We don't feel we can do justice to how excellent the Gang Of Four show was last night at Avalon. Perhaps some praise randomly culled from the Interweb can impress up readers. From ILM:
"HOLY CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jon King beating up a microwave! Jon King doing the Jesus Christ pose! Jon King doing THE CRABWALK! And ANDY GILL! F*cking hell."
Alright, we can't find much more online about last night. But if you search for comments on the other shows from this tour there is a constantly repeated mantra: "I expected them to be good, but I didn't expect them to be *that* good."
Anyway, the band opened with the amazing "Return the Gift" and ploughed through most of Entertainment (which was expanded and re-released today) as well as a bunch of other hot tunes. They did two encores, the first ending with "Damaged Goods" and the second and final consisting solely of a rousing run through "I Found That Essence Rare." They played particularly ripping versions of "At Home He Feels Like A Tourist" and "Anthrax." The whole performance was intense and electric. The band was really amped up and trolled the stage like caged tigers, switching mikes, striking dramatic poses, and acting totally and unironically punk without coming off like arseholes. The performance was very dramatic, and much of the proceedings were lit solely with those naked white spots from the foot of the stage that cast giant shadows of the performers against the back wall of the stage area, making them look like the huge rock Gods that they were last night, and apparently every other night on this tour so far. So that's that. By all means go see this act on this tour if you can.
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We had an interesting email from a nice label head for a respectably sized indie who has released records you know and may conceivably own. Not going to name him or the label, since it's not really anybody's business. But said label head just wanted to give us a little more info about working with IODA, a subject we discussed in this previous post.
Some interesting takeaways from the email: 1) IODA gets 15%, presumably of the purchase price of the individual music file. We aren't a real reporter anymore so we didn't get specifics. 2) 85% of the label's digital sales are through ITunes. 3) The label head mused that, coincidentally, his current digital sales breakdown means that conceivably he could have just done a deal with ITunes directly and be making the same amount right now (since the 15% of non-ITunes digital sales he is doing is equivalent to the 15% commission IODA gets) 4) All that said, the label head really likes IODA and says they truly do make things "very easy for a small label who couldn't possibly set up with a dozen or so digital distributors." So there you go.
Go over to The Big Ticket and read all about The Downing Street memo. It's not a band. And we don't have the energy to discuss how maddening it is.
Finally, we got our formal rejection from WMBR this morning. Can't say we are surprised or bummed -- it became very apparent during the interview that the show we were proposing would be duplicative of other programming that they currently devote some 20+ hours of air time to in any given week. So, disappointed, yeah, but we know the politics and difficulties that come into play when programming a radio station from our days at WESU.
We're listening to the Dogs Die In Hot Cars record for the first time right now and we are not feeling it.
That is all.
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