The end of Korova

Korova is one of my favourite Liverpool music venues. They attract the smaller touring bands I want to see, like Holy Fuck and Free Blood, and the decor is crazy-sexy-cool. OK, sometimes the indier-than-thou atmosphere is a bit irritating. It also took me months to figure out where the handriers are in the toilets. (Under the mirrors.)
Unfortunately, the Korova Group have gone into administration. Even The Daily Mirror's 3am Girls have something to say. However, when they describe Korova as the Arctic Monkeys' favourite Liverpool bar, they actually mean the band went there once to take photos for the debut album sleeve. Apart from Korova, a joint investment with the Ladytron boys, there are eight bars and restaurants affected. Three are on the Albert Dock: Babycream (a bar/restaurant for clubbers who've slipped into the next demographic), Circo (a circus-themed bar for suits) and the New Raven (an Irish-American pretend pub). Over-ambitious brand expansive, or the credit crunch?
If an investor takes over Korova, would they really want to run it as the tripartite business it currently is? Managing a bar, canteen and gig venue on one premises is a lot. Especially as it's in that area of Liverpool city centre which heaves with chain bars advertising drink-til-you-puke offers. There's more money to be made from stag and hen parties downing two-for-one shooters than arty student-types sipping San Miguel.
I fear that whatever becomes of Korova, it won't involve so many free/cheap gigs. And then where will young bands get a start in this city? Korova's downstairs venue is free to hire and has a decent PA. Taking that away would be a massive blow to the DIY music scene. It's a sad day for Liverpool and for "culture". Also, the mini Lambananas have been taken away! Sniff.

Death of the CD update

Much of my CD collection has been packaged up and sold to eBayers around the world, from Liverpool to New Zealand. And I'm sick of queueing up in the Post Office. I still have a carrier bag full, which I attempted to donate to a charity shop. But they don't accept donations of CDs, so I had to trundle home with it.
It was sad to say goodbye to my CDs, but necessary. And the vinyl stays, obviously. The money went straight onto new clothes. Wearing nice clothes is nice, but I despise trawling around shops, feeling hideously exposed in front of changing room mirrors, navigating around gaggles of teenage girls etc. But my wardrobe was thinning to the point where I had about three daytime outfits, so off on an internet shopping trip I went. To Etsy, naturally, which is full of people with mad skillz.


Above is my favourite new Etsy purchase, from Victoria n' Bird. The picture doesn't do it justice, but it's a fabulous pinafore dress beneath that gold scarf (from Brussels). And I know I need a haircut. Sorry, Mum.
And the back. Mad skillz indeed! I'd wear it everyday if I could. But I spilt my dinner on it earlier. OOOPS! Maybe I should just wear black dresses from now on. It might be a bit clammy on hot days, but at least I wouldn't have to over-think outfits.

Seven inch shambles

Today I popped into Zavvi to see if they have Annie's I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me on seven inch. Turns out they don't have anything on seven inch. When I asked a young chap working there about it, he didn't have much to say apart from "we didn't sell many". I'm not surprised, because those now empty slots always seemed full of One Night Only and Scouting For Girls. Basically, music that about 10 people in the UK would probably want on vinyl.

Well, me and Zavvi are through. I never need go in there again, especially since the ground floor is full of DVDs, games and mobile phones. Is there a place on the high street for music? These days, it's looking like NO. In the much trumpeted Liverpool One development, the only "music" (read: entertainment) shop is HMV. I'm pulling a sad face at this one. Does the disappearance of seven inches in Zavvi mean we're a tiny step closer to the day when music is officially shit, because it's been packaged up to advertise mobile phones and so on?

Also, that £22 Bjork record you see above is not a special edition of Volta, but a pack of Wanderlust remixes. Come on, One Little Indian! £22 for some unnecessary variations on a theme?

St John's box office watch

I snapped a couple of photos of St John's box office this morning. St John's is Liverpool shabby shopping centre and indoor market, where you can buy everything from Paris Hilton's latest perfume to a pig's head. It's like the dirty little secret of Liverpool's (apparently) glittering retail sector, and the council would probably bulldoze it to the ground were it not for all the people who need budget shops. I buy all sorts of bits and bobs in Iceland. You can get 18 Penguins for £1 in there.

Anyway. Let's take a look at the Manchester side:

I know it sort of looks like there's a small ghost trapped inside, but there really isn't. You can just about see that upcoming gigs include Bon Iver, Crystal Castles, Hot Chip and Jeffrey Lewis. But what about the Liverpool side?

The Australian Pink Floyd Show, Michael Ball and a Beatles Day. And what sound like poor quality emo bands at Academy/Barfly (Multi Purpose Chemical and Glamour of the Kill). And a mere three gigs scheduled for "Uni & Korova". These two venues are nowhere near each other. They're not even in cahoots! The far right column is the top sellers, and it reads 'Creamfields, Creamfields, Creamsfields, Ministry of Sound'.
St John's box office doesn't represent all the DIY gigs and so on, but from this investigation it's Manchester 1, Liverpool nil.

The death of the CD

With a heaviness in my heart and tear in my eye, I realised that my love affair with CDs is officially over: my collection is being dispatched to eBay and charity shops. My near complete bundle of Kula Shaker singles has already been posted off to a better life in Germany. Blub!
I've moved so many times, and will probably move from Liverpool in the near future. And dragging around boxes of CDs and books is the heaviest part, so one of them has to go. A lot of my books are annotated (see left for some of them. Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Angela Carter - it's all what you'd expect). With books, you can often revisit them, flick through to re-read that poem or paragraph. But I'm not going to be giving those Mansun b-sides another listen. Ever. I'd prefer to MP3-ise my music and be able to move around, instead of staying in one place surrounded by Bernard Butler and Beth Orton albums.
Sorting through all those plastic boxes stirred a lot of memories. Remember when Tom Jones released that covers album stuffed full of stars of the day, including Cerys Matthews, Natalie Imbruglia and the Divine Comedy? He was like the Mark Ronson of 1999. And what about when Blur's Tender was avant garde because it contains a gospel choir, planks of wood and lyric that makes you think of F. Scott Fitzgerald? And who could forget that fortnight when Catatonia were the Biggest Band on the Planet (or so it felt when you turned on the TV or radio)? Or when that irritating Vodafone advert featuring the Dandy Warhols made it ok for bands to "sell out"?
Memories of record shopping was also stirred up. For a while at university, I had a three-times-a-week Record Collector habit. That shop was too conveniently located between seminar rooms and my student house not to pop in for regular browsing. It's like they jumped out into the pavement and dragged me inside every time I tried to hurry past.
My CD collection isn't vast, I always preferred ritualised browsing to spending money. Most of it is late 90s albums, when I was old enough to catch a train from home in south Shropshire for an afternoon in Hereford. The big city! They had Andy's Records, Our Price and the Dinosaw Market, an old warehouse full of second hand everything. All three are now defunct.
An even bigger record shopping treat when I was a teenager was Tower Records in Birmingham. After hearing Goldfrapp's Utopia on a Q magazine cover mount I HAD TO HAVE the album, but it wasn't going to turn up in the local Woolworths. So I spent weeks convincing my parents to take me to the big, big city of Birmingham where I could buy Felt Mountain. They did, and I loved it.
It's a bit sad that something which once meant so much is now a burden. But it's the music that's important, not the little plastic discs. Isn't it?