Photo from Luxury Stranger's Facebook page (give them a like here)
Something I wish I had the time to do these days is listen to more albums. I mean properly listen, not just on to fill the silence while I am working or reading, but sitting down and not getting up until the end with the option of moving a little bit to turn the record over. When I was a child the record player (we used to call it a Hi-Fi) was in the living room so I would disappear into my own world with the headphones on and just take in every note of the album. On my ninth birthday I would tape record albums and take them upstairs to my room and lie on the bed listening, a far more savoury activity than the one I would enthusiastically partake in behind my locked bedroom door a few years later.
I'm not sure why this activity died out (don't worry, I'm back to talking about albums), are people really that busy these days? To be honest I suppose I am and the luxury of just over an hour to sit doing nothing is one that I can only dream of at the moment. Another factor was the introduction of the MP3 player. I know we had the ability to make our own compilations on cassette but if you recorded an album on cassette for use on your Walkman then at least the songs stayed in the correct order. We can't even do that thing where our brain automatically cues up the next track when you hear a song on its own.
Bands are still making albums though and they should be appreciated in the right order and preferably with your undivided attention. Even when a band performs an album on stage there is still distraction. When I went to see Peter Hook and The Light at Rescue Rooms performing the two New Order albums Low Life and Brotherhood and as great as the band sounded I started to wonder why a large section of the audience bothered wasting their money to attend as all they seemed to be doing was pushing through people on the way to the bar and back, then on their way to the smoking area and back. If I hadn't been writing the review I would have lost my patience with these clowns and gone home, but then I would have let them win. It annoys me enough when people talk when the live music is on, but having a sponsored walk during a gig just marks you out as an arsehole. If a band release an album then there is a far better way to play it to an audience all the way through and tonight I found it.
I have never been to such an event before but I can't for the life of me explain why this isn't a thing. Luxury Stranger are not releasing their album Darkness Falls Upon the Light until March next year but invited a select audience of friends, colleagues and music industry types who had supported them to listen to it. Here's the genius part, we were listening to the album in a live music venue. After a brief introduction from Simon York and Jake Hampson we were left in peace to listen to the album all the way through with no commentary and no interruption. The best part of this is that everyone just sat and listened with no talking and no getting up to go to the bar or out for a smoke. There was a little confusion after the first song, I was sitting next to Martin Valentine (one of my fellow Notts Factor judges and owner of Random Recordings) and he wasn't sure if we should applaud after each track but we didn't, we waited until the end.
The album is a masterpiece by the way and this gathering was a brilliant move that I would love to see more bands using in the promotion process when there's a new album to get people listening to. Not just for us music business types, these could be public events providing everyone behaved themselves and didn't talk.
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