Someone isn't happy...

Hello Fans,

This week I was going to write my 500 words about ‘The Bouncer’ by Kicks Like A Mule, but I have been so upset by something that I literally died. I literally died, inside. All my positivism is shot to pieces and I don’t even know if I can carry on with the column any more - my love of music has been that badly affected.

Do you want to know what upset me so much?

This:

"Do you know the tracks that just go over your head, and by the end of the song you realise you didn’t take even the slightest bit of it in? Well, ‘Girls Who Play Guitars’ is exactly one of those. While this spasmodic guitar dirge is playing on the stereo in the background, we start imagining how cool it would be to have telekinetic powers strong enough to fire a custard pie filled with cyanide straight at Paul Smith’s gob. “We used to talk about girls who play guitars/We used to talk about plans in tiny bars”. Splat! We can but dream".

That is the NME said about my band’s new single.

:(

Apart from being factually wrong and shoddily written that review is heartbreaking because it takes a piece of art that I spent seven years of my life bringing into the world and dismisses it out of hand, as if it doesn’t matter.

OF COURSE the song will go over your head if you listen to it on a STEREO!

Maximo Park makes music for headphones.

Spasmodic guitar dirge? GWPG is one of our best compositions! Our manager even said so, and I'm sure I heard Edith Bowman tell someone she liked it.

I won't even dignify their desire to MURDER ME with a response.

And who is this ’we’, Mr. Jamie Crosslan (for it is he who authored the above savaging)? ’We’ start imagining? ’We can but dream’? Collectively? I think not. Using ’we’ to describe oneself is the sort of thing pretentious bloggers do and I cannot abide by it. ‘We’ indeed.

As I say the whole thing has left me very upset and I am still unsure as to whether I will be able to continue being positive enough about life in general, let alone music, to carry on writing a column about my favourite old records.

With that I bid you a saddened good day.

Paul
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