How do we get this back?>Where music appears unimportant, irrelevant, unloved, demanded for free, and the audience stays away in drive, atrophy and selerosis descend. Where, on the other hand, there is a reasonable chance of fair payment for mistake labour, freedom of thought, technological development, critical engagement, and a easy and enthusiastic audience; oh, what gems may emerge. >Such was the music ecology of London in the 1960s. We could play anything we wanted. Two gigs a week would pay for my flat and prevent starvation. The rest of the time we could practice, do our hair, and look for better gigs in Melody Maker. More than people making things happen, it seemed rather as if things were happening to us, at breathtaking speed, and we'd just better be ready. I don't really remember signing a record contract; I just always had one.>Government education policy sent a small army of creatives to art school, where they promptly became Musicians with Ideas. University and college campuses offered gigs, lots of them. You only had to fall out of bed to get one. On Monday, you joined a hardcore blues band; by Wednesday it had metamorphized into something psychedelic, and by Saturday you were in a fully paid-up progressive rock outfit.Audiences were much more receptive of variety back then, much less programmed by genre. It was an age of innocence: many believed in an immutable connection between notions of integrity, quality, and record sales.
>>131080046I wonder why contemporary London audiences are less receptive to musical variety. Maybe we could have had more of these situations if young people weren't either priced out of major metropolitan areas or working constantly to subbornly remain in them.
>>131080046You don't Just like you can't get naivete backSome stages of development were only possible in a certain historical context and once things overgrew to another phase, it all became so saturated and already done before that you couldn't simply revert to the sunny days when there were so many possibilities aheadReally you want to pick and choose a certain epoch in history just because you din't get to live it
>>131080046all you have to do is tax the wealthy and fund the arts.
its like british psychedlia as a whole, a whimsical reaction to post war austerity and the horror of WWII. It will happen again but it will be the generation after shit really goes bad that will experience it. At best youre looking at being old enough when the good times start that youd be old and hate it
>>131080046It felt like we had attained something like this in the 2000s. Probably wasnt as easy to make a living as a musician then compared to the 60s as bruford explains it but the underground music community was striving for a couple of years there
>>13108142500s was just the final dying gasps of the alternative explosion in the 90s.
