2006: Gnarls Barkley, Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
While it was only a few short years ago, 2006 was a real game changer in terms of this decade. The previous year saw the implementation of digital sales into the singles chart and by summer this year Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ became the first UK number one not to sell a single physical copy. It was the also the year that YouTube went supernova and allowed many of us to check out classic clips of bands performing on Top of The Pops while we mourned the final weekly episodes. While the great rush to add people to your fledging MySpace account may have been slightly earlier, there are two acts that will forever be associated with it; Lily Allen and The Arctic Monkeys.
Both however were not solely interesting due to their online presence. The Arctic Monkeys were the money shot that NME had been waiting for in the wake of The Strokes and The Libertines. A critically acclaimed British band that would go on to smash Elastica’s first week sales record for a debut and no doubt shift a few extra copies of the magazine when appearing on the front. Lily Allen’s similar attitude to making her material available online (ah, the irony) also saw her star rising this year. Her bouncy, reggae and ska flicked home-spun pop was for me, and no doubt many others, the sound of that summer. Her openness on her MySpace blog would go on to be the norm with many acts big and small having Twitter and Facebook accounts as well by the end of the decade.
Lily Allen also paved the way, if only in the heads of broadsheets and lifestyle pieces, for Kate Nash, Adele, Duffy in the next couple of years and now we can’t move for La Roux, Little Boots, Florence and The Machine, Ladyhawke etc. Of course aside from not standing up to urinate and being about 20, there’s very little to connect all these acts together but if there was really was a movement it started this year. It certainly provided the tabloids with something other than Pete Doherty to put in their showbiz sections until Amy Winehouse returned.
On a more personal level, I spent a lot time this year searching out new music for myself online, using blogs, message boards and webzines over relying on the mainstream press and radio. This again wouldn’t have been possible without a broadband connection and lots of free time (I finished university this year) and is now slightly easier with Hype Machine, the mainstream press publishing their taste-making online and the technology existing to stream effective making the whole process more smooth. This saw me championing the debuts from Guillemots, Plan B, The Young Knives, Howling Bells, Mystery Jets, The Pipettes, The Long Blondes, Burial and best of all Bat For Lashes amongst returns from The Knife, Hot Chip and Joanna Newsom. I’ve never been one to fall madly in love with North American Indie Rock as pushed heavily by Pitchfork but I do still enjoy bits of Shut Up, I Am Dreaming and Destroyer’s Rubies more than your average NAIR.
With all this youth and young womanhood dominating my listening habits this year it was comforting to have strong statements from old-hands like Morrissey, Bob Dylan and Scott Walker in what I felt at the time and still do now the poorest year of the decade. While there was plenty to recommend I certainly didn’t think the well of very good albums or singles cut as deep as it has done in the three years since. Maybe that’s also partially due to this being the last year I suffered from the curse of the untouched .rar sitting on an external hard-drive, whose prices seemed to plummet around this time.
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