Gig news

It seems that every few months I have to do another 'catch up' post. This could simply demonstrate that I'm a terrible blogger with nothing to say, but I do have an excuse this time in that my missus gave birth to our daughter on May 17th. "But that's ages ago!" I hear you cry. Yeah, well - babies take up a lot of time, energy and 'thinking brain'...

So anyway, to the news. Hmm... where to start? I might have to break this up into a few posts (a-ha! That automatically gives me more material for the next article...) so let's start off with gig news:

We've only played a couple of shows that I haven't blogged about. First off, we played at the Cobden Club on April 28th as part of the BMI Sessions/Hit Sheet showcase night. The Cobden is a funny old place. I know the area fairly well as it's just down the road from Eastcote Studios, where we recorded our album, and I love that part of London. The night, however, was a bit odd. As an industry showcase, we knew it wasn't going to be a night where a sea of appreciative audience members whoop delightedly after every song, but even so it seemed a very staid and somber affair. Unfortunately, everything over-ran. So much so, that by the time we got on stagewe were told to keep the levels low, and the sound man turned everything down. Not ideal for a band like us... Quite how many 'industry' people stayed to listen to us I don't know, but we played pretty well so I hope anyone that did bother to stay enjoyed it.

Whilst flyering around the local area before the gig, we bumped into Tim Brownlow (of Avatars and Belasco fame). we had the opportunity to work with Tim's 'voice' when we remixed Avatars forthcoming single 'The Air', so it was great to put a face to the name. He's a top guy too - we ended up hanging out in the pub with him much longer than expected - so long, in fact, that the label ended up calling us from the venue asking where the hell we were!

So yeah, a good night all in all, and a venue I'd like to play again - although maybe not quite so late next time!

On May 20th, (me with bleary eyes and a lack of sleep) we were back at the Hatfield Forum. JamJar is the student-run monthly event at the Forum which we played back in February and I raved about the show and the venue then. This time it was a 'best of' event, showcasing the best bands that had played at JamJar nights during the year. I don't need to say again how amazing a venue The Forum is - my previous blog post says it all - but I will say that if I could play venues like that every week, I would be the happiest gigging musician on the planet.

Anyway, the night was topped off by the audience cheering for the band they thought were the best of the 'best of' show. We won this hands down and were blown away by the response from the crowd once again. We even managed to shift a few albums! (More about the album to follow - that's a whole other blog post...)

Once again big thanks to the Forum for having us, and to our artist liaison, who managed to track down some headache pills for Andy and was still there to help us load out after all the other artist liaisons had left hours ago!

My last blog post was short but sweet - Glade Festival was cancelled. This is a real shame. We loved the experience of playing at the Rabbit Hole Stage at Glade last year, even though we had to perform without our drummer Alex, who was in the US at the time. Glade's organisers' statement alluded to problems agreeing policing arrangements, etc. with the local authority which is such a shame. Unfortunately, it highlights the fact that cancellation can happen to any festival, no matter what its size, at any time - even well established ones.

Nevertheless, we plough on and we currently have a few dates on the horizon. First up, we're at Hamswell Festival near Bath for the third year in a row. Early bird tickets are still available for £35 for the whole weekend and you can click here to buy them. This is a proper grassroots, up-and-coming festival, featuring a fantastically unpretentious line-up and about the best atmosphere you could hope for in a small festival. Hope to see you there!

The week after Hamswell we're off to Spain, for two gigs in the North-West. On Thursday 19th August we'll be playing at Le Club in La Coruña, then on Saturday 21st we'll be at the Festival Independente de Vilalba. We're really looking forward to this trip - it'll be fascinating to see how we're received by a completely impartial crowd. I'm also looking forward to hearing Andy's Spanish banter!

The build up for these gigs has included some features in the Spanish press and on local Spanish radio, so hopefully there will be a few people there to support us!

Along with all of this, we're hoping to do an online streamed gig on the 4th August - details of this to follow. There's talk of some other exciting venues coming up as well, but with nothing confirmed, I'll leave you in suspense for the moment...

Right - I think that's us all up to date with the gig news now - I'll be back soon with the other news!

Glade Festival Cancelled!

Gutted...

Hopefully we'll be able to find some more gigs to fill the gap, but the summer won't be the same without our trip to Glade...

Smart Playlists

I've blogged before about my troubles choosing music to listen to on my very short journey to The Day Job, so I decided to try something new: smart playlists.

iTunes users will be aware of Smart Playlists, I'm sure - they are iTunes' way of sorting music into lists based on certain rules. I've used them in the past to catalog my music in different ways - a playlist of all low bitrate MP3s (so I can dig out the CDs and re-rip them), a playlist of anything that falls into any one of several genres of music (usually things I don't want to listen to, so I can deselect them for syncing to my iPod) - but mostly for collation or informational purposes, rather than listening to them.

Whilst rummaging through my iTunes library, I discovered the vast numbers of songs on there that I have simply never listened to. Ever. Of course, a lot of these are ripped from CDs that I definitely have listened to at some point in the past, but not all of them.

It's maybe a flaw of digital music collections that the lack of physical product means there is no proper 'flicking through' your collection. Yes, with cover flow you can 'see' the albums as you scroll past, but that's not the same as pulling it out of the CD rack, checking the back for track listings, a particular song catching your eye, or the artwork calling out memories from way back... Maybe this is me being a touch nostalgic, but you get the idea.

So anyway, I created a new Smart Playlist called 'Things I've never listened to' which, funnily enough, contains everything with a play count of less than 1. And this is what I've been listening on my journeys to and from work these days.

For reasons unknown to me, the playlist is sorted alphabetically by album title. Maybe this was the order I was sorting my iTunes library in when I created it? Anyway, when it first started, it contained over 3,500 songs. 3,500? That's a lot of unheard music!

And so I started wading my way through it. This started months ago, and two weeks ago I got below the 3,000 songs marker.

So what musical delights has this adventure thrown up? Well, I'm still working through 'C' at the moment (in fact, I was listening to Morcheeba's 'Charango' this morning), so here is a roll call of some of the highlights, and frankly bizarre-lights of the 'Things I've never listened to' playlist so far:

A is for:

Abandonded Shopping Trolley Hotline (Gomez)

All Over the World: The very best of ELO (ELO) - I'm pretty sure this belongs to the missus...

Angel Dust (Faith No More)

Several of the Another Late Night series of compilations.

Arrested Development Greatest Hits (Arrested Development)

Attica Blues (Attica Blues) - classic old Mo'Wax album - really glad I re-found this

B is for:

11 Back To Mine albums - absolutely love these compilations. Have discovered loads of other artists through this series.

Bandwagonesque (Teenage Fanclub) - I used to have this on cassette!

Lots of 'Best of...' albums, including Bob James, Blur, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, De La Soul, James and The Small Faces!

Beverly Hills Cop Soundtrack - yeah, pretty sure this isn't mine either...

Blue Lines (Massive Attack) - this definitely falls into the category of 'overplayed CD, underplayed mp3s'

6 remixes of Boombastic (Shaggy) - actually, I seem to remember buying this...

Brixton (Pearl Jam) - a double CD bootleg from the Versus tour. Barely audible bass on the recording, but still awesome.

The Burdens of Being Upright (Tracy Bonham) - I went to a Skunk Anansie gig once just to see Tracy Bonham play. Great harmonies here.

C is for:

Cafe Del Mar volumes 1-9. No idea why I stopped at nine, nor why I've never listened to them on my iPod. Love these - Cafe Del Mar is a massive influence on my more downtempo writing, both the place and these compilations. Really interesting to listen to them all in order and hear the whole 'chill-out' sound develop year by year...

Californication (The Red Hot Chili Peppers)

Casanova (The Divine Comedy)

And that's us all up to date. Will keep you posted if this whole process turns up any more gems or howlers!

A sigh of relief, and filming videos.

OK, so I guess you're all dying to know how my studio computer is...

Good news! It's fixed! There was a VST plugin that had 'gone rogue' and was stopping Cubase from loading. Plugin identified by watching the loading messages on Cubase, then removed from the VSTPlugins folder and it's all fixed! Woop!

Of course to keep the ying and yang of technology balanced, the digital fates have now decreed that Andy's laptop won't load Pro Tools, or edit video...

The video editing thing is a bit of a problem, since we're in the process of creating a video for our track 'Has To Be Done'. This is a far cry from the last video we made, but instead comprises of Andy and I filming a lot of stuff in the dark.

I've mentioned before about how important YouTube is as a source of information these days and this is definitely true of emerging artists. However, it's often easy to be lazy about such things and post up videos of songs with single still images over them. We're guilty of it ourselves, but with such a wealth of material that we want to make available on YouTube, we have to cut corners somewhere.

In order not to cop out completely, we like to make sure that there are proper videos for some of our tracks every so often, so that's where this video comes in.

Hopefully it will be ready in the next couple of weeks (if we can get a video editing computer working again...) so keep an eye out for it then!

It never rains, but it pours...

So a catalogue of things have pissed me off in the last couple of weeks.

First up, WHY oh WHY is it so difficult to get any information out of Ryanair about how much a flight is going to cost? Here's the scenario: we're playing a festival in Spain in August. We need to get to Spain, along with our equipment. How best to do this? Surely flying on a low-cost airline seems the simple solution?

Since we're organising travel ourselves, rather than the festival organisers doing it (gah...), I had to provide a rough estimate of the total amount I'd be invoicing them for. So I pop onto Ryanair's website (no email address for sales or anything and a permament 20 minute wait on the premium-rate phone line...) and flick through the price list and come up with a figure.

Now, I knew that I was going to have to pay through the nose for baggage. That's fine - we're taking loads of heavy stuff, it's to be expected. So I cost up the required number of flights, an extra seat for the guitar, the additional costs for flying musical instruments, etc and come up with a figure, which I present to the festival organisers. They seem happy with this and off we go.

So I actually go to book the tickets online and there's a £30 per seat charge for online check-in, plus a £10 admin charge per seat, and no sign of the alleged discount for checking in baggage online! So now I've booked flights, but no baggage, and I'm already nearly over budget! I mean, what the hell is that all about? So it looks like I'm going to be paying out of my own pocket to be able to go and play in Spain after all. Ridiculous.

Second gripe: how on Earth can the Trinity Bar in Harrow justify having such a terrible sound system? As Harrow's only live music venue, they surely have some sort of responsibility to make sure that bands playing there get to properly showcase themselves. And Harrow, once again, seems to be a hotbed of talent at the moment...

Playing your home patch is important. When we played last Thursday, there were loads of people there that wouldn't normally trek up to Shoreditch to see us play, but were more than happy to pop up the road to Trinity to see us. Yet after the show, the general response from punters was, "yeah it was alright - sound was shit, though".

Yes, I'm well aware that somewhere like the Trinity can't have the kind of sound system that, say, The Cobden Club or Hoxton Bar and Kitchen have, but there seem to be some pretty fundamental problems there:

1. Why are all the Bose speakers around the room pointing at the same spot in the middle of the dancefloor. Doesn't this create some horrendous phasing problems?

2. Why are there four Martin PA speakers hung in front of the stage that aren't even connected?

3. Why is the sound position not front-of-house? How can you expect a sound engineer to have any idea what is going on from a monitor engineer position?

4. Why does their website say, "We now have finished installing our brand new PA and we think you'll agree it sounds pretty tidy"? Sorry, Trinity, but I'll have to disagree with you there...

It's really sad, cos I see a lot of benefit in playing at Trinity - the only venue in our home town - but if the venue isn't up to scratch then I guess we'll have to keep hacking it up to Shoreditch instead...

To be fair, maybe not all the blame should be levelled at the Trinity. Maybe the question should be: why are there no live music venues left in Harrow?

Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, our main studio PC has stopped working in that in no longer loads Cubase. I've yet to see the problem first hand - I'm going round to have a look tonight - but it sounds pretty grim to me.

I bought the studio PC around 6 or 7 years ago as a custom build from Digital Village's shop in Acton. It's a 2.4GHz P4 with (now) 4GB RAM running DV's stripped out version of Windows XP and Cubase SX2. It's old, tired and I have a terrible feeling that it might just have finally decided it's had enough and wants to be retired to the great circuitboard in the sky...

The problem is what do we do now? I mean, we've got a small Pro Tools M-Powered rig running on Andy's laptop, but we have a lack of plugins for that, since everything we own is VST and on my PC. I've got Ableton running on my Macbook, but I'm only just getting in to that, and it's proving a difficult learning curve after so many years of Steinbergishness.

Meanwhile, we've got half-finished remixes on the studio box that we can't get off, and a stack of other work piling up. Gah!

Moan, moan, moan... Maybe I can find some good news to end this post? Um... Oh yeah, the Cobden Club gig has been moved forwards to April 28th, so that's a good thing.

Other than that, keep an eye on this blog for either tears of joy or sadness when I've assessed the state of the studio PC...

Catch Up

I know, I know - it's been ages since my last post...

It's not that I've had nothing to say, it's just that The Day Job has been pretty manic recently so I've had a lack of time on my hands.

So what's new? First up, we played a couple more gigs - first at the Rhythm Factory (a new venue for us) and then back at the Underbelly, Hoxton Square as a last minute fill-in for another band that had pulled out.

We're now racking up the gigs for the coming months, so grab your diary and put these dates in:

1st April - Trinity Bar, Harrow
20th May - The Forum, Hatfield
30th June - The Cobden Club, W10
17th July - Glade Festival
14th August - Hamswell Festival
21st August - Festival Independente de Vilalba, Spain!

Hopefully there will be a few more to slot in over the coming weeks so keep an eye out here, or on our Facebook page, for any announcements!

Meanwhile, label-mates Relation are gearing up for their next single, 'Optimistic' - our favourite track off their debut album, 'Fear of Night'. One of the remixes on the single is by us, and as part of the promotional drive this is available FREE for a short time only! You can pick up the free track, along with a couple of others from the single, from Soundcloud now! Click here!

On the releases front, we've been gathering the remixes for our next single so hopefully we'll have some details about that very soon.

More posts to come, I promise... I know I've been slack! Meanwhile I look forward to seeing you on the 1st April at Trinity - we're assured this is one of the busiest nights of the year, so it should be immense!

Smash more gigs!

Whenever we play venues we've never been to before there is a certain sense of anticipation. Will it be dingy? Dank? Will the sound system be appalling? Will it be too small? Too large? Will we get a decent dressing room?

Sometimes, things work out much, much better than you could possibly imagine, and that's what happened to us last Thursday.

The Forum, Hatfield opened in September 2009 and is one of the premiere live music venues in Hertfordshire. Built at a cost of £38m, it boasts a total capacity of 2,000 people over three rooms and has already hosted acts such as will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Doves, Scouting for Girls, Taio Cruz, Enter Shikari and N-Dubz.

Situated on campus at the University of Hertfordshire, it also acts as a massively impressive venue for student union events, such as Jam Jar - the night that we played at.

So anyway, we rocked up and sound-checked, whilst technical folk scurried around sorting out lighting, monitoring, smoke machines, etc. (All of us except Owen, who managed to be 3 HOURS LATE for soundcheck. Nice one...) and wondering how many people would turn up to such a big venue.

The answer was lots! It's a bit of a no-brainer, really: free entry, pound-a-pint, free parking (for those not taking advantage of the pound-a-pint promotion, of course), great venue... makes me wonder why we ever bother playing dingy basement venues in London that are £8 to get in, and over £3 a pint!

Seriously, though, the whole student union experience far outweighed the recent forays into London. The crowd were much more responsive, the venue was much more impressive, the staff were much more accommodating - whether this is just a great advert for The Forum or whether it's the norm for such venues we'll wait and see, but for now I'm crossing my fingers for more University gigs!

Anyway, here's a snippet from the gig - our opening track from the show, "Underwater". Enjoy!

PS: If you haven't already, head over to SoundCloud to download our latest free single NOW!