Blog seems to be back – server problems took it away for a few hours. All seems to be working fine again… finger’s crossed.
Soundtrack – King Crimson, ‘In The Wake Of Poseidon’.
Lost and found part 2
So, other than my speeding ticket, I’ve unearthed a couple of long-missing CDs – ‘the Free Story’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Off The Wall’; both great CDs that I’ve missed over the last few months. Especially ‘Off The Wall’ – ignoring for a moment the fact that for the last 16 years or so, Mr Jackson’s private life has made far more impact than his music, he has been responsible for some awesome music in his time, and Off The Wall is arguably his masterpiece.
It didn’t sell as well at Thriller, but then, nor did any other record ever made, so that hardly makes it a ‘hidden gem’. It contains some of the funkiest songs he’s ever recorded – Rock With You, Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough and Get On The Floor – the only track that doesn’t quite maintain the quality is ‘She’s Out Of My Life’ which is a nice ballad, but not up there with the funky stuff.
Anyway, if you haven’t got it, set aside thoughts of the recent court case and weirdness involving surrogate mothers, oxygen tanks, pet monkeys, Liz Taylor and baby-dangling and pick up one of the finest soul/funk/pop albums ever made.
Soundtrack – Michael Jackson, ‘Off The Wall’.
Some indie solidarity…
BDB just sent me a link to a band called The Books – two blokes from the states who make odd noises with samples and one of them plays cello and bass (can’t work out what the other one plays) – they make their own samples, release their own records, and have a very odd website. All fine stuff.
A quick look at their stats on Last.fm reveals that they have over 74,000 listeners on there!! A truly remarkable statistic.
Which made it all the more sad to find the following notice on their website –
We feel the need to dispel any notions that we are financially sitting pretty because of the acclaim our music has enjoyed. It’s true, we’ve released a couple of records and we’re grateful to all of the writers who have taken the time to write about them, but unfortunately our record sales do not reflect this. Our work, although deeply satisfying to us, has left us both on the brink of financial collapse since we began, so we are asking you: Please, do not steal our music thinking that we can afford it. We barely get by, and aren’t able to afford basic things like health insurance, let alone raising a family, etc. We love what we do, and we love that people listen, but if you would like to see our work continue, please support us, and all of the artists you enjoy, as directly as possible. The sad fact is, we can make a much better living selling t-shirts than we can selling music, so please help us keep this going.
Thanks!
Paul and Nick
Sad reading but I know exactly what they mean – I get way more interest, and have way more people who know my music than my CD sales would suggest. I remember a stat pre-internet that said that for every album sold, two copies were made. I’m guessing that’s at least doubled now. But it’s tricky – we all want people to listen to our music, and don’t want to have to go the route of disabling CDs from being copied onto iPods, or only having really shitty quality MP3s available. But it can be tough to make it all pay. One argument suggests that if people are swapping your MP3s then they’ll turn up to your gigs, and I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but on a week by week basis, it’s still tough to keep a record label functioning at the ‘profile’ level that the artists have when the sales don’t neccesarily reflect that.
From their statement, compared to their listening figures on last.fm, I’m in nothing like the dire situation that The Books appear to be in, but then I also haven’t got every track of every CD of mine available for download (all of theirs are on their site, I’m not sure if you can actually download them all).
The sales of the download versions of my CDs are doing well, and like the Books, I can see t-shirts being a good earner as time goes on.
I was talking at one point about doing a CDR amnesty – that anyone who sent me their copied version of one of the albums, or a signed statement that they’d just made MP3 copies off their friends could have a replacement for it for a fiver… I still quite like the idea but it was pointed out that it was in effect rewarding piracy and penalising those people who bought the CDs in the first place. I like to see it in more pragmatic terms than that, but I’ll hold off for now.
Still, you do have the opportunity to head over to the online shop and buy a CD/download/T-shirt/gig ticket if you like! There’s even a paypal tip-jar on the MP3s page (though I’m not sure if that just a way of absolving people’s conciences for downloading over an album’s worth of material but only giving me £2 for it!)
Either way, I feel sorry for The Books if things are really as bad for them as the statement above suggests, and I’m glad that my fan base is generally more forthcoming with the money for Cds!
Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’; The Cure’, ‘Greatest Hits’; Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’.
Reasons to be tidy, Pt III
Oh shit, I’ve just found, sealed in an envelope, addressed ready to be sent, a signed form admitting that I was driving my car at the time it was caught on a speed camera back at the end of august. I was SURE I’d sent this, but just now, having a bit of a tidy up (not so as you’d notice, but still) I found it, sealed. And it’s now 29 days from when it was supposed to be sent – shitty shit. I’ve no idea how fastidious the police are about the dates on these things – does the fine go up? Will I get a summons? I’ll post it first thing in the morning, and hopefully they’ll get the letter before they instigate whatever proceedings they are thinking of instigating. it’s ironic that I no longer own that car… no, actually it’s not ironic, it’s just because I sold it. There’s no irony in selling a car, what am I talking about?
Anyway, fingers crossed/prayers whispered that it doesn’t go any further than this, just the usual fine/three points deal (fortunately since my last speeding offence, my first speeding offence has expired, so that’ll be three points coming of my licence just as these three points are going on.)
time for some sleep I think, and then to post the letter first thing!
Soundtrack – The The, ‘Singles’; Talking Heads, ‘Stop Making Sense’.
Are we living in a police state??
I just read this article in the guardian, thanks to a post on Jyoti’s Blog – it’s the story of a guy that was arrested on the tube under the ‘prevention of terrorism act’, had his flat searched, DNA and fingerprints taken and has now been landed with what looks like it may be a permanent police record despite being found innocent, just because he was carrying a rucksack and wearing a coat.
This is some seriously fucked up stuff. Really really scary – if it had gone another way he might have ended up with a bullet in his head like that poor Brazillian lad. He’s done nothing, is entirely innocent, and yet is now ‘on file’.
Why is London turning into some crap version of a Judge Dread cartoon? This doesn’t make us safer from terrorism. It makes all of us more distrustful of the police – surely that’s a really bad policy at this time, when trust in the police is already pretty damned low. It’s not going to put terrorists off, just make them more determined to beat the system that has presented them with this challenge.
If they need to stop people, surely the least they can do is wipe records clean when a person is proven to be utterly innocent, to treat them and their possessions with respect. Instead, he’s treated with suspicion all along, has his privacy violated in a number of ways, his girlfriend is terrified, and his chances of ever getting a work visa in the US are now utterly buggered.
It’s nice to know that the people that are supposed to be looking after us are doing such a damn fine job of breeding fear.
Once again, I feel sorry for those police officers who entered the force to actually protect and help people. They are going to be labeled along with the muppets that arrested David Mery as some kind of Miliitia.
Very scary stuff. Way way scarier than the threat of a terrorist attack, seriously.
Soundtrack – my last.fm ‘neighbours’ radio station. (no, that doesn’t mean I spend all day listening to tracks by Kylie Jason and Stefan Dennis)
how does this happen?
Have a read of the rest of the article. How can anyone, of any faith or no faith, feel that there is anything worth protecting over and above the kids that were being abused? Was it just an old boys network of fellow abusers? A misplaced faith in the church to sort out its own problems? Pressure from church heirarchy to not blacken the name of the church? All of those are so insignificantly tiny when compared with the irrepairable damage that the abuse these 63 (63??????) priests inflicted on so many children.
It is so far beyond me that anyone would ever go out of their way to protect a paedophile that part of me believes there must be more to the story – were the Cardinals being threatened? Did they really not know? Surely no-one is that rancid, least of all those who preach in the name of the ‘prince of peace’.
I guess the ones I feel most sorry for (after the abused kids, of course) are ordinary Catholics, who must be torn between turning their back on a church institution that has allowed this to go on, and sticking with the church that has nurtured their faith thus far. thinking about it, there are certainly things that go on in the Anglican church that sicken me (the rabid homophobia of some of the bishops in the international synod – and I don’t just mean the opposition of the ordination of Gay clergy, I mean the vile hatred that is preached by some of the more extreme characters), and other things that I just disagree with. Maybe it’s just that as a late joinee of the C of E, I don’t feel that much of a bond with the worldwide Anglican communion. I certainly don’t feel any affinity with those who preach homophobia, mysoginy and racism in the name of God!
It’s an eternal struggle for people of any faith, I guess – do you stick with the institution with all its faults, aware that you may be tarnished by your association with those unsavoury types, or do you form your own little cuddly club of likeminded people… Having spent many many years in a cuddly club of likeminded people, I’ll give that one a miss. Surrounding yourself with people who all believe the same thing is really really hazardous to one’s critical faculties. I know too many fundementalists of all stripes – be they religious fundies, athiestic fundies, football fundies or musical zealots – who constantly seek the company of those who serve to uncritically affirm their beliefs, which just leads to ever more entrenched levels of unchallengeable belief. I once spent almost two years surrounded by people who thought roughly the same things as me – towards the end it started to feel like some sort of benign cult.
Since then I’ve tried to vary my circles of influence, to bring my beliefs under question when possible, and to work on the assumption in what I believe that ‘I might be wrong’ – seems really obvious when you say it, but I went for a very long time being closed to the idea that someone might prove me wrong about any of my deeply held convictions about the life the universe and bass playing.
I still have a support network – when you’re feeling down, the last thing you want is some muppet tearing at the things you hold dear – but I try to broaden things out where I can.
Soundtrack – Trip Wamsley, ‘It’s Better This Way’.
Stay Safe, Tripster
With the impending attack of the hurricane named after a Liverpudlian traffic warden, Trip Wamsley and his lovely family are having to evacuate.
Once again it brings it home just how ‘real’ all this stuff is – Trip’s coming over here for some gigs with me in November, when he’ll be post-hurricane, and dealing with what will hopefully be some minor disturbance in his home town, not the wholesale destruction that NOLA saw.
So for now, stay safe, Tripster – see you in a couple of months!
Soundtrack – Earth, Wind And Fire, ‘Greatest Hits’.
OK I take it all back… well most of it
Aha, serves me right for basing a rant on something written in the Mail – apparently Cliff hasn’t given up recording at all – it was down to crossed wires. Or as it’s the Mail, probably just a load of made up lies, as that seems to be their stock and trade. Still it’ll spoil Simon Heffer’s column, where he was no doubt going to blame asylum seekers and single mums for ruining Cliff’s career.
So in fact, what started as him seeming like a churlish fool has actually turned into Cliff’s best bit of publicity for years. I mean, how many blog posts are there out there about Cliff, in general?
Soundtrack – The Cure, ‘Greatest Hits’.
Cliff gives up recording… hmmm
So Sir Cliff has given up recording because radio won’t play his tracks – what a damn stupid reason not to record music! It says a lot about Cliff’s motivation and his relationship with his fan-base, who would buy whatever he put out regardless of the perceived radio-snub.
In general, I have a bit of a soft-spot for Cliff. He’s faintly ludicrous, but whenever he actually speaks or is interviewed, he aquits himself superbly, and is pretty hard to fault.
However, refusing to make records because a handful of style-crippled stations won’t play music by a man pushing 70 is pretty foolish. If he wants to retire from recording, good luck to him, but don’t try and lay the blame at the feet of radio. If that happened to me (like I’ll ever have enough radio play to notice if anyone stopped playing it!) I’d see it as a challenge to make better music, unless it was just that the demographic my music was aiming towards was different from that the radio station was targeting (as is clearly the case with Radio 1 and Cliff).
He’ll keep touring, which I guess is good news for his fans, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional live album came out. I guess that would even give him a way to sneak the occasional new song on there. Although, maybe that’s what this is about – he just can’t be bothered to learn any news songs!
Anyway, it’s a shit reason for not recording, and Cliff should really know better.
Soundtrack – The The, ‘the Singles’.
Eric's Funeral
Yesterday was Eric Roche‘s funeral. I was hugely grateful to Thomas Leeb for forwarding the details to me, and I drove up to Haverhill yesterday lunchtime.
The turnout was amazing – hundreds of people including the great and the good of the UK guitar scene turned out to pay their respects to a musician we all loved and admired so much.
The service itself was lovely – the vicar did an amazing job, helped by the fact that he’d known Eric for over a year through his illness, and had spent a lot of time with him talking about his plans for the funeral.
The eulogies were very moving, particularly the ones from one of Eric’s oldest friends who’d been with him since he was in his early teens, and the one from guitar legend Martin Taylor – Martin had produced Eric’s last album, the truly brilliant ‘With These Hands’. The job of playing one of Eric’s tunes – the title track from that album – fell to Stuart Ryan, who did an amazing job of it. That was a role that no-one in the room would have relished, and Stuart played beautifully.
Funerals are a mixed affair generally – it’s often difficult to get past the mawkish hyperbole about what a great person the deceased was, but in Eric’s case, the vast majority of people there were just repeating what they’d been saying for years – he was a deeply inspiring person, amazing musician, hilarious to be around and hugely encouraging to his students and peers.
The get-together afterwards was an amazing gathering – guitarists and writers from all the UK’s major guitar mags mixing and chatting about eric, about guitar about gigs – all the things that Eric did so well.
The more I chatted to people the clearer it became that we were running a parallel course in so many ways – for years we were both teaching at music schools, writing columns for magazines, releasing solo CDs, playing at tradeshows and mushing it altogether into a career. Eric was way more marketable that me, and an even better self-publicist, and was, tragically, on the edge of moving into much bigger things. He was already selling out in provicial theatres, and was the star attraction at guitar festivals across Europe, even visiting China earlier this year. It would surprise me at all if he became the Eva Cassidy of the guitar – though it will be tragic for all the people who from now discover him through his records not to be able to see him live.
Still, you’ve got to get With These Hands – it’s genius, it’s beautiful and no CD collection is complete without it.
The main thought I had going through my head during the service was how unfair the whole thing was – some people live who seemingly don’t deserve to, and others die needlessly due to the genetic russian roulette of cancer. But that’s just it, I guess. Life isn’t fair, never has been. The world is a lot of wonderful things – it’s beautiful, inspiring, funny, there’s music and art and love and nature and rain and the sea and cats and mint tea and friends and family and all kinds of magical beautiful unfathomably wonderful things. But it isn’t fair, and we can’t earn our health, or the right not to get cancer, or the right not to get run over or mugged or blown up on a tube-train or… We can limit the chances by taking care of those things that we have control over – eating properly, not smoking, avoiding situations where people might run amok with an automatic weapon. But we’re not in control, and there’s no system of fairness that apportions tragedy to those who deserve it and witholds it from those who are ‘nice’ or ‘clean living’ or whatever.
I was looking at Eric’s parents and thinking that no-one should ever have to bury their own kids. It’s the great injustice. The order’s all wrong. Eric was only 37, which is no age at all. Two little kids and a wife. A family full of love. It’s too much to even think about, really.
But some things live on. the music definitely, and the memory and the inspiration, in big and small ways. Eric’s most well-known peers have expressed a desire to do something to help, to organise benefit gigs for the family. Some are already taking place (Martin Taylor is playing in Cambridge in October, and we’re talking about getting something to happen in London in January). And we can spread the world about the music – that’s the easy bit, it spreads itself.
There are small things that live on – Eric inspired the best tune I’ve written in a long time – and there are big things, like the ACM in Guildford renaming their guitar course after him (Eric was head of guitar there for years, and wrote the guitar course).
And you, you can go and buy his CDs – start with With These Hands, it’ll blow you away. Go on, you’ll discover some great music, and his family will benefit too.
So all in, the funeral was a fitting tribute to a much loved guitar genius, and a testament to his influence. On Radio 2 yesterday afternoon, Billy Bragg – who has been working on a songwriting project with terminal cancer patients – commented that the one thing that cancer gives you is time; time to get things in order, to plan your funeral to say what needs to be said, in a way that a sudden tragedy doesn’t.
Soundtrack – KT Tunstall, ‘Eye To The Telescope’; Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’; Juliet Turner, ‘Season Of The Hurricane’.