Just read that Ray Davies new album Working Mans Cafe is free with tomorrows Sunday Times.
Don't suppose any of our boys will do something like this in the near future ,
if ever

Never in a million years would "our boys" do that.
The nearest thing was the Exile on Main Street flexi-disc with extracts of the album, that went out free with the NME way back in 1972.

its a clever way of spreading the music to the masses which makes sense if otherwise you only sell a couple of thousand copies.

what if the Stones had decided to give a free copy of ABB away with every ticket purchase? their new music would have been much more common which would have helped a great deal to get them away from the nostalgia act image.

svendborg wrote


''The nearest thing was the Exile on Main Street flexi-disc with extracts of the album, that went out free with the NME way back in 1972.''



I still have a mint copy of that flexi as I bought a couple of copies at the time.

Mick would have reached more people if he had done this with his latest release though

It's a good idea.
Radiohead does it very clever as well. You can choose how much you want to pay for the download, so you could actually also download it for free. The average price people pay is still 7 $. That's not so bad, given the fact that they have no costs for distribution, etc.
The Stones should do that with their vaults. Release it on the website only!


Belgrade-Bucharest-Budapest-Brno

Lorenz Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The Stones should do that with their vaults.
> Release it on the website only!

that would be ok with me as long as their website would also offer lossless FLAC files, not just mp3.

Next week it hits the shops with 2 extra tracks.

alimente Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> its a clever way of spreading the music to the
> masses which makes sense if otherwise you only
> sell a couple of thousand copies.


I agree but that isn't the case with The Stones.


> what if the Stones had decided to give a free copy
> of ABB away with every ticket purchase? their new
> music would have been much more common which would
> have helped a great deal to get them away from the
> nostalgia act image.


Imo it would make them look like more of a nostalgia act giving away a cd for free instead of having it chart well worldwide and selling two and a half million copies. Besides it wouldn't have reached many more people if they gave it away for free at the concerts. It sold 2.5 million worldwide. How many people attended the concerts? Maybe five million tix but many of them were repeat customers so how many different people? Probably wouldn't have made that much of a difference as far as the number of people that got the album.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-20 22:04 by FrankM.

-

"Lyin' awake in a cold, cold sweat. Am I overdrawn, am I going in debt?
It gets worse, the older that you get. No escape from the state of confusion I'm in.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-21 20:37 by FrankM.

Ray Davies irons out the kinks
Ten years on, Ray Davies has fulfilled his solo promise. He talks about his new album, which comes free with The Sunday Times today

Every other summer for the past six years, Ray Davies has held a residential course in songwriting for the Arvon creative-writing foundation. “I thought he’d fly in for a couple of hours and let an assistant do the rest,” blogged one recent participant. “But he was so selfless. That’s not the image we have of celebrities, being so giving.” There are plenty of people who have played alongside, managed, produced or married Davies in the course of the past 40-odd years who might raise an eyebrow at such a description. The central irony of the former Kink’s life – that as a musician he is one of pop’s most effective communicators, while on a personal level he has always seemed to struggle with intimacy – is not lost on him. Talking about a lyric in his new song One More Time – “Why is true love so difficult to find?” – he says: “Every time I sing that line, I get a funny, eerie chill.”

A notorious skinflint who apparently used to walk around London in the early days of the Kinks with all his cash stuffed in one of his socks, the 63-year-old risks debunking his cagey, tightwad reputation further by giving away copies of his new album, Working Man’s Café, with today’s Sunday Times. But Davies has always been fleet of foot when it comes to evading categories and expectations. He may have shown an uncanny knack for prising defeat from the jaws of victory, as when, on the cusp of a breakthrough in 1965, a violent argument with a union fixer on an American television set led to the Kinks being banned from performing in the USA for four years. But he has also demonstrated a prescience at odds, again, with received wisdom, which has Davies down as a curmudgeonly Little Englander, for ever shackled to his past and railing against modern life. His live show, Storyteller, which mixed sung performance with inter-song reminiscences, inspired the American music show of the same name. And here he is, 50 years after he first picked up a guitar, surfing the cover-mount zeitgeist and seemingly quite comfortable in the uncharted commercial waters in which he has set sail.

Well, fairly comfortable, at any rate. “I think I’d rather have stayed in the West Country and gone fishing,” he cackles, when our discussion turns to the value that is placed on music in today’s file-sharing environment. “It’s difficult for people like me not to sound hypocritical, because music is for the people. But there must be some means of compensation to the artist. I’m supposed to be a wise old head, but I’m baffled by it all.” We are in Davies’s publicist’s office in north London, and the singer, despite sitting semi-concealed beside a bookcase, is on affable form. He begins by removing his shoes. He tends to do this, he says, because it eases the pain in the leg in which he was shot during a robbery in New Orleans in 2004. He is wary, he admits, of succumbing to nostalgia for the old record-industry days, even though, like many, he is pessimistic about the present situation.

“We got totally ripped off,” he says about the early contracts the Kinks signed. “Now, though? I’m not saying Oxfam should start a record company, but it’s getting that way. At what point does it become charitable? The good thing about the music industry, back in the Wild West days, was that there was always another crook to go to. Now, it’s down to two or three major labels that own the world.” Davies traces the current crisis back to the 1970s, when “it became grotesquely inflated. I remember sitting in Warner Bros and this man said, ‘I’ve got some bad news today. We’ve become an industry’”. Not that Davies is entirely against the coexistence of creativity and the bottom line. “I don’t know if commerce should dictate art, but in a sense, it always has. The wisest, most durable painters always had a bit of a business head, from Michelangelo. Rembrandt had to go to his benefactors. And I can go on about the bad old days of corporate interference, but it’s good to have something to fight against – it gets the anger up. Or people go off and make concept albums.”

Including, of course, Davies himself, who embarked on a succession of such records with 1968’s superb The Village Green Preservation Society, before descending into megalomania with stinkers such as the two mid1970s albums Preservation Act 1 and 2. This least lovely period in the Kinks’ canon culminated in 1975’s wretched Soap Opera album. The conceptual conceit here was that a delusional accountant named Norman believed he was Ray Davies; thus live shows saw “Norman” (oh, go on then: Ray) acting out this fantasy by singing Davies compositions. Unsurprising that the Kinks left their record label shortly afterwards.

A key track on Working Man’s Café seems to touch on this state of confusion, of a sense of identity being bent out of all recognition by other people’s perceptions. “It’s been great to watch the sights,” Davies sings on Imaginary Man, “playing the edited highlights/And all the outtakes you did not see were only my unreality.” The song opens with the arresting and implicitly stock-taking question, “Is this really it?” “If you say that,” argues Davies, “people get it at once. If you open a door for the listener, you’ve got their attention, simply because you’ve just said, ‘Please come in and find your world within mine.’ I did some writing once with [the playwright and scriptwriter] Jack Rosenthal, and he said that the best way to start a film or a play is to see a brick going through a window. You want to know.”

What was largely missing from those mid1970s conceptual nadirs – the tunesmithery that produced imperishable classics such as Waterloo Sunset, Sunny Afternoon and You Really Got Me; the inclusiveness and need-to-know structures of his human mini-dramas – is what Davies’s new album sees him rediscovering. His first official solo album, last year’s Other People’s Lives may have been lyrically acute, but, with one or two exceptions, it failed to reconnect with that once gushing musical and narrative wellspring.

In contrast, Working Man’s Café positively bristles with melodies and inquiry. The “ooh-ooh” harmonies on Imaginary Man; the descending chord progressions on Peace in Our Time and You’re Asking Me: these work to templates invented by Davies, which are his and his alone.

As, too, is his ability deftly to turn the general into the personal, which is at its most devastating on the title track. Beginning as a lament for landmarks and reassurances lost in the hurly-burly of change and progress, the song switches suddenly and unmistakeably to the subject of Davies’s younger brother and long-term love/hate figure, Dave: “I thought I knew you then, but will I know you now?” the elder sibling sings. ”There's got to be a place for us to meet/I'll call you when I've found it.“

“I would like to work with him on a creative level again,” Davies says of his brother, who suffered a stroke only months after Davies was shot. “It’s something I really look forward to, as irksome and painful as it can be at times. But it’s the spark that made that unit function in the way it did. I miss that opposition. I’m not saying what I do now is unopposed, or that I don’t do a certain amount of self-criticism, but I do miss that continually having to prove my point.”

The self-criticism he himself brings to bear on his work is an inevitable part, Davies says, of the solitary nature of songwriting. When I ask him if his own personality made this process more insular than it might have been, or vice versa, his answer goes round and round the houses. “I was solitary as a child,” he begins, “in a big family, but very self-contained.” (He was the second-youngest of eight children, and Dave, his only brother, was born three years after him.) “Song-writing suited my lifestyle,” he continues. “It was something I could do really late at night when I couldn’t sleep.” Later, he doubles back. “It really suited my development as a person: we came together at the right time, the art form and the person. After the first few hits, I thought, ‘Here’s this wonderful opportunity to develop this mad, chaotic bunch of people and just give them things to play.’

“The only downside was that I didn’t really go out and enjoy the 1960s: I stayed home and wrote songs, in a semi. But, you know, what’s wrong with that?”

Plenty, apparently. “People would say, ‘If only Ray Davies would do a solo album, get away from the Kinks.’ But I’ve done that, and I miss them, I miss the playing, casting music for them. We’d make records like Village Green, somehow knowing that it might be a flop, but it was a cause, we all believed in it. You can do that with bands. It’s like Radiohead saying, ‘Let’s put this record out and let people pay what they want for it’. A band can make that statement. It’s much more difficult as a solo performer.”

Private space is, he says, overrated. “You go, ‘I’m alone at last,’ and what happens? You can’t write. A lot of the good stuff is written on the back of newspapers you’re carrying around, anyway. But I’m really bad at taking that handwritten scrap and typing it into a computer. In a strange way, it loses its innocence if you do. It’s not as tactile, you can’t feel it, that moment in a restaurant when you wrote it on a napkin.” He pauses, and lets out a long sigh. “I’m so dumb, it’s not true. Why can’t I just be normal?” Like the quintessential songwriter that he is, hovering above himself, self-medicating through song, Davies reflects: “I write a lot to discover why I’ve reacted in a certain way, or how I behaved, why that moment affected me.” He ends with the startlingly bleak conclusion: “I’m so uncomfortable being a solo artist – it really is awful.”

Morphine Song, another key new track, unites all of Davies’s gifts in one four-minute package: narrative, setting, contrast (the jaunty knees-up of a tune, jollied along by accordion and brass; the narrator’s humour-coated but essentially bleak, hospital-bed view of life, and death, going past). On No One Listen, he attempts to cauterise the psychological wounds resulting from his shooting with a wry but menacing sideswipe at the Lou-isiana justice system, which recently announced that it was not proceeding with charges against the singer’s assailants. “It has given me considerable grief,” he says. “Do you let somebody go who you know perpetrated the crime?”

Later, on the phone, Davies is on even more avuncular form, laughing when I suggest he has been burdened with a sourpuss, doom-mongering reputation every bit as onerous as the stupendous back catalogue he carries around with him. “I don’t think my work is as glum as people make out,” he chuckles. “Sourpuss and doom-monger? I definitely oppose that.”

I ask him if he ever plays his music to his children (he has four daughters, from separate relationships). “I’ve got an adorable 10 ½-year-old who just likes the hip-hop,” he answers, sounding slightly downcast. “The older ones get to listen to my music eventually. It’s always nice when someone close to you says, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good.’ I remember with my last album, I played it in my car to my youngest daughter, and afterwards she said, ‘Dad, do you have any other songs?’ ” Oh, just a few.

— Working Man’s Café is out on V2 on October 29

You might have to scrape me off the floor at the end of the tour, but it'll be really good scrapings. - Mick Jagger

The article above, taken from the Timesonline also has links to download Vietnam Cowboy, from the new album, and an iMix from the Kinks years on the Pye label

[entertainment.timesonline.co.uk]

You might have to scrape me off the floor at the end of the tour, but it'll be really good scrapings. - Mick Jagger

FYI everyone; it is being given away in a London paper. The author of the thread used the phrase "Sunday Times" which I mistook to mean the Sunday edition of the New York Times. So don't go out on a wild goose chase like me and go to your local Seven Eleven looking for it. Guess I'll have to wait until it hits the stores.

"Lyin' awake in a cold, cold sweat. Am I overdrawn, am I going in debt?
It gets worse, the older that you get. No escape from the state of confusion I'm in.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-21 20:42 by FrankM.

Sorry about that FrankM I thought most people realised it was the British or as you say London Sunday Times, it is only know here as the Sunday Times, when I have been in America I'm sure there is one called the New York Sunday Times.
Didn't mean to confuse anyone.

adotulipson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sorry about that FrankM I thought most people
> realised it was the British or as you say London
> Sunday Times, it is only know here as the Sunday
> Times, when I have been in America I'm sure there
> is one called the New York Sunday Times.
> Didn't mean to confuse anyone.

No need to apologize. There is a Seven Eleven right around the corner so I didn't go out of my way really. I just wanted to warn others that may have mistakenly thought (as I did) that is was the Sunday New York Times. Should have known it was too good to be true- getting his new cd for four bucks lol.

FrankM Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> alimente Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > its a clever way of spreading the music to the
> > masses which makes sense if otherwise you only
> > sell a couple of thousand copies.
>
>
> I agree but that isn't the case with The Stones.
>
>
> > what if the Stones had decided to give a free
> copy
> > of ABB away with every ticket purchase? their
> new
> > music would have been much more common which
> would
> > have helped a great deal to get them away from
> the
> > nostalgia act image.
>
>
> Imo it would make them look like more of a
> nostalgia act giving away a cd for free instead of
> having it chart well worldwide and selling two and
> a half million copies. Besides it wouldn't have
> reached many more people if they gave it away for
> free at the concerts. It sold 2.5 million
> worldwide. How many people attended the concerts?
> Maybe five million tix but many of them were
> repeat customers so how many different people?

far more than 2.5 million. Youre also assuming that everyone who bought the CD attended the shows. Thats not the case.


> Probably wouldn't have made that much of a
> difference as far as the number of people that got
> the album.



well, Prince's new album - given away with the Sunday times in the UK - reached 3 million homes.

His previous album sold 80,000 copies here. Quite a difference - the publicity it got him for his run of shows at the 02 was absolutely massive and the deal (for UK distribution only) trousered him about £250-300,000

Chart positions are meaningless. Theres no point in the Stones making any more new records if they wont play the bloody songs because they have no confidence in their audience either buying the product or knowing it. If they give the album away with ticket sales (something Prince has been doing now for a while) or do a similar newspaper deal, the audience have no excuse NOT to know their new product and it helps get them away from just being a nostalgia act. Plus, the overheads on distributing the CD are less and they'll end up making more money out of it.

Have a similar distribution in several countries around the world and you multiply the sales and income several times over.

Everyone wins.

I can imagine the press they coud have gotten if they have gave away free Cd with every ticket purchased...We'll still be hearing about it.

Maybe the newspaper deal is more dignified.

I bought it on sunday in Virgin Magastore for £2!!!

And its quite good.......

leteyer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I can imagine the press they coud have gotten if
> they have gave away free Cd with every ticket
> purchased...We'll still be hearing about it.
>
> Maybe the newspaper deal is more dignified.


I dont think theyd have got ANY bad press had they given a CD with their album. What is there to complain about when you get a deal like that?

At £150 or $450 a ticket, it would be a good way of getting back countering the negative press they usually get for putting profit before art all the time.

IMHO I think the giving away of your latest album free in a Sunday newspaper gives the impression of desperation. ie: Your not gonna sell many anyhow so why not?

You also don't get any packaging and the buyer immediately suspects that it'll be crap.

I'd suspect this is something the Stones after 8 years would want to avoid.

Radioheads idea was very intersting and caused alot of fuss. It also makes you want to search it out and must be a very good marketing tool ie: focus more promotion on your website.

the give away at the gigs also makes me as if the CD's a 'by' product and not worth any artistic merit. A CD of rarities might be worth it but joe public wouldn't give a toss

FrankM Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Imo it would make them look like more of a
> nostalgia act giving away a cd for free instead of
> having it chart well worldwide and selling two and
> a half million copies.


"Look like a nostalgia act"?

The Rolling Stones ARE a nostalgia act.

To a degree, but I suspect the stones don't particularly perceive themselves as a nostaglia act.....

Hey, Frank M., Ray Davies' new CD will not be available in America except as an import. V2 Records closed up shop in the States apart from their classical releases. He intends to find a new label to release it Stateside in 2008. You can get it from Amazon as an import only.

The tune, "Vietnam Cowboys" was part of his Capitol Records showcase in 2000 with Yo La Tengo along with several songs that made it onto OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES ("Stand Up Comic," "Next Door Neighbours," Creatures of Little Faith," "Thanksgiving Day," "The Morning After") and a few that have yet to be released ("The Empty Room," "The Deal," "Americana," "Otis Riffs").

As for the Stones, they definitely have a different view of the touring band than they do from the studio band. If they didn't the BIGGER BANG tour wouldn't have just been another greatest hits tour like LICKS.

ablett Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> IMHO I think the giving away of your latest album
> free in a Sunday newspaper gives the impression of
> desperation. ie: Your not gonna sell many anyhow
> so why not?
>

what impression does playing 1 song per show from the album (and occasionally NONE) give?

An artist cant really expect their audience to embrace their new work if they've clearly no respect for it themselves

If you want to avoid the obligation of being a nostalgia act, then surely the obvious way is to maximise your potential audience's awareness of your new product. Ticket sales clearly arent translating into new album sales, so this is a much more effective way of getting the music across BEFORE you attempt to ram the new music down the throats of the concert attendee.



ablett Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> To a degree, but I suspect the stones don't
> particularly perceive themselves as a nostaglia
> act.....



pre-40 Licks I would have agreed with you 100%. A Bigger Bang - in reality - turned out to be more or a greatest hits-heavy show than Licks (with the possible exception of the stadium gigs) ever was.

Theyve completely gone full circle once they saw how much money could be made from nostalgia in 2002. No coincidence that it shifted more units since any album since Hot rocks 30 years earlier.

>the give away at the gigs also makes me as if the CD's a 'by' product and not worth any artistic merit. A CD of rarities might be worth it but joe public wouldn't give a toss

the Stones clearly think Joe Public didnt give a toss about ABB pretty quickly, so if thats the case what is there to lose? Of theyre going to continue to target a certain audience in the way they do, then the situation isnt going to get any better. Prince managed to get his new music across to an audience of 'casual' fans who hadnt listened to his new stuff in well over a decade. Sound familiar? Wasnt anywhere near his best work, but he recognises that his audience arent necessarily there primarily to hear the new stuff but he can find a way of making them aware of it...also makes it much easier to work it into a concert setting.

As for the 'artistic merit' argument. You can turn it round another way. Even if you dont like much of the album, theres always a comeback of saying "well it wasnt that bad considering what it cost". Its really down to the band to put a value on any new product. If they care about the songs - then f**king play them. If not, then find an easier way of getting them to the ticket buyer.

Incidentally, the Stones have done 'give aways' of a new release before with a product purchase. They gave 40 Licks away with the fan club membership in 2002-2003 when you bought tickets. Granted, we all pretty much had it but its still a way of getting the music across...I'm sure quite a few of us used those extra Cds as gifts!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-22 19:17 by Gazza.

Gazz, I'm with you. The stones made a poor move compared with say the Who with intrducing new stuff at the ABB shows.

But I still think giving your latest album away gives an impression of liitle care regarding the album.

It had been 8 years since the last one.

the CD gained many lengthy and positive reviews. thats the complete opposite to ray davies OR Princes new album which would hardly chart.

And regarding nostalia, I would guess the Stones no a good meal ticket when they've got one ie: hits laden shows but I still bet Jagger et all don't regard themselves as some happless sixties nostalgia act doing the rounds.

see - the acknowledgement of them knowing a 'meal ticket' reinforces my argument, I think. Money over art every time.

Maybe its the audience they target that they see as 'hapless'? When you're apologetically introducing stuff 'Sway' as an 'obscure song' (friom an album that sold 7 million) thats a pretty revisionist take on nostalgia in my book.

I'm not suggesting they should have given away ABB in a newspaper when it came out - I'm suggesting they should have promoted it better by playing the songs or in some way of making their audience aware of it. I dont think including a CD with a $450 ticket is cheapening themselves. Its an act of good faith. they gave 40 Licks away with a fan club membership that cost a lot less than that.

Accepting the fact that after a while of making a reasonable fist of doing so, they gave up the ghost on promoting it, maybe its time for a rethink on the way they get across FUTURE music - which is something they must continue to create to STOP being a nostalgia act.

They dont seem to have a record contract now, so maybe this is a new way of shifting their product in a more effective way.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-22 19:31 by Gazza.

The fact that they didn't played ABB on the ABB tour pissed me off, like most people here on the forum or any fan anywhere in the world. But that didin't hit the newpapers or news sites on the web, the press couldn't care less.

But if they give away the new album, now they have something to talk about, and for some reason, -maybe I'm totally wrong- I'm sure the press will have a blast attacking the old boys and how nobody buys their albums anymore so they have to give them away, or get a freeby if you buy a ticket.

Again, I may be very wrong, but just a thought...

Gazza Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> see - the acknowledgement of them knowing a 'meal
> ticket' reinforces my argument, I think. Money
> over art every time.
>
> Maybe its the audience they target that they see
> as 'hapless'? When you're apologetically
> introducing stuff 'Sway' as an 'obscure song'
> (friom an album that sold 7 million) thats a
> pretty revisionist take on nostalgia in my book.
>
> I'm not suggesting they should have given away ABB
> in a newspaper when it came out - I'm suggesting
> they should have promoted it better by playing the
> songs or in some way of making their audience
> aware of it. I dont think including a CD with a
> $450 ticket is cheapening themselves. Its an act
> of good faith. they gave 40 Licks away with a fan
> club membership that cost a lot less than that.


I agree on this point. A newspaper give away would look silly imo (for The Stones anyway). I don't have a problem with Ray Davies doing it since his solo stuff is way under the radar and the fact that he has to give it away is no reflection on the music. I also wouldn't have a problem with them giving it away with a ticket purchase but I still maintain that it would not reach more people that way unless you are giving it away at the concerts AND selling it the usual way.

Do the math. They sold 2.5 million copies worldwide. If they didn't sell it the conventional way and just gave it away at the concerts it would still reach about the same number of people. I know by now they have probably sold five million tickets or close but a lot of those are repeat customers. Some people went to five shows, some to ten, some to more.


> Accepting the fact that after a while of making a
> reasonable fist of doing so, they gave up the
> ghost on promoting it, maybe its time for a
> rethink on the way they get across FUTURE music -
> which is something they must continue to create to
> STOP being a nostalgia act.
>
> They dont seem to have a record contract now, so
> maybe this is a new way of shifting their product
> in a more effective way.


I honestly think this "nostalgia act" phrase is overused here. Yes to SOME DEGREE they are a nostalgia act. They play little of their new stuff at their shows and their best days are behind them, but when I hear the phrase nostalgia act I think of someone like Frankie Valli, not a band that just topped the worldwide chart with their latest release.

FrankM Wrote:
> Do the math. They sold 2.5 million copies
> worldwide. If they didn't sell it the conventional
> way and just gave it away at the concerts it would
> still reach about the same number of people. I
> know by now they have probably sold five million
> tickets or close but a lot of those are repeat
> customers. Some people went to five shows, some to
> ten, some to more.


There isnt THAT high a proportion who went to multiple shows. Take a few major cities out of the equation like New York, LA, London etc and most people only got one opportunity. In many areas, they didnt get any. How many people in a vast country like Australia for example got the chance to see BOTH of the shows they chose to play there? Hardly any. A high % have to travel to see a show, they dont necessarily play their home city, let alone make return trips to that area.

Plus, a concert ticket was out of the price range for a lot of people who could have afforded to buy the CD (which was 10% of the price of the average concert ticket)

Target the affluent concert ticket buyer in your major markets (ie the ones youre playing in much of the time) with a promotional gimmick like that as WELL as selling it in the shops and you reach more people...and even better, you get the new music to them BEFORE they go to the shows, so they (gasp) may actually listen to it, recognise it and even LIKE it when the band play the songs.


I honestly think this "nostalgia act" phrase is
> overused here. Yes to SOME DEGREE they are a
> nostalgia act. They play little of their new stuff
> at their shows

.....which by definition makes them a nostalgia act....(in some cases they didnt play ANY new stuff)



and their best days are behind
> them,

Thats not necessarily a case of being a nostalgia act, more a case of losing one's creative muse. You can still be past your best and continue to try and play new material. It would be unrealistic for any fan to expect any act in their 60's to produce work on the same level as their best output from when they were 30-40 years younger - especially when theyve such a high standard of material to live up to. ABB was a noble effort, though....theyve nothing to be ashamed about with that one.


but when I hear the phrase nostalgia act I
> think of someone like Frankie Valli, not a band
> that just topped the worldwide chart with their
> latest release.


Ok, then theyre not a nostalgia act for the first couple of weeks after they release an album. Being compared to relics like Frankie Valli is simply uncomfortable for fans of a band which we like to perceive as cool, but thats not borne out by reality.

Consider the band's releases since Bridges To babylon ten years ago - a live album, a 2-CD greatest hits album (which they toured behind), another greatest hits album reissued for the US market for the first time (Jump Back), a live double album, a new studio album and a Rarities release (half of which werent rarities but a sampler of easily available songs from recent albums)

Not a nostalgia act? One studio album, two live albums consisting mostly of old songs and three compilations - and thats not counting the ABCKO rereleases, because thats out of their control.

Some shows in late 2006 featured barely one song written within the last 3 decades.

Post-Licks the Stones have become more and more conscious that theres a lot of money to be made in nostalgia and have unapologetically went down that road almost to the exclusion of creating or performing anything new. I cant see how thats undeniable when you look at simple facts.

Uncomfortable reading for anyone who thinks theyre still cutting edge, I think.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-23 00:59 by Gazza.

Never said they were cutting edge Gazza but if you think a band that sold two and a half million copies of their latest album is just a nostalgia act then go ahead and think that. It's just your opinion. You are too hard headed for me to talk any sense into anyway lol.

"Lyin' awake in a cold, cold sweat. Am I overdrawn, am I going in debt?
It gets worse, the older that you get. No escape from the state of confusion I'm in.

LOL. Touche.

Thing is, though - theyre 'selling' healthy numbers (by the standards of most acts) of that album - but its the band themselves who need convincing, it seems.

They've evidently little confidence in the music or in their audience if they can sell that many copies - yet are assuming the same audience still doesnt know the songs or cares about them.

theyre a nostalgia act as a concert attraction (which is their own choice) - but they are still capable of making good new music.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2007-10-23 01:34 by Gazza.