|
 We opened up the 2006 ‘Year in Review’ by
lamenting the England football team’s abysmal failure, reality shows
clogging up the airwaves and troubled rock stars becoming tabloid
fodder.
As we sit down to write this feature twelve months later, it seems
little has changed.
Replace the 2006 World Cup with the Euro 2008 qualifiers, reality shows
with talent shows and Pete Doherty with Amy Winehouse, and it’s all
pretty much the same old same old.
Or has it? There’s been a lot going on this year in terms of movies and
music, inspiring us to once again trawl through the entertainment
archives and comment on the highs and lows of the year past.
The Scene is Dead, long live The Scene
Back when The LINC magazine still dropped through your door in the form
of a newspaper big enough to gift wrap a whole house and The LINC Online
was in its infancy, we raved about how exciting the local music scene in
Wigan Borough was.
Whenever the opportunity presented itself, we’d be out at The Tavern,
Fever, Nirvana, or anywhere else where the best of the borough would be
peddling their loud and lairy wares, before legging it straight back to
LINC HQ to tell you lot just how good local bands were.
However, you only need take a quick glance at the Gig Reviews page to
see that it hasn’t been the same this year. In fact, besides the annual
Haigh Hall Festival, the only ‘local’ gig we’ve covered this year was at
Fever back in February, when we praised visiting French punks Madkaps,
but rather harshly laid in to Wigan’s own Deluxe Inspiration.
So what happened? Are we getting lazy? Is it just that our girlfriends
won’t let us play out anymore (well yeah, but that’s no excuse really,
is it? - ED)? It could be, but mostly it’s due to the fact that the once
celebrated ‘Scene’ is rumoured to be on its last legs.
There are numerous arguments as to why there’s been a gradual decline of
interest in our local scene, yet we have our own theory.
For every great band that ‘The Scene’ produced back in the day, it
invariably threw up twice as much in-fighting, elitism and general
hero-worship for a select few bands at the expense of all the other many
other talented acts on the local circuit.
And when said worshipped bands either split up (The VCs et al), or
didn’t quite live up to the hyperbole of huge record deals (Dirty
Circus?) and those who claimed ‘The Scene’ as their own disappeared to
pastures new, what they left behind was a half-knackered scene that
those who were initially kept on the outside no longer cared about.
Yet the death of ‘The Scene’ isn’t all bad news.
There’s still been plenty of local bands making great music and, through
the pages of The LINC Online, we’ve been lucky enough to chat to and
review great local acts such as The Gekko, Urban Circus and Me Versus
amongst others, all of whom have proved that Wigan doesn’t need a scene
to produce great music, it just needs great bands. And we have those in
abundance.
We’ll make a New Years Resolution right here to review more local live
music in the New Year. Yet since nobody told us about anything
interesting happening locally this year, we’ve been trekking out to
cities such as Preston for our live music fix where we discovered one of
our new favourite bands, the metal militia known as Without Motive.
Which brings us nicely to our next point.
Heavy Mental
You might say that if 2007 belonged to any musical genre, it would be
Radio 1-friendly indie, but if we had to listen to one more band with
jingly-jangly guitars and ‘whoa-oh-oh’ choruses, we swear we’d go mad.
Which is perhaps why, somewhat subconsciously, here at The LINC Online
we made 2007 the year of metal. Not only did we get the aforementioned
Without Motive, but we’ve also had the pleasure of reviewing stellar
albums from the likes of metal veterans Machine Head and Ozzy Osborne,
local groove mentalists The Hicks and Earache signings Short Sharp Shock
and Municipal Waste.
Yet indie music hasn’t been a complete bore this year. We’ve also
enjoyed albums from Arctic Monkeys and Electrelane, whilst bands such as
Reverend and The Makers have clocked up Single of the Month honours.
Meanwhile, if we had to pick an album of the year, we’d probably pick
the groove greatness of Jon Amor’s ‘Unknown Soldier’, though admittedly
it would be a tough choice to make.
Sequels and threequels
If we tried to make 2007 all about metal in terms of music, there wasn’t
much we could do about the year in film, which was undoubtedly all about
sequels, threequels, and erm, more-quels.
Let’s count ‘em shall we? We’ve had White Noise 2, Mr. Bean’s Holiday
(read: ‘Mr. Bean 2’), Pirates of The Caribbean 3, Spiderman 3, Fantastic
Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (or ‘Fantastic Four 2’), Oceans (1)3,
Die Hard 4.0, Evan Almighty (a sequel, of sorts, to ‘Bruce Almighty’),
The Bourne Ultimatum and those are just the ones we’ve reviewed! There’s
been Shrek III, another Rocky film, and sundry remakes that we didn’t
get round to.
Yet the year at the cinema hasn’t been totally devoid of originality.
There was the long-awaited big screen arrival of The Simpsons, Run Fat
Boy Run and The Number 23, all of which were greatly entertaining.
The Year Ahead
So, it’s been an interesting year has 2007, but what’s coming up in
2008? OK, so we won’t be going to Euro 2008, and no doubt we’ll have to
sit through yet more ‘I’m a Desperate Celebrity in a Jungle, Give me
some Publicity’ and ‘I can’t sing but I want to be on Telly and Shout at
Simon Cowell’, but there’s plenty to look forward to next year.
Keep an eye out on local acts Seven Sundays, who we recently described
in The LINC magazine as having ‘a front man with charisma and confidence
to burn and great riffs’, and Tiredness Kills, who we’ll be featuring in
‘Unsigned Exposed’ in the New Year.
Plus, there’ll be new albums from Bullet For My Valentine, Metallica,
Radiohead, The Offspring, Gnarls Barkley, Dr. Dre and My Chemical
Romance, and in film, there’s more Harry Potter, Chronicals Of Narnia,
Incredible Hulk and Scary Movie.
And of course, you can expect to read about all these, and much more at
The LINC Online in 2008. Until then, have a great Christmas and a safe
and happy New Year from all of us at The LINC.
Disagree with our views on 2007? Want to tell us your own thoughts on
the good, the bad the down right ugly of the past twelve months? Drop us
a line at linconline@wlct.org and we’ll publish your comments on our
‘Rants’ page.
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