Adventures in Musica

According to this article , Reverend & The Makers frontman, John McClure, has announced that he plans to quit music in the new year due to frustrations with the music business.

Speaking to the BBC’s Music 6, he said: “I don't want anything to do with this industry, it absolutely stinks, I don't like the way it's all run by rich men in their 50s who went to private school. It's not something I want to be part of.”

All this brings several questions to mind:

1) How come it’s taken him so long to work that out? The industry hasn’t changed that much since the band broke into the mainstream with ‘The State of Things’ last year. If he really hates the music biz’ so much, why didn’t he just decide to call it a day there and then?

2) Why wait until next year? The ‘Makers are due to release their new album in 2009, and McClure intends to make his exit once this is all done. Why bother? If you really can’t stand what you’re doing, why carry on doing it?

In the same article, he says:
“"It's all done for profit and not for any degree of musical feeling or sentiment.”
And there, my friends, is the answer to that question. But I have one more, which is probably the most important of them all.

3) Does anybody actually care? We’re hardly talking about the break up of U2, Metallica or even Coldplay; bands with viable long-term careers who have made an impact on the musical landscape. We’re talking about a bunch of Arctic Monkeys cash-ins who have only been around for three years and, in that time, only managed to release one full album which revels in mediocrity.

Ultimately, all this stinks of publicity. Once they got their slew of singles out the way, the band have pretty much faded into the back of the nation’s conscience.

As such, the only way to remind people that they still exist, and to ensure people cough up the cash next year, is to instil this notion that they’re next album will be their last, their grand-finale, their ultimate swan-song.

Good riddance I say.

If you don’t want to be in music, get out, make room for those who do and stop whining about how you’re leaving because of some artistic moral, when the truth is you’re leaving because you’re not that good and nobody will give a darn when you’re gone.