BEING into a band means you have a moral obligation to pretend to enjoy all associated solo work and never to admit it’s crap. Loyally play the following:
The Smile
Radiohead haven’t released an album for eight years. Like a man desperately wanking over his ex’s Instagram, you’re reduced to telling yourself Jonny Greenwood’s film soundtracks are just as good. Thank heavens then, for Thom Yorke-fronted The Smile. Now you can pretend that the next OK Computer is coming and Cutouts is a grower.
The Voidz
The Strokes were the too-cool-for-school sharp-dressed drunken nihilists who got all the girls and smoked all the fags. Julian Casablancas’s spin-off band The Voidz, conversely, are revising for their GCSES a year early and spend lunchtimes in the IT department. You pretend their mature, experimental rock recaptures your exciting 20s, lying.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
Despite the faux-cockney posturing, you loved Blur’s rousing anthems and mosh-pit energy. So didn’t really go for this Damon Albarn project of downbeat sketches of a wounded, fractured Britain. You told yourself it was evidence of his range as a songwriter, ignoring that spooky organ textures and dub bass are impossible to leap around playing air guitar to.
The Plastic Ono Band
Even the most ardent Beatles apologist draws the line somewhere, usually here. You may as well face that John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band represents a serious drop in songwriting quality from the guy who came up with Strawberry Fields Forever. ‘It’s a devastating outpouring of emotion and unprocessed pain,’ you say. Yeah. It f**king sounds like it.
The Last Shadow Puppets
‘Alex Turner? A genius who articulates the concerns of contemporary working-class youth like no other,’ you said in 2006. You could hardly retract your position when he came out as one more guitar-pop throwback wishing it was the 60s. You declared The Age of the Understatement to be another work of inventive brilliance, and never listen to it.
Beady Eye
You don’t have to be a pretentious wanker to wrongly place hope in solo projects. You can be a proper bloke who likes proper bands and still believe that Oasis minus their only good songwriter would work. There was a song called Beatles and Stones. However wank Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds were, they didn’t stoop to that.
Foo Fighters
It’s easy to forget that babymaker Dave Grohl played everything on the first Foo Fighters album, and it only evolved into a proper band because of idiots trying to fill the Nirvana-shaped hole in their life. You should be full of self-loathing for liking this monotonous dad rock and not in a Kurt Cobain way. Cobain was the voice of a generation; Foo Fighters are the voice of someone asking how to work the printer.
