Anyone with the impulse to write about music, DJ or collect will essentially deal in the currency of “if you like that wait until you hear this”. If not that then maybe “if you think that tracks groundbreaking wait until I show you where they got the idea from”. We collectors spend our time, every day, wading through the acres of recorded music from the past hundred or so years and when we uncover something wonderful we want to share it around. Because music is such a personal experience, there is a tendency for us to appear dismissive of tunes that are being trumpeted elsewhere, especially in the mainstream. This is in no way down to an elitism, simply an awareness that while a small percentage of music with major label marketing budget hoovers up all the media attention, a multitude of equally worthy releases old and new are drifting along in the margins. This is nothing new, in 2004 John Peel told me that even though The Zutons were a great band, there was no point in him playing them on the radio when everyone else was doing it. Just like the rest of us, he wanted to show that thrills are found far beyond the limited selections held up as representative of current sounds.
Thirty years ago Dire Straits were about to release their ‘On Every Street’ album. It was the bands first release in six years, following the period when their last record, ‘Brothers In Arms’, had been superglued inside every CD player worldwide. There followed an inevitable backlash from everyone sick of having this middle-of-the-road mainstream rock shoved down their throats. The new album was slowly drip-fed to the world with all the usual marketing tricks that accompanied an “important” release; exclusive first plays on Radio One tickled up days in advance, blanket press coverage, that sort of thing. My recollection is that one of the weekly music newspapers concluded its review with words like “this is the most important album release of the year and it’s alright”.
For all the cattiness in that remark, it should be noted that it was fairly accurate. 1991’s ‘On Every Street’ didn’t offend the ears and neither did it hit the heights of the bands earlier work. It sounded like an album that had to be made to fulfil a contractual obligation, a release contriving to ensure it contained enough sonic reference points to leave the listener in no doubt that this was new Dire Straits. Listen closely and you can hear the sound of a band dutifully clocking on. You can forgive the music press their sniffiness; hardcore fans of a mainstream act on the rough end of the press will often dismiss this attitude as music snobbery yet it is anything but that. 1991 had already seen the arrival of classics like R.E.M.’s ‘Out Of Time’, Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica’ and soon ‘Nevermind’ by Nirvana. Creations by artists who were on the rise and bursting at the seams with inspiration. Two of this trio would one future day hit a similar state of creative dire straits (Nirvana tragically didn’t get the chance) but in 1991 they were making the music that would endure, music that you feel certain they’d have written recording contract or no.
In the six years since their crowning commercial release, Dire Straits had watched the arrival of the CD format and with it a huge proportion of their audience lock their vinyl collections into a cupboard and embrace the digital age with a purchase of one or two compact discs a year. The landscape changed beyond recognition in the late 80s and early 90s with many a Dire Straits fan vocally supporting the ‘keep music live’ campaign, spawned in reaction to Dance and Raps sampling culture. You can’t choose your fans obviously, but all of this would have firmly placed the band on the wrong side of the fence for the early nineties music press. I was firmly on the anti-Straits side of the argument too, I loved a Mark E Smith joke at the time asking “what do you get if you cross Dire Straits with Chris Rea? Diarrhea”. New music was far from a spent force as far as I was concerned, the eighties seemed instantly condemned the worst decade for music and I was pleased to see the back of it, the new developments all rather exciting. Nevertheless, if the journalists had trashed Dire Straits I would have felt it an undue kicking for the sake of it (something I never liked to read), but instead they seemed to call it right. This album was OK.
I have been thinking about all this because in the past month new music from Adele has arrived. It’s her first new music in about six years and it has been slowly filtered out to the public in stages. The first clip I heard was just a piano intro that lasted about 13 seconds. Within a couple of weeks you could not escape it, everyone seemed to be talking about this amazing return from Adele and how it was already nailed on to be one of, if not the, most significant releases of 2021. And for those brothers in arms who maybe only buy or stream one or two new albums a year, this is indeed going to be big music news. The trouble starts with people like me who have been listening to and discovering sensational new music all year long (and will round it all up in depth on these pages in December), we know that there is an awful lot of other music in 2021 equally deserving of these accolades. Yet when you voice these opinions you stand accused of music snobbery, an elitism that wants to dismiss something that everyone else is enjoying just for the sake of being different. And it’s not that at all. I have now heard the new Adele in full, it is indeed a very Adele sounding piano ballad beautifully sung. I haven’t included it in my monthly playlist but yes, you know, what can I say about the new Adele? Well, (shrugs shoulders), you know….it’s alright!
What I have done is front load the November playlist with a series of Pop jewels and ballads featuring the piano or electric keyboards as the lead instrument. After all I love a bit of piano and keyboard based music, especially a really well written song; it’s simply that, apparently unlike all the people currently celebrating the return of a sonic saviour, I’ve been going to that place with or without Adele for years, that’s all.
Fruit Tree Records 