Why is that you can’t listen to mainstream radio now without hearing totally over the top productions?  There was a time when you could write a good song, record it in a morning, release it the next day and have a gold record a week later. Why isn’t a good song with a few good hooks enough anymore?

You must be getting the hang of this by now; that’s a rhetorical question.  I’m not really asking for your opinion, it’s just a way of getting to my next pithy observation.  The major artists are so desperate to maintain their profile and their increasingly fickle fanbase that nothing’s sacred and jumping the shark is what you have to do to keep up with Lana del Rey (or Lizzie Grant before the makeover).

Did you know that successful pop music producers have the ethical standards of the Borgias and a relentless urge to force us to listen to their work (sorry, rhetorical again)?  So, at a time when major artists are desperate to stay at the top of the slippery pole, here’s what happens.

One of the biggest artists in the world, Beyonce, releases the song “Love on Top” and it’s a really good song performed by a great singer.  So you don’t need any clever tricks do you?  No posse of “C” list rappers, no credible guest vocalists, no Autotune and definitely no Mark Ronson.  You might think there aren’t many more production tricks you can pull.  Well, let me tell you about the trucker’s gear change.

It’s a little trick which has been around for decades and it’s really effective.  When you get towards the end of a pop song and you’ve run out of verses, you repeat the chorus a few times to get you to the three and a half minute mark.  It can get a bit tedious hearing the chorus three of four times but you can make it more exciting by moving the pitch (or modulating) upwards; it gives it a lift and it can be really easy to do.  But it’s not usually very subtle which is why it’s called a trucker’s gear change.

Usually one of these is enough to keep up the interest to the three-thirty mark: occasionally you get two (Northern Soul classic “The Snake” by Al Wilson for any trainspotters).  So how many do we get in this Kitsch ‘n’ Synch production?  We get four; count them next time you hear it.  How desperate is that when you have a good song to start with?  Was it an engineer who saw the transpose function months ago and went a bit tech-happy when he finally got a chance to use it?

What if the song doesn’t finish at three minutes, thirty seconds?  What if it just keeps going, moving to a higher key every chorus?  Maybe it’s actually a twenty minute mix that only our dogs and cats can hear after 5 minutes; my cat was strutting his stuff five minutes after I thought the song had ended, which is surprising because I thought he was much more into Rizzle Kicks.

Do us all a favour, just give us the song without any gimmicks and trust us to decide how good it is.

What is it about X Factor that makes millions of people watch it on a Saturday night when they could be out actually having a life instead?  I mean you could even go out and watch proper musicians who write their own songs and can play them live without the help of dozens of session hacks.  Within a 5 mile radius of the X Factor studios in Wembley there are dozens of venues where great bands are playing to tiny audiences while a bunch of minimal-talent C-list wannabes are performing to a live audience of hundreds and a TV audience of millions.

So, what’s the point of X Factor?  Is it to give someone the chance to become pop star?  How many previous winners are in the charts at the moment and how many can you remember? Can you remember the first winner in 2004? It could be about trying to get a guaranteed Christmas No. 1, but they haven’t always managed that; if anything, the show has made bands and the public get online and creative about beating the X Factor acts to the Christmas No. 1 slot.

What it’s really all about is viewing figures on Saturday evening and you get those by giving the public what they want; bread and circuses.  In this case it’s bland processed bread full of unhealthy additives and a circus featuring a bunch of inept clowns (and that’s before we even get to the contestants).  It’s the same as any other reality TV show and it takes its lead from Big Brother; the longer it goes on, the more outrageous the participants and the content have to be.  It was bad enough with Jedward (they’re twins called John and Edward, see) but this year we’ve had judges falling out and contestants involved in sex and drugs scandals.  Look out for Phil Spector and Gary Glitter as judges next year; it should be fun when they fall out.  It might be interesting to see Phil Spector’s motivation techniques at work during the boot camp section.

Be honest with yourself, you watch it because it’s car crash TV.  You want to hear deluded egotists who couldn’t carry a tune if it came shrink-wrapped telling snide judges that they don’t have a clue and that they can become stars without X Factor.  I’d love to see a follow-up study on those wannabes.  And once you’ve got those out of the way and you’re left with the ones who have some knowledge of the concept of melody (and way too much knowledge of vibrato – thank you very much Mariah and Whitney) being given totally inappropriate material to work with by their “expert” mentors.  What we’re being sold here is nothing to do with music; it’s a soap opera with characters that change year by year.  Even Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke are pretty difficult to spot these days and they were really successful during their 15 minutes in the spotlight.

Do yourself a favour, go out and watch a band this Saturday; you might even like it.  And, on the off chance that you care, the winner of the first X Factor was Steve Brookstein.  How many of you will remember Little Mix in 2018?

Merry Christmas.

How many times have you read an interview with a musician that started with the words “I caught up with…”?  Are musicians so elusive, or is the interviewer admitting to stalking their subject over a period of years and finally running them to ground backstage at Shepherds Bush Empire or Rock City?  It sounds like it’s really difficult to get an interview with a musician but anyone promoting a new album will offer body parts on Ebay to get a bit of publicity for their masterwork.  If a journalist opened a piece by saying that they’d caught up with Usain Bolt or Mo Farah, I’d be impressed, but a chain-smoking, nocturnal  guitarist isn’t quite in the same league.

So it’s journalistic shorthand, isn’t it? Or maybe journalistic laziness, but you wouldn’t find it in the quality music press, would you?  Just have a look at any recent copy of NME or Q.  How about the phrase “long-awaited”? You see it all the time, but what does it really mean?  It means that the minders finally got all of the band members together at the same time, relatively clean and sober, and persuaded them to knock off a dozen songs to cobble together a follow-up to their critically-acclaimed first album released 3 years ago.  Long-awaited by a multinational media company desperate to recoup their initial investment before the talent dries up or dies.  After waiting nearly 3 years for the follow-up to “Hotel California”, Asylum Records sent the Eagles a rhyming dictionary to help them with the album that became “The Long Run”.  What a waste of 15 dollars.

“Long-awaited” also has 2 illegitimate siblings, “comeback” and “return to form”.  A comeback is the last-chance saloon before doing the package tour nostalgia circuit and shouldn’t be confused with the contractual obligation greatest hits album and tour which is designed to wring out every last bit of revenue before the fanbase grows up or moves on to the next phenomenon.  A return to form means that the artist is out of rehab/a psychiatric institution/prison/the clutches of an anorexic junkie supermodel or any combination of the above and has managed to wring out a couple of songs which are vaguely listenable.

Another pair of journalistic siblings are “-indebted” and “-influenced”, as in Beatles-indebted or Smiths-influenced.  This is really simple; the songwriter has absolutely no original ideas and shamelessly rips off riffs and lyrics which have already been successful for other bands.  The second Duffy album might or might not be an example of this kind of opportunism, I couldn’t comment.

And what about those old favourites,” idiosyncratic” and “experimental”?  These words are journalistic code for the unlistenable output of artists investing all of their royalties in recreational substances or the latest musical version of the Emperor’s new clothes.  You’ll probably see “challenging” make an appearance as well, as the journalist implies that only an insider with outstanding musical taste can fully understand the genius of the artist being dissected.

And what about tributes when someone dies?  Why is it we always get a flood of tributes?  Shouldn’t it be a gush?

Here we go, it’s summer again.  John Major once said that summer was about drinking warm beer and hearing the sounds of leather on willow.  What did he know?  He probably never even watched Buffy.  Anyway you know what summer’s all about anyway, don’t you?  It’s all about people everywhere trying to impose their lack of musical taste on you.

It’s bad enough trying to deal with the year-round annoyances like teenagers on trains and buses listening to music on their phones or the ones who very considerately use headphones then turn the volume up to ear-bleeding levels to annoy us anyway.  It sounds terrible and it’s usually something that you would rather eat your own toenails than listen to.  Then along comes summer.

Half a day of sunshine and the rules change completely; suddenly everyone thinks they have the right to assault the ears of the rest of the world.  I was woken up at 7am by some moron who had parked his car outside, left the engine running, opened the doors wide and had the radio up to 11.  Which artist do you think gently eased my passage into wakefulness?  You’d expect Rizzle Kicks or David Guetta or Calvin Harris, wouldn’t you.  No, this leader of the mild boys was waking up the neighbourhood with John Cougar feckin’ Mellencamp (“Jack and Diane” if you must know).  Every car either has the windows open or the roof down so that every motorist can show the depths of their musical appreciation.  And the mainstream radio programming is so predictable; whether it’s DJ Sammy or Don Henley, you can get too much of “Boys of Summer”.

But it gets even worse.  Sunshine in the evening and at the weekend means it’s barbecue time and vegetarians get the double whammy of the smell of dead animals being cremated to the accompaniment of your neighbours’ music collection.  But there’s another refinement to the torture; you don’t think anyone uses a music system designed to deliver a good sound outside do you?  Of course not; it costs a fortune to hire the expertise to produce a decent sound outdoors (and even then, there are no guarantees), so it’s much easier to just stick the speakers out of the window.  It can go 2 ways from here; either you can’t get it loud enough to hear it or someone cranks it up so it distorts so much that it could be anything by the Jesus and Mary Chain.  When someone does get a decent sound system for a special occasion it costs so much that they decide to get full value by playing till 3am.  It’s a lose/lose situation.

Can things get any worse?  Afraid so; reach for the ear defenders when the teenage DJ Wannabe turns up with his (they’re always boys) laptop and mixing software.  You can do all sorts of clever stuff with software now, and this kid will do the lot to impress his mates.  If you look really closely at any Hieronymus Bosch painting you’ll see a spotty adolescent with a laptop and headphones in a corner somewhere.  Seriously.  Roll on winter.