Summary of 2011 in Music

The year in music summed up in 12 sentences!

• January: Adele releases "21" which would go on to became the biggest-selling album of the 21st century, overtaking Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black". 

 

• February: The White Stripes announce that they are to break up whilst Adele is again in the spotlight as she steals the show at the BRIT Awards.

 

• March: Alice Cooper, Tom Waits and Neil Diamond are among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees.

 

• April: LCD Soundsystem play last ever gig, their final song at Madison Square Gardens being "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down".

 

• May: Azerbaijan win the Eurovision Song Contest while Jedward and Blue finish 8th and 11th respectively. 

 

• June: U2 and Coldplay headline Glastonbury with a surprise gig from a recently reformed Pulp but it's Beyonce who claims the festival with her Sunday night slot. 

 

• July: Amy Winehouse dies at the age of 27 

 

• August: "Video Games" is posted on Youtube. 

 

• September: REM announced via its website that it was "calling it a day as a band" and PJ Harvey becomes the first artist to win the Mercury Prize twice. 

 

• October: The Stone Roses announce they are to reform at the years most entertaining press conference 

 

• November: The Streets play last gig together but luckily Black Sabbath announce they will reform. 

 

• December: Little Mix wins the X-Factor and sells more copies of their cover of Damien Rice's "Cannonball" in one week than Damien has since he wrote the song!

Top 5 Songs of 2011

Well, that's pretty much the end of 2011 then. Not really a great year for music if you ask me. I'll tell you why I think that. This post was going to be called "Top 10 Songs of 2011" but when I had a think about it I couldn't even come up with 10 songs that really blew me away this year. That's terrible isn't it? On a more positive note though, the songs that did impress me were really so good and some unlike anything I had heard before.

The power of Youtube, Facebook and Twitter as music discovery tools was proved to me this year by the fact that I heard three of my top five songs online months before I heard them anywhere else. So here they are................


5. "Someone Like You" - Adele

Hard to have avoided this song in 2011. Her performance at the 2011 BRIT Awards showed what a good song is all about. Here was this girl, backed only by a piano, singing about her heartbreak over an ex-boyfriend whilst that heartbreak was being played out live in front of our very eyes as we watched her deliver a perfect performance on the verge of breaking down. Afterwards she explained why she had cried at the end of the performance saying, "I was really emotional by the end because I'm quite overwhelmed by everything anyway, and then I had a vision of my ex, of him watching me at home and he's going to be laughing at me because he knows I'm crying because of him, with him thinking, 'Yep, she's still wrapped around my finger'. Then everyone stood up, so I was overwhelmed."

4.  "A Real Hero" - College (ft. Electric Youth)

I'm technically cheating with this song because it was actually released in 2009 but I only discovered it this year as I'm sure 99% of the other people who heard it. The reason we all heard the song this year was because of the film "Drive". It soundtracks the final five minutes of the film but stands on it own as a brilliant electro-pop anthem.

3.  "She Loves Me" - Willy Moon

I wrote a bit about Willy Moon earlier in the year and I'm a big fan of his already. The Guardian have his debut song "I Wanna Be Your Man" at No.26 in their top songs of 2011 but it's his follow-up song that I can't get out of my head.

2. "Video Games" - Lana Del Rey


Young Lizzy Grant has split the music-loving Internet down the middle with opinions over her music, her history and her lips flooding every social media avenue in the past four months. However, despite what anyone says, it's hard to deny that this is a genuinely class song. Almost 13 million views since the video was posted on Youtube in August has made Lana Del Rey somewhat of a household name for those with an Internet connection.

 
1. "212" - Azealia Banks (ft. Lazy-Jay)


I heard them play this song last week out the back of the Amersham Arms in New Cross to a packed dance floor and the place went berserk. Credit has to be given to this Lazy-Jay fella for laying the foundations for Miss Banks's potty-mouthed tour de force. I'm going to put my neck on the line here and say that she's going to be a one-hit-wonder. But what a hit.

Stay tuned for Johnny Bottles' "Summary of 2011 in 12 Sentences"

5 Legendary Recording Studios

1. Abbey Road - London, UK

Probably the most famous recording studio in the world due, in no small part, to the fact that The Beatles named an album after it. They recorded almost all their albums and singles there between 1962 and 1970 and are synonymous with the studio and it's nearby zebra crossing. But it wasn't just The Beatles who recorded here. Other famous recordings made here include;

• "Living Doll" - Cliff Richard
• "Apache" - The Shadows
• "Ghost Riders In The Sky" - The Scorpions
• "The Dark Side Of The Moon" - Pink Floyd
• "Duran Duran" - Duran Duran
• "The Bends" & "Kid A" - Radiohead

2. Hitsville USA - Detroit, Michigan, USA

In 1959 Berry Gordy bought this former photographer's studio and converted it into the headquarters for his Motown label along with the label's own studio. At it's peak it would stay open 22 hours a day, closing between 8am and 10am for maintenance. The house band known as "The Funk Brothers" are said to have played on more number-one records than The Beatles, Elvis, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys combined. Artists to have recorded here include Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Four Tops, The Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson.

3. Muscle Shoals - Sheffield, Alabama, USA

Formed in 1969 when legendary session musicians Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson and David Hood, known as "The Swampers" left FAME Studios to create their own studio. Their distinctive accompaniments and arrangements have been heard on a number of legendary recordings, including those from Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, Lynyrd Synyrd and more recently, The Black Keys. If you're wondering where you've heard about Muscle Shoals and The Swampers before then have another listen to Sweet Home Alabama

4. Studio One - Kingston, Jamaica

Studio One was founded by Clement "Coxsone" Dodd in the late 1950's and became known as the "Motown of Jamaica". It was hugely responsible for the catapulting of Jamaican music into the world scene. Through innovative producers like Dodd, Prince Buster and Lee "Scratch" Perry the studio oversaw the evolution of Ska to Reggae to Dancehall. Almost every Jamaican musician of note recorded here including The Skatalites, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Burning Spear, Toots & The Maytals, Delroy Wilson and Sugar Minott.


5. Hansa - Berlin, Germany 

Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin became legendary in the 1970's when David Bowie went there to record his album, "Heroes", with the help of Brian Eno. It became known as "Hansa by the Wall" or "The Great Hall by the Wall" in reference to the fact that it was right beside the city's infamous partition. It wasn't long before many of the big names in music flocked there to record. Some of those included Iggy Pop, U2, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode and in more recent years, Snow Patrol, Supergrass and REM.

The Bo Diddley Beat

Bomp, Ba-Bomp-Bomp, Bomp-Bomp!

Following on from my recent review of Willy Moon, who's song "I Wanna Be Your Man" is based on this classic Rock & Roll rhythm, today we're going to learn about "The Bo Diddley Beat"


In 1955 Bo Diddley released a song called, funnily enough, "Bo Diddley". The song was under two minutes long but would go on to shape the music we listen to today. It's hard to comprehend now but when people first heard this song it was unlike anything they had ever heard before. Bo used his electric guitar to play Rock & Roll over an African juba beat. He said he first heard the beat in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were to be found in several places. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty that goes “shave and a haircut, two bits”. This now distinctive "Bomp, Ba-Bomp-Bomp, Bomp-Bomp" was massively innovative and would be used in countless songs for years to come.

Next time you see Westlife on TV don't change the channel. Take a deep breath and listen until about two thirds of the way into any one of their songs. Up to this point you will have noticed four men in white/black/grey sitting on four evenly place stools in the centre of the stage. Small dark-haired lad singing mostly, tall dark-haired lad doing his bit, two blonde lads looking contemplatively to the side. But any second now we'll see what we've been waiting for. A momentary pause in the music, a single beat of a drum and the four lads with undoubtedly rise in unison from their stools. What you just witnessed was the infamous key change. A musical device adored by pop song writers the world over. The key change creates an excitement in the song through the sense of tension and release. In "Bo Diddley" however, there is no chord change whatsoever. This song gets it's excitement from the rhythm of the drums and guitars. It was so catchy it became known as the Bo Diddley Beat.


On 20th November 1955 Bo Diddley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan wanted Diddley to play a song, "Sixteen Tons," but without telling Mr. Sullivan, Bo played this ground-breaking song anyway, which didn't go over well with the host. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Bo Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years.


The Bo Diddley Beat became one of Rock & Roll's bedrock rhythms. Some of the more famous uses of the rhythm include;

• "Not Fade Away" - Buddy Holly/The Rolling Stones
• "His Latest Flame" - Elvis Presley
• "Desire" - U2 
• "Faith" - George Michael
• "I Want Candy" - The Strangeloves
• "Black Horse And The Cherry Tree" - KT Tunstall
• "Movin' On Up" - Primal Scream
• "Born To Hand-Jive" (From the musical Grease) - Sha Na Na
• "Mr Brownstone" - Guns 'N' Roses
• "Rudie Can't Fail" - The Clash

 
 

New Music: Willy Moon

I suffer from a terrible  inner conflict when it comes to music. I listen to music from the 50's  and I wish that I was alive back then to be part of that scene. I listen to music from the early days of Rock and Roll and envy people who got to be part of the music and the energy that went along with it. My conflict arises when I realise that people are still making music today, believe it or not. The problem is that music is at it's most exciting when it's new and raw. Music is constantly growing and developing so the energy that teenagers felt at a Chuck Berry concert in 1958 will be extremely diluted if we were to listen to it in a nightclub in 2011. We get our "high" now from the booming hip hop beats and basslines that lie under all of today's floorfillers. If listening to Little Richard on a dance floor nowadays can only really happen at my cousin's wedding how do I get that euphoric feeling that the teenagers of 1958 felt?

The solution to my inner conflict?........Willy Moon.

Willie is one cool cat. He's got the moves, he's got the sharp suit and he's got the voice. His first song, "I Wanna Be Your Man" is to the rhythm of the classic "Bo Diddley Beat" and in true 50's Rock and Roll style it's all over in 1 minute and 49 seconds. For me, what makes Willie Moon stand out from the crowd isn't the fact that he jives and shimmies to a Buddy Holly-esque song, it's the mixing of that classic sound with the ultra-modern production on the track. The song is transformed from a fairly simple surf rock song to a fairly addictive stomper of a song by the backing beat of hip-hop style breaths and claps which give the song a driving rhythm.

His second song, "She Loves Me" continues with juxtaposition of old and new sounds. This song has the surf rock guitars again but now accompanied by an Electronica sound with the vocals cut up synthetically to give the song a great hook on the chorus.

Personally, I'm going to be keeping an eye out for Willy Moon playing live. Should be interesting to see how he gets on. And if it all falls through he can always be a stand in for the lad in Crystal Swing.

Johnny Bottles On Twitter

Not sure how much I'm gonna use this but I'll give it a go. If anyone fancies following me on Twitter then head over here

The Magic Formula

Researchers at Goldsmiths University in London have recently published a study they conducted on the "catchy-ness" of certain songs. In their study researchers observed how volunteers reacted when asked to sing along to different songs, and found out that long and detailed musical phrases, multiple pitch changes in the main hook, a male vocalist, and preferably a high pitched male vocalist, all helped make songs catchy. 

Goldsmiths music psychologist Dr Daniel Mullensiefen says "Every musical hit is reliant on maths, science, engineering and technology; from the physics and frequencies of sound that determine pitch and harmony, to the hi-tech digital processors and synthesizers which can add effects to make a song more catchy". 

Of the songs they tested, the top 5 catchiest songs were:

1. "We Are The Champions" - Queen
2. "Y.M.C.A." - The Village People
3. "Fat Lip" - Sum 41
4. "The Final Countdown" - Europe
5. "Monster" - The Automatic

All pretty catchy songs you'd have to agree. I wonder will it lead to finding the magic formula for creating a hit song?

Johnny Bottles has been conducting his own research though and I think I might have cracked it. It's all in the opening guitar riff. Do what you like after that but if you get the start right then you're sorted. 

What guitar riff you ask? Ah, well have a listen to the start of these four songs then get writing!!

"Bohemian Like You" - The Dandy Warhols

 

"Little Bitch" - The Specials

"Brown Sugar" - The Rolling Stones

"Strutter" - Kiss