... Long live the Guitar Band?
A recent interview with Jim Chancellor, MD for Fiction Records, revealed that record companies are scared to sign up guitar bands, preferring to invest in other forms of music. The reported interview can be found on the BBC Newsbeat website here.
Apparently there was only one debut album in the top 35 of 2011 from a guitar band (The Vaccines). The interview also cites the fact that only one guitar band made the top 15 shortlist for sound of 2012 as reason to panic.
Shaun Keavney on 6music hit the nail on the head the same morning when he declared that this sort of non-news story rises up every three or four years as music tastes cycle, and a quick search of the internet in trying to find the newsbeat story brought up quite a few, very similar, stories from previous years.
So, what do you think? I certainly would agree that there isn't the mainstream interest in indie guitar music that has been enjoyed around the time of, say, the Madchester scene of the late eighties / early nineties, or the Britpop scene in the mid nineties, but that's not to say that the quality of the movement is any lower, rather the genre is missing that one (or two) great bands to lift the scene into the public eye. I can't see 2012 delivering any such band, but then again sometimes I quite like the fact that the genre is left to deliver good, honest music without having the massive mountains of hype dropped on it by the 'mainstream' radio stations and TV programmes.
In celebration of the institution, here's a track by my favourite guitar band of all time. One, Two, Three, Four!
This Boy Can Wait by The Wedding Present
