John
Becoming more clichéd than hi-fi show music itself is complaining about hi-fi show music. Guilty as charged. Never one to play the hi-fi show music game is Cambridge Audio whose presence at Munich High-End 2023 was, once again, a whoosh of fresh air.
When I bowled up to their ‘booth’ – which wasn’t a booth inside the MOC but a red double-decker London bus parked squarely out front – a Faithless CD could be heard playing from an EVO CD player and EVO 150 amplifier pairing. The London-based company was firing more commercially oriented British music from the windows of a decommissioned British public transport vehicle in support of another product being launched in Munich — which isn’t a tangible product at all.
Kicking off on Spotify this month is a new podcast series called Made By Music in which host Sean Hannam “will get up close and personal with guests to discuss key moments from their lives, in particular the records that shaped and influenced them, songs from the artists’ back catalogue, plus an ultimate “Music Moment”. (That’s the press release talking).
The first three episodes are already online and feature interviews with celebrity bassist Guy Pratt, Boy George and Norman Cook (pictured with Hannam above). And then from tomorrow, three more episodes will drop: James Lavelle, Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and Stephen Street, which I will be digging into first because of the man’s production work on Strangeways, Here We Come, Viva Hate and Modern Life Is Rubbish.
And despite The Smiths being one of the biggest bands of the 1980s and Blur the 1990s, hearing “Death of a Disco Dancer” or “Oily Water” at a hi-fi show remains a pipe dream.
Further information: Made by Music on Spotify
