Two contrasting experiences of life in the music business. On Wednesday, the Music Monthly's friends at Vice magazine let slip that they'd be staging a gig by the Arctic Monkeys at a pub in east London the following night...
But keep it quiet, they insisted: if too many people found out, the band would pull the gig - which was going to give them the chance of bedding in their new temporary bass player. Come yesterday afternoon, and the head of Domino, the band's label, has only just heard the news himself. He's drinking in a pub near the Grosvenor House Hotel, in the aftermath of the Ivor Novello awards. These have proved a surprisingly convivial affair; besides which, it's not often you'll see Rolf Harris, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream and Sir Harrison Birtwistle follow each other on stage (the first two were presenting awards, the latter picking one up, and railing entertainingly against pop music). Anyway, finally it's time to head east, and we scuttle up the stairs of the Old Blue Last in (yes) Hoxton. The room's tiny. A couple of hundred people at most are squeezed in. The band turn up. No fuss. They play - 10 songs in a 40 minute set. They're fantastic, and it's fantastic to see them like this: a reminder of what it should be all about. The new bassist's good too. Everyone's buzzing. And now it's early Friday afternoon, and I'm just back from a playback of four tracks from the new Beyonce album. The event has taken place in another airtight box of a room, but this time in the sickeningly chic St Martin's Lane hotel. Forty-odd people from the press, radio and TV have been summoned, and are being served champagne and canapes. It probably doesn't help that there's nowhere to sit and I'm still sweating alcohol. An improbably-named flunky from the American side of things introduces some video footage. For 10 minutes, we're bombarded with images of Ms B, and bombarded with facts and figures - there are shots of her singing the Star Spangled Banner at the Superbowl and performing in front of the President; we're told of her fashion range, of her proud association with companies like McDonald's. It's very much as if we're being invited to invest in Beyonce as a commodity. So it's sort of beside the point that the music, when we hear it, is pretty fantastic (but then what do you expect when you hire the most expensive producers in the business, like the Neptunes and Rich Harrison?). The heavy-sell sticks in the craw. It's made very clear, that with a new album in September and a hit movie following at Christmas, this will be Beyonce's year. 'She's a huge, huge brand artist for us,' says the UK label head. 'And the brand is going to get bigger.' Is it any surprise we prefer those stars who let us get up close to them?
