David Singleton's Diary

Fleetwood Mac Live

As you may have spotted, there is an inverse relationship between the fullness of my life and the emptiness of these diary pages : the busier I am, the less time I have to write a diary. Which is somewhat frustrating, as there is so much to say.

Last Wednesday, after seeing Fleetwood Mac at the O2, I promised Robert, amongst others, a detailed blog on my thoughts about live performance – and have yet to address it a week later. So I shall temporarily bypass all the exciting things that have happened in the interim, and address it now.

First, an admission (and the reason for my kitchen discussion with RF) : none of my truly transformative musical moments in the rock/pop world have been ‘live’. All have been listening to recorded music. This was inevitably the case with bands from the 1960s and early 1970s, who were often long gone by the time I discovered them, but has continued even with contemporary music. Why might this be, you may well ask. Well, my one view is that, as a lover of songwriting – which is primarily a marriage of melody, harmony and lyric - the subtleties that one can savour and enjoy on recordings are often lost in the “broad brush strokes” and muddied sound of live performance. It is a common reaction at live performances not to enjoy “new songs” as much as those you know. This is not necessarily because such songs are less good – merely that with familiar material we complete the picture with our existing knowledge . We have the high resolution pointillist version sitting in our head to add detail to the larger scale blurred canvas. There is also a tendency for live music to be “upside down” – driven from the bottom up as opposed to the top down. I always recall the first time I heard Paul Simon singing “The Boxer” live, and being appalled at the constant chugging rhythm, which accompanied it and enslaved the melody. But on closer listening, I discovered that those same rhythms were there on the recording, it was simply that they were far less prominent.

On the plus side, what is so wonderfully right about concerts is that instead of just hearing with your ears, you hear with your whole body. You hear with your chest, as a single bass drum beat has the power to make 10,000 people catch their breath. You hear with your eyes as you see and understand the performance, and you hear with your feet, as (albeit within the limits of a self-conscious seated middle-aged audience) you surrender to the rhythm. And, yes, it was fab. The band knew that we all knew the material, so could take enjoyable liberties on the way in and out of tunes. Everyone was familiar with the road map. And it was wonderful to hear such familiar material afresh. To hear it thump– and to be reminded what a damned good guitarist Lindsay Buckingham is.

And, returning to my kitchen conversation with RF, these thoughts are significant because they colour how I approach recorded live music – how, for example, one might present a complete live show by the seven-headed beast of Crim. If “Live at The Orpheum” is to some extent an example of live music beautifully presented as close to studio music, there is an equally valid alternative viewpoint – one in fact we have generally favoured with DGM live archives (probably due to my own inclinations as described above) – of big, powerful and proudly live. Not necessarily the ball-busting nutcracker, knobs-to-eleven, of B’Boom, but something that will rock my world. This is not really a question of mixing (thankfully Jakko now spends those long hours on the studio) more of mastering. : the European “light touch” approach. the American more-eq-more-compression ballsier approach, or even the ToneProbe production mastering, let’s-take-this-somewhere- completely-different approach. It will be fun to see what it may become.

Done. It’s 11.38pm. Time for bed.