The band t-shirt is sown into the fabric of our world. It is as an essential component of metal as the riff, the drum solo and casual drug use. It act as a form of cloth based branding, allowing us to identify other members of our tribe, as well as a lucrative income stream independent from record sales. I have hundreds of the buggers and I can trace the evolution of my tastes and my bank balance over the 38 years I have been attending gigs.
Read MoreCurrently, you can get a ticket on Ticketmaster for Slipknot’s much anticipated 25th anniversary tour for around £220. That’s not a VIP ticket or a resale one, that is a bog-standard ticket. This is because of a phenomenon known as dynamic pricing. They didn’t begin life at £220. They started at a much more palatable (but still high) £70 but as the “maggots” (who know must all be in middle-aged well paid IT jobs) swarmed over the tickets they steadily increased in value as their scarcity increased.
Read MoreAside from humanity finding new depths to its innate ability to be horrendous to each other, the other thing that captured our imagination last weekend was Power Trip. It may have happened thousands of miles away, but we still felt compelled to talk about Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Guns n’ Roses, Tool and Metallica sharing the same billing. However, the conversation wasn't about what they played, it was about how much it cost to witness the whole thing.
Read MoreMy passion is music. It's my release and it's my obsession. My close friendships are based around music. My downtime is based around music and I met my wife through a Guardian soulmate ad which read "Musical obsessive seeks indie chick for passionate pogoing”. Yet, I'm not sure where this obsession sprung from. My parents were not great muso's and if the radio was on in our house, it was Radio Four. I did not have any great compulsion about musicality passed on to me, it just happened quite randomly and quite organically.
Read MoreIt spread through the internet like the proverbial dose of salts. “Have you seen what Gojira are charging for merch?”. The French giants, long regarded as a band of the people were caught with their fingers in the tills asking for forty quid for a t-shirt and eighty quid for a hoodie. I think what hurt most and caused the most disdain is that they weren’t a band that we expected this of. Gene Simmons yes but Joe Duplantier?
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