It is hard to pinpoint when things began to go wrong between the major record labels and the music-buying public. All anyone can say with any certainty is that the fun went out of the relationship a while ago. Maybe it was the record industry's sour-faced approach to illegal file-sharing and downloading. Or perhaps it was the deadening routine of overhype. Either way, it was hardly surprising when the fans began to seek excitement elsewhere.
This has been the year fans have increasingly taken music into their own hands, rejecting the overprocessed diet served up by many major labels in favor of something a little more homemade. In the process they have notched up numerous high-profile successes, including Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spinto Band and Nizlopi.
Enabled largely by the Internet, bands have been able to record and promote their own music, and fans to revel in it and pass it on -- without the aid of major label backing, stylist and towering billboard advertisements. Furthermore, fans are finding it ever easier to interact directly with their favorite bands, rather than seek nourishment from the insubstantial publicist-approved quotes given in interviews. The result, of course, is that the charts have become imbued with a rather joyous and friendly anarchy.
Arguably, it was the Libertines who set the pace; the baton then passed to Babyshambles and imminently to Carl Barat's new band, Dirty Pretty Things. Characteristically, Libertines gigs (and those of their circle) eschewed the over-priced ticketing, over-priced ale gig-going conventions that had become standard in the Clear Channel era, and instead guerrilla gigs were played ad-hoc in bizarre venues, such as rooftops, farms and the London underground. Fans were informed of the "venue" hours before in a flurry of e-mails, Web site postings and text messages, and would travel from all over the country to congregate at the elected hour and see their favorite band play centimeters from them (and probably go to the pub with them afterwards). Pete Doherty allowed fans to bed down in his flat if they missed the last train home.
The Libertines' and Babyshambles' sprawling international fanbase was largely united by the Internet, on forums such as Conversations in Arcady, and Web sites www.babyshambles.net and Spirit of Albion. The most intimate of the sites, however, is www.balachadha.com. Launched in August, and created with his friend and literary agent, Paul Roundhill, Bala Chadha is intended to be a living biography of Doherty, as well as a method of reducing the gulf between himself and his fans.
Getting in on the act
Bala Chadha's moderator is Texas Bob, who moved to London in 1996, having heard of Camden's most infamous pub, then the hub of Britpop.
"I got a one-way ticket here so I could go to the Good Mixer," he explains. Bob, 37, works in the post room of a mail-order company by day and spends his free time videotaping his favorite bands. He met Babyshambles through mutual friends the Paddingtons and was instantly smitten. "In my lifetime, I've never known a band break down the wall between the band and the fans like Babyshambles."
In another example of rapidly augmenting fan power, this year's Christmas number one contender in Britain is a largely unheard-of band, Nizlopi, singing about driving a JCB. Quite how a formerly niche band could floor the sleigh-belled, gospel-powered might of the major label yuletide offerings is a lesson in humility, hard graft -- and the power of the circulated MP3.
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