Format

I'd forgotten this about Rock'n'Roll. Just how pervasively it eats away at your soul. I've just spent an hour or so working though a small press database I did for myself last week. About an hour later, about ten lines in, I'd had enough. Four emails, three dead sites and four wanting a Cd.
So? Two things. One. I emailed a contributor to one web site (as was suggested in their notes).
I'm an old Marxist, everything is an economic exchange. Chris, (it was the guy's name), please review my album... No, there is nothing in it for you, no BJ, or big bag of sweets. It will take up your time and will not pay your mortgage. What's that line from half a band hawking round a 30 year old classic album “an economic exchange in the bedroom”.
I read a very very rubbish book about rock venues recently. It was so bad I nearly killed another tree putting pieces of paper in betweeen pages of book to highlight the factual errors, and sections of prose that made the facts meaningless. Right until the end, where the book ends up with a couple of stunningly written and informative chapters. Totally out of tune with the rest of the book. So does it work like this? Evil publisher gives writer book deal around a couple of articles, but, with so little money said writer needs to cut and past the rest of the book from the internet over a weekend. Integrity or starvation?
Point Two. I can live with web sites wanting hard copy of our Album. What I might not deal with is when they ask for something that is not a Cdr.
For 30 odd years I've had two mantras, one of them being. “It was easy,it was cheap go and do it” an early “Desperate Bicycles” single. It has become so easy and so cheap over the recent years that “us creative's” can just shovel stuff into the ether at a pointless rate. Who are the gatekeepers? We have not moved forward if every website and magazine requires a glass mastered Cd before it will consider a review. But, we are moving backwards if the arbiters of taste, the journalists, are hobbyists too. At some point we must start paying for something. If not the content, the analysis of that content. If not, we will not hear the quality though the noise.

Evaluation

Again to Bandcamp, following the grind to make the Bollnas Wolverines better known.

One of the guru's of music in the Internet age has a little theory
about how music is consumed.

Basically is goes; one – hears, likes, then buys the music.
Which is interesting, because a lot of music I bought in my youth; one - read about it,
trusted the journalist, then bought it. A subtle but important difference.
Let's use Wire's Pink Flag an example of this.
In Wilson Neate's wonderful book on that album he states, the order of the tracks had been decided before recording commenced (page 75).
With Abandoned I had a sort of vague feeling we should sort of mimic the flow of Pink Flag.
So I followed that in a half baked way, starting side 1 with a long track and side 2 with an instrumental. Even splitting something that only exists on the Internet into two sides.
Pink Flag's long first track draws you into the rest of the album. Also by then you'd paid hard cash and was at home with the LP on the turntable.

(Aware of the shocking hubris of mentioning Abandoned in the same breath as Pink Flag), I had a similar idea.
Using Bandcamp's statistics it has become apparent that no one has listened all the way though Bivouac. The original track 1.
It's a mood piece (or boring, depending on my mood).
Not a good way to get people though the door. Especially now where there are so many other free doors just round the corner. Back then you had paid, walked into the room and had no choice but to listen.
Hence a restructuring of the Abandoned's order. Moving away from what I felt in my heart to... Something we all know. There are lies, damn lies and statistics. I might have just become a focus group.

Sold a bit of my soul, in a place were no one seems to want it for free.

Dunces

Gigs part Two….
What do you do for a living?
Really?
Tell you what; I’ll turn up where you work on Monday, pissed,
and I’ll still tell you how to do a job I’ve never done.
I know you cannot hear the vocals, but that’s because the band wouldn’t turn down and/or the promoter, to make more money, wouldn’t pay out for a PA that would do the job.
So you’ve done this at college, have you?
Well that’s interesting, why have you spent the last few minutes looking at the lighting desk telling me to turn the vocals up?
Or. Over there is the EQ box, or so you tell me. In my world it is the Sound Desk or FOH Board, or something like that.
Which college did you go to?
Just don’t, don’t talk to the technicians about your thoughts about the quality of the sound or lights. They will know what is wrong, and they will be trying to fix it.
You are drunk but we have a bit of pride left.
You have been there…
I feel I have lifted a weight…

Civility

As I mentioned in the first post, I work in in a local theatre.
To me the venue is an extension of my front room. You invite a few people round to have a few beers and watch stuff, and everyone should have a good time. As with your house you occasionally ask yourself who you have invited in?
Lets start with the acts. When did schools stop teaching people to introduce themselves? Over the years I've had; Stewart Lee, Kurt Wagner, Jason Peirce, Richard Herring, Lloyd Cole, Mark Thomas, and many many others walk into my pretend front room, shake me by the hand and tell me who they are. As if I didn't already know. Modesty and talent hand in hand.
The funniest was “carry that in for me, put that there, could you move that to there”. After a few minutes of this “Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm Glen by the way, it's so rude of me not to introduce myself and ask you to do all of this”.
But since it was Glen Tilbrook, one of Britain's best post war songwriters I was quite ready to forgive him.
And when you get the likes of Martin Carthy and Peggy Seeger introducing themselves, this really is politeness on another level.
Anyway, last week, we had a three band bill; the inexplicably famous, the unbelievably signed and the bewilderedly local. About half an hour after the time the bands should have arrived a couple of people walk in and sit on the stage. Myself and the sound engineer were evidently invisible.
“Can I help?” Is my stock question at this point. The sub text being – how dare you walk into this space and blank me, how would you feel if I was walking round your cheap and no doubt badly decorated house, ignoring you and passing comments on you revolting wallpaper, I've scraped better things off my shoes than you.
You aint got off to a good start.
Some of then get it some of then don't. They did, and I enjoyed their company more than I did their band. So about an hour after the next get in time more gear start to appear, this time with a shouting Scotsman. After about 10 minuets of shouting and swearing at me and the sound guy he mentions in passing that he is the sound engineer for the band. If he had told us this to start with we might have been friends.
He might have good “ears” as they say, but with that attitude he wont have a full set of teeth for very long.
So in conclusion, if you are in a band, walk in find out who's in charge, introduce yourself, be polite, ask questions, look like you are interested in the sorry plight that has brought them to this. Remember, it's not the technicians fault he doesn't know who you are, it's yours for not being famous enough. But I assure you, they will remember the next time you meet on your way down the slippery pole of fame.