A letter to the Pauper Guy Garvey (who’s band are currently on an arena tour)
Dear Mr Garvey,
Pertaining to your recent comment:
“If you can afford it {music} and you don’t pay for it then you’re going to hell and you’ve got your own room”
After all the hard work you go through thinking up a tune that sounds like Hey Jude, but not so much like it that you’d get sued, and having to sit and think up deep meaningful sounding lyrics about curtains or something and having to make them rhyme, and then having to record it in a recording studio with a man to make it sound good, and then having to travel the country having to play said Hey Jude/curtains song to scores of appreciative people who are giving you money, sometimes for weeks on end, and then after said tour you have to think of some other songs to make new songs to sound like.
It sounds like a living hell, and it is only fair and decent that the population pay you, let’s say, more than a doctor gets paid. Which is only fair as anyone can perform a cholecystectomy whereas it takes a genius to make up the Hey jude/curtain song.
Actually when you think about it, you have a privileged job where you earn a living touring the country doing nothing more important than producing songs so poignant that they get used in shows such as Waterloo Road.
So some people like your music enough to be bothered to steal it, you should be flattered rather than outraged. So some bloke in Sheffield didn’t pay 80p for Hey Jude/curtains and now you’ll have to have the regular foccacia instead of the one with olives in. You are supposed to be a singer and musician, (an artist?) Not the CEO of Elbow Ltd.
You are everything that is wrong with music today.
Yours disappointed
Russ Palmer
