PARIS: To launch or to not launch? That’s the query haunting the music trade because the coronavirus casts doubt over a slew of forthcoming albums.
The Canadian hit-machine Weekend held his nerve and dropped the 14-track After Hours Friday, with the cult British artist Baxter Dury additionally going forward although he admitted that “it’s terrible timing”.
The Weekend’s new album for Common had been closely trailed on his YouTube channel, which has 17.7 million subscribers.
The album’s darkish theme was set by a brief movie of the identical identify by which the singer, his face bleeding and crushed, wanders an eerily empty metropolis.
Swept up in a type of unseen panic, the claustrophobic environment is bizarrely prophetic of a world that’s now both in lock down, or quick approaching it, due to the virus.
Not that the three-time Grammy winner is resistant to what’s going on round him now. The streaming king not too long ago tweeted a video of a quarantined DJ taking part in one in every of his songs on a balcony in Italy, the nation worst affected by the epidemic.
Luckless Bob Geldof
However you must really feel for Bob Geldof, who had simply launched The Boomtown Rats’ first album in 36 years, just for it and the accompanying guide and documentary concerning the Dublin punk band with which he made his identify, to be swallowed up within the chaos.
“It is what it is,” the Dwell Assist founder advised AFP, declaring that with “the world in the state it’s in and… that vulgar fool Trump” within the White Home, it was time to “make noise”.
Geldof, 68, described with glee how paranoia spreads. “I put on my mask on the Eurostar train to Paris. Everyone started looking at each other suspiciously and before you knew it they were all in masks,” he stated.
Dury – son of the punk icon Ian Dury of ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’ fame – was additionally grinning and bearing the discharge of his The Evening Chancers, a becoming soundtrack for city solitude, regardless of the widening world shutdown.
The songwriter stated he didn’t wish to be seen as cynical. “I don’t want to be the guy who’s trying to sell records right now,” he advised AFP. “You have to be sensitive to what’s going on.”
Is it indecent?
As for touring the album, he stated “I think we will have to wait six months before having another concert. No one really knows.”
For now, Dury is hunkering down in his London condo attempting to not “go stir crazy” and serving to his son examine for exams.
Different musicians, nevertheless, have most well-liked to postpone their releases, together with French singer Thomas Dutronc, who has Iggy Pop, jazz diva Diana Krall and ZZ Prime stalwart Billy Gibbons on his new album Frenchy.
After saying he was placing it again to June, Dutronc posted a video to Twitter wanting quite down within the mouth, warning followers to take the virus significantly.
“Be careful, think of yourself carrying the virus and look out for people you love and for the old folk,” stated the son of Gallic music legend, Jacques Dutronc.
However the folk-pop duo Hey Hey My My went forward with their British Hawaii regardless of questioning whether or not “our music would appear totally futile with all that is happening now,” singer Julien Gaulier advised AFP.
“Is it indecent to bring out a record now?” he requested, saying he hoped folks may discover a modicum of consolation of their contemplative melodies “played with real instruments”.
“It took us ten years to do this album – after our last one, maybe our absence wasn’t much noticed – so we weren’t going to leave it sitting in cardboard boxes,” he joked.
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