Lying To The Kids

Covers and that

2010-05-28T15:46:00.000+01:00

Here, preview this

then download this:

http://corporaterecords.co.uk/artists/The+Indelicates+Versions+Project/The+Indelicates+Versions+Project+2010/

Songs For Swing Lovers - Out Now

2010-04-12T17:55:00.002+01:00

Ladies and Gents,

"Songs For Swing Lovers"

by The Indelicates

is OUT NOW

exclusively on corporaterecords.co.uk

Scouting for a Fight

2010-03-23T17:26:00.003Z

So, if the government manages to ram through the Digital Economy Bill without debating it properly, a number of things will change. Among them will be our relationship with so-called 'intellectual property'.

The reason we have separate laws to deal with copyright is, quite simply - and whatever Ray Winston's offspring is paid to say about it - because it isn't the same as theft. Theft is the deprivation of someone else of their property, meaning, once you've deprived them of it, they don't have it anymore. As this isn't true when you move 1s and 0s into the same pattern as someone else without their permission - they still own the pattern they made - copyright infringement is not theft at all. It is closer to trespassing.If the Bill becomes law, people who 'steal' copyrighted data will be subject to expulsion from the space where the 'property' they've 'stolen' is legally available. It is akin to ASBO-banning a persistent hoodie thief from all town centres that have shops in. As such, the harshness of the punishment redefines society's view of where on the spectrum that runs between property and non-property copyrighted data lies. If you can be cut off for copying - as the ORG points out - £18 worth of music, then consumers of music will have to stop looking at downloaded data as trivial information and start looking at it as a real purchased object.

The entertainment-industrial complex's stupid adverts declare that "you wouldn't steal a car" and ask why, in that case, you are happy to download their stuff. This implies that there is a moral equivalence between the two. If the Bill is passed, society will have recognised this moral equivalence.

So. When you buy music, you will be buying a real object. People who don't pay for it are thieves - if you do pay for it then you are now a consumer. Consumers have rights.

For a start, DRM will have to go. It's an object you bought - they can't tell you what to do with it - if you can deprive them of it, then it isn't theirs anymore. DRM should be made illegal immediately.

Secondly, it is time to start demanding full consumer rights for all goods purchased, whether tangible or not.

In the past, before copyright infringement was officially stealing, we were able to allow a certain sensible line to be drawn when we were dissatisfied with the data contained within a product. Obviously, if we considered the data to be shoddy then we were stuck with it; if the CD was scratched, we took it back. Now though, the data itself is the only product on sale. If we are going to view the data as something stealable then we deserve full consumer protection when we purchase it legally.

The sale of goods act, 1979 (amended) is clear:

If you have bought goods you have a right to expect that they should be as described, fit for purpose and of satisfactory quality:
‘As described’ means that it should correspond to any description given about the goods such as the quantity, colour, measurements etc. These descriptions may be verbal statements about the goods, statements in the brochure, on a shelf edge or even on the box.
Goods are of ‘Satisfactory quality’ if they reach the standard a reasonable person would expect taking into account the price and any description.
- The law says that goods that are of satisfactory quality are free from minor defects, have good appearance and finish and are durable, safe and fit for all the purposes for which such goods are commonly supplied.
In addition to being fit for their every day purpose goods should be fit for any specific purpose you agreed with the seller at the time of sale [for example, if you specifically asked for a printer that was compatible with your computer]

So say, for example, that prompted by their earnest, heartfelt and passionate pleas for money on Panorama I were to buy 'She's So Lovely' by Scouting For Girls. As a consumer, I have a right to expect that the data will reach the standard a reasonable person would expect of it.

Well.

As a piece of new music from the esteemed Sony corporation, I would expect it to be wholly original, to have lyrics that express something about the human condition and for it to cause a positive emotion to be generated in my brain.
Sadly, very little about the track can be called original.

It shares a title with a 1997 John Travolta film about a violent ex-husband causing trouble for his remarried wife. The Band's name is a 'repurposing' of the title chosen by Baden-Powell for his handbook establishing the boy scout movement only with 'girls' instead of 'boys', presumably in order to emphasise the band's affinity with kerb-crawlers and pimps.

Musically, the song is built around a four chord progression (G, C, Am, D) which is repeated for most of the duration. As any pop musician will know, the actual musical content of a chord sequence is not in the notes but in the progression - and this progression: from the 1st to the 5th to the minor 2nd to the 7th, while less common than the 1st, 7th, minor 9th, 5th sequence found in the majority of pop songs, is not new or original. It can be found (though with less repetitions) in 'True Love Will Never Fade' by Mark Knopfler, 'An Eluardian Instance' by Of Montreal, 'I'm Set Free' by the Velvet Undergound, 'Three Little Bears' by Jimi Hendrix and 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' by The Smiths among a host of others. The topline melody of the chorus consists of four notes: D, C, B and A with the latter two repeated one after the other for the majority of the tune - only adding the D and C to spice things up a little at the end. The song is in standard 4/4 time.

Given that there is nothing in the music that we can identify as uniquely original, perhaps we should turn to the lyrics. As a consumer, I have a right to expect that they should be 'fit for the purpose for which such goods are commonly supplied'. As such, and as words deliberately arranged into a meaningful order, I can expect that they should convey something with a reasonable degree of skill.

I quote:

"A stunner

I want her

Was she this fit When she was ten years younger?

Come see me,

Discretely,

She says she's got a trick or two to teach me

I don't know how we'll make it through this (repeated)

I think that you are lovely"

leaving aside the suggestion of paedophilia in the 'ten years younger' remark, we might wonder who is being asked to 'come see' the narrator given the confusion of tenses. Perhaps the grammatical ambiguity is designed intentionally to create a sense of dislocation in the listener and prompt a questioning of the protagonist's sanity and reliability? Is this a song about a tragic figure - literally out in the streets, delusionally but literally Scouting for Girls? Unlikely - as the 'she; in question has apparently already confessed her interest by implying that she has 'a [sexual] trick or two' that she intends to teach our hero. The only interpretation of this passage is that the writing is, in itself, faulty - a reading underscored by the seemingly random insertion of existential doubt inherent in not knowing 'how we'll make it through this' and the laughably clumsy and meaningless final assertion.

This neither uplifts or pleases me.

The packaging of this product suggests that it is a professional release conforming to a reasonable standard of quality. As the music is an entirely unoriginal cobbling together of slowed down trills and regularly used chord progressions - we can only look to the lyrical content of the data to determine it's compliance with consumer protection law and trading standards. As the lyrics fail to reach a basic level of competence - any consumer would be well within his or her rights to return the goods to the seller and demand either a full refund or that the song be repaired to a reasonable standard.

If the digital economy bill is passed and if the pedlars of such data are to be afforded enormous protection against 'theft' of their goods then consumers must demand the right to treat data as goods themselves and be entitled to rights when the goods are substandard.

I'm not sure how one goes about returning a copy of a digital download. And I'm pretty sure that every song I've ever heard or written is every bit as unoriginal as 'She's So Lovely' music wise and nearly as inept lyrically - but still, if this is how it is going to be - it's time to demand better. After all, the music industry says that without the Digital Economy Bill it will be unable to discover and develop new talent. They haven't appeared to do this for quite a long time now - but if they're going to take our rights, it's about time that they started.

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care

New Indelicates Album - Full details and Cover

2010-03-17T19:19:00.002Z

A Corporate Records Press Release
regarding
The New Album From
The Indelicates
"Songs For Swinging Lovers"

released exclusively on corporaterecords.co.uk
12/04/2010

physical and special editions released June 2010

Cast your mind back to the halcyon spring of 2008. Indie distributors danced happily through the acid green money-fields of Camden, hand-in-hand with the joyous executives supping decadently from the salary cocktails served by sub-prime indie labels. Every other haircut was the genius we'd been waiting for and everything was amaaaaazing. There were banks and mortgages and public services. There were advertising revenues and advances. All was well in the western world.

Somewhere in this fisher price quagmire, The Indelicates saw fit to release their debut album, American Demo - a spite fuelled howl of discontent, it sat distinctly at odds with the time - but still succeeded in gaining the band a serious national and international following. Now, having successfully begged their label to let them out of their contract they are back with their new album - Songs For Swinging Lovers - and a new record company - that anyone can sign themselves to anytime it suits them.

Recorded in Berlin by gifted producer Ed East (Chikinki), Songs For Swinging Lovers is a stunning, diverse and intellectually complex record that marries the band's trademark lyrical precision and songwriting skill with a broad palette of musical styles and influences. The strains of country, Weimar cabaret, holy bible-era manics, belle epoque cafe music, Muder Ballads-era Nick cave, 90s indie and 70s sleaze can all be heard in the arrangements.

A more personal album than it's predecessor, Songs For Swinging Lovers veers between the furious (Your Money, Flesh) and the reflective (Savages, Sympathy For The Devil) with detours into the metaphorically historical (We Love You, Tania) and the outright disturbing (Roses).

The Indelicates are convinced that the much discussed collapse of the record industry is being absurdly hyped as something that will harm 'artists' and even 'music' itself. They believe that the weakening of the economic power held by labels and the undermining of their business model by various facets of the Internet can only benefit those who are actually committed to making music. They are vociferous opponents of the measures proposed in the governments' 'Digital Economy Bill' and are heavily involved in the campaign to stop it becoming law.

As such, they are treating this release as an opportunity to experiment with the long-accepted norms of the recorded music market. Working with investors, web developers and artists they have built 'corporaterecords.co.uk' an innovative new digital audio platform that is free and easy to use and that allows anyone to release their recordings quickly and simply in a way that encourages the free sharing and promotion of music while giving fans an incentive to reward artists as they see fit.

Songs For Swinging Lovers will initially be available exclusively from the corporaterecords.co.uk site. Once it is released, you will be able to blog, twitter or otherwise share individual tracks (or the whole album) with single static links that take your readers directly to a download page where the song or album will be available on a 'pay-what-you-like' basis using the share code and social networking buttons provided.

Following the initial release, we will be releasing in the following formats.

CD
Digital (inc. iTunes enhanced LP)
Special Edition: CD + full length book of supplementary essays 'Apologies and Explanations'
Extra Special Edition: CD + 'Apologies and Explanations' + Art Book + Customised USB album (details TBC)
Super Special Edition: As above + Simon and Julia will come round your house, perform the album for you, record the performance and sign a contract transferring the rights in the master to you.

The books will both be available independently.

The joint project of Simon and Julia Indelicate, The Indelicates formed in Brighton in 2005 - with Simon's lead guitar and Julia's piano backed by Ed Van Beinum's Drums, Kate Newberry's Bass and Al Clayton's Rhythm Guitar. They were joined in 2009 by bassist Lawrence Owen and guitarist/backing vocalist Lily Rae and currently have a floating line-up for live shows, (with much of the new album favouring a lusher, more acoustic sound). They have played and been released all over the world, headlining the second stage at Austria's frequency festival, supporting Art Brut in Germany, Amanda Palmer in Scotland and The Vaselines in New York; as well as touring extensively in europe and the UK. In 2009 they released a well-received poetry book and continued to give performances of Simon's 'Book of Job: The Musical'.

Largely so as to never have to be called a Brighton Band again, Julia and Simon moved to Lewes in 2007.

Please direct all press enquiries to:
info@indelicates.com

For more quotes, artwork etc, see the full Indelicates Press Highlights Doc:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWXM5KI1s9zhZGNzNnJod18xMTFmZHR0bXhmNw&hl=en

Hi-Res Stills with all permissions granted are available at:
http://indelicates.com/press

For more on The Indelicates see:
http://www.indelicates.com

For more on Corporate Records read the full press Outline here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWXM5KI1s9zhZGNzNnJod185NmZ6NjQ4Nmhn&hl=en

More:
Simon Indelicate on the Music Business and Economics
Try Out The Corporate Records Automatic Press Release Generator (beta)
More on The Digital Economy Bill etc from the Open Rights Group

Praise for The Indelicates

"...I was hooked in one, as they took apart, with bitter grace, the media /academic obsession with and delight in the downfall of stars and idols."
– NEIL GAIMAN (Author of Coraline, The Sandman Comic series)

"Neo-Brecht/Weill theatricality? Check. Profane razor strop wit? Check. Irreverent misanthropy? Check. Scathing socio-cultural critiques? Check. Acid sweet indiepop songcraft? Check. Meet the fabulously unfashionable, unfashionably fabulous Indelicates."
–ROLLING STONE

"It’s impossible to overstate how much music today needs The Indelicates; in our darkest hour, hope may yet be at hand"
– THE FLY

"...this is intelligent, poetic indie-rock. In other words, it bears no resemblance to The View, The Fratellis, or any other examples of that kind of nonsense"
– ARTROCKER

“This record is vicious. It sits in the corner of the pub, performing character assassinations on you and all you hold dear. And you let it get away with it because it is beautiful. “
From Music Towers

“‘We Hate The Kids’, quakes like the cup of water in Jurassic Park as the Tyrannosaurus Rex approaches, and the climax is breath-taking...This is an important album – nothing and nobody will convince me otherwise.”
From Playlouder

“Corrosive performance poetry and pop music passion, this is an album on immaculate themes. American Demo really is the aesthetic arm of the outsiders, and The Indelicates right now are pretty much unbeatable.”
From Music OMH

Fudge Really Has Nothing To Do With It.

2010-02-18T13:05:00.001Z

Johnny Others asked me to contribute to this debate with some edifying thoughts about the workshops I sometimes do for a good daily rate in impoverished schools in Hastings. I think the idea would have been to make the case that by diversifying into such avenues, it remains possible for cultish, little-known indie musicians to make money – despite the scourge of internet piracy. I said I’d do it- but then I didn’t, I think this is why.

I don’t really subscribe to any part of such a case. I don’t know if it will remain possible to make a living as a non-classically-trained, artistically uncompromised musician.I don’t know at all that expressing yourself to a rhythm can ever be lucrative. I don’t think intellectual property is the same as property and I don’t think stealing something that the victim still possesses post-crime is the same as theft – but I don’t really like being identified as ‘anti-copyright. Unpaid commercial exploitation of a composition, for example, does deprive a victim and is much easier to call stealing. It is all very grey and defies a labelled position. Most of all though, I don’t really think that internet piracy has anything very much to do with the rapid decline of the music industry.

Let us be clear as to why the music industry was briefly profitable. A small number of companies were able to acquire, by wealth, a few scarce resources. Firstly, the expensive equipment required to record multiple tracks of high-quality audio and mix them together until they sounded nice. Secondly, the spending power to order at a bulk discount lots of plastic circles with data encoded on them as well as to print attractive packaging to house them in. And, lastly access to a large, physical network of shops and printed magazines with which to promote these items for sale...
read on at indieoma.com

In It Solely For The Money

2009-11-09T20:22:00.002Z

If you find this infrequent blog too high and mighty and long for poorly thought through content that's updated often enough that it doesn't matter and fancy contributing to the CTR part of my monetisation strategy - go here:

http://www.thenoughtieswereshit.com

Exlcusive Preview of New Album

2009-10-11T13:32:00.002+01:00

View Full Size HERE

About Human Rights and About Human Wrongs

2009-10-06T23:46:00.000+01:00

Fundamental Human Right. It's a phrase we use a lot, we who posture intellectually. It is one of those things - like 'illegal war' or 'monstrous tyrant' that we use as an axiom, assuming that somewhere, at some point, someone has performed the logical contortions necessary to demonstrate its validity. We tend to assume that there is someone somewhere who could specify which particular law it was that a war broke. We assume that someone has checked off the behaviours of a dictator against a checklist of monstrosity. The result is that we throw about our pre-assumed rhetoric, hoping to convince others, when in fact we are fighting with blunted swords - their blades deadened by the simple fact that our arguments rest on things unshared.

So it is with fundamental human rights. I might say, for example, that access to the internet is a fundamental human right: you might adequately counter that it isn't - and there we would be, staring at each other across the barricades of assumption as the wheels of legislation turn without us.

Instead then, let's ask what a fundamental human right actually is and see where that gets us.

Firstly: Fundamental to what? I think we can safely ignore for the moment the idea that humans have been gifted any intrinsic rights by a deity or by their innate dignity or even by their ability to suffer - if only because there are too many different ideas on this for us to agree. Instead, let's work from the most basic moral axiom going: that one should treat others as one would wish to be treated.

If we accept this as a founding principle, then it follows that a good society would be one that protects individuals from suffering fates they would not wish to, of necessity by acting punitively against those who seek to cause such suffering. We do, of course, have a contradiction already, in that we would not wish to be punitively acted against ourselves, however, the benefit of acting as a society is the ability of societies to assess the relative merits of contradictory moral acts. We would accept that some immoral punitive action is justified when weighed against the broader moral benefits they cause. While we have now moved away from our nice basic principle, it is not too great a leap to a new one: that a good society, when faced with conflicting options, chooses to act in the way that least causes individuals to suffer fates they would not wish too.

With such a society established, we might begin writing basic rules of thumb in order to help define the nature of fates that individuals would not wish to suffer. The first (and one might have thought the most obvious) of these is the 6th commandment: Thou shalt not murder. Very few of us wish to be murdered. It seems entirely correct that anyone wishing to murder should be prevented from doing so and that anyone who has murdered should be prevented from doing so again. It seems entirely accurate to say that the urge to murder goes against the most basic assumptions underpinning any good society and that not being murdered is the least we can expect from any organised body of humans. Not being murdered is, in fact, fundamental to our experience of being humans among humans. It is a Fundamental Human Right.

The key thing about this is not that the right to continue living is divinely apportioned or intrinsic to our dignity or self-evidently apparent. It is that it can be deduced logically and that we can choose to adopt it (or otherwise) based on our conception of a good society. A right is not divine, nor is it intrinsic - it is better than that: it is an aspiration that is consciously declared. When we adopt something as a fundamental human right we make a statement about the world we wish to live in, we do not appeal to any absolute, we aspire to something greater than our current condition and challenge ourselves to do our aspiration justice.

So now, when I say that access to the internet is a Fundamental Human Right, do not misunderstand me. I don't say so lightly. It is not a position I have adopted because it looks good on a petition, or because I know it will get a cheer from people who already agree with me. I say it because, right now, sat at my computer, I am more than I was when I was in the kitchen. Ask me a question about anything within the realm of human knowledge and, chances are, I will be able to give you an answer in a few minutes or less. Ask me to survey distant kingdoms from space, ask me to deliver a lengthy message of salvation to a prophet almost anywhere on the planet, ask me what something looks like, where anywhere is, ask me anything. Ask me who dissents from the position of my government and what they say. Ask me where the demonstrators are assembling. Ask me who is being persecuted, and what village has been raided and where it looked like they were being taken...

I say it too because, tomorrow I may wish to make art of some kind and key to the creation of art is an appreciation of other art. On the internet I can find free or inexpensive tools able to perform tasks that would have required my parents to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds merely to access. I can immerse myself in the art of others, be influenced by it, use these tools to create art of my own and then, at almost no cost, I can distribute the fruits of my labours to the four corners of the world.

I want a society where these things are available to everyone as readily as they are to me. I believe firmly that such a society would be more free, would be less at risk from tyranny and would have more beautiful things in it. It is a society that I am proud to aspire to, and one for which universal, high-speed internet access is fundamental. And believing these things, as I do, I consider internet access to be a fundamental human right.

Now, you'll remember that earlier we acknowledged that societies sometimes have to break moral principles in order to protect themselves against greater moral wrongs. We saw how in certain cases a moral judgement had to be made that balanced the harm done to some against the harm done to a greater number of others. The argument currently circulating about the music industry and the business secretary's attempt to pass a law removing internet access from those who persistently share files is such a case.

On the one side we have a law that would breach what I consider to be a fundamental right. On the other we have an industry that, due to the expense of recording, manufacturing and distributing records and CDs was once able to make and sell a scarce resource at a high cost - but which now finds the value of its product collapsing as the internet replaces expensive processes with cheap ones. This industry (and several of its high-profile employees) believes that a contributory factor to its decline is the sharing of music files and that removing the right to internet access from those who persistently do so will halt said decline. I don't believe it will, but even if you do, you still find yourself facing a choice. Either you support a measure that may or may not prolong the profitability of an industry at the expense of declaring the right to internet access conditional and not fundamental - thus crushing much of its potential as a transformative, liberating technology or you decide that yes, indeed, universal access to the internet is more important than the right to control the not-for-profit reproduction of your intellectual property.

It is not an easy choice, but it comes down to which society you'd prefer to live in. The one we lived in ten years ago when you heard less recorded music and when money you spent on it ended up in the hands of large record companies and the tiny minority of musicians they chose to make financially viable (while most made little or no money) - or the one you could live in soon, where there is more music than you know what to do with and any money you choose to spend on it goes directly to the musicians you choose to reward (while most make little or no money) and where, in addition, all the information of the world is right there, inalienably, at your fingertips.

I think it's a fundamental human right. I think if you want to take one of those away you need a damn good reason, a better reason than my copyright, a better reason than the collapse of some companies with a redundant business model and a much better reason than the dwindling salaries of those who signed the Air Statement.

The times they are a-changing, boys and girls, they can change for the better if we make them.
XX.S.I.

Line In Sand

2009-10-05T16:11:00.007+01:00

Via @Akirathedon
Read his full post at: http://www.akirathedon.com/2009/09/f-the-fac/
I'm excerpting this letter because it really should be spat on by as many people as possible:

On September 24th a very special meeting took place at Air Studios in London. It was an unprecedented gathering of artists who all met in the spirit of collaboration and with the aim of discussing the very challenging issue of file-sharing and how it affects the lives of so many artists and all the people that support them in creating the music that we all know and love.

The statement below is the result of that meeting…

The Air Statement:

We the undersigned wish to express our support for Lily Allen in her campaign to alert music lovers to the threat that illegal downloading presents to our industry and to condemn the vitriol that has been directed at her in recent days.

Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.

Signed:

Tim Rice-Oxley (Keane)
Jamie Turner
Adriano Buffone (Raygun)
Allan Bradbury
Helienne Lindvall
Tony Crean
Andrew Laidlaw (Luck Soul)
Isard Haasakker
Tony Morrelli (The Fire Escapes)
Jean-Baptiste Pilon (The Fire Escapes)
Mark Headley (The Fire Escapes)
Hal Ritson (The Young Punx)
Billy Bragg
Ben Ward
Karl Harrison
Howard Jones
Tjinder Singh (Cornershop)
Phil Simpson
Athleen
Steve Jones
John Reynolds
Sandie Shaw (via phone)
David Rowntree (Blur)
Ed O’Brien (Radiohead)
Alan Sharland (The Hoosiers)
Martin Skarendahl (The Hoosiers)
Steven Hogarth (Marillion)
Mark Kelly (Marillion)
Guy Chambers
Patrick Wolf
Sam Duckworth (Get Cape Wear Cape Fly)
Jamie Allen
Toby Sebastian
James Kelly
Beryl Marsden
George Jones
Ross Millard (The Futureheads)
Stax Dempsey
Rona Sentinar
Fran Healy (Travis)
Karl Addy
Nathan Taylor (The Young Punx)
Josh Allegro
Ali Howard (Lucky Soul)
David Arnold
Lucy Pullin (The Fire Escapes)
Annie Lennox (via phone)
Lily Allen (Not a Member of the FAC)
George Michael
Nick Mason (Pink Floyd)

Signed After the meeting;

The Music Producers Guild
John B
Claudia Brucken (Propaganda)
Rick Wilde

The Air Statement can be found on our website www.featuredartistscoalition.com

We also have two fantastic events coming up for artists. See the events section of our home page for more info.

Taste that? In the back of your mouth? Yeah, that'll be the little bit of vomit that it's impossible to keep down when you speculate about the gall of a bunch of no-account indie pricks (and one or two of my favourite singers, grown tragically anachronistic) supporting a 'three strikes' law against filesharing. That anyone, anywhere could think it even slightly acceptable to remove from 7 million people the right to participate in one of the most incandescently transformative, intelligence squaring technologies ever invented in order to briefly prop up a rotten, vacuous industry that is doomed anyway for basic economic reasons while continuing to funnel the money of recession-hit teenagers to Lily Allen - that anyone could support such a backward, ludicrous and neophobe idea is beyond me. That people who call themselves artists can do so makes me want to drown them all in their own mucus and spend a decade inventing transhumanist consciousness-uploading just so as I can send them all to a special virtual hell.

Fuck the FAC, fuck you if you agree with them, and fuck the FAC again. There is a war coming. Pick a side.

It Must Be America

2009-07-01T15:08:00.002+01:00

(for Indieoma.com)

Last year, The Indelicates played a few gigs in New York. Shortly before then, we had released a single called ‘America’ – which, along with being vaguely intended as a correction of the record following Razorlight’s astoundingly graceless song of the same title, was unequivocally pro-American. It addressed what I saw as a distressing tendency among the British, middle-class left to view the world entirely through an ill thought out and fatuous anti-Americanism. It had, as its chorus, the assertion that ‘with godless America’, I would ‘stand and fall’.

In Jersey City, In Springsteen’s home state, dressed in an American flag shirt with an American flag guitar strap holding up my American guitar, I performed the song, confident that I was, in some small way, paying due (if arrogant) homage to a country that I like and admire. It is a source of some dismay to me that, the following week, I found myself attacked on the Brooklyn Vegan forum on a charge of being anti-American.

...read on at indieoma...

Book Of Job

2009-05-16T13:59:00.002+01:00

So, June 4th Camden Head, we are reviving the musical I started writing five years ago - first rehearsal yesterday. It is actually sort of gratifying to be able to do so without toecurling embarrassment, in fact, I still think it's good, which I can't really say about things I wrote six years ago.

Anyway, there's a new site at:
corporaterecords.co.uk/job which has wanky flash, some visually accompanied music and easter eggs (I am also locked out of it because the *fla corrupted, so will never be able to update the content and will have to leave it stranded - a desolate beacon on the electronic frontier..), check it.

XX

An Unexpected Savior?

2009-04-19T17:40:00.000+01:00

Simon Indelicate on how the credit crunch could revitalise the music industry

The music industry is dead, deceased, over, kaput, it has shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible: it is an ex-industry.

(...read on at Maps Magazine)

New David Koresh Superstar site

2009-04-14T16:24:00.000+01:00

http://corporaterecords.co.uk/koresh/index.html

BRANDS: How Rebellion Works pt.1

2009-03-25T17:22:00.002Z

------ Forwarded Message
From: Kevin O'Donnell
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:57:16 -0000
To: Sam Smith , Stuart Green
Cc: TOTEMPOLE , Alex Knight , Tom
, Dave Howell , Dave Cawley
,
Conversation: This weeks 6 Music Rebel Playlist vote - Send it around
Subject: This weeks 6 Music Rebel Playlist vote - Send it around

Hiya all.

Brakes are in the 6Music Rebel playlist vote this week.
If we blitz this vote, win it by a substantial margin then we can push for a
playlist spot again next week

Can evereyone get all the bods they can to vote on this please? The vote is at the
bottom of Lammo's home page http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/steve_lamacq/ and I've
pasted the info below.

Tom and Tom can we get this info up asap on all the websites too?

Thanks
K

Two Deaths

2009-03-22T13:50:00.001Z

Jade Goody.
Yep. I Went there.

Now to be clear, I don’t care about this. I don’t believe that Big Brother indicates anything particularly important about anything. At most it is a minor stepping stone along the path toward the new forms of narrative that will replace those that are currently in fashion. The commonly held assumption that a passable piece of light entertainment can only be properly regarded as an indicator of the direction and nature of the cultural hegemony is, I think, a distortion brought about by the prevalence of irritating humanities graduates in the print media and their tendency to clumsily apply half-remembered lessons about absurd French celebrity philosophers to everything. Big Brother is not Foucault’s panopticon. It is not the desert of the real.

And I don’t care about it. I didn’t care when Jade Goody was on it the first time – I wanted Kate to win. I cared a little bit when she was on it again, because it seemed thoroughly apparent that the blonde member of SS club 7 (kudos on the pun to Jimbob) and the pert model were much worse racists than Jade and were being treated better by the press because ‘doing nice singing’ and ‘having a pretty arse’ are regarded as ‘talent’ by morons who haven’t ever thought about it. I thought that Jade had demonstrated a likeable level of concern for her mother earlier in the programme. I wondered whether the reaction to the story was indicative of the transfer of base liberal middle class loathing from their former colonial inferiors to the white working class who had so disappointed them by preferring turkey twizzlers to owning the means of production. But still, I didn’t really care.

What I do care about, and care about increasingly at the moment, is the revolution in data transmission that we are currently living through. I define data as all information that can be digitally encoded and, consequently, where I have often in the past been unclear as to what it is precisely that I doing with my life, I now define myself as a creator of data. I have no interest in being a musician, designer, playwright, writer or poet - these titles feel loaded and dishonest. I’m a data creator, that’s my business, and it is important to me that the movement of data should be understood as much as possible.

Jade Goody, is significant for being among the last great failures of the old-fashioned, moribund print media. The filtration of data through a once necessary - now economically doomed - infrastructure of graduate recruitment, printing presses and hierarchies has perpetrated the sickness and unbearable fucked-upness of the Jade Goody story. Print has been defended as the maintainer of quality, the guarantor of truth, the upholder of standards, the roman centurion before the internet’s barbarian hordes and yet it has insulted, preened, peered, lied, raised, razed, gossiped and distorted. It has defined a young woman as a pig, as vile, as brave, as ugly, as courageous and, ultimately (on the cover of Richard Desmond’s OK! Magazine) as dead when she was none of them. Like a rough john who feels within his rights to kick the shit out of a hooker he’s paid for, it has made the spurious and revolting argument that the payment of money to a person legitimises any form of abuse. It has raised the odious, giftless charlatan Max Clifford to a position of power and riches. It has indefinably but unmistakeably lowered the level of our discourse. Jade is not the point. Her deadline-unfriendly death was just sad and horrible.

And look now at the internet. That great threat to truth, quality and decency. Yes, there was isjadedead.com – sick, certainly, but tempered (as sickness must be to be forgiveable) with a degree of wit and, unlike OK!, at least accurate. Yes, there are people spreading scurrilous gossip and disparaging abuse on the digital spy forums – but they are tempered by an immediate and equally prominent faction who find their actions revolting and rebut them. Yes there is sickipedia – but there is no pressure from the medium to buy into its worldview, you can laugh or you can be offended: it’s up to you. At the same time wikipedia (that self-policed, establishment defying replacement for the Brittanica - once among print’s proudest achievements) gives an accurate uncontroversial account of Jade’s life without resorting to emboldened little adjectives; a google news search gives us unfiltered access to every different version of events; Stephen Fry twittered about it; And I, quite consciously and unsteered chose to notice.

The internet is not a piratical upstart spoiling business models for a vital fourth estate. It is an improvement on the press in every way. As Jade Goody - poor, dead, rich Jade Goody - is remembered, I feel a little bit sad. When print goes the same way, I cannot say that I shall feel anything very much at all.

Addendum:
The dead press has this week also been complaing about the EU changing guidelines on women’s titles. Apparently insisting on Ms instead of Mrs or Miss is ‘political correctness gone mad’. Just so we’re clear, the argument for Ms. Is this:

It is not acceptable for a woman’s public status to be contingent on her relationship to a man, if a man’s public status is not equally contingent on his relationship to a woman.

It’s not complicated. It is very simple, very clear and very difficult to dispute. So don’t. Stop being wankers and use Ms. already. Idiots.

S.I. March 22nd 2009

Shades of Brown

2009-03-08T18:16:00.000Z

As you probably know if you are reading this, I am the singer and guitar player in a pop band. Consequently, I find it hard to find a justification for writing about politics. I feel fine with economics as it is at the heart of pop music; fine with religion for similar reasons. I feel fine attacking the postmodern theories of the intellectual elite because plenty of half-baked pop musicians have ineptly deployed them and I feel entitled to reply. I feel fine, also, attacking shallow anti-americanism, programmeless anti-globalism and silly adolescent brands of socialism because these too are the playthings of dilletante pop musicians.

Where I stumble is attempting to write about real politics where people stand for elections and make changes in that thin band of policy that actually affects people. Why should my opinion on such things be worth knowing about? I don’t know. I suspect they aren’t. But, all the same, for one blog only, I shall tell you what I think about the Prime Minister and then we can all move on.

I fucking hate the Prime Minister.

I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool labour party supporter. I discovered that I was one of those while voting in 2005 and finding out that any notions of voting otherwise were simply inconcievable. My Dad is a union lawyer, I’ve been to parties with Neil Kinnock and funerals with John Prescott, My heart welled with glee when Stephen Twigg won Portillo’s seat in ‘97 and it shrank with dismay when he lost it to David Burrowes in 2005. I dislike Tories, even the ones I like, because they are Tories and that’s how it is.

More than that, I am (in the short term at least) New Labour. Eventually I should like to see the abolition of menial work, the abandoning of all borders and the universal application of mechanised of welfare divorcing a basic level of free living from economic participation maximising liberty while encouraging scientific innovation – but, for now, I believe in equality and protection for members of involuntary minorities; I believe that there are market solutions for many social problems but that society is obliged to maintain a basic living standard for all; I believe in a strong transatlantic alliance, I believe that human rights are universal and worth defending; I believe in coming to terms with the transformations that were the result of Thatcher’s cruelties and ploughing on with a tweaked mixed economy… In other words, until Bob ushers in the age of Slack, I am of the Blairite, third-way, centre-left.

I believe, also, that a Tory victory at the next election will hurt people. There is a pernicious myth that the two main parties are basically the same. This is not true, but - even if it were the case that the leaders of both believed and acted identically - there is no end of difference between a man who, when forced to compromise to please his base, makes concessions to Trade Unions, Peaceniks and Liberty and a man who would do the same for little-Englanders, Daily Mail readers and racists. There is a gap and the recession is widening it. You probably do not fall into that gap, but millions do and a Tory government will hurt them while you glibly pontificate on how the parties are identical.

Gordon Brown though. Ugh.

It was obvious all along. The nonsense about abolishing boom and bust. The ineptness of his spin. The sulkiness. The facial tics. The airless speeches. The smirking pretence at contentment. The self-satisfied promotion of a ludicrous ‘iron-chancellor’ image… He is the living embodiment of the Peter Principle which sees managers promoted to the level of their own incompetence.

It was never at all relevant that he was ‘competent’ anyway. There are a great many people who are competent waiting to be employed. The man does not understand the British people. He does not understand the we are a nation of skiving chancers who like to be told that we are hard working – not a nation of hard working people. He does not get that we are increasingly connected by the internet, media and its currencies and that we do not know anybody else who would call her ‘Jane’ Goody. He doesn’t understand that poorly delivered, badly written jokes about Peter Mandelson getting doused in custard are fine for Peter Mandelson but beneath an elected prime minister and head of government. The man cannot lead.

People used to criticise spin, but spin was not the problem. Good spin can inspire, can enable democracy, can broaden understanding. Good spin is Henry V at agincourt, Obama’s oratorical tours of wheatfields and aircraft carriers, Kennedy’s inaugural, men on the moon. Bad spin was always the problem – weasly and obvious, seeking to distort rather than present. Brown is horribly spun and hopelessly unspinnable. He appears contemptuous, dishonest and small. He is unlikeable and cannot be made to appear otherwise.

The job of Prime Minister is not to tinker and control but to communicate an agenda and steer its passage. Brown can’t do either and he will lose the next election because of it. The labour party must act now, as it should have months ago. Ditch him. Pick a successor. Call an election. Lose it. Let the Tories mismanage the recession for five years and then take the country back. There really is no other choice.

I shall go back to fiddling with effects pedals now.

The Recession Song – An Explanatory Note

2009-03-02T12:20:00.003Z

----------
First Appeared on the Von Pip Musical Express
http://tinyurl.com/demjka
---------
The Recession Song – An Explanatory Note

I was talking to a friend the other day. While this was an unusual enough occurrence that it deserves its own sentence, it should come as no surprise to anyone within the noughties indie clusterfuck that he’s a friend out of some band and that most of the conversation concerned some other bands and the narrow range of music that they make. The conversation turned, as they will when I’m steering them, to the Brighton Institute of Modern Music and the usual debate as to whether it falls squarely into the set of evil things.

BIMM is, like the Brit school, a place where young people go to learn how to be popstars. It has likely produced more popstars than your school. I can’t speak with authority about the syllabus but I imagine they are taught to grow out the curly hair they were always bullied for in order to brand their silhouettes effectively; that they are instructed to affect adenoidally half-australian/half-mockney vocal styles in order to generate an easily identifiable sonic profile for radio; that they are encouraged to fuck each other and talk about it; that they are encouraged to pick bandnames that are easy on graphic designers, vaguely reference David Bowie and stand in direct contradiction to what their bands are actually like. The ‘Kooks’, say, for example.

So anyway, I’m halfway through my usual tirade about BIMM, building up to my sexy rhetorical flourish where I slag off the Kooks, when this friend does something unexpected: he defends the fuckers (BIMM, not the Kooks – he is my friend after all).

It turns out that among his many sacked drummers was a BIMM alumnus who set him straight about a few things. It turns out that a BIMM education is jolly hard work. That the stars it produces are among the lesser of its talents. That it offers a route into the industry for the underpivileged. That it is, on balance less evil than one might assume. And, like a member of the liberal Intelligentsia confronted with the fact that Saddam Hussein used to make naked political prisoners sit on sharpened metal spikes, I am sent at once into a conversational tailspin, scrabbling around for a reason why I’m still right.

I am right though, and here’s why:

Systems, by their nature, exclude. No matter how broad a system of education seeks to be, no matter what it encompasses, it will keep at its heart a notion of the best way to go about something. By definition, this will exclude other options. An educational system involves a power imablance between the teacher and taught. This power imbalance interrupts the flow of communication. To communicate the fact that they have learned, pupils must, in some sense, achieve goals set by teachers. If the process of learning is goal orientated, then those who accept that hard work within the definitions of a system is their best route to success will succeed. If such people succeed, they will further promote the assumptions that were the basis for their success and more such people will prosper. Thus, the hegemony is established.

The system, ultimately operates on a self-perpetuating bell-curve, each generation adding ever-more skewed data to the definitions of normal, good, best. A graph plotting success against conformity to expected norms will take the shape of an ever steeper parabolic hill with the mediocre teaparty of the average perched atop it. Perhaps it excludes the very bad. Perhaps, the very good. It certainly excludes the odd, the unexpected and the outlier.

And you know what? that would all be fine if the system was designed to identify and promote suitable cabinet ministers or plumbers. In these (as most) fields, the benefits of odd brilliance are outweighed by the dangers of odd dreadfulness. An odd plumber might increase the efficiency of your pipes and save you £20 a year in heating bills, but he might also plumb your CD player into your bath and kill you. An odd cabinet minister might usher in a golden age of liberty and enquiry, but he might as soon gas you for failing to live up to the standards of his utopia. Mediocrity has benefits.

But when it comes to art – music – the downsides are irrelevant to anything while the upsides are vast and bounteous. An odd musician might well make a very very bad album; but he might make an inspirational heavy metal masterpiece that forms the basis for a future society based on being excellent to each other. Consequently, the mediocrity-benefiting bellcurve that can’t help but be created by BIMM’s success is just damaging, there is no upside for anyone except the Kooks.

Because music is built on freaks and poor people. The old established sectarian lines between ‘artschool’ and working class musicians disguise this broader truth: that good music is made by outcasts. People who don’t fit on the bellcurve. Maybe because they are poor and socially immobile and hate it. Maybe because they are too weird to do anything else. Maybe for reasons I can’t yet imagine. People who say fuck it, what else are we going to do? It cannot be a profession. It cannot be professional. It cannot be a career – it’s for people who don’t want a career, for whom fun is secondary, who have lost hope, who obey no fashion.

In a time of plenty, when struggle seems quaint and life is a series of consolidating gestures BIMM and it’s ilk do nothing but harm as they leave handprints and signatures along the good intentioned pathway to entropic, featureless hell. They serve and regenerate the established. The money keeps them strong. Like the traders who see their share prices rising higher and higher and know that it can only cause harm to point out that they have come adrift from reality, the fact of financial success ensures that no questioning of the system’s assumptions can be taken seriously. It is boomtown thinking.

Now, however, we are in a recession and the gold is running thin. It has yet to bite. Even today, parents buy their children guitars and open BIMM prospectuses and see that yes, this music thing is a viable career choice for their moptopped little dullard. Still the bellcurve steepens as the career paths of the boomtown economy remain trodden. Still Icarus ascends.

But the fact looms that there is now no money in it. The Music industry was on its knees already and now they can pretend no hope. The y axis of our graph is starting to look shaky as the definitions used to measure ‘success’ start to crumble. When it breaks, there will be no future for mediocrity hill and those on higher ground will have nowhere to fall but an x axis populated by very irritated freaks.

The really important thing here is that I was right. BIMM is definitely evil. But, that said, it is not unconquerably so. Everything is changing, print is dying, the idea of selling generic round objects with data on looks increasingly absurd, the idea of companies standing between musician and audience taking half the money more so. The recession will see a slashing and burning of the suffocating foliage to make way for new shoots. I feel guilty for saying it, because outside in reality there will be suffering and misery and panic – but here, in music, in art - thank fuck for the fucking recession indeed.

#

David Koresh Superstar

2009-02-20T13:24:00.004Z

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=454329186

A few demos from a concept album I done. Due for release in the murky uncertain future.
XX.S

Reclaiming Hate

2008-12-04T13:07:00.002Z

As the season of peace and goodwill to all men gets into full swing, I thought it might be an appropriate time to post some thoughts about Hate and its benefits.

I, personally, enjoy hate - I find it an enriching and invigorating emotion, almost on a par with spite – but in recent years this most piquant of emotions has had a bad rap, something that I think needs altering.

I am literally on record as finding myself agreeing with Bill O’Reilly more than the left. No one seems to believe me when I say this, much as no one seems able to accept that when I write a song called America about how I like America in which the chorus says ‘I’m with America’ that I mean it and do, in fact, like America. Saying positive things about Bill O’Reilly and America is like trying to stage an anti-semitic presentation of the Merchant of Venice at the National Theatre – you could indulge in every Jewish stereotype going, have a grotesque, green-skinned, gargantu-nosed Shylock delivering the ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech in an asthamtic wheedle while fingering gold coins like Poker chips and every review would praise it for daring to confront the semiotic hallmarks of its context. This is because the idea that the National Theatre could actually have descended into Jew baiting is inconceivable. This is good. It is not good that, in the same way, every vaguely intelligent western voice should be pre-assigned to the anti-American faction. America remains a shining city on the last best hill and deserves better than the vapid dislike it receives from sophomoric Europeans who have yet to realise that they are Alexandrians in the age of Rome. I dislike being grouped with them.

In fact I Hate it. And this brings me back to what I was supposed to be talking about. I am on record as sometimes agreeing with Bill O’Reilly. However, something that I really disagree with Bill O’Reilly about is Hate.

Often, on the Factor, O’Reilly will co-opt the left’s traditional opposition to Hate and turn it against the kind of legitimate Hate that I think needs defending. Suddenly, ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate websites’ - terms coined to describe Klan rallies, Queer bashing and WhiteSupremacist.com (amazingly, I checked, and this domain really exists) – were being used to describe bloggers and commentators who wanted nothing worse than for Dick Cheney’s assasination attempt to have gone better and for people to sneer about Sarah Palin. This, and I think O’Reilly knows it, is supremely offensive and dishonest. There is no equivalence between hating a minority and hating an individual, it’s blazingly obvious. And yet people seem confounded by it.

So effective was the progressive campaign against Hate that now, as with ‘theory’, it has run into a problem: many people are uncomfortable with the idea that a word might have several related but distinct meanings.

Theory could mean ‘vague guess about what’s going on’ or it could mean ‘rigorously tested and internally consistent idea about what’s going on that fits the available evidence and is as close to true as we can get, considering’. Similarly, ‘Hate’ could mean ‘unreasonable reactionary emotion caused by unacknowledged prejudice within the hater’ or it could mean ‘sense of extreme revulsion augmenting a reasoned response to an idea or individual that has grossly offended your moral philosophy’. It is not paradoxical to hate hate. You can hate racial hatred. It's easy.

That this does not readily spring to the articulacy of many allows O’Reilly to get away with his distortion. He confuses the two meanings. You can’t endorse a blogger who hates someone because Hate is bad. And those tasked with rebuttal enter a tailspin of misconceived axioms – hate is bad, after all.

None of this particularly matters because the custodians of the laws dealing with hate are not morons and are thus able to differentiate between confusing homonyms. Where we get into trouble is when the co-option of Hate by right wing forces meets the twisted way we treat religion. As has been discussed a lot lately, we have fallen into the odd trap of viewing religious opinion as distinct from it’s sane counterparts. If you prefer the superposition model to the multiple universe hypothesis you argue about it and you curse bloody Dr Stevens and his damned sexy hypothesis that gets all the funding. If, however, you prefer a model where a God directs the movement of photons through slits of card then you are not argued with: your opinion is just respected and you are treated as part of a distinct group with a collective identity that can be regarded as a singular noun and afforded protections.

This is ridiculous. Subscription to a religious position entails nothing more than the adoption of a set of opinions. Opinions are not innate, they are not fundamental to one’s person. Hatred of a person because of their opinions is a category two hatred, akin to hating Dick Cheney – not akin to hating Gays.

When the British government passed a wholly unnecessary law outlawing threatening speech or behaviour inciting religious hatred (it was already illegal to incite crimes and this covers any provable case of being ‘threatening’) it had been gratifyingly watered down so as not to cover ‘abusive or insulting’ speech. Still though, the debate fell into the same trap I describe. Rowan Atkinson’s celebrated opposition to the bill studiously (and probably sensibly) avoided an attempt to justify hate, instead worrying about the outlawing of ‘criticism’. The government responded by saying that it was ‘hate’ not ‘jokes’ that they wanted rid of. Aside from the waste of time, money and law the saga ended well, but it remains to be said that religious hatred should not just be legal but that it is often a moral imperative, just as hatred of racism is.

I would like to have category two Hate back. I would like it to be uncontroversial that, should a man subscribe to a belief system in which gays can be stoned to death, in which women can be considered and punished for adulterers when raped, in which mutilation of girls is justifiable, in which the story of Abraham’s willingness to murder Isaac is considered morally instructive, in which condom use is discouraged in AIDS ridden African nations, in which the benefits of technology are disregarded for a nonsensical devotion to an imagined spinning-wheel past, in which terrorism is acceptable… should a man subscribe to these beliefs, I feel within my rights to hate him. My rights, in fact, are irrelevant: I do hate him. He’s a nobhead.

Like the grumpy old misanthrope who looks at a glass, calls it half-empty and then, spurred by his awareness that, given the nature of time and its relentless progress in a forward direction, a glass halfway toward emptiness will inevitably become empty and hastens at once to make arrangements for its refilling – I consider my Hate to be a good thing. It forbids acceptance of the repulsive, precludes respect for the damaging and prompts resistance to the indefensible. Hate is a negative thing that - like dissatisfaction, boredom and horror - can have a positive outcome. Hate is a thing to cherish. I like it. I’m having it back.

On which note, Merry Christmas.
May your days be merry and bright.
XX.
Simon Indelicate

"Steal This Book" and other brand-building strategies

2008-04-13T14:08:00.003+01:00

Our Album comes out tomorrow. You’d think this would make me happy, but, oddly really, it doesn’t. It is a horribly exposing feeling. You know when you see Heather Mills or someone being excoriated in the press and you don’t feel bad about it because you know (and she knows) that at some point and at some level she was asking for it? Well, I’m fairly sure that the day you release an album is the day that you cross that line – they might not give it me, but I’m asking for it. I’ve offered part of myself for sale: I’m now fair game. It is enough to send you scurrying back to the cellar-based poetry scene you came from, miserable verse in hand, sorry about what you said about the bongo drummer they brought in and begging to be allowed back.

I should be getting over myself shortly.

In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy the small and rare pleasures. For example – two weeks ago I was delighted to be able to download my album off bitTorrent. Whatever the people who invented it claim, there can’t be many people in the world who can claim to have used bittorrent entirely legally, but I am now one of them and it feels pretty good.

I have to admit to about ten minutes of outrage – (‘What? These people are stealing from me! Right! Well! I shall get Scotland Yard on the phone at once! This must be stopped!’) – before I remembered what I think about bitTorrent and calmed down. For those I’ve yet to bore with the details of What I Think About BitTorrent, here is a brief precis:

1) The Internet will embody the entirety of human knowledge. Every bit of data that humanity has generated and then seen fit to record can be stored and readily accessed using it.
2) The simplicity of accessing this data makes it indistinguishable as a data store from the memory centres of the brain. Not just figuratively, but Literally, a human being at a computer is vastly more knowledgeable.
3) An abundance of knowledge usually leads to increases in Intelligence, Empathy and Creativity
4) The benefits to humanity of this development are incalculable and vast. They entirely dwarf the issue of copyright which looks absurd and petty by comparison. I want to get paid – I need to get paid – but, even without the obvious impracticality of enforcing my copyright, getting paid at the cost of impeding the flow of data around the world is, basically, a crime.

People will tell you that this is a dreadful way of looking at it because it devalues music. I read furious attacks on Radiohead for their ‘pay what you like’ branding exercise on exactly that basis. As I explained in this entry however, music does not have an intrinsic value, as supply vastly exceeds demand. What has scarcity power (and thus value) is a brand. And brands are far less susceptible to infringement by the free flow of data because one of the characteristics of brands is the self-enforcing desire for authenticity. In other words, if I make something ‘official’ that is identical to something ‘unofficial’ then my thing is worth more because people demand brand authenticity: It’s only gucci if gucci say it’s gucci. It’s only a fiver if the bank of england says it is.

So we need to think of better ways of getting paid and branding is probably the asnwer. It is for this reason that Julia is currently at her mothers making dolls of us. Like I said, we’re really asking for it now.

Half a league, Half a league...

XX.S

Couldn’t get the visa to take Manhattan, Attempt to take Berlin…

2008-03-31T14:21:00.002+01:00

I don’t know why it is that I have the same taste in music as Germany, but I do. While favourite bands of mine like The Auteurs and Carter USM are ignored by the pudgily welsh indie historians of Grim Britain and neglected by the kids they serve – in Germany everyone seems to know who they were and seems to hold them in the proper esteem. While, in Germany, Art Brut (and we should pause to note here that we’re mates because we think they’re amazing – we don’t think they’re amazing because we’re mates) are rightly heralded as the best thing to come out of Britain in a decade – here their press remains grudging and unable to see past the novelty band they simply aren’t. And, to an extent, they like us – which proves nothing and undermines my point but is, all the same, why I bring it up.

We’re just back from launching the album in Berlin (It was decided to release it over there three weeks prior to its coming out in the UK so as to give bittorrent uploaders a bit of a decent run-up) and, as usual, it was a pleasing excursion into the realm of minor indie celebrity. They give you things there, you see: bounteous dressing room tables overflowing with rolls and sweets and cakes and ale, dinner, beds, taxis and an audience. We’ve a track on the covermount of their premier music magazine. Their principle mainstream online entertainment portal picked our cover art over REMs for it’s weekly album review link. The kids want things signed, the crowds want an hour and a half and the interviews! Ah, sweet luxury of interviewers who don’t care why Julia left some band and why I want to kill Pete Doherty…

But still, self-indlugence aside, we’d love Berlin anyway. It is nothing like other european cities. Its most pertinent apsect is not it’s past. London, Paris, Rome and their lesser cousins are monuments, tombs – preserved relics of dead things. Paris is romantic because it was once so; London similarly cool. Their sights are distinguished by no one living (and Buckingham palace is an exeption on only the most technical of grounds). All that stuff about a vibrant, multicultural, polyglot society is nonsense and made moreso by its shoehorning into the ugly narratives of the idiot academy. The vibrant are living in museums and, wherever their history lives, it is not London, nor Paris, nor Rome.

Berlin is different. You can’t say what Berlin is like because it doesn’t know yet, it is still happening. While it is full of History, it is not full of hindsight – you can guess what will happen to it but you can’t be sure. There is graffiti everywhere and it can’t be washed off because some of it is graffiti that will come to have mattered. There is no order to the architecture, just a competing jumble of attempts to impose order. There are patches of wasteland everywhere - grassed over and strewn with old railway sleepers – even right in the centre where a Yo Sushi and two Starbucks could happily have been inserted. In the east, the DDR’s apartments – built purposefully large and luxurious so as to ease the discomforts of limited resources and compromised freedom – can be bought or rented for a London pittance and filled with a thousand fliers for parties, gigs, art shows, cabarets, anything that can be tried before the calcification sets in.

People you talk to had Nazi grandparents, were communists until they were ten, are anarcho-syndicalists now but still buy strawberries at Easter with the unabashed glee of those who do the impossible. You can mention the war – as befits a work in progress you can mention anything that helps – but you won’t be speaking the same language. The end of our history was the beginning of Berlin’s and, while it can’t last forever, it will be ongoing for a generation at least. I think. Maybe.

Maybe there’s a link between all this and the difference in musical tastes? Maybe germany was less poisoned by the comfortable self-satisfaction of the victor’s children in the sixties? Maybe fun and dancing don’t cut it as motivating factors for music when they are not enshrined in the canon of a generation’s birthrights?

I don’t know. We played a gig, sold some merch, went to an amaaaaazing bar…

British Music That’s Better Than Anything We Sent To SXSW In 2008

2008-03-22T16:10:00.002Z

By far the worst hour I had at SXSW was at the Latitude bar, the venue repainted as the home of the British Music Embassy. We saw the end of one band, the whole of another and the beginning of a third before escaping. They may as well have all been the same one: identi-haired, A-level concentration on their incurious faces, grinding out the new British rock sound for an audience of UK journalists. Any of them could have been the next big thing and none of them should be. Horrid horrid horrid.

I’ve often toyed with the idea of an mp3 blog. I like some of the ones I’ve discovered through narcissistic blog searches and I can’t see anything I like without wanting to appropriate it – I have a lot in common with Madonna that way. The fact is, though, I really don’t like music very much and, when I do fancy hearing some, I mainly listen to country and western. Instead of an ongoing project then, here are five musical production units that I do like and that you might not know already:

1. The Flesh Happening
You know how glam flirted with gayness but got coy before it got too dirty, the forces of straight acceptability moving in and turning it into a minor facet of the bloke-ish personality? Well The Flesh Happening take it back for the queers, drag it into an alley behind a really scary bar and rape it back to life. They are the answer to the big men at Morrissey gigs who fancy a quick weep before their next fight. Angry, squealy, arresting and the only band that has made me uncomfortable in the twenty-first century. Come and see them play at our album launch – they are one of very few Brighton bands more interesting than having a cigarette outside.
myspace.com/thefleshhappening

2. Lily Rae
First seen at Nambucca elevating an already above average teenage new wave band called Bottle Rocket with sneery banter (“there’s more people in than for that last band – I wonder why that is?”) and good singing. Lily Rae has resurrected herself as a solo artist with a Blondie-esque catchiness and a lyrical audacity that sticks her firmly in the category where Lily Allen isn’t. For some reason, the use of the word ‘nob’ in a chorus rings with the clarion note of truth where the word ‘dickhead’ sounds fake and stageschool. She’s tiny and she drips with attitude and she plays shows in shit pubs as though they were arenas. And her dad is in her band and she stares you down and dares you to make something of it. She’s ace.
myspace.com/ohnolilyrae

3. Red Zebra
One of the weirder gigs we’ve played was a flood relief benefit in Worcester, headlining an alldayer at a school. The rest of the bill was made up of local kids – all of whom were impressive – and we ended up playing to a half-empty hall because, by the time we got on, everyone was outside throwing up litre bottles of cheap cider and shouting ‘leave it’ at each other. Earlier in the day, Red Zebra had been gobsmackingly fab. There are loads of them, they have a brass section, they’re shambolic, loud and joyous and, during their set, pretty much everyone in the audience was onstage daring the parents-cum-bouncers to try and get them off. It was like watching the Happy Mondays must have felt like. We keep trying to get people in London to book them, but they don’t believe us. They should.
myspace.com/redzebrafunk

4. Philip Jeays
I really shouldn’t need to talk about Phil Jeays. In the world I wish I lived in, he is beloved of his nation and sells out yearly 5-day runs of gigs at the Royal Albert Hall where he is assaulted with bouquets and is able to score crescendos of rapturous applause into his live instrumentation. Sadly, this is not the case – though he does sell out yearly christmas gigs on the battersea barge – and I am all too often forced to watch him in pubs with a fat drunk businessman heckling. Still though, his Bowie-d up Jaques Brel-ian ballads are bitter, cruel, genuinely funny and genuinely, achingly heartbreaking. Buy all his albums – you can’t fit him into myspace.
myspace.com/philipjeays

5. Jim Bob
The only other contender for a British Jaques Brel. You probably have half-baked, poorly thought out opinions about Carter USM – the number one album, glastonbury headlining, NME cover fronting band that the idiots forgot – and you should reassess them. A good place to start would be with Jim Bob’s last two Solo albums (‘school’ and ‘a humpty dumpty day’) which are just fantastically good. Lyrically dazzling, musically focussed, conceptually coherent – no one does this stuff better, as you should have known ever since he rhymed ‘Balkans’, ‘Falklands’ and ‘Waltons’ and got away with it in the late nineties. You should listen to Abdoujaparov (fruitbat’s band) too, especially ‘Hit Her With The Pig’: it is about exactly what it says it is.
myspace.com/jimbobm
myspace.com/idou2

SXSW Blog Part Five (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

2008-03-21T00:46:00.001Z

Apparently, the man from Pinnacle distribution thinks that we are going to get our heads kicked in one day. I can’t imagine why. In the musical culture I thought I lived in, introducing We Hate The Kids with ‘We’d like to thank South By Southwest for this marketing opportunity, so stick that in your fucking blackberry – this is a song about how we hate you’ would be at the lower end of normal for rock’n’roll attitude. Not so. These days it’s all about being pleased with the living you scrape out, mugging gratefully for the people whose job it is to follow you about and swiftly londoning up the hertfordshire accents whenever you’re on the radio. I’m frequently shocked at how nice everybody is.

For example, we’ve got a song called ‘New Art For The People’ that, in its first line, uses the word ‘come’ as a noun. I’ve seen young, alternative minded people on the internet complaining that this is ‘designed to shock’. Really? Are you that prudish? It’s seedy, yes – as is the thing being described – but shocking? Have you actually listened to a Pulp album, or is it just cuddly uncle Jarvis and his cheeky working-class synthesiser that you remember these days? Have you listened to Suede? Elastica? even Sleeper? Frankie Goes To Hollywood shocked Mike Reid a bit in the 80s, maybe, but the young? Fuck no. This generation is the reason David Cameron looks electable – and that IS shocking.

We played two shows on Saturday. The first, we had been told, was in a 2,000 capacity central venue called Pangaea with some other bands who have achieved what passes for fame. As it turned out, it was in the garden of a shop three miles out of town called the Pangaea Patio and the other ‘famous’ band had taken one look and buggered off. The temptation toward prima donnaism hastily throttled (Don’t you people know who we are…? Oh, right, yeah, you don’t. Fair enough). It was a pretty good time all the same. It was another opportunity to hang out in lovely Austin, eat Pizza at a joint owned by Texas U. alumni who had decided to turn hanging out eating Pizza into a career, and generally enjoy the sun. Playing solos whilst leaning against a Texas live oak as a petrol scented breeze blew my daft fringe over my eyes felt good: the feeling slash must crave just before he steps out of weddings to rock on cliff tops.Back in downtown, we pulled up to our official Showcase at the Rio Grande – usually a Mexican restaurant that puts you in mind of Casa Bonita from that episode of South Park. It has a big neon Texan over the door and an indoor pond with a canoe in. The event manager pulls us over to one side as soon as we arrive and asks if we are the kind of band likely to want to jump into the indoor pool. Apparently, the lead singers of 6 bands have already seen fit to jump into it over the week and – while he doesn’t mind them jumping in – he won’t let them back on stage with wet clothes on account of all the electricity and significant risk of death. We assure him that we aren’t that kind of band. We’re all for rebelling against industry smugness, musical arrogance, indie self-satisfaction and conservatives, but we leave rebelling against perfectly sensible advice for the less syllabic of our countrymen. He seems mildly relieved.The venue fills up, pleasingly, and we are properly nervous. This translates into a show that we are all very happy with. The kind of show where you walk on feeling awful and off feeling amazing – where the crowd laughs in the right places, is quiet when you are and loud when you stop. We introduce ‘Waiting For Pete Doherty To Die’ with ‘this is about British Music, because it’s just so amaaaazing’ and people cheer like they get it.
We’re happy.

The rest of the night is all crowded rooms and chatter. We talk to journalists and weirdos and cousins who have a band with no name who are really into Cold-play and want to know if they’re big in England. We watch a Detroit beat combo called The Singles who play a likeably unaffected version of happy sixties pop that is alright for making no claim to credibility. We walk sixth street again as it works itself into its nightly frenzy. We are fliered and gurned at, ID’d and hobbled by the Texas distances.We end up at bar with a outside stage where, we are assured, there is good music to be heard all year long – an Austin place among the bars the locals leave for kids and Tourists. We want to see Matt and Kim – a Brooklyn duo on drums and cheap synth whom Keith TOTP has hosted in his Camden fortress. They are preceded by an indie electro-preacher in a gold Jacket rapping the crowd into a frenzy with a rant about the ‘assholes on sixth street’ – he’s ace. As are Matt and Kim who have the best grins in Indie and some of the better tunes.

SXSW has a downside. It really does. Its buzzes and PDAs and hype-generation-meetings are everything you hate about the music industry made flesh. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.". Much of SXSW is for small minds – names are on lips where notions should be. But there is something there that it can’t clean and that the british invasion can’t ruin. It is the spirit of Texas and America where nothing is as simple as the rest of the world imagines. It is in the backyard bar where a happy man in a hoodie tells a crowd of stagedivers that he loves them. It is the next day, walking down sixth - miraculously tidied and spotless bearing no hint of the bedlam the night before – when a bedraggled, presumably homeless, teenager wanders over asking if we’ll pay her to read a poem to us and then, when we give embarrassed English coughs and say sorry but no, asks if we’ll listen to it anyway because she’s trying to expand her vocabulary. It’s the mexican waiter who, bored of serving, sits down at our table and tells us how the previous night he was bummed out because he lost $100 on a boxing match but then some rich assholes started hassling him in the street about his ponytail – one of them said he could have $100 right there if he’d cut it off, so he did it, cause whatever, right? – and now he was back even.

There is a palpable sense of life returning to normal on Sunday. We all meet up in town, deciding whether to stay in Austin or drive down to San Antonio – we’ve got a reasonable economy and we wanna see some history.

The odd convention pass flutters in the breeze from the coming storms and immaculately haired guitarists sit in cafés nursing three day hangovers and forests of wristbands. There are probably last minute meetings to be found, blackberries to be courted and industry to be charming at – but it’s hot and it’s dusty, and we have a car with Del Reeves on the radio, and it’s eighty miles down the highway to the Alamo. The Texas sky is big and the sunset impossibly distant - but hell y’all if we ain’t gonna do our darnedest to ride off into it.XX.
Simon Indelicate, Austin 2008

PS.
Just listened to Huw Stevens SXSW Radio 1 show – he was going on about some british hope [Florence & The Machine] who’d been amaaaazing. Apparently she jumped into the indoor pond at the end of her set. Just remember, kids: One of six. In four days. And I know for a fact that the event manager didn’t let her back onto the stage...S

http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk

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SXSW Blog Part Four (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

2008-03-20T16:41:00.000Z

So we’re sitting in the lakeside bar of the five star four seasons hotel drinking Ice tea that is so classy that they make the ice out of tea so that it doesn’t dilute the drink when it melts. Julia and I are with Keith (who we’ve been travelling with and who is the person we are most likely to say we owe it all to, should we ever suffer an attack of gushing sentimentality at a low-rent corporate awards show) and Becki who we’ve only met this week, who is here working and who is lovely.

She’s reeling off the Old testament length litany of bands she’s seen in the past few days and asking if we like the ones she mentions. And as we keep bowing our heads sheepishly and mumbling, er… no, we hate them, actually… we have no wonder what we’re doing in this business at all.Keith points out that he’s seen other bands’ blogs about SXSW and that they usually consist of excited tracts about all the shows they’ve been to and how they were all very good. Ours isn’t really like that, is it?

Take today: we did see a great band, as it happens and we played what I thought was a good gig but the main thing we did – and the thing I’ll look back on fondly when I’m buying food next week at home – is go to the Bob Bullock museum near the state capitol and see a high-tech educational attraction about the history of Texas. I love high-tech educational attractions. They are probably my favourite thing in the world. This one was among the better ones. They showed slides and little dramatisations on screens that faded away to reveal static scenes behind of Hardship struck Oil prospectors and the dead of the Alamo. And when there was a storm on screen the seats shook and the room filled with smoke and wind. When there was a reading from a pioneers diary about rattlesnakes a hydraulic spring poked you from within your seat making you jump and the class of fourth-graders on a school trip behind you scream and say ‘oh my god’ to each other. It was ace. And well worth commemorating with the purchase of a Texas flag design formal shirt. (If you’re not in a band, you’d be amazed what you can justify to yourself with the simple words: ‘for stage’).You see, aside from the unresolved rejection issues and our deep sense of personal inadequacy, we got into this for the travel. We don’t understand bands who see nothing of the places they visit.

In Berlin once, we had been flown out for twenty-four hours to play at British Music week, we didn’t have time to do much, but by God if we didn’t go to the Brandenburg gate at four in the morning and have a damn good look at the fucker. The band we played with had been there for several days but had only seen the inside of a bar. A really cool bar, yeah? But a bar just the same. It is beyond us.

No one in the museum has an SXSW badge on except us. The guitar playing fools - they don’t know what they’re missing. I’d build a high-tech educational attraction to explain it to them, but they’d never come.

So on to our show, which is in a hard-to-find scout hut of a bar called the palm door. Apparently it was a well-known dive called the Red Rum until recently and this is why no one knows where it is, but it’s nice inside and has an enjoyably rickety outer terrace that lurches out over a trickle of water at the bottom of a mini, semi-concrete canyon. The guys putting it on are likeable New Yorkers and the atmosphere is great.Relaxed, receptive and Fringe-y. We are preceded on the bill by O’ Death who are a sensational blend of bluegrass instruments, wild biker looks, entrancing drumstick trickery and screaming/shouty vocals. They suit the 90 degree heat and swamp-shack surroundings perfectly and are easily the best thing I’ve seen so far without a high-tech educational attraction in it.

Our show is pretty good too. Everything clicks and there is enough space on the stage for Al to wave his guitar about and pull aggressive faces without knocking Julia off her stool. Perhaps predictably, Americans are intrigued by our new single ‘America’ (which is about the European left’s willingness to find accommodation with religio-fascists as a consequence of their dogmatic anti-American position) as, being live music, you can’t hear most of the words.

The subtleties of such a dialectic tend to be harder to discern when it is being shouted ovcr a rock band. Still, explaining ourselves gets conversations going and we are soon making five minute friendships and swearing blind that we’ll register for the kind of Web 2.0 start-ups that Duncan Bannatyne sneers at on Dragon’s Den.

So we finally end up in the four seasons (and my, that’s a very nice hotel indeed) wondering why we got into this business when we don’t really like music very much. But, of course, we’re not really wondering any such thing. We know why. It’s because we like the edges and the backrooms and the terraces and the smoking cabins. We like naked men in beards playing ukuleles. We like the bars of hotels we have no real business being in. It’s not us, it’s everyone else, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk

SXSW Blog Part Three (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

2008-03-20T16:39:00.002Z

British music is the new French food. Walking the streets of downtown Austin we are surrounded by the British in droves – they have the same hair and clothes, they play guitars and bang drums and they sing to each other. They congregate at a bar called Latitude which they have painted with the Union Jack and adorned with Arts council funded posters advertising the moderate rock of the regions. Journalists stand and watch them, nodding unsmiling heads while pound signs flash across their pupils.They take the same pictures over and over and tell each other that they did great shows. Like French food - everybody knows that British music is the best in the world, so they buy out second-rate brasseries and microwave pre-seared Steak Frites for the tourists and the drunks sure in the knowledge that the Rubes don’t know what they’re eating.

I had begun to worry that Austin was like Brighton. Brighton was a great town once. My friends were poets (good poets too – not the failed stand up comedians and self-help addicts who populate most readings), anarchists and pegs so beaten up and twisted that they’d fit no hole, square, round or otherwise. They went to Brighton as a last resort and made a place that wouldn’t stare at them – it was a grimy flyposted utopia. Then money heard about it. Money moved in. There was funding, design, self-confidence –all the things that kill a place like that. Slowly it died. Those who couldn’t afford the new prices left. Those who could afford them bred and their dullard, giftless offspring grew up to believe they were entitled to all the world’s generosity and formed dullard giftless microwave steak bands.

Austin has a similar history. If you’ve seen Slacker, you’ll likely know what the place was like in the early nineties and, if you are the kind of person who has gotten round to watching slacker, you’ll likely have wanted to visit. All the ingredients for a Brighton-style meltdown were in place. The difference though – and what we have learned today – is that Austin fought back.

You can see it if you look. There is a window selling Pizzas on sixth street (SXSW’s hub) that has a sign scrawled on a paper plate reading: “Cheers mate! Is not an acceptable tip in Texas”. In the South Congress area (a free bus ride out of downtown) a bass player and guitarist stand in a doorway with a sign announcing that they are “doing it for Johnny Cash” and belt out furious rebel country – the gist of the lyrics being that ‘this town ain’t what it used to be’ and that everyone should ‘get the fuck out’. In Allens boots (a cowboy boot and western wear emporium that is possibly the best shop in the world and that is also now in possession of all our money) the woman selling boots to Julia explains with supreme contempt that the 6th street zip code is really ‘just full of college students…’

Austin, in fact, is fuckin’ cooool. It really is full of gen X obsessives who are relaxed and interested and weird in a good way. Looking for a can of Mountain Dew, Julia and I wander into an emporium selling, principally, bongs and dildos. The desk clerk is drawn at once to Julia’s new boots (they really are very good boots) and he starts discussing the merits of various tobaccos. By the time I get back from looking at illuminati themed joss sticks they are laying Julia’s change all over the counter to see how many state logos she has inadvertently collected. I think this kind of thing is the Austin norm. When the credentialed ponytails have gone back to whichever media village they call home, Austin will keep on with the weird. The guy in the bong and dildo emporium will be talking conspiracy theories with the rebel country busker from SoCo and life will be sweet.

But anyway: music. We see Billy Bragg in a stale room inside the convention centre doing some tracks from his new record. He’s great by default, but he looks a bit annoyed at the setting – and it’s hard to blame him. The rest of our band all go and watch Hanson (yes, that Hanson) and despite my shudders of indie-cred embarrassment they repeatedly insist that it was good. The evening is mainly snatches of drums and occasional diversions of guitar. The atmosphere on sixth is not, as I’ve heard it insisted, wild or crazy. It is full of purpose – everyone going somewhere, queuing for something, relaying meta-praise about someone – but it looks like chaos. There is a lengthy parade of Asian youths in colourful uniforms which – according to the fliers they were passing out – is an advert for the showcase of a band described as the ‘first Korean band to tour Europe’. Surely that can’t be right? There must be another successful band from South Korea… unless… Is this parade from the other Korea? Is Kim Jong-Il here somewhere? Scanning crowds and tapping notes into a blackberry? It is entirely possible.

In the bar of the Hilton late at night, a bearded, roll-necked vision of a liverpudlian mid-life crisis lurches up to our table roaring the lyrics to a song about chicks and that.

‘Come On!’, he yells, ‘Come on, yeah? Yeah? YEAH!
Rock’n’roll, right?’

‘Yeah man’, we smile, ‘rock’n’roll!’

‘Sorry about him’, leans over a smirking shirt in male cosmetics and square glasses, ‘he’s got a number 5 album.’

And that, it would seem, explains that.

http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk

SXSW Blog Part Two (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

2008-03-20T03:41:00.001Z

We’ve now been awake for 45-55 hours. I would be more specific, but what with time zones, daylight saving time and so on – being more specific would involve maths and we’ve been awake for 45-55 hours. Numeracy was among the first things to go.

We’ve just played our first show at the festival for a private party promoted by a man from Arizona who dresses like a pilot. At least that may have been the promoter – it may have just been an actual pilot - or a hallucination of one. At some point a guy in a day-glo green T-shirt was giving away ‘hiphop energy drinks’. At another a similar looking guy was eating twenty-three hotdogs. At least one of them was on television – but it’s hard to say which. Things are blurry.

Having finally gotten the necessary paperwork to travel, our revised plan was to fly to New York spend six hours doing whatever we could think of then get back on a plane, fly to Houston, hire a car and then drive the last 180 miles to Austin for the show. This was a good plan. Admittedly,
on a pie chart, the slice marked ‘sleep’ was reserved for the anorexic at the travel dinner party – not existing as it didn’t – but hey, rock’n’roll, right?

New York is a shock. It’s too big to capture in words or pictures – that must be why people are always trying to. It’s not like London, a small city that has eaten some rather dull villages, it is real city all the way through. It towers and it yawns, shouts and drawls, sticks its chin in your face then steps back and just basks in itself. Our six hours are fast, they have an international standard hamburger in them, and Time Square and mournful Jazzy cab rides and those manhole covers that really do billow steam. It feels like – and may well actually have been – a dream.

The plane chases the night across America and is caught by day as it lands. We hire a very very big car and just about fit ourselves, guitars and cases into it. It’s a weird thing about a country that England so often attacks for homogeneity and corporate standardisation that it is
so much less so than England. States and towns bellow their identity. You can’t look down without seeing a ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ bumper sticker stuck to something and people don’t just fly their state flag but wear it and paint it on plates. Towns decide what they’re going to be famous for and stick to it. There are no terraces. People buy bits of street and build their own idea of what a house should look like on them.

There is nothing at all homogenous about, for example, Tony’s Family Restaurant in Sealy, between Houston and Austin. There are pictures of the local high school football team (National Champions 1939!) on the wall next to the longhorns and chalked up specials and roll of honor, which seems to contain the names of people who were so happy working at Tony’s that they did it until they died.

It makes you mournful, stuff like that, when you’ve been a wake forever and are on your way to a music festival that is really a conference for the industry. Every blog or interview I’ve seen from attending bands has used the word ‘excited’. It worries me this, that all the new bands in the world greet the prospect of playing for some men from A&R departments and establishment magazines with excitement. It is about sales not songs; marketing not music. And it is the bands themselves who do it –as excited as a boyband before the pollwinners party and saying so because that is what you say.

I wouldn’t say we’re excited. We’re thrilled to be here, in America. We’re looking forward to the week – but we don’t lose sight of what SXSW is. Primarily it is something that you can’t afford or spare the time to go to. It is where the NME and the PR departments and the managers meet up to hang around in bars and discuss what they’re going to say happened when they get home. It is the Bildeberg meeting for the lies that drive the music industry.

We check in to places, pick up badges and hire keyboards and wristbands. Everyone in town has a badge around their necks. It is like when they hold the conservative party conference in British seaside towns only with everyone in beanie hats and three-day stubble. I bump into James from our record label.

‘Look’, he says, pointing at a man in a woolly hat being interviewed by a TV camera, ‘it’s Div from Lightspeed Champion’. I have no idea who Lightspeed Champion are. I do know that lightspeed is a constant and that any lightspeed race would therefore be pointless – rendering the concept of a lightspeed champion nonsensical. Perhaps this is what they are getting at. Capturing the ennui of a role in life marked by the language of achievement yet constantly undermined by the knowledge within that there is no factual basis for the plaudits you receive. Probably not though. At any rate, he’s blocking the pavement.

The show is OK. It takes a few songs to find the right sound balance and we have to construct an elaborate three mic stand sculpture to get Julia’s microphone to rest near her face but by the end we’re rocking out properly and being as inadvisably sarcastic as usual. We’ve got three more to do over the coming days and will be better when fully conscious. There is talk of Australians giving away free lager and REM at midnight and a band with three guitarists and steakhouses and margheritas and crazy times – but it’s been 45 hours, maybe 55, maybe more. It is time for bed.

http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk

SXSW Blog Part One (reposted from Noize Makes Enemies)

2008-03-20T03:35:00.003Z

Emma Lazarus’ oft-quoted poem – inscribed at the base of the statue of liberty – has long been an inspirational literary beacon to those trying to get into the United States. "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.", it says. What it neglects to mention; and what we have discovered over the past four months, is that the sorry condition that the wretched refuse of teeming shores like us are in when we turn up in New York is largely down to the visa application process. If we weren’t tired and poor when we started – we sure as hell are now.

Everything about it costs money – and not petrol to Worcester, a sausage roll and two kit kats money either – serious money. The kind of money that you really ought to be putting into an ISA. You have to pay to file a petition in the US and prove that you have been an international artist for a ‘sustained and substantial’ period of time. This means that you have to frantically email every bulgarian fanzine editor who’s ever printed an appreciative word about you and beg them to send you scans of their publication so as to convince an immigration official (and what kind of person chooses to be an immigration official? Surely it’ll be some NRA meet-attending good ol’ boy motivated by his hatred of mexicans who thinks all music that isn’t by Merle Haggard is essentially treason) that you are worth admitting. Then, you have to pay an additional THOUSAND dollars just to get them to promise to think about it during the next three months, maybe.

You wait and you worry. You buy plane tickets and motel rooms. You try and persuade your record company to give you a bit more money. You experiment with giving up heating. You consider larseny. And then, finally, when it must be too late, they approve you. The democratic institutions of Washington and Lincoln have judged you and found you worthy. It feels good. For a minute or two you strut about thinking ‘Hah, people from school who wouldn’t let me join their Nirvana covers band, who’s the sustained and substantial international artist now, eh?’. Then you phone up the American embassy to make an appointment to apply for the actual visa. It costs £1.20 a minute.

That would be fine, of course, if the appointment service wasn’t entirely staffed by incomprehensible glaswegians who want large amounts of information, the imparting of which requires a mutual compatibility of vowel sounds. They want passport numbers, exact spellings of names and – naturally - credit card details. Credit card details so as to charge you an additional application fee.

They send you a confirmation and instructions. You are required to attend at the given time. You should be early, so as to get through the queue in time. You should not be too early otherwise you’ll make the queue too long. You can’t bring phones or ipods. You must bring all your documents. A list of these documents is on a website. It is up to you to find out where. You must fill in a form. You must not omit any information. You must answer the questions honestly….

If you’ve ever been to America, even on the tourist visa waiver programme, you’ll be familiar with the comedy security questions they ask everybody. Have you ever had AIDS, taken drugs, been in prison; and, of course the one about whether you’ve ever participated in genocide during the thirties. I’m sure that particular question remains on the form solely to weed out the unamericanly sarcastic. It is very very hard not to say yes to it, but you manage. You need a photo. It can’t, however be a normal passport photo, it has to be an extra four millimetres wider. Consequently, it can’t be from a photo booth but has to be done specially – it costs a tenner.

So you finally make it to the embassy. You get there an hour early. You clear security and get a number and hand your application to a woman and have your fingerprints scanned and just when you think its over you are told to sit down and wait for your interview. What? That wasn’t the interview? No. The interview will take place at some point in the next day. Please take a seat. Do we need to pay a seat hire fee, by any chance? No, but if you’d like to avail yourself of a hershey bar they’re for sale for a pound over there…

We’re quite highly strung as bands go. By this point Julia and I are in a state of near critical tension. We are still, but if you look closely at us, we are vibrating like magnets pushed together. We get mild whiplash from snapping our heads up to look at the board that displays the appointment numbers every time one is mumbled over the tannoy. I spot AA Gill (the food critic and perhaps closest real-world equivalent of Ratatouille’s Anton Ego) waiting across the room. It is little comfort to note that even he is looking a little bit apprehensive.

Finally you’re called and you go to the window where Uncle Sam waits to decide your fate. You expect a grilling. A polygraph. Maybe he’ll test you for TB and change your surname to the name of sicilian village you were born in. Maybe he’ll just take one look and laugh: YOU in America? Fuck No.

‘Hi, guys, where you playin’?’
‘er… New York and then driving down to Austin for South-By-Southwest.’
‘Cool, what do you play?’
‘Um… guitar.’
‘OK, that’s all approved.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’
‘So, what now?’
‘Go see the courier and arrange to have your passport sent back to you.’

It costs twenty-five quid.

But, at least, it feels like a done deal at this point. You’ve done everything right – all you need to do is sit back, pack, and wait for the passports to show up. What is it with these fly by night bands who you always read about cancelling US dates because of Visa issues? Amateurs! It’s all fine. Uncle Sam said so.

So it gets to the weekend. You’re due to fly on Thursday. It’s fine. Still no passports on Monday. Fine. You phone the courier. Is it fine? Yep. It’s fine. Tuesday. You phone again. They don’t have them yet, but they can arrange a next day delivery when they get them. It’s fine.

Wednesday. You phone the courier. You phone the embassy. They say to email. You email. They send an email back that says they don’t respond to emails. You phone the courier, the embassy, they say to phone the passport office. You phone the passport office. The passport office takes your date of birth, name, address, eye colour, sexual history and medical records – then they ask what you want. They don’t have anything to do with visas, sorry. You phone the courier, the embassy, they say to email again but this time to put some specific text in the subject line. You email, putting a some specific text in the subject line. They email back: Your visa is awaiting petition verification in Washington and will not be issued today.

It is not fine.

You have no passports or visas and you can’t get on your flight. This really, really, really, really sucks.

The company who sponsored your petition say that they don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on, but that you’ve probably been flagged by a CIA computer as having been involved in running guns to Nicaragua during the sixties and that there’s nothing anyone can do.

Did I mention we were highly strung? The last four days have been medievally cruel. We’ve paced rooms, shot innocent pixel-people in Grand Theft Auto, been on 3am ASDA safaris and sat helplessly by the door for hours staring at the reception bars on horribly silent telephones and sobbing into our cursory, untasted meals. Finally, today – Friday – we heard that the passports were on their way. This means that we can go to SXSW – though not New York, and not embark on the Kerouac and Cassady Roadtrip through the Deep South that we’d been planning – but we are going. As god is our witness, we are getting on that plane.

Tired, Poor, huddled and wretched… that big green french bitch had better be pleased to see us.

http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk

All Bands Are Liars

2007-11-20T14:28:00.000Z

(A short primer on the economics of scarcity)

I.
According to economics, one of the most valuable things you can control is scarcity. If you are in possession of a scarce resource – that is, something of limited availability that people wish to buy – you can offer it at a higher price.

For example, say you have the only 100 diamonds in the world. Maybe there are 90 people who would be willing to pay £120 or more for a diamond. Unfortunately, if you charge that much, you won’t be able to sell all the diamonds. The level of supply will be higher than that of demand and the price will have to come down.

When the price is lowered to £80, there are an extra 20 people willing to shell out. Now you have 110 people all trying to buy 100 diamonds. The balance of supply and demand has shifted and you now have scarcity power. Now you can raise the price.

Somewhere between 80 and 120 pounds is the price that 100 people are willing to pay (let’s say £100) – and, without interference, this is where the market will settle. This will be a perfect market. The value of the commodity will be determined at a level that reflects the truth about the participants’ intentions. Everyone knows that you want to sell your diamonds for as much as you can. Everyone knows how much they would, ultimately be willing to pay for a diamond. The market tells everyone the resluting price of diamonds and everyone can then make a decision about whether they want to proceed or not.

For a potential buyer who would be ready to spend £90 on a diamond but not £100, the market will give her all the information she needs. If the market says that diamonds are worth £100, then she knows that other people value diamonds more than she does and she can spend her £90 elsewhere. She is not being ripped off, mistreated, or lied to – she knows the truth and is able to make a well-informed decision.

And that would seem to be that. Except that, right at the start, you knew that 90 people would be willing to pay £120 for a diamond and that you had 100 diamonds. In the end, you sold all 100 for £100 each and made £10,000. But what if you’d just sold 90 diamonds for £120? Then you’d have made £10,800. More.

You couldn’t have sold 90 for one price and 10 for another: if you had, then the first 90 would have refused to pay the higher price. No, if you want to get the most out of these diamonds you’re going to have to start putting some lies into this little exchange of truths. That’s the only way to turn scarcity to your advantage.

The simplest thing to do would be to destroy 10 of your diamonds. That way, supply would meet demand at the £120 level and you’d make your extra £800. There are better ways though.

You could do what clothes shops do – sell the first 90 diamonds for £120 then, in January, announce a SALE with BIG DISCOUNTS on all goods, bring out the diamonds that you had previously hidden and sell the last 10 for £100 – then you’ve got £11,800: even better.

You could invent a number of diamond seasons and cycle from one to the next every time you get a new shipment of diamonds. Sell at the high price at the start of each season, then sell off the rest in a SALE. Now, you have a profitable diamond business.

The point is the control of scarcity. You can get more if you have less diamonds because you can change the place on the price scale where marginal customers make their decisions. When there were 100 diamonds, the 20 people willing to pay between £80 and £120 for a diamond got to decide the price. If they had, on average been willing to go to £105, that would have set the price at £105. If they had only been ready to spend £95, that would have cost you £1000. By altering the number of diamonds you make available you are pricing these skinflints out of the market and moving the marginal area. With 90 diaomnds available, the people who set the price are those, perhaps, who would spend between £100 and £140 on a diamond. Those other losers can wait for the sales.

Even better than the sale strategy, though, you could invest a little bit in some of these diamonds and get to work on BRANDING. With branding, you are no longer restriced to controlling scarcity bluntly. Now you can have different levels of scarcity, all of which allow those who are willing to piss their money away on diamonds to pay as much as you can get from them while obscuring their true market value and still being able to sell the rest at the highest possible price.

Say you take 10 diamonds and put them in little presentation boxes. You include a little can of diamond polish and write the numbers 1 –10 on little pieces of card which you slip into the boxes along with a booklet explaining where the diamonds were mined. You now have 10 limited edition super-elite-collector’s diamonds, which, market research tells you, you can sell for £200. You have manufactured scarcity, moved the marginal area and put a bit of untruth into the market. You now have ten £200 diamonds, eighty £125 diamonds (the price went up when you reduced the number from ninety to make the special ones) and ten £100 discount sale-price diamonds. After spending £50 on the boxes and cans of polish, you have made £12,950 - £2,950 of which came entirely from putting lies into and distorting the market. Well done. Now let’s form a band.

II.

Music, the ability to make music, recordings of music, lyrics, lyrics set to music and all related commodities are not scarce resources. Talent is not a scarce resource.

Guitarist A might, technically, be the most accomplished guitarist ever seen. When measured using high speed film and a team of trained observers he may be able to play the riff from Sweet Child O’ Mine faster than a hummingbird beats its wings. He might be able to go from low E to top G in a faultless blues solo before Eric Clapton can fingerpick a chord. This is all impressive. But, without the knowledge of what is happening, the experience of seeing guitarist A live or buying and listening to Guitarists A’s album (On The “A”-Train: Guitarist A comes alive, on CD and download) is no different to that of seeing/listening to the plethora of guitarists that guitarist A is better than.

People don’t buy music because of skill. Mostly, they experience music as a loud, rhythmic noise that causes them to dance, or to relive past memories, or as atmospheric background, or to experience emotions other than those directly caused by their situation. Sometimes they experience it as literature, as collections of words that tell stories or offer new ideas. The market for skill – that is, the market with knowledge enough to genuinely recognise skill when they hear it - is not big enough to exploit.

The market that is big enough to exploit is the first one – the people who just want something to cause dancing, reliving, atmosphere, or emotion. Music that can fulfill these functions is not a scarce resource. Half the girls in your school could sing as well as most singers. There are barely any kids with guitars so inept that they can’t play guitar as well as most guitarists. Even when you raise the bar to a level where only regularly rehearsing live acts who are capable of producing an hour’s worth of listenable recordings are admitted – you still have an abundance of music. Take a glance at the live listings for london in any newspaper. Every single band is capable of producing music to the satisfaction of the majority of the market.

You probably have opinions about the music industry. But the sale of music by Industry to public is not the only transaction involved. We call it ‘getting signed’ or ‘being discovered’ (because we’re liars) but what actually happens in such situations is that a transaction occurs between a band/artist and a company. The company purchases music from the artist at a price dictated by the market.

The problem for bands as salespeople in this market is that they have no scarcity power. They have one of a hundred thousand bog-standard diamonds to sell and only a handful of people willing to buy diamonds at all. Supply so far outstrips demand that the commodity of extremely low value. Additionally given that a record company buys music to sell on at profit, that it can only afford to buy a certain amount of music and that it can only control scarcity by restricting the total amount of music available in a conveniently packaged form – there is a threshold which must be crossed before there is even the slightest chance of making a sale. If your commodity is valued below the level at which a company can make profit by its resale, your commodity’s real-world value is zero.

When you were in the diamond business, you were in a far better initial position. Before you did anything, you owned something that was worth £10,000. You injected some lies into the market and managed to add nearly three grand of value – but you were basically honest, just trying to make your way in the world.

Now you’re in the music business and the commodity you own has no value. How then, can you start selling your music? You need to start manufacturing some scarcity.

Everything that a band does to get signed is an excercise in the manufacture of scarcity:

A band in your normal clothes is valueless, but maybe a band with a silly gothy coat on is scarcer and is worth £100; maybe a band with drainpipe trousers is worth £150.

A band that has never played a support slot for a band with significant market value is valueless, but bands that have are more scarce and have more value.

Good guitarists are ten-a-penny, but a guitarist with a press release explaining how a team of scientists measured his fingers while he played Sweet Child O’ Mine and how they pronounced them faster than hummingbirds’ wings is really very scarce indeed.

A band who have not been reviewed by their mate on the internet is scarcer than a band that has. A band with a self-released single is scarcer. An artist whose father is an actor is scarcer. A band with a singer who writes essays on economic theory and posts them on the internet is scarcer.

Perfect markets work because they let free people decide the value of the things they buy and sell cooperatively and without governance. The process of turning your worthless rock into a limited edition super-elite-collector’s diamond is entirely one of branding, of controlling scarcity, of distorting a market, of lying.

And that is why all bands are liars.

Especially Joe Lean and The Kim Jong Il or whatever it is they’re called. They are very bad liars indeed.

Stay tuned, pop kidz

The Brighton Effect

2007-11-12T15:38:00.000Z

So, Kid, you wanna make it in the indie business? Well, there’s a possibility that I can help. This largely depends on your definition of making it. If by ‘making it’ you mean fame, fortune and a lifetime of being invited to talk about the stearving eafricans at labour party conferences: I can’t. If by ‘making it’ you mean getting to the stage where somebody else pays you to record an album that they intend to pay for, promote and sell: I can.

I can’t tell you how it is done. It is done, no doubt, in a myriad of ways. I can tell you how it was done, once, by me and my band. I can also tell you how it isn’t done. For example, no one is ever in the last gang in town, no one ever meets on the A-train carrying a copy of trouble man, no one breaks on the internet and no one is ever discovered. There is no such thing as a scene, there are no cool towns. There are no guitar heroes and no fuck you attitudes, no princesses and no elves, no gods and no poets.

There is a big secret to success that no one is telling you. But it is this: There is no secret. The thing that ennables most alternative pop stars to strut about like they deserve it is just confidence, and not an innate mystical confidence either, just the plain old confidence that you can learn. Depending on where you grew up, it’s the same confidence that made some kids sure that they would go to university, or get married, or become lawyers, or fuck a mother and daughter at the same time, or win the apprentice. It’s the same confidence that made them popular.

If you don’t live in Brighton, you might still be aware that an awfully large amount of alternative music seems to be made there. This didn’t used to to be true. Once it was really just the Levellers and - though beloved by fans – they were always the butt of crusty jokes in the alternative music press and were definitively NOT COOL. Now, to name a very small percentage of the total, The Electric Soft Parade, Electrelane, British Sea Power, The Pipettes, Eighties Matchbox, Bat For Lashes, Brakes and the Kooks comprise the core of indie for many people. You might imagine that this is attributable to a sudden rise in the creativity and cultural productivity of the town. In fact, the reverse is true. By common consent Brighton is a less interesting place now than it has ever been – it’s edge blunted by rising house prices, an influx of commuters, gentrification and commodification of its cultural resources. Artist’s squats have been replaced by branches of Sainsbury’s. Established secondhand book shops have become expensive furniture outlets. Costa and Starbucks have swallowed its cool cafes. Flashy theme pubs have rebuilt it’s cheap venues in their image. It is wealthy, content and bland: finally become the London-by-Sea that its residents used to deny.

Why then all the bands?

The answer is generational. It has been often remarked that the current generation is the first in a while that is less radical than the one preceding it. This is, surely, objectively true. Moreover, it is true that the radical middle class of the sixties did not, in fact, drop out of the system – but altered it, creating wealth in the process. Dynamism in an economy always results in growth; growth raises the wealth of all, but especially the middle class, and even more especially those members of the middle class able to embrace dynamism. The result, today, is a significant number of left-leaning, essentially liberal, but rich families congregating in England’s southeast. Those who are most liberal and left-leaning have flooded Brighton, offering - as it does – wealth, comfort, like-minded people and an acceptance of left/liberal values.

These people, these ‘guardian readers’ have produced offspring. These offspring have recently grown up. These new grown ups are in the enviable position of being both wealthy (with the resultant confidence, security and popularity) and by nurture left/liberal. They do not necessarily possess the intellect that would have brought them to a left/liberal position on their own, but this is irrelevant. Merely by not rebelling they are mired in marxism, theory, creativity and – we come to it – alternative guitar music.

The traditional incentives to form bands have been rebellion, discontent, anger, otherness. In Brighton these have been replaced. Bands bring parental pride, assistance, social acceptance. Operating under these conditions, young Brighton bands are extraordinarily self-confident. They feel a sense of entitlement when they survey the music business: it is their birthright. And that is why all these kids are succeeding and you aren’t.

If you aren’t like them, then you know – deep down – that you can’t make a living being in a band. Who would want your album? Who would pay to see you perform? People who do that are other, elvish, gifted – you might dream, but dreams are all they can be, surely.

Well no. The big secret is only this: if they can do it, you can. It is just a matter of confidence.

Well, step one anyway.

Stay tuned.