At some point in the past I wasn’t actually sure that this would ever come out but here it is, yo. I could write something moving about the relationship between the artist and his/her audience, the symbiotic line we each have one end of etc But really this is
YOU - ‘We like music’
Me - ‘I’ve made a music you might like, would you like to buy one?
You - Hmm, I dunno, what if it’s crap..?
It’s not crap. It’s me doing what it is that I do nowadays but maybe not next time and after that who can really say?
I should never have given records away, I should be proud of what I do. Besides, baby needs records, I mean, clothes.
Much more to come this year. The soundtrack to this fine Monday is ‘Brand New Day’ by The Staple Singers
THANK YOU! x
So the album is out next Monday. It’s all happening so fast and I can’t keep up. There have been some ace reviews, notably in Mojo and Pitchfork and a bit of radio play. Weird for a bunch of songs that have been on on Myspace for well over a year (I’ve taken them down now but they’ll be up again soon) but it feels good to know that people are hearing what I’m doing, it’s been a while since I felt that, ace.
So, if you register at my shop (nothing there yet but have a look anyway, go frolic in the orangicity of it all) you win yourself a Sonny Boy Sampler, ‘Deep, High, Ocean Wide’ which is the title of a song I wrote that is lost forever to the winds and the shadows that gather where once memory basked etc Anyway it features the custard of the Sonny Boy stable. Martin Carr, The Black Serpent Choir and mr bravecaptain himself who may not be making any more records for the foreseeable but who has kindly donated his back catalogue for us to enjoy all over again.
I know that you know that all these bands are just me but this is only the beginning…
Ok, stay on this frequency….
Flow Machines have a FREE remix ep available from their site featuring remixes by Akira The Don, Cian SFA, Mark West (ex Fanfarlo), Three Men in A Dub and Me, yours truly, mememememe.
It’s ace actually. GO GET IT!
WE ARE STARLIGHT EP
I don’t seem to have any time to put word to the machine at the moment. The days are crowded with things to do. Artwork for the album is almost finished, thanks to Dubai Dave who, unfortunately, is not as dodgy as Mary’s monicker for him would otherwise suggest. I have a folder somewhere full of photographs that I took while making the record but they are lost to me at the moment so they won’t appear on the sleeve which, as I’m sure you will agree, is most unfortunate. If I find them I’ll stick them up here so fear not! You’ll be able to look at pictures of me sweating and singing out of tune to your hearts content.
A couple of weeks ago an illustration that I did for the Times received a number of complaints from Christian members of our community including this one from a Mr Brin Dunsire from Princes Risborough.
Please note this as a formal complaint about Martin Carr’s graphic associated with Caitlin Moran’s article about the 1970’s in the issue of 27th April.
He chose to insert a gorilla’s face over the face of the Virgin Mary, and George Bush’s face over that on the Infant Jesus.
I hope he genuinely did not realise that the icon he chose to use was more than simply a “stock” image of the Madonna and Child; it is in fact an icon known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, and is very precious to many Catholics across the world. My interest is that it is special in the Catholic Diocese of Northampton, for which I have the privilege to work ; we have two churches named after Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, and a rare copy of this icon is displayed in a shrine church in Northampton. Catholics do not, of course, venerate pictures and objects as such, but the content and concepts which they evoke, and these may be very intimately held in our spirituality.
Martin Carr may be the kind of person who thinks it is cool and amusing to mock the images associated with religious belief: I can see from his portfolio that this is not the first time he has chosen to incorporate a Madonna & Child image into his cartoons for satiric purposes. But this use was simply gratuitous and vacuous. It is difficult to reconstruct the thought processes involved in deciding to use a Madonna image in the context of illustrating Caitlin’s Moran’s opening paragraph, which itself was purely a whimsical diversion from the main point of her article. Surely, if his point was to imagine a gorilla “nurturing” a Baby Bush, this could have been done in a more clear and amusing way ?
It is also disappointing that the inappropriateness of this kind of material was not picked up by a sub-editor, though I suppose time is short.
You (and Mr Carr) may be tired of hearing this point being made by Christians, but it bears repeating nonetheless; can you genuinely state that you would have no hesitation in publishing a picture of the prophet Mohammed with a pig’s face inserted, if it suited the pure purpose of mocking religion, and the only thing that is stopping you is the fear of possible violence ? Because if your reply would be “ No, that’s not the only reason, it is not right for us to cause gratuitous and unnecessary offence to religious people” then you should not be using illustrations like this simply because they are “only Christian” and you can get away with it without being threatened. What do you say ?
I say nothing Mr Dunsire, if I can’t believe you have nothing better to do than write letters such as this then I would be foolish to become involved in a debate with you, theological, sociological or otherwise.
Actually, fuck it, while we’re here..
I found Caitlin’s column difficult to illustrate that week. I don’t why this is, some weeks the image jumps out at you as you read through but I couldn’t find anything suitable, no overreaching theme that needed illustrating. I decided to focus on a throwaway line she had written about a time traveling gorilla. Hang on, let me find it…
“Going back to the 1970s could help tackle global warming, researchers claim. Well, yes. We’ve all seen ‘Quantum Leap’. Of course Dr Sam Beckett leaping back to 1973, into the body of a climate-campaigning gorilla capable of sign-language, who touches the heart of the young George W Bush forever, could help. That’s not in doubt. We know that.”
Ok, that’s illustration gold right there and who cares whether it fits in with everything else she says. Like the May Fly the page lives for a day before returning to dust and looking at the wider picture, at the daily injustices meted out by uncaring, corrupt, inept politicians, the poverty, the violence, the greed, war, starvation etc It’s not that important. Not really.
The illustration, as you can see, is of a time traveling gorilla using sign language to teach the young George Bush about the benefits of protecting our beautiful planet. It was called ‘Greenilla’. It has nothing to do with religion. I have nothing to do with religion. I’m not an atheist either, I’m not involved. Nor do I think that it’s ‘cool and amusing to mock the images associated with religious belief’. I’m forty years old, I don’t think anything is ‘cool’ (except for maybe Stuart Hall). I love religious images, songs, buildings. I love people who deemed their immense talents to be a gift from a higher being, Diego Maradona, Christopher Wren, Mahalia Jackson etc but I don’t believe what they believe and I see nothing in the various icons that I’ve collected over the years but their manifest beauty. Even if I were willing to guide you through the minutiae of my thought processes, I couldn’t do it. Inspiration works at speeds many, many times faster than light. I threw some images together until it looked like I wanted it to, that’s all I did and if that offends you, I don’t care. Obviously the sub-editors at the Times feel the same way as I hand my illustration in three days before publication.
And you’re damn right I wouldn’t put a pigs head on Mohammed. I’m scared just to type it out. I think visually and as there is no visual representation of Mohammed permitted, the thought would never occur to me. I didn’t stick an apes head on Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, I pushed pixels around a screen until they were ordered in such a way that I liked.
It’s all in your mind, not mine.
The panoramic function on my phone (LG Renoir) is pretty cool is it not? Just roll your eyes and say ‘Yes Martin’, indulge me.
Yes Martin
Good, now; I was going to write about what I’ve been up to the past week but I can’t get it in any kind of order so I’ll just start writing and see where I end up. It’s 7.01am and I’ve been up for a couple of hours now, rendering the vocals that Mary and I recorded for Akira the Don’s new album, ‘The Life Equation’, last night. He had wanted a huge rabble rousing chorus but as it was only Mary and I with a baby upstairs in bed, snoring his chubby little face off, he wasn’t going to get that; so we sang a sixteen bar vocal arrangement that I hope he fits in somewhere.
When Mary was overdue with Sonny, she booked three sessions at the local chinese herbal place. they reckoned that they would relax her enough for him to pop out without us having to go to hospital for an induction (he was born at home, in a pool). I like that, ‘Induction’, like there’s a guy waiting with a clipboard when he’s born, showing him where the photocopier is and how to smoke a fag without dropping his pint. Anyway, after the second session she went into labour and we haven’t slept or washed since. I was in Music Box studios when she rang me. I panicked and bought eight caramel Freddoes, just in case the gas and air didn’t show up.
So we were owed one session and Mary booked it one for me yesterday because I’ve been run down and I’ve been suffering from bad headaches and mouth ulcers and all manners of coughs and colds. I pretty sure that I would be much healthier if I could sleep for more than three hours at a time, I have no concept of day or night any more. Sometimes I’ll go to bed at nine and be up again at half two, wondering where everybody is. I’ve given up drinking coffee though and immediately I’ve felt much, much better.
I had a brief consultation where it was solemnly announced that I was not going to die, then taken upstairs for acupuncture (head and ankle) and a full body massage which was nowhere near as sexy as it sounds, quite the opposite. All my bad ghosts and shitty-ass chi were brusquely ushered out from my body in a frenzied series of slaps and rubs. It was like being patted down by a drunk Rhino.
I felt better after anyway, pathetically grateful for the lie down more than anything. Then I came home and mopped the floor, the roar of the Ninian Park crowd, gone now, never to return, keeping me company. Mary and Sonny were at Ikea, again! I’m sure they’re both having an affair, she’s meeting up with some big Swedish bloke who isn’t tired and fat all the time while he gets thrown up in the air and has his little big tum tickled by another dad who, again, isn’t fat and tired all the time. I mean, how many times can you go to the same shop? What are they selling? Crack?
The artwork for ‘Ye Gods’ is being done this week, I spent a few hours sifting through photographs from last year earlier in the week. We have literally thousands of photographs from last year alone. The ones I took on our trip to Norfolk last April are my favourites. It was such a beautiful week, Mary was pregnant, the weather was gorgeous and everywhere we went we listened to the Fleet Foxes album. Actually it couldn’t have been April because the European Championships would be on when we got back to the house where we would cook dinner with fresh foodstuffs we had bought and I would drink Leffe and play my guitar and read about William Blake. The whole place was really, I dunno, seventeenth century, which is right up my alley. I know I took photographs when we were recording the album but I can’t find them anywhere. Hmmm.
I’m working on a Flow Machines remix this week, a track from their excellent first album which you can cop here. I’m getting behind on the Black Serpent Choir album but there are more urgent things I need to get sorted first.
Sonny spent the night in hospital last Monday. He developed croup very quickly early on in the evening. We thought it might be an asthma attack, Mary suffers from asthma, and took him in. It was scary seeing him in there with all those machines, especially as he was born at home and we’d never seen him in a hospital. He’s fine now, it’s 9.04am now. Since I started writing this he’s been up, had his nappy changed, eaten his breakfast and has gone back to bed for a bit. HE IS ME IN 1996!
Ok, will upload more music soon. Love y’all.
Hey, I don’t know if this is the right way to go about these things but I am desperately behind in most if the things I need to do. Mainly artwork/layout stuff. I’m knee deep in childcare/recording and nothing is getting done on the label side of things. If anybody wants to help me out and is handy with the old photshop/illustrator/indesign side of things and doesn’t mind talking to music business scaries then please, get in touch and we’ll have a chat. I have no money at the minute but that will hopefully change soon and I will try and repay anyway I can. Somebody not too far away would be great but not essential. Thanks!
Well, it’s up there. Are there five thousand people in the UK who care enough to invest? Are there five thousand people who have even heard the name Martin Carr?
I have no idea.
Seeing my name there, with no money next to it is terrifying but it’s exciting too and I’m glad I’ve done this. I was unsure at first, wondering whether or not I should wait to see what happens with the first acts, maybe leaving it until the next album, but I became really fired up by this idea and I want to be the first.
I do know that some people are dismissing the whole concept out of hand. I’ve found the most common points that have been raised, mainly on the internet, and here I will try to answer them as simply as possible which should be easy because the concept is very simple.
Caroline Sullivan wrote an article for the Guardian website last week. Let’s look at some of the points she raised:
“I predict that music lovers won’t jump at the chance of suddenly turning into the man. For them to be part of that process, receiving profit statements and attending AGMs, would divest music of the romanticism that every fan cherishes.”
Ok, she may have her tongue in her cheek here but the facts are that investors have no say in any aspect of the record they are investing in. The point of this system is to eliminate ‘the man’, whoever that may be. That doesn’t mean that Bandstocks is in competition with record labels, no more than they are with each other anyway. In fact, once the money has been raised the process is almost identical.
“The devil’s liniment that is The X-Factor has done enough damage with its campaign to turn pop into a faceless commodity; no righteous fan is going to want to finish the job by investing in Bandstocks.”
I don’t see the parallel between X-Factor and Bandstocks at all. The investor is merely replacing the record company. I don’t know what record companies Sullivan has visited but they as faceless like any other office. Believe me, there is nothing glamorous about a record label. The album is released the usual way, advertised the usual way, toured the usual way, sold the usual way and charts (or not) the usual way. The only difference is the way that the money is raised.
The acts on Bandstocks have been signed up, just like an act signed to an ordinary record company have been. You can’t just stick your band on the site and hope to raise the cash. To call this a talent contest is to paint the last eighty or so years of the music industry the same colour.
“No matter how much quirky pleasure there may be in bankrolling your own pop star, it’s one of the chanciest things you could sink your money into. Of hundreds of new acts launched every year, the great majority fails to sell”
For your ten pounds you get a download album plus a credit mention (I do doubt these would be on the cover, they would be on an insert or within a booklet). If the project fails to reach it’s intended target THE INVESTOR GETS THEIR MONEY BACK. There is no risk, no chance. I spent money intended for my mortgage on making this record and with a baby on the way I would say that’s a wee risk but this is my life and it’s worth it, I wouldn’t ask anybody else to take anything like that risk on my behalf.
“To pull a name at random from the current issue of Music Week, the 2007 debut album by American rapper Plies sold a total of 222 copies in Britain, and that was with the might of Atlantic Records behind him.”
That’s because Plies is shit. Is she saying that we should continue to stick with record labels because they, with all their money and marketing might, can only sell a couple of hundred records?
“Since your artist’s marketing budget would depend on how much has been invested, she/he might record the best album of the year, only for it to remain unheard because there’s not enough cash for advertising.”
The budget is done at the beginning. It’s all there on the site. If you haven’t budgeted enough for marketing you are a fool. Anyway, as Caroline points out, all the marketing in the world can’t sell a Plies record. If it’s a good record it will be reviewed and played on the radio. Adverts never sold a record.
Robert Andrews on digital media economy site paidConetnt:UK says
“The concept is basically a carbon copy of Sellaband and Slicethepie before it”
Not true. These two models are open to anyone and are full of bands who can’t get signed elsewhere. All the artists on Bandstocks have had offers but have chosen Bandstocks because they believe in it (and because the contract they sign is incredibly artist friendly).
When I was on Radio 5 talking about this a couple of weeks ago, somebody texted in to say:
“Why should we pay your recording costs?”
Well, who do you think pays for them now? The band pay out of their advance which is recoupable and is recouped through sales ie YOU pay for them. All expenditure is recouped by the record company, now more than ever. They used to take it from record sales but now you have to sign away merchandising money and tour fees. Yes, you are paying the studio cost (and ten pounds is quite cheap) but this time YOU will recoup if sales go well. Imagine if Oasis had bankrolled their first album this way, or The Stone Roses, we’d all be rich HA HA HA HA etc
I could go on, please feel free to ask post any questions after this post and I will answer every one. The only people who can make it work is us. It won’t happen by itself and it’s easy to sneer and be cynical. It’s harder to get involved and work at it. Ten pounds and word of mouth and we can be the first.
