HMV is Dead, long-live HMV!

On 'Everything Goes to Hell' from his misanthropic masterpiece, Blood Money, Tom Waits growls:

There are a few things I never could believe
A woman when she weeps
A merchant when he swears
A thief who says he'll pay
A lawyer when he cares
A snake when he is sleeping
A drunkard when he prays
I don't believe you go to heaven when you're good

Waits could well have added, 'a musician who claims indifference to money' (maybe he just couldn't make it rhyme). Bankers are often maligned as the most avaricious of people, but in my experience few people are as money-grubbing as self-proclaimed musicians. There's good reason for this - if you work in financial services, there's a simple equation that, more often than not, accounts for success: intellect + ambition + hard work = big payola. There might not be as much of it going around as there was before the financial crisis, but there's still plenty of money to be made. As such, the average City dweller may not be sweet, careful or kind, but they're not falling over one another, knives at the ready, as they scramble for change. But from the distinct lack of comradeship and camaraderie on the gigging toilet circuit (of which I have direct experience) to the self-aggrandising and self-obsessed excesses of performers atop the scrapheap (about whom I've read a lot of books), musicians are unsurpassed when it comes to the pursuit of fame and fortune at the expense of all else.

The Chimera

In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson characterises the axiom that the profligate use of credit to generate wealth in the United States is funded by China's consumption of American debt as 'Chimerica', recalling the mythical hybrid of a lion, snake and goat. In a different fable, a musician might be part rat, vulture, magpie and scorpion - the kind of creature that picks through debris for shiny things and repays kindness and trust with a sting simply because it doesn't know how to behave any differently. Desperate hustling's in its blood. Put another way, talent + ambition + hard work don't necessarily equal fame and fortune in a music industry that's been decimated by the threat of 'free'. It's fiercely competitive, the barriers to entry are low, there are innumerable substitute products and buyer power (or, increasingly, consumer power, because they're not necessarily buying) is very high. But it never used to be this way.

Before the internet, the map preceded the territory

In the '90s, when the good times were still rolling, anti-commercialism was the order of the day for the workaday musician; if you weren't in the mainstream, you bemoaned a record industry that valued profits more than they valued artists, and when (if) you made it to the mainstream you pursed your lips and shut up about it. The music-buying public liked it when musicians talked this way because, as much as we believed that music had value, we also resented paying far over-and-above the material value of the paper and plastic from which the music delivery device (to borrow a term from the tobacco industry) was chiefly constructed. It seems crazier than ever that a CD used to retail for £15 in the mid '90s (£25 in today's money), but when we couldn't imagine an alternative, we accepted it as the price of being a music lover. In a sense, we protested too much about over-commercialisation because we were loathe to admit that we were held so tightly in its sway.

Just good friends

At the time, the high barriers to entry and bargaining power of suppliers meant that profits primarily went to the organisations that distributed music. This was convenient for the consumer, because it meant we could go on conceiving of musicians as demi-gods whose enlightenment meant they were unconcerned with the material concerns of mere mortals, and direct our ire about the high price of CDs and affiliated merchandise towards the bean counters who kept the industry ticking over. The reality wasn't quite so black and white. At the height of his domination of pop music, Michael Jackson personally approved every cheque that MJJ Productions wrote, and acknowledged every cheque that came in. The world knew him as a creative genius, but few knew that MJ was also an astute, and oftentimes ruthless businessman whose investments helped sustain his uncontrollable spending in the years when he'd long-stopped producing music. MJ's friendship with Paul McCartney, which produced three massive hits in 'Girlfriend', 'Say Say Say' and 'The Girl is Mine', was severed when Jackson bought the Beatles back-catalogue and refused, despite numerous attempts by McCartney, to negotiate a deal that would give McCartney a more favourable return on songs he'd written. This was all before the internet, when it was possible to keep the facts quiet in the interests of the perpetuation of a myth.

Many lament the death of a beautiful business model. At its most profitable, it let kids chart the territory before it swooped in to capitalise on the latest fashion, sound or scene. The blueprint for packaging a product was the same each time, even as the time, place, sound and/or look changed. Get In The Van, Henry Rollins' diarised account of life on the road with Black Flag, documents a bygone era, when riot police stormed gigs for fear that misfit children might be incited to overthrow law and order, and when a predatory music business regularly co-opted and made safe a raw and pure teen spirit. It was a time when people believed that music could change the world - for better and for worse. Ironically, the eventual cultural revolution wasn't musical but commercial.

Why isn't Taylor Swift on Spotify?

Today, when you read the music press, it's remarkable how so many articles - from interviews with musicians, to reviews of concerts and new records, to editorials - contextualise the content in economic terms. In and of itself, this isn't strange; when time's are tight, money's always an issue. What I find remarkable is how comfortable everyone is with the economics of it all overshadowing the music. It's as though the decimation of the music industry has liberated everyone to come clean about the real motives behind playing music. These motives are, I suspect, varied - from the desire to be part of a high-performing and creative team, to the need for attention and adulation, to the drive to be entrepreneurial and acquisitive.

Of course, it could also be that, now that control has been wrested away from the record companies, the lines of demarcation that separated artist from corporate suit have been blurred. Musicians today have been forced to focus on business as much as on the music, because a single, mapped out road to success no longer exists. Perhaps Michael Jackson was a pioneer rather than an outlier; the pinnacle of creative and business genius to which all of us unwashed pop music hustlers aspire. One thing is clear: the future history of the music industry is being written, and rewritten, as we speak (or as I write).

When file-sharing first reared its disruptive head in the late 1990s, Lars Ulrich and Metallica were vilified by music consumers and critics alike for suing Napster and their own fans for 'lost sales'. At the time, a cartoon lampooning Metallica caricatured James Hetfield as a slow-witted ogre and Lars as a calculating, shrieking harpy, intent on killing not just the party but the partygoers as well. In defence of Napster, indie bands proclaimed that the internet would level the playing field, bringing about the death of tired, old music dinosaurs and allowing bands that actually cared about their music to reach new audiences and prosper. Ten years on, it didn't quite work out that way. Ulrich can crow now about how proud he is that Metallica led the charge against file-sharing (and crow he does), and those listening simply nod sagely. There's either something in the water, or the indie rockers just gave in and drank the Kool Aid.

Ogre James and Harpy Lars badmouth Napster

In 2013, music streaming is the new file-sharing, and my New Year's resolution was to stop wasting money on buying CDs I used once (to burn the files to my hard drive), containing music I often didn't think was worth the money I'd paid for it. I declared that from here-on-in I would no longer own new music, and would simply rent it. I signed up for Spotify Premium at £10 a month, and felt immediately pleased that for £120 a year I could listen to as much of whatever I liked, without having to 'um' and 'ah' about whether I should or shouldn't buy something, or wait for a CD to arrive in the post, or regret wasting my money on a disappointing record. Then I discovered that I couldn't quite listen to anything I wanted. The genesis of this blog was when I googled 'why isn't Taylor Swift on Spotify?' and discovered that her record label, Big Machine, had decided to withhold her new album, Red, from streaming websites. Claiming, rather disingenuously, to be a small record label that couldn't afford to give away music, Big Machine CEO Scott Borchetta felt that they'd lose potential earnings because low-priced streaming 'sales' would replace real sales of the album via download and in stores. Four months in to my music-renting sojourn I gave in and bought Red on CD in Sainsbury's for £7.99 (it was worth every penny).

It's not just big-names who decry streaming for hurting their bottom line. Read here an impassioned polemic by Jana Hunter of Lower Dens, an obscure indie rock band from Baltimore. Hunter writes in her blog post: 'Music shouldn’t be free. It shouldn’t even be cheap. If you consume all the music you want all the time, compulsively, sweatily, you end up having a cheap relationship to the music you do listen to.' It's an interesting point that's been made in a few different places: music has become commoditised. The argument for and against streaming is about scale. Advocates claim that, as the popularity of streaming grows, so too will earnings, as more and more consumers listen to more and more songs; naysayers counter that there are a lot of lost earnings to forego before the streaming business model proves itself by achieving that much-needed scale, and that it's a bit of a risk to bet the ranch when you've already lost the lifesavings. But when everyone's making decent-sounding records in their bedrooms and releasing them on Spotify and iTunes and wherever else, what was once a premium product becomes of little more value than a handful of coffee beans, picked straight from the bush, simply because there's so much of it. And so, to make it profitable you've got to shift a ton of the stuff.

Paradigm shift, from ownership to consumption

Achieving scale won't be easy, and it puts the ball firmly back in the court of those organisations who already have enormous customer bases. Enter Microsoft, who've launched XBox Music, pre-loaded with 30 million songs to all Microsoft products, including Windows 8, in a bid to make the as-yet unprofitable Spotify obsolete. While we can't know yet whether XBox Music will wipe out Spotify and/or become the dominant music streaming platform, what we might assume is that the commoditisation of music is likely to continue, relatively unabated. This goes hand-in-hand with two significant trends in consumer retail: the move from ownership to simply consumption and, as such, the increasing importance of experiences over tangible products.

These two trends are a direct result of the growing dominance and sophistication of the digital economy, which has made ownership of things like CDs redundant. Ownership implies responsibility, opportunity cost in that you could've chosen to own something else instead of the thing you ultimately chose to own, and the tricky issue of where to put things once you own them. Consumption without things is more convenient, ephemeral and frivolous, and involves far less opportunity cost. Paradoxically, the commoditisation of music comes as a result of music being set apart from a physical product. Setting music free from its earthly body, however, allows it to function more fluidly as a complement to other things, both commercial and cultural. We might now accept that music can't change the world (for better or for worse), but it sure as hell can help sell other things.

But here's an interesting thing: even as physical sales of music continue to decline, revenues from live music are increasing. Today, we are all content producers who show and tell, make and share, our real world experiences online via the social web. Our usage of the social web, measured in 'eyeballs' (the number of users for a service multiplied by the number of times each user uses its website) creates value, which allows the owners of online social services to sell advertising. For many, many people, the music experience is a catalyst for and a source of the production of user-created content that fuels the value of the social web - in the form of photos from gigs, and videos of friends drunkenly singing karaoke, and quotes from songs. Perhaps then, organisations like Microsoft, Google and Facebook, who earn advertising dollars as a direct result of the number of users they have, should be paying for the music its users consume - as a cost of sales, customer retention and new customer acquisition? Could the music biz become a predominantly business-to-business, rather than business-to-consumer, industry?

In a sense, we've come full circle. When humans first began recording music it was only available to listeners on the radio; like today, it came and it went, in the air. But ever since we were given the opportunity to own music, the monetary value we place upon it has been intrinsically linked to the unit in which it was encapsulated - vinyl, tape, CD. Now we're back where we began, with a history of music ownership behind us, and we realise we don't know how to value, and so how to price, the music (the intangible) without its physical delivery device (the tangible). I, for one, believe that when we nostalgically lament the decline and disappearance of the bricks-and-mortar record store, we're more concerned with the loss of the social experience of shopping than the devaluation of recorded music. When Spotify disappears, we may lament its demise with memories of that kid-in-a-candy-shop feeling when, for the first time in history, we were amazed that all the music we could possibly consume was available to us for our pure listening pleasure, and our pure listening pleasure alone.

                                                                                                                            

Maybe we'll say, 'remember when we used to actually listen to music?' And the musicians will say, 'who ever heard of such a silly idea?' as the product endorsement money rolls in.

'Scenes from the future of on-demand marketing' lifted from this McKinsey article

If I sound cynical, it's because nobody buys Scandinavia's music. In the interests of attracting some of that product endorsement money, you can download for free our latest offering, 'HMV is Dead!'.

The best of the Bouncing Souls

Went to see the Bouncing Souls last night at the Garage in London, with my friends Pat and Mark. The Bouncing Souls have been together for 24 years and are getting a bit long in the tooth, have a tendency to be rubbish live, and have made more crap albums now than good ones. It's hard to explain, but I still love them.

It's 1998, I'm 18, it's the end of the summer and I'm staying on this guy Riz's couch in his cramped New York apartment, and he says to me 'do you wanna see the Bouncing Souls tonight?' I'm like, 'I've never heard the Bouncing Souls' and he says, 'you will love the Bouncing Souls'. It's a homecoming show for them at the Continental at the top of St Marks, and they're recording it for a live album ('Tie One On'). They've been touring their self-titled third album (the 'Guinness album', so-called because they ripped off the Guinness brand for the front cover), and are playing for the first time some of the songs that would appear on Hopeless Romantic - their best album and the last with original drummer Shal Khichi. And Riz is right - they are fucking unbelievable and I immediately love the Bouncing Souls. Months later, Hopeless Romantic comes out, and Riz calls me and says excitedly 'there's a picture of you at the show at the Continental on the inlay card!' And again, he's right, there I am looking dumbfounded amidst a crowd of true believers who are going nuts.

Over the past 15 years I've fallen in and out of love with New York, and been disappointed many times by the Bouncing Souls - live and on record - but nothing tarnishes that memory of seeing them live for the first time, nor the feelings that I associate with their early records. Mark and Pat know what I mean, we talked about it after the show over posh cherry beers (the kind where the bottle comes wrapped in paper). How times have changed. For some reason it bothers me that I can't find out online what happened to Shal. Apparently, not long after we saw them at the Astoria on Charing Cross Road (like the Continental, now long-gone), Shal tuned out and turned off; despite their attempts, the others couldn't get through to him - couldn't work out what was wrong - and had no choice but to ask him to leave. He wasn't a good drummer, but his limitations helped make them so unique.

Incidentally, they were great last night, and new album 'Comet' isn't bad either. I doubt they'll ever capture again the youthful, funny but sentimental spirit of the first four albums, but you can't blame them for trying.

So, because I love lists, here are my top ten Bouncing Souls songs. Ole!

True Believers
Kate is Great
Single Successful Guy
The Freaks, Nerds, and Romantics
The Whole Thing
Ole!
Kid
These Are The Quotes From Our Favourite 80s Movies
Holiday Cocktail Lounge
East Side Mags

Heavy metal management: cultivating sheep in wolves' clothing

Only the Swedish can be po-faced about irony, so it's unsurprising that a venture capitalist on the Spotify board, Par-Jorgen Parson, and his investment-banker-turned-crime-writer friend, Hans-Olov Oberg, have written a business strategy and management theory book that in all seriousness suggests big businesses should model themselves on Metallica, AC/DC, Black Sabbath and others.

I haven't read Heavy Metal Management, but the reviews suggest that, like much of the po-faced, ironic product that comes out of Sweden, in substance it's derivative but in packaging and presentation it's clever and good fun. Even if it's not treading new ground, it preaches a pretty sound gospel: too many businesses are boring and unoriginal, and place too great an emphasis on rational analysis when constructing strategies for winning new customers. Why? Because customers are people, and people are irrational and emotional, driven by instinct. Ironically, they've created an analytical framework that they've earnestly called the six-sided pentagram, which outlines how businesses should go about building long-lasting brands that customers truly love:

• Be epic: Without a fantastic story to tell and a great vision, you are doomed from the get-go.
• Be a master: Craftsmanship is the bass for true respect.
• Be instinctive: Rational analysis is dead. Trigger basic human drivers instead.
• Be sensory: Involve as many senses as possible – continuously.
• Be forever: You have to be strategically consistent over a long time span.
• Be total: True conviction and single-mindedness is a core requirement for every successful company.

The Who's John Entwhistle once said 'I'm only interested in heavy metal when it's me who's playing it. I suppose it's a bit like smelling your own fart'. In a sense, metal is the ultimate musical proof of cognitive bias - bands who play music that no one should like actually have the most die hard followers. Though I still occasionally listen to Metallica, Iron Maiden and Slayer, in truth I'm a fair-weather metalhead. That said, I totally get where Parson and Oberg are coming from, and salute their ability to make a buck or two from an in-joke. I've deconstructed my three favourite, long-lasting indie / alternative bands that are still going strong, having worked out exactly how to keep their followers loyal.

Blink 182

Blink Inc.

Many will disagree, but in my view never have a band done more with the four chord business model than Blink 182. Whatever other bells and whistles they add, every great Blink 182 song can be boiled down to a chorus that consists of the chord sequence G, D, E minor, C (or the same but in a different key). In the early days, Blink was an LLP formed by boyhood friends Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus. Replacing troubled early drummer Scott Raynor with enfant terrible Travis Barker was a commercial master stroke that added a third prominent partner to the mix. Barker combined a precocious talent with a strong instinct for promoting his celebrity status, and he had a powerful influence over DeLonge. At the height of their fame in the bull market of the early 2000s, DeLonge was boasting publicly of his desire to Inc. Blink and build a corporate empire, combining music, fashion and lifestyle brands. In the end, DeLonge's overreaching would have a significant long-term impact on the band - the catalyst being Barker and DeLonge's side-project Boxcar Racer. In 2005, as the rift between Hoppus and DeLonge worsened, the Blink partnership was indefinitely suspended. DeLonge's hubris scaled bloated new heights with Angels and Airwaves, with whom he declared he would 'revolutionise rock n roll for a generation', while Barker and Hoppus achieved new lows of mediocrity with Plus 44. By 2009, fate had intervened to save Barker's life after a plane crash, and give the three former business partners cause to continue with their most successful venture. Neighborhoods, their 2011 comeback product, was as good a distillation of the Blink business model as any of its predecessors. Let's have a look at it in more detail:

• From the get-go Hoppus and DeLonge assumed a fairly equal responsibility for lead vocals. Hoppus' dulcet tones were the perfect foil for DeLonge's standard punk nasal sneer, and helped set them apart from competitors. As the band progressed, DeLonge's songs got better and became more plentiful, squeezing out Hoppus's contributions. Despite this, they always find space for at least one song per album where Hoppus and DeLonge trade-off vocal lines - a back-and-forth style that's become a key Blink trait
• Another Blink USP is the guitar riff that uses the 'pull-off' technique to dance around the song's scale. It was employed most effectively the first time it appeared, on their breakthrough song 'M&Ms', but they've used it subsequently on at least one song per album
• Simple, unadventurous pop punk melodies embellished with hints of the early 80s New Romantics and Southern California hardcore a la Agent Orange, TSOL, Black Flag et al; a sprinkling of electronica and drum showmanship, all topped off with lyrical themes of teen angst courtesy of 40-something men
• Lack of a coherent visual branding strategy. Blink have no consistent logo or visual style but they've made this an asset; the Blink brand is not defined by a logo but by the three band members themselves, a marketing strategy typically followed by more traditional boy bands

Dinosaur Jr

Dinosaur Jr and Co.

Thank god for Dave Grohl. Without Grohl, J Mascis may just have been Nirvana's drummer (he auditioned but didn't get the job), and as such Dinosaur Jr would likely've ended three albums in. Instead, Kurt Cobain burned out, the mainstream got Foo Fighters, and Mascis has since churned out eight or nine records that sound blissfully identical, despite the line-up changes. For someone who gives the impression that his life proceeds at a snail's pace (and is about as interesting), Mascis is incredibly prolific, and probably just as shrewd. Intentional or not, he's built a brand that's lasted way beyond grunge and outlived the Neil Young comparisons. As Pitchfork said, 'for all their ubiquity, then and now, I can't think of one band but Dinosaur Jr able to do what they do'. Here are the essential elements:

• Wistful, psychedelic pop songs enhanced by stoner rock riffs and the odd bit of funk
• At least one seemingly aimless fuzzed-out guitar solo per song
• One seven or eight minute long song per album, which could've been much shorter but provides a great excuse for Mascis to extend his guitar wailing
• Effortless (literally) croaked lead vocals and cracked falsetto backing vocals
• A ratio of two Lou Barlow songs to approx nine Mascis songs per album, the Barlow-penned tunes a nod to melodic diversity and collaboration in what is essentially a command-and-control organizational structure, set up to showcase and maximise Mascis' tunnel-visioned brilliance
• Artwork that combines acid-influenced cartoons, out-of-focus photos of animals and Mascis' scrawled handwriting

Belle and Sebastian

Team Belle and Sebastian

Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch has mastered the art of creating a world and telling its ever-evolving story. Though the company name is French in origin, the world of Belle and Sebastian is rooted in (and in-between) urban Glasgow and the Scottish countryside, seen through the eyes of a contrarian poet - bookish, cynically romantic, and horny, who laments the unfulfilled promises of church and school and who celebrates the rich potential of long, lazy summer days and a chance encounter with a dark-eyed beauty on a mundane bus journey or during a hungover breakfast at the local caff. It's a wonderful world because it's the real world seen through ironic rose-tinted hipster glasses, and because the B&S brand has been so perfectly crafted to evoke this world in all its facets - the music, lyrics and artwork. Forget the Stone Roses or Oasis - to my mind, Murdoch and B&S are the natural heirs to the mantle of Morrissey and the Smiths; and though they may not be as influential, B&S have surpassed the Smiths in terms of building a long-lasting brand. Here's how they've done it:

• First and foremost, by distilling all the best elements of all the various genres of pop music from the past 50 years. Like Ryan Adams, Murdoch has an uncanny ability to craft pop songs in almost any genre, in great quantity (and unlike Adams, of consistently high quality). B&S have done folk, country, synth pop, techno, garage, punk, glam, psychedelia and even hard rock, and made it sound like Belle and Sebastian
• By building a great team. Despite a couple of high-profile departures in Stuart David (whose own songwriting ambitions were constrained by Murdoch's dominance) and Isobel Campbell (with whom he was in a tumultuous relationship), Murdoch set out to build a diverse, multi-talented team from the start who would compliment his songwriting skills. It paid off in terms of developing a customer base, and when his break-up with Campbell threatened to destroy the entire enterprise (proving it's never wise to sleep where you work), the B&S team were there to steer the ship through troubled waters. 'Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant' and 'Storytelling' may not be the best contributions to the product portfolio, but they kept the brand afloat while Murdoch worked out his demons
• Indulgent liner notes that read like diary entries by a smart teenager of indeterminate sex. In and of themselves they're of little interest, but they subtly enhance the overall impact of each B&S product
• Artwork that uses photos of pretty, sulky-looking girls posing provocatively as Catholic schoolgirls, bad-tempered waitresses, contemplative aspiring writers, lovelorn teenagers etc. Each album is colour-filtered to distinguish it from the others; to date, they've used shades of red, green, yellow, pink, orange and sepia
• At least one song per album about a smart, hot girl who's misunderstood by figures of authority and who subverts the system in some way (and who, we assume, must be the character on the album cover)
• At least one song per album sung by guitarist Stevie Jackson, in a nod to melodic diversity and artistic collaboration in an organisational structure that, while fairly flat, most certainly does have a single CEO whose decisions are final

Scandinavia music videos and album #3

Nadim

There are few ways of connecting the sense of giddy freedom inspired by scenes of wild horses running free on the beach, Italian models cavorting on a yacht, free diving into waterfalls, seafood, dolphins, parrots, planes and Greenwich Observatory, but Scandinavia have managed to do so in the course of two quick n dirty, cut n paste music videos.

The first, by Nadim Samman, makes hay with a series of glossy advertising clips to emboss the title track from our debut record 'Good Living' with a sense of refinement, purpose and hedonistic entitlement. Part pastiche, part mission statement, it's a vivid insight into the mind of Scandinavia's maddening and remarkable frontman.

Watch the 'Good Living' video

Ted

The second, by Ted Byron-Baybutt, juxtaposes the peace and quiet of nature with the silent majesty of aeroplanes in flight, spliced between outtakes of film cut in the pastoral idyll of Scandinavia's week-long sojourn to the Granary Studios in Kent to record 'The Gods'. Ted uses a raw, unfinished version of the track 'The Queen Entranced By Ancient Prayer Book' to temper the serenity with a healthy dose of grit.

Watch the 'Queen Entranced By Ancient Prayer Book' video

Finally, we've started demoing for our as-yet-untitled album number 3. We have a handful of songs, whose titles include:

I Like Dumb Tunes
HMV Is Dead!
Adventureland
What Can You Give A Girl Who's Got It All?

This video, which unveils the code of life, tells you all you need to know about the enigma that currently is Scandinavia's album #3.

Watch 'Code of Life Now Revealed' video

2012: the year that was

Yesterday, I had my first ever traditional barber's wet shave. In between mild panic (when he put the hot towel on my face I thought of Christopher Hitchen's terrifying account of being waterboarded) and sheer terror (a straight razor shave is so close it actually hurts, and when the barber's at your throat your life really is in another man's hands), 2012 flashed before my eyes. Here's what I saw.

Weddings

I went to five weddings this year, in the UK, France, Spain and Thailand. Nothing says 'early 30s' like your annual social calendar being built around weddings. I'm not complaining, I love a good wedding. I never cry and rarely take pictures, but there's something wonderful about seeing lots of people who usually take pleasure in being rude to one another smiling and talking interestedly, or hearing people say all the things they can't usually say in public, and really meaning it. The trick, I've found, is to get just the right amount of alcohol in you and in front of you in time for the speeches, so you're compus mentis throughout but never in danger of going without - there's nothing worse than minor dehydration signalling the onset of an early hangover. Then, when the speeches are done and the music starts, you can well and truly knock yourself over the edge in a blizzard of hugs, chugs and demented dance moves.

Kids

Children are closely related to weddings and the onset of true adulthood, and I had the pleasure of meeting a few of my closest friends' new additions this year. You're not human if you're not moved to prod, tickle, make stupid noises and grin at babies, and of course I did all that, but I was also surprised to find that I was genuinely interested in the routines, the stages of early development, the coping mechanisms that new parents instinctively develop. In January 2012, former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks became a mother and named her daughter Scarlett; a striking name, considering Brooks' 2011, and it struck me that having a child is so significant, signalling a new start, a chance at redemption perhaps, rebirth following birth. 2012 was also the year of the Jimmy Savile revelations - what a shame that the News of the World wasn't around for one last hurrah to help capitalise our collective feelings of outrage that Britain's most prolific kiddie beast was allowed to operate so flagrantly for so long.

Family

Kim and I had our first Christmas together, in London, with both of our families. Now that I think about it, I don't remember a single argument, which is unusual for my family. Hollywood films and newspaper editorial columns and tv comedy suggest that bringing the in-laws together is generally a recipe for calamity, but it worked out pretty well this time round, until my dad got his 1980s Warren Beatty cream-coloured coat out of storage...

Trips

I rediscovered skiing in February, spent a week on a farm in East Sussex recording with Scandinavia in April, and got a firsthand snapshot of China's economic boom in June. I also got a load of much-needed sun at each of the weddings I went to, not just in France, Spain and Thailand but also in England - I spent the sunniest day of the year, in early September, sitting on the hill at the University of Kent overlooking Canterbury, with barely a soul in sight, and felt at once nostalgic and the most relaxed I'd been all year. But maybe best of all, I got to enjoy the London 2012 Olympics without needing to travel much - we'd all predicted armageddon, but instead we got a well-orchestrated month-long celebration of human strength, endeavour and spirit.

Material things

Book: My Friend the Mercenary is like Andy McNab on ecstasy: more vivid, exciting and sentimental. Cambridge graduate James Brabazon, the author, is a rookie war reporter, looking for his big break, which he finds in the civil war in Liberia in the early 2000s. His chaperone is Nick du Toit, an apartheid-era special forces soldier from South Africa, with whom Brabazon becomes close friends. It's a Boy's Own adventure come to life, highlighting the tragedy of modern-day Liberia and the moral complexities of doing politics and business in Africa. Photographer Tim Hetherington, who accompanied Brabazon and du Toit, was killed in Libya in 2011. I quite literally couldn't put this book down.

Music: As I get older, I'm not as interested in new things as I used to be. I buy my clothes from shops I've come to trust, loading up on jumpers from Uniqlo, buying shoes from Russell & Bromley when I need them, and so on. The Weakerthans are like one of these trusted clothes shops. Reunion Tour, their last album, was released in 2007 but it's the best thing I listened to in 2012. Night Windows in particular is majestic, the best song John K. Samson's written to date, inspired by the Edward Hopper painting but apparently about a friend who died in combat in Afghanistan.

Film: Maybe it's because I watched Drive alone, in a bed that felt like the floor, in a mostly-empty hotel with decaying '70s decor near Beijing airport, that it resonated so strongly with me. But I suspect that the technicolor dreamscapes set to Kraftwerk-influenced, transient, emotionless and catchy faux-80s synth pop, sharply contrasted with some thrilling all-American genre-violence, would have worked just as effectively regardless of the viewing location. I read the book afterwards, which is a triumph of chilling 21st Century LA noir and far darker than the film, but if you're going to cast Hollywood A-listers as anonymous outsiders you've got to add some haunting romance, and Drive the movie has it in spades.

Scandinavia shows in October and November

A typical Scandinavian crowd

It looks as though we're going to be playing a couple more shows this year, to double the number we played in 2011.

The first is on Saturday 6 October at Cargo, in Shoreditch. We're on from 8-8:30pm, which then leaves us the rest of the night to argue amongst ourselves and hang out with anyone else we know. Cargo is massive, and we've been told by the promoter that there'll be hell to pay if we don't get friends to turn up. So, if you're free that night and fancy a bit of live music, please come down. We'll send out a facebook invite soon.

Cargo is very popular

The second is likely to be on Saturday 17 November at the Banksy Cafe, on Essex Road, which is a ten minute walk from Angel tube station. It's an acoustic show, disguised as a joint birthday party for Tom and I. The Banksy Cafe is so-called because there's a real Banksy (ironically, semi-ruined by graffiti now) on the wall outside. Inside, the decor is great, it's super laid back, they serve booze and stay open until around 1am. They also have a working upright piano, hence the acoustic show. Once again, we'll send out a facebook invite soon.

Banksy Cafe, Essex Road

Finally, please check out Mark McCafferty's photos from the Scandinavia Summer Ball 2012 here. These glamorous shots of men in Moroccan shirts should make you want to attend one of these upcoming shows, especially if you missed the Summer Ball. Hopefully see you at one or both of these shows!

Warrick

I'm not punk, and I'm telling everyone

Pussy Riot

When I was 17, the question 'what is punk?' was as important, and as difficult to answer, as the universal rhetorical question, 'what's the meaning of life?' It was hotly debated in the pages of fanzines like Maximum Rock n Roll and even caused punk rock luminaries like Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys to be physically assaulted for 'selling out'. Of course, it's a trivial issue and was rightfully lampooned by Jawbreaker in the song 'Boxcar'. But it's not entirely meaningless. Reading about the two year prison sentences handed down to the three members of Pussy Riot yesterday for singing an anti-Putin song in Moscow's main cathedral, it struck me that the question 'what is punk?' has been answered. And the answer is 'Pussy Riot are'.

Pussy Riot - unmasked and in court

Why? Because their protest performance was truly about resistance in the face of state and cultural oppression. It was about politics - big, scary politics rather than the local kind particular to one city, region or community. And it was about popular culture - not the industry of pop culture, but the very fabric of Russian society. The target of Pussy Riot's rant was Vladimir Putin who is almost certainly a tyrant (if only with a lower case 't'). But in this case, Putin is the devil simply because he is the ultimate representative of Russia and its people.

The Devil

Singing songs about political leaders you dislike does not make you bold. Jello Biafra was not being particularly punk when he wrote and sang, so imaginatively, about Ronald Reagan, California governor Jerry Brown and Pol Pot. Rather, he was a shrewd businessman (who, like so many shrewd businessmen before and after him, was sued, years later, for ripping off his partners). His business was entertainment. In the early days of his punk career, Biafra was an articulate, humorous and creative critic of corporate America and the Moral Majority. But the Moral Majority, despite their misleading name, were never mainstream American society; rather, they were predecessors of the modern day Tea Party who, however weird, are just as marginal as the hyper-liberal bi-coastal communities that Biafra has, by turns, chided and called his compatriots. And corporate America, despite its poor environmental record, has made life for those living on American soil richer, cheaper and more convenient than in most other parts of the world. Despite his nom de plume, the man his parents named Eric Boucher was an American whose gifts to the world (and they were wonderful rock n roll gifts) were enabled by freedoms of speech, economy and personal movement that are endemic to American life.

Jello Biafra

PMRC's contribution to pop culture

Biafra's greatest claim to being punk was when, in 1986, his home (and office of Alternative Tentacles, his record label) was raided by the police and he was briefly accused of distributing harmful material to minors. It was a political move, he claims, by the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC), to send a message to other musicians that writing and selling obscene music could prove to be prohibitively expensive if you faced the likelihood of being taken to court. Led by Tipper Gore, wife of former Vice President Al Gore, the PMRC were more mainstream and, potentially, more powerful than the Moral Majority could ever have hoped to be. There was a court case, and there were probably a few tears, but in the end common sense prevailed. Funnily enough, in 2005 Biafra and his would-be prosecutor, Michael Guarino, publicly reconciled on a US radio programme, and Guarino talked about his change of opinion. A great example of democratic local politics in action.

The PMRC, with Tipper Gore far-right

When the state, rather than simply an individual in a position of power, is against you and everything you stand for, and when the culture at large stands by that prejudice and allows, or uses, the legal system to punish you, you're an outsider. If you stand by your beliefs, then you might be a brave, or foolish, outsider - and there's a good chance that someone will make a martyr or anti-hero of you. You may also be Charles Manson, a lunatic who deserves to be locked away. In Pussy Riot's case, seemingly few people in Russia admire their protest. It was considered blasphemous and their demands for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, distasteful. They are outsiders, but they should not be. In a democratic country their actions would've been considered a publicity stunt. If only. They are being sent to jail and very few people in Russia, especially those with influence, appear to be speaking up for them. There's no romance in this.

The concept of punk could only have been invented in the West, and could only ever have any real meaning in places that do not have the good fortune to enjoy the freedoms of speech, action and economy that people in democratic countries enjoy. Once, at a work conference, we were asked to talk to the person sitting next to us about an educational experience that had defined our learning when we were at school. I was sitting next to an older Indian man, a CEO, and I told him about playing in a band, writing our own songs and putting on our own shows, and how I learned more from this than I sometimes felt I did at school. He looked at me and said, 'wasn't it just a bit of rebellion?', to which I responded 'not at all, my parents were extremely supportive of it'. And there it is. We thought of it as punk, but it really wasn't. It was a privilege and I get nostalgic at the memory of it. I doubt very much that the members of Pussy Riot will be able to look back upon this period in their lives, and the greater life of Russian society, and say that it was a wonderful time.