Tag: Comments

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Violence over being called violent

Much has been said about the events following the Pope’s perhaps unwise comments about Islam – see here and here – but it’s worth repeating. Unwise though the pope was, does it really do any favours to show your displeasure at being accused of being a violent religion by killing nuns or calling for ‘a day of anger’? If the pope was feeling particularly rash he’d probably just go ‘see???? you nutters are proving me right!’.

What is clear is that there are a heck of a lot of Muslims who aren’t into violent retribution for nonsense talked by the pope. But the ones who do declare fatwas on people for trash-talking the Prophet or the Koran could clearly do with a reality check. Either that or just say ‘yes, we are indeed a violent religion – you, in the robes, outside, now!’

Every faith has its extremists – America has it’s gun-toting so-called-christian militia (otherwise know as the GOP), but they aren’t generally referred to in the press as ‘Christian extremists’ – same with the troubles in Northern Ireland. Our language is very different. Perhaps because the terms we use to describe the different levels of commitment to a religion don’t really work for Islam – moderate doesn’t seem to be a word that any muslims like, with its connotations of being watered down and less committed. Perhaps what we need to support are those muslim leaders who challenge muslims that it is more intrinsically muslim to be anti-war than it is to be pro-violence.

A very wise friend once commented that the problem with George Bush isn’t that he’s an evangelical christian, it’s that he’s not evangelical christian enough. The culture of right wing Evangelicalism in the US has very little to do with any Biblical notions of ‘christ-like’ behaviour. Blessed are the peace-makers? Is it possible to read the whole story of the bible and not come out with the conclusion that God is on the side of the poor? the marginal? Sure, it’s easy enough to proof-text any level of craziness, in the same way that Armando Ianucci can edit a Blair speech for Time Trumpet to make him look like he’s into all manner of surreal weirdness. But if you take the Bible seriously, it seems to me pretty clear that the calling on people who are inspired by Jesus is towards peace, reconciliation, justice, care for the poor, sick, disenfranchised. All very politically charged things. As Desmond Tutu once said ‘when people tell me religion and politics don’t mix, I have to wonder if they’re reading the same bible as me’, or words to that effect…

So in the same way that the deranged war-monger in the White House needs to be exposed not as a religious extremist, but as a having a violent, neo-imperial agenda utterly indefensible from the Bible, so it’d be great to see more public dialogue about the nature of ‘true’ Islam, rather than just some late night channel five discussion show chaired by Terry Christian (which was the last one I saw – truly dreadful).

For reference, my favourite book deconstructing the theology of the far right in the US is Ceasefire – Searching For Sanity In America’s Culture Wars by Tom Sine – it’s pre-Bush Jnr, but pre-empts it perfectly, and is still prescient. Would love to see Tom Sine update it, but he lost a hell of a lot of friends when he wrote it…

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'>David Byrne's blog

I told quite a few people about this over the weekend, so thought I ought to post a link to it – David Byrne’s blog – some great stuff here, thoughts, reviews, comments. Well written and interesting.

Let’s face it, he’s the man who brought us ‘Stop Making Sense’ – I’d read his shopping lists.

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Spamspamspamspam

So, I switched comments back on yesterday, and have had over 300 bits of spam since then!

For fuck’s sake, is there no way of blocking this stuff from even getting here? it all gets filtered into a junk-mail folder, but then so do all the normal comments, so I have to go through them all looking for non-spam. And before any geeks ask, no they aren’t from the same IP address, so I can’t just block it, sadly.

…and I thought pizza leaflets were a pain in the arse.

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How to do the Fringe

This is as much as a note for me to refer back to next year as it is info for you lovely bloglings, but if any of you are planning on going to The Fringe, maybe some of these tips will help –

  • Venue – things to take into consideration.
    The average edinburgh audience size is about 6, literally. If it’s your first year, you’re very likely to end up doing a few shows to virtually no-one. With that in mind, book a small venue. It’ll save you money, and feel less crap when you eventually get up to 15-20 people.

    a lot of venues charge more for ‘prime-time’ slots, so think about when your show is best going to attract an audience. I seem to do pretty well late night, so can take a cheaper slot between 11-12, rather than trying to book between 7-10pm, which is pretty much the main time for shows.

    When you talk to the venue, haggle over the cost of the room. I’ve never paid full asking price for an Edinburgh venue. Check what the extras are (do you need a tech? lighting engineer? door person? backstage help? most of that will be charged) – bargain with them. The usual deal is to pay a ‘guarantee’ and then it’s a 60/40 split in your favour over and above that. Some places do a straight hire fee where you get all ticket money. others can be convinced to do a straight 50/50 split.

    It’s also worth finding out what kind of publicity the venue are going to do. If you go into one of the ‘big five’ – The Pleasance, The Underbelly, The Gilded Balloon, The Assembly Rooms or C Venues – they’ll have a load of publicity of their own. It’s not worth relying on (shows in each of these venue complexes still end up with 2 people in the audience), but it’ll help. A bit. possibly.

  • Promo before the fest. Make sure you get signed up to the EdFringe press office mailings, there are lots of useful things to do in there. They send out info of lots of press opportunities and other promo things like playing at the Fringe Opening party, Fringe Sunday etc.

    Get good photos! there’s no substitute for having a really eye-catching image, something that says something about your show. Remember, there are close to 2000 other shows on, putting on nearly 30,000 performances in the month. That’s a lot of competition, and a tiny amount of time you have to grab the focus of your prospective audience – you need to grab them with the picture and show title first, then the strap line, then the blurb. It’s all got to be there, arty doesn’t really cut it. I’ve been given flyers where I can’t tell a) what kind of show it is, whether it be music/drama/comedy/physical theatre/dance etc. and b) what the story is if it happens to be a narrative piece. It’s all got to be there on the flyers and posters.

    Also worth spending a lot of time on is your fringe programme entry – you’ve only got 40 words, so they have to be the greatest words you can think of to describe what you do. Quotes are good if they’re relevant. be descriptive, pique people’s interest, be hyperbolic – everyone else will be.

    Work out your budget for promo. Flyers and posters are a must. An absolute must. But you might want to take out an ad in the programme, or some ads in the free papers at the festival (Three Weeks and SkinnyFest), or even on the EdFringe.com website. Again, you might be able to haggle on price, or team up with another show to take out an ad between you.

    One way to expand your budget is to get sponsors – this can either be individuals – see Richard Herring’s SCOPE appeal for more on this – or companies that have some vested interest in the publicity you can offer. For the last two years, my show has been sponsored by the Bass Institute – an excellent music school in West London. They can obviously get access to loads of people interested in music, particularly bassists, through my show, and I give them a logo on thousands of flyers and posters, as well as a full page ad in the show programme. A great deal for all.

    Use the press list! The Fringe press office sends out a press list, with the contacts of everyone who writes or broadcasts about the Fringe. Write a great press release (get help if needs be), and follow it up with additional news etc. Stick to the recommended method of communication, and don’t bug the people if they ask to be contacted only once. This again is where those killer photos come in handy. Press people are 100x more likely to write about you if you got good photos. head over to Steve Brown’s site for photo stuff – he regularly takes magazine front covers, so knows all about generating eye-catching, product-selling images for artists.

  • Once you get to Edinburgh – keep doing all of the above. Use the internet to follow up radio and press contacts, chase up reviewers and sort out cabaret and showcase slots. There are a few of these – you should contact them before the fest if possible, and then follow up when you get there. Some times people have slots to fill last minute, make sure they’ve got your mobile number for last minute bookings. A lot of the showcase and cabaret slots will be 10-15 minutes long – make sure you’ve got a highly portable extract from your show. This is harder if it’s a play, but it’s worth doing for the audience it generates. Shows like Mervyn Stutter’s Pick Of the Fringe are a great way to reach a much bigger audience.

    And now all those flyers and posters come into their own – put posters up in every legal possible place. Shops are a great one, cafes, restaurants – get there early to guarantee a slot on the walls. Make sure your venue has done enough promo around the building, you want to catch as much passing trade as possible. Don’t go too mad putting out piles of flyers alongside all the other piles of flyers – they get buried fairly quickly.

    Then it’s time to hit the high street and sell the show – have a one sentence description – ‘late night music show’, ‘chill out comedy’ bizarre road trip comedy’ ‘shakespeare on ice’ – something that’ll grab people’s attention. Then have a prepared one paragraph description, so you don’t um and ah through it. Be confident and smilie, very friendly, ask people’s names, shake hands, say how much you’re looking forward to seeing them at the show. In short, make them feel like they are as special as the show is, and they clearly belong at it! As for quantity, you really need about 7000 flyers for your first week, and 5000 for each successive week. We had 5000 this year, and could easily have done 7000 in the time we were there. If you can get friends to come and stay and flyer for you, that’s great, but there’s nothing quite like people seeing your picture on the flyer and then chatting to you about the show.

    Same with posters – about 150-250 a week should do it – make sure you put them up on the pillars on the Royal Mile at least three times a day, as they get covered up pretty quickly. Same for the boards outside the E-ticket tent.

    Work out with your venue before hand what they are happy for you to do in the way of comps, 2 for 1 deals etc. Do you need to have special stickers for it? can you just write it on the flyer? how precious are they about it? If you’re doing three weeks, I’d recommend doing maximum effort in the first week just to get people through the door, try and create a bit of a buzz, get the word out. Lots of two for ones, comps to the casts of other shows etc. Be generous with other performers, most of them won’t have much money for full price tickets.

  • Take care of yourself. Edinburgh folklore is all about people staying up late, getting drunk, stoned and shagging anything that moves. Clearly not a good idea if you actually want it to be a success for you. Almost everyone at the fest loses money. Perhaps this is why. I’ve never lost money there. I hardly drink at all while I there, and try to get enough sleep – I really don’t want to be falling asleep on stage. If you’re a pro, it’s work, 24 hours a day. If you take it seriously, you can do well there. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t go out late night – it might be a great way to meet people who could come to the show, or review it. There’s a whole other world at the fest that starts at midnight. Just proceed with caution. ;o)
  • And finally, make sure the show is shit-hot. If your show is lame, all the promo in the world isn’t going to sell it. People will come, and you’ll get crap reviews, crap word of mouth and the crowds will die off. Come with a great show, and it’ll go the other way. Spend the time making it right, and you can do really well.

    What have I missed? If you’ve ever been there, post your best tip in the comments section…

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Comments off…

I’ve just switched the comments off, for a few days – the comment spam has just gone mad of late, from one particular source, so I’ve switched it off in the hope that the spambot will stop coming here… no idea if that’s how they work, but I’ll switch it back on in a few days and see what happens…. Failing that, I’ll have a chat with Sarda about preventing comment spam…

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Other peoples opinions on your music…

I’ve just been reading a thread over at BassWorld.co.uk. One guy posted a link to a recording of a solo of his, and another guy posted the following response –

“I have to do a solo during “Into The Arena”, a rock instrumental we open the second set with, and I hate doing it, mainly because I’m not up to it, it’s really difficult to fire off some quick licks while keeping the momentum of the song going, and when there are musos in the audience, you just know they’re watching your every lame move, and thinking to themselves, “I could do better than that”. “

and here was my response –
I’m not sure how serious this feeling is, but if musos are in the audience are sat thinking ‘I could do better than that’, they really ought to F*** off. It’s such a non-response to music, such an irrelevance to what’s going on. For a start, ‘better’ is such a nebulous concept, given all the variables, it’s largely taste-driven so not really valid in terms of assessing whether the band are doing what they want to do, and the simple fact is that you are doing it, and they aren’t.

It’s like people who say ‘you really ought to do such and such’ – no, YOU really ought to do such and such! If you think it ought to happen do it, don’t go projecting your own musical wishes onto someone else who almost certainly doesn’t share them.

So, play the solo you want to hear, and remember that if there are musos in the audience, it’s because you’ve got a gig that night and they haven’t, so any complaints are moot.

It’s why I refrain from commenting on most of the stuff I hear online – there’s very little of it that really does it for me (all of us actively dislike most music – making great music is really hard, that’s why it’s such an addictive life-long passion. If it was easy, it wouldn’t feel special), but in the grand scheme of things, I don’t want to discourage people from making music by telling them that it doesn’t do it for me. That’d be a complete waste of my time and theirs, because no-one in their right mind should take what I or anyone else says about their music on an online forum as being worth the pixels it’s written on.

Play the music you want to hear, learn all that you can about the process of music making, never stop studying, try to stay focussed and ignore the opinions of people who haven’t actively earned the right to comment on what you do by demonstrating clearly that they understand fully what it is that you are TRYING to do. The relationship that matters is the one between intention and outcome, not audience expectation and outcome.

…that was my response on the forum.

This is something that really bugs me about the way things have gone with the net, and I’m caught in a paradox. Like any musician, I like encouragement. It’s lovely when someone says ‘I really like what you do’ – that doesn’t really require qualification, it just says that they are enjoying the music. It’s pretty much vital that a reasonable number of people feel like that, otherwise I’ll be looking for a new job rather quickly.

However, when people feel the need to qualify their comments with ‘but I don’t like this, and you should do this, and why don’t you do a whole album of funky stuff, or a whole ambient album or whatever’ there’s an assumption behind it that I’m in someway trying to meet their criteria for what a good album is. And I really couldn’t give a shit what their criteria is for a good album. In the midst of the creative process, I don’t make music for anyone but me. I write the music that I have to write, the music that feels like it can’t not be written. Once it’s recorded and out there, I do my best to market it, to get it to the ears of the people who are likely to like it. Of course I want people to hear it, and I really don’t mind if there are people who don’t like it – I’m a solo bassist, FFS, there are a heck of a lot of people who won’t have any frame of reference for instrumental music without drums or an orchestra. It’ll just sound alien and weird, and that’s fine.

The problem comes when I start thinking about those markets in the process of making music – ohh, maybe if I do something with a drummer, it’ll sell more. Or, conversely, I’d better not work with a drummer or solo bass purists will think I’ve sold out.

It’s all utter bollocks. As I said in the response to the email above, the relationship that matters is the one between intention and outcome, not audience expectation and outcome. – that’s a really really important notion for musicians to grasp. Your audience don’t understand what you do. Even if they like it, they as a mass of people don’t understand it. What they hear is different from what you hear, and their reasons for liking it are almost certainly not your reasons for recording it in the first place. That’s not a snobbish musician thing – I don’t understand a lot of the music I listen to, and I don’t need to. It’s become part of MY soundtrack, so has my own set of very specific and utterly subjective resonances and meanings and the thing I liked about it in the first place may well be something entirely un-musical – it reminds me of a place, or time, or person. None of that could or should have any influence on the person making the music. You can’t control it happening, and you certainly can’t recreate the effect.

Stil, loads of musicians try. Most of them disappear, some become very rich because of it. But in my limited experience with such people, they aren’t the happy ones. They aren’t the fulfilled ones. To sell millions of CDs for making entirely unfettered music is clearly ‘the dream’. Does anyone manage it? I dunno. I’ll tell you when I sell a million. :o)

The problem with worrying about sales is that small-artist-syndrome kicks in, and the music can become willfully obscure, as cynically influenced by public opinion as someone ripping off Britney. I can’t play that, it’s too pop. I can’t make that album, it’s too mainstream. it’s too happy, not dissonant enough, it’s got a singer, it’s fun, it might actually be an album that should by any commercial estimation sell thousands, and it doesn’t. Which makes me face up to the fact that great music doesn’t sell CDs. Great marketing sells CDs, and the music just has to be sufficiently inoffensive to stay out of the way of the marketeers.

OK, that’s a touch cynical, but still 95% true in the industry. That doesn’t mean that great music doesn’t sneak through – I thought Crazy by Gnarls Barkley was an outstanding pop record – but it’s not a prerequisite of selling records. Otherwise, Top Of The Pops would still be vital viewing, and it hasn’t been for well over a decade, and that’s why it’s been axed.

Anyway, musical bloglings, be true to yourselves, make the music you want to hear, need to hear, and be open to the advice and counsel of those who have earned the right to give it.

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Some very successful Recycling

Well, last night’s Recycle Collective gig was an absolute blinder! For starters, it was the biggest crowd we had so far (more than 80, possibly 90…), the air conditioning was just perfect after the sweatiness of London these last few weeks, and then there was the music…

I started off with a solo set – I sat down to play and realised that all my song-remembering space in my head was full of the New Standard tunes, and I wasn’t sure I could remember my own stuff! But thankfully they all went really well – definitely the best solo set I’ve played at the RC. Finished off the set with a lovely and slightly shorter than the album version of ‘One Step’ with Julie. Fab first set, well done me!

Then came The New Standard Edinburgh set – as y’all know, we’ve rehearsed long and hard for this, and it all went off without a glitch… well, without a noticeable glitch. Small screw up on the play out to the last tune, but I rescued it, and I v. much doubt anyone but Julie noticed. Julie sang beautifully, and the audience loved it. What fun!

And Set three started with two solo pieces by Cleveland Watkiss – the first a baroque counterpoint thing that was just sublime, and the second a dub/drum ‘n’ bass/gospel thing that was equally amazing. Two fine trio improvs finished off the evening, and everyone went away happy, Julie and I both sold lots of CDs (Cleveland is his usual style didn’t bring any merch).

I think Edinburgh’s going to be magique.

If you were there, please write a review, and post it in the comments here, or over in the forum – thanks for coming!

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Um, er, just stuff…

Getting ready to head out to a gig in Petersfield tonight – last one on this trip with Ned.

Been a good week so far – great rehearsal with Julie on Tuesday – our Edinburgh set has got to the point where we’re dropping great material to make way for even more marvellous stuff, and also medley-ing some of the songs, to get even more surprise and delight into the show. Our myspace page is getting loads of great interest, and many favourable comments, which is nice…

Yesterday was a bit of a disappointment in that I headed into town with the aim of getting my Cds stocked in a few shops – the manager of Ray’s Jazz wasn’t there, the dude in the Jazz dept at Virgin gave me the number of head office, the dude in the Oxford Street HMV said they have a jazz buyer but he wasn’t in, and the dude in the Bond Street one said everything has to go through head office!

I did drop a copy in for John Lewis at Time Out, so hopefully he’ll enjoy it and write nice things in the mag.

What else? Ah yes, Wimbledon has started, Henman’s out (no major surprise there as he met Federer in the second round), Andy Murray’s doing well, and some unseeded bloke who’s never got beyond the first round of anything til now has just taken the first set of Raphael Nadal… this could be a HUGE upset if it goes the distance. No breaks of serve as yet, just the tie-breaker between them…

Maybe see you in Petersfield later, fair bloglings of Hampshire, x

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New War/Old War

Much has been made of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, with reporters and politicians calling it great news.

Clearly, al-Zarqawi was a mad terrorist, though in body-count terms, he couldn’t hold a candle to the destruction wrought by the US/UK illegal invasion and subsequent killing spree. The twistedness of one set of international warlords crowing over the death of an opportunist who had galvanised support for his mad behaviour out of the perfectly logical opposition of the Iraqi people to the presence of the US/UK troops is hard to watch. It makes a little more sense of what George Galloway said last week. I still think Galloway phrased it in a stupid way (though it depends on how edited the quote was by the GQ writers), but his point about the equivalence of someone killing Blair vs. the blowing up of innocents in Iraq was a point that needs to be made. The point isn’t that killing Blair would be a good thing – of course not – but that ALL the killing is wrong. Bad guys getting killed isn’t a good thing. It’s occasionally understandable if it’s an attempt to prevent further killing (cf. the role of Deitrich Bonhoeffer in the plot to assassinate Hitler), but rejoicing over death is a perilous activity (I’ll reserve final judgement til I see my own reaction to the eventual demise of Margaret Thatcher… the desire for a street-party will definitely be bubbling below the surface, but I do hope she dies peacefully…)

Anyway, none of that was the point of this blog. The point is how the world leaders’ comments on the death of al-Zarqawi reflect their appalling understanding of the nature of anti-western sentiment across the Arab world. They keep referring to a-Z as the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, ignoring the number of correspondents who say that al-Qaeda hardly exists at all as a hierarchical structure, and clearly not getting that the killing of a leader leading to a collapse of the resistance is a distinctly old war way of looking at things. If the plot to kill hitler had succeeded, it’s quite plausible that the second world war would not have happened. He was very strongly the driving force and ideological brains behind the Third Reich.

al-Zarqawi holds no such power. He was a new war leader. He was a fire-brand and a loud mouth, but he didn’t invent anti-western sentiment in Iraq or anywhere else. He didn’t invent suicide bombing or car bombing. His are not the only resistance army at work in Iraq. Much has been made of his Jordanian birth, to try and suggest that the resistance is a foreign thing, not an Iraqi thing. I think the former residents of Falluja might have something to say about that.

And before any of you hawkish readers get on your high horse – no, I’m no fan of al-Zarqawi. I’d have liked to see him tried in a war-crimes court, alongside Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, John Reid, Condoleeza Rice, Saddam Hussein and any other psychotic war-mongering nutter engaged in killing people across the planet. He’s an easy target for a government desperately looking for some ‘good news’ in a worsening situation, but the death of one dude isn’t going to change the state of play in Iraq – it’s more likely to strengthen the resolve of those opposed to the occupation – and it certainly doesn’t provide any kind of counterbalance to horrific atrocities happening in the name of ‘enduring freedom’.

The mad thing about all of this is that I wish they were right – I wish the killing would stop, it’s a shame that taking out a-Z isn’t going to be the end of journalists being kidnapped and beheaded. But it’s an even bigger shame that the western troops are still there, still provoking, still giving footholds to murdering loons looking for an excuse to kill more westerners. All the presence of the army does is prove them right. All the killing of a-Z does is provide reason to ‘avenge his death’.

As the magical Franti says, ‘you can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace’. When will they stop trying?

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Debut gig – much fun!

Julie and I got through our first gig together unscathed! What fun! The set list, as I said, was a mixture of jazz stuff such as ‘Like Someone In Love’ and ‘What A Wonderful World’ coupled with a load of less likely candidates from The Cure, Slipknot, Green Day, The Police etc.

There were a couple of expected loop gremlins (first gig going without a hitch? yeah, right.) but nothing that spoilt the gig, and the audience seemed to really enjoy it. A great first outing, methinks. (if you were there, feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section.)

And in other music news, Cd sales are going really well – thanks so much to all those of you who’ve already bought it. The feedback on ‘Lessons Learned Pt III’ is great too, which bodes well for the CD of ‘Behind Every Word’ arriving. (you can post reviews of LL Pt III in the new shop, if you want… or, for that matter, of any of the other CDs – I wasn’t able to copy the reviews over from the old shop database, sadly.

Anyway, keep telling your friends about the new stuff, point them to the MySpace page to hear some tracks from it, and then send them to the shop. :o)

Soundtrack – Jeff Taylor, ‘Demo 2005’; James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, ‘Live, 1971’.

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