Just kidding: Liam Gallagher's greatest pearls of wisdom

A recent binge-watch of Simpsons episodes led to the sharp conclusion that Nelson Muntz, Springfield's teenage miscreant-in-chief, reminded me a bit of of Liam Gallagher.

Like Muntz, Liam has established himself as resident school playground thug, with his swagger, faux menace and daft proclamations about, well, anyone. All he lacks is the high-pitched mocking "Ha-ha!" of his cartoon prototype.

But as Gallagher Junior today celebrates his 41st birthday,dealing with being kicked out of the family home by wife Nathalie Appleton in the wake of allegations that he fathered a child with a Rolling Stone journalist, What Would David Bowie Do? thought it would cheer up the whole miserable mess by reminding you of why, like José Mourinho, Liam is immensely quotable. 

So, here's Our Kid on…

Pete Doherty: "Needs a slap, and the sooner he gets it, the better."

and: "What does the word Libertine mean? Freedom! He's in the corner doing smack with a helmet on his head. There's nothing free about that. It's nasty."

Coldplay's Chris Martin: "I don't hate him. I don't know him, know what I mean? I just think he's a bit giddy. He ought to calm down, he isn't going to save the world."

And [Chris Martin]: "Looks like a geography teacher."

Ageing: "I've mellowed, but not in the sense of liking Radiohead or Coldplay."

Coldplay & Radiohead: "I don't hate them, I don't wish they had accidents. I think their fans are boring and ugly and don't look like they're having a good time."

Radiohead: "Them writing a song about a fucking tree [The King of Limbs]? Give me a fucking break! A thousand year-old tree? Go fuck yourself!"

Robbie Williams: "I'd like to fucking hang Robbie Williams onstage. What's he done to me this time? Nothing. He's just somebody I'd like to hang."

And: "[Robbie Williams] "He's a fucking drama queen. You make a crap album then want everyone to feel sorry for you. Tosser!"

Bono: "You see pictures of Bono running around LA with his little white legs and a bottle of Volvic and he looks like a fanny."

Mumford & Sons: "Everyone looks like they’ve got fucking nits and eat lentil soup with their sleeves rolled up. They all look like they live on the heath. Maybe that’s where they record. Everyone’s fucking Don McLean — far too many acoustic guitars, no style. They look like they shop at Oxfam."

One Direction: "I like them. Fair play to them. Why not, man? They haven’t got a fucking clue either. I met them at the Olympics and their heads were up their ar*es, but they’re harmless."

Florence Welch: "I’m not having anyone with ginger hair making music. She sounds like someone has stood on her foot."

Gorillaz: "Like three-year-olds’ music — worse than Steps."

Victoria Beckham: "She can’t even chew gum and walk in a straight line, let alone write a book".

Kanye West: "If I ever win any more fucking awards I'd personally invite him to get up and fucking take my award of me. I fucking tell you that... That was rude when he did that to that girl, that Taylor Swift. So yeah, give me an award and see where it goes. It will roll out of his fucking arse."

Muse: "Muse fucking scare me. They're like fucking creepy shit. But people like 'em. They at least play guitars, but when I hear his voice I'm like, Ah, fuck him."

Scissor Sisters: "Bright colours and fucking weirdos on stilts? I'm more entertaining than that shit."

Franz Ferdinand: "You look at [Alex Kapranos] and the singer from Right Said Fred. It's the same person! he's just gone on the Atkins diet and grown his hair."

Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day): "Fuck right off. I'm not having him. I just don't like his head."

La Roux: "No way, mate. She's got man hands."

On the Blur reunion: "I'm right into it, [because] it'll finish off the Kaiser Chiefs and put them to bed. There's nothing worse than a shit Blur."

Bloc Party: "They remind me of a band off University Challenge. Like they’re sitting on a panel."

Keith Richards & George Harrison (in 1997): "They're jealous and senile and not getting enough fucking meat pies".

Mick Jagger: "I don't think singers who start off singing should play guitar. It looks fucking stupid."

Amy Winehouse & Pete Doherty (as a couple): "I don’t give a fuck about her, I don’t give a fuck about the other dick and I don’t give a fuck about any of 'em".

Jack White: “The White Stripes? Fooking rubbish. School ties? At the age of 24? Fooking hell."

Ozzy Osbourne: "How come everyone thinks he’s great? He’s a bit of a fooking mong, if you ask me."

The Beatles-vs-God: "It's got to be being in The Beatles. When was the last time God made a decent record?"

Noel Gallagher: "Shitbag".

Spin Cycle

Stop me if you've heard this before (actually, you have - The day to love the smell of vinyl in the morning), but this is the day I get in my annual moan about how things aren't what they used to be, that policemen are getting younger and that it's a travesty that digital downloads are killing off physical music formats.

So here goes: the 2013 Record Store Day has come around again to get us all out there in actual bricks-and-mortar record shops, buying CDs and vinyl and, you know, actually getting more out of the music-purchasing experience than doing so slumped in an armchair, laptop and apple Danish balanced precariously on our laps.

This year's RSD comes at a time of continued attrition in the music retailing business, with streaming services like Spotify now accounting for a fifth of all music acquisition, and sales of physical formats declining by another 5%. Last year, for example, 833 million CDs were sold worldwide - compared with 2.4 billion a decade ago.

According to the IFPI, the worldwide music industry association, it isn't all doom and gloom, at least for those making music. The IFPI's annual Digital Music Report this year announced that global revenue from recorded music was actually up by 0.3% to $16.5 billion, thanks to new digital distribution channels, the first rise since 1999. There is evidence to suggest that Adele has much to do with this.

"Licensed downloads" - i.e. the type the record industry wants you to have - are still canibalising sales of 'physical' formats, with download sales increasing in number by 12% around the world last year, to the extent they represent 70% of all revenue from digital music. Subscription services also leapt in 2012, with a 44% increase, accounting for more than 10% of digital revenues for the first time.

All of which is nice for the artists and record companies, but still not good for the record retailer. What shouldn't be forgotten, however, is that physical formats like the CD and vinyl aren't disappearing, and still account for almost two-thirds of all music sold. Vinyl even grew last year, with its highest sales since 1997, fuelled by a combination of teenager DJs and those of us of a certain age returning to the format via exorbitantly-priced heritage releases.

But, according to some analysts, physical formats have a clear shelf life in the mainstream of music buying. "By the end of the decade, the physical product will be seen as a thing of the past," was the stark prediction given earlier this year by Matt Piner of research agency Conlumino in a CNN interview earlier this year.

Since the last Record Store Day we've seen the collapse of the UK's HMV chain and further high-profile closures such as the Virgin Megastores in France. Analysts say this has much more to do with their business models as any major change in media buying culture. Amazon - with its tax-friendly distribution base - has been steadily eating into over-the-counter record sales, mainly due to the sheer convenience of online shopping, while supermarket checkout-based CD racks have offered consumers a convenient but limited choice of the big-name, family-friendly releases.

Which gives us all the more reason to seek out a Record Store Day-supporting retailer today. To make the experience even more attractive, hundreds of acts have issued special RSD releases which are exclusively available from shops involved in the day.

From a 40th anniversary 7-inch vinyl picture disc of Bowie's Drive-In Saturday to one-off live albums from Mumford and Sons and Robyn Hitchcock, a vinyl re-release of Orange Juice's Rip It Up, a box set of all the single Paul Weller released off Sonik Kicks, all presented in 7-inch form, a rare Sly & The Family Stone album released on 10-inch vinyl, and archive re-releases from The Doors, Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

The White Stripes have also released an RSD-exclusive 10th anniversary edition of Elephant. Jack White is - unsurprisingly - a strong supporter of the whole initiative:

"I think it’s high time the mentors, big brothers, big sisters, parents, Guardians, and neighborhood ne’er do wells, start taking younger people That look up to them To a real record store and show them what an important part of life music really is," he writes on the RSD website with alarming disregard for correct use of capitals.

Wilco's Jeff Tweedy puts it a little less eccentrically when he says: "Nothing beats browsing in your favourite store, listening to music, finding something new or old that you’ve been searching for, all that," and adds: "Without these stores, there’s just no way [we] would still be around."

There's no doubt that those of us who share Tweedy's view are suffering from romanticism. The fact that The Doors and Deep Purple are releasing special vinyl editions on RSD suggests that the vinyl resurgence is being part refuelled by the same instincts that sees Harley-Davidson motorbikes ridden out of bike dealerships by late middle-aged men in bandanas. Some are actively seeking the smell of vinyl in the morning because it associates themselves with a youth they may never have had.

There is, though, certainly something pleasantly redolent in putting an album on a turntable, applying the stylus and listening for that initial crackle. This is also the same psychology at work that makes us apply Instagram to give a vintage wash to an otherwise pristine digital photograph Apple spent a fortune developing high-end iPhone optics for.

Comfort, though it may be, there is pleasure to be had from owning vinyl and listening to it. And not only is there a tactile joy from removing a disc from its dust sleeve and placing the needle gently on Track 1, there is also the cardiovascular benefit of getting off your arse to turn the record over to Side 2.

So, get out there today and find your local Record Store Day retailer. Whether you're an older head into albums, or the restless type who only downloads individual singles, go and buy yourself an actual album or an actual single. And don't tell me you didn't enjoy the packaging.

Stroll on down electric avenue

With the Clan Mumford continuing their waistcoated march across the western world - like a band of marauding Pa Larkins armed with ukes and mandolins - the grand pappy of British folk-rock, Richard Thompson has stormed back this week with Electric, his 22nd album since leaving Fairport Convention.

I must confess, Thompson is one of those staples of British music I've managed to avoid. Not deliberately, mind, but light prejudice and shameful cliches involving beards, Aran sweaters and rural inflection may have been involved. Where I have lent folkwards, it has been in the direction of Nick Drake and, of course, my uber-hero, John Martyn, or towards the Appalachian charms of American roots.

For Thompson, however, Fairport Convention and all that early-70s hurdy-gurdy is a long way behind. Electric is a barnstorming affair, as it's title might suggest, dictated to by Thompson's Stratocaster mastery. It's a finger-picking virtuosity to rival Mark Knopfler, with whom Thompson shares a close musical affinity, stylistically, lyrically and tonally.

Recorded at the Nashville home studio of Robert Plant-collaborator Buddy Miller, Electric weaves in and out of Celtic-tinged rock, honky-tonk and bluegrass with a lyrical spectrum spanning the acerbic and the solemn.

To those familiar with Thompson's output in recent years, Electric may, simply, feel familiar. Like Knopfler, settling in to a sound and a groove. But that would be to unfairly suggest that Thompson turned up, plugged in and went home again.

Stony Ground kicks it off with ribald tale of an ageing lothario lusting after the widow across the street, essentially a bluesy jive about someone not that dissimilar to Open All Hours' Arkright ("Silly old man with his teeth all gone/Poking his nose where it don't belong/She's a rose all right but she's got thorns....").

The title of Salford Sunday provides the premise of a dreary tale about a dreary Sunday in a dreary Manchester suburb, but it's gently shuffling bluegrass (with Allison Krauss on backing vocals) is less another dour Northern tale as one of slight regret at leaving behind a particularly entertaining Saturday night, if you know what I mean.

While list compilers have largely focused on the Claptons, Gilmours and Becks in their compilations of great British guitarists, Thompson has probably never been given the recognition he deserves.

Perhaps its the folk association, but Stuck On The Treadmill provides a snappy showcase of just how gifted - and varied - a guitarist he is, applying a bluesy, bassy edge to opine the cause of the workin' man.

There is more familiar folkiness in The Snow Goose, another somewhat regretful, even mournful tale of a Northern lass, and in Saving The Good Stuff For You, which picks the tone up a notch with the help of fiddles and gee-tars.

Electric may not be the album to change your view of the world, but if you enjoy your Saturday night bar room entertainment guitar-flavoured, you won't be disappointed, from the tankard-swinging ballad Another Small Thing In Her Favour to the honky-tonk funk of Straight And Narrow.

Compared to, say, last year's Locked Down by Dr John, I'll admit that Electric hasn't turned me over in a sweating, heaving wreck of spooky roots blues; but it is pleasantly blessed in the manner that only American folk - as Plant and Krauss themselves demonstrated so admirably with Raising Sand - can do, providing a highly likeable soundtrack to either a night down the pub, or a cross-country trek across Appalachia.

In A Spin

Tonight, this afternoon, or tomorrow morning, depending on where you sit in the world, the music industry will amass at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles to celebrate what is boldly tagged "Music's Biggest Night" - the Grammy Awards

Like all televised American awards shows, it will be a glittering, glamourous affair. A red carpet roll-up for the photographers. Artists - those appearing, performing, presenting or simply sitting in the front row - have been issued with explicit instructions on how they should dress. In an attempt to prevent anything too rock'n'roll at the music industry's equivalent of the Oscars, an e-mail is alleged to have been sent out warning:

"Please be sure that buttocks and female breasts are adequately covered. Thong type costumes are problematic. Please avoid exposing bare fleshy under curves of the buttocks and buttock crack. Bare sides or under curvature of the breasts is also problematic. Please avoid sheer see-through clothing that could possibly expose female breast nipples. Please be sure the genital region is adequately covered so that there is no visible 'puffy' bare skin exposure."

It's possible that 'puffy' might refer to the dress Jennifer Lopez wore to accompany P Diddy to the 2000 Grammys. Anyway, I digress. At the end of the day, the Grammys represent the suited, still-or-sparkling-sir? business end of the music business, as far removed from guitars turned up to 11 in suburban garages as it's possible to be.

British interests this year are solidly represented by the usual suspects: Adele, Adele and Adele, as well as newcomers like Ed Sheeran, plus Muse, Mumford & Sons and the venerable McCartney.

Even my friend Steven Wilson - criminally overlooked elsewhere by the British music press despite being one of the industry's most industrious artists - is in with a shout for his Surround Sound production work on his own musical collaboration, Storm Corrosion, with Mikael Åkerfeldt of Swedish prog-metalists Opeth. It's his third Grammy nomination, the previous both for his production work on his band, Porcupine Tree's Fear Of A Blank Planet and his debut solo album, The Incident.


Eight miles and a fifteen-minute burst up the Hollywood Freeway from the Nokia Theater is one of the last vestiges of what probably got a good two-thirds of the audience at the Grammys into music in the first place: LA's last big record store: Amoeba Records.

With the demise of Tower Records and the Virgin chain, both of which had prominent outlets not far away on Sunset Boulevard, Amoeba is something of an anomaly. A vast but funky record and video retailer, with its own underground car park and spillover parking lot around the back, it is clearly the place where Hollywood - the geographic neighbourhood, rather than the showbusiness idiom - comes for its Saturday afternoon fix of physical media.

And long may it stay that way. Browsing around Amoeba's new and second-hand racks one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago felt like a copious, beer-fuelled, riotous reunion with an old friend. One of those record stores with endless potential for serious credit card damage: out-of-stock CD specialities, budget-priced vinyl rarities, DVDs and even VHS tapes. And given its location, you never know quite who you might run into. Certainly no shortage of 'in the business types', if anecdotal testimony from both LA-resident and visiting musicians is anything to go by.

You could, though, hardly say that Amoeba, and it's Californian sister branches in San Francisco and Berkeley, are thriving. Busy, yes, successfully surviving, even, but the world beyond their front doors is cruel and getting worse.

In recent weeks we've the brand-franchised Virgin Megastore chain has announced its closure in France, including their delightfully massive branch on the Champs-Élysées; and, of course, there is the ongoing disassembly of HMV in Britain. All are the latest victims of the same epidemic: people are falling out of love with physical media, and if they do, they're buying from Amazon or at the supermarket. Or simply avoiding physical formats altogether.

Which means we, IKEA 'Billy' bookcase-attached, CD and, perversely, retro-vinyl collection-building media junkies are becoming a shrinking minority. As much as we pretend to ignore the obvious, our supply line is drying up.

This afternoon, Virgin in Paris was thriving, likewise its near-neighbour FNAC. But if you looked closely at what the locals and tourists were buying, it was heavily discounted sale items - DVDs for a handful of Euros, '4 for €20' CD deals, Blu-ray releases for €15 and half-price box sets.

Amoeba, back in December, was just as busy, but it was hard to separate those shopping in the nearly-new budget aisles and those browsing the brand new. Still, if this was an expiring patient, the 20 checkouts in constant use were vital signs of a pulse.

Sadly, the prognosis is not good: new figures from the BPI, the British music industry body, say that now almost one-in-five consumers (19.6%) prefers downloads to physical media formats. In 2012 well over a quarter of all music was bought either as a dowload from an online store like iTunes, or streamed via Spotify or YouTube.


It would, though, be wrong to assume that the record shop is in terminal decline, however. Yes, digital will continue to grow and, yes, sadly more record chains will close. But the idea that they will disappear altogether is ill-founded.

"We must do all we can to serve music fans who love CDs and vinyl," promises Geoff Taylor, CEO of the BPI. That remains to be seen: a third of HMV's 239 UK's outlets are to close in the next two months, which, while no fatal blow, will still deprive cities like Blackburn, Durham, Luton, Watford, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Wrexham of a mainstream music and video retailer.

HMV's decline will no doubt push more people onto services like Spotify and iTunes. And Amazon will continue to benefit as well as, depressingly, the supermarkets. But anyone who thinks that clicking on a website and then waiting for a package to drop onto the doormat, or picking up a CD from a tiny selection of Top 10 offal, while doing the weekly shop, is not music buying - even if both the mail order giant and the supermarkets can offer whopping discounts.

Graham Jones, author of Last Shop Standing: Whatever Happened to Record Shops? - ironically, for sale at Amazon.co.uk for a discounted £11.66 - claims the independent record stores are even getting better terms from record shops, especially as the fading chains, download sites and mail order companies fail to serve smaller record labels.

Independents like Kingston's Banquet Records (in my teenage years, Beggars Banquet) remain the last haunt of the vinyl junkie, or the CD junkie, for that matter. People still want to touch, inspect, examine and appreciate their records, even those now old enough to need reading glasses to study the sleeve notes on a CD. And for those who really care, there is the return of vinyl - even if you now pay double for a 12-inch piece of crackly plastic.


Rather than decline like the big chains, the independent are finding their own place in the market. Spencer Hickman, co-organiser of the annual Record Store Day initiative says that there are even new independent shops opening up: "It shows that there are still music lovers who want to buy physical music from people who are just as enthusiastic as they are. There are lots of people who still want music as an art form not just a download."

"When I wrote Last Shop Standing," adds Graham Jones, "I thought I was writing the obituary for the independent record store. It turns out that may have been premature."

The Grammys may be a world away from stores like Banquet in Kingston: but while the music industry comes together tonight to gorge itself on the meagre pickings it claims it is raking in from selling its whares, I hope the assembled suits raise a glass of San Pellegrino to the retailers still doing their bit to make buying music as enjoyable as taking home your purchase and actually listening to it.