For those about to piss me off…

Many things about small city life maker me smile. Others make me wince, but very few make me angry. Local music/musicians can manage all three, while also making me joyously happy on occasion.
First/early gigs make me smile. How I'd love to see footage of the so-called greats on their first outings - Gallagher, Mercury, Jagger, Cocker - I bet they were utter dog shite. The music is normally appalling, with the drummers nearly always sounding worst and with guitar noodlings in every track. But they make me smile, because from these pools of piss come great steaming turds, and there's nothing quite like a good shit.
Normally, those friendships forged in there teens get dragged to their limits as experience moves the goalposts of interests and what's left is the lowest common denominator. Sometimes these bands drag on and on to the point where they can perfectly play the turgid shit they should've left behind years ago - SPLIT UP! These bands make me wince.
When they do finally split, be it drugs, partners, uni or 'musical differences', out they go, meet like minded monkeys and hopefully form the sort of bands that create the joyously happy bits.
All this seems, to me, like natural progression - crap, hesitant, ok, marvellous - but there is a dark side. Some bands are not really bands. They are one fevered ego surrounded by some very often talented yet shy, retiring, unconfident musicians. This ego does all the 'creative' work and normally has doting partners/fans/friends that tell them until they believe it that they are a god-like genius of unimaginable proportions. Their bands tend to create laughable, self indulgent, in-jokey art wank of the lowest order.
So that's what makes me angry, eh? Well no, actually. Sometimes it works - The Blue Aeroplanes, Swirl, Ultra Vivid Scene, to name but a few. No. What makes me angry is the effect these arseholes, especially the failed ones, have on their surroundings and those around them.
A few words for you, arseholes, for you know who you are. First up, you're not, actually, very good at all. If you want to be singer/songwriters, do it on your own - be Dylan, be Bragg, be Costello. Write songs and play them and live by the sword. If you're any good, you'll float, and good luck to you. If you want to be in a band, be IN a band. It is the combinations of imaginations that makes the greats.
And don't piss on other people's chips. Not only are you not gods, neither do you have a special veto that mean you can wank all over other people's lives and then claim some kind of poetic licence. The rules that apply to others apply to you too, and you'll get yours in the end - karma may be hippy dippy religious baloney but the reality is if you screw enough people, the odds rise that you'll bump into your match - lets just hope I'm there to see it.
I saw a wonderful band supported by a woefully shit one recently. The shit one came on late, played an awful bunch of nearly-tunes and then ran over their allotted time, potentially cutting short the headline bands set. To top it all off, the arrogant and largely talentless frontman proceeded to come in for the quiet headliners set and talk, loudly, through half of it. The irony is that, if he were half the musical purist he claims to be, he would've given the band the respect they both deserved and had afforded him. Either that, or at least have had the common decency to fuck off.
And there you have it, the anger. But that's just me. The old, fat, hairy, opinionated fuck from London who thinks he knows everything. Wanker. Fuck him. He wouldn't know a good band if its TV landed on his head from a hotel window. Yeah yeah. Now go get a job, you scruffy Herberts.

Ol' man Marling