PROG ROCK ALLERGICS

Ooo. Look at that title. It do sound very much like a daytime quiz show, or a programme about true life stories in which unexpected events occur. Like discovering your local publican is in fact your Daddy. It is also redolent of a Strictly montage when participants are forced to catalogue their journey, though I am not wearing a unitard as I write. Pity, really.

Anyhoo, when one is wrapping up an internet portal such as this one, it customary to reflect upon what one has learnt, in the manner of an squirming exit interview. Does one understand the vagaries of the music industry and all its merry participants any better? Is there one golden question one should always ask a musical personage? And is it really wise, is it really so sensible, to focus all your pashing instincts on the plumpulent form of Tom Out Of Keane?

It is hard to say.

I have come up with a Best Ever Interview Question. And it is ‘How did you get to be so amazing?’. It’s a deceptive little fucker of a question - at once prostratingly fawning and wonderfully inane. It’s also - and this is rather important for making the fragile egos of music feel secure - utterly disarming. Your interview subject of choice will giggle, they will think ‘Are you taking the piss?’. And a liccle part of them - the part that made them go into music in the first place, I suspect - goes, ‘Yes, I am indeed a little bit amazing, how did that happen?’. It’s even better when you actually mean it and I wish I’d asked it more often.

Another thing that is pobly important to point out, is that we did The Lipster because we felt united about the way 'indie' and 'dance' is covered in the proper presses. Because though it is all very well being clever and showing off your encyclopedic knowledge of the charts - explaining the importance of a record in the context of The Canon (zzzzzzzz) - nobody really needs another site that does that. Surely it was therefore more important to be giddy as toddlers, flighty as butterflies, and convey our enthusiasm via bad photomontage. I mean, if someone's record reminds you of the GCSE art project you did when you were fifteen - all MEANING and WHY DOESN'T ANYONE UNDERSTAND ME? - it makes more sense to scan in said GCSE artwork and say, look everyone, this is what this record sounds like. [Becca: 'Roby, we never actually did that' / Me: 'It was on the list'] Also, the measured judgement of classical reviewing doesn't really account for your record buying anomalies. For to explain - I don’t know why I found fidget house as enlivening as I did last week, but I do know that next week I will have ditched it for graveyard jazz, or canteen dubstep, or wangy house. Or - AIIIEEE - Keane's Perfect Symmetry. I'm not meant to have liked that record. But I did, with all my heart, and I was not about to curtail my pash just because I have a few Autechre records in my collection. This, of course, is the wickedest wicked thing about music - what works for you or me is peculiarly personal. And often, one's tastes don't 'make sense'.

The other big rant I bored Becca with regularly is about how your response to music is often more visual than it is texty. You hear a brilliant noise - a hi-hat, a donk, a bassline - and it makes you think of an abstract thing. It stirs something in your frontal lobes, and what is called to mind is not the other 875 bands that the record sounds like, but something else. It might be a memory, a common human experience, a bowl of trifle or a spatula. And - what do you know - that visual response is just as valid as being able to know what a donk is supposed to mean, man. The point for me is that the donk pushes some buttons in your brain, fires your synapses and makes you happy. Traditional criticism occasionally feels like arguing that the academic interpretation of the colour green is more valid than the green you or I see. Maybe the colour green makes you think of apples. In which case, write about apples. Don't write 2000 words with reference to Pantone colours #7836 through to #9763. Apart from anything else, it's sort of boring. And it immediately excludes anyone who doens't know what Pantone #7836 is.

IT'S A THEORY. DON'T EXPECT ME TO HAVE WORKED IT OUT PROPERLY.

What else have we learnt? One - do not interview anyone at the end of a day of press junketing, when you have been told you have less than 8 minutes to extract something entertaining from them. Especially if they are in a cab with four other people on a phone line so shit you are forced to bellow every question. And especially when your list of questions includes the opener ‘If your bottom was a spaceship…?’ For even shiny pop stars get tired, and the resulting recording - full of whats and sorrys - will make for a horrorshow afternoon’s transcribing. There were a few moments in the last year where one was forced to conclude that one sounded like a bit of a prannet on the phone. And it is not much fun listening to yourself on slow speed when that is the case.

That said, we had some amazing interviews with some rather special people. I should probably not admit this, but I had expected those cats in the category marked ‘dance’ to be a bit more tricky to interrogate. After all, if one has spent years alone in one’s bedroom twiddling and fiddling, it might be hard to talk to me about how a new rug in the studio might 'bring the room together'. And that is why it was such a pleasure to happen upon coves like Drums of Death - a well-rounded fellow if ever there was one, and who was both mile-a-minute talky and full of enthusiasm for things quite, quite apart from brrrap beats. Also La Roux, Jesse Rose, Rebekah Stricken City, Lake, Alela Diane, School of Seven Bells, CocknBullkid, Benji Hughes, Tom Chaplin. Do you know, they are all very nice people.

It is also important to say a few thank yoooze. One, to anyone who read us – fanx, it was nice having you and if we knew you were coming we’d have baked a cake (my mum sings this, no idea why). Two - the nice people at DiS (Sean and Tom, who hosted our portal and tweaked it every time we had another amusing ‘idea’ - even though they were busy as Boxer with their own internets). Anyone who ever wrote for us, and anyone who ever wrote *to* us. It was remarked on at many a Top Level Board Meeting of Dread that we were very lucky, because our readers were clever and amusing, and almost everyone who wrote to us was LOLs. Even the ones we offended - and let’s face it, I was asking for it most of the time. Although someone did write and call me a 'Grade A Cunt’, which seemed just a teeny, tiny bit of an overreaction. I only said they were bald. And fat.

(Ah.)

Best of all, of course, is Becca. Who I have to tell you, is the most charmingest of persons to do a web thing with. She is brilliant - a hot spring of ideas and enthusiasm. And she is funny and clever and has good t-shirts. I had an absolute bloody ball doing this website, and that is testament to her.

Lots of love (and very big sadface)

Roby xxxxx