Backing Tracks, Cabinet Backs and kicking the facts about REAL MUSIC.

One of the more bemusing recent internet scandals was over a controversial photograph of Black Veil Brides on the Warped Tour taken from behind their guitar amps. Instead of having the standard black hardwood casing on the back of the cabinet, the cab was open, revealing that there was - gasp - nothing inside. Judging by the response online, the Oz-like unveiling that the amplification onstage isn’t really what’s pumping the music out into the great beyond evidently came to the surprise of many. Like Dorothy’s lament of ‘oh, you’re a very bad man!’, The Brides (as I’m sure they’re known) were inundated by a social legion of latent audio experts with cries of ‘sell outs’, ‘poseurs’ and ‘that’s not how you credibly amplify a guitar signal through a festival PA across a 40,000 cap site’. But unlike Oz, BVB didn’t reply with ‘I’m a Humbug’, instead opting for a pithy Twitter retort that likened their onstage set to the singer’s tattoos… something obviously a part of a show. The truth of the matter is that the revelation that those cabs weren’t being used to do very much at all surprised a grand total of no one who has ever played music on a stage bigger than that of a pub. So far, so internet.

Yesterday a character called J Willgoose Esq of dance-rock duo Public Service Broadcasting was upheld by The Independent newspaper’s online service to, seemingly unwillingly, represent the ‘keep music live’ guard and challenge the use of backing tracks in live music. You can read the article HERE. Maybe the accompanying photograph of him behind a sequencer should ring alarm bells that his technological broadside is being taken way out of context but in the article he decries acts that rely on hidden laptops, stating that 'live music should have an element of risk and an element of danger'. Well, on the subject of risk and danger, he’s presumably never tried running a laptop on a keyboard stand onstage at some of the dives we’ve played. The article proceeds to wildly scrawl big, thick, clumsy lines from his statements, (originally quoted in Q magazine) across to Deadmau5's DJing and then over to Coldplay’s use of sequenced strings. From there the article has been copied and pasted by various internet music sites as a kick-off for discussion about backing tracks in live sets and it’s off to the races for everyone who has ever wanted to bloody the noses of us cheating, no-good laptop-using BASTARDS.

Of course, in reality the difference between enhancing your line-up with the advantages of new technology and ‘playing to backing tracks’ is infinite in its scope. But on the internet, we don’t bother ourselves with such pesky notions as perspective. It’s a lot easier, and more fun, to stick your thumb up or down at the subject, like some cyber-Caesar staring at a gladiator who’s just used a futuristic laser gun to kill a lion. A fairly recent thread on the UK’s leading punk forum about backing tracks uncovered an overwhelmingly negative response to the concept. The trouble with all this discussion it it is indeed the concept that is met with mistrust, rather than the result. In my experience, at a gig most of the audience don’t know, and don’t care, how either an amp or laptop is specifically used in the live context. And yet when confronted with the question ‘do you approve of backing tracks?’, or presented with a funny photo of a hollow cab, the response is to suddenly appropriate the staunch Rock n Roll purism of a 1974 Led Zeppelin roadie. And yes, we’ve all seen the amazing live performances and, true, those lads didn’t need bloody backing tracks or fake amps. But they didn’t need cut scenes where Jimmy Page stopped shagging a 14 year-old long enough to dress as a wizard and climb mountains either but we had to put up with them didn’t we?

Like The Independent's liberal associations around J Willgoose Esq’s original interview, I may be drawing broad lines between these two stories. But while the specifics are different, much of the reactions are not. Underneath Facebook re-productions of the articles in question are a litany of comments decrying ‘cheating’, ‘fake musicians’ and the lack of this, that and the blinking other in music today. While the hankering for the straight-up spirit of Rock n Roll is charming, it’s all slightly misguided. And more often it shows internet commentary at its frothy-mouthed worst, passing absolute, Sword of Damocles judgments over intensely multifaceted topics while on the toilet at work. In 140 characters or less.

There are a number of reasons why the spat dummies over ‘that’ photo are ridiculous. It may well just capture an unorthodox onstage amping set-up that the guitarist or the sound engineer have devised, with all the guitar going through onstage wedges and in-ear monitors. For a whole host of very sensible audio reasons, their amps could be at the side of the stage. In that, frankly very likely, case, I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to have a guitarist standing in front of nothing like a kid with a tennis racquet. On the other side of the coin, perhaps the guy from BVB is miming and he can’t play guitar at all. Maybe he prefers to survey the crowd with a cold, steely glare and pick out the bevy of hot rock tottie he’s going to denigrate just seconds after his final fake chord rings silently out from his empty cab. Who knows? Unless everyone’s been keeping their profound expertise in the art of onstage festival audio design from me, there’s no way to conclude the specifics of that guitarist’s set-up from that photo alone. But it’s a perfect photo for anyone with no knowledge of this subject to confirm a prejudice they already had about a particular band being 'fakes'.

Jimmy Page, yesterday

The cabs are up there to create a strong onstage visual. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Rock n Roll is about that. And if that’s not punk, tell The Ramones to stop dressing like each other. It’s just part of the show. You can argue it’s giving the crowd value for money. From the coolest indie band to the grandest metal band through the whole spectrum of Rock n Roll, there’s more dummy Marshall cabs onstage than there are MySpace Band Profiles gathering dust in cyberspace. Hell, we’ve done it ourselves. It’s only because these particular cabs have no back on them that anyone on the outside is let into that little secret. If the issue is that every cab in the vicinity of a band has to be projecting live, pure, old-fashioned MUSIC then what about those bands playing in front of their silent amps in their videos hey?! Like every band ever! Fakes!!! WHO ARE WE TRYING TO KID!?!?

The upshot of this whole thing is that the photo struck a nerve with people and sums up a lot of feelings about that band’s reliance on image over music. The photo was taken by the drummer from The Bronx, a tremendous band and one with a lot of credibility. He took this image and used it to illustrate that he didn’t have a lot of respect for BVB, and possibly to make a statement about the booking of that particular tour, for reasons we can probably guess. Fair enough. But, judging by the resultant online uproar, I didn’t perceive that many of the commentators fully understood the context of what was being said with the image. And I disagree with that in principle because it’s a tabloid tactic to twist an image into something else because that’s what you want it to represent. Ultimately, I’m uneasy with the fallout of that photo, as straight-forward as the intentions may have been behind it.

To put it another way, if you want to rag on that band, don’t rag on their dummy amps, rag on the fact that the shameless painted buggers charge their daft fans for the pleasure of meeting their greedy arses. But that’s another blog.

I cry foul of the reaction to this photo because it feeds into this naïve and, frankly silly, notion that the only way to be credible as a band is to go up there, stripped down and ‘do it live’. It’s a lazy exercise in limiting the parameters of what you appreciate in a live performance so that anything that falls outside that becomes somehow substandard. It’s exactly the same mentality as people that call out DJs for ‘playing other people’s records’ because they’ve never considered the fact that the art form is ‘playing other people’s records’ in a way that connects with people and works a dancefloor into a frenzy and the myriad of other intangibles that goes into the art of being a DJ. And further down the spiral, it’s the same mentality as people that decry all electronica, pop, dance music, or whatever isn’t played by white people with guitars, as ‘not real music’. It’s a limited way of looking at music that begins and ends with what you can be bothered to understand. And that leads me neatly into my issues with the inferences thrown up by The Independent via the comments of J Willgoose Esq.

Of course, from the article we don’t know to what exact extent J Willgoose Esq is knocking backing tracks. He might very well hear Sonic Boom Six play live and go ‘oh no, THAT’s OK, I was talking about those OTHER backing tracks’. But that’s the problem with where the article takes his discourse. The resultant broad discussion about the subject means that without calling specific bands out, it’s akin to saying that all bands with double-bass pedals are cheats because they should be able to do it with one foot. And it makes bands like mine feel slightly ‘got at’ for using loops and samples as part of our live show. And with articles like this, that perception is only going to get worse. With the sum of the article being ‘guitar good, laptop bad’ we fall upon the ire of the internet musical commentators who turn off their Cream albums long enough to scream that using backing tracks over their pure, white, unpolluted live music is, and I quote, ‘boring and cowardly’, before moving on to the next round of Candy Crush Saga.

J Willgoose Esq, about to kick a sequencer off the stage.

That's not to say that there aren't bands who use backing tracks to prop up a bad performance. But they're just bad bands, like there have always been bad bands, with an iPod running in the background. And the crowd will pick up on that, whether they know why or not. An obvious backing track is just another symptom of an overall lack of quality rather than the cause of the problem. And it's the band's job to make the tracks work. Last year I saw a show by the pop side-project of a leading post-hardcore band's singer, whose set came across as uninspired and insipid and was panned by the magazines and punters alike. The set was shackled to glaring, pre-produced tracks. The reliance on the tracks was just one aspect of the larger problem of a badly-conceived live show that lacked any onstage spark and utilised a skeleton crew of a band that looked like they didn't want to be there in the first place. Meticulously-produced audio pumping out into the room or not, listening to the grumbling fans leaving Sound Control in Manchester with disappointed faces, the fact that the band had misused backing tracks was just one of the complaints about an overall lacklustre product.

J Willgoose Esq rightly posits that 'there should also be room for improvisation, even if only in small measures. How else are you supposed to be able to tell a good performance from a bad one?' The thing is, the aforementioned pop band were the exception that proves the rule. I’ve rarely seen a band so dominated by backing tracks that there isn’t room for improvisation, in small measures or not. Certainly the mammoth productions and tremendously talented backing bands of most leading pop acts don’t fall into that category. And for any act out there simply miming to pre-recorded backings - maybe some Pop Idol also-ran that’s playing a few shopping centres - I’d credit the crowd with enough intelligence to be completely turned off, without even necessarily knowing, or caring, why. Conversely, if a band like The Streets or Enter Shikari or Hadouken! or Skindred even Sonic Boom Sodding Six, use backing tracks in a way that’s fun and inventive and enhances the show then the crowd forget all about all the ‘cheating’ going on and enjoy the show. As long as we don’t talk about it. It’s kind of like an audio Fight Club.

The most galling facet of the anti-backing tracks mentality is that it misses out a whole aspect of music that has come into play with the availability of software like Ableton Live which allows synched backing tracks to be accessible to all bands, not just those with elaborate stage sets and multitudes of expensive equipment, as was the case not too many years ago. This technology allows bands to be creative, adventurous and integrated with their use of backing tracks from day one. Lest we forget, when acoustic guitars were first amplified, members of the music community saw that amplification itself as cheating. Yes, there were Luddites that would see me climbing onto the stage with anything less than a double bass projecting out notes with my bare, swollen digits as fraudulent. Absurd, but no more absurd than the notion that all use of backing tracks onstage is dragging the music away from a position of honesty. Seeing backing tracks as ‘cheating’ robs one of the opportunity to appreciate backing tracks, samples, loops and electronic elements being used in a way that is as interesting and inspired as any guitar solo. Listening to James talk to Skindred for hours on end about the specifics of their set-up is enough to convince even the most ardent skeptic that this is a very involved process indeed. Fucking ragga-metal FRAUDS that they are.

Ask yourself where the music on the backing tracks comes from. You don’t walk out of the studio and get presented with a burnt disc with 'cheat mode' written on it in Sharpie and hand it to the soundman. Integrating tracks into your set takes time and skill. We work for hours in rehearsals on our arrangements like any band, but for us, the instrument of the laptop is another layer in that process. Making the performance emulate what is there on record, but still allowing for the 'live band' sound to come through, is a major factor of that development. Playing along with the drums to a click is no mean feat in itself but creating triggered loop points within songs which allow for improvisation and formulating segues is every bit as demanding as it is having a bass, guitar and drums vamp on a blues riff for a few bars while the vocalist talks. In fact, I’ll go there. It’s WAY more demanding than that. That’s well easy! And that’s the total and utter Billy Bollocks of the whole debate. For any band using backing tracks in the way we do, it is more involved, demanding, and dare I say it, difficult than it was when we didn’t use them. And the bottom line is that our current music, and lots of other music that dares to deviate from the bass, drums, guitar archetype, wasn’t written to be heard ‘stripped down’. Far from running scared from that exposure, we were thinking bigger. As big as technology allows.

Sonic Boom Six, today, in their magic backing tracks factory, preparing to cheat the music world.

As a final case in point, Coldplay is a band named in the article as a band who have come under fire for their use of backing tracks. Like them or not, Coldplay is a band that can play. And SING. No matter what’s added, you’re going to be able to hear the performances of the incredibly talented principle four musicians, without a great deal of trouble, which Chris never meant to cause you, of course. And I for one would rather hear that accompanied by all the grandeur that the live arena and technology allows, and all the creative elbow-room that entails. If I wanted to hear them, or us, or any decent band stripped down and ‘real’, then there are always the acoustic performances. If the crowd are singing along at the show I think most of them agree. But attack them for using backing tracks on a blog and a lot of that same crowd might grit their teeth and bang out things like ‘cheating’, ‘boring’ and ‘cowardly’ before watching Charlie Bit My Finger.

People talk about backing tracks, and dummy amps, and equate them with ‘faking it’. People harp on about technology reducing the art of live pop and rock music. I think the opposite is true. Music technology is increasing the scope of live music performance. Music technology can enhance production of the live experience in the largest arena and the smallest toilet venue, as long as artists and sound engineers are willing to be inventive and creative with it. I give the crowd credit. If the music is stifled by the technology, they’re gonna hear it. If it adds to the music, they’re gonna cheer it beyond all the lip service we give what we consider ‘real’. That’s the bottom line. That’s the art. Bear in mind that The Beatles apparently stopped playing live because they could no longer emulate the sounds that they could create in the studio. It's hard to picture them making that argument today. The scope that this technology presents us with is only as limited as our imaginations and this should be celebrated and embraced. It should be appreciated at the very least. Keith Richards said ‘Rock n Roll is music for the neck down’ and that’s certainly the philosophy I endorse. Appreciate a band on the basis of what’s presented to you out in the crowd, not from a stolen photo behind the curtain. And, whatever you do, don’t read the comments section.

Until The Sunlight Comes...

Barney x