This week’s Rock Band DLC has gone a little bit country, which induces me to grimace at horrible, horrible memories of when Shania Twain and Billy Ray Cyrus were on the radio every other day - thank goodness that particular fad has passed before I was forced to go all Van Gogh on myself. But still, music is personal after all, and if you want to listen to hokey tunes with madatory banjo solos, that’s your business. However, I would still consider this to be a ‘niche’, and as such I feel that Harmonix now owe us some more British band DLC, because surely those who appreciate British rock bands must be more numerous than those who are into country. I hope. Sure we’ve had some like David Bowie, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, The Police, The Stone Roses, and Oasis, but come on, Britain has a rich culture of music that is going massively untapped compared to the number of tracks from North American bands.
I can rattle off a huge list of UK bands that have been cruelly overlooked: Arctic Monkeys, The Bluetones, The Charlatans, Coldplay, Def Leppard, Elbow, Franz Ferdinand (cover in GH1 only), Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, James, Kaiser Chiefs (yes, I know Ruby was in GH3 but that was rubbish), The Kinks, The Kooks, The La’s, Led Zeppelin (unlikely because of master track paranoia), The Libertines, Manic Street Preachers, The Magic Numbers, Morrissey, Nine Black Alps, Ocean Colour Scene, Pink Floyd, Primal Scream, Queen (see below), Razorlight, The Seahorses, Shed Seven, Snow Patrol, StarSailor, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, Supergrass, Travis, U2, The Verve, The Zutons - and I’m sure there are loads more.
On both a positive and negative note, I saw that Queen is finally due to make an appearance in Guitar Hero : Metallica - which is both encouraging and perverse. Encouraging that Queen is finally ready to release master tracks in band games, perverse because they have to stow away on a Metallica disk. Queen is a supporting act to Metallica? On whose planet?
I guess it’s because all these decisions are made in the States, where musical taste is somewhat different. For any Americans reading this, how many in the above list had you heard of, and would you be interested in any?
Well, Harmonix
For some reason I was suddenly curious as to how much money I’d spent since last December on digital content for the 360, such as XBox Live Arcade titles and more recently Rock Band DLC. Of course you buy things in Microsoft Points on the 360, which like Wii Points and Disney Dollars are designed precisely to disguise how much money you’re actually spending. The PSN has my respect in this regard for taking the brave step of actually pricing things in units of real money. Quite why Microsoft and Nintendo chose to go against the precendent set by every other marketplace in the developed world (except Disneyland, but that’s intentionally ‘wacky’) I’m not sure - I doubt we’d take most high street retailers very seriously if they required us to buy things in ‘Starbucks Bucks’ or ‘HMV Quatloos’.
Finally! I’d already had She Bangs the Drums in GH3, but it’s not one of the Roses’ best tracks and the GH3 implementation was, typically, not that much fun.