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It also seems a bit unfair that (to the best of my recollection) they had two jazz players competing for, er, two places, while they had several rock players competing for one.
Seems a bit sexist to me, as well- they actually had a bunch of good women players (IMO) who I liked more than most of the men, and only one got through (alongside seven men), and why exactly did they put the two acoustic women against each other when letting the other acoustic guy through? It's like "women" is a niche genre of music or something. Even if there was nothing behind it (which I doubt), it looks bad, and not realising it looks bad says a lot.
EDIT: Also in the second episode some of the competitors got way more air time than others- like they've already decided who they want to win, or at least progress further. Again, that looks bad, and not realising (or caring) that it looks bad again says a lot.
Goes without saying there was way too much talking and not enough playing. You know, instead of telling me how good they are you could just let me hear them...
Yeah, ridiculous.
Then when the obsequious fawning started I was wishing they'd gone back to just letting george benson play. my delicate constitution just can't cope with that level of embarrassment... more like sycophant star than guitar star.
And I don't want to do the young Epi LP toting lad down, but as rock players go, he's no better than most others his age that I've heard - playing the intro to Run To The Hills which seemingly really impressed GB - just shows how they need a good name rock guitar judge/mentor on the show.
* I don't think there's any correlation between guitar playing and intelligence, it's just a figure of speech.
How will you survive without sleep?
And yeah that's the fawning bit I was talking about. Once he appeared to be on the verge of proclaiming George Benson as the greatest human being who ever lived (while also being on the verge of tears), I decided to fast-forward through all the fawning before I needed to seek medical attention.
Which worked well, except that meant the rest of the show lasted about 30 seconds...
And crawling to celebs. At least these guys are celebs for actually being exceptional at something other than self-promotion.
So far there's been enough good stuff among the dross to keep me watching. For me the standard is more consistent and higher than last year, albeit 2 or 3 of the contestants fail the not-a-dickhead test. The absence of Bowman is a small bonus and the absence of Huey a big one.
I agree the rock content is poor yet again, but I don't see an easy solution. With jazz and classical, musical excellence and technical excellence are closely related. There are well established traditions of playing solo guitar. There's a lot of common ground in judging good from bad.
None of this applies to rock/pop. Most players don't sound good without a band, and for a lot of fans and even fellow players technical excellence is unnecessary or even bad. For every fan of Van Halen or Satriani there are several who think they are self-indulgently missing the point of the music, and who'd rather worship at the shrine of Keef or BB King or Neil Young or Nile Rogers. There little consensus about what's good, and among the majority of rock guitar player fans who think technique isn't what matters, even less consensus about how to measure the nebulous thing that does matter, so much so that last year it came down to being a good-looking kid who waved his hair around a lot.
I'm happy they've more or less sidestepped these issues by having only one rock guy, who incidentally isn't as terrible as I thought at first but is still the weakest of the finalists by a long way. If the only kind of guitar you're interested in is rock guitar the show probably isn't going to interest you, which is fair enough.
Incidentally anyone else think John Gomm would make a far better presenter than the ones they chose? Confident, articulate, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, generous and with a natural ease in front of the camera that none of the others had. Not a huge fan of his music (amazing for 5 mins, but tedious after half an hour is my suspicion) but if there is a 3rd series and I were the producer I'd be giving him a bell.
Milos irritates the crap out of me. For someone who's been groomned to within an inch of his life to mention the kid's hat was a bit much. The difference between his "recital" approach and Gomm's "playing" approach is very noticeable. I don't like Gomm's music, nothing against him personally, but he looks for positives and Milos seems to be looking for faults.
EDIT: Nice Tom Anderson, though.
Wilcos playing itself was sadly lacking and I can't help wondering what was going through his mind when the slide playing dude sat down with him coz he totally outclassed wilco.
The widdly Rock kid wax awful .. was he the best of the bunch coz honestly he should sort out his technique. His picking was sloppy and his heavily distorted noodling lacked focus, musical content truly terrible.
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Bizarrely it was also seeing her guitar that made me realise I'd seen Lianne before, on Jools: just the look of her wasn't enough to trigger the memory until I saw her with that distinctive black and white guitar. I really need to get out more.