Camden Crawl 2008

• I love having bands to stay. Sky Larkin were here all weekend, and it has been a joy. However, I think they may have left me all their beer by accident. Oh dear.
• Watching bands at the Camden Crawl is overrated. ‘Crawling’ at the Camden Crawl is overrated. Over two days I watched Sky Larkin twice and Rolo Tomassi once. I am happy with my lot. Sky Larkin were great both days, but Saturday just edged it for me.
• Rolo Tomassi are part of the Fear & Records empire, and I didn’t really think I’d enjoy them. But they were actually properly really great. The inaugural ‘Fear & Beer’ night on Thursday (Gareth, Peter and I went out and got drunk) followed the next night by F&R camaraderie at the Crawl made me feel cheerful for the future. Bring on The Great Escape, eh?
• Red Stripe sponsorship is ridiculous. We stole a LOT of beer.
• The police were all over Camden. We saw six policemen chase a guy down the street then tackle him to the ground last night, and Nestor [SL drummer] and I saw two people get pulled rather abruptly out of a phone box and get instantly arrested. Drugs probably. One of them was a midget wearing a pink tracksuit, so it was actually just quite funny.
• I’m tired now.

Sportsday GO! Megaphone

I started working with a new artist, Sportsday Megaphone, at the beginning of September. I was ridiculously excited then, and continue to be now. Hugh is massively talented as a musician, remixer, and indeed video-makerer too. Check out his video collective O W L S‘ new video for Wax Stag at the end of this post. He’s signed to Sunday Best, Rob da Bank’s label, and is working on his debut album at the moment. It’s due for release in the spring of next year.

I came across Hugh having seen him play with GoodBooks in Cambridge at Kill Em All’s night at the Junction in July. I was a bit blown away and after when he said he didn’t have a manager, I said “oh don’t tell me THAT”. A couple of months later, after a lot of “But I don’t see why I need a manager!”, Hugh asked me to arrange a show for him so an agent could come down and watch him just before he played at Bestival. After the show I gave him a lift home, and he said “so about this management thing…”. Awesome. The next day we got phone calls from said agent saying that he would indeed like to work on project Sportsday, and thus my involvement with Sportsday Megaphone began in earnest.

To celebrate the whole thing I went down to Bestival that weekend, where Hugh was playing on Saturday night. I continued my habit of arriving at festivals in the middle of the night and pitching up my tent (wrongly) in the dark, and on Saturday night watched Hugh play a great show, complete with dancers! Amazing. His girlfriend George had painted a multicoloured skeleton onto a white bodysuit thing (with legs too), and it looked mental – but totally awesome. Later that night I watched Foals and Patrick Wolf, then broke into a stall with Hugh, Jack from Friendly Fires, Dan from Bolt Action Five and his girlfriend Sarah, and sat there for far too long wearing stupid hats. We surfaced at about six in the morning to find a lot of unsavoury characters wandering about, and promptly lost Jack to the hippy drummers of Bestival. Such is the way of the festival.

One of the nicest things so far about working with Hugh – aside from the total excitement about how brilliant his music is, and him being a joy to work with, etc – is that he and GoodBooks all get along very well. Whenever I am with Hugh and one of GB ring, they say “send our love to Hugh!”, and vice versa. Life is much easier with artists who get along and enjoy hanging out together, and hopefully there’ll be remixes and the like in the future between the two bands.

Working with a talented one man band is interesting, because a lot of the time it feels more like a collaboration than a management-artist relationship. I know from early days with GoodBooks that that’s likely to change – as bands get more used to having someone around to help them out, they use the resource even more. But Hugh does his own artwork, wants to make his own videos, and when he tours he can potentially do it on his own. In a business sense, it’s great – all of his releases going to be very Sportsday (rather than very someone else’s idea of what Sportsday is/could be), which these days I think is crucial. The more artists put into a release, the more the audience has to connect with – and that can only be a good thing.

Not only that, but in a bit of a money-making, cynical sense, if we can limit our spend on all of those things (artwork, videos, touring) then, well, that’s brilliant. Less spend + more income = profit, and as I am learning rapidly, one’s artist and one’s self being able to afford to eat is always beneficial to the cause.

Here’s the O W L S video for Short Road by Wax Stag:

Festival season

Around the middle of this month I got seriously festival-ed out. I didn’t even go to that many, but I seemed to fit everything into two weekends, which wasn’t very clever.

The festival I was most looking forward to was Field Day. Loads of people I knew were going. It had the bestest line up of ever. Even the weather was good. But it was a sore disappointment. It’s all been written about before, but from an artist’s perspective:

• Five beers on the rider? That day band+crew+management totalled 8 people. Five eighths of a beer is not enough on a sunny afternoon, especially when our rider states “two crates”…
• A dB limit of 85dB on the Adventures in the Beetroot Field tent. This is quieter than the sound of an unmiked drum kit. The noise police arrived halfway through our set and forced our engineer to switch off the PA. That’s right, switch off. There were stagehands going on stage to turn the amps down, and none of the band could hear a thing. JP swore on stage (“This is fucking ridiculous”, or something of that ilk) and then had to apologise to his mum afterwards. Mums shouldn’t have to hear swearing! It’s not fair! You could hardly hear a thing all day, so it wasn’t just our set – but having to give up on Battles cos I couldn’t hear was not what I had in mind.
• Everyone from our label who was coming down missed the band’s set, because they were stuck in a guestlist queue from 2pm to about 3.30pm. Stage time of 2.50pm. You’d think that 50 minutes would be long enough to queue, get in, get a beer and wander over to the tent…but no.
• Beer queues of 90 minutes. NINETY MINUTES?! And toilet queues around the same. I was lucky in this instance of having access to the backstage bar and toilets. But I felt for those who didn’t. Who were many, given that…
• They ran out of guestlist passes. No one on our guestlist had access to backstage, because there weren’t enough passes. It’s a minor quibble, and one made from a privileged position. But it was a bit annoying.
• Actually, they ran out of artist passes as well. We got the last of them. I dread to think what happened to any bands arriving later than we did. Oh well, no one would be able to hear if they didn’t turn up anyway.

I really really wanted to love Field Day. I like Tom the promoter and he’s apologised to me multiple times in emails since the event. But it was a let down, and I will think twice about going next year if I don’t have a band playing.

Underage Festival, on the other hand, was actually really good. It was in the same park as Field Day, on the day before, and everything was loud, there weren’t too many queues, and “the kids” were “loving it”. Standing watching the Mystery Jets felt a bit odd when there were covetous looks at my Red Stripe coming from all directions, and I’d never realised how used to tall people at gigs I am (they were all so small!), but in terms of atmosphere and enthusiasm and general goodness Underage was really good. Despite feeling too old and too tall.

The weekend before Underage and Field Day was Tales of the Jackalope, near Norwich. I didn’t see much of that festival actually, just Le Tetsuo, but I don’t really like Vice magazine to be honest so it’s probably best I got away quickly. The line up was a bit too Shoreditch for my liking. Says the lady with the sometime office up the road from the Old Blue Last.

The reason I wasn’t at Jackalope for long was Electric Gardens festival down in Faversham, near Canterbury. It was a long old drive including a scary overturned lorry on the M2, but I got there about 7pm. As you walk into the festival you can see the whole site below you. The sun was just setting and The Pipettes were playing and all of my driving aches and pains felt like they went away. Our agent and I wandered over to where GoodBooks were playing then both bought ridiculous checked hoodies to keep the cold away. I liked the whole thing so much that I changed my plans and decided to stay on till Sunday, which was lovely too – all full of sunshine, Maccabees and Hot Club de Paris. Paul from Hot Club and I spent about an hour putting the music industry to rights – hugely enjoyable. I landed on my ankle weirdly and used that to justify becoming part of Jack Penate’s crew and steal a beer behind Stage 2. Once upon a time I wondered if I would ever be as good a blagger as my friend Alice said she was, but now I realise you just have to vaguely know what you’re on about – seemingly at small festivals where the security isn’t quite Reading/Leeds standard, no one questions a thing if you say you’re part of a band’s crew. Fools!

I skipped Reading this year, though I did end up in Reading town for a meeting on the Sunday morning of the festival. I want to go to End of the Road in a few weeks, though I probably can’t afford it, and my dreams of Bestival have been scuppered by a GoodBooks gig on the Friday night. Then I guess that’s it for another year. Unless I go to Truck……..

Technorati: Reading Festival, Truck, Electric Gardens, Tales of the Jackalope, Field Day, Underage Festival, Bestival, End of the Road, Hot Club de Paris