Recording shopping in Liverpool

Saturday shopping has never been a hobby of mine, but I spent some time browsing record shops this morning. Liverpool city centre is fairly hectic most days, but Saturdays are packed out with teenage girls struggling with Primark bags.
My boyfriend and I went to Zavvi, where I snapped this picture of the dance section:

It's like an eerie vision of the future, where everything has been packaged into separate compartments (Ibiza chillout, summer dance, funky house etc), but everyone is impossibly attractive because they're made out of plastic. And the content is all the same. Zavvi is not my kind of shop, but the boyfriend did find re-pressings of The Cars' Greatest Hits and The Art of Noise, for £2 each. Although we're usually eco-conscious to the point of being eco-bores, he asked for a plastic bag (well, we need something to put the rubbish in). It was hilariously large, and pictured here with the Norton Complete Shakespeare for scale:

And that Norton Shakespeare is BIG. We also browsed Probe Records, but left empty handed. In Hairy Records I picked out Roxy Music's Music For Your Pleasure, and the boyfriend selected a Stock, Aitken and Waterman compilation called The Hit Factory (of course). When I was sticking it onto the turntable at home, two press releases fell out:

The text is the same, but one is double spaced. Are they the former property of a SAW completist who bought them? Or was it a promo copy? They're dated 14 October 1987, but the record was released 12 October 1987. Nice to know that Stylus Music had the marketing campaign was well planned. As press releases go, it's a good one as it's full of facts. And there's no purple prose, unless you count the badly punned title of "Stylus score spectacular coup with SAW collection". The 12" had a dealer price of £4.17, and RRP of £5.99, while the CD dealer price was £8.34, RRP £11.99. The TV advertising campaign had a £500,000 budget, and there's even a Telex number at the bottom. The past really is a foreign country. I don't really to keep them, but don't want to chuck them in the recycling (yawn, eco-bore). If you want me to post you these pieces of SAW history (you know you do), email me at takeittothechorus@gmail.com.

Florence and the Fuhrer

I had another inspection of the Liverpool Sound City guide, and discovered the most inappropriate sentence under the blurb for London folky-dolky Florence & The Machine:
'She also has almost as much stage presence as Hitler'.
Honestly. Who thought that was an acceptable use of language? And one mention of Adolf apparently wasn't enough, as it continues:
'She's like a funny, sexy popstar Hitler without the despotism and with more beautiful songs and the utmost love and respect for Jews and gays and gypsies.'
There are some words I don't think belong as adjectives in music writing (such as anorexic or schizophrenic), but using such a feared dictator in a simile is just wrong. Mitigating it with the 'respect for Jews and gays and gypsies' does not make this even slightly OK. It's not even constructed elegantly: there are five uses of 'and'.
I hope it's a fan-written ode copy-and-pasted from her MySpace blog. It must be, right?

Erroneous apostrophes

Somebody decided that Liverpool needs a music conference. And so, 27-30 May will be the inaugural Liverpool SoundCity! It is a music conference so exciting that it comes with an exclamation mark attached. 'Music conference' basically means a load of gigs over four days, with industry bods giving a few talks. Well, it gives Midge Ure a job.

Festival director David Pichilingi writes in the introduction that 'it is hoped that by being in the early part of the year SoundCity! can become as important in the UK as SXSW is in the States'. Well, maybe, given time and investment. But such a sloppy approach to spelling, grammar and punctuation in the festival (sorry, conference) guide is a poor start.

It's a nice design, courtesy of a Fact Magazine template. But asking bands to write their own blurb is asking for trouble. Some of the more ridiculously overblown statements, gleaned from the 'unsigned' section, are below. Somewhere, an underpaid and overworked editor is weeping.

-'This lot just write songs that soar forever and want you to stop what you are doing and change your life... forever'. (Man From Michael) Doesn't that sound a bit cultist?

- 'Like a well travelled suitcase, their music wears faded stickers which say Reggae, Dub, Punk Hip-hop and Rap alongside the more sober emblems of Blues, Western Surf and Rock.' (Daniel Orlick & The Diplomats) So you're like a battered suitcase? And music genres are not proper nouns.

- 'Each live performance serves as an exorcism, and with songs as rich as maple, you'd be wise to watch'. (The Pedantics) Unsettling, mixed exorcism/tree metaphor.

- 'Here is a band, with poise like no other, who simply aim to sing about what's right to them, whether good or bad. Whose tunes raise drowned heads'. (The Vagabonds) They resurrect the dead!

The lesson here is that bands should concentrate on music. And that editors should be given more than ten minutes and payment in Doritos to edit this bollocks.