Payola? Still here. Methodology? Totally different

Some traditions never go away. They just morph 

I have a problem with hype. It's not new and it's not just with music. You see it with movies, gaming and more. The film industry does it best. They're brilliant - they sucker me every time. I wind up really wanting to catch a movie, and then, when I do, I often leave vaguely dissatisfied. Indie film makers with zero budgets must hate this. 

Hey, this is entertainment, where there's a need to recoup investments made sometimes on the back of risky emotive judgements. It gets vile and slimy when vast sums are laid out to manipulate public taste. In general, shamefully, the media know this. But they play along.

From Rave promoting to e-marketing 101. An object lesson from TicketSellers

Rave promoters then; impressively legit now. Who knew?

Slick and online. Times have changed....

You've almost certainly bought gigs tickets online. Leaving aside scam sites who will relieve you of £2.5k for an Adele ticket, there are dozens of straightforward operations, whose business is simply to ease the transaction process for operations both small and large. Links for gigs pop up on band sites, face book and twitter. Click and you land on the site. Pay and you get a code number which you present at the gig, on paper or on your phone. You're name's on the list, you go in. Voila. Life was never simpler for small acts and promoters.  Um. Maybe. 

Our local music ecosystem is brutal. That can actually be a good thing.

Studies in PR: deals and favours over there; music supported right here. 

The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. Honest.

This past month, several pretty great music releases came out, all from local acts. Hannah Brown premiered her new single two days ago at Birmingham's Ort cafe. Chris Cleverley plays there there next week to launch his new album. Boat To Row are now dishing vinyl copies of their first album, with a celebratory hometown gig show soon, and Victories at Sea, fresh from an All Year's Leaving dj set, have come up with a gorgeously packaged first album, also marked with a gig. Last week's post covered Kim Lowings and the Greenwood's new album. 

All are local to the West Midlands; all are self-releasing, fiercely proud of their work, and all are engagingly modest. For all them, it's about the work and the creativity. They've all run through brick walls to get to this point. 

I'm sure that an awful lot of established artists feel the same.  But there's a critical difference. Once a national promotion machine kicks in, they're just... product. 

Pledging My Love with Boat To Row

A modest crowdfunding appeal to get their album pressed: 88% of target in 16 days. Great going. 

Wayne Fox Photography    

Chatting with Boat To Row is a pleasure. They're great company, and damn fine musicians to boot. The band has quietly built up a very loyal fan base in their six years. Now they're working that fan base to cover production costs for a first album, using that cornerstone of fan-funding, Pledge Music.

We met for coffee in Brum this week: me and three band members. The other two? Tied up with a very new baby and teaching paperwork. But the Colmore district was packed with celebrities: Perry Barr MP Khamid Mahmood was hanging at Yorks, and Julian Lloyd-Webber, the new Principal at the Conservatoire, was in the Wellington. Movers and shakers clearly surround this band.

Catching the buzz: Rhino and The Ranters

That critical moment when it all starts to work...

Assuming there's merit and talent in a band, and that the band then backs it up with graft and a bit of a marketing push, there's usually a point when word gets out. Suddenly, big numbers show up for gigs. Suddenly, the name gets bandied around. Suddenly, there are faces turning up to check out the new boys on the block. Suddenly, people you tend to listen to are mentioning them.

Last week, at Dylan Gibbons' Blues Night at the Spotted Dog, you could see the signs. There were faces aplenty, come to take a look at Rhino and The Ranters. And it was a cracking gig. 

What's your music worth? Well, how about asking?

The Bluebeat Arkestra put up an online Honesty Box for their new EP and plugged it on Facebook. Here's what happened.

Dark Disco, Trip-Hop, Funk,    

Electronic  and Breakbeat heaven    

You can get lots of free music online. Much of it is on dodgy torrent sites who stiff musicians illegally. Streaming sites pay tiny royalties and stiff musicians legally. 

What's to be done? Ubercool web marketing gurus tell you to give it away; it's promotion. That's the online equivalent of expecting a band to play for free. 

The bottom line? The web has devalued music. It's great for spreading and sharing ideas. It works fine for me: I like to write. But it's not great for musos who put up money and rehearsal and collaboration time to make their statement. 

A while back, Dave Breeze of The BlueBeat Arkestra told me of their plans to launch an EP with an online honesty box through Bandcamp: download for free and then pay what you like. We fixed to meet up after the release to find out how it went. 

Spoonfed by robots: What do we get from music streamers... and what do we give?

Step aside, Radio. The web is the hot way to get new music. Or is it? How we relate to music and performers isn't a commodity you can easily exploit. 

2010 Facebook traffic. Look - that's me, Liking The Destroyers

A question: where do you go for new music? I follow tipoffs, or I catch a promising support act; I dig around. I use the web, but I'm not happy.

I rarely get any leads from radio now. After decades listening to people putting themselves before the music, or relegating music to filler status, there’s only a few shows I can stand to listen to. In truth, that's probably how it should be. 

And it's fun following my nose to live and local new stuff, before it becomes product. There are inventive, fresh performances to discover, played to interested audiences. Do this, and you’re a grassroots part of something unique, priceless and intangible, that’s at the very core of the music industry. That's what this post is all about.

West Midlands video viewing numbers

Some West Midlands artists are racking up viewing figures numbers that outstrip viewing figures for established names. Time to take a closer look...

This time last year, I had a stab at measuring airplay for local bands. It was fun but inconclusive. That said, more bands and acts are scoring national airplay this year, but the local airplay picture remains pretty drab. So I've yet to go back into that particular data mine - but I plan to. 

This year, it's been hard to ignore YouTube numbers for some of the acts I've featured on this blog. For example, both George Barnett and Electric Swing Circus have numbers that put some mainstream artists to shame.

So I did a bit more digging: some rough and ready research to try to get a picture of which local West Midlands acts are doing well on YouTube (and Vimeo - although the Vimeo numbers are in the main dwarfed by the YouTube scores). It's produced quite an interesting chart... but it's also something of a statistical minefield. Details, names, rankings, numbers, the all-important criteria and more after the jump.

Juggling tasks: John Fell

It's been a busy year for John Fell, and it doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. 

The band he plays in, Goodnight Lenin, have packed in a ton of gigs, including tours of Scotland and, this week, Ireland, supporting Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny.

Tracks for the first album are now in the can; mixing is underway. There are winter gigs to plan for, including a hometown Christmas special. Before that, a string of releases are due, including a live EP. And in addition, it’s been a frantic summer of booking acts for Mostly Jazz/Funk and Moseley Folk Festivals, as well as the Lunar Festival. 

So - a busy man. On top of all this, he's also championing new talent, such as Katherine Priddy. 

For those who don't know Goodnight Lenin yet... they are a hugely promising five-piece, all from Northfield in South Birmingham, who, pretty much, have all known each other since childhood. They are cheerfully happy to be seen as anything but modish. The music is folk-rock, strong on harmonies, with definite nods to giants of the 70s like Neil Young. On stage, they ooze relaxed goofy charm - in fact their gigs are generally a hoot. But their strong suit is a terrific portfolio of songs, which you can explore by checking out their YouTube pages and on their website. One song, 'Wenceslas Square', is embedded here, and it's an absolute gem; you'll find it further down the post. And, for all their knockabout live appeal, the band has the ability to reel off breathtaking numbers which stop you in your tracks. 

What makes things more interesting is John Fell's role within the Mostly/Moseley festivals group, where he is events manager and has responsibility for booking most, if not all of the acts. It's a tricky balancing act to pull off. 

Goodnight Lenin at Moseley Folk 2012. John Fell second from left :-)


First things first. You’ve been recording for what seems like a long time. What’s the release schedule?

We’ve got a single, and an EP – a Live EP – planned before Christmas. The album will arrive next year. The album’s pretty much recorded. We did it on analogue tape at Highbury Studio. It’s the way we wanted to record. So you get that warmth, and it also means you work in a certain way. When you’re recording digitally, you know you can fix anything. It feels a little bit like cheating… But our music is on 16 tracks, with some stuff bounced down (combined on one track), and that’s how it’s going to stay.

Is that a good discipline?

It’s great. It really tests us, because we do like to layer and layer and layer. We might put up five sets of strings on it. Then we need to add our harmonies, so it really is tight. It’s great for us, because we do get that warm, live feel; we’re all looking at each other – you can tell when we’re all grinning. It adds something to it. But we are going to get that digital side too, because all the tracks have been converted to digital for the mixing. 

The single is out at the end of October, and it’s being mixed by John Wood, who did a lot of work for Joe Boyd back in the day. 

Vintage names from the heyday of Brit folk-rock!…Do you sometimes feel you were born thirty years too late?

We’re quite content where we are! It’s just what we listen to. There’re artists from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s that people still listen to. We want to be the band from 2012 that people listen to in thirty years’ time. 

Talk to me about finances – there’s a lot of stuff to pay for here.

Finances? it’s tough. Obviously, most bands at our level – in terms of where we are release-wise – don’t get 400 people to a gig. So that’s unbelievable for us. But then we’re still financing the band. We’re putting in £40 a month, each, and that pays for our practise room. 

So you are still funding the band? No rock and roll lifestyle yet? 

Absolutely. We don’t take any money from the band at all. It’s all done for the love of it. 

 But you’re getting a name…? There has to be some light at the end of the tunnel?

We’re getting looked at. Some producers - names we’d never dream of - have checked us out. There are publishers and labels looking at us. We’re happy to stay with Static Caravan, who released our last EP. If a bigger label came along to give us that marketing push, we’d be happy. But we still want to do everything ourselves. If we make any mistakes, it’s down to us. We’ve had a few sync offers come along, which is nice, bit I’m very wary of all that, especially if it means losing publishing rights. I don’t mind doing one-off non-exclusive deals where we keep the rights in the long run, but that’s not the way most sync deals work. I don’t want to be the guy sitting in the pub at Christmas when my Christmas hit comes up, knowing I’m not getting anything for it.

Are we talking about 'Wenceslas Square', maybe perhaps….?

Well…

About Wenceslas Square… would you mind telling me how much you paid for that very wonderful video?

It’s a difficult one. The person I did that video with would have charged a lot more. I could tell you that the puppets and the puppeteer cost a thousand pounds. And there were twelve people working on it. It took a year to make. Does that give you an idea?

So, not cost-effective whatsoever?

Not yet! But there were a lot of favours done.

Let’s sum up: The band’s had a good year. Lots of lovely new songs, a growing audience, you’ve reinforced your standing; if I was still programming at radio in Birmingham, I would happily be playing your stuff; I can't understand why people don't… and yet and yet, and yet – it’s all to play for in 2013, and there’s not a precise plan yet. It’s almost like you’ve casually surfed into this position on the back of your songs and onstage appeal…

I think that’s fair. In terms of the band, we’ve done everything we wanted to do. Next year, we’re going to step up. But we’re not in a rush. Bands who are in a rush just bang stuff out.

So Moseley Folk is done and dusted; I thoroughly enjoyed it. But you’re in kind of a tricky position, as you book most of the acts. So you are... a gate keeper: people have to come to you for a slot. How do you keep everyone happy?

You don’t. I’m picking the acts, but I’m picking for the Festival. If I have a friend, and I don’t think that friend’s very good, I can’t give him a slot. If some industry person is looking for some new talent, and I have a bad reputation for bias, they’re not going to respect my choices. So when I book people, there’s no favours being done, it’s people I genuinely think will go over well.

There’s more talent emerging than you can fit onto the slots you have.

With local bands, some people, you see them once, and they’re in. I don’t care about their Facebook page. It’s what they do live. 

How much sleep do you get when you’re doing the Moseley events?

I’m up about 5, putting the last things together… and I go to bed about 2 the next morning. I stay away from the afterparties… until Sunday. And Goodnight Lenin played on the Saturday as well. You know, I'd planned to sleep for a week after the end of Moseley Folk 

Did you?

Of course not! 

And the Christmas show has been announced now. Tell me about it. 

We’re back at Birmingham Cathedral, which we sold out last year. We're not sure about support. I’ve got a few ideas. There’s this new girl I’ve found. She’s mind-blowingly good. I’m kind of... helping her, not being her manager or anything. She’s just 17, so she’s got a lot of choices. I’ve just told her to speak to me if she needs some advice.

That’s highly creditable. 

But it’s what I love doing. 

Katherine Priddy at Moseley Folk 2012 - picture Richard Shakespeare


 The ‘new girl’ John Fell has found is Katherine Priddy. She made her Moseley Folk debut in the Acoustic tent on Sunday, in the middle of the afternoon, and it pretty much felt like she owned the place after two songs. I talked to her last week after a support set in Birmingham. She plays a mix of originals and material from Nick Drake, John Martyn, and some more contemporary songwriters. 

It’s rare to find someone so new digging so far back into the golden age of British Folk and Folk-Rock.

I was brought up on a mixture of Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa! … but also John Martyn, Richard Thompson… I really really like that sort of music, and so I decided to follow it myself. My dad used to sit around and play those songs, so I chose to to do that tool. He played one song in particular – John Martyn’s 'Golden Girl' – which made me decide to try to teach myself guitar. 

How many gigs so far?

Not many! This is probably the first that people have paid to see, with me as a named support. Moseley Folk Festival was probably the first ‘big’ gig.

So now you’re writing, writing, writing… who are you using to bounce your songs off?

John is good! Lots of people, really. I upload a lot of stuff on YouTube. I got some good responses, and now have quite a lot of subscribers; they’re quite dedicated, and give me some very honest feedback and critiques. I met John by chance at Lunar Festival. I kept sending songs over to him on Facebook.

Next steps? 

University, hopefully! I want to keep on playing for the sake of playing. If it did go somewhere, that would be lovely, but if it doesn’t, it’s a lovely hobby to have. 

Goodnight Lenin website and full gigs list
Katherine Priddy on Facebook

They split. They reformed. Sometimes that works great. Other times...

Revisiting the good old days isn't always the best of ideas. But sometimes it works beyond everyone's wildest dreams. It just depends on what you may be looking for. 

Sometimes people do it for fun and memories; sometimes, there’s unfinished business. Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do, at the right time. And sometimes the results are just not what you might expect.

And it’s never the same. 

This post covers two bands who have split and reformed. One's Punk, one's Folk. And, before you ask - yes, they do have a lot in common.

Toy Hearts: Family. Tradition. Attitude. Experimentation. High Heels. Don’t Mess.

Hannah              Stewart                Sophia           

Birmingham has brilliant musical dynasties. Many of today’s brightest are the children of 70s veterans; they grew up absorbing music, tech skills and more from their parents, almost by osmosis. 

Fabulous talent can emerge from this kind of music-intensive family environment, and that’s a great thing. But that doesn’t mean that, even if you’ve got the music nailed, the path is any smoother. 

Promo work: flyers and posters ready for mailing at THHQ

On a hot Spring afternoon, Toy Hearts are hard at it, doing promotion, prepping the latest mail-out, marketing, answering emails and booking gigs. That’s Sophia and Hannah Johnson, who run the band. Their father, Stewart, who also plays in the band, isn’t working quite so hard – but then he’s just engineered their next album. Hard work it certainly is. Four albums, constant touring, developing and self-managing over six years is a lot of work, most of it an uphill slog.

Toy Hearts operate in a very tricky and sometimes unforgiving area. Family bands aren’t uncommon in Folk music in the UK, and even more so in Country and associated genres in the US. But it just so happens that followers of those genres in the UK are not always, shall we say, the most open to new and experimental approaches. Genre-bending works a treat in Rock, Jazz and Urban fields…  but you mess with ‘traditional’ genres at your peril. To negotiate those landmines, Toy Hearts have developed tougher skins. They're now battle-hardened, and perfectly happy to go eye to eye and toe to toe. 

Marketing yourselves as a bluegrass-western swing-country band, in a home territory which doesn’t really get this music, can’t be easy.

Hannah: I don’t think it would be anything any of us would have chosen to go into – such small, niche genres – especially as young people. People have expectations of a down-homey, check-shirt, dungarees type look, and we definitely don’t have that. That’s made it difficult in a way. People see us and then don’t expect us to be able to play our instruments well, or think we’re going to play pop music. 

Fact is, Toy Hearts can really play. Sophia Johnson is an ace guitar player, and Stuart has excelled on dobro, lap steel, banjo and other exotica for well over thirty years. Hannah is a great singer and a seriously good mandolin player with it. 

With what you play – bluegrass, country and western swing - you have to be ironclad; bullet-proof, especially when you take your act to the US…

Sophia: Actually, I disagree! I think where you have to be bullet-proof is here. We go to America, and people are lovely to us. In this country, we’re told we shouldn’t be writing our own songs; or we should only be playing Bill Monroe music from the period when Flatt and Scruggs were in the band… Don’t you go down the Chris Thile  route! Who wants to win a Grammy and sell out concert halls all over the world? 

You’re kidding… 

Stewart: No, that’s a typical set of English attitudes! In America, they’re just fantastic. We’ve never had anyone in America pick us up on what we do, or try to tell us what we should be doing in the genre – unlike in England. 

But England doesn’t own the genre

Stewart: The people who are into bluegrass in Britain are a very closed community.  Those are the people who criticise us. When we put this music in front of people who’ve never heard it before, they just seem to get it. The actual bluegrass/country community in this country… unless they can have some kind of ownership over it, they just want to criticise what we do.

On the other hand… because you can play really well, and Hannah and Sophia have that sisterly harmony thing going on, doesn’t that get you acceptance?

Sophia: We have more success going into rock gigs and converting people who’s never head this stuff before, than in the UK bluegrass scene. The festivals don’t book us. 

We in the UK tend to consume and re-interpret big chunks of American culture, and put these chunks in boxes which have nothing to do with how the music emerged in the first place. People dressing up at country gigs…

Sophia: The Americans would be horrified at what goes on here. Nobody dresses up at US Bluegrass festivals in America! 

Stewart: We did a UK tour with Robert Joe Vandygriff. He’s from Texas. One of the first gigs was full of people, all dressed up... wearing guns. Robbie Joe got really uneasy.  We had to reassure him. If anybody walks in to a bar in Texas with a gun strapped on, everybody hits the deck! We had to explain to him that these are people living a fantasy, which they probably got from cowboy films rather than music.  And of course, this sort of thing puts young people off. Nobody in his right mind would want to go to a gig where he might see his uncle dressed as Wild Bill Hickok…

The band is unusual. A Father and Daughters combo 

Sophia: This was never, in any way, Dad making Hannah and I join his band. Of course he influenced us; we heard all this stuff we really liked; bluegrass was one of those things. When got to be 14-ish or so, we started to see all these Bluegrass gigs over at this Bluegrass club in Kenilworth, ad we fell in love with it.  We wanted to be in a band. And we told Dad.  

So, not Svengali territory…

Stewart: No, not at all. I mean, I would come home, and I’d hear Bob Wills coming out of one bedroom and Hank Williams out of the other, and I’d think: Those are my CDs; will I ever get them back?  The first gig that we did together… I was playing with some people at the Ceol Castle in Moseley, and they all dropped out. So I asked Sophia and Hannah them if they wanted to sit in. An ad-hoc arrangement. That became a regular one night a week residence. 

When did things move forward… seriously? Now you’re slick, tough and road-hardened. I watched you waltz on stage at Moseley Folk last year, without a sound-check, and knock the crowd dead. How did you get to that place?

Hannah:  That’s really hard. I don’t think there is a specific point when we could look and say, yep, we’re there. I don’t think we’re there! We still think we’re not good enough, and there’s work to be done; and we probably always will. All we’ve ever tried to do is to be the best we can be and be on top of our game. That’s helped us.  Constant gigging, constant practising… I’m not saying it’s made us good – but it has made us really tight – and people do notice. A lot of bands don’t do that.

You can always tell a band that works that way. It shines from the stage. 

Sophia: Dad always said to us that from day one, you need to get out and gig. Give yourself permission to not be that great for the first year or two, and to really work at it. There are so many musicians that I know who really great musicians – in their bedrooms. They cannot get on stage and perform. Part of learning to do this is that we were made to get up and perform. Play a song a million times in your bedroom – fine. Perform that song once on stage and you learn far more about it.

The album isn't officially out until late May; the rough mixes that Toy Hearts kindly let me hear me when we did the interview are very promising indeed; bearing in mind last week's post about local bands scoring national airplay, I would not be in the least surprised to hear their new material daytimes at Radio 2. Here's a video from last year, where Hannah went over the top with the kohl... 

So, the new album…

Sophia: ... is called ‘Whiskey’. We recorded most of it right here, in this house, and then we sent all the files to Nashville for mixing by Ben Surratt. We wanted to have a go at doing it our own way, so we weren’t clock watching. Another big factor in the album, bluegrass apart, is our big love for Western Swing. We’ve been to Austin, Texas about four times, and one of our favourite bands over there is the Hot Club of Cowtown, who really inspired us. A couple of years ago, Dad bought his triple-neck steel guitar, and I bought my 1958 Gibson Arch-top. And then we said… right! These have to work their way in. 

It’s the first album which is half covers, half original material. Two Bob Wills songs, a Bessie Smith song, a Ronnie Self rockabilly song, a Wayne Hancock song. And it’s the first album that has drums on it – courtesy of Dean Beresford, Richard Hawley’s drummer. We added fiddle in Nashville. 

Weird feeling doing all your tracks, and sending it all over to someone to mix – someone you trust, but still, they’re your babies, aren’t they?

Hannah : It’s a good thing, but… ooooh – when you’ve spent so long writing and crafting them, and getting so involved with them… it’s actually a relief. We became really ground down by the whole process with previous albums. You live with the tracks and the mixes and the remixes for soooo long. I guess the key to it all is trust.   

In terms of basic kit, how did this work?

Stewart: We wanted a total live rhythm track – no tracking on the core of the band. We put the drums in one bedroom… the double bass in another, I had Sophie playing rhythm guitar in that room over there (up the hall), and Hanna singing live guide vocals in here (the kitchen).  I recorded on to my computer in the front room, with industry-standard software… but I used vintage mics – some vintage Neumann U87s, with valve pre-amps. The only problem was running cabling all over the place, and closing doors and wrapping people up in duvets… and it’s worked! 

Marketing the band is critical…You take that one on head-on.

Hannah: I’ve never understood why, playing the music we do, that we can’t have a commercial image. That doesn’t wash with me. We want to get a certain look – to be true to who we are as young women, and how that relates to our music. 

That’s crystallised over the past couple of years…

Hannah: We’re in an industry dominated by men. I’m five foot two, and I do feel more empowered when I’m on everyone’s level!

Sophia: We’ve always dressed up. The Bluegrass bands that we really loved made an effort. Sometimes they got it horribly wrong – all the band are wearing putrid yellow shirts… but at least they all matched!

You’ve amped this up several notches over the past couple of years. . You’re a lot more made up, the heels are higher…

Sophia: We live in a visual world. Our music is good enough if we get people to the gigs, but you’ve got to pique the interest. And that gets us to newer audiences.

Is there a danger that you’re going to be dismissed as two cute girlies?

Sophia: We are continually dismissed as two cute girlies. But you’ve only got to come to our shows and watch us play. 

                                      

In a lot of the photos, you (Sophia and Hanna) are upfront… Stewart, you’re in back.

Stewart: It’s important that they see what the front of the band is. The girls are the front of the band. I don’t see my role as a very visual one for publicity purposes. But I am wearing a cowboy hat on the new shots…  After all, they formed the band; the asked me to be in it. Actually they said I’d better be in the band 'cos I’m the only banjo player we know…. 

And you’re doing all the PR right now

Sophia: Not just the PR. Hannah and I joke that our second instruments are our laptops. You can’t not. It takes too bloody long, but it absolutely has to be done. There is no manager to this band – everything that has to be done, it’s done by us. 

Helluva workload…

Sophia: Eventually we’ll get a manager - but it has to be someone we trust. 

For full gig details, check the gigs page on the Toy Hearts website.