Saturday 12 June 2010

At Mojo Awards Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page celebrated


Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has been inducted into the Mojo Hall Of Fame at the magazine's award ceremony.
The best album prize won the Singer Richard Hawley, while Kasabian's single Fire was named song of the year.
But Florence and the Machine, who led the field with four nominations before the London event, was overlooked.
Page, who last won a Mojo award for the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion, revealed he was working on new material with a number of different projects.
He has been taken on by Robbie Williams' management company IE.
He said,"I'm just looking forward to making some music and surprising people with it".
"It won't be just teaming up with lots of people who are (big) names. I've got an idea of something which I've had for a long time and now's the time to do it." But he declined to give further details about his collaborators or his new direction.
Mojo is now the best selling music magazine in the UK, selling more than twice as many copies as NME.
Five winners were voted for by Mojo readers, including best album, best single and best live act. That category saw US act Midlake beat Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine.
A further 16 honorary prizes were handed out. They included the classic album award, which went to The Stone Roses for their 1989 self titled debut LP.
Bassist Mani, who picked up the trophy, said it was "gratefully received".
Asked why there were few new guitar bands making a splash in the way The Stone Roses did, Mani replied: "Bands of my era had a whacked out agenda. They walked it, they lived it, they breathed it.
"(They were) not necessarily the best musicians in the world. I think what's wrong with British music at the moment is people are too career orientated. They're afraid, or record companies will not allow them to take risks, and that just makes everything so uniform." A number of other acts from the 1980s were also honoured, including Marc Almond, Jean Michelle Jarre and Teardrop Explodes.
Teardrop Explodes were due to reunite for the first time in 28 years to accept the Mojo inspiration award, but singer Julian Cope did not turn up.
Keyboard player David Balfe said: "At seven o'clock I was told, 'He's going to be there - he likes to make an entrance.' At eight o'clock, 'He's going to be here.' Then we got a text - and he's not here."
Balfe went on to establish record label Food, which signed Blur.
Mojo editor Phil Alexander said: "The 80s are almost the new 60s. You can hear the influence of that decade everywhere.
"The aspects of the 80s we chose to celebrate at the Mojo Honours List reflect the genuine innovation of that period and I think you sense that the best music made at that time has had a massive impact on the musicians of today, in the same way that the 60s and 70s did previously.
"Somehow, there is a freedom in parts of 80s music that resonates among a new generation of musicians and fans."

Tuesday 8 June 2010

Best band ever of Led Zeppelin really


The best band ever of the Led Zeppelin. ‘I’m In A Rock And Roll Band!’ crowned the Seventies rock gods, after boiling it down to a short list of three: Zep, Queen and The Beatles.
All good choices, of course, coming from a longlist of The Clash, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Joy Division, Nirvana, Radiohead, The Rolling Stones & The Smiths. Presumably a lot of names got weeded out along the way but it’s hard to argue with Led Zeppelin, an incredible coming together of nice musicians who pushed and pulled rock music in a host of new directions while fundamentally defining what it meant to be a hard, heavy, sexy rock band.
But personally, I would put them third on the list. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are the bands who set almost the entire parameters for rock music in the Sixties. They remain the quintessential rock bands, and everything that followed is a kind of offshoot, either by reacting against them, or following through on their inspiration. Led Zeppelin certainly took up the baton and charged into the Seventies, but by that time the core of what it meant to be a rock band had already been defined.
I was talking this morning to the great English folk and rock guitarist Richard Thompson (he’s curating the Meltdown festival which starts this week). I made an observation about how rarely you hear the electric guitar in modern pop records, to which he retorted, “Good, its about time”. His argument was that the truly original and creative use of the guitar dominated rock template was essentially over by 1971, but its visceral and commercial entreaty is so great it has lingered on long past its sell by date.