The Blog/News

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'Too much music' – further thoughts on filters.

As I’ve said here recently, part of the problem with the notion of limitless downloads is the basic flaw in thinking it to be a good thing.

There’s never been an easier time to record and release music as a band or solo artist – anyone and her mum can get Garage Band or Audacity and record their songs. Then via the wonders of the web, you can even do one CDR, and then get it onto iTunes etc. via the internet miracle that is CD Baby.

This is, obviously, largely a really really good thing. The problem is that of filtering, and the part of that task that both cost and record labels used to play.

See, back in the day, you recorded a demo – it was probably live in a rehearsal room. You sent it, or took it to someone at a label, and asked them to come to your gig. If they bothered to turn up, they then acted as the first filter, but were obviously also influenced by audience reaction – same as it ever was, getting your mates out to a gig can really help…

Anyway, what this meant was that little labels sprang up all over the place, specialising in different kinds of music, and acting as enthusiastic ambasadors and as filters for what was good in that scene.

That’s now gone – the labels are still there, it’s just that a lot of people (like me) don’t even bother to contact them, and lots more contact them, and after endless rejections, they convince themselves they are misunderstood geniuses and release it themselves. And some times they are right.

However, a lot of the time, it’s that the music is substandard. And, back to the point about ‘value’ having a cost, when the recording hasn’t cost you anything to make, you’re automatically going to be less disposed towards making sure that it’s the VERY best you can do before releasing it. If putting a record out was going to cost you 6 months wages, you’d make pretty damned sure that it was the best possible representation of what you can do. You’d probably make sure that some of that spending went on getting an engineer who knows what he’s doing, maybe even a proper producer to oversee the project. You get outside help to make sure that you were fooling yourselves into thinking that you’re legends when in fact you’re substandard MySpace-filling nonsense.

So where does that leave artists. It leaves us needing to be mindful – mindful of the pitfalls, of the potential to overestimate how good we are, mindful of the things that we’ve overlooked because we live in an immediate culture that is all about cheapness masquerading as ‘value’. We need to make sure that the record we’re putting out there is one that we believe can become the soundtrack to people’s lives.

Why? Because if we don’t, we’ve lost. We’ve lost the battle with those who are trying to reduce the place of music in our lives to something that is measured not by its quality, integrity and creativity, but by it’s all encompassing availabilty and usefullness as an advert for some other commercial process – ours or someone else’s. We abandon ourselves to a world where we don’t get the music we want or need.

That’s why I make the music I make – I make it because it’s the music I want to hear, it’s part of a way of making music that I value hugely as a listener. It’s not fundamentally about it being marketable or popular or radio friendly. It’s about me believing that I am my own target market. What kind of music do I love most? How do I go about making that music?

That’s it, that’s what I do, and that’s what the feedback I get suggests is what my audience connects with. They’re a bunch of people who have similar taste to me, and thus click with the music that I’ve made for myself.

Of course once it’s recorded I then market it, promote it, advertise it, hope it gets radio airplay, hope it makes its way onto TV and film and into the iPods and CD players of the world’s music lovers.

And what does it mean for us as fans? It means that we need filters, we need both practical filters and abstract ones. Having to go out and buy a CD is a practical filter that stops us from wasting time on music with no pedigree. It means that we tend to buy things we’ve discovered somehow via a trusted source, be that friend, radio, review, TV, whatever…

But it also limits us to that. The digital realm, at it’s best, allows us to dip in and out of the filtered world – we can listen to a radio show, hear some great new music, then immediately get onto our music buying site of choice and buy the download, if we want to hear more at higher resolution. If we want to gift that music in a nice package, or we just like having physical product, we can order the CD.

Having access to all the music in the world doesn’t help anyone, because there’s too much of it. In the same way that very few people trawl wikipedia for news – it’s almost entirely search driven, so people find info about a subject they are already interested in – but still read random news from trusted sources (I read stories about all kinds of things in The New Statesman, just because they are in there – I don’t go searching for stories on the potential for civil war in far flung places, or the plight of migrant workers in the Caribbean… I read them because the New Statesman is my filter – if they deem it important, so do I) – we need ways of filtering for QUALITY, not just STYLE. you can search on myspace or wherever for funk bands with loads of plays, and that has some kind of popularity-related filter, but that kind of interest is driven by the degree of geekiness of the band and their ability to mobilize a an e-team, not just the quality of the music…

No, we need to be mindful of how valuable our listening time is, what a great addition truly great music can make to our lives. And artists need to think about that as an aspiration – not just putting it out cos it’s cheap and easy, but genuinely writing world-beatingly great music.

It brings me back to one of the many great points in Hugh McLeod’s How To Be Creative post – “The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world.” – I want to write music that changes the world. It probably won’t change all of it, but I aim to make music that is significant, of value, and that represents everything I have to say in music, and hopefully becomes part of the soundtrack to the lives of the people who hear it. Whether I’m successful in that or not is almost moot… That’s not really anything I have control over beyond aiming for it.

The important thing is the intention. Be mindful of your intentions.

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Stephen Fry on Smoking

Stephen Fry’s blog is a wonder to behold. His command of the English language is, as we’ve know for decades, incredible, but he’s also clearly completely at home in the digital realm (I had no idea he was such a gadget obsessive).

Anyway, he posted a while back on addiction, and posts a particularly wonderful description of the utter stupidity of smoking –

Imagine that one day someone hit himself lightly on the head with a parsnip. Instead of stopping (for this is a foolish thing to do) he carried on doing it. When he eventually did stop he went about his business but discovered, much to his surprise, that he had a sudden unconquerable urge to hit himself lightly on the head with a parsnip all over again. So he did. And the more he did it, the more he needed to do it. The act of doing it gave him a tiny surge of joy, a little rush of pleasure that had to be elicited, never mind what a twazzock he looked, parsnipping himself on the head all day.

Smoking is no less stupid than that. In fact it is a whole bicycle-shed more stupid, because it’s smelly, unsociable, carcinogenic etc etc etc. But the principle is the same: smoking has absolutely no point other than to stop the misery of not smoking. Smokers claim that it aids concentration, soothes the nerves and so on, but we know really that it only does those things because it’s tobacco addiction that messes with concentration and jangles the nerves in the first place. Tapping your head lightly with a parsnip would aid concentration too if not doing it made you all jumpy and desperate.

…and so it goes on, in great detail. Marvellously written and argued.

I HATE smoking. With the typical vengeance of an ex-smoker. I hate that it imposes on my by making me smell horrible and damaging my health. If I started pissing on people’s feet in bars just because I was drinking so much liquid that I couldn’t possibly be expected to make it to the loo every time I needed to go, I’d probably be arrested, despite it being arguably less intrusive than smoking in a confined space with someone. It’s certainly far less likely to damage their health, and would only require their shoes to be cleaned, not every item of clothing they’re wearing… (and don’t even get me started on trying to dry clothes in doors in a flat where people smoke…)

So stop, give up, admit defeat. It’s a rubbish, antisocial habit that makes you look like a tragic addict not a cool pop star. It makes you smell, wheeze and is such a gruesome waste of money.

AND – this is the one that really riles me – don’t even THINK to pretend to me that you have any ecomonkey credentials at all if you smoke. Unless you’re growing your own tobacco. Save for the arms trade, there is no legal industry in the world more damaging than the tobacco industry. So if you’re drinking fair trade coffee and smoking Marlbro lights, you’re a complete joke. You might as well buy a copy of the Big Issue then punch the bloke in the face and steal all his money. The notion that smoking is any way ‘counter cultural’ is so utterly laugable. It ties you to the whims of big corporations more than any action short of throwing tear gas cannisters at protestors.

And, let it be known, if you’re smoking near me, I might not comment, but right then, I’m thinking about what a complete nob you look with a ciggie hanging out of your mouth, and I’ll like you a lot more the minute you stop. :o)

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managing copyright in a global environment…

One of the big problems for artists distributing music (for free or profit) online is that copyright laws are different the world over. That’s why there are Russian websites selling very cheap downloads of ‘illegally’ ripped CDs. There’s very little law enforcement in most of the former soviet union, and if a site is hosted in a particular country, it’s subject to those hosting laws…

…at least, it seemed to be. Tom from the forum sent me a link to this BBC article about a public domain sheet music site in Canada who had fastidiously made sure that all the music they posted complied with Canadian copyright law, but were then threatened with being sued for copyright infringement when Europeans downloaded the scores! (the salient legal point being that copyright in Europe remains with the estate of a deceased composer for 20 years longer than in Canada).

The interesting thing here from a moral/ethical standpoint is that the point was a) contested by the Europeans, and b) there wasn’t an option to add a disclaimer to the site. Interesting that one of the synonyms for this in the web world would be porn, where the laws related to what you can and can’t look at are hugely different across the globe (I’m not sure if they still do, but the UK used to have MUCH stricter laws about what could be published than in the US…) – I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot of stuff available on sites that are legal in the host country but illegal in other places. In the US, it’s probably true across state lines! But has anyone been prosecuted? I’ve not read about it if they have (but to be fair, I tend to read a lot of news stories about legal issues in the music industry, and not too many about the porn industry…)

So it’s kinda sad that porn goes on unchecked and able to get round localised legality just by hosting off-shore, and a wiki established by a student strictly within the laws of the host country, attempting to provide a great resource for musicians firstly in Canada, but then across the world, is curtailed…

The pernicious onward march of Capitalism, I guess – he who can afford the best lawyers wins…

…though it’s definitely worth comparing the worlds of sheet music and recorded music here – this was, apparently, the largest public domain music score library on the internet, and was being widely used. Is there much of a community for trading public domain recordings? I know there was a bit of a kerfuffle recently when a bunch of still-living crusty old jazz dudes were getting upset that they were about to lose the rights to their own recordings which were now 50 years old (that does seem a bit weird, though not really top of the list when looking at the positive and negative impacts of copyright…) No, copyright infringement in recorded music is now seen as a matter of not getting caught – the RIAA prosecute a bunch of school kids for downloading and think it will frighten everyone else into compliance.

But they screwed it up for everyone by trying to make it an issue of illegal action followed by legally enforced action. They excluded themselves entirely from any dialogue about the impact on creativity, or as I keep saying, and the impact of the music life of the listener when you have no filter. So in a digital world, where community ethics seem to have far more influence on behaviour than any notions of legality, they pushed the discussion into communities that proceeded to laugh at them, use Lars Ulrich as as totem of out-of-touch-millionaire-rock-star-greed and were then able to ‘morally’ justify all the filesharing as a blow against ‘the man’.

Actually, I guess what’s worth throwing in here (damn, this is a disjointed blog post!) is the case of the Real Book – a book of jazz scores written by a load of (I think) Berklee college students, with some pretty heinous chords in them, which was sold by the hundreds of thousands the world over. I’ve no idea who was duplicating it, but it was sold under the counter in shops for YEARS before anyone did a proper legal version – then Chuck Sher came along and published a great book called The New Real Book, which has the proper chords for things in it, neatly printed arrangements, a load of unneccesary pictures of jazz stars (huh?), but is generally a great resource. There are about 5 volumes, as well as Latin versions (that’s Latin music, not jazz scores in Latin) and a ‘Standards Real Book’ which I haven’t got, but is probably the most useful of them.

However, there are digital versions of this kicking around as well – some enterprising young file-sharer has scanned in the New Real Books and uploaded them somewhere. I guess they see themselves somehow in the tradition of the old Real Book, keep the music alive, or whatever… I dunno, it’d be great if Chuck would put out a legal PDF version of all the books for a sensible fee. It’s great to be able to support the people who write these tunes.. There is also now a legal version of the old Real Book – cleaned up, some corrected changes, much cheaper than the Sher books…

Anyway, where did this start? Ah, yes, sheet music, porn, cross-border copyright problems… My last point to note is that there’s already cross border protection for buying digital music – you can only access iTunes in the country you’re a) from and b) in – I can’t buy from UK iTunes while I’m in the US!! That seems completely mad. One central store, in the host country of the company, so occasionally someone else gets a break due to fluctuations in exchange rates. Surely that makes the whole thing easier and more fun? :o) Even my favourite legal download site, emusic has different costs for stuff in different countries. There aren’t many online industries that bother with that – if you’re looking to buy domain names, or web hosting, you just pay the fee for the country where the service is being provided…

Anyway, I hope the music library is able to just stick a disclaimer at the top of certain works saying ‘this music is still illegal to download for free in Europe, please go and buy it’ and get their archive back online…

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Bass playing, like riding a bike…

Yesterday was the first rehearsal for the London Jazz Festival gig that I’m doing on Nov 24th with Corey Mwamba. I played with Corey years ago at a gig in Derby and we’ve been trying to find a way to play together again since then, so when he asked me to do this gig, I said yes straight away. However, the first time we played together it was all improv (my forte). This time, it’s REALLY heavily written stuff, Corey’s own marvellous, dense, polytonal, odd-meter compositions. Definitely the toughest music I’ve played for a very long time.

I can’t remember the last time I had a heavy reading gig – probably depping on a pantomime about 7 years ago… but at least that stuff had each of the musicians playing in the same key, and the same time signature as the drummer… this stuff is way deeper.

Anyway, I’d glanced at the sheet music a few weeks ago, but had woefully underestimated how tough it was going to be, so when I had a play through on Tuesday, I was pretty certain that at Wednesday’s rehearsal I was going to be rather shit.

Fortunately, I’d also underestimated my own wikkid skillz, and found the stuff much easier than I’d thought. (‘Easy’ definitely being a relative term here…) I got through most of it just fine, and managed to read some of the bits that apparently none of the other bassists who’ve played this music have got right.

A few things helped immensely that are pertinent here for anyone dealing with learning tunes on gigs.

firstly, the rest of the musicians were not only hugely talented but really lovely people. Robert Mitchell on piano, Deborah Jordan on vocals, Shaney Forbes on drums and Corey himself on vibes are all amazing players, great improvisors and delightful people. The aim of everyone was to encourage eachother to get the best out of the music. This has been my experience in EVERY situation I’ve been in like this. At one college I used to teach at, the owner of said college once had a go at me for not giving the students enough of a ‘roasting’ (a very unfortunate term given some of the stories about the antics of certain sporting icons at the time…) – meaning make it tough for them, give them a hard time etc. His reasoning was that that’s what it’s like in ‘the real world’ so was what they needed to be prepared for. Bollocks. It’s never happened to me. Learning to deal with antisocial misanthropic losers isn’t what one should be learning at music college. Developing a love for music and a passion for creativity as well as an understanding of the mechanics of music, a deeper knowledge of the history, of style, of nuance… getting a hard time from the staff is a really stupid idea (especially given that the person who said this time me hadn’t done a proper gig in years, if ever, so was speaking out of no experience whatsoever…)

Secondly, the rehearsal was staggered – it started with just Corey, me and Shaney, working on the rhythm section stuff. It gave Shaney and I a chance to get used to eachother’s playing, and as Deborah and Robert had played the music before, they weren’t sat around getting bored while we learned parts.

Thirdly, Corey was all about making great music – he was open to suggestions, very vocal when he was happy with what was happening, and we were all smiling and enjoying ourselves with it. Deadly serious about having fun.

All in, it was a great day, I realised that I’m a better musician that I thought I was, and learnt some new skills too, played some deep challenging and beautiful music with amazing musicians. What more could we want?

We’ve got another rehearsal next week, and then the gig on the freestage at the Barbican on Nov 24th, at 2.30pm… be there! :o)

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The difference between BitTorrent and 'home taping'.

Back in the 80s there was an ad campaign run by the RIAA or someone that said ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’ – there were even moves to levy a royalty on blank cassettes… A lot of people are now drawing comparisons with the way that people now download music off the web, ‘we’ve always had copied music, I used to tape stuff off my friends when I was a kid. Bit Torrent is no different’, goes the argument.

Here’s where it differs – and why I believe home-taping, and the real equivalent now which is duping a CD from a friend, aren’t killing music – lending music to your friends so they could copy them carried a lot of social capital. In general, people only lent CDs to their friends, and there was a reciprochal loaning taking place, if you had cool music to lend to your friends, it carried with it a cache that could put you in strong social stead at school, and it meant that in a functional peer group, everyone bought music with their pocket money, and everybody had a slightly bigger music collection than that which they could afford. Still, you were copying stuff from people with whom you would then discuss it, and the likelihood was that as a group you may well build an affinty with a particular band, scene or genre, and as your disposable income increased, so did the desire and means to own more than just the one album that you bought. I know that when I was at school I had a couple of copies of Cure albums before I bought them, and felt a great sense of pride when I replaced those tapes on vinyl – now i was a real fan.

It was an entirely different relationship to that of the downloader who installs BitTorrent and then proceeds to download 60 albums worth of Bob Dylan, and a 12gig Torrent of Joni Mitchell, or whatever… where the ‘ubiquity/scarcity’ dichotomy that Gerd talks about is enacted on your iPod or harddrive in a way that actually wrecks your relationship with music. So instead of developing a unique soundtrack within a peer group, one that requires a degree of financial investment, a fair amount of time (copying stuff onto cassette took a lot longer than downloading!) and the building up of a whole load of social capital, now you have a music collection bigger than most record shops, and absolutely nothing defined about it that makes it YOUR soundtrack. No filter. And our relationship with music is ALL about the filters.

So, again, the question is not just ‘how do we get paid for this?’. It’s bigger than that. It’s about how we re-engage with the process of becoming the soundtrack, how do we provide those filters, how do we connect with our audience both in an iconic way (where our music and the associated ‘brand’ speaks to them in some way) and also connecting personally.

The web is such an amazing tool for breaking down the barriers between artist and audience. It’s magic that I can write this stuff, and people can comment, or post on my forum. It’s great that I can email many of my favourite artists direct from their myspace page. It’s also great that I can then buy their latest album directly from them, investing in their career, connecting with them directly (or at least from my paypal account to theirs) and often get a ‘thankyou’ email back from them… That’s a good thing, and I don’t think the same is going to happen with free downloads. It just doesn’t carry the same transactional currency (even without the financial consideration) – it’s an uneven exchange, as the artist has provided music (that – let’s not forget – didn’t take weeks or even months to make, it took YEARS of playing to get to the place where the music is any good) but the downloader has just provided attention. Now don’t get me wrong, I am grateful when people take the time to listen to my music, but I’m not a charity case – I hope that people who listen to it again after that do so because it’s GOOD. It’s of value, and it offers them something of substance. Best case scenario it becomes part of their soundtrack to the world, along with all the other music that means something to them. And if it means something, it’s worth something, more than just a fraction of a penny from their ISP collected download tax, that Google then forward onto Sting and Madonna on my behalf – hey, don’t mention it, my financial situation will hardly be altered by the few meagre pounds that come my way each year, whereas your uber-wealth needs feeding. ;o) etc.

Does that make sense? (not the bit about Sting and Madonna, the stuff about bittorrent and home taping)

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More on studying music full time

Last week, I went up to Manchester then Perth in Scotland to do two University masterclasses. Luckily for me, neither of them were billed to specifically, so I got to get up and play a bit, then talk about a mixture of musical things and business things. The reaction was largely wonderful, as I’ve already mentioned, and I’ve had quite a few nice messages via email and myspace from the students saying that they were inspired to think differently about their career, their creative path and what it is to be a musician… That’s magic, and I’m delighted that what I was TRYING to say actually got through…

Here’s a summary of a few of the things I was telling them – much of it was the same as I posted here last week –

College is the only place where you get the time and space be absurdly creative without considering how to pay the bills – it may be that you’re having to work a job to pay your way through college (I did for a while), but your actual college time should give you space to do the kind of absurd creative things that you probably won’t have much time for once you’re in a band that’s trying to get gigs and find their niche. You’ll have some time for it then, I hope, just not as much. So make the most of it.

Being a great musician is not guarantee of work – I know lots of great musicians who aren’t making a living at it, and a fair few shitty ones who are millionaires. So think about the business now, think about what’s important to you now, start thinking like someone who is going to spend their life making music now. Cos the only concrete difference between you as a student and me as a ‘pro’ is purely financial. The rest is perception.

Music is way too important to be wasted on fame – fame is, by and large, the penalty you pay for musical success. If your aim is to be famous, write to Trisha about your unnatural love for large breed dogs, don’t devalue music in your own life and that of the people around you by trying to use it to chase fame. The chances of you finding ‘fame’ are minute, and when you get there, you’ll probably hate it… So instead, look for a way to make money playing the music you love. It is possible. Tough, but possible.

If you were there, can you think of any other things I said that helped? Oh, yes, I talked about finding your voice as a player, and made my regularly made point that if you’re looking to absorb an influence, don’t write music that sounds like their music, aim to write music that makes you feel the way their music makes you feel – it’s no use me trying to sound like Joni Mitchell, or else people will just say ‘he sounds like Joni Mitchell’ – no-one says that about Joni, or if they do it’s a way of highlighting her originality, not her derivativeness! Instead, when I listen to Hejira, I try to be aware of what I feel like, what mood it evokes, what it is about it that makes it such a special record. And I try to embody some of that honesty, integrity, transparency and narrative clarity in my own music…

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Music as ancillary?

So, back on track – onto the task of unpacking the notion of our music being given away for ‘free’, the story going that it’s great publicity, that we’ll develop a degree of ubiquity (or localised ubiquity – is that an oxymoron???) and it will serve us well in the long run.

A lot of the talk about new ways of getting music out there has revolved around established bands ‘giving away’ their music, with the aim of spreading the word about their tours, and making it back in the live arena, the two main ones being Prince (who gave his new album away in the UK with copies of The Daily Mail – a heinous newspaper, inexplicably read by a couple of million people a day…) and The Charlatans, who gave theirs away to downloaders on the XFM radio website.

Now, what’s happening here really? Is anyone being altruistic? Prince was paid handsomely by the Mail (just been trying to find out exactly how much, but can’t – it was over a million anyway…) the Mail circulation spiked by almost a million, and you can bet your ass they charged more for advertising in that issue, knowing that they would have that many more copies out there.

No, what happened was that the CD – and the music on it – became an ancillary product to the Mail selling advertising space, and getting people who wouldn’t normally buy it (both those who hate it, and those who would normally buy a rival paper like the Sunday Express). No-one was ‘giving away’ anyway. The mail sold it as part of the cover price, and Prince sold it to the paper.

I know less about the Charlatans deal, but the XFM website is advertising driven, and they clearly benefit from increased traffic, both in terms of new listeners and click throughs to their advertisers. I wonder if the Charlatans are on for a cut of that. I also wonder what they’ll do when everybody’s doing it.

See, advertising space in newspapers is REALLY expensive, so if you can get the jump on the rest of the market, and are a big enough band to make a splash by announcing something like this, or the Radiohead deal, you’re getting serious amounts of column inches for free, or rather, for the cost of the album. Right now, it pays for a band like the Charlatans or Radiohead to be seen to be giving it away, but it’s a trade, and for the people doing the giving away, the music is ancillary to their primary business – it’s just there to generate traffic.

This isn’t a new thing, as I’ve blogged in the past about Carling owning loads of venues, with the purpose of selling more beer (wow, it was over two years ago that I wrote that!), but it is something that we REALLY need to be aware of in all the talk of ‘free’ – we need to ask the question, ‘is this ‘free’ idea just about someone else making money out of me giving my music away?’

It’s already happening – Myspace, for example. You get free hosting of a few music files and a page, and they make billions in advertising. We’re providing the content that fuels Murdoch’s empire (yeah, when you put it like that, it’s pretty seedy). However, it’s a knowing agreement, and in return WE get the traffic too – it’s our content, we can get the click throughs etc. and hopefully the increased audience…. hopefully.

So there are two models here – symbiosis and exploitation. Trying to sell indie musicians on the idea of giving their music away for free because Prince and the Charlatans think it’s a great idea is utter bullshit. It’s heinous. There is no parallel, as we won’t generate either the column inches or the fee for licensing our product to whichever media outlet wants to distribute it…

And unless someone comes up with a far far better workable scheme, the same would be true of whatever globalised collection agency was needed to distribute the fees collected when music is made downloadable for free in exchange for a ‘tax’, possibly collected by ISPs. The music would be ancillary to the company behind the agency making money and branding it. The kind of size of operation needed to do such a thing online means it could only really be handled by one of the online giants – Google, Yahoo, News Corps, Microsoft or Macintosh – I really don’t relish the thought of trying to contact Google’s new licensing department to get my share of the license cash… Still, I have a couple of chapters of The End Of Control that I’ve not read yet, so must go and find out how Gerd has been expanding on his ideas…

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Today I will mostly be…

Busy day today – got a remote recording session to finish up for a studio in Nebraska, need to listen through and read through Corey Mwamba’s tunes for a rehearsal tomorrow for the London Jazz Fest gig in November, need to chase up the peoples who said they ‘might’ be coming to tonight’s Recycle Collective gig and confirm as many of them as possible, and then pack up my stuff, get down to the gig, and play! Then tomorrow is the rehearsal with Corey (assuming it’s still going ahead – no confirmation as yet)…

So Thursday may be the next time I get to blog properly, sadly – I’ve got lots of thoughts about all this ‘future of music’ stuff that I need to get down; I might see if I can grab 20 minutes this afternoon to get some of it written up.

Last night’s Musician’s Union session on gigging and getting gigs was very good – lots of interesting info, support and pointers to places for funding and contacts. The panellists were all very approachable, helpful, and well chosen for the event. The gigs and the money the do them are there if you have the get-up-and-go to get out and get them! Time to get motivated…

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Recycle Collective gig, Tuesday 30th…

(this is cross-posted from my mailing list – thanks to the lap-top problems I’ve been really slow to send out info about tomorrow night’s Recycle Collective gig, so am putting the word around as much as I can today, giving you the chance to make a last minute decision to come and spend the evening listening to marvellous music in the gorgeous surroundings of Darbucka…)

Sorry for lack of communication over recent gigs (if you have a look at www.stevelawson.net/gigdiary.shtml you might see some stuff that you’ve missed) – broken laptop has messed up my web-life all round… all the more reason to subscribe to the gig RSS Feed on that page… :o)

But anyway, this is really a reminder about tomorrow night’s Recycle Collective gig at Darbucka in Clerkenwell, London – www.darbucka.com is their website.

The line-up is me on bass and loopage, Patrick Wood on keys and Roy Dodds on drums. This is a bit of a dream line-up for me, as I’ve been a fan of Roy’s drumming since his days with Fairground Attraction (yup, that was him on ‘Perfect’) through to his beautiful playing on Theo Travis‘ new ‘Double Talk’ album. And Patrick is a regular at Recycle gigs, having played with us at Greenbelt this year, and is never less than amazing – melodic, funky, inventive; the ideal improvised music collaborator! :o)

So PLEASE come down – it’s only £6 to get in, and Darbucka does fabulous food either upstairs in the restaurant beforehand, or while you’re sitting listening to gorgeous music!

Music starts at 8pm – www.stevelawson.net/gigdiary.shtml – head there for a link to a map for where Darbucka is. The address is 182 St John Street, London EC1V 4JZ and the nearest tube is Farringdon, and we’ll aim to finish in time for you to get the last tube home! Music starts at 8pm.

thanks – please check out the gig calendar for more dates and my blog for more on what I’ve been up to. Hope to see you soon,

take care

Steve
www.stevelawson.net
www.recyclecollective.com
steve.anthropiccollective.org
www.last.fm/music/Steve+Lawson

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