You know how, when you ask someone who their favourite bands are, and they reel off names that you've never heard of, and you think to yourself, "Music wanker"...?
That's probably me now. It wasn't me until the mid-noughties. Up until that point, as you've maybe noticed from previous posts, nearly all of my favourite albums are from well-known artists, names familiar to people who aren't even that much into music. But the new millennium brought with it a fundamental change in popular music: the most popular mainstream bands were not longer the best bands around, the obscure ones were. I mean just look at the barrel-load of dog shit that has been picking up Brit awards in the last 20 years and compare your Coldplays, Ed Sheerans, Killers and Arctic Monkeys to The Police, Madness, Blondie, The Jam, etc... etc...
Heading this list of obscurities are my favourite band, more so even than The Beatles and Madness, and they go by the name of 'I am Kloot'. Easily the most incomprehensible name you couldn't imagine. There's no explanation for its origins, but one theory is linked to the fact that 'kloot' is Dutch for 'bollock'. Their first album, "Natural History", is one of 3 I have rated 10/10 in 2001 - the first year since 1978 that can boast that many with a perfect score. Their second, self-titled, from 2003, breezes to a 10/10 and rivals Bob's "Highway 61 Revisited" for my favourite album of all time. I'm equally and obsessively generous in awarding top scores to their third album, "Gods and Monsters" (2005), their 4th, "Play Moolah Rouge" (2007), their 5th, "Sky at Night" (2010) and, guess what, their 6th and final studio album, "Let it All In" (2013). I am Kloot's incomprehensible avoidance of commercial success was a blessing for the cult of Kloot followers like myself, who consequently got to see them in small intimate venues, as I did on 8 out of 10 occasions, and more often than not, also got a chance to meet their lead singer and songwriter at the merch stand afterwards. John Bramwell is self-deprecating, a hilarious raconteur and instantly likeable. So you can imagine how awestruck, gobsmacked and privileged I felt, when, at a recent solo gig of his, I was chatting with him afterwards, and this happened: He spotted and admired the screen saver on my phone, which was of a painting I had recently done of Coronation Street's Elsie Tanner, played by actress Pat Phoenix. (He's a Mancunian, that must have been the reason for his interest.) He said, "What's that? That's great!" and when I told him he asked me to send it to him and gave me his mobile number. We've even had a couple of text exchanges since. Non-stalkery too. A surreal experience.
The problem with lesser known bands is that you don't always know about them. I didn't know about The Decemberists until after that decade had finished. Here was a folk-rock band with the ability to tread a path between Nick Drake and Led Zeppelin with Beatles style melodies, spinning wry tales of rogues, murderers, queens, cranes and infanticidal fathers from unspecific historical times. Their discography from the Noughties consists of "Castaways and Cut-outs" (8/10 2002), "Her Majesty, the Decemberists" (8/10 2003), "Picaresque" (10/10 2005), "The Crane Wife" (9/10 2006) and "The Hazards of Love" (8/10 2009).
The Decemberists, like I am Kloot, have the added benefit of a very likeable and witty songwriter and lead singer, Colin Meloy. I don't feel a need to really like the people I listen to, or to get a sense that they harbour personality traits and values that I look for in friends. It's just nice when they do. In stark contrast to Bramwell and Meloy, is Ryan Adams. Again, he's not well known. When I mention him to anyone, I feel the need to say, "Ryan Adams, not Bryan Adams, Ryan not Bryan, very different." But Ryan has turned out to be a bit of a ****. In 2019, it came out that he had been using manipulative behaviour against younger female artists, promising them help in their careers and then sexually harassing them in texts and via social media. This included an under-age girl. Adams made a public apology, but undermined it with a disclaimer, suggesting it was unintentional, denied the allegations and confessed that he had made mistakes in life. Wanker. Now this put me in a difficult position in regard to enjoying his music. He had a hugely prolific decade, releasing ten studio LPs in that time, including one of my absolute favourites, "Gold" (10/10 2001) and also "Heartbreaker" (8/10 2000) and "Cold Roses" (9/10 2005). I certainly didn't feel like listening to him after that news broke. And the first album he (eventually) released afterwards, I just couldn't stomach listening to, especially as he sounded mawkishly and self-indulgently apologetic, with the pathetic whine of the sort of self-obsessed, malignant little bastard that he obviously is. But, I came to realise that if we allowed our moral evaluation of the personal lives of artists whose work we admire to lead us into a refusal to experience it, then we'd end up listening to very little music, reading very few books and watching very few films. That moral evaluation may well colour my enjoyment, but I find myself able to disassociate the person from their art. If I can do that for Chuck Berry, then I can for Ryan not Bryan Adams. (But definitely NOT Gary Glitter! You have to draw a line somewhere)
Listening to songs which are so explicitly about the singer's depression is nearly always pretty depressive. The song-writing tends to be either too earnestly confessional or resignedly woeful. But Malcolm Middleton is a Scottish folk singer who sugars his tales of depression with a gentle upbeat, an almost jaunty wistfulness. Lacing his self-deprecation with just enough wit to make it palatable, songs like "Fuck it, I love You" and "Blue Plastic Bags" (in reference to bringing bottles home from the off licence for a Friday night in), make him another favourite obscure artist of the decade. His debut is graced by the impossible to accurately recall, stream of consciousness title of "5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine" (7/10 2002). Later in the decade he had a string of 3 great albums in 3 years: "A Brighter Beat" (9/10 2007), "Sleight of Heart" (8/10 2008) which includes a heartstring-pulling cover of Madonna's 'Stay', and "Waxing Gibbous" (7/10 2009).
And my final music wanker mention of a lesser known act, is eels. Not Eels. Not The Eels. And in fact not even a band, but instead a band name for an individual called Mark Oliver Everett. Following a strong start in the 90s, eels score highly in the Noughties with the LPs "Daisies of the Galaxy" (8/10 2000), "Souljacker" (7/10 2001), "Shootenanny" (8/10 2003) and "Hombre Lobo" (6/10 2009)
Returning now to those more well-known artists who have appeared on my lists in previous decades - with generally less unsavoury reputations than Ryan Adams, albeit perhaps not as warm and cuddly as Bramwell and Meloy - the Noughties proved an unexpectedly fertile period for many of these old favourites.
Bob Dylan had his most consistent series of albums since the 70s, starting with "Love and Theft" (10/10 2001) which grew on me slowly over about 15 years before I decided it was one of his best, followed 5 years later by "Modern Times" (9/10) and "Together Through Life" (9/10) in 2009. He never fails to surprise.
Neil Young had a similarly consistent spell, though with far fewer gaps between albums. Young released "Are you Passionate?" (8/10 2002), "Greendale" (7/10 2003), "Prairie Wind" (7/10 2005), "Living with War" (8/10 2006) and "Chrome Dreams II" (7/10 2007). Five great albums in five years? Bloody hell, you'd think it was the 70s again.
Madness, who took 14 years after their first split to release one new studio album, then waited another ten to make a stunning return to form with "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" (10/10 2009).
Robert Plant's solo career reached a higher level in the Noughties, but his best effort was actually in collaboration with Alison Klauss - "Raising Sand" (8/10 2007).
Bruce Springsteen had a much better decade than the previous one. He makes the lists with "The Rising" (8/10 2002), "Magic" (7/10 2007) and "Working on a Dream" (6/10 2009).
Johnny Cash, in his final days, continued his "American Recordings" series, which covered a plethora of wonderful songs from the likes of Springsteen, U2, Tom Petty, Neil Diamond, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and most famously Nine Inch Nails ('Hurt'), in such a way as to make many of them his own, but with so much emotional poignancy that the originals occasionally became instantly diminished. "American III: Solitary Man" (9/10 2000) is his best, with "American IV: The Man Comes Around" (9/10 2002) not far behind and "American V: A Hundred Highways" (8/10 2006) a worthy posthumous addition to the series.
And finally, David Bowie rose to his greatest heights since 1980 with "Heathen" (7/10 2002) and "Reality" (8/10 2003) before having ten years off as well. These old boys were clearly on some kind of musical equivalent of Viagra.
Not a decade that has anything strong to characterise it in the wider music loving public's consciousness, but for me it was a time of new people making old man music, while old men made new music.
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