The Soldiers Pity the poor professional musician. Pirate downloads have destroyed album sales, the record companies are in disarray… and now your jobbing muso faces yet another threat.
Here come the Talented Amateurs. Suddenly, there’s scarcely a profession or interest group that doesn’t have its own singing group of down-to-earth real people like you and me – if you and me were a bit craggier and/or a bit sexier.
Here are Port Isaac’s Fishermen’s Friends, 10 salty seadogs with a hold full of sleekly produced sea shanties, an album cover that makes them look like the Pogues’ more dangerous (but craggier and sexier) older brothers, and wave-toss’d videos that resemble a Captain Birdseye advert. The message is that these are not weedy boy band types but working fishermen who can punch a lobster to death with their bare fists. You could fair smell the grog in the air when PIFF went Top Ten last May.
Then there are the Harmonies, a buxom vocal quintet assembled via an X Factor-style talent contest between members of the Women’s Institute. Dispelling the WI’s fusty image of jam-making and floral pinnies, the Harmonies are the logical successor to nude calendars – not Girls Aloud but Mums Aloud.
Amazon users will find that customers who bought this CD also bought Letters Home by the Soldiers, a rugged trio of squaddies whose last release raised £270,000 for veteran servicemen.
With their camouflage gear they look like the Manic Street Preachers, but well-worn love songs like Yesterday and Everlasting Love regain their meaning in the context of real loss and separation. Even the Chelsea Pensioners have an album out, Men In Scarlet, raising money for the Royal Hospital.
“You put the scarlet on and you become somebody,” says member Michael Allen who, at 67, is younger than the Stranglers’ drummer Jet Black. (You know you’re getting old when Chelsea Pensioners look young.) Then there are the Fron Male Voice Choir, the 1,000+ member internet-based Rock Choir, and the Zimmers…
Where does it all come from? Perhaps it really is the influence of the X Factor, which has revealed in tone-deaf Britons a sudden desire to sing because “my whole life has been leading up to this moment” (the contestants who say this are usually 16 years old). Perhaps it’s because, unlike the tiresome process of actually learning to play an instrument, singing is something you can either do or you can’t. Or maybe we’re just tired of today’s feeble professional pop stars. The notion that someone really is in it for the music and not the chance to marry a footballer or a WAG suddenly seems romantic.
Often the Real People Bands are triumphs of presentation. On the cover of their second album, Harmony, Irish trio The Priests – guess their job – are standing on a rocky shoreline, not looking at the camera.
This is excellent rock-star behaviour because stony shores mean the primal outer limits (Led Zeppelin, Roxy Music), and not looking at the camera means you are a free spirit who cannot be controlled (U2, Depeche Mode). The record is innocuous male vocal stuff – Amazing Grace, Te Deum – but packaging transformed the whole proposition, even if it is a bit Father Ted.
The trio went Top 20 in the UK, put the proceeds of their first album towards schools in Uganda, Cambodia and Thailand, and sang for the Pope on his UK tour, which is like opening for the Stones at Wembley.
We will know we have arrived at true multiculturalism when a band of singing imams get their Eid party album into the charts: Ramadan-A-Ding-Dong, perhaps. In the meantime I would love to hear The Priests’ version of My Lovely Horse.
Let’s be honest, none of this is expanding music’s boundaries and the world doesn’t need more versions of Jerusalem or Unchained Melody. Rather, it is symptomatic of the modern belief that nothing has really happened until it has been turned into entertainment. Therefore I am off to engineer my own man-band of retired butchers. The Meatles will be singing American Pie, Black Pudding Bertha and Bill Haley’s Rock This Joint. Jools Holland, here we come.
Website: www.chelsea-pensioners.co.uk