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.
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.
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.
Goes the opening line of ‘Young Lust’ by Sportsday Megaphone, one of my artists. It’s the b-side to his new single ‘LA’, but I think it’s just as good – in a bit of a different way. Hugh Sportsday has just put it up on his myspace, so it’s one to go listen to now.
The backing vocals are done by Hugh’s girlfriend George, which I think is rather a nice touch.
Sportsday will be touring in May with Envelopes and also appearing at The Great Escape. LA is out on 16 June with the album ‘So Many Colours/So Little Time’ following later in the summer. And more dates to be announced very soon.
I love this song. It’s just the right prescription of twee, American indie, melodic and cheery but a bit bleak lyrically, and just bloody brilliant.
Thinking about the Dum Dums just then started me on their second album demos. There’s 18 tracks all in – if they’d just picked twelve, it would’ve been a great record. The song that grabbed me when I first heard any of them was Closer To You (mp3). I wasn’t allowed to keep the CD of demos my friend Kelly played me the first time – so I wrote out the lyrics in an attempt to remember the song. That bit of paper is still on my wall today – note to self, must redecorate!
Funnily enough though, the video for Closer To You reminds me rather a lot of a video made by another band I happen to be rather close with. Have a look…
Closer To You – Dum Dums
Turn It Back – GoodBooks
I am 12 years old and I am in the school canteen. A girl in year 9 – year 9! They’re so cool! – has just sung a song to her friend which I’ve heard before on the radio, and I decide to go and buy it this weekend because I really like it. It’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Thoughts” by the Dum Dums, and it’s the beginning of an obsession.
I am 20 years old and I am in the office of Wichita Recordings. I’m not here very often – getting up and on the tube often seems too much – and too expensive – when I can just work from home – but they’re kind enough to give me a desk all the same. I need a tour manager for a few weeks hence. I ring Steve Clarke, ex Dum Dums bassist and now tour manager. The years in between then and now have been a gradual swap from fan to friend, and so it doesn’t seem like a ridiculous leap to have hired Steve now. We get along well, and it’s not weird at all – it feels more like we have an odd shared history. But if you’d told me that eight years ago, I never would’ve believed you.
Two years on from the Dum Dums and it’s not that they’ve lost my heart, far from it. When I think back to the days (/months/years) after them splitting up, I almost think it was the biggest heartbreak of my life to date. It took me years to get over them. But the Pixies got me – hearing Doolittle for the first time was a revelation. They became my new obsession and I loved every little bit of them, every BBC session, every cover, every Spanish word I didn’t understand. When they reformed for some shows, my mum let me skip school the morning the tickets went on sale so I could get hold of some. My mum is awesome, but she does not condone playing hooky – I like to think her letting me off was her way of saying she understood.
So then this evening I went to see The Breeders, Kim Deal (of Pixies fame)’s band with her sister Kelley. My friend Ben came with me; we met four years ago through the Pixies, so it seems fairly natural. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been properly fan-ish at a gig – turning up over an hour before stage time (normally I’m at least five minutes late), going to the front (normally, even seeing a bit of someone’s head is the standard), jumping up and down during songs (‘Cannonball‘ particularly – everyone was). So it feels strange afterwards to bump into some friends of mine – Ben and Janine from Wichita, Bart from Domino, and Paul from Truck – and be given aftershow passes. An aftershow pass? For the Breeders? What the FUCK. If you’d told me that five years ago, I never would’ve believed you. The band weren’t there…but that’s not the point.
It’s a funny old thing. My life is far from ideal, far from enjoyable half the time – though I’m fairly sure that’s more my head making trouble for myself than any external factors – but there are always small victories. Never would I previously have thought I’d get an aftershow pass for the Breeders, and with the band present at their own aftershow or not, it feels a bit like a quick pat on the head for my younger self. “Look at then, and look at you now!”.
I discovered this evening that a girl I vaguely know now does regional press for Beggars, including the Breeders. She’s been round the country with them on their UK dates these past couple of weeks. Tonight she told me that at one point Kim bought her some Tampax, and she thinks it might be a highlight of her life. Sad as it sounds, if it was me it would be mine too – those tiny moments with the bands you adore that make it seem like your life isn’t wasted, everything isn’t futile, we’re not all going to die in a global warming credit crunching disaster. If getting an aftershow pass for the Breeders is one of those, then I’m happy for this evening.
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