I’m listening to new Bloc Party and remixes of Kylie Minogue…
If only my brain could come to terms with the idea that if I finished up here at blogjob, I could go home and do more European tour preproduction!
I just LOVE my life sometimes. How is it only Thursday?
NB the quality of the video below is better on Vimeo where it looks incredible. But I don’t know how to embed that here, so deal with that.
Johnny Foreigner are one of the only new bands (see: haven’t released a third album yet) in the world I can sit around and listen to and love and not do anything else and I find them exciting and enthralling and enrapturing.
Friday was paella and a conversation between a few of us about what the new verb which has recently entered our collective consciousness actually means. This verb? ‘To skullfuck’.
Don’t look it up, by the way. We did. It’s pretty gross. This isn’t though. This is me being AMAZING company. Who wouldn’t invite me for dinner? I’m great with parents, small children and animals, too.
My laptop had a sadface hard disk epic fail last week. Most of what I need is on my external hard drive, so all’s not lost – but it’s a bit frustrating all the same.
Right now I’m trying to make a mix CD. It’s struck me that it would be FAR FAR easier for me to make a mix TAPE – using the aux cable into my stereo for stuff that’s on the computer, whether it’s streamed audio or on iTunes, and recording from CD to tape for the stuff that I have on easy-to-hand CD. Rather than worrying about importing tracks from CDs I can’t find the whole time I could just record off muxtapes and Last.fms and all the rest.
Unfortunately the intended recipient doesn’t own a cassette player, else that’s what I’d be doing. Perhaps I’ll do it for myself anyway though. For when the revolution comes and technology eats us all up, and all that’s left of your portable media devices is the indestructible Walkman you’ve had since you were 7 and a half and somehow – despite dropping it in puddles and bashing it around your bag for years – somehow, still works.
This feels like a depressingly long list (I keep going back to it and adding stuff on, as well), and it makes me think of three things: how much there is out there that I know about and haven’t had time to listen to as yet; how much there is out there that I don’t know about (this scares me less than what I know about – the known unknowns versus the unknown unknowns); how crap I am at times at sitting down and putting a record on, especially new ones.
Actually this list makes me feel entirely unqualified to work in music at all. How my friends think I have cutting-edge music taste when I don’t own any Super Furry Animals records is shocking, and how the bands I work with take me seriously when I’ve not really listened to After The Goldrush or, in Sky Larkin’s case, any riot grrl other than Le Tigre…the fools.
My ex girlfriend is obsessed with new music, new bands, new everything, and just wouldn’t listen when I tried to make her listen to Roxy Music or Talking Heads – she said there was too much great new stuff to listen to, and besides, she wanted to see bands live. I am the complete opposite – what on earth is the point of all of this new music when you can go back and listen to so much amazing stuff? And I could do without gigs for a while, really.
I feel exhausted even thinking about all of that. But there’s joy and goodness to be found in all of the above, so it’s not really a chore.
I think my cat is getting fatter. I’m still not sure I love anything on this planet more than him.
I’m over at Tumblr far more often these days. It imports from Twitter and everything! And generally I think gives a far more balanced and regular perspective on my daily life and activities…
So I suppose this is a “yeah, best to update your RSS feeds” post…I tried to work out how to automatically forward this blog to there, but I don’t think it’s possible.
I don’t want to be a manager forever – artists are more hassle than they’re worth. Perhaps I could stick with it for longer if I made more money and the F&R gang had an office and a dogsbody, but it is not the thing for me, not really. I’m not brash enough and I probably think too much. And my blogjob is great, but not overly brain exercising at the moment – and though we’re expanding our service, I’m not sure it will become more absorbing. At the moment, it seems like to be progressive in the music industry you either need to have a killer idea and execute it brilliantly, or be ridiculously successful. Knowing that things need to be different…well, it’s a bit like banging your head against a brick wall. The music industry will not be for me forever.
What do I enjoy?
I like books, the feel of them, and reading them as well. I was about to type that I have a concentration problem, but actually that’s not overly true – I merely have an actually-starting-to-read problem, and I’m not particularly good at working out which book I want to start reading once I’ve finished the last. I like fiction but I’m still figuring out which style – I’m growing out of the Beats who I used to adore. Recently I’ve enjoyed Saturday, Atonement and Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, but – other than covering the rest of the McEwan bibliography – I’m not entirely sure where to go next. I like graphics books because of how they look, but I don’t really know what to do with them – so I get on far better with marketing books designed like graphics books like Life’s A Pitch. I’m just a romantic about print media – I’m a sucker for a well produced magazine, a matt cover on a book, a well laid out blurb. I like poetry, and keep on resolving to learn a poem a week off by heart – partly because I’d quite like to be one of those people who can quote a bit of poetry ad lib. I’m already “that person” for songs amongst my friends, but pop songs don’t feel quite so worthwhile. Perhaps because they’re taken far less seriously than poetry as an art form. But I’m not a poet, and I’m not a fiction writer either.
I like going to restaurants. I’m not entirely sure why, other than the fact that I’m fond of food (I quite like cooking as well). Probably partly because I’m interested in people, the way they interact and the way they present themselves – you get a lot of that in restaurants. And I like restaurant reviews an awful lot, partly because most restaurant reviewers seem to be wonderfully grumpy. I couldn’t work in a restaurant and be happy, but I could write about them.
I keep up to date with politics. I was going to say that I like it, but that’s not really true. It’s simply one of the things that is so ingrained into me that I don’t think the Four Hour Work Week’s “don’t read the newspapers” point would work very well for me (though I kind of see the point). I care about transport, about social welfare, and about the environment and the world’s population’s effect on it.
Those last three things all add up to my penchant for cycling, too, though I enjoy it more for the speed and feeling of freedom than the environmental upper hand. I don’t much like the maintenance side of things – I’m not a bike nut, I just like getting from A-B quickly. I do enjoy Time Out’s cycling column though.
I like music, though I’m not always sure how I feel about working in the music industry. I had a chat very early on with an A&R guy at one of the Universal labels, discussing how different records sound when you’ve been there while they’re being made, and wondering if those involved in making Dark Side Of The Moon were really able to listen to it and hear what everyone else hears. The conversation stuck with me because with music coming out now I find myself thinking about the marketing campaign surrounding the band rather than anything else.
I think things should be straightforward. I like simple design, and I don’t like corporate spin – whether in words (blue sky thinking!) or in actions (sorry guys, but we all know this is bullshit). I like companies who explain their actions, and I like companies who try to affect the rest of the world in some kind of good way – you know, like Innocent, except less smug about it. Partake in the government bike scheme, and recycle, and use eco light bulbs, all that stuff.
I’m not much cop at coming up with product ideas, but I’m pretty sure I know what’s good and what works against what’s bad and doesn’t – and once the idea is there I’m good at improving it. I’m good, I think, at communicating, though I’m a little unsure of myself from time to time – that needs to change, and will do. That’s maybe the problem with my writing – it’s slightly uncertain, and why I’m far better at writing reviews of things which have happened than of abstract concepts like features or writing about music.
Oh, and I’m alright with numbers. Don’t enjoy them, but I’m alright. I’d be good at languages if I kept it up, and I like them. I can understand and edit CSS and HTML, but not write it from scratch.
No idea where this points. Probably like…marketing nicely laid out books full of cycling poetry written in French.
Bet there’s a HUGE market for that.
Part of me wants to have a band who blog all the time, update Twitter every three hours, moblog their tour activities, edit their studio video footage to put up on their own YouTube channel, put their camera photos up on Flickr, email their fans back for at least three hours a day, and goodness knows what else.
The other part of me would like a band who is mysterious, doesn’t blog, whose names and ages no one really knows, and focus entirely on making a good record.
I’m not sure where the balance is for success, or if this whole web 2.0 and fan interaction stuff is as important as we make it out to be anyway. The people who make records go platinum – Radio 2 listeners – don’t want to “buy into” a project, they just want to hear some nice songs. Fan interaction and building it up from the ground up is quite an indie approach, and as a manager I quite want to go beyond indie and have my bands headlining Brixton Academy, please.
I spend too much time thinking about all of this.
There’s this band, right, I love them, I am not going to mention their name here, and they don’t have a manager.
I first saw them at the Barfly a couple of months ago when my colleague/Sky Larkin co-manager Gareth invited me along to see them – they were unmanaged and he’d been invited down. We both thought they were great, and also that we didn’t have enough time to do it. Seemingly everyone else thinks that too, and so they remain manager-less.
A trip to Leeds the other week to catch up with Sky Larkin included going to see said band, and we got into a bit of a chat. They’re finding it a little overwhelming, I think – I’d find it tough if I had a record deal and my album was about to come out and really a lot of people (in an indie way) like it an awful lot. I mean, I’ve got a pretty good head on my shoulders and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for sorting out a band’s trip to Japan…
Bands in all positions are left without one member of a team – GoodBooks don’t have a publishing deal, and people always look shocked at that – but when that member of the team is the manager, the person who’s meant to pull everyone together, it’s hardly an enviable position for the band to be in. There’s a lot of not very nice people in “this industry” (always sounds like such a disgusting phrase, doesn’t it?) from lawyers to PRs to A&Rs and managers are meant to weed them out…while I’m all for personal responsibility for bands (yes, do your own bookkeeping. No, I don’t care for checking your bank balance for you), there’s some things I think they should be allowed to stay away from, so they can just focus on being a band. But when you get to this point in a band’s career – ie no potential massive advance to take a commission on – even a lot of the good people aren’t interested.
I still don’t have time to manage them, nor quite the burning desire that takes over my WHOLE ENTIRE SOUL when I really want to do something. But hopefully I’ll be able to help them out here and there along the way, and in my indie idealistic way I feel like that’s part of what’s missing from music – some kind of sense of camaraderie, we’re all in it together, helping folks out even though there’s no money in it for you. Where’s the humanity without that?
…and to be really cynical, people buy into humanity, don’t they? It’s a great marketing tool.
Yeahyeah good point, ITV premium phone lines, terrible scandal, etc. And I’m sure there’s so many whats-her-names in the world that this one shouldn’t be quite so surprising, and clearly I am coming from not a typical position, but really, lady, is it SO hard to say to your son, sometimes mummies and daddies love each other very much, and sometimes two daddies love each other too. Or SOMETHING like that. Surely, surely, surely, it can’t be that hard to get one’s head around.
I am, on the whole, rather blasé about feminism and gay rights and all of this stuff that really I probably should care about, and I think that might be because I have grown up and had it all handed to me on a plate – a single sex grammar school obsessed with the advancement of women in the world, The Guardian as pretty much prescribed reading for me and all of my friends, the right (or wrong, as you like to see it) role models at the right (or wrong) times. But this is the kind of thing that makes me slightly riled, just basic problems with people’s THINKING.
And I suppose that’s why most people care about the whole rights stuff, eh? Maybe I should listen more in school.
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