On Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings up and down the land, thousands of people paid good money to see a movie which had generated massive amounts of publicity and discussion in the previous couple of weeks. In fact, there was so much heat generated in advance that you wondered why the Da Vinci Code people even bothered to take out adverts, writes Jim Carroll
Still, thanks to the general hullabaloo surrounding the release of, by all accounts, a pretty lousy film ("sheer torture" - Donald Clarke, The Ticket), last weekend was the Da Vinci Code weekend in entertainment industry terms. This weekend it may well be X-Men: The Last Stand's weekend as that event movie takes over big screens. Later this summer, you can enjoy the Superman Returns weekend, the Pirates of the Caribbean weekend and the Miami Vice weekend.
The Da Vinci Code was a textbook example of how these things work. It sucked up a vast quantity of the available promotional oxygen, amassed millions of column inches for Tom Hanks and his Brian Kennedy-style haircut and brought millions of punters into their local cinemas with cash in their hot little hands. Even those of us who haven't read the book (or who certainly have no intention of going to see the blasted movie) couldn't escape the thing. If we went to see Brick or watched TV, the trailers and ads still got us in the end.
Naturally, other sectors of the entertainment industry have taken notes and the music industry, for one, has become very keen on the notion of an event album. There are now certain releases which, thanks to very astute marketing campaigns and incredible coincidences amongst commissioning editors, seem to be everywhere at once.
Event albums are the releases you know all about, even if you've absolutely no interest in the band or their music. You will hear the radio advert, see the billboard poster, ignore the TV3 news package lifted directly from the press material and sense the expectation every day for weeks in advance of the release. Like that albino monk skulking about the Louvre, you just can't avoid them.
When Coldplay or U2 release an album, for instance, you can hang out the bunting without even hearing a note of the music. Even if the band in question are releasing below-par, uneven, turgid affairs (guilty as charged in the case of the last albums from both of the above acts), the event album party still goes on.
This month's event album was Stadium Arcadium from The Red Hot Chili Peppers. The album is Number One in 26 countries worldwide, all the way from Ireland to New Zealand. The band flogged 442,000 copies of the album during the first week in the US and they've also done over 20,000 sales in Ireland already, a very healthy number by Irish standards. Sales will continue all summer long as the band play here for the fifth time in six years. It's The Da Vinci Code in a sock.
And, as with the film of the book, the album is a stinker, a flatulent double album of steroid-enhanced funk-rock. There are 28 tracks on Stadium Arcadium and you would really defy anyone to tell most of them apart. But, like any tome with Dan Brown's name on it, Stadium Arcadium is selling because the publicity, advertising and star billing has worked wonders.
By the time the word of mouth kicks in about how truly iffy the music is, the event album wagon will have left town and moved onto the next release.
jimcarroll@irish-times.ie
