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Those of you who've been with CLUAS for a while may remember that I was an Adams evangeliser. I reviewed his first two solo records for these hallowed pages - Heartbreaker and Gold. These records, alongside the final Whiskeytown album Pneumonia, represented Adams at his most vibrant and vital. Acclaim was immediate and fulsome. Over time, Gold has tarnished but the other two represent an early 21st Centuty zenith in singer songwriting. The stage seemed set for Adams to achieve superstardom. 

Yet Adams has remained a big live draw. Playing two Enmore Theatre shows in a row has demonstrated his marketability here in Sydney. Having seen him play three times before, each one being a dramatic and memorable night, I was excited. The band trotted onstage in almost darkness and played in the blue hue of a few Chinese lanterns over the centre of the stage. Calls of "Turn the lights up!" started almost immediately. The crowd murmured as Adams kicked into Goodnight Rose, the lovely opener from Easy Tiger. I could not pick where Adams was standing onstage. The gloom was distracting but the band’s sound was clear, chunky and strong. Adams was in fine voice. Over the years, his voice has definitely improved. Dear John was an obvious early highlight as was Wild Flower from Gold. Intricate melodies delicately played and sung.

It’s hard to pinpoint where it all went horribly wrong. I could point at the band which seemed to play at the same intensity all evening. That’s not to say that weren’t competent. Just that without light or a focal point on stage, the music was found lacking. And there were too many samey guitar licks. It could have been that Adams let Neal Casal, his lead guitarist, interact with the audience. Adams’ only outburst was to admonish us for "not knowing how to act" as the band took an early intermission. That legendary stroppiness was there in spades. Maybe it was because he played lots of new or obscure songs and the lack of familiarity grated on those of us who know that he has many classics in his back catalogue.

Maybe the effort that Adams clearly demands of his audience is not repaid with interest by him and his band. It was obvious that the calls from the crowd resulted in a set change – did we deserve to be punished? Does this sound familiar?

Even faced with what was clearly a below par gig, the Adams apologists were immediately out en masse. Under the byline ‘Seems Like the Greater They Are, the More You Have to Like It or Lump It’, the Sydney Morning Herald’s chief music critic Bernard Zuel reckoned the show had been Dylanesque in its wilful awkwardness but that it had moments of brilliance. Whilst the article is mostly piffle, does he have the nugget of a good point there?

The debate on this Adams Blog sheds further light on what was an infuriating night. Is an artist being disrespectful to the paying public by being difficult and awkward? Can these recent awful Adams and Rice gigs be attributed to Dylan’s behaviour on his Never Ending tour?

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Blogging will be light from me until early September. In meantime here's a few links that caught my eye recently:

• It turns out that YouTube's Terms & Conditions state that it can license any content uploaded to its servers as it sees fit. CNET have the details. Any independent bands uploading, for example, DIY videos of their music to Youtube should sit up and take note. A similar broo-ha hit the interweb last year for MySpace but a campaign - spearheaded by Billy Bragg - got them to dilute down their terms. Will YouTube, like MySpace before them, soon do the decent thing?
• Major US ISP throttle Bit Torrent: if such policies become more widespread among ISPs could it reduce the usefullness and efficiencies of the Bit Torrent protocol? Maybe the time if ripe for the long awaited version of BitTorrent that that is capable of using a secure protocol...
• Is interest in hip hop collapsing? So asks Time magazine. Sales are down, big time. And not just because of this interweb thing putting downward pressure on CD sales...

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When writing about Limerick it’s all too easy to make cheap jokes at the expense of some of the counties, shall we say, less attractive elements. Now, Key Notes is not the kind of blog that likes to stick the knife in so it won’t. Instead it’ll have a stab at discussing Limerick’s role in the Irish music scene (okay, it's stops now, promise).

Limerick, home to Ireland’s fourth largest city, is at the very centre of the countries south western tourist region with the Shannon Estuary and Shannon airport playing important roles in attracting visitors to the region (though not from Heathrow). Musically, Limerick has provided the rest of the country an eclectic mix of talented and influential musicians and composers; Dolores O’Riordan, Bill Whelan, Richard D. James and Johnny Fean to name but a few.

While Dolores is still plugging away, her ex-Cranberries band mate Noel Hogan is working with Vesta Varro on a follow up to their debut album Exit Here. Despite being named on NME’s Hotlist for 2007, Vesta Varro are actually quite good. Wearing the influence of Matt Bellamy & Co.’s penchant for spine shatteringly explosive rock proudly on their collective sleeves, Vesta Varro are a band with masses of potential and in lead singer Damien Drea have a vocalist with the ability to make you forget what you were supposed to be doing, as happened me the first time I heard Coming Back.

On a totally different planet, never mind note, are Giveamanakick. The only way to truly experience what this band has to offer is in a live setting. I can still remember my first Giveamanakick gig, how could you forget seeing someone shouting into a gas mask! However, both Is it Ok to be loud, Jesus? and We are the way forward disappointed. This blog hopes that, having spent the past three years honing their skills with support slots to the likes of Deftones, Dinosaur Jr. and The Presidents of the United States of America, Giveamanakick’s third studio offering can finally live up to the verve and vivacity of their live shows. 

One of the great things about writing this blog is discovering something new and not being ashamed to admit to not hearing it before. This is the case with Headgear, a Limerick band (though not by birth) discovered by chance while this blog was conducting "research" in an establishment that may or may not have been a public house. However Key Notes heard about Headgear it's glad it did. Flight Cases, the sophomore release from the band contains my new favourite song, Harry Truman. An amalgamation of sounds that the band itself describes as ‘mongrel music’ there’s something about this band that suggests they have a lot to offer the Irish music scene and beyond. Below is the video for Singin' in the drain. 

As this blog continues its quest to find the best bands from outside Dublin it would appreciate your help. Who has this blog missed in Limerick? Also, this blog’s next stop will be Meath; any suggestions of bands to be featured can be mailed to keynotes@cluas.com

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Anyway, the French Communist party and extreme-left community have a daily newspaper called L’Humanité, and each September the paper organises a large outdoor music and arts festival in the Paris area. Fête de l’Humanité is traditionally the last big bash of the Paris summer season.

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What do The Rolling Stones today and a lion taming act in a circus have in common ? Quite alot actually. Let me explain. When you see the lion taming you have to understand that, great act though it is, the lions and their tamer are pure artifice. The lion is portrayed as the king of the jungle, a fearsome man eating beast. The tamer is portrayed as brave hero, gallantly holding back the lion with nothing more than a whip and a chair, making this terrifying creature submit to his or her will and encouraging the deadly big cat to perform a series of dainty tricks. The problem is; both the lions and their tamers are in on the act. The lion is usually a hand reared pet who in the golden age of the circus often slept in the tamer's caravan. The tamer on the other hand knows that if the lion was really wild and ferocious a whip and a chair would be as much use as a feather duster. So what you have is a show, primarily for children, where real danger and pure emotion have been replaced with amused guffaws and theatrical flourish.

Nowadays, The Rolling Stones are alot like those circus lions, as far removed from the dark mystique of Altamont as our tame lions are from their forebears in the Coliseum; where they happily munched on Christians for the amusement of the Emperor Nero and his blood thirsty Roman subjects. For example, when Keith Richards stumbled on stage solo in the middle of the concert at Slane to mumble winningly, the audience happily remarked to each other, "Ooh, there's Johnny Depp's dad from Pirates of the Carribean 3'. See what I mean?

The band that played Slane last weekend wasn't THE ROLLING STONES, of myth and legend, it was a bunch of canny old men with one eye on the clock and the other on the money. A savvy bunch of pensioners who long ago realised that nostalgia and a well tended brand name can keep you going long after passion and sincerity have disappeared along with your natural hair colour. I admire them in much the same way as I admire those toothless lions and their beloved tamers, I even applaud them and when they have gone the way of the traditional circus I'm sure that the world will be a less colourful place but, do I feel anything inside when I watch them play ? Nope.

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Yesterday the Consumer Association of Ireland published the letter they sent to MCD after receiving complaints from hundreds of ticket holders for the Barbara Streisand gig in Celbridge. The letter seeks a refund in addition to compensation for the complainants that contacted them.

Will MCD cough up? Many doubt it and that what awaits us, once they send in their reply to the CAI, is another round of phone-ins to Joe Duffy featuring some of the punters in question, the CEO of the CAI and a PR person from MCD going on the defensive with a list of banal talking points. And then it'll all quieten down, until the next concert controversy.

Surely there is an alternative here? An opportunity for MCD to turn this around? Instead of taking a position of 'no compromise' in the face of consumer uproar and having to go on the defensive, why not take control of the conversation and turn it around to their benefit? There's many ways this could be done but here's one 5 step plan for MCD to do exactly this:

1. Reply to the CAI acknowledging some shortcomings in the organisation of this particular gig that effected a small proportion of patrons and agree, as an act of goodwill, to take it on the chin and reimburse these ticket holders (limiting it to those that had contacted the CAI up to the date the CAI sent their letter). Cost? My back-of-envelope calculation says we're talking about 100k Euros.
2. Ensure the report of the 'specialist committee' that MCD set up to investigate what happened at the gig (it is due to be published the week of Sept 10th) has a set of solid generic recommendations for organising & managing events of this nature.
3. When the report is published issue a press release welcoming the report and accepting its recommendations in full, stating that they will be fully reflected in a new 'Customer Charter' for all MCD events, to be published by the end of 2007.
4. Commit to placing the 'Customer Charter' at a visible place at all future MCD-managed events and provide a freephone customer contact service on the charter for patrons who wish to complain about any aspect of the event's organisation.
5. Then invite all the other promoters in Ireland to either:
   
        a. Draft a similar Customer Charter for their customers, or,
        b. Propose the text of the MCD charter as a model for all promoters.

With this sort of approach they can, Jujutsu-like, turn what has been a PR disaster into a PR coup, one that puts its competitors on the back-foot and raises the game for the entire industry.

Update: An hour or so after this entry was first published Jim Carroll posted on his blog that Aiken Promotions have recently published a 'customer care policy' on their website. I dug around a bit in the search engines and was able to conclude (from various cached copies of the Aiken website's home page) that the 'customer care policy' was published by Aiken sometime between July 17 and Aug 3rd (i.e. just after the Streisand concert debacle). So the opportunity for MCD to lead the way on this front has been taken from them by their main competitor. The Aiken policy however I note is not complete (e.g. no customer care line in place) so there is still room for MCD to up the ante and offer a 'charter' that is far-reaching and sets a high bar for the rest of the industry.

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The Consumer Association of Ireland (CAI) today published a letter it sent to MCD, motivated by 95 complaints representing 343 ticket holders to the Barbara Streisand concert in Celbridge.

No matter what you think of Madame Streisand's music (or, for that matter, of people prepared to cough up a fortune to sit in a field and listen to it) the letter presents a long list of complaints from a large number of punters.

The letter seeks not only a refund but also compensatation for the complainants for "their lack of enjoyment of the concert" (although I do note that the lack of enjoyment they talk about is not of the musical kind).

Citing the The Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act, 1980, the letter also claims a breach of the 'law of contract' and that the punters in question are - therefore - entitled to a "remedy". Hmmmm. Roll on MCD's reply, which - it would seem - we can expect the CAI to publish on their website.

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