Time may change me, but I can't change time

On Friday night, my friends and I ventured to the wild and dangerous underbelly of Stoke-on-Trent and to that city's one half decent music venue, The Sugarmill. It was a tearful return to the place that had seen me spend many a Friday night in my formative years, watching the dregs of the Britpop scene working their way through the northern toilet venues. To mark the occasion, I wore my period Adidas Firebird jacket (black with white Stripes, a la Noel Gallagher on the cover of Cigarettes & Alcohol) and matching Superstar trainers.

Of course, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Not because I was a hideous anachronism with clothes and musical tastes that were ten years out of date, but because both bands on the bill were eighties influenced acts, and my get-up was a futuristic indication to a yet to be concieved mid nineties revival. Principally we'd gone to see Alphabeat. Although we were hell bent on going to the Sugarmill even if Napalm Death had been playing, Alphabeat's MySpace page allowed us to audition a few of the songs beforehand.

If you need to know that the maximum age of a MySpace music fan is about 19, then listen no further than their track Fascination, practically a dynamic-by-dynamic remake of David Bowie's Modern Love. Of course, your average knuckle-dragging listener to Radio 1 is too busy revising for their GCSEs to know they're being duped by a blantant and uncreative reinvention of the past. Only when they finally become disillusioned with the current music scene can the past be truly discovered, revealing a lineage of grave robbing that started with the Stone Roses lifting Byrds licks, and has run a 20 year parallel between influence and influenced to the present day. It seems the current trend is for now-obscure Nile Rodgers produced albums of the early eighties to be ripped off in the quest for fleeting fame.

Bowie hangs heavy in the air at the moment, not just because his less memorable 80s output is being "reimagined" by Scandanavian chancers, but because the long awaited sequel to the BBC's Life On Mars has come to our screens. Yet while he seems to be nodding all the right heads, the Thin White Duke maintains a Macavity-like absence, preferring to watch from the sidelines while lesser beings do his bidding.

Like millions of others, I was an ardent fan of Life on Mars and got totally caught up in solving the unusually intelligent puzzle of whether Sam Tyler had a) gone mad; b) was in a coma; c) had stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator. Factor in John Simm and Phillip Glenister's sublime performances and all that seventies nostaligia, Life on Mars, together with Top Gear doublehandedly justified the existence of the BBC for a whole two years.

When the second series ended, and with John Simm unilaterally deciding there would be no more, Life on Mars seemed destined to join the ranks of Fawlty Towers, The Office and Twin Peaks as self contained, cerebral and era defining television series that didn't overstay their welcome, and (with the exception of the latter) came to a satisfying conculsion.

There's nothing the British like more than a bit of nostalgia. A new decade and a kitsch wardrobe beckoned. It was time for everyone to involved to cash in their creative chips for the immediately announced sequel.

Wow! The new series would be set in the eighties! Gene Hunt's brown Ford Cortina would be replaced with an Audi Quattro!

The new protagonist was DI Alex Drake, a female lead (played by Keeley Hawes) that would stick an even bigger thorn into the side of misogynistic Gene Hunt than Sam Tyler's noughties modern policing ethic had in the original.

I actually missed the Thursday night broadcast, but caught the episode on Saturday morning, thanks to the BBC's new fangled iPlayer service. Now us licence-fee paying Brits have the oppurtunity to watch some the TV-tax funded programmes we would otherwise miss. Impressive, almost TV quality picture on a 19" monitor which will be great until the BBC try to justify making the licence fee compulsory for all internet users.

Ashes to Ashes didn't get off to a great start for me. My first gripe is that the show has been relocated to London, yet Gene Hunt's entire team has followed him down from Manchester. The reason for this is obvious - the eighties only happened in London. In the north of England, it was the same dreary run-down distopia that it had been for the previous ten years. Were it not for Only Fools and Horses and Stock-Aitken-Waterman records, the entire decade would have passed by unnoticed.

Second complaint was the highly annoying opening scene, with Alex Drake attempting to diffuse a hostage situation only for her own 11 year old daughter to wade in and become the hostage herself. I loved my parents when i was 11, but if I'd seen someone pointing a gun at their head I would have let the drama play out a little before bursting through a police cordon and taking charge, and such gauche sentimentality is a contemptuous risk to take in an opening episode.

Gene Hunt made his big dramatic entrance in a shot that was obviously intended for the teaser-trailers, but looks hopelessly out of place in its proper context. It wasn't looking good, and with so many obvious and corny eighties pop cultural references crammed into every frame (knickerless tennis player, Ultravox, George and Zippy)I was getting rather bored. Keeley Hawes gave a borderline hysterical portrayal that was at odds with John Simm's brilliantly paranoid performance in the original series. With the mystery of why he was there nicely wrapped up in the final episode, all her attempts to make sense of the situation seemed rather pointless.

About a third of the way through the programme, I remembered my golden rule of watching the first episode of a new TV series. It's always rubbish.

In the case of a phenominally successful franchise as this, writers are caught between establishing a new feel to dinstinguish it from predecessors, pandering to existing fans looking for something fresh, while at the same time trying to not alienate first time viewers.

I didn't see much of the first series of Life on Mars, so I didn't see it struggle to its feet like a newborn foal. While the second series was cracking television, I unfortunately saw the clumsy conclusion, the show unable to suspend its own disbelief and falling at the final hurdle.

Thus, Ashes to Ashes shouldn't be judged too harshly on its first episode. I wasn't impressed, but I've still got goodwill for the franchise and I want to like it. Despite her annoying introduction, Keeley Hawes showed promise once the episode established itself in the final quarter or so. And although Glenister seemed to be playing it up (and in turn, the director played up to Glenister), the old magic flickered in and out like Drake's connection to the real world. Hopefully there won't be too many amateur moments directly comparable to its seventies forbear, and once its established, it could turn out to be great. I hope the BBC can pick the ball back up and run with it.

* * *

We missed Alphabeat, but instead caught the rather excellent Palladium. An exciting looking outfit, they were another eighties flavoured band that reminded me of Duran Duran and similar guitar/synth-pop of the day. Certainly a break from the usual indie schmunglists that waft in an out of the Sugarmill. Despite there only being about 30 people there (and half of them were screaming 15 year olds who'd probably found out about them on their MySpace page), they played like they were at Madison Square Garden, throwing themselves around the stage and even indluging in some extended instrumental sections. We stood like the three miserable looking has-beens we were - you'd hardly expect us to scream with the girls (although I did whoop a few times) - but it was great. The most authentic eighties experience of the whole week.

Pop will eat itself

There was an enormous whoop of panic in the music industry this week when online music provider QTrax announced that it was not only going to provide free downloads, but had several major record labels signed up the service with up to 25 million songs on tap. The story was reported in The Times (London), appearing on page 3 of the paper version, and also making a few waves on the BBC news website.

QTrax had apparently blown 500,000 sheets (sterling) on a glitzy launch for champagne quaffing Cannes Film Festival goers, announcing that the artists would recieve their dues by way of advertising revenue generated from the site.

By Tuesday, common sense finally prevailed amongst the dervish-like hype surrounding what at face value seemed to be a final nail in the coffin of traditional music supply. Oddly reminiscent of the launch of 1994's Rise Of The Robots, QTrax had inflated news of Warner, EMI, Sony etc's participation in talks for the venture as full blown commitment to the service. Needless to say, this had all been quashed by Tuesday.

This latest chapter in the music industry's slow suicide is just another indication that not only have the big providers totally failed to grasp changes that the internet has made to the way we consume media, but that the product they're selling is increasingly commercialised, artisically compromised and culturally bankrupt - and that consumers are getting wise to the fact.

If you think I'm wallowing in schadenfreude, you'd be quite right.

My considerable irk at the music industry comes from my early CD buying experiences, when I first got the disposable income to go to HMV and blow a day's wages on the music of the day. Nowadays, traditional retailers are slashing prices to get people through the doors, but back in those days it was perfectly normal to pay £12.99 for a first-week-of-release CD. If you wanted listen to something a bit more select, prices would be ramped up to £15.99, presumably because you were more likely to have decided before getting in the shop that you wanted it and would cough up the extra coins they were unexpectedly charging when you saw it on the shelves. Let's face it, if you'd had your heart set on Generation Terrorists by the Manic Street Preachers, you were unlikely to get back on the bus empty handed for the sake of a couple of quid.

Being a serious music fan, I spent a lot of money on overpriced albums only to find out that the only decent tracks were the ones I'd already heard, or that there were no decent tracks at all, and that I'd only bought it on the recommendation of some self serving dopehead monthly music journalistic who'd drawn a parallel between Primal Scream's Vanishing Point and Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On.

If the cynical overpricing of so-called 'serious' music was letting down the credible side of the medium, the twin evils of the NME's hegemonic grasp of the weeklies (following the demise of Melody Maker), and the beginning of Pop Stars/Pop Idol/X-Factor's poisonous run in 2000 meant that both indie and mainstream pop were ineffably compromised. With the mainstrem media and the once credible music press on their side, it was all looking good for the music industry.

Of course, they'd failed to reckon with the internet. Even in my darkest moments, my faith in humanity is restored by the human race's ability to triumph in adversity, and the whole try-before-you-buy concept of piracy is our biggest weapon against the forces enticing us to buy unimaginative and exploitative music, recommended by advertorial writing sycophantic journalists and celebrity radio disc-jockeys.

Being honest, I'll admit to scamming a fair bit of music off the internet for an 18 month period earlier on this decade. It was in the days of dial-up, and my crimes were nowhere near as serious as I could commit with my broadband connection. But I look at this philosophically. On the 17th March 2003, I deprived Kelly Osbourne of whatever she got for Shut Up, but I actually saved myself a tenner because the song was rubbish and I only would have found that out if I'd coughed up the dough for the album - and then it would have been the record company who 'd exploited me. However, Elton John, Eminem, Michael Jackson, Rammstein, Electric Six and even Kelly's dad DID subsequently get paid following a cheeky download from Kazaa.

Anyway, it's time to get back to my original point about QTrax. It might have blown up spectacularly in their faces, but the cowardly abandonment by the majors shows that they're still not ready to embrace the new age. If they want to save their skins, they're going to have to start backing artists instead of products, and realise that when people buy an album, they want twelve good tracks, not four singles and eight slices of white bread.

It depends if QTrax recover from their ineptitude, or if someone else learns the mistakes and finds a new way forward. It's as clear an indication that the days of exploitation of consumers AND artists by the music industry does seem to slowly be coming to an end.

Whatever happens, I hopefully won't be buying Ta-dah by the Scissor Sisters again.