Monday 19 October 2020
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Music
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COURIER
Forget festivals! This was the summer of streams Our writers discuss the best virtual concerts from music's weirdest summer ever
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Leo Dawson
harli’s recent record is practically tailor-made for virtual performance, leaning into the PC music genre of her peers and giving an upbeat and appropriately glitchy live performance for the Boiler Room streaming platform. Since Charli XCX’s latest album how i’m feeling now (sic) was written, produced and released during lockdown as a musical exploration of how Charli feels during quarantine, it seems appropriate that the first live performance of the record was a virtual one. A £5 entry fee and exclusive access to limited edition merch meant the livestream’s chat was packed with fellow listeners and despite some expected lag and buffering, Charli and Boiler Room pulled off a great live event. With her boyfriend acting as a cameraman, Charli performed eight fan-favourite hits from how i’m feeling now with the technical mishaps actually seeming quite well suited to the glitchcore and hyperpop sound of Dylan Brady and AG Cook’s production and Charli’s own vocoder-heavy vocals. It was definitely a makeshift performance with the popstar dancing around her living room in sunglasses, capris and an oversized shirt but Charli made up for the often unpolished nature of livestreamed performances with incomparable high energy, wrapping up her performance with an intimate Q&A session that would often go ignored by many artists. Charli has gone on to perform at other virtual concerts, such as producer AG Cook’s ‘Appleville’ alongside Kero Kero Bonito, Hannah Diamond and 100 gecs, the latter of which even holding their own virtual concert called ‘Square Garden’ on a Minecraft server during lockdown.
Grace Lazzaro
Leonie Bellini
orey Taylor. A name that some of you might be looking at and think to yourself, “Who? Jeez, Grace, you’ve lost me once again.” Then some of you- I’m looking at you my lovely fellow metalheads- who instantly shoot up at the sound of that name because you know he is arguably one of the best and most talented singers today. For those of you who fell in the former category, Corey Taylor is a metal/ hard rock singer, most notably known for his involvement in popular bands Stone Sour and Slipknot. Recently, however, Taylor branched away from his bands a bit to release a solo album, CMFT, on 2 October. I won’t go into my usual rants of how amazing this album is as the point of this article is to talk about the live stream concert he put on last Friday, but I will say no matter what type of music you listen to, you must go listen to this album right now. I don’t even care if you don’t finish this article to go to your music app as long as you go listen to it. Anyways, now onto the actual point of this article. As I said, last Friday, Corey Taylor, like many other artists, put on a virtual concert for fans as, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, live concerts are tragically unable to happen. However, Taylor did not pull back for this show. Though it was online, he somehow made it feel like you were right there in the pit with him. From stage effects to continuing to speak to the 'crowd' to his innate connection to his fans, I was transported out of my bedroom and to his concert which was a truly amazing experience. Taylor also didn’t hold out on his actual performance either. He sang his heart out and jumped around the stage just like he would at any show. My inability to be able to go to concerts has probably been the most difficult adjustment for me with this pandemic. But thanks to Corey Taylor and his willingness to go all out for a virtual concert for his fans, I was able to experience that inexplicably joyful feeling once again.
he highlight of those one-walk-a-day lockdown weeks came every Friday for me, in the form of Frankie Cosmos (the band name of New York musician Greta Kline) livestreams, broadcast late-night on Instagram for ten weeks. The best parts of Cosmos’ songs have always been the songwriting itself, the humorous observations of lyrics, odes to pets and best friends, wrapped up in catchy melodies and delivered with a skilful mix of sincerity and wit. This all translates perfectly to an Instagram stream which is lo-fi by its bandwidth-dependent nature, the wavering sound quality unimportant when all you really need is a voice and a few notes on an instrument. Her bedroompop songs sounded perfect and intimate exactly where they were penned. The lively comments (arguably half of the fun of a livestream) were full of people reciting their favourite lyrics in all-caps, and inside jokes being created in real time through phone keyboard typos across the world. Beloved deep Bandcamp cuts (‘Be Normal Frankie’, ‘Solitaire’) were played for the first time in years, the set lists handwritten based off fan requests from an immeasurably extensive back catalogue. In the absence of bandmates, Cosmos’ family joined in, with her parents and brother offering harmonies and keyboard accompaniment they’d only practiced that day. After the music was over, the stream turned collaborative, with split-screen conversations with friends and bandmates, including chats with keyboardist and merch designer Lauren Martin, instantly entertaining and hilarious as only best friends can be. In the absence of real-life connection, this was a novel way to learn more about the people behind the music, and ask them the stupid (mainly food-related) questions you’d always wondered about. These sweet bursts of music stripped back to its joyful bones gave my weird lockdown weeks structure, and offset some of that live music longing in the most playful way possible.
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Images: Pixabay, Instagram (@charli_xcx, @frankiecombos, @ coreytaylor)
Interview: Will Farquarson of pop-rock quartet Bastille Bassist Will Farquarson spills his favourite moments in the pop-rock four-piece. Finlay Holden — Music sub-editor
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astille are one of the UK’s biggest indiepop exports – having topped the charts, dropped 3 killer LPs and teased us with 2 big new singles, Will from Bastille shares his highlights from a decade in the iconic four-piece. FH: Hi Will! How have you been doing over the last couple of months? WF: Hello! Yeah, I’m good, thanks – as good as anyone can be doing in this strange, strange time, anyway. FH: Have you guys been able to get back together as a band recently? WF: As lockdown eased enough so that groups could meet up again, we were able to get straight back in the studio thankfully, yes. We’ve also been busy doing some radio promo for our new music, and have been able to get in a couple of virtual performances – sadly without any crowds for the moment. FH: At least you were prepared enough to have new music to drop! The lyrics to ‘survivin’ hit hard at the moment. WF: I’m not sure what specifically the lyrics are in reference to, but it was actually
written way before all this COVID stuff and it tries to reflect the human condition in more general circumstances. I think that’s the magic of music really – a lot of the meaning is given by the listener, and not what the musician necessarily intended, so it’s quite amazing that this song has actually ended up being even more meaningful to people given the current circumstances. FH: Either way, it’s been great having some new tracks from Bastille during lockdown. Your last single, ‘WYGD??’, was more of a rocker; is that something you enjoy as the band’s guitarist/bassist?
WF: Yeah it was good to have another rock tune, we’ve done a few now and we do sound rockier live. The guitars on this song are actually from Graham Coxon [Blur], which was an absolute honour. It was honestly kind of crazy to me to have such an iconic guitarist play something for us, especially someone you’ve been a fan of for like a decade. FH: What’s your biggest success been since you came together?
WF: One of the things I’m most proud of in Bastille’s career, though, is that we have never “sold out”. Yes, we have done some poppy tracks, but we’ve been offered some deals over the years that we’ve turned down; we don’t do things just to try to make money, we do them because it makes the best art and that’s what we’ve always focused on.
There’s a real hole in the culture of our country at the moment, and it needs filling right back up as soon as possible. FH: What do you think about Rishi Sunak, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, recently saying that musicians struggling to survive through COVID should retrain for other jobs? WF: Well yeah, it’s just not a fair thing to say at all, is it? I feel bad mainly for our crew… as a band, we can go for a while without putting out a new album and we’ll be fine, but our roadies are really not in a great situation at the moment, as I’m sure you can imagine. They’re vital to us, we couldn’t succeed without them, and so suggesting they retrain to do something else now seems a bit silly. I do worry that we’re losing something culturally – with all our museums and theatres being closed, as well as there obviously being no live gigs, there’s a real hole in the culture of our country at the moment, and it needs filling right back up as soon as possible. That cannot happen if all our creatives have been forced to leave the industry. Images: Chuff Media, YouTube(BASTILLEvideos)
