Live at the Limelight: UTV series slimed

UlsterMusic.com invites comment and criticism. Here’s the personal viewpoint of of Iain Todd on programme 3 of the new UTV series “Live at the Limelight“. Programme 4 was aired on Wednesday, March 11 and featured Deablo, The Cutaways, The Beat Poets, The Jane Bradfords. UTV have recently taken it upon themselves to deliver live performances from unsigned Belfast bands into the houses of the public, in the form of their show “Live At The Limelight” [watch again - ed]. The format is simply a television show focusing on around three bands each week, playing their own music to a live audience who appear, at times, genuinely disinterested and passive or, at other times, genuinely insane with enthusiasm and revelry but, at all times, scarce. As ingenious and eagerly awaited a show like this is, questions do need to be asked  as to the quality and, indeed, quantity of such acts that can be achieved within such a small music “scene”. I hear people reply with stories of the tiny music scenes which have achieved greatness and left an unrelenting effect on the world, such as the East Bay Californian punks of the 1980s or the Trad scene in Ireland of the 1970′s. But as true as this might be, the music and general demeanour of the TV show I watched last night is too far from these genres to even allow comparison.

One of the main differences I noticed in the show was the mediocrity of the music of three out of the four bands, namely, Colenso Parade, A Plastic Rose and The Coronas. Colenso Parade’s music essentially consists of a repetition of the verse, then the chorus, then the verse, then the chorus with, it should be said, outstandingly little difference between the two. It was almost as if they had stumbled upon relatively catchy songs which were probably only really worth two minutes playing time at best, and attempted to stretch them into what eventually felt like a homophonous Mike Oldfield epic.

A Plastic Rose, it has to be said, appeared at first glance to be a much better option as the songs appeared well constructed. It took only a minute of their playing, however, before it was obvious to the viewer that here stood possibly the most pretentious band of the night. Playing guitar with mouth open, staring into the distance and pretending to be indifferent, mimicking Eddie Vedder – it was all there. The emo “rock” sound has never sounded so tedious. Indeed, at one point their emotional, heartfelt song, “Sun’s A Shadow”, became so boring that the singer had to speak to the audience in between lines – possibly to cover up the bland, greyness of the sound, possibly to prevent the eyes of the audience from melting into a pool on the floor.

The last, headlining act, The Coronas, certainly lived up to their namesake, the famous Mexican beer. Bland, tasteless, ubiquitous and unoriginal. At this point everyone in the room in which I was watching gave up and began to speak over the television but from what I could grasp, you need only picture a band with a homophonic, acoustic pop sound whose lead singer opts to drop his lyrical, artistic and literary renowned Dublin accent as a singing voice and replaces it with a placeless, English/American hybrid, using “sh” sounds instead of “s” ones.

All this was incredibly annoying, but I can put it down to personal taste. The most aggravating part of the show for me was the interview with the music executive from London. If ever a personification of the downfall of the music industry existed, this type of person is it. She couldn’t have possibly been more passionless or blatantly interested in making lots of money if she had stolen a charity box. Describing one band as “…Klaxons meets MGMT” and mentioning “…that’s the sound I’m really feeling at the moment”, the viewer could be forgiven for thinking “I’m really feeling” should read “that is really popular”. Even when she was trying to give an honest opinion we were addressed only with her apparent desire to see “a soul/funk mix between reggae/indie kind of act”. What does that even mean? Does it even matter? According to her, “that kind of act is really current at the moment”. Ah, I can see a pattern emerging in her technique. After hearing her interview, I would actually challenge anyone to argue that her heart was in the music and not the industry. She seemed more interested in helping NME sell copies than introducing the world to Belfast music.

The one band that did impress me was Not Squares. Two basses, a keyboard, drums and vocals. The first song, “Yeah!”, had no lyrics, relying on sustained vocal harmonies, jazz-style drumming and bass riffs that reeked of improvisational ability. The second song, “You’re Still Drunk” used a-tonal vocal rhythms, hardcore influenced bass lines and syncopated electronic melodies. The passion and, at points, anger, was visible and the band looked like four people who knew and cared about their music.

In short, if this is the Belfast music scene, there isn’t a lot to hope for. It didn’t help that UTV insist on employing interviewers on the basis of their preceding popularity or, in the case of the female presenters, their looks. According to the UTV website one of them is a local model [Belfast babe Katie Larmour - ed]. Aside from the typically Irish substandard production quality, the music on the show demonstrates, I feel, both the lack of musical depth and originality within this “scene”. Even applying the word “scene” to a group of people playing music who appear to have no collective artistic depth or integrity seems to me optimistic. I am also not going to make this article come full circle by being so clichéd as to suggest a bright hope for the future or even that Not Squares were the saving grace of the show, as that would be tantamount to compromising my original comments. What I will suggest, however, is that perhaps, as has often been seen in the past, the record companies and television shows who seek to promote new bands and music within this country are the very people who should not be given such an opportunity. As usual it seems that the real gems of music this city has to offer are yet to be discovered both by the mainstream, and myself.

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