What do The Rolling Stones today and a lion taming act in a circus have in common ? Quite alot actually. Let me explain. When you see the lion taming you have to understand that, great act though it is, the lions and their tamer are pure artifice. The lion is portrayed as the king of the jungle, a fearsome man eating beast. The tamer is portrayed as brave hero, gallantly holding back the lion with nothing more than a whip and a chair, making this terrifying creature submit to his or her will and encouraging the deadly big cat to perform a series of dainty tricks. The problem is; both the lions and their tamers are in on the act. The lion is usually a hand reared pet who in the golden age of the circus often slept in the tamer's caravan. The tamer on the other hand knows that if the lion was really wild and ferocious a whip and a chair would be as much use as a feather duster. So what you have is a show, primarily for children, where real danger and pure emotion have been replaced with amused guffaws and theatrical flourish.

Nowadays, The Rolling Stones are alot like those circus lions, as far removed from the dark mystique of Altamont as our tame lions are from their forebears in the Coliseum; where they happily munched on Christians for the amusement of the Emperor Nero and his blood thirsty Roman subjects. For example, when Keith Richards stumbled on stage solo in the middle of the concert at Slane to mumble winningly, the audience happily remarked to each other, "Ooh, there's Johnny Depp's dad from Pirates of the Carribean 3'. See what I mean?

The band that played Slane last weekend wasn't THE ROLLING STONES, of myth and legend, it was a bunch of canny old men with one eye on the clock and the other on the money. A savvy bunch of pensioners who long ago realised that nostalgia and a well tended brand name can keep you going long after passion and sincerity have disappeared along with your natural hair colour. I admire them in much the same way as I admire those toothless lions and their beloved tamers, I even applaud them and when they have gone the way of the traditional circus I'm sure that the world will be a less colourful place but, do I feel anything inside when I watch them play ? Nope.

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Yesterday the Consumer Association of Ireland published the letter they sent to MCD after receiving complaints from hundreds of ticket holders for the Barbara Streisand gig in Celbridge. The letter seeks a refund in addition to compensation for the complainants that contacted them.

Will MCD cough up? Many doubt it and that what awaits us, once they send in their reply to the CAI, is another round of phone-ins to Joe Duffy featuring some of the punters in question, the CEO of the CAI and a PR person from MCD going on the defensive with a list of banal talking points. And then it'll all quieten down, until the next concert controversy.

Surely there is an alternative here? An opportunity for MCD to turn this around? Instead of taking a position of 'no compromise' in the face of consumer uproar and having to go on the defensive, why not take control of the conversation and turn it around to their benefit? There's many ways this could be done but here's one 5 step plan for MCD to do exactly this:

1. Reply to the CAI acknowledging some shortcomings in the organisation of this particular gig that effected a small proportion of patrons and agree, as an act of goodwill, to take it on the chin and reimburse these ticket holders (limiting it to those that had contacted the CAI up to the date the CAI sent their letter). Cost? My back-of-envelope calculation says we're talking about 100k Euros.
2. Ensure the report of the 'specialist committee' that MCD set up to investigate what happened at the gig (it is due to be published the week of Sept 10th) has a set of solid generic recommendations for organising & managing events of this nature.
3. When the report is published issue a press release welcoming the report and accepting its recommendations in full, stating that they will be fully reflected in a new 'Customer Charter' for all MCD events, to be published by the end of 2007.
4. Commit to placing the 'Customer Charter' at a visible place at all future MCD-managed events and provide a freephone customer contact service on the charter for patrons who wish to complain about any aspect of the event's organisation.
5. Then invite all the other promoters in Ireland to either:
   
        a. Draft a similar Customer Charter for their customers, or,
        b. Propose the text of the MCD charter as a model for all promoters.

With this sort of approach they can, Jujutsu-like, turn what has been a PR disaster into a PR coup, one that puts its competitors on the back-foot and raises the game for the entire industry.

Update: An hour or so after this entry was first published Jim Carroll posted on his blog that Aiken Promotions have recently published a 'customer care policy' on their website. I dug around a bit in the search engines and was able to conclude (from various cached copies of the Aiken website's home page) that the 'customer care policy' was published by Aiken sometime between July 17 and Aug 3rd (i.e. just after the Streisand concert debacle). So the opportunity for MCD to lead the way on this front has been taken from them by their main competitor. The Aiken policy however I note is not complete (e.g. no customer care line in place) so there is still room for MCD to up the ante and offer a 'charter' that is far-reaching and sets a high bar for the rest of the industry.

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The Consumer Association of Ireland (CAI) today published a letter it sent to MCD, motivated by 95 complaints representing 343 ticket holders to the Barbara Streisand concert in Celbridge.

No matter what you think of Madame Streisand's music (or, for that matter, of people prepared to cough up a fortune to sit in a field and listen to it) the letter presents a long list of complaints from a large number of punters.

The letter seeks not only a refund but also compensatation for the complainants for "their lack of enjoyment of the concert" (although I do note that the lack of enjoyment they talk about is not of the musical kind).

Citing the The Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act, 1980, the letter also claims a breach of the 'law of contract' and that the punters in question are - therefore - entitled to a "remedy". Hmmmm. Roll on MCD's reply, which - it would seem - we can expect the CAI to publish on their website.

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Kevin Spacey as Christopher Walken as Harrison Ford as Han Solo.

The Theme from Star Wars as performed by Lego Figurines.

 Star Wars on a banjo

 Disco Dancing Storm Trooper in Tokyo

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This weekend’s Festival of World Cultures in Dún Laoghaire (24-26 August) doesn’t feature any music we’d normally consider as being French – no bal de musette or Piaf-style torch songs or even Parisian DJs stepping two-by-two off the nearby ferry.

However, Algerian-born traditional singer Rachid Taha has spent much of his life in the former colonial centre, is enormously popular there – and he was present at one of France’s seminal musical events (of which more later). In many ways Taha represents an important aspect of French culture today.

Traditional Maghreb music from north Africa, the wailing vocals and swirling rhythms that soundtrack holiday programme reports from Tangiers and Tunis, is known as rai – but Taha, always scornful of genres, wittily deflects such talk by referring to himself as Rai Cooder or Rai Orbison.

Like Tinariwen and Toumast, the Tuareg bands of the Mali Sahara, Taha has electrified the old style with modern punk and electro sounds – and very contemporary lyrical concerns. His songs, sung in Arabic, deal with questions of identity; his excellent 2004 album was called ‘Tékitoi’ (phonetically, Tay Kee Twa), a txt-msg style compression of “T’es qui, toi?” meaning “Who are you?”

Four decades after Algerian independence from France, national identity remains a live issue here. Racial discrimination – casual or official – is still rife: non-whites in Paris live in constant expectation of identity checks and police harassment that whites like your blogger never experience (in almost three years I’ve never been ID-checked). Taha’s first band was called Carte De Séjour, named after the French residency permit. His 1986 punked-up cover version of old crooner Charles Trenet’s ‘Douce France’ was banned from French radio just because of its aggressive attitude and implicit attack on bourgeois France.

(The recent film Indigènes, released in Ireland as ‘Days Of Glory’, exposed the injustices faced by North-African-born French soldiers in World War II; as a direct result of the film’s agitation the unequal pension paid to those surviving Maghreb veterans was brought up to the same level as for French-born soldiers. France’s huge ethnic-origin population faces such petty racism every day, and one hopes that Rachida Dati, France’s justice minister, can make real progress – she’s the daughter of Moroccan-Algerian parents.)

Whatever about political radicalism, Taha is associated with one of the revolutionary moments of French music – the 1981 five-night residency by The Clash at the Theatre Mogador in Paris. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this series of concerts determined the course of French rock for the following fifteen years. Taha was in the audience, as was young Manu Chao and his future band Mano Negra, members of Les Negresses Vertes (another fine ‘80s band) and other future French rock stars – all were inspired to form bands, mix punk with traditional music… and wear leather trousers. This was the template of nearly all French bands until Daft Punk’s dancefloor revolution in the mid-‘90s.

Some accounts credit Taha with a more central role. After one show he met Joe Strummer and Mick Jones backstage and gave them a copy of his recordings. The following year, The Clash released ‘Rock The Casbah’ – directly influenced, claim the French music community proudly, by Taha that night (There’s no evidence, though, that Taha inspired Strummer’s epic Paris disappearing act the following year).

This blast of French pride would seem to be borne out by subsequent events. Taha recorded his own Arabic version of the Clash hit, retitled ‘Rock El Kasbah’, for the ‘Tékitoi’ album – and Jones and Paul Simenon have joined him onstage to perform the song, most recently at Taha’s April 2007 London concert.

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Its fair to say that any band which takes their name from a memorable quote spoken in the movie 'Amadeus'  by the Emperor Joseph II about the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart probably doesn't intend to ply their trade with three chord tricks but Tu Meni Notes went far beyond any concept of what a reasonable level of musical proficency is within a band enviroment in their pursuit of a new golden age of instrumental guitar rock.

Formed in Galway by a group of classically trained musicians who were sick and tired of being in a series of bands with slackers who were more interested in the jazz woodbines than the jazz solos, Tu Meni Notes set out to bring back the kind of virtuoso rock that led to, among other things, Deep Purple Live At The Royal Albert Hall, Joe Satriani and Pat Metheny. 

The game plan they came up with is worthy of a standing ovation alone. Briefly, once they had formed they went off and rehearsed for two solid years without ever playing a single gig. Two years of 8 hour sessions with a 10 minute tea break grudgingly thrown in. Thats not counting the endless hours of solo rehearsal time the individual members put in to ensure they didn't get shown up at official band rehearsals; a sort of arms race of virtuosity if you will. Not content with that, they drew up a set list of almost impossible to play numbers, the kind of tunes that make your hands cramp or fingers bleed halfway through, and to top it off, when they finally felt they were ready to perform in public they booked themselves into Galway's scruffy mecca of hard rock, Sally Longs, for 8 gigs on consecutive weeks knowing full well that they would be playing to a crowd that knew their guitar rock inside out and would be very vocal in their dismay if the band didn't cut the mustard.

And you know what? Tu Meni Notes rocked the roof off the house. Then, after eight triumphant concerts, they split, the band having imploded under the insane, self generated pressure to deliver razor sharp, note perfect performances night after night. Here is the band at the height of their short but white hot career, tackling the Rach 9 of fusion, Al Di Meola's "Race With The Devil On Spanish Highway".
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Seth Lakeman: "Lady of the Sea"

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Now the two are together again in Belfast – Emily Loizeau is supporting the Duke at his concert tonight (Sunday 19 August) at the Empire. If you’re going to the show, lucky you.

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For those of you 'down with the kids', this will be old news. 50 Cent and Kanye West are releasing their new albums (Curtis and Graduation respectively) on on the same day in the US - September 11th. A rather entertaining war of words has now escalated to the following sensible conclusion: they'll be debating who has the best album live on television. As you do.

Fiddy's somewhat baffling response to West's TV debate request closed with "Just don't be asking me if I am a conscious rapper. I know exactly what I am saying - so I am conscious". I read this imagining Fiddy in baby oil placing his finger on his chin and pursing his lips a la Dr Evil.

Kanye's somewhat more reasonable reply ("What am I going to debate about?") has led to even more drama! Fiddy has declared that he will never make another 50 Cent album should West outsell him. This is an empty threat as Cent is regularly amongst the highest selling artists in the world. Still, we can but hope.

At least this level of juvenile engagement probably won't result in multiple gun-related rapper casualties.

Still, this is all rather reminiscent of other music battles. I thought I'd start a list of my own personal favourites, NOT in the order of their cultural significance of course!

• The Stones vs The Beatles

Still a healthy debate a full 35 years plus since the bands were at their peak, this argument will probably never be definitely settled. For me, Beggar's Banquet to Goat Heads Soup wins the day.

• Oasis 'Roll With It' vs Blur 'Country House'

Conventional wisdom ran that Blur won the battle (Country House debuted at no 1, beating Roll With It to top spot) but that Oasis won the war. Morning Glory went on the sell squillions and the Gallagher brothers became OK and Hello fodder. But... Blur scored bigger hits in the US (Song 2?) and have arguably released better and more challenging albums than their Mancunian foes. For me, Blur by a street.

• One True Voice vs Girls Aloud

Heh! 2 "bands" created on 2002's Popstars - The Rivals. One managed by Pete Waterhouse, the other by Louis Walsh. "Sound of the Underground" announced the arrival of a sassy young group that wiped the floor with their male rivals. One True Voice fell apart after just two singles and Pete Waterman has never been heard of since. Yey!

• The Music Industry vs Downloaders

Still raging. And dealt with elsewhere on the CLUAS blogs.

• The Dark Wars - Norwegian Death Metal vs Finnish Black Metal 1992 - 1994

It's not just the rap genre where musical conflict has escalated to murder. Varg Vicenne of Barzum stabbed Øystein Aarseth of Mayhem 23 times and is currently serving a 21 year jail sentence for his trouble.

• The Killers vs The Bravery

The Killers currently ahead on points in the Lightweight Dead-eyed Careerist Championship of the World.

Any others I've missed?

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