What fresh hell is this? Another unplugged album, another heap of acoustic crap, another lame excuse for product from dullard rockers. These infernal unplugged affairs were supposed to have gone the way of Hootie and The Blowfish and techno music and become just another useless relic from the 1990s - something to be dragged out and spat upon in some inane nostalgia programme featuring omega-list celebrities.
The unplugged thing may have had some sort of musical cachet for the briefest of moments, but even that is lost now. Lost somewhere in the lower level of hell that is the Alanis Morissette unplugged album.
It's often remarked that the 1990s began in 1989, on the night when The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays both appeared on Top of the Pops. Scratch that: the 1990s began in 1989, when MTV hosted its first unplugged show.
It's galling to think that the first song they ever broadcast in this new "shsssh" format was Squeeze's Pulling Mussels from a Shell, performed by Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook.
Since then everyone from Dylan, The Stones and Springsteen down to Alice in Chains has done an MTV Unplugged and has the accompanying album in the shops to prove it. The very word has entered the lexicon, now stretched to mean something that has been stripped down to its basics. You knew something was very, very wrong here when one of the first converts to the cause, Ms Sheryl Crow, said of the format: "Getting to perform unplugged means taking your music and honouring the song as opposed to blowing up amps and stuff."
Yes, the stupid hippy bint really did say "honouring the song". And as for "blowing up amps and stuff", when I pay to see a show, I want to see a show, as in amps blowing up and stuff, not some folkie fool weeping into the mike. And that was the problem with these shows. After being to one, you had to rush home and listen to your entire Rammstein collection (bootlegs and all), just to cleanse your system.
In a perverse way, dance music was entirely to blame for the unplugged plague. With all those samples and sequences cluttering up the charts, people who preferred real music thought the unplugged thing was a return to core values or something thick like that. There was also the 1980s backdrop of Milli Vanilli (done for lip-synching); people now wanted the authentic, live experience.
All was lost when Sting and Eric Clapton (the two most boring and smug musicians in the whole world) jumped on board the unplugged bandwagon. Older musicians used the format to revive flagging careers; newer ones used it to kickstart theirs. For all the guff from artists who talked about "embracing" the new format, the only reason they appeared on the programme was that they were forced to by their record companies, who did their market research and found that unplugged albums were bought indiscriminately by people who played squash and drove BMWs.
Nirvana's producer, Steve Albini, was totally opposed to the band doing an unplugged album (even though it's the only album you'd pull from the unplugged wreckage). For Albini, the whole exercise was a cynical attempt to repackage old, previously recorded material: "From an artistic standpoint, it's a total joke," he said. "You take bands that are fundamentally electro- rock and put acoustic guitars in their hands and make them do a pantomine of a front-porch performance. It's not an authentic reading of that music at all. It's like watching a water ballet crossed with an NFL football game."
What was worse is that the unplugged format changed how bands played live. Acts who didn't know what an acoustic guitar looked like were suddenly doing unplugged segments in the middle of their acts. For a while there, it all became a bit like one big Don McLean concert - or a bad night at Whelan's.
When's that new Darkness album out?
