Even the number of ‘best podcasts’ lists is bewildering. Is there just too much to choose from?
There is too much of everything. I spoke to Alan McGee last week regarding a film about his life, in which he is played by the chap who played Spud in Trainspotting. It’s really good. When I asked about the state of music now, the man who discovered Oasis and has worked with Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, among others, shrugged helplessly. He said that it is now next to impossible to make an impact because there is simply too much music about.
In the Oasis documentary Supersonic, Noel Gallagher says he thinks of their massive Knebworth concerts of 1996 as the last hurrah of the pre-digital age. “The last great gathering of the people before the birth of the internet,” he says. “It’s no coincidence that things like that don’t happen any more.” Seen through this prism – and he obviously wasn’t referring to the pandemic here – the footage of hordes of thrilled punters thronging their way into the concert is quite elegiac; I hadn’t seen such innocence in them – or maybe all of us – before. We didn’t know what was coming.
