Posted on

My first restaurant gigs in years!

This weekend I did two restaurant gigs, just playing bass with someone else… when I say ‘just playing bass’, of course I took a looper with my (my Akai Headrush for ease of transport and set-up) and ended up playing quite a few melodies, but it wasn’t a me-gig, even though we did arrangements of a couple of my tunes.

The gig were with a guitarist called Luca Sirianni – a fine player and very nice guy to work with, playing a mixture of standards, pop stuff his tunes and a couple of mine. A couple of things about it were noteworthy. Firstly, he found me through MySpace – who’d have thought that any musician would ACTUALLY make some money through myspace – there we were, thinking it was all about collecting a million friends who have no idea who you are, and inadvertently it provides some geniune work! The second is that I get asked to do precious few of these kind of gigs, despite the fact that I a) rather enjoy them and b) am rather good at them – I love playing in a duo setting like the gig on friday (sunday’s was a trio with a percussionist which was just as fun), and I’m kinda handy to have in that I can play tunes, chords and solo pretty well through most things – takes some of the heat off the guitar player.

So hopefully it’ll turn into a few more gigs. I don’t want to end up doing them 4 nights a week – I know too many people doing that and hating it – but it’s nice to get out and play with some new people, busking some cool tunes, and making a lil’ cash.

Posted on

The best thing on the internet… ever. no, really.

OK, here’s the deal – head to thealldaybreakfastshow.com, download all 22 episodes thus far, and realise why the internet was invented. Solely to bring the ADBS to the world. It’s genius, pure genius.

Danny Baker and I go way back. Not that I’ve ever met him, just that I’ve been listening to him for decades – first on his weekend breakfast show on Radio 1, then a bit when he was at Virgin, and then again when he took over on breakfast at Radio London, following him when he switched to the afternoons. He is, without doubt, my favourite radio presenter ever, and the most consistently funny media figure I’ve ever come across. The podcast is like him replaying his greatest hits without the shackles of the BBC code of conduct. And it’s amazing. L and I had a 10 hour ADBS marathon on the way from Austin to Nashville and it made the journey fly by.

So go, download, listen and sit mouth agape at the genius that is Danny, Baylen, Amy and the oh-so-strange David Kuo.

Posted on

Live Earth – not crossing my radar..

So the Live Earth Gig is going on, on TV, on radio, everywhere. And the only time it’s registered on my radar was talking to Oroh last night who’s playing at it with Corinne Bailey Rae, arranging to meet up afterwards…

Why hasn’t it? I’m HUGELY concerned about climate change, a qualified but largely enthusiastic supporter of what Al Gore’s taken up as his cause (An Inconvenient Truthx is definitely required viewing), but the notion of a bunch of largely ill-informed rock stars flying in in private jets to ‘lend their support’ (and prop up their often-ailing careers) is just plain hideous. Claiming to ‘carbon offset’ your private jet useage, and putting low energy lightbulbs in on your yacht does not make you a shining example of planet-saving eco-warrior-ness. It means you’re trying to party as the ship goes down, pretending that planting a few trees excuses your King Kong-sized carbon footprint. And that, my dear bloglings it’s what’s known in scientific terms as complete bollocks.

The organisers are claiming that they are trying to make the whole event carbon neutral and have booked bands in the cities they live in. But they don’t seem to have asked the bands to sign up to any kind of rock star eco-charter that curtails their use of private jets, and commits them to running their tour buses on bio-fuels and selling fair-trade bleach-free merchandise etc. Surely the concert would have smacked less of being a giant photo op for some of the worst abusers of aviation in the world if there’d been some kind of commitment to change, to reducing their own load on the planet – if you will, ‘putting their own house in order’, rather than looking like the bunch of fucking hypocrites they are. And I say this as someone who so far this year has made two return flights over the atlantic, and one return flight to Edinburgh, but who has also done two month-long tours round Europe in the last year on trains, and is committed to continuing that trend, and to not flying domestically (someone else booked and paid for the Edinburgh trip, and I was too slow to change it to a train ticket..)

So there you go, Live Earth – great cause, dreadful way of making the point. Please don’t be fooled by the myth of carbon offsetting – we all need to radically REDUCE our carbon footprint, rather than thinking we can carry on as normal but just plant some trees to make it all go away. It’s not going to work.

Posted on

must.. get.. over.. jetlag…

I am officially knackered. Jetlag done got me bad, mama… or something.

I’ve got a gig tonight (just a restaurant gig with a guitarist, hence it not being on the gig list), so must get ready, find smart restaurant gig clothes etc. as well as sending out CD orders, and dealing with the speeding fine I got before I went away…

but all I want to do is sleep some more.

Posted on

my taste in soundtracks vindicated at last…

Just read this post about Bugsy Malone on the Guardian music blog. It’s long been one of my favourite films – there’s something fabulously surreal about the kids-as-adults thing – like a school play, without the forgotten lines and corpsing. And, as cited in the article, the soundtrack is stellar. I only own a tiny handful of Soundtrack albums (odd, given that everything I’ve ever recorded sounds like a soundtrack album) – Local Hero, Paris Texas, One From The Heart, Bill Frisell’s albums of Buster Keaton music, and of course Bugsy Malone. It was the first thing I searched for when I discovered you could buy music online, trying in vain to find it on CD. I think I eventually got it in the Virgin Megastore in London.

Anyway, it’s magic, give it a listen.

Posted on

Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty…

Home now, back in London (well, Hertfordshire, but it’s near a tube station, so it’s London). Flight was fine, watched two more episodes of Doctor Who on the plane, got a lil’ bit of sleep, then arrived at Heathrow to find that Virgin had lost my bass. Again. Remember, it happened in LA in January? Actually, that wasn’t Virgin was it? Oh well, anyway, they lost it, left it behind in NYC. But it’s on the way to me now, according to mylostbag.com.

Time. To. Sleep.

Posted on

Telling half the story…

Just saw this article about the demise of the Record Industry on RollingStone.com – it’s a good read, but here’s the salient bit for this blog –

“In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 785.1 million albums; last year, they bought 588.2 million (a figure that includes both CDs and downloaded albums), according to Nielsen SoundScan“

Now, I’m sure I’m not typical of ‘the average consumer’ – I know I’m not (I’ve only ever bought one CD from a supermarket…) but I do know that all of my sales, or most of the CDs I buy will never show up on a ‘Nielsen SoundScan’ report… I’d love to know how indie sales impact that figure, and the parallel figure about the number of people now making a living, or part of their living, from their own music. I’d like to see figures on the number of indie labels and artists that are self publishing and selling more than 500 CDs a year (given that if you’re pressing it yourself, you can make between £5-£7 clear profit on each disc – $10 to $14 – so that’s over £2,500 a year in CD sales income, which carries with it the assumption that you’re making probably at least as much again on gig money…

I think the future looks VERY bleak for the majors. They’ve long relinquished their part in the process of pushing the art of popular music forward, settling into a pattern of releasing tried and tested formulae, usually being at least 3-4 years behind the cutting edge of any musical movement (how long had the ‘grunge’ thing been happening before Geffen released Nevermind?). So now they are trying to do marketing tie-ins, computer game promotion, TV show placement – anything to keep their grubby fingers in the many musical pies.

But the major label end of the industry is imploding, the indies are thinking faster, changing, adapting, and in many cases thriving.

It’s a tough time to be a musician and make a living at it, for sure, but the opportunities and potential are there, especially if you lot keep supporting the indie peoples (check out the links page here to get some new musical ideas)

Posted on

Oi! England! SLOW DOWN!!!

wow, you go away for 7 weeks, come back, and find a new prime minister, a smoking ban, a massive terrorist weirdness thing going on, Wimbledon tennis in full swing… Will i recognise it when I get off the plane? Have all the men grown Amish beards? Have all the laydees grown Amish beards???

I fly to New York tomorrow, and then – hopefully – to London on Tuesday. We’ll see what happens with all the mentalism that’s going on in England at the moment… Does anyone have an email address for the nutters with the non-exploding car bombs? It’d be nice to email them, tell them how much they are potentially disrupting my travel plans, and ask nicely if they wouldn’t mind changing their method of protest… I’m sure they’d listen if they heard my concerns about the airlines reinstating the restrictions on hand-luggage…

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top