Friday, 11 January 2013

The Obscurometer

The Guardian ran an article today about obscure bands and hidden treasures , citing a website called the Obscurometer which, as the name suggests, calculates the obscureness of bands based on last FM plays or something,  giving them a percentage.

Although obviously this is a fairly meaningless exercise, as an existentialist I love all things meaningless and couldn’t resist putting in Saloon and some of our contemporaries. Here are the results:

SALOON 89.1% OBSCURE

A pretty respectable score. More surprising perhaps were the results of some of our solo offshoots:

ARTHUR AND MARTHA (me) 93.0 % OBSCURE

THE LEFT OUTSIDES (Alison) 93.3 % OBSCURE

THE LEAF LIBRARY (Matt) 94.2 % OBSCURE

Very surprised that A&M were the least obscure (just) seeing as we haven’t done anything for years, although perhaps that is to do with the fact that the results are based from Last FM and the ‘sort of people’ inclined to listen to A&M’s electronic bobbins are more the sort of people to use Last FM.

Anyway I thought it interesting to look at some of our contemporaries that we played with :


STEREOLAB 52.0% OBSCURE

POLYROCK 89.8 % OBSCURE

HERMAN DUNE 81.3% OBSCURE

THE PROJECTS 92.6 % OBSCURE

KICKER No score  because there are two bands called Kicker

TOMPAULIN 91.2 % OBSCURE

OF MONTREAL  39.7% OBSCURE


Does this mean finally Saloon are less obscure than they of the lovely splitter van, Tompaulin? Can’t believe the mighty Polyrock are more obscure than Saloon (not A&M though, which is right as A&M ripped them off once or twice). Perhaps the most ‘shocking’ is Of Montreal, who are ‘officially’ less obscure than Stereolab.  I bet when Saloon toured with Of Montreal in France and they were playing ‘the Noise of Carpet’ in their set, they never thought one-day that would happen.. .or did they, actually they probably knew all along.

Oh I did one other search, for a band that played the Exeter Cavern a couple of days before Saloon did:


COLDPLAY 0% OBSCURE


That sounds about right.

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