The music streaming service, along with iTunes, 7Digital, Amazon and the like, has given us instant access to almost every song ever recorded. We have more music than we know what to do with, and we don’t need or want any more for Christmas.

That’s a shame, because for the past 25 years or so, CDs have been the ideal no-brainer Christmas gift. Now no one wants CDs – and digital music is much more difficult to wrap…

Read the full story over at Sabotage Times.

Read the full story at Sabotage Times.

And there, in 30 seconds of televisual madness, John Barnes manages to both hit a new career low and defile the greatest football record ever made.

Quite an achievement for a man whose playing career ended with lumbering embarrassment at Newcastle and relegation at Charlton, and whose managerial career with Celtic (‘Super Caley go ballistic’ etc) and Tranmere must surely rank as one of the least successful of all time.

Barnes never exactly pulled up any trees playing for his country either, and some might say his original rap on World in Motion was the best thing he ever did in an England shirt. It would be hard to argue with that opinion.

Because World In Motion by New Order, some say EnglandNewOrder, is indisputably the best football record ever made. You can keep your Three Lions, and your Back Home, and your All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit.

It is the best football record ever made because: a) It is really very good; and b) It helped change the face of English football – and some might say football in general – forever.

Cast your mind back to the end of the 89/90 football season. English football was virtually unrecognisable to the bells and whistles phenomenon it is today. Liverpool won the Barclays First Division, but they didn’t get into Europe. English clubs had been banned from European competition for five years, and Liverpool for six. The shadow of hooliganism still hung over the game.

It was only a year on from Hillsborough, and the memories of that disaster remained fresh in the mind. Racism was prevalent on the terraces, and football was hardly an attractive place to take the family.

And on the pitch things were fairly uninspiring. The PFA and football writers’ players of the year were David Platt and that man John Barnes, and there was very little foreign talent around.

Not that you would get much of a chance to watch it. Armchair fans were restricted to the occasional Big Match and lamentable highlights shows on ITV.

Overall, English football was in a pretty miserable state. There was absolutely no reason to think that the national team would have any success at the World Cup that summer in Italy. There was very little optimism.

And then came World In Motion. New Order, fresh from the success of the Ibiza-infused Technique, teamed up with Keith Allen, Dad of Lily, to record the track. Also roped in were Barnes and various team-mates including Paul Gascoigne and Peter Beardsley, both of whom, legend has it, recorded versions of the rap that never made it onto the final track. Throw in some Kenneth Wolstenholme samples, and the end result was something quite special.

The genius of World In Motion is that, as the rap admits, it ain’t a football song. Yes, there is talk of creating space and beating your man, but really it’s bigger than that. ‘Love’s got the world in motion,’ the chorus proclaims. Love, not football. It’s only at the end, as it swells to a climax, that the song throws in, ‘We’re playing for England, En-ger-land!’, and by then you’ve been drawn in and can hardly help singing along.

World In Motion helped create belief in a national team that arrived at Italia 90 with little to no chance. Peter Hook has said that the song ‘enhanced patriotism’, and that’s true. These were the days before every other car flew a cross of St George, and just about the most commitment anyone gave to showing their support for England was to collect World Cup coins or Panini stickers.

It’s obviously an exaggeration to say that World In Motion propelled England into the semi finals, but it certainly helped. It encouraged us to go out and buy England shirts, have a couple of beers, throw our arms around our mates and holler, ‘En-ger-land’. It encouraged us to love the game again.

What happened next is securely stored in the memory of any football fan. Sir Bobby’s genius, Lineker’s goals, Waddle’s penalty, Gazza’s tears. And that was that. English football was never the same again.

Within a couple of years we had the Premier League and wall-to-wall TV coverage. We had an influx of new talent, sponsors and money. There were new stadiums and kits and haircuts and multi-coloured boots. Not all of the changes were positive, of course, but overall the game became a bigger and better thing.

And World In Motion was the starting point. Had it not created a surge of pride and goodwill that propelled the England team into the semi finals of Italia 90 who knows where our national game would have ended up? We might still be watching the bloody Big Match. And that would be no good at all.

So now it’s 20 years on, and it’s World Cup 2010, and England have no chance of winning the thing. Or do they? If they hold and give and do it at the right time, anything is surely possible.

New Order – World In Motion (Spotify)

Every so often you get blown away by a band, and tonight was one of those occasions. I might not even have been here tonight had Danny and the Champions of the World not been on the supporting bill. The always-entertaining Danny (operating in reduced circumstances with opening act Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou joining him for a stripped-down set) was great, but The Duke and The King were even better – undoubtedly one of the best bands I’ve seen up here for years.

Originally a side project for Simone Felice of The Felice Brothers, The Duke and The King (named after a pair of travelling hustlers in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) has now become Felice’s priority, and seem destined for very great things. Felice (The Duke) and Bobbie Bird Burke (The King) recorded debut album Nothing Gold Can Stay in a one-room woodstove-heated cabin. It’s a good album – warm, catchy Americana – but it becomes really great in a live setting.

Adding Simi Stone and Nowell Haskins to become a four-piece takes the songs to another level. All four are outstanding vocalists, combining voices to produce outstanding harmonies, and the swapping of instruments and singing duties gives the set real variety.

Opener If You Ever Get Famous starts as folky Americana with Felice’s voice and guitar, adds Stone’s fiddle, Haskins’s drums and Burke’s bass, and builds into a glorious, harmony-fuelled gospel-soul number.

Then it’s straight into The Morning I Get To Hell, with audience participation encouraged and gained. The setlist is great – the cream of the album, plus a couple of Felice Brothers songs – Don’t Wake The Scarecrow and Radio Song – and a few nice cover versions.

One of the many highlights is a wonderful sing-a-long version of Neil Young’s Helpless, which has Danny and The Champions and the majority of the audience joining in. But the most surprising moment is when Haskins (aka Reverend Loveday) goes centre stage to perform a jaw-dropping acapella version of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. This guy’s amazing voice gets a huge roar of approval from the Cluny crowd, so loud it must be heard all along the Tyne.

The fact that these guys seem to be enjoying themselves a great deal only enhances the evening. It felt like a privilege to be here tonight, seeing a band that in a more perfect world would be on every iPod in the land. That day may come, but until then we can feel incredibly lucky to have seen a band with so much talent it could barely be squeezed into this tiny venue.

The album Nothing Gold Can Stay is on Spotify.
A fantastic live session can be downloaded free from Daytrotter.
A Later… performance of The Morning I Get To Hell is on YouTube.

Spotify Mobile allows users to stream a huge catalogue of music over WiFi or 3G and, crucially, to store 3,333 tracks in offline playlists. The Spotify Mobile app is free to download, but you’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use it, which costs £9.99 a month.

Downloading and installing is a breeze. Just access m.spotify.com on your mobile browser, and you’ll automatically get the appropriate version. Once installed, just enter your Spotify username and password and the playlists from your desktop version of Spotify appear.

Various Symbian phones look to have different onscreen layouts – neccessary, of course, as the various phones have different sized screens.

On the N78, the app’s main screen offers four options: Playlists, to view your playlists; Search, to search the entire Spotify catalogue; Home, to view the latest releases on Spotify; and More, with options for connection mode and syncing.

You can search the catalogue by track, album or artist, and enjoy instant playback, just as you would via the desktop version. If you find a track or album you like, you can easily add it to an existing playlist, or create a new one.

The Now Playing screen offers a big cover image, with the usual pause, skip, and rewind/fast forward options. Holding forward or back makes a large time elapsed display appear over the cover image, so you can easily find your favourite bit of a particular track.

Sound quality is fantastic, streaming at 320 kbps, which is twice the quality of many MP3 files, and higher than iTunes’ highest quality Plus downloads, which are 256 kbps. I listened with a set of Bose earbuds plugged into the phone’s jack, and also connected the phone to my HiFi, and was very impressed. There was a big improvement over MP3s played through Nokia’s music player, and a noticeable absence of any background noise. And, of course, with a Premium subscription there are absolutely no adverts.

For many, the killer feature of Spotify Mobile will be the offline mode. And I’m here to tell you it works a treat. Just select which playlists you’d like to make available offline, and syncing will begin. I set my app to sync when connected to WiFi, which is obviously the fastest option. It took between 5 and 10 minutes to download each album, so the initial sync takes a while. But it’s worth it. Once synced, those tracks are there for you to enjoy whenever you like with or without an online connection.

By my reckoning each track takes up around 6MB of storage space, so storing 3,333 tracks will require the best part of 20GB of memory cardage. This highlights a slight problem, as the biggest MicroSD card currently available for the N78 is 16GB, although Sandisk are set to release a 32GB card in the near future.

I also had a quick play with the iPhone Spotify app to compare. Features-wise, it was very similar, although I found it difficult to add new playlists on the iPhone, and overall preferred the Nokia app’s onscreen layout. Also, in a big win for the Nokia app, Spotify can be minimised and play in the background while you use the phone for other tasks. On the iPhone, because of Apple’s restrictions, Spotify can’t be minimised, and must be shut down to take a call or read a text.

Overall, Spotify Mobile is a must have for any Nokia Smartphone or Symbian phone user, genuinely putting a world of music in your pocket.

More Spotify posts

I say “new”, but most of it is the very definition of old rope. Alongside the admittedly very shiny and apparently very good Beatles Rock Band video game, is a glut of “remastered” albums released on a long-forgotten format known as “CD”. So we have one cutting edge 2009 release, and several very old fashioned releases that would have seemed cutting edge circa 1982.

The remastered CDs will sell of course, thanks to millions of pounds worth of marketing and blanket media coverage, although not as many as Dame Vera Lynn, who pipped the Fab Four to this week’s number one in the UK album charts. But do we really need them?

There’s no denying they’re a great pop band – maybe the best pop band of all time – and I’m a big Beatles fan (despite that rubbish pun of a name, the often tiresome psychedelic nonsense, and the inescapable fact that John Lennon was a right tit…). They recorded some of my favourite songs of all time – Blackbird, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Eleanor Rigby… Most probably if I had an XBox I’d buy The Beatles Rock Band game. But the remastered albums have precisely zero appeal.

The Beatles albums have already been released as they were meant to be heard – on vinyl (most of them in mono). The subsequent original CD releases are apparently of ropey quality. If that is the case then I’d be delighted to return my CDs to Apple/EMI to be replaced at their cost with satisfactory ones. But I don’t see why I should be expected to fork out for “remastered” CDs.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this whole thing is that Apple and EMI have yet to release the Beatles’ music digitally for download. This is due to a long-running disagreement (yes – over money) with the unhappy consequence of making the Beatles virtually irrelevant to an entire generation of music fans. I wrote about the online “Beatles Gap” in the Guardian.

Now that the music has been remastered, and with Rock Band pricking the interest of the internet generation, why not release the Beatles catalogue for digital download, rather than on hoary old CD? (And if CD, why not cassette or mini-disc?)

The answer, I’m certain, is greed. Digital downloads will eventually be released, probably in 12 months time when fans have had a chance to empty their wallets purchasing the CDs. They’ll then be expected to buy the downloads as well. Anything to wring more cash from the Beatles’ legacy. Money, that’s what they want.

The whole farrago reflects poorly on Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (and of course the other players involved in the Beatles’ estate). Nether surviving Beatle can be accurately described as being short of funds, and Ringo in particular has seemed to become particularly irritating in recent years.

First there was the Liverpool 8 debacle, then his regrettable rant at those autograph-seeking fans who have so generously contributed to his fortune. Then there is the frankly dim-witted Aviva name change advert in which Ringo asks, “Would any of this have happened to me if I’d still been Richard Starkey?” No, a common name like Richard would never have worked, you’d have needed an unusual name like John, Paul or George…

So ignore the money-grabbing tactics, but continue, like me, to love the Beatles’ music. Listen to the vinyl (or the old CDs), convert it to mp3, maybe hold out for the digital download release. But you don’t need the remastered CDs, and The Beatles don’t need your money. Money can’t buy them love.

In a world of rock and pop where the words “genius” and “legend” are thrown around with carefree abandon, here is a man who truly deserves to be called both.

Having survived drugs, mental illness and a rock dad who made Joe Jackson look like father-of-the-year material, for 67-year-old Brian Wilson to be on any stage, anywhere in the world, is something of a triumph.

Tonight he shuffles on at the Sage in a baggy beach shirt and white running shoes, perches slightly precariously on a stool behind his electric piano, and yells, “Hello Newcastle upon Tyne! I hope you enjoy the concert!” His ten-piece band assembles behind him and, after a sweet harmonising intro, launches into California Girls. And what a glorious sound. Paul McCartney reckons the musicians behind Brian are the best touring band in the world, and on this evidence it’s hard to argue with Fab Macca. To hear intricate teenage symphonies like Good Vibrations recreated live with such detail in this fantastic venue is simply stunning.

Brian seems happy and genial, even if some of the between-songs banter and skits induce a touch of deja vu. And when he sings, his voice fragile but unmistakable, it’s thrilling. To hear Brian Wilson sing God Only Knows feels like nothing less than a privilege.

The show lasts for two and a half hours, and the only grumble for my 50 quid is that there is not enough material from the Pet Sounds and Smile LPs in the set (no I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times or, my fave, Surf’s Up). The emphasis is on the upbeat, and there is little room for Brian’s more melancholic output. Not that the wedding dancers in the aisles care a jot. By the end of the show, everyone is on their feet, including Brian, leading his band through a finale of Surfin’ USA and Fun,Fun, Fun. Hats off to the band, and thank you to Brian. Won-won-won-wonderful.

Listen to my Beach Boys / Brian Wilson Spotify Playlist.
Listen to Brian’s latest album That Lucky Old Sun on Spotify.

There’s another Bruce Springsteen compilation. Cat Stevens’ best of is, apparently, ‘one of the best compilations ever!’ The Very Best of Don Henley features Boys of Summer and, erm, you know, all his other best stuff…

I hate commercial compilation CDs (got to love homemade ones, though). In the digital age they are a redundant concept. Pre-digital, they did fill a need. Like a couple of songs by one particular artist, and keen to dip into the back catalogue without buying all the albums? Before the internet, would need to pick up a compilation CD (or, indeed, an LP or cassette). You’d accept that fact that there’d be a few tracks you didn’t like, and a few of your favourites would be missing, and the track order might be a bit annoying – because there was nothing you could do about it.

Now you make your own compilations. You go to Spotify or iTunes and you compile a playlist or download all your favourite tracks and arrange them in a sensible order (always chronological, I’m saying!). You can burn a CD if you need one, tweaking it for individual friends or parties or car journeys. You are in control, and you get exactly what you want. Your personal version of the Very Best of Don Henley ends up with a much shorter running time.

The record companies seem to have realised that time is running out to peddle their officially-compiled compilations. I quite like Cat Stevens, but can the Best of Cat Stevens really be considered one of the best compilations ever? There are five or six great songs on there, but there are at least as many that only the most devout Yusuf Islam fan could describe as anything other than bloody awful.

And pity all the Dads who get Don Henley’s CD for Father’s Day on account of whistling Boys of Summer once within earshot of an offspring, and then have to appear grateful while subjecting their ears to the album’s other 12 tracks of turgidly forgettable soft rock.

Polydor have bought text ads on Amazon: ‘Celebrate the career of a legend with The Very Best Of Don Henley.’ Who is this legend, and how can we be confident that he or she would like to celebrate their career with a 92-percent rubbish Don Henley CD?

Back catalogue sales make up a huge portion of record company turnover, but they need to accept that the way we consume music has changed forever. No longer can they trawl the archives every year for another batch of artists to revive courtesy of a best of CD. Pre-selected compilations are going to die out in the very near future.

The ad for Bruce Springsteen’s new best of CD helpfully advises that it is also available as a download. But why would anyone bother to download a pre-selected compilation, when they can download their favourite tracks individually and compile their own compilation? Bruce’s new Greatest Hits is essentially a re-ordered version of his last Greatest Hits, and it’s obviously very good, but it can still be improved by the addition of your personal faves that didn’t make the fairly obvious selection. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out or Atlantic City, anyone?

With compilations, homemade has always been the way to go, since the days of the C90, and while hand-compiled tapes and CDs still make great gifts, it’s a whole lot easier to email over a Spotify playlist.

It would seem natural to end this with some links to Spotify compilations I’ve compiled. But they’ve got my favourite songs on. Go and compile your own.

The Stone Roses, Technique by New Order, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic by The Sundays, Doolittle by The Pixies, Bizarro by The Wedding Present, Paul’s Boutique by Beastie Boys, Three Feet High and Rising by De La Soul… The list goes on.

Here’s a 1989 Spotify playlist featuring tracks by most of the above. As is the nature of Spotify, you can easily click through to many of the full albums.

One of the tracks on the playlist is Sensitive by The Field Mice, who were on much-loved indie label Sarah Records. A whole bunch of Sarah compilations have recently arrived on Spotify, and it’s fascinating to consider how the delivery of these songs has changed in 20 years.

Back in 1989, if you were like me, you’d peruse Sarah’s lovely hand-typeset catalogue lists, complete with evocative dispatches from exotic Bristol written by label co-founder Matt Haynes. If you were lucky you might have heard the odd song on Peel, or read a review in the NME, but largely you made your selection based on the reputation of the label and its bands without having heard a note.

Then you’d send off a postal order – a postal order! – along with your wishlist, and wait 28 days. Eventually, the records would arrive – 7-inch vinyl with folded sleeve slotted into a polybag, usually accompanied by a handwritten note from Matt. And you would place the record on the turntable, blow dust from the needle, and for the first time you would hear the delights of Another Sunny Day, or Heavenly, or Brighter, or The Orchids.

Fast forward 20 years, and if you want to hear The Joy of Living by Blueboy (and you should) you can get it instantly, free, no postal order required, and without even bothering to download it, via Spotify. Part of me thinks that’s progress, but another part realises that we’ve lost something, and that actually hearing the music was just the end part of a bigger, more enjoyable, experience.

Sarah Records closed down in 1995. The label released 100 singles, plus a few albums, and then took out half page ads in the NME and Melody Maker announcing that Sarah was finished: ‘Didn’t YOU ever want to create something beautiful and pure, just so that one day you could set it on fire, and then watch the city light up as it burned?’

So here’s a Sarah Records Spotify playlist. And here’s a complete label search of every Sarah track on Spotify, including five compilation LPs. [Unfortunately the tracks on the Engine Common compilation are all mis-titled.] If you want to get some background info and sample some of the sleevenotes, visit Matt’s blog.

I remember clearly the day I first discovered The Smiths. I was about 12 years old, and in a music lesson at school. Music lessons back then consisted of a lazy teacher sticking a tape of classical music into a cassette deck and making us sit still for 45 minutes listening to it.

Fed up with this arrangement, one of the lads in my class secretly swapped the teacher’s classical tape for the Smiths album The Queen Is Dead. The lesson began, the teacher played the tape, and a curious sound emerged…

A sample of music hall song Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty is drowned out by feedback, then a driving drum beat, guitar and bassline kick in, and then – that voice. Farewell to this land’s cheerless marshes / Hemmed in like a boar between arches / Her very lowness with a head in a sling / I’m truly sorry, but it sounds like a wonderful thing. What a fantastic and compelling racket. (Hear the track The Queen is Dead on Spotify.)

The teacher, furious, sat red-faced and grimacing, but let the tape play to its conclusion. (If I remember rightly, the entire class was put into detention at the end of the lesson.) Within a week I’d spent my pocket money on a vinyl copy of the album, and I subsequently made regular trips to Oldhitz in Newcastle, eventually collecting second hand copies of every Smiths LP and single. It’s fair to say that Morrissey and The Smiths have played a massive part in soundtracking my life ever since.

Highlights are many, but second single This Charming Man (I would go out tonight / But I haven’t got a stitch to wear / This man said, “It’s gruesome / That someone so handsome should care.”) remains one of my top-ten all-time favourite pop singles. It also features one of the most curiously memorable lyrics in pop history: Why pamper life’s complexities / When the leather runs smooth in the passenger seat?

But my favourite Smiths song has to be the glorious There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. And if a double-decker bus / Crashes into us / To die by your side / Is such a heavenly way to die. It’s gorgeous and funny and heartbreaking and anthemic and a load of other things that great pop music should be. There can be few songs I’ve listened to so many times, yet it still sounds fresh, still stops me in my tracks when it comes on the radio, still delights when it pops up on Last.fm. Wonderful.

Mozzer has been solo for 21 years, and it’s fair to say he has never singly recorded anything quite on a par with his output as part of The Smiths. The lyrics remain sharp, but musically he has never had a band to come anywhere near matching Marr, Joyce and Rourke. But, despite jumping ship for Los Angeles, Moz has remained Blighty’s most valuable pop star – clever, funny, outspoken, sometimes infuriating, a compelling live performer, and occasionally putting out decent records.

I’ve not bought his last few albums, but I’m glad he’s still releasing them. There’s something comforting about hearing Morrissey pop up on daytime radio, inbetween the latest teen pop or indie jangle wannabes, to holler: Something is squeezing my SKULL!

At a time when words like ‘icon’ are used to describe anyone but the most flash-in-the-pan pop chancer, it feels good to celebrate a true rock icon. Happy 50th, Morrissey. Don’t overdo it on the jelly and ice cream, will you?

Listen to The Smiths and Morrissey on Spotify.