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.
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.
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 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:
The iTunes Festival is on throughout July at the ICA in London. Lovely lovely venue. There are a lot of established acts playing (Paul McCartney to name but one) every night of the month and it’s being filmed for Channel 4, recorded for iTunes and broadcast on Xfm/Capital (well, some of them anyway). GoodBooks were supporting Editors last night there.
It’s a funny set up because all of the tickets are free and given out to fans of the headline band – so after a hectic day (post office closures/broken amplifiers/free clothes/buying black sheets all part of it) the band played to a room a quarter full in a venue they’d nearly sold out themselves two months ago. Jamie from the ICA told me beforehand that they’d had that problem with Loney, Dear last week too, and that iTunes were trying to sort it out. It didn’t help our situation that the band were told to go on at 7.30pm, 15 minutes before we’d been told and therefore told everyone – including our record company! I had to run out as they started to tell Ollie that they were on, and then leave the venue (no reception there. The only bad thing about the place!) to call our marketing guy Chris. But it all came good in the end – the band played brilliantly and all looked great, the lights were ace and the three trumpeters we got to play in Passchendaele were fantastic too (thanks chaps).
Afterwards I watched some of Editors – great live band – and then discovered ‘the green room’, which had a bizarre ceiling like a water bed, a massive freezer full of little tubs of ice cream, and a nice fridge which came in use because we’d finished the rider. I introduced myself and the band to Ged, Sony BMG UK’s Chairman, who as yet hasn’t seen GoodBooks live (and missed both bands last night) and is apparently embarrassed about it. Given that they’re the best new band on his label (yeah, I went there. Gash, gash, and kind of all right, to name but three) he probably should be. Anyway, despite my waryness towards major label chairmen we had a good chat, partly about blogs and how Ged thinks there’s no reason not to be honest or transparent in writing them. Which bodes well for my Ali Love criticism, then. That aside, I think honesty should be true for all levels of the industry – too much of music is sort of shrouded in this mystery and people not wanting to share tactics or secrets or whatever. GoodBooks – probably me as well – went through a phase of treating music like a competition in terms of “beating” other bands and it took a lot for us all to get out of that way of thinking. There aren’t a finite number of successful bands and talking about how to make good ones successful shouldn’t feel like you are always watching your back.
Still, there’s politics involved, and for every manager who’d carry an amp home from Finsbury Park on the bus at 11pm for their keyboard player (that would be me, then) there’s others in the team who have other acts to focus on too – I guess it’s all about reaching the top of their pile. And that sort of is a competition. Bloody hell. I’m not sure where I’m going with this…
Tonight GoodBooks are at the Buffalo Bar so I’m headed down there in a bit. Fingers crossed it’ll all go to plan. I am going to drive there so that I don’t drink, because when open fridges and aftershows are involved the next day always seems a little fuzzy.
I want to test out this videos thing, so here is the video for Passchendaele by GoodBooks. The single is out next week. Preorder?
This evening my best buddy and I formed a band. We currently don’t have a drummer or a singer, and Dina can’t play the bass (yet!), but that’s all right, it just means we’re DIY as fuck. We spent the evening listening to Elastica, The Cribs, Breeders and Le Tigre with me going “Yes! Let’s sound a bit like that!” and then worrying that I was turning into a band control freak (a tendency of mine. Probably why I’m a manager). Dina drew the line when I started trying to push Saves The Day into the equation, which is probably reasonable to be honest. It’s just I love lyrics like “Is it his brown eyes? I know blue eyes get boring but I’ll wear dark glasses all the time”.
Though our band is probably a joke (we’ve decided to be called Better Than The Clash, because I kept on shouting that about Vaseline by Elastica), it did make me come home and start learning loads of Cribs songs on guitar. I haven’t played in ages so that makes me pleased. I’m in the process of trying to get my lip back with the trumpet too, because I enjoy it and, in a vague planning for the future way, the more I play and the more people I know know that I play, the more likely I am to be paid money for it at some point in time. Managing keeps me busy but mainly, I think, because my body does not keep up with what my mind wants it to do – the plan is always getting up seven hours after going to sleep, and it never works like that, I always sleep too much – so if I can start making myself even busier then I am going to force my body to work the way I want it to. Part of me wonders if, because I burnt myself out so utterly and totally in the last year of my A levels (till June 2006 – when I managed GB at the same time), I have been spending the past year attempting to recover from it, and to be honest I wouldn’t be surprised by that. I would love a proper holiday but just can’t afford to take one, timewise. So instead I am going to force my body through the pain of living and make it want to do things like play the trumpet and start club nights.
This weekend was good – I went to Rough Trade and reminded myself inadvertedly of how I do enjoy music really. Bought some Teardrop Explodes, Beirut, Roxy Music (obvs), The Blue Aeroplanes and Magazine. I sort of see what the fuss is about with all this Prince/Mail on Sunday lark, even if it is meant to be good for Prince (ie he makes money) – being given free CDs all the time, whilst wonderful, does mean I end up not listening to a lot of them. I think I undervalue the ones I get for free – there are albums I’ve had for months and not listened to (Death From Above 1979 for one), whereas I’ve done some pretty comprehensive listening of The Teardrop Explodes and The Blue Aeroplanes already. I paid for them and so they seem worth it. Funny how the brain works.
Today: the things I hate mainly involve contracts and diaries, and the things I love are mostly The Cribs.
I got back from my run (oh, running. Starting to run again after getting the cast off my broken wrist feels like the beginning of a new romance. But that’s another day) this evening to find emails from GoodBooks with all of their ‘thank yous’ for their album sleeve. Reading it over – and calling them back to check about adding in people here and there – triggers off thinking about all of these people and what they’ve done in the past two years (and more) for the band. The document runs onto two A4 pages with the collective band thanks and individual thanks – just goes to show, I suppose, how many people there are behind the scenes! It feels crazy to think that we’re at this point now of doing the credits in the album – feels like something of an end point to the making of this record. Of course it won’t be done until the artwork’s all put to bed and we’re holding the stock and discovering the typos really. They’ve spent so long, though, working on the actual record that it’s cool to get to a point where we’re just packaging it up and making it look as special as it sounds.
A few years ago I really wanted to make an album, but that was pretty much mostly because I wanted to write a thank yous list. I’m pretty sure I spent more time thinking about that than the actually making songs – so I’ve been quite jealous this evening reading all of theirs! One of the perils of starting off as their friend and not manager is feeling at times like I should share in all the perks that they get (writing thank yous, free clothes, free Playstations, all that jazz) – it’s a good reminder when I don’t that there is a distinction between where I end and they begin. Boundaries that are necessary and welcome…I don’t think I’d like being in a band.
Tomorrow I’m off up to Birmingham to see GoodBooks and will catch up with a couple of old friends when I’m there. Should be good I hope. I have a feeling this week might be a bit gruelling, but I’m quite looking forward to that – recent conversations with those close to me have made me feel a bit more gung ho, all militant and full of the “Yeah!” spirit, so if I can keep on acting like that (new motto: Be more hardcore) then good things should happen. And good things happen when good things happen.
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