Money Don't Make My World Go 'Round

As an Aston Villa fan, most of my opinions are made through gritted teeth of frustration. Frustration at the way football, the sport that I and millions of others love, is now a complete farce of a sport in the modern age. Sport is supposed to reward effort, courage and technical ability, and football is no different. However, because it is a team sport without a wage cap, it actually rewards the rich more than anything else. And that is the price for unparalleled popularity.

The Premier League is pointless if you support any team other than Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool. The money that is thrown at our league from sponsors and TV rights goes exclusively to the Premier League clubs, and then just goes straight into the back pockets of the already overpaid players, who have little to no respect for the clubs they represent anyway. Champions League football offers an extra £20-£40 million per team. This separates the top 4 as virtually untouchable, because if ever one of them is in danger of being displaced from their pedastals, they can just dip into their spare change and buy £17 million worth of Russian wing wizard and eleviate their worries. As a fan of one of the others, I watch on enviably as the big four buy the best and win comfortably week in week out against the alsorans. The fact that their fans go into every game expecting to win is a bit of a disgrace: It's a scenario you cannot envision in many other team sports. Formula One is infamous as the most boring sport in the world, whereby Ferrari and McClaren win every race simply because they have the most money to spend on developing their car. But even F1 isn't as boring any more. Three teams' ingenuity this year lifted them above the rest, while Red Bull's well built car is keeping them second in the constructor's championship. Ferrari are chasing and McClaren are simply nowhere to be seen. Such a thing seems like an impossibility right now. Imagine the lower teams making some shrewd purchases, putting so much more effort in, and leaving Chelsea and Liverpool to battle for a Europa league spot whilst Man Utd settle for 10th place and Arsenal struggle to avoid relagation. Maybe then their fans might know what it's like to be a football fan. To feel the highs and the lows. And maybe fans like me would know the joys of topping the table and going into a season thinking that we genuinely had a chance to win it come the end of 38 games. I would like nothing more to see a FIA style wage cap enforced, or at least discussed, to perhaps have some kind of parity in England, akin to that of the MLS. At the moment, it's just not going to happen.

Manchester City, however are showing that the little guy can stand up to the footballing giants and buy the big names. This is in no small part down to the backing of a man with a personal fortune of £33billion. No doubt with the players they intend to sign, they will break into the top 4, and no doubt create a top 5 of immovable teams. Now all that is needed is for every Premier League club to be taken over by a huge multi-billionaire owner and we may have an even playing field. Only for the big boys of course, then you have to worry about the lower divisions, because there is no altruism in football, no money gets filtered down. The big boys want the gulf in class to be a chasm, and luckily for them, at the moment, it is.

At the moment, the Premier League is the mutts nuts; the puppy's scrotum of world football if you like, much like it was for Serie A in the early 90s and La Liga at the turn of the millenium. However, there's a shift on the horizon. This summer, it's already been seen that players are turning down the chance to play in the Premier League, preferring to stay with clubs like Lyon, Porto, Fiorentina, Athletico Madrid and Valencia, who would generally be considered mere feeder clubs to the might of the English league. Why this sudden change in player perspective? It may be that the major signings of Kaká and Ronaldo for Madrid has made everyone decide that La Liga is where it's at again. It may be that the loss in the final for Man Utd has transferred the air of invincibility to Barcelona and the Spanish league. The German league is always strong and seen as one with a great deal of integrity, not to mention the fascinatingly open title race for the Bundesliga last year. The Italian league is known as the most cerebral and technical of them all, in contrast to the all action physicality of the Premier League.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's that in the land of crazy money, things are not looking as rosy as they once were. Granted, there has been an economic downturn for all of the Western world, but England is in a rather unique situation. I've already established that to be the best, you have to be the richest, because you need the most money to attract the big named mercenary stars. We have recently been dealt a 50% income tax on all high wage earners, meaning that for the average player to take home £100, 000 a week (an entirely reasonable sum), the club will have to pay out £200, 000 a week. Compare this to Spain where their income tax for high earners is just 20%, a club outlay of £125, 000 per week will see the player home with the same balance. Presuming these players get paid for 52 weeks of the year, that's £3.9million extra that the club has to pay to make sure that the player goes home with the same wage that they would in Spain. Notice a lot of players suddenly going to Fenerbahcé? It's because they have an income tax of 12.5%. Mercenaries will go to the highest bidder. No wonder Manchester City are willing to pay £250, 000 to bag Eto'o, because if Barcelona wanted to pay him £156, 000 he'd get the same amount in bold on his payslip. Not that he's remotely worth it. The point is that the attraction of money isn't going to be as big now. Not to mention the collapse of Setanta, which brought so much competition to TV rights that every club in Premier League was rewarded with £40million a season. Without that competition, Sky can pay a little bit less, and the clubs in turn will receive that little bit less.

It may get difficult to continually pay the wages that so far have only increased during worldwide economic decline. Maybe all of this over indulgence that has been seen from the top 4 and Man City, who are all operating at ridiculous amounts of debt, may haunt them in the same way that it haunted RBS recently. I hope beyond all hope that they all follow the example of Leeds United, and maybe in a few seasons time we will get to see a title race, whereby any one of a handful of teams can win. I can hope, but so long as the mega rich are bankrolling such stratospheric amounts of debt, the Premier League as a competition is more dead than John Cleese's parrot.

It's pastiche, capisce?

You know that you're smack bang in the middle of a musical movement when the new talent begins to argue amongst themselves that they sound nothing alike. We've moved on from the era where everyone sounds like the Libertines and the Strokes, and now we're into the Klaxons era. I say Klaxons because they were the first ones to really bring this DIY electronic sound back from the 80s/90s, and now every good band seems to be a variant of them.

Which brings me to the latest crop of artists. Recently, Adele, Kate Nash, Lily Allen et al. have been bossing the category of female solo artists, with their sometimes witty, often spoken word lyrics and inoffensive background tones. But with the introduction of Ladhawke, the bar has not just been raised, but completely warped. The musical scene has turned full circle, with the arse end of Britpop Version 2.0 being replaced with the very soulless electropop that preceded Version 1.0. You turn on Ladyhawke, and you hear Stevie Nicks. Turn on La Roux and you get Erasure. Little Boots, a more electro Blondie. Pastiche is all well and good, but the Klaxons were great because although you got the energy and out of control feeling of early 90s rave, they actually didn't sound like anyone before them. The second wave of NuRave is witnessing pop circa 1986. But all of this is only negative in an artistic sense. The fact is, as music goes, it's great to listen to.

Take Ladyhawke's debut album; 12 perfect slices of pop with lyrical hooks that you cannot shake off. It may not be up for winning any Ivor Novello awards for "Hey, stop playing with my delirium, 'cause i'm out of my head and out of my self control", but as a chorus, it's sweeter than a nut in Tropicana, as Dizzee might suggest. This being said, you can listen to twenty minutes and have no idea how many tracks have actually been played, due to the sheer similarity of each track. Closing track Morning Dreams does hints at a real softness behind Ladyhawke's otherwise brash appearance, but it is a case of having 10 tracks at the same semi-fast tempo and then 2 ballads tacked on to the end. A lesson in how to mix it up needs to be learnt for album number two.

Lady Gaga of The Fame fame is guilty of a particularly American folly. She has created 4 stunning singles, of which Just Dance, Pokerface and Paparazzi, could quite easily make up the top 5 of the year come December, but has completely dismissed the rest of the album. To say that track 5 onwards could have been replaced better with actual horse urine in the CD case is no exaggeration. Full 16 tracks or 4 tracks and donkey piss? I'd have much preferred to have had that option in HMV. But it does not take away from the brilliance of Lady Gaga's singles as near perfection.

Little Boots' Hands offers a very similar return. The difference is that the singles, although brilliant, are not as strong as Gaga's, and the weak tracks are nowhere near as dismal. However, the confidence and competence in Little Boots' instrumentation is what is sure to elevate her above her peers. Electro Goddess wouldn't really be an overstatement of what she could achieve, with Alison Goldfrapp the obvious benchmark. Mathematics demonstrates what seems like an impossible amount of geometric puns on top of perfectly layered piano, synthesiser and big beat 80s drum machine, in what is undoubtedly the album highlight. She dabbles in the ballad and the middle of the road chug-along pop that serves as album fodder, but it is only when Victoria Hesketh really aims for the dance floor that she truly displays her potential.

The comparative early careers of these women shows a great strength in new female solo music, but each with their own shortcomings; namely of continuous pastiche (Ladyhawke), lack of quality in depth (Lady Gaga) and desperately inconsistent (Little Boots).

Enter La Roux, not entirely a solo artist (she has a silent partner) but close enough to be talked about in the same ilk as the above. The band manage to tick the boxes that are left blank by the rest of their peers. Whilst the synths have a distinctively Erasure-esque tempo and tone, there's something wholly innovative about the texture created with the high pitched, piercing nature of Elly Jackson's vocals. In for the Kill is intimidatingly seductive, illustrating the awkward feelings when lust is dangerously close to spilling into an emotional relationship. La Roux takes Gaga's simplistic assertion that (When it's love; if it isn't rough, it isn't fun), and magnifies the power struggles between boy and girl (Let's go to war to make peace, let's be cold to create heat). Clearly letting someone in was a mistake for sorry Miss Jackson (I am for real), as Bulletproof sees a hardened character develop, (I’ll never let you sweep me off my feet, I won’t let you in again). Audible sugar is the only way to describe the synths, the lyrics are perfectly weighted as to suggest the slightest chink in her armour, (Baby your time is running out) as if there is still time, and the chorus at just six words, is too simple to get out of your head. These floor filling songs though are an affront to the painfully honest heartwrencher Cover My Eyes. Okay, that may be a tad hyperbolic for a song which is about seeing a bloke you like with another girl, but it's a moment of vulnerability as she admits "I'm scared to look in your eyes, you've turned me away so many times", above a choir, which is refreshingly quiet in the background. A real moment of emotion let out on record, elevating herself above the likes of Gaga and Little Boots, who really get nowhere close to this honesty. It's not all good though, I'm Not Your Toy sees a fairly decent song ruined by what sounds like the backing tune to a shit Namco platform game circa 1994, though this is the price you pay for originality. You can either hit, or miss. The simple facts of is that La Roux have learnt from the deficiencies of their contemporaries and make sure that they hit a lot more than they miss.