I'm sticking on old Cure CD's into my iPod. Looking back at these, I'm surprised by how much detail we paid to things in those days. "The Head On The Door" is 37 minutes. (Morrissey's "Kill Uncle" is just 33 minutes). There wer esingles, yes, occasionally. If you were lucky you could afford the 12" at £3.29, which had two extra songs and maybe a remix. Possibly a 4-track 10". With a live song on. That normally came out a week later to keep it in the charts. The only time you heard about these bands were when a newspaper had an interview, or if you were a megafan, the band sent you a photocopied pamphlet with an interview in. Ah. The joy of fanclub magazines. And fan-run fanzines. Remmeber them? Selling £1 pamphlets done at Dad's photocopy shop after the gig?

These days there's almost too much stuff. Every single has about six b-sides (two for each of the three CD's, or 2 CD's and DVD, however), every artists has a website (and no doubt plenty of fansites), all chock full of interviews, information, forums, weird MP3's. Fansites have radio sessions, bootlegs of live shows days after they happen, the whole thing. About the only band nobody knows anything about is Guns'N'Roses, and that's because their website has three pages, they don't do interviews, play live, or anything.

There's an overdose of information.

On The X-Files I can see the wheels of an old cassette tape moving to indicate something is being recorded. How quaint. Nothing dates faster than time. More later.

M
- posted by Mark @ 1:00 pm