People of the Decade

I was standing in the fine surroundings of my local supermarket over the weekend, waiting for my girlfriend to acquire her party provisions (wine, wine, some munchies and wine), trying desperately not to get in the way of the assortment of rambling folks scrambling for that third jumbo pack of toilet paper, when my eyes settled upon the magazine section. The Times was proudly listing their conteders for 'People of the Decade'. And the nominees were (cue drum roll...): Barak Obama, The Queen, Osama Bin Laden, Katie Price and Simon Cowell.
Now, the first thought that leapt to mind was something along the lines of 'you have to be joking'. A couple of heads of state are fair enough, but a terrorist leader, a girl who's breasts get as much if not more column inches than she does and a man who's been responsible for a sucession of terrible Christmas number 1's sung by glorified karaoke contestants? No way should they be contenders for a 'People of the Decade' award. However, as I continued to stare at the cover of the magazine, my reasoning was given a jolt, most likey initiated by the old lady hitting me with her shopping bag as she loaded up with a 4th jumbo pack of toilet rolls.
Firstly, consider the award title. 'People of the Decade' has no reference to 'Best People of the Decade' or 'Most Worthy People of the Decade'. It's just 'People of the Decade'. No inferrence is made one way or another. When you realise that, a whole other dimension is opened. Based upon impact on the decade alone, with no consideration of positive or negative tendancies, there's actually a pretty strong case for inclusion of all of these people. Which then results in a further question of just what kind of a mess are we in as a society and people when Katie Price has had a mammoth (mammary?) impact upon the decade. Her manipulation of the media for her own ends has made her millions, and could well end up as a case study of how to operate the world of celebrity when you start on pretty vacuous grounds.
Simon Cowell covers the same sort of ground that Katie Price does, but is actually more sinister. Whereas Jordan has made an admirable fist of coming across as someone limited who has made the most of whatever assests she has, Cowell is a far more openly clinical manipulator of the masses to his own ends. He occupies the position of someone who could probably do well in whatever field he chose, there's no denying his smart business acumen and ruthless streak, but what makes him personally so, well, ickky is the best way I can put it, is that he chose to exploit the masses for his job. And whilst there are many, many people who do that (politicians, companies, banks and executives), none do it whilst encouraging millions of people to watch in some sort of bizarre vouyeristic ritual. But it's that very thing which gives him his impact upon the decade, and makes us sorry collaborators.
Taking the award for ultimate bogeyman is Osama Bin Laden. For impact on the decade with minimal public phone-in votes, and no real need to extract his acres of cleavage whenever there's a camera near (not that that happens much), look no further than the man who hasn't been seen for nigh on ten years. If ever there was a maximum return from minimm effort, OBL's use of the media has been it. A fuzzy handycam sub-youtube quality clip every now and again, and the world media laps it up. None of the 'I'm on every chat show' kind of PR that Katie Price has to engage in. Just the odd 20 second video clip, and that's it for the next two years. Yes, Barak Obama and HRH have undoubtedely had a huge impact on world affairs and the man in the street, but have any had quite the resonance that OBL has managed? Certainly none of them on so little real work. And if the person of the decade really is Osama Bin Laden, what does that say about the state of the world as it is?

Sleepy Does It

There has been a severe increase in the time and demands on my beddy-byes. I've never been a particularly heavy sleeper, always retiring pretty late, but this last couple of weeks have pushed the boundaries. With some serious recording being done with the band at a studio about 150 miles away, I've been commuting back home to then spend all evening until about 2am doing more recording at the studio up here. Then back to the other studio the day after. And all this due to an imaginary deadline we set for ourselves. There's no record label pressure, no manager screaming at us, and no expectation from a rabid public awaiting the results of our endeavour. So why the heck are we pummelling ourselves? Because we must, and if we in some way miss our own targets, we fail ourselves. And that's the biggest fail of all.

Manflu Strikes!

I should really have seen it coming. There has been a tendancy for my life to follow a pretty obvious pattern in the last few years, and it goes something like 'Get up early, go to work, race home, spend evening playing music/rehearsing/at gigs/doing sport of some sort, return home, then break out computer and start doing all the admin/emailing/web posting etc. that needs doing for keeping bands working, go to bed usually well into the early hours, then repeat'. This pattern continues, normally allied to a less than perfect diet, until my body says 'that's your lot, I'm having a breather' and promptly inflicts crippling diseases upon me. Such is the current case as I'm off work with a head feeling like it's going to explode and a throat that's as sore as a Death Metal vocalist's.

You know you really need to re-organise your time in order to avoid these kinds of issues, indeed, it's no co-incidence that I've not blogged in ages because I'm so busy, but of course what will happen is that I'll get over the illness, and before I know it I'll be back in the manic rat race of a life I lead and not have time to think about re-organising my time. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to really consider how best to approach what I do and how I do it. If you don't see regular posts on here, you'll know I've failed miserably to sort myself out...

I Also Play Drums...

Have you ever felt that the weight of everything else bears down on you to the point that the original cause and point of the exercise gets lost in the morass of detail? Let me explain. As a wee lad, I was motivated by the usual kiddie urges to follow my interests, and for reasons that elude me (but probably relate to being attracted to noisy, obnoxious and person-unfriendly things), I ended up being into playing and listening to music. Specifically, music that involved me sitting behind the drums and banging away. Now, this activity kept me enthralled and engaged for many years, and I got to the point of being quite good at it, so much so that other people asked me to play with them in bands and even to go on tour with them. But it was at that point things started to go a little awol. In the quest for betterment, and the promotion of advancing your cause (whatever that may be), other factors start to loom large. For instance, recording an album. With the cost effectiveness and ease of doing it yourself these days, spending thousands of pounds in a studio or doing it yourself would seem to be an obvious choice to make. But after a day at work, heading straight off to your personal studio to spend a whole evening recording guitars, bass, keyboards, vocals, Chinese Nose Flute or whatever starts to take it's toll. Combine that with having to send e-mails, sort your band finances out, arrange rehearsals and sort all manner of minutiae out for the band's admin purposes, and before you know it, in a week you find you have about half an hour to cram some drumming practice into the schedule. Which, given that the whole point of the exercise was to enable more drumming opportunity, seems more than a little odd.
It's for these reasons that I've almost stopped thinking of myself as a musician. I've involuntarily shifted into a position of desk-jockey, where it's almost become more important to make sure that a rehearsal is scheduled properly than to actually pay any attention to what's played at the rehearsal itself. Therefore, this is a personal wake up call to myself to make sure the purpose of doing all this extra work isn't lost. Yes, the management is important, but the music, and the thrill of playing it, is even more important. As long as that is kept in mind, I'll be able to smile to myself knowingly when someone else asks what I do in a band. "Sit at a computer typing. Oh, and I also play drums..."

DMB @ Wolves Civic

Yes, you read that right. Dave Matthews Band at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall. And this photo is from my girlfriend's camera. From American Enormodomes to Arenas, to Hyde Park and then onto... Wolves Civic. Venue holds about 2300, and I had ticket 000001. I had to get on a plane, go to New York and sit in Madison Square Garden last time I wanted to see this lot. And this time they play a tiny hall 15 minutes from where I live. To say I'm still buzzing would be a chronic understatement...

Click or Brick?

The commonly held belief amongst (admittedly older) music consumers is that you haven’t really made it as a band until your album is available in the shops. I know full well from the experiences I’ve had working the ‘unsigned/toilet circuit’ up to the ‘band is signed, has record deal and tours’ level that your average punter used to judge you by whether or not you had your own name divider in HMV or not, rather than what the heck your band sounded like or if you were any good.
Now, you’ll have had to have been walking round with your head in the sand if you were unaware of the current dilemma facing the music biz at the moment. The advent of digital downloads, file sharing and the resultant plummet of physical cd sales means the old school method of controlling artist output via big labels is just too sprawling and slow to react to be of any use anymore. Yet having your album ‘in the shops’ still seems to carry a certain gravitas with certain sections of the public. It’s clearly hard to break that old notion that if it’s not available at the record shop, no-one is going to buy it.
Just recently, there have been more than a couple of offers for The Dreaming Tree to get their albums into stores via distribution deals, and we’ve been pondering whether or not to take the offer up. It would mean our records are ‘in the shops’, and even within what are the (hopefully!) enlightened ranks of TDT, and our determination to stay outside the boundaries of ‘conventional’ music business models, there is still a whiff of excitement that getting to that stage would add an air of kudos and, for want of a better word, legitimacy, about seeing the band’s work in a retail outlet.
However, we need to stop and just question what is actually on the table here. I know from personal experience as a music lover that of all the time I spend in a shop, I’m bound to only see and look at a fraction of the music on offer. More likely, I’m going to go for stuff I know and am familiar with, and then if I’m faced with a choice of getting the latest record from Metallica, or an album by a band I’ve not heard of but who look like they could be interesting, I’ll probably be putting my £15 on the Bay-area Thrash legends. Far more important than that, though, is the hitherto unconsidered idea that actually finding the shop may soon prove more problematic than finding the record within.
My brother recently returned from a short break in Manhattan, NYC, where he expressed more than a little surprise that he couldn’t find any of the shops he used to frequent over there. HMV on 5th Avenue, Virgin in Times Square and other shops that used to be a thriving mecca have all, without exception, closed down. The reason for this has to undoubtedly be the impact of declining physical CD sales. I myself recently walked around York and saw yet another Zavvi being gutted after their collapse. The one HMV I did find had masses of DVDs, loads of console games, a hefty literature section (?) and about 2 racks of CDs, stashed almost apologetically at the back of the store out of harm’s way.
Essentially, the retail outlet seems to be well on the way out of fashion. Supermarket chains now carry the bulk of the record companies’ releases, so you’ll have no problems picking up the next X Factor Idol Strictly on Ice’s record from Tesco. For the rest of us, however, it seems that online is where everything is going to be. Certainly when you consider the difference in pricing that online providers can achieve compared to normal stores, shopping on the web is a no-brainer.
The conclusion therefore has to be that the limited resources of the ‘DIY’ band need to be firmly targeted at the point that is likely to garner the most return. In this case, online retail. Especially as getting your CD ‘in the shops’ these days would seem to suggest that your work is going to be seen as a bit of an obstruction to the spotty gamers desperate to reach the latest copy of Grand Theft Auto...

Oh, I'm Loving Dave...

There’s many a fine, fine drummer out there at the moment, and many of these fine, fine folk have reached a level of musicality and ability that others just have to sit up and take notice. Be it for reasons of nuclear-warhead infused speed, sheer outrageous technique, unrivalled musicality or a combination of all those features, there are several players around who flag up on the radar as great. Now, I love all these players, and there are indeed many, so why is it that whenever I speak to many other musos, and indeed even other drummers (deliberate gag, there...) the current name-drop of choice is none other than Dave Grohl.
Now, I like Dave. Indeed, he’s one of the very few guys who managed to achieve that most difficult of objectives, and change my opinion of him entirely. When Nirvana came out and I was at school, having just picked up the sticks, my first impression was ‘great tunes, shame about the caveman beating the kit’. This was set against the backdrop of listening to Neil Peart complete all sorts of odd-time tomfoolery (Tom-Sawyer-y?) with Rush, hence my teenage distain for anyone not playing in 13/16 and on a massive drumkit. Unfortunately, that prejudice stuck with me and I always thought our Dave was a bit of a basher, even though I musically liked Nirvana and later on the Foo Fighters. My opinion changed when Dave drummed on the Queens Of The Stone Age album ‘Songs For The Deaf’. I think that was the first time I actually felt the attitude and vibe coming off his drums, (especially on the song ‘A Song For The Dead’. Check out the intro. Ouch.) and from that point on, I’ve listened back to his drumming history and realised that I was the one who had gotten it wrong. He’s a monster player, with a deep pocket and great vibe, who gives it some attitude and plays for the song.
Now, you may be surprised that I feel a little on the narked side when my fellow musos quote Dave as being their current skin-beater of choice. Why, after the glowing recommendation I’ve just given him, is that the case, I hear you cry? Well, it stems from a couple of things, really. Firstly, the assumption that is inherent in many of the points that are raised ‘pro Dave’ relate to the idea that he plays ‘simple’, and because he does, then it’s cool for me to do so too. Nothing untoward in that, of course, it’s all good and proper for us to absorb the influence of our heroes and take that into our own playing. Sadly, I can’t escape the feeling that a lot of the time it’s apologist for not actually wanting to practice your instrument to improve. Indeed, many of the players saying that Dave is their favourite are the kind of people who can only bash, and are not only using Dave’s silky skills as cover for their own lack of ability, but are also missing the point when it comes to just how well Dave operates within a song. Secondly, when I turn up to a gig with my double kick, multi tom, several cymbal, monster drumkit, many are the sound men, promoters, venue owners and other bands who take one look, then rise as one to proclaim that Dave Grohl is their favourite drummer and he only plays a four piece kit, and I should really check out some of his stuff and see how he plays a four piece kit and still manages to make it sound awesome with only four pieces. Cheers, Dave. Get a bigger kit and start blasting some 16th notes at 200bpm just to keep these folks quiet, will you?