Indeed…vampire by name, vampire by…

Actually, in that case I think Haircut 100 have more cause to feel aggrieved than anyone else.

And what would poor Tommy Potts have made of all this ??

Mebbe being a bit western -centred there yourself….African musicians get ripped off all the time of course, but I doubt if they mind any less than their counterparts here or in the US. Assuming they continue on their vibrant way without suffering might just be an effect of distance - and not understanding what they’re singing about.

Further to that too, there’s been a lot of debate on various music blogs about the ethics of labels like Mississippi, Subliminal Frequencies, and others - about the deliberate exoticism of the packaging and lack of info, obscuring the fact that often no effort has been made to locate the owners of masters dubbed off dusty 7″s. Africa may be dark, but they have telephones and the internet and stuff…..

Put it another way: the first recorded bluesmen got by ‘with shoddy or non-existent royalty payments for decades’ - and as a class they died young, in barroom fights, or went back to manual work after the recording boom of the 20s ended with the depression. Furry Lewis was regarded as a virtual aristocrat among his peers because he had a meagre pension from the city of Memphis, thanks to his missing leg. And when young and eager white folklore collectors would come to record him, he would make sure his guitar was in the pawnshop so they’d have to redeem it - that way, at least, he got some payment for sharing his ‘culture’ - because his young acolytes saw it as ‘folk’ music, and therefore not really his - he was the mere conduit through which the great tradition poured - but he was a conduit who liked his whiskey, and also one who had a justifiably high opinion of himself as an artist: he was a pro - folksingers were a class well below.

Mali may be bit different, but I wouldn’t imagine the position of West African urban musicians varies that much from that of Furry in his later years - and westerners singing the praises of a vibrant folk culture that’s so different from the debased commercialism of pop music in the developed world might ring a little hollow…

Of course, astonishing music gets made despite everything all the time - but I think we need to be careful not to mythologise the circumstances of its creation to much - Robert Johnson’s life makes great story, but I’m sure he’s have liked the option of a secure and revered old age. Adorno once said something to the effect that it is a short step from admiring the humour and resilience of the downtrodden workers to admiring the conditions that made them thus.

Good luck with the move Conor….and sorry for even more Fall Videos

Re; Imro - as well as keeping CdB in Green Ink and Bono in Grecian 2000, they do pay me about 50 quid a year in respect of songs that never get played on the radio- and I’m sure thousands like me get a few bob every now and then as a derisory token acknowledgement of a misspent youth…..

More seriously, as people began to think of music as something that’s just ‘there’ like TV, and not something you have to pay for, the question of how the fuck musicians are meant to earn a living becomes more pressing - it’s not an accident that a fair proportion of new rock music seems to be produced by upper-middle class US grad- students who can afford to treat being in a band as they would an internship. And to be fair, Imro, the PRS and the rest, are relatively un-corrupt and even redistributionist to an extent.

Not that going after blogs, which, as radio used to, probably stimulate record sales, is the way to go.