Doin’ the Zebedee thing

I do wonder how many people get the Magic Roundabout references that pop up here from time to time…

Anyway gang, it’s been fun. No really. Real fun.

I’ve been up since 8am and it’s 9.25pm which, by last night’s standards, is a very late night indeed.

Thanks for your company. I’d love to stay and chat with you all some more, but I’ve got a hot date with a hot woman and a certain Mr Hornby Of The School Of Cool Writing.

Bastard that he is, because no-one should be allowed to write as well as he does.

Anyway.

And tomorrow, you know, it’s promising to be another busy day.

I have a feature on record labels to finish, it’s weeks overdue. And I have to finish audio editing a loooong interview with a band, it’s months overdue.

And I have to finish resurrecting Soph’s laptop from the dead.

And I need to ride a couple of horses – one of them needs cross-country schooling if I can swing some time up on the course.

And clean and polish my work-shoes.

Clean out the car.

Take the lorry out and tank it up.

Breakdown, clean and oil 3x saddles and 2x bridles.

And I need to enter the one-day event at Larkhill too, but there’s a couple of days left for that one.

So I’m going to bed now.

‘Cos there’s lots to do tomorrow.

Have a nice one.

Solving the problem of online gig listings

I’ve been thinking about my quest to define the ultimate band website. It’s a huge topic, so let’s break it down. First up, gigs online: listings, tickets, RSVPs, sharing, feeds…

What are the choices?

• Facebook events
• Myspace gigs
• Upcoming
• Eventful
• Twitter tools like Twtvite and Schmap
• Hand-rolled (eg. Wordpress plugin)

Facebook

Facebook events seems like a good place to start. The way Facebook handles events is great (mostly). It’s tempting to just use Facebook events and embed widgets everywhere else. But it’s not open. Facebook event listings are usually publicly accessible and show up in Google listings, but you need a Facebook account to interact.

Myspace

Unsurprisingly, Myspace gigs gig listings are shit. They look messy, they are annoying to update, you can’t share them easily and they don’t link in with anything useful. Also unsurprisingly, they are the most commonly used gig listings ever.

Upcoming

Upcoming is an event listing site that’s really clever about using hcal, RSS, Flickr machine tags, and other geeky stuff. It’s close to perfect as a solution for the online gig conundrum but non-geeks probably won’t use it, so we would need to feed listings from Upcoming out to other, more familiar, services.

Eventful

Eventful is pretty similar to Upcoming, but maybe not quite as slick. It seems to be a little more US-centric too. On the other hand, it has the “request a band to play in your town” feature, which is what Jonathan Coulton used to plan his early tours.

Twitter tools

Twtvite, Schmap and the rest are great single-use web apps. If your entire audience is on Twitter they are perfect. If not, they will only ever be part of the answer.

In the context of Twitter, I reckon you could do some great stuff with these tools. Something like Schmap is a lightweight layer between the ephemera of Twitter and the static info page. There’s a map built in for instant geographical context, a simple one-click RSVP, a short decsription, a single image and a link to a page with more info. For the Twitter part of the solution you could do a lot worse.

Hand-rolled

There are some good Wordpress plugins and modules for other CMSs that let you post gig listings and make them look cool, link to ticket shops and so on. The problem with all of them is that they restrict the listings to your site. Great for fans, but not for everyone else. How many people look at your site to see who’s playing at their local venue?

The secret weapon

There’s a site called ArtistData that lets you update loads of services at once. You enter the gig details once and they get synced to Myspace, Facebook, etc. We still need to figure out where best to put the listings, but ArtistData will come in handy.

How do we put them together?

Let’s get technical. What are the fixed points?

1. We can’t ignore Facebook. People on Facebook will want to use it for events.
2. We only want to update gig details once.
3. A gig needs to be shareable on at least Facebook, Twitter and email.
4. We want people to be able to say they’re coming and ideally comment, but not necessarily all on the same platform.
5. Each gig needs a single canonical URL which acts as the digital address of the physical event.
6. We want to avoid automated or annoying tweets and status updates.

I think the trick is to separate out the functionality:

• Create one master page for each gig with all the details, links, pictures, flyers etc.
• Automate the creation of an entry on each platform you want to support that provides basic information and links back to the master page. This doesn’t include Twitter, unless there’s a very clever non-annoying natural language solution. Better to automate the creation of the Schmap and update Twitter by hand.
• As a bonus, it would be great if the master page could pull in some stats from the satellite pages (eg. how many Facebook RSVPs or Twtvite sign-ups) and reflect the conversation going on around the gig (which might tie in with Steve Lawson’s post about machine tagging gigs) UPDATE: Steve’s post was about machine tagging beta releases of music, but is still worth a read.

What do you reckon?

The question is, what do we use to create the master page? Facebook might be a contender. It’s tricky to feed stuff out from Facebook, but ArtistData could push the content to Facebook and the others.

What do you reckon? Any thoughts? What do you use?

UPDATE: @garrettc, @quitexander, @platform3, @Jazza_UK and @mondoagogo mentioned Last.fm, GigPress, Songkick and friends as good platforms for and/or sources of gig info. Thank you all. I’ll investigate and report back. ;)

I’m playing Hammond at the Albert Hall with Little Fish

In a bizarre twist of fate I’ve ended up playing Hammond organ for Little Fish. This is a good thing. Little Fish rocks, I love playing the Hammond and I get to play the Royal Albert Hall.

The backstory is rather convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it short. It begins at the Zodiac in 2001…

I went to see the Roadworks Songwriters Tour at the Zodiac. There was a guy called Jont who was great and wore no shoes. I went to his monthly gig at the 12-Bar Club a few times and drank a lot of tequila.

Over the next five years I went to loads of his gigs. Some of them were UNLIT (a mixture of a house party and a gig), and eventually I put on an UNLIT of my own at the Gardeners Arms in January 2008. Jont played, I did a set at the piano and Stornoway played acoustic. Jont noticed that I could actually play, and I started to play piano at some of his gigs. We played a load of house concerts, small gigs and festivals around England (and a couple in Paris) through 2008/9.

Last year Jont put together a band he likes to call The Infinite Possibility (a 7-piece with bass, electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, backing vocals, percussion and my brother on drums) and we recorded an album, produced by Nigel of Bermondsey. A couple of weeks ago we were down at Rotator rehearsing for a final recording session (Jont wrote a new song that’s going on the album). JuJu from Little Fish turned up to sing some vocals on the new track. It turns out she had been looking for a Hammond player for almost a year, and I’m a Hammond player.

And now we’re supporting Them Crooked Vultures

It’s slightly insane. In a couple of weeks I’ll be sitting behind a beautiful Hammond VK-3 and staring wide-eyed past JuJu with her 50s Gibson and Nez with his immaculately tuned drum kit, into a 3-storey sea of Them Crooked Vultures fans. Not bad for a Monday night.

Unfortunately it’s all sold out (in – like – 0.3 seconds), but we’re playing another half dozen gigs around the country in the next couple of weeks (Bristol tomorrow, then Portsmouth, Oxford, London, Nottingham, Manchester). You should come and see us!

The ultimate band website revisited

I’m going back to an old topic from a new perspective: the ultimate band website. Having thought about it for a year I have a load of random ideas, but I haven’t yet put them together into a coherent structure. This is an attempt to find out what I think about band websites – an essay in the true sense.

What’s the point of a band website?

Most bands want a website that looks cool, in the same way that they want their album art to be cool and their gig posters to be cool. Album art and gig posters have a very simple purpose: the one-way communication of a small amount of information. A website has a complex purpose: it has to be a social object¹ around which people can gather and converse, a point of engagement between fan and band, and a shop (if not more). And it has to look cool.

As with all this internet stuff, there’s no single answer that will suit every band. I rarely find band websites that I think are good, but when I do it’s always because the site completely fits with the band. Pomplamoose’s main internet presence is their YouTube channel, because they make Videosongs and that’s where their fans go to engage with them. BareNakedLadies have a full-featured website with multi-author blogs, behind-the-scenes videos, and shedloads of content², because their fans are geeks and enjoy getting involved with all that stuff.

What about bands that aren’t geeks?

There’s a problem when a band doesn’t use the internet in the same way as its fans. If a band only wants to use MySpace I’m never going to notice them. If a potential fan isn’t on Twitter they are unlikely to hear about me. If a band wants to communicate by post (I’m looking at you, Islet ;) they are going to have trouble engaging with the digital geeks who want to be involved.

There’s a part of me (the wannabe rock star) that sides with the stubborn bands. I stopped playing live gigs completely last year and just played online in various weird and wonderful ways. I love the two issues of The Isness that Islet have posted to me (in the actual post – on paper). I understand that as a band you want to define the rules of engagement and make your artistic statement. I understand that a lot of bands don’t spend all their time online. I understand that maintaining an element of mystery and theatre can make for an amazing magical live show.

But there’s another part of me (the music fan) that’s only ever had really deep positive experiences with bands when I’ve been able to get past the show and find out about the people and the story behind the music. At first it was from my Dad telling stories about records in his collection. As a teenager it was through books and films about rock stars and music scenes that I’d missed by decades, and endless conversations in record shops and issues of Record Collector. Then people started posting MP3 bootlegs on forums³ and making websites about otherwise mysterious legends. Now people recommend music on Posterous, tweet Spotify playlists and the conversations about music are easier to tap into than ever before.

Why not let the fans make all the content?

The old music industry model created social objects (records, magazine interviews, press releases, tabloid stories) to feed the conversation, so the artists didn’t have to. Now people want to engage with bands outside the mainstream press, and either the band creates the social objects or the fans do. A lot of bands are building websites that allow fans to create stuff, but it’s not that easy.

Jonathan Coulton fans make loads of videos, cover versions and remixes of his music, but he gave them loads of stuff first: he posted a song a week and blogged the whole thing. He also spent half his time answering email.

So why not let the fans make all the content? Because in almost all cases they won’t. Not unless the bands make way more first.

Why do fans go to band websites?

This may be the wrong question to ask, because I’m not sure they do. I certainly don’t (well, almost never), and in my straw poll of random people in pubs over the last few months nobody else did either. Let’s figure out the reasons why I very occasionally visit band websites:

• I visit Steve Lawson’s site for the blog. But only occasionally, because I read it in RSS and only ever click through to the site if there’s a funky embed that doesn’t show up in Google Reader.
• I went to Pomplamoose’s site after I’d watched all their YouTube videos to see whether they had anything else to offer. They don’t. Their site is just music players, the latest video, iTunes links and an about page.
• I follow links from Twitter to blog posts on bands’ or artists’ websites sometimes. If it’s an amazing blog post and I’m absolutely overwhelmed with respect for the author I might listen to a track or two.
• That’s it. I may not be a representative music fan, but I’ll bet that if you asked random music-liking people⁴ which band websites they visit regularly (or ever) you’d be met with blank stares. So…

Where do fans go to engage with music online?

Me first. Here’s what I’ve used recently to discover, share, research, listen to and talk about music (not counting my own music):

• @solobasssteve just recommended a band to me on Twitter, after I mentioned liking Pomplamoose.
• Earlier today I checked out Chris TT’s tour schedule after seeing him talk about his upcoming gigs on Twitter. He doesn’t pimp his gigs often – I follow him because I enjoy reading his tweets – so when he does I’m interested.
• Also today I saw Richard Walters tweet about Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue, and sent him a link to the fan website where I originally read about it years ago (before it was reissued⁵).
• A few days ago I listened to some tunes by The Monroe Transfer on their Bandcamp page, after I had a conversation over Google Chat with Nick about releasing music online.
• I’ve watched a load of songs on YouTube that people have recommended, embedded, tweeted, Facebooked or emailed recently – maybe 30 this year.
• I’ve listened to Miriam Jones’ Solitary Songs on Bandcamp because I keep meaning to buy them but haven’t got round to it yet.
• I’ve embedded an occasional YouTube video of a song on my Tumblr blog.
• I’ve listened to maybe a dozen tracks that people I follow have posted on Tumblr, but only when there’s a story or at least a hearty recommendation to go with it. There’s nothing less appealing than a lonely Flash audio player.
• As I was editing this post I listened to three tracks by a band called Physical Education because they flattered me on Twitter.

I don’t really know what other people get up to, but off the top of my head:

• People still seem to be using Spotify quite a lot. This year I’ve only opened it to get a couple of invites to send to people, but then I don’t listen to music radio either so let’s not read too much into that.
• I see quite a few links fly by on Twitter to blip.fm, last.fm and the like.
• Andrew Dubber is making Dubber’s Weekly Jazz (“Like a weekly specialist radio show – but on Spotify”), a weekly Spotify playlist posted to a Posterous blog.
• Steve Lawson is embedding Bandcamp players on a Posterous blog to recommend new music (he even recommended my album!)

Any conclusions?

I’ll let this lot compost for a while and see if I can come up with anything useful, but here are my initial thoughts:

1. I’m an edge case in the big picture of listening habits. But now that the homogenous glob of “audience” is fragmented into a whole load of individuals, I guess we’re dealing with an entire dataset of edge cases. I know that can’t exist (except maybe on a circular graph – anyone?), but you know what I mean.
2. Maybe a band website just needs to link to all the other stuff (sort of like flavors.me, which I used to set up benwalkersongwriter.com yesterday).
3. Maybe a band website needs to be a blog to be interesting. That’s certainly what draws me in to a band (and what I’m leaning towards with my own site).
4. Maybe a band doesn’t need a website at all.
5. Bands need to create shareable stuff. For me as a music fan that means blog posts, YouTube videos, music on Bandcamp or Spotify and MP3s for Tumblr.
6. Mysterious bands never appear on my radar. They may be getting great reviews or appearing in Sunday supplements or being on TV or making the best album ever, but I won’t know about it. And if I don’t know about it I won’t miss it.

I need to have at least half a dozen more pub conversations about this before it will start to make sense. If you can help clarify any of it, or just add an example to my painfully narrow data, please comment. I’m intrigued to know what you think. ;)

Do you like sweet music (yeah, yeah)

We have pulled out the stops to bring you four cross-genre works of musical art wrapped up in this week’s This Reality Podcast:

• The power-chord driven Paramore-esque goodness of The Hype Theory
• The indie/retro flavours of Little Room
• The smokey, seductive, after-dinner qualities of Hollie Sheard and Friends
• The Edinburgh-based collective of excellence known as Night Noise Team

As well as the musical brilliance we also bring you just a flavour of life-inspired ranting, brought to  you courtesy of the kind of week that the two presenters of the show have had.

You can subscribe and listen for free via iTunes http://bit.ly/25zMa8, or pick this episode up from the podcast website at http://bit.ly/cGFKOU

Sade – Soldier of Love, Review

(4/5) The title of Sade’s new album, Soldier of Love, could not be more apt. The fifty-one year old singer – who has been making music for over twenty-seven years with her constant band members Stuart Matthewman, Paul Denman, and Andrew Hale – seems to have spent a lifetime not only battling love, but fame, life, and her own personal demons. The result is a singer who sounds both defiant and weary on a set of songs capturing love’s disappointments but with a sense of hope that love will redeem and save. This is evident not only in the lyrics Sade has written, but also in the quality of her voice – world weary, slightly frayed around the edges, full of melancholic soul, but still as beautiful and rarefied as ever. The album is also the crowning achievement of a long career which has seen her shift more records than any other UK female artist, and though she is not as well-known these days in her homeland, she is revered in the States as one of the best soul singers of her generation, a reverence much deserved.

Penultimate song Skin has the distinction of featuring a small tribute to Michael Jackson, whose name is mentioned against one of his faint, infamous yelps. The song has tough beats, dub bass, and washes of guitar that match Sade’s gritty determination to leave behind a lover who is wrong for her against a wonderful melodic refrain. The album closes with the delicate guitars of The Safest Place, a paean to her daughter. It is full of the tender love and protection only a mother can offer her child. Again, the lyrical themes of the album are prevalent; "My heart has been a lonely warrior who’s been to war/so that you can be sure" she sings, and her voice rings with truth. It is a gentle close to an album full of lyrical grit and sonic toughness, but it is also full of hope and warmth. Soldier of Love might not win Sade any new fans, but those who have grown up with her music will have much to love.

Official Website of Sade

Buy Sade – Soldier of Love (Amazon)

Review written for and originally posted on Wears the Trousers.

Husky Rescue – Ship Of Light, Review

Husky Rescue started off as the one-man project of Finnish artist Marko Nyberg, whose cinematic and expansive music aimed to capture the dual qualities of photography and imagined film scores with the use of ambient and atmospheric flourishes. The ensemble as we know it was formed by Nyberg for 2002’s debut album, Country Falls, with Reeta-Leena Korhola joining on vocals, Ville Riippa on keyboards, Anssi Sopanen on drums and Miika Colliander on guitar. Despite this expansion, Nyberg’s early intentions are clearly in evidence on third album, Ship Of Light. These ten songs have a widescreen feel, full of space and ambient atmospherics, but it’s meshed with a synthesised pop mentality that prevents proceedings from becoming too ethereal, pinning the eerie sonics down with traditional pop song structures and Korhola’s precise enunciations.

Showing an encouraging progression from previous Husky Rescue releases, Ship Of Light adds up to an unusual mix of pop music, climatic electronica and serious musicianship that’s perfect for the last months of winter.

Official Website

Buy Husky Rescue – Ship of Light (Amazon)

Review written for and originally posted on Wears the Trousers.

Blogging with TextMate and Markdown

What a geek. Seriously.

I should be in bed, cause I was out playing a club gig with Little Fish last night. Instead I’m seeing if I can blog from TextMate using Markdown¹. If you don’t know what I mean, you’re lucky. Your brain doesn’t make you geek out this much…

Alex Gardner – I’m Not Mad, Video

Alex Gardner has just dropped his debut video, I’m Not Mad, ahead of a new album due out later this year. The single is available from 22nd March and it’s a great melancholy pop tune marrying Gardner’s soulful voice with Xenomania’s shimmering pop production. I really love the song but the video is a little uninspiring – it’s basically Alex in a room of tin-foil and mirrors emoting into the camera with a wan female simpering around the place. Fortunately he is good looking enough to distract from the rather non-existent premise but the video does throw up some interesting questions. Prior to its release Gardner has been marketed as a much younger Paolo Nutini – model good looks, soulful croon, acoustic guitars, plaid shirts and skinny jeans. He has in fact done some live shows with Nutini and until recently his website had been showcasing an acoustic song, There Goes My Heart, which seemed to suggest his musical direction would be the typical singer-songwriter with a guitar on his lap.

Fast-forward to I’m Not Mad and all of a sudden we are presented with an electro-pop singer in the Frankmusik/Erik Hassle mode. The question is, did Gardner want to take this more commercial direction or was it imposed on him by his record company? In truth, Paolo Nutini’s music is out of step with the sound of 2010 and it would be a high risk strategy to launch an unknown male solo act to try and emulate Nutini’s surprising success. To have Xenomania produce Gardner seems a highly calculated step and one I am not convinced Gardner is that well-suited to. If you watch the video, he just doesn’t look comfortable in his glossy surroundings. The closest he comes to dancing is tapping his foot, which seems strange in a pop medium of dance beats and electronica (similar artists like Sam Sparro and Dan Black dance around happily in their videos). He is dressed in very simple clothes – grandad shirt, smart trousers and trainers, and not a single outfit change throughout. He just seems so jarring and out of place and lacking confidence. Compare I’m Not Mad with There Goes My Heart (in which he is very relaxed) and you can appreciate what I am saying.

I hope Alex Gardner does well – I do really love I’m Not Mad and I can only wait until the album is released to appreciate what direction he is being taken in. I think ideally this song would have been better released in its original form with a remix by Xenomania – he would have had the best of both worlds and it would have given his record company a forum in which to find out what style people are responding to more favourably. The danger is, in a bid to sound current and go against his natural style, fans might not take to his music and it would be a travesty if he is overlooked. We our long overdue a bona fide male popstar in the UK to replace Robbie Williams.

Official Website for Alex Gardner

Madonna – The Best That Never Was, Part Two

In light of the collaborative blog I wrote with Dan (see my selection and his selection) I decided to compile an album of the songs we chose as a kind of ‘best of’ that never was (hence the title). As well as the five songs apiece Dan and I selected from across Madonna’s career, I have added four other songs to represent all eleven of Madonna’s studio albums, hence the inclusion of Physical Attraction (from Madonna, 1983), Till Death Do Us Part (from Like A Prayer, 1989), Inside of Me (from Bedtime Stories, 1994) and Let It Will Be (from Confessions on a Dance Floor, 2005) all of which represent the strongest non-singles on those albums. Think of it as a retrospective of a number of Madonna songs often overlooked when people think about her huge catalogue of work. I hope you enjoy it.

Tracklisting:

1. Physical Attraction (Single Edit) (3.50)

2. Over and Over (Remix Edit) (3.58)

3. Where’s The Party (Remix Edit) (4.16)

4. Spotlight (Radio Edit) (3.42)

5. Till Death Do Us Part (Album Edit) (3.56)

6. Something to Remember (5.07)

7. Where Life Begins (Radio Mix) (4.33)

8. Inside of Me (4.12)

9.  Sky Fits Heaven (Radio Mix) (3.45)

10. Time Stood Still (3.48)

11. Amazing (3.43)

12. Mother and Father (Radio Edit W/Out Rap) (3.25)

13. Let It Will Be (Radio Edit) (3.38)

14. Devil Wouldn’t Recognise You (Album Edit) (4:00)

Download Madonna – The Best That Never Was Album (To download the album, right click and save as – you will need to unzip this file). This album is intended as a limited download only and anyone who downloads it should purchase music by this artist. Any request of copyright infringement will be heeded and the album removed.  It is intended to promote the works of the artist.The link to this album will be deleted within one week.

Please note the quality of sound may vary on some of the tracks due to the different sources this album was compiled from.