Interview With Me For The Unconventional Guide To Art And Money

Last week I was interviewed by Zoë Westof for the Unconventional Guide To Art and Money – it was a really fun interview to do (anybody surprised that I love talking about art, vocation, creativity, business and stuff like that??)

The eBook itself is a really interesting idea, in that with it you get a bunch of audio interviews, and then updates – more interviews as they come along. It’s a great way of fairly easily ‘adding value’ to a digital product. Much harder to do if you have to mail out hard copies of extra chapters to a real book, but for digital services like this, it makes a lot of sense to continue updating them (I know that a lot of authors continue blogging on the same subject to update the info in their physical books. that works too!)

So, check out the book by clicking here – it’s interesting that so much of the advice in it is about visual art, rather than music or writing, but that actually makes it more fun (and perhaps easier?) to abstract principles from it rather than getting caught up in the details of someone else’s execution of their ideas.

Anyway, here’s the interview with me – it’s an hour long, so set aside a little time, or download it and listen to it on the bus on the way to work 🙂



or download it here.

I don’t have a transcript of the interview, but if you want to pull out the quotes from it that connect with you the most and add them to the comments, we can put together ‘edited’ highlights.

Interview with me on BBC Radio 5 Live

Pods and Blogs websiteLast Thursday I went over to BBC TV Centre to be interviewed for BBC Radio 5 Live’s Pods And Blogs. It’s a segment in the overnight show on a Monday, I think, but for those of us who aren’t nocturnal, it’s also a rather excellent stand alone podcast. I’ve been listening to it for months, and Jamillah Knowles does a great job of rounding up what’s happening in webland in a 25 minute show.
Continue reading “Interview with me on BBC Radio 5 Live”

Interview with me from Bass Guitar Magazine.

Bass Guitar Magazine article photo, cropped from the web page.I’ve been hoping this interview would surface online for a quite a while – Adrian asked a really smart set of questions and, crucially, came back with questions relating to them. Email interviews can be really dull if it’s just a questionnaire (unless it’s MEANT to be a ’20 questions’ type deal…) – because there’s no conversational flow. So as a tip for those of you interviewing online, send 2 or three questions to start with at most, preferably unrelated ones, and then develop each one with questions that follow on…

But I digress, this is about me 🙂 – anyway, it’s a great interview, and I was kinda surprised at the quote in the sell that says,

The unexpected popularity of bass looping in the UK can largely be attributed to Steve Lawson‘,

but I guess there’s some truth in that. It’s probably just that I’m more aware of my own influences than my influence.

So, either click on the photo above, or click here to read the interview

Lawson/Dodds/Wood Pt 6 – an interview with Roy Dodds

And the 6th video (the last of the ones recorded in Patrick’s Studio on Sept 18th), is an interview with Roy Dodds. Roy’s main drumming world is playing with singer/songwriters, but he’s always been in demand in the jazz world as well, thanks to his effortless musicality, something he brings from playing with people like Eddi Reader and Boo Hewerdine. So when he improvises, he’s always thinking ‘song’ rather than ‘jam’. A vital distinction if you want the music to go anywhere…

Here’s the video –

Feel free to share it, stumble it, post it to facebook, etc. etc.

Lawson/Dodds/Wood Pt 5 – What Patrick did with the improvs…

Here’s my favourite of the little Lawson/Dodds/Wood videos so far. After doing the 18 minute long group chat that the last four vids were culled from, I did two 7-8 minute interviews, one each with Patrick and Roy, about what they did specifically on the project.

With a project as well defined as this, it seems really important to set the scene as to where the music came from, what limitations we put on ourselves, how we managed to do edits and overdubs while sticking as close as we could to the improvised basis of the project. Patrick describes his (major) part in that really well here –

If you’re enjoying the youtube vids, please feel free to comment on them, rate them, and hit the ‘share’ button to send them to your friends on Facebook or to ‘stumble’ them etc. It all helps us a lot!

One from The Vault – interview from BassRocket.com

In the process of transferring my website over to this lovely shiny new format, I removed a lot of dead links to reviews and interviews that were no longer online. Fortunately, I knew a few of the writers, and so was able to get hold of transcripts of the original interviews direct from them.

One that I found was this one from BassRocket.com – the site itself no longer exists, but the article was written by Andy Long, a music journalist that had interviewed me a number of times for different magazines, and always asks interesting questions, the answers to some of which surprised me (I tend not to have pre-written answers to interview questions, so often come up with stuff on the spur of the moment that I look back on and learn from 🙂 )

It’s also interesting to see how few of the projects that I listed as ‘upcoming’ in that article actually happened… The planned recording and gigs with Eric Roche is particularly hard to read about, as Jan 2005 was when Eric was in his short remission period between his first bout with cancer and when it came back and tragically took his life. We talked a lot through his recovery time about our plans for gigs and recording, but nothing ever happened. One of the few big regrets of my career.

Anyway, have a read of the article, it’s from a few months after Grace And Gratitude came out and it’s a good ‘un!

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