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Originally Posted by Derek
But the records are what draw people to the gigs.
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This is a slightly different thing, to me - in as far as you're talking about the general live experience. People who go to gigs expecting the record will be disappointed. That the recording - the endlessly-repeatable, so-say perfect artefact - is given aesthetic primacy, is taken as the sine qua non of 'what music is' is part of the reason for the live scene not being as healthy as it could be.
What's a reasonable night out for the average person? A few pints, a meal, the cinema - but try and get people to a gig by a band they don't know is fucking impossible. How many people here nip out to see a band just because it's on? Few, I expect.
What I'd like to see is a return to the live show, if the record is to dissolve into incoherence or irrelevance. There's no reason that people won't want to support local, non-famous bands, and it's only really been in the last 30 years that culture's changed (as far as I can see). What we need in this country is a change in the licencing laws, to make it easier to put bands on, to encourage people away from the TV and into the pubs.
The problem is we're in a transitory phase - the record is pretty much irrelevant, but so is the live show except for a hardy few. The devaluation of the record is one thing, but the devaluation of music
in general is very worrying.
[These are some thoughts in an order that is apparently arbitrary]