Do the D.A.N.C.E.

If I'm going to write a blog in honesty, it has to have a ribbon of silky-smooth music running through it. Not literally (or not yet, anyway), but at least in its subject matter.

Today, reading 'The New Review' in the The Independent On Sunday, I felt myself concurring with many of the views expressed. Namely these:

"Scouting for Girls are like the sound of Satan's
scrotum emptying. They're abysmal." - John Niven

"You can't grow up on a diet of The Pigeon
Detectives and think you could topple the Government one day. If we end up with 20 years of Tory government, it'll be the Pigeon Detectives' fault"
- Andrew Collins

And who can argue with either statement? The article itself was debating the decline of indie into what has been dubbed "mortgage indie", an infinitely more profitable and less exciting version of the original genre.

This is something people have been banging on about for a while now, and I thought it was just a load of hype until I really thought about it. I fell in love with indie through the art-indie-pop group Maximo Park, way back in the good old years of 2002ish. Before that I had groped around with the likes of Franz Ferdinand (who I still maintain are pioneers of soft-dancey-pop-indie) and my parents' Manic Street Preachers and The Charlatans CDs. Maximo Park led me to purchase an issue of NME adorned with a photo of Paul Smith, lead singer of my band of the moment. From that day forward I was what is now known as an 'NME Reader'. Lately my interest has dwindled; I put this down to two things.

1. The ridiculous price of £2.20 for a weekly magazine, which doesn't even has the volume of content it did when it was a lower price.
2. My growing interest in dance music.

It came to a point where music like Dirty Pretty Things (a past favourite band) and Razorlight (NEVER a favourite band - inevitably, quite the opposite) came to sound like they had a hole in them. There was something missing, and it was synths. And a good beat.

I don't really dance a lot. I love it when I do, but my inability to get into clubs (although nearly vanquished) prevents me from doing so on a regular basis. So the source of my foray into the likes of Justice, Soulwax and 2manyDJs, Metronomy and Battles cannot come from my 'happy feet' (Also, see that I like good dance music, not Freemasons, and Ultrabeat, a.k.a rubbish).

I think there's just something in a squelching synth, in a laser and a strong bassline, that completes a song. It feels whole and round, like every possible area in the spectrum of noise has been successfully covered.

In relation to indie, some of the emerging dance acts appear to have flashes of that indie ethos that Scouting for Girls, The Hoosiers and The View lack. Dead Kids, my band-of-the-moment are out there, unbeknown to many music lovers, putting on sincere and riotous rock-and-roll shows. Their genre? Electro punk. It would be difficult (nay, impossible) to class them as 'indie' in the current sense; and yet they have that integrity, that politically-minded drive to stop us being 'dead kids' that echoes the punk roots of indie; Joe Strummer, even to Damon Albarn and Blur.

Enough music, I leave you with this:
I was watching Foyle's war last night, for the first time properly. It was ok, a bit boring and cliched in places, but it brought this to my mind:

"Foyle's war and other stories"

It wasn't just Foyle's War;
It was the war of that boy
Out of Goodnight Mister Tom
And James McAvoy in Atonement, too.

COPYRIGHT 2008
There's another verse somewhere in my mind, it just wont coagulate into a proper one yet. I'll leave it to mellow.

Thanks for reading.
Sq.