Live music is called live music for a reason. It wishes to
imply that its opponent – recorded music – is dead. The use of the term ‘live’
to describe a performance that is ‘heard or watched at the time of its
occurrence’ only arose in the 1930s. Musicians’ unions promoted this usage
vigourously, as they campaigned hard to ‘keep music live’. They targetted
recorded music, describing it as a ‘grave threat’, a ‘serious danger’ and an
‘ever-present menace’. Their great fear was that records would take the place
of performing musicians: ‘The musician may well become extinct and music may
cease to be written’.
To a
certain extent their terminology was appropriate. The term ‘record’ has
preservative connotations. To record is to embalm sounds that would otherwise
pass. Death haunted the earliest phonographic reveries. The first article about
sound recording declared, ‘certainly nothing can be conceived more likely to create
the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than
once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead’. Thomas Edison, the inventor
of sound recording, promised an epitaph that would last through the ages: ‘This
tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, mimics your tones,
speaks with your voice, utters your words: and, centuries after you have
crumbled into dust, may repeat every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain
word’.
And yet the
promotion of the term ‘live music’ has been more duplicitous than first appears. By
the 1930s records were very much seen as living things. This is because Edison
was a liar. His original tinfoil recordings lasted days rather than centuries;
they were destroyed when they were removed from the phonograph. Shellac and
vinyl offered improvements upon this format, but they too proved susceptible to
ageing processes. Consequently, the preservative function of records was
downplayed. In its place came a recording industry that focused on a fast
turnover of products. It didn’t want you to keep your records forever. It
wanted you to buy new ones.
This had phenomenological ramifications. Records felt alive precisely because you could play them to death. Analogue
records aged in step with their owners, acquiring the same scuffs, knocks and
dust as they passed through time. Elvis Costello made this point clear in ‘45’,
his paean to the 7” single: ‘Every scratch, every click, every heartbeat, every
breath that I bless’. This ethos casts the musicians’ unions’ campaigns in a
different light. They weren’t attacking records because they thought they were
lifeless; they feared them because they are very much alive.
And were
they trying to cover up the fact that it is live performance that is morbid? One reason to
see an artist in the flesh is to witness them before that flesh withers. This
much has become apparent following the rash of popular music deaths this year.
How did people respond to the passing of David Bowie and Prince? By boasting
that they had seen them when they were alive. Social media was awash with
pictures of ticket stubs, as people sought to prove that they were once in the
same room as the recently deceased.
The death cult of live
performance increases as artists and audiences grow older. There is a sense of
chalking musicians off your list before they pass away. It is not only confined
to OAP artists, however. One of the reasons why people pay to see unpredictable
and doomed performers such as Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty is in the hope
that the artist will die young. The viewer will then be able to speak from the
privileged position of having seen them while they fretted their hour on the
stage.
Gig-goers are a cruel bunch.
