Harry's Place Arts

Cross posted from For All and None: An interesting article at the BBC website on plagiarism in the internet age begins: A German minister has resigned after copying huge chunks of his doctoral thesis, while the London School of Economics is probing whether Colonel Gaddafi’s son lifted chunks and used a ghost writer for his [...]

“As Lord Mandelson’s anti-piracy Digital Economy Bill begins its uncertain journey through parliament, John Tatlock investigates the music industry’s most troubled decade yet and says ‘stop whining, it’s only a scratch’.” Read the full article at The Quietus and see how Tatlock demolishes four music industry myths. Meanwhile, The Register notes that grassroots opposition to [...]

When I started out playing in bands in the late 1980s, getting into a recording studio was a grand ambition. My first band used to record our ‘demos’ on a stereo hifi tape deck, which necessitated getting a good live mix and a mistake-free performance (just like they did in the 1950s). We dreamed of [...]

I recently got my hands on a copy of the DTS-Audio version of Frank Zappa’s 1978 Halloween concert in 5.1 surround sound… very cheaply, I’m happy to say, at the Brighton Record Faire a fortnight ago. It compensated for the fact that one album I bought (ok, it was in a 50p bargain box) didn’t actually have [...]

Former Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman, according to The Guardian, “has criticised music video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, claiming they will lead to fewer young people taking up real instruments.” “It encourages kids not to learn, that’s the trouble. It makes less and less people dedicated to really get down and [...]

I had the very great pleasure of sitting front and center at the Open Fist Theater in Los Angeles for the Saturday evening performance of Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage . In my opinion Joe’s Garage represents the very best of everything Frank Zappa created through a career marked by densely packed, sometimes inaccessible avant-garde compositions [...]

If you watch the video at this BBC story about Guitar Hero, you’ll hear Jason ‘Jay’ James, from Bullet for My Valentine, say: You get involved playing the notes. Let’s make this clear, You get involved in “playing” the notes in Guitar Hero in the same way you get involved with fine art by doing [...]

The photo above is of an extremely rare James Brown record. The record is rare not because it flopped – believe it or not hit records, mass produced in their millions, are not as rare or as valuable as ‘misses’ – but because the government of the country in which it was pressed, destroyed every [...]

Well, my new Q Magazine has just dropped through the door. I see the fidgety editors have overseen yet another re-design. It now looks like counterfeit Wired. I can’t keep up with the redesigns and reformats of what was once an iconic magazine. But that’s not what I want to post about today. It’s the [...]

Leaving aside the ghastly garish website and the rather annoying claim that this is all about “embracing social networking” rather than promoting Universal’s forthcoming Motown 50 album, deciding what your favourite Motown songs are is a great opportunity for pub-conversation-style musical discussion. For the record, I’ve chosen purely on the basis of the ones I [...]