not only critiqued capitalist consumer society on 1979’s awesome Entertainment! album but refused to censor their lyrics in order to appear on Top Of The Pops, now have no problem with reforming not to create more music but to play Entertainment! note for note to festival goers in exchange for filthy lucre whilst gig promoters and record company execs rub their hands with glee. “Sell out, maintain the interest” indeed. Even experimental rock titans Sonic Youth have joined in on the act, taking a break from producing new music to play the whole of Daydream Nation to packed auditoriums.
Why is the music industry so entrenched in nostalgia? From band reunions to the ever expanding reissues market, so much of the music we listen to day is part of the past, preserved in aspic. Bands make careers out of mining sounds from a particular era of popular music. Part of it must be that pop music, while being by nature entrenched in the here and now, increasingly in these iPod days serves also as an escapist fantasy away from the here and now, taking the listener somewhere familiar, warm and fuzzy. Also, as the internet makes more music from every era immediately available to the curious, more and more interesting and overlooked records from the past are exhumed to be rediscovered and reevaluated. The past has never been a more busy or exciting time.
Still, it’s hard not to feel that something’s gone wrong. Reforming used to be the ultimate sign of selling out – when the Sex Pistols reformed in 1996, Siouxsie and the Banshees split in protest. However, The Pixies’ recent reunion saw the band welcomed as returning heroes rather then has-beens milking the last few dollars from their back catalogue. Admittedly, the Pixies reformation gave a generation of fans a chance to see their favourite band live, making it a bit more then a bunch of middle-aged hipsters reliving their youth. But surely the point is that young people these days should be listening to something else. Popular music has become complacent, largely I think because of an overly reverent attitude to the past. Bands seem unafraid to mangle up or distort their influences into something original. Placing Daydream Nation and Surfa Rosa on pedestals is unhealthy on two accounts – firstly, you have generations of artists struggling in thrall to these records when they should be aiming to produce something so amazing that it utterly destroys both records, and secondly, by making records ‘canon’ you immediately detract from their revolutionary and iconoclastic nature: they simply become one in a list of ‘worthy’ records that people really ‘ought’ to have listened to, alongside Revolver and Highway 61, and hence part of what must be kicked against in order for pop music to stay alive, protean and relevant. This is a process which happens naturally and is indeed the healthy natural order of things, but it doesn’t stop it being disheartening to see Daydream Nation’s fire and brimstone tamed not 20 years after its release. More disheartening still is to see an adventurous group like Sonic Youth consign themselves to the Irrelevant Old Farts scrapheap years ahead of their time by actively taking part in the process. Sadly, however, we live in a world where the music business is big bucks, and with the amounts of money involved, it must be harder and harder to resist for the sake of integrity.
What can be done about this? It is tempting to call for a punk-style, year zero, scorched earth policy, but in the information age this is not really possible and, with the past admittedly still having much to offer, it is perhaps cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. There needs to be a change in attitude to the past – there is a wealth of musical ideas, but they should not be approached with such reverence – assuming that you can never better it means you never will. Nostalgia as a whole should be abolished – ‘Balti and Vimto and Spangles were always crap, regardless of the look back bores’. Once bands reach the stage where they have nothing new or relevant to say, they should retire with grace and dignity, and if you never got a chance to see them live, well, tough. Far better to remember them this way, minus the bald patches, paunches and session musicians. And if you really like Daydream Nation, go out there and make something even better.

Liam Is A Parasite: 10 Artists With the Most Malign Influence in Pop Music

The problem with producing an awe-inspiring masterpiece is that, in inspiring awe and reverence in a generation of music fans, you get a rash of musicians who are either unable or unwilling to creatively step out of your pervading influence. The problem with producing a dreadful piece of crap that so happens to come along at the right time and place in people’s lives is that you have a generation of musicians whose idea of a great record is the appalling rubbish that you put out. If you’re really unlucky, could wind up influencing multiple generations of music. Gross simplification as this is, I feel it makes a valid point. Influence is always a tricky area, for both those influencing and influenced – witness Mark E Smith’s belligerence towards all the modern bands who have claimed to be influenced by The Fall. And in this day and age of casual musical plagiarism, the line between ‘influenced by’ and ‘blatantly ripping off’ becomes further and further removed. However, that’s another story. The point of this article is to look at bands that I feel have had a malign influence over pop music in recent years. There are several easy shots that I have decided not to take because they should really go without saying – no one needs another band ripping off The Beatles, The Stones and Dylan. Also, as this is my list, I’m sticking mainly to indie rock, because I think this is where the focus is most needed – I could whine about the way the gangster rap has wrecked the original political ideals of, say, Public Enemy, but I feel this is a widely enough acknowledged point. Also, I could sit here and blame Black Sabbath or Led Zep for inventing heavy metal, but I don’t really think that would be very constructive. Plus I have my own axes to grind. I’m not saying that everyone who has been influenced by these records are rubbish, or that these bands are necessarily rubbish, but it does bother me when a band I like says, ‘Nirvana really influenced me, they changed my life, maaaan’. In this day and age, it’s not hard to find decent, interesting and different music to listen to or draw fuel from. Let’s give these records a rest.

10. Queen

An admittedly odd choice to start off with. I certainly wouldn’t have thought that Queen would really have had any lasting influence over the music scene. I hate them and everyone else loves them, but I didn’t realistically think that any band whose main contribution to musical innovation was extreme bombast and daft genre exercises would wind up being musically referenced by anyone at all much. Unfortunately I was wrong. In a strange way, Queen are more influential then they have ever been. The first stirrings were the novelty rock horror that was The Darkness, who basically replayed Queen’s daft costumes and airbrushed rock shtick but with far less charm and infinitely less talent. Then Muse decided that their silly Radiohead-lite act just wasn’t silly enough, and so went even further into the land of ever-increasing overdubs and screeching operatics that, I suppose, had already been their stock in trade. Now, My Chemical Romance have mined Queen’s overblown sonic armoury and coupled it with loathsome self-pity and have managed to delight a generation of teenagers who must have something seriously wrong with their ears. But the biggest tragedy here is that, post-Darkness, Queen seem to have become a novelty rock text, with increasingly diminishing returns, the most dramatic of which has been the deplorable Mika, who has taken Queen’s template and combined it with dreadful songwriting, a sickeningly narcissistic desperation to be liked and a horrifically overblown ego, sucking anything resembling fun out of the proceedings in the process. Indeed, the irony is that none of Queen’s bastard progeny have that quality for which the band were originally, justly or not, known for – fun.

9. Coldplay

A no-brainer really. We all have to live in a world in which Coldplay are huge, which is bad enough. But even more depressing is the fact that a lot of people in bands have been hugely influenced by them. Coldplay have done a huge disservice to music in a number of ways. Their mind-numbingly bland sound is hugely popular, creating legions of bands trading in the same unadventurous whiny indie rock, from Snow Patrol to Athlete to Keane and onwards – the list is endless and still growing. For a band famed for alleged ‘songwriting’, Coldplay’s music is curiously unmusical. All their songs use very similar hackneyed chord sequences, layers of instruments come in only to play exactly the same parts as other instruments, their over-compressed recordings leave no room for dynamics, and all their lyrics are trite clichés that a 13 year old would be ashamed of. And whilst pop music doesn’t have to be raucous guitar rock to be exciting, Coldplay’s incredibly dull and unexciting music is surely the polar opposite of what pop music should be about. But not only have Coldplay caused blandness, poor songwriting and trite empty sentimentality to spread through modern music like a cancer, they have perpetuated a stereotype of ‘miserable music’ that is incredibly unrepresentative. Coldplay, like Emo (hold your horses, we’re getting there), is whiny music made by boring middle class wimps with absolutely nothing to say. As a result, all miserable music gets tarred with the same brush by people who like and dislike Coldplay/Emo, meaning that many people will never get a chance to appreciate the icy bleakness of The Marble Index or the drugged-out visions of hell that surface on Closer, nor the cleansing catharsis they bring to the listener. Miserable music and piano-led songs can be exciting and deeply affecting; Coldplay are not.

8. Blur

First thing first – I hated Britpop. Lazy retro guitar music, gratuitous plagiarism and brainless lad-ism. The great bands of the era either ha nothing to do with it (Stereolab, Current 93, Massive Attack, The Fall), or set themselves apart from the pack by possessing intelligence and wit, as well as actually owning more then three records to rip off (Denim, The Auteurs, Pulp, Elastica). Blur’s smarmy, happy-chappy lad-ism grated enough by itself, without the music to go with it. Yes, I have also listened to the Beatles and The Kinks, do you want a meddle? As well as not paying attention to any musical advancement after 1969 unless it was to mindlessly plagiarise XTC or Talking Heads in a vain attempt to achieve sonic variety, Blur were one of the original proponents of what I like to call lumpy songwriting. Put on Modern Life Is Rubbish and listen to the clumsiness of the melodies, the misjudged leaps into the chorus, the utter lack of melodic grace – this is what I’m talking about. Now, I will be the first to say that you don’t necessarily need great tunes to have a great record, but if you’re trying to be the Beatles of the Kinks, it helps to be able to write a melody as sublime as Waterloo Sunset. Also, if you’re aiming for Ray Davies’ witty social commentary, it helps if you can write lyrics that don’t make you sound like a complete retard, and are possessed of more wit then one of those ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps!!!!!’ signs. Also, signing in provincial accents is fine, as long as it actually is your accent. Pretending to be a cockney geezer shouldn’t make anyone like you. Unfortunately, none of this stopped Blur becoming huge, and now a generation of young musicians write music whilst thinking that Parklife is the best thing since sliced bread. The result: The Kaiser Chiefs. I don’t think I need to say anymore.

7. Green Day

Punk is a classic example of what I’m talking about with influence. People who formed bands after seeing the Sex Pistols include Magazine, Subway Sect, Joy Division, The Slits, The Fall… and it also includes Sham 69 and Simply Red. People get all idealistic about punk, but these days it mostly seems to be some berk with pink hair and daft tattoos getting incredibly inarticulate when asked what Black Flag mean to him. Musically it was played out by 1978 at the very latest, and that’s me being generous. Nevertheless, Never Mind The Bollocks and Damaged provide much artistic fuel to inarticulate youths the world over, including this lot, who I blame for the resurgence of not just ‘punk’ and therefore loads of lame punk bands, but that loathsome hybrid ‘pop punk’. Blink 182 owe far more to Green Day’s obnoxious vocals, immature posturing and daft clothes then anything else. ‘But Blink 182 aren’t real punks!’ cries a voice from the back. Well done. Neither are Green Day. More recently, Green Day’s poor music and self-centred whining have provided the template for all the horrendous Emo bands that we are now saddled with. Don’t believe me? Take Green Day’s ‘Basketcase’ – with its themes of ‘misunderstood’ adolescence, daft flirtation with ‘edgy’ themes like madness (remember the incredibly silly video with the band as mental patients?) and its oh-so-self-deprecating opening couplet. ‘Do you have the time / To listen to me whine’, if the song was released today, it would be classified as Emo. Billy Joe Armstrong even wears eyeliner these days. Thanks guys.

6. The Libertines

I was tempted to put The Strokes here instead, seeing as it’s thanks to them that we have The Libs, but I decided against it, if only because The Libertines are so dramatically worse then The Strokes. More retro guitar pop mixed with blatantly sexist lad-ism, but this time played by people who can’t even play their instruments properly. And in the Libertines’ case, this isn’t a case of inventive non-musicians bravely pushing the boundaries of popular music, or even cute C86-style incompetence, it’s a case of a bunch of morons failing to play their instruments, and not even in an interesting and endearing way. Hell, the Strokes were no Television, despite what press releases may have told you, but at least they could play better then the Libs. But worst of all, the Libertines showed a generation that you can get by on tabloid hysteria and a shrewd press campaign and music need have nothing to do with it. Pete Docherty may have failed to kill himself at the most opportune time to guarantee true immortality, but the sickening press circus that tore the band apart was truly disturbing to watch. The NME journalists circled the band like vultures, and you got the feeling that no one could have cared less about the safety of the people involved as long as it would generate more column inches. But the truly disturbing thing about it was the controversy whipped up simply due to the fact that Pete Docherty was doing heroin. Pop Star Takes Drugs Shock. Pop stars have been taking drugs since there were drugs for pop stars to take, why this should be a surprise or a noteworthy subject in this day and age is a complete mystery, which makes the whole thing leave quite an unpleasant aftertaste. The Libertines and the associated hysteria was nothing more then a very cynical hype campaign – one listen to their very mediocre records should tell you all you need to know. The press comparisons to Sid Vicious were, for once, quite accurate – both Vicious and Docherty were ultimately expendable individuals whose main purpose was to whip up public interest by any means possible. And yet there are people who genuinely think that Pete Docherty is a talented individual – see The View, The Kooks and dozens more who have sprung up in the band’s wake. What this all calls into question is, how far are you prepared to go in order to become a legend? Disturbing.

5. David Gray

I really think it’s a bit unfair that David Gray and his hordes of followers get labeled singer-songwriters. This immediately puts them in the same genre as incredibly talented individuals such as Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, whose complex, innovative yet deeply soul-searching music is miles and miles away from the chart-friendly dross put out by Mr Gray and his ilk. David Gray has been largely responsible, in my eyes, for dragging this respected genre through the dirt. Gray’s simple, bland songs hold an obvious appeal for a market that snapped up Coldplay and made them superstars, and indeed he shares much of Coldplay’s unimaginative musical approach and ‘serious young man’ image. His breakthrough into the charts opened up the floodgates for many imitators, culminating in the truly odious James Blunt, one of modern music’s most cynical and unpleasant creations. Though nowhere near as disturbingly exploitative as James Blunt, the main ingredients are all in Gray’s music, from the shamelessly exploitative ‘emotional’ chord changes upwards. The sooner the Great British Record Buying Public snaps out of it the better, then hopefully all these idiots will be out of a job.

4. The Streets

Another no-brainer really. Mike Skinner’s blokey tales of everyday working-class British life were largely responsible for bringing back social realism to British pop music. But not even the man himself could have realized how influential this would have been. Although British indie rock had been revitalized (read: found something slightly different to rip off) by the appearance of the Strokes and the White Stripes, lyrically it was still running around like a headless chicken. In the post-Britpop, post-Radiohead landscape, Coldplay and Travis-style lyrical emptiness was the style of the day. The genre greedily hopped on the social realism bandwagon, giving rise to the likes of Hard-Fi, the Arctic Monkeys, Lilly Allen and so forth. Suddenly, everyone was singing in thick provincial accents about how crappy 9-to-5 jobs are. Now, the main problem with social realism is that, if you write about how boring and mundane modern life is, there’s a limited amount of time that you can go without your lyrics becoming, well, boring and mundane. As a lyrical slant, it has a very limited half life. No one cares about Kate Nash’s boyfriend being sick on her trainers, it’s just not very interesting. Also, there is a tendency for the lyricists to be unable to make any interesting comments about their chosen subjects because they are simply too involved themselves to be able to see the larger picture. This results in a very self-centred lyrical approach, dove-tailing with Emo-style self-pity – both are unable to see past their own nose, making for an almost autistic lyrical world that isn’t very inviting to the listener, nor, ironically for the social realists, having much to do with reality. And of course, there’s the fact that with ‘Dry Your Eyes’, Skinner managed to combine social realism, hip hip-lie and the power ballad, paving the way for such despicable entities as Jamie T and Just Jack. Unforgivable.

3. Nirvana

There have been few bands in recent memory capable of inspiring such undying devotion and worship as Nirvana. Everyone likes Nirvana, they were a huge influence on just about every band who followed in their wake. All this despite a very slim legacy – Nevermind is pretty much Bon Jovi with more street cred, their early thrashings are something of a joke to all but the most desperate of wanna-be hipsters and In Utero is very patchy despite the Steve Albini production credits. But the really perplexing thing it that Nirvana regularly get let off the hook for all the dreadful bands they inspired. I realize that Silverchair and Nickleback would have horrified dear old Kurt, but they exist because he left them Nevermind as a template. Plus, already Nirvana have aged horribly – play them next to Kurt’s heroes The Pixies and Husker Du, and Nirvana sound very poor indeed. Yet for some reason, everyone still falls over themselves to tell people how much Nevermind meant to them as a kid. Get over it and go and listen to something else.

2. U2

There are an awful lot of U2 fans making music out there at the moment, but surely few will ever achieve such stellar levels of self-importance and pomposity as U2 themselves. From Bono’s deranged messianic posturing to their music’s sexless bombast, there are many reasons to hate U2, and indeed, many do, but I’m not going to let them off the hook just for that. U2 have always strived for passion and meaning, but you get the feeling that it is just that – an overwhelming desire to be passionate about some sort of meaning or other which the band, bless their cotton socks, have never been quite bright enough to figure out. However, from day one they were certain that they were An Important Band who made Important Albums, and everything they have done has been stuffed with this bizarre self-importance, from the overbearingly earnest early records to their 90s output where they overbearingly and earnestly discovered irony. There music is completely devoid of subtlety, always going for the grand gesture before figuring out what the grand gesture is for, or even thinking whether it might or might not be appropriate. Equally missing is any sense of sexuality or humour that might leaven the heavy-handed moral tone. Their shows are excruciatingly staged to the last detail, sucking out any form of spontaneity or humanity. Their influence is everywhere, a direct musical influence on Coldplay and their soft-rock following, but also felt wherever bands decide that they must make a Grand Statement, sacrificing humour and humanity in the process, a sadly common disease in modern indie rock.

1. Oasis

I was originally going to be somewhat glib about this, but I feel I have to tread carefully here as I think this is a point that needs making. Oasis were unashamedly careerist, and are I think largely responsible for the way that, in the eyes of the music press, the public and musicians themselves, ‘ambition’ refers to your career rather then to your art. You may love Oasis and argue back that this is not a sin in itself, especially as you feel that they wrote some great tunes, but I’d like to point out the huge musical debt that all of their songs owe to previously written material. You already know that Cigarettes and Alcohol is Bang A Gong, that Hello steals directly from Garry Glitter and Don’t Look Back In Anger is Imagine via Felt’s New Day Dawning, and so on and so on, so I won’t labour the point. You could also point out that Oasis are not the first band, or indeed musician, to directly plagiarise tunes, but the combination of Oasis’ blind arrogance and lust for fame leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. Certainly, in their wake there are legions of bands that opt simply to cop ideas rather then innovate, leading us to the paltry state that much of indie rock is in today. Basically, the message is, you can get by on swagger and bluster alone, which just isn’t healthy. And, interestingly enough, the crushing lack of subtlety and bland clichés that characterize Oasis’ ballads helped to pave the way for the worst excesses of Coldplay and their ilk. Though they would surely balk at the suggestion, Oasis and Coldplay share much in common: Oasis prioritise popularity over innovation, which again I admit isn’t a sin in itself but ultimately leads to musical stagnation. I don’t have a problem with Oasis existing – I loathe them but I can ignore them – I have a problem with Oasis being such a musical touchstone for a generation of music fans. Best record since Definitely Maybe doesn’t cut it for me – to aspire to follow that record is to create a record free of innovation, daring and originality, some of the qualities that drive my passion for music. Piss off and get a job.