Top Tips for Band Promo...

I've been putting together information on the line up for a festival's new website, collecting photos and what I'd call bios (i.e. short informative descriptions of each band) to go with an external web link for each artist on the bill. I thought this would be a straight forward task...

A lot of bands make this easy and have PRs to deal with requests for such things, or have great websites with all the material someone who is trying to spread the word about an event that the bands are involved in might need, but there are some who seem to need a bit of help...

Here's some important things I've noted, if you want people to find out about your band:

1. Have a name that is Googleable! 
2. If you use MySpace (really?), Bandcamp and Facebook they will likely show up top of a search,  so make sure they're up to date. If you don't want me to listen to your old demos, take them down. If it's the first time I've heard of you I won't know which page you want me to use, so...
3. Have your own website – even if it’s just a place to cluster all your links. It would be better if it were more than that - you've got a great opportunity to control your image, please use it.
4. Unless you’re super well known and too cool, write something about yourselves. How do you want to be presented? Please God, not just “indie rock”. I don’t have time to listen to your entire back catalogue, watch all your videos, read all your press. Condense it.
5. Have an easy to find contact email. If you have a PR working for you, lucky you! Why not make it easy to find them so they can do their job!?
6. Even better, have a nice high res picture that is downloadable from your website.
7. While you’re at it, name that picture file with your band name and if the photographer wants a credit, stick their name in there too. 
8. When replying to emails that are requests, please check that you’re sending what’s being asked for – a list of hot shot record company flunkies who might be interested in your band, a list of platforms where you’re releasing your single and some gigs you might have coming up ARE NOT THE SAME AS A BIO!
9. A bio is this: Who are you? Where are you from? What do you sound like? What’s your website?
10. That photo – is it a picture of three or four disinterested blokes standing against a wall (or worse, train tracks)? IT DOESN’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR BAND and you’re wasting an opportunity to make me interested. 
11. When I Google you, do I find your best, most representative song? WHY NOT?
12. On Facebook, which shouldn’t be your only web presence, have you filled in the contact details in the ‘About’ section? This is a quick reference and should help people to describe you (yes even if you’re so wildly and fantastically original that your music defies categorisation sometimes it’s necessary to use, you know, WORDS). Failing that it should let me email the people you pay (or owe favours to) to do this for you. OR let me email you and ask you for what I need.  
13. Nominate a band member to deal with this stuff, bass players often have a lot of time on their hands...
14. Finally, when you're emailing someone who is obviously dealing with a lot of artists sending them stuff, remember to mention the name of your band in your message so they know who you're talking about.

Come on, you're not all like Nickelback are you?

There's tons of advice out there from places like Hypebot, Musician Coaching and Fresh On The Net 

Anyone got any more to add? I'd be interested to hear what you think. And don't get me started on gig listings!

Repurposed T-Shirts: Accessories

Inspired by Stitch Up  I dug out my bag of old, well-loved T-shirts and decided to do something to reuse a few of them.

I wanted to rescue the print from a shirt I got a long time ago (in Barcelona!)  I'd already chopped the neck and sleeves and worn until it was falling to bits, but I like the design and I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.
I decided to decorate a tote bag (this one was a freebie at a conference).

I ironed the shirt (inside out) and then roughly cut out the design, (I could do with some sharper scissors!) 

I don't have a sewing machine, so I used my old favourite, Gaffa tape.

Cut out the design from the shirt,( if you want to use the rest of the shirt for something else, try to cut it away in large pieces). Leave enough room around the edges so you can use tape to stick it onto the bag without covering the design. (This one worked as a square but some designs require a bit more ingenuity, it really depends on the size of the picture and the condition of the shirt. In this case, I think the black tape makes a bold design and covers up any rough edges.)

Try and make the edges of the tape the same size and level at the ends (it's tricky, but fabric Gaffa tape has lines on, so you can cut it fairly neatly). 

This left me with the rest of the T-shirt material, I found some tutorials linked by Stitch Up  and decided to have a go at the No Sew Necklace. 

When I chopped my T-shirt, I kept the bottom section in one piece (so it was still a tube). This shirt had no side seams so was just right for the necklace. First, cut off the bottom seam, then cut the tube into strips about 1.5cm wide, they don't have to be particularly neat but it helps if they're all about the same size. 

Cut the whole section up into loops and then pull them to stretch, the material will curl in on itself, making the loops thinner and still quite elastic. 

That one on the end was too thin and snapped, but it came in useful for fixing things together later!

Put all the loops together and then double them over, until you have a necklace at the length you want, then tie them together by wrapping the spare loop around (I looped it over and then wrapped it round, tucking in the ends. See what works with what you have left over.)

This gave me a necklace like the one in the tutorial, but it was a bit loose. So I used a bit more of the left over T-shirt to make a flower rosette (which I learned the last time I went to Stitch Up!)

Cut a rough circle out of the material, about the size of a small saucer, then cut it into a spiral (this one is very rough, I definitely need sharper scissors!)

Thread a needle with cotton, mine was a bit darker than the fabric. Start in the middle and layer the fabric, sewing with small stitches as you gather the flower/ rosette together. This is the back:

Sew until you run out of spiral, you can then cut the edges to neaten it up if you want. This is the front:

The stitching in the middle was a bit messy so I added a button. I flattened it out a bit then positioned it on the necklace to sew on, in the end I tied a bit more of the spare T-shirt thread around to hold the strands together behind the flower, then sewed it on fairly loosely. 

I've also redecorated a couple of other tote bags with designs from old T-shirts - I used Gaffa tape (it comes in different colours) so these are no-sew projects:

This is a nice way to use T-shirts that have got too worn out to wear, and also it means the bags will last a bit longer as the T-shirts make a good patch for any holes!

Caitlin Moran Stole My Life.

Well not really, but sometimes it kind of feels like it. I'm finally reading her book, How To Be A Woman and remembering how I first came across her when she used to write for the Melody Maker.

My Gran, keen clipper of articles from the Daily Mail, presented me with a full page feature on the young Moran, aged 16. In the accompanying photo she is resplendently grungey in long floral frock, doc marten boots and possibly a floppy velvet hat. She is brunette, a bit fat and a bit goth. Granny passes me the page and says something like "She looks a bit like you. She's had a book published already. You could do that. Why haven't you done something like that?" 

In that fabulous way that family members have of undermining your confidence while at the same time imagining they are boosting it, she didn't understand why I read the article and went off in a strop. At 17, I may have been reading the Melody Maker and NME religiously but I was still stuck in the sausage machine of A Levels - seemingly the only logical option for someone with a modicum of intelligence wanting to leave a Midland town in the early 1990s - and here was this girl, published, leading a rock 'n' roll lifestyle free of parental constraint in London, who had been home schooled by hippies and had no qualifications to speak of at all.

Later, when I did leave town and adopt my version of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle (though from reading the book it certainly contained less sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll than Moran's) our paths did briefly cross.

At a gig in Wolverhampton in 1995, I spotted Moran and Pete Paphides ligging at a Radiohead gig. Had I been less shy and more drunk, I might have introduced myself but I didn't. I was just a pleb and they were proper music journalists. I always wondered what it was that stopped me being more like Caitlin Moran and getting on in the way that she has and now, reading her book - which like the cover says is "part memoir, part rant" - I think I've worked it out. She wasn't afraid of making a fool of herself, had the luck to be in the right places at the right times, was brave enough to be a bit stupid sometimes and most important of all had the confidence to throw herself headlong into things and not worry about the consequences.

I'm just over half way through the book now and I've identified with her, laughed at her jokes, agreed with her most of the time and recognised some familiar episodes of teenage angst that seemed to be so popular in the 90s. I was always annoyed that she managed to make a living writing one of those "me, me, me"columns about everyday stuff, that seem so easy but unless you are prepared to exploit yourself and your experiences like a true writer are actually very difficult.

I think I'm still a bit jealous.

Book Review... Sophie Hannah Spilling CID series

Sophie Hannah: Little Face, Hurting Distance, The Point Of Rescue, The Other Half Live, A Room Swept White. (Hodder)

After finding the latest three of Sophie Hannah’s books in paperback in Biblocafe, having been alerted to their existence by an ITV adaptation staring Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd called Case Sensitive (which turned out to be loosely based on the third of her Spilling CID series The Point Of Rescue), I found myself compelled to read the whole set and binge read the lot. A quick trip to Amazon found me the first two but by the time they arrived I had already hungrily got through most of The Point Of Rescue and The Other Half Live.

Hannah’s psychological cop thrillers stand out both for the strength of her writing (she is also a poet and author of several non-crime novels), and for the inventiveness with which she approaches the genre. Each book is written from at least two perspectives; beginning with a teasing, scene setting chapter from the point of view of a woman at the centre of a usually complex and emotionally fraught crime, she then switches to the third person to take us to the heart of the investigation from the police side. Alternating view points like this cleverly allows Hannah to set up some nail biting suspense and audacious plot twists. There is a victim’s eye view from some often unreliable narrators alongside the unfolding investigation.

Her team of cops, based in the fictional but well-realised town of Spilling, centre around DS Charlie Zailer, an academic-turned detective with a sharp tongue and a volatile personal life; DC Simon Waterhouse, a brilliant but emotionally suffocated sleuth and their glacial boss, DI Proust (nicknamed The Snowman). The rest of the CID officers – including the boorish DC Sellers and the hardnosed DC Gibbs - each have their own fleshed out characters, but Hannah is savvy enough to know when to paint with broad strokes and when to delve deeper. 

Each book untangles the emotional fall out from a case – Little Face centres on a manipulated and manipulative young mother and the identity of the baby she claims has been swapped; Hurting Distance is a convoluted but ultimately gripping investigation into what starts off as a missing persons case, becomes an allegation of a rape, looks like an attempted murder but finally is none and all of these, dragging all the protagonists through an emotional firestorm which has repercussions in successive books.

The Point Of Rescue pulls together a double murder, an abduction and the detectives’ own increasingly complicated relationship – Zailer and Waterhouse’s bond is too awkward to be called a romance, but the author gives you just enough to keep you intrigued, denies you easy outcomes and leaves a lot unsaid, coming back to the underlying tensions between them at salient moments, allowing you to piece together what has happened in the gaps between the books.

The Other Half Live, billed as a murder mystery with no dead body, pushes credulity but has some nicely written details like a Sunday Newspaper “rising stars” feature linking important characters and some (for once in this sort of novel) fairly accurate Art History. A Room Swept White is the most ambitious of the books, encompassing well researched, but potentially sensitive material about mothers wrongly convicted of killing their own babies, a shamed forensic paediatrician and some rather colourfully drawn TV documentary makers. As with the other books, this one is told from the perspective of a woman embedded in the story but possibly deluded about her role in it.

I found myself pulled in and gripped by the whole series (even though I read them from the middle outwards) and I enjoyed the relative unpredictability of the plots - a formula is starting to emerge but even five books in (with one more available in hardback) there is still enough invention to keep a lit-snob like me happy. Like Kate Atkinson, but with a cruel psychological bent, Sophie Hannah keeps enough style and wit in her writing and interest in her characters to satisfy even a demanding reader.

Live Review: Best Coast

Here's one that got away...

Best Coast, The Arches, Glasgow, 27/4/11

Photo by Alex Woodward,@ CrimsonGlowPhotography

On last July’s Crazy For You, the much touted long-player from trio Best Coast, singer Bethany Cosentino conveys an obsession with her native California with the intensity of a teenage infatuation. It’s all about crushes on boys and long days at the beach being the most important things in the world.  As one song puts it, “When the sun don’t shine you aren’t mine.”

Taking the stage to the Beach Boys’ California Girls and greeting us with a “Waaaasup?!”  Cosentino’s distinctly lo-fi glamour and directness with the crowd is demonstrated when she decries a heckler for daring to tell her that he doesn’t like her beloved cat, as featured on the album cover, with a pithy retort. (“Suck My Dick!”) She’s like a surfer dude version of Courtney Love.

It soon becomes apparent that the stoner attitude of her songs are her code to live by, after The Sun Was High And So Was I she says “Feel free to move, y’all look kinda bored, smoke some weed like my guys have.”

There is a Ramones-like quality of happy dumbness to Summer Moon, which is dedicated to the beautiful weather. New song Gone Again has a wordless vocal intro and sounds like a work in progress. Like on the older material, too many of the harmonies that gave their album richness are missing, a backing singer or some vocal participation from ex-Vivian Girls drummer Ali Koehler would make no end of difference.

Boyfriend, the most direct nod to the saccharine masochism of the 1960s Girl Groups is the pop hit of the set. A stoned Shirelles go garage. When The Sun Don’t Shine looses its melodic hold and while most of the songs are basically solid enough, sometimes the band can’t quite keep up with themselves and things seem on the verge of falling apart. Cosentino needs to vary her wailing vocal, as the songs are already unsophisticated.

Lesley Gore’s That’s The Way Boys Are is followed by a demand that we all go home and “download a bunch of her songs.”

Our Deal, gets bogged down and comes off like Joan Jett with no bite.  A new song, When You Wake Up/11.30 has no wild departures from the formula and yet more of what is starting to sound like mooing. A crowd surfer braves the security guards and receives congratulations and Cosentino apologies for referring to the UK instead of to Scotland, pleading our forgiveness as she didn’t graduate high school.

A mosh pit erupts at the younger end of the all ages crowd as if to embody the dumb urgency of youth embedded in the songs. Apparently members of the support band Spectrals (who owe an even bigger dept to the Phil Spectre back catalogue than Best Coast) are causing a ruckus, spitting beer and generally kicking off.  Closing number Each And Everyday is the noisiest of the night, it takes unrequited love to levels that without the innocence of the tune might be construed as stalking, but as a threat it lacks teeth. The band don’t seem to have the chops to cut loose and really impress, and without the production values of the album, nor do they quite have the charm. 

 More photos by Alex on his site

Overdue Reviews Archive 2010-2011

Going back to last year, here's a round up of stuff I've been writing for various sites. Think of it as a folder full of clippings...

For The Fly:

Wickerman Festival

We Are The Physics


Big Chill Festival

Wilco, supported by Philip Selway

Fyfe Dangerfield

Eastern Promise at Platform

Sparrow & The Workshop, supported by Fists

Frankie & The Heartstrings

Mudhoney

Jim Jones Revue

The Black Keys

Foals

The Phantom Band

The Yummy Fur

Kochka

A Blog about Celtic Connections

For Wears The Trousers:

School Of Seven Bells: Disconnect From Desire

Land Of Talk: Cloak & Cipher

Josephine Foster & The Victor Herrero Band

Dark Dark Dark: Wild Go

Ani DiFranco

Jessica Lea Mayfield: Tell Me

Joan As Policewoman

Janelle Monae


New for This Is Fake DIY:

Crystal Stilts

and bang up to date with

Deerhunter, with Lower Dens

Escapees: Reviews that got spiked...

Here are a few reviews from the last few months, that for whatever reason, didn't quite make the cut:

Band Of Horses, O2 Academy, Glasgow, 27/1/11

Apparently, in 2011, bands who want to fill good sized venues need to be sensitive guys with beards and checked shirts. North Carolina based five-piece, Band Of Horses, fulfil this requirement having mastered a brand of classic American rock whose appeal, judging by tonight’s turn out, is as strong as ever.

Is There A Ghost establishes this formula. Country tinged Southern rock, with amiable vocals, melodic details and radio friendly hooks. Further polished on last year’s Infinite Arms album, this method serves them well, even when some of the more delicate details get dulled by the bombast.

Lazy comparisons with Neil Young don’t hold much water: songs are earnest yet ambiguous - emotional dilemmas, starry nights, life on the road - all are touched on with a vagueness that leaves space for the audience to add their own imaginative interpretations. There’s no danger of any politics or polemic sneaking through.

Compliments is one of several transiently engaging numbers that have spread the band’s popularity across the world. Their slideshow of tour snaps indicates they had a particularly good time in Australia and at an array of German festivals.

No One’s Gonna Love You, the kind of song that polite boys put on mixtapes, recalls a drowsy Midlake. Ben Bridwell’s twangy voice is ably complimented but the band is too workmanlike to possess either the dexterity of My Morning Jacket or the melodic invention of Granddaddy.

Factory’s “this motel ain’t home” sentiment loses its crispness, the organ part sounding muddy. Monochrome National Geographic images of barns and landscapes seek to conjure some country authenticity for Laredo.

A cover of Silver Jews’ Black And Brown Blues sounds like a band fooling around to enliven an overlong tour, but they’re happy to be duty bound to deliver the goods. 

Belle & Sebastian, Barrowlands, Glasgow, 20/12/10

I Fought In A War, this band’s answer to Two Little Boys, provides an understated start to the second of three festive hometown gigs. The stage is full, with up to a dozen musicians helping to create the now distinctive B&S sound.

Tonight’s set is largely made up of songs from their second and most Glaswegian record, If You’re Feeling Sinister, and by comparison some of their later material sounds twee to the point of self parody.

Stuart Murdoch, demonstrating his fey shadow boxing moves, which is never really what you could call dancing, seems narcissistic and oddly sexless.  His trendy teacher persona takes charge, he even calms the crowd with “Now, now class settle down”.

An appeal for participation precedes Stevie Jackson’s I’m Not Living In The Real World. It typifies the polished nostalgia for childhood that pervades many of their songs, including Lord Anthony which sees Murdoch have mascara applied to his lashes by a front row fan.

Suki In The Graveyard adds another to their gallery of characters and We Rule The School begins as a melancholy piano ballad but ends as a anthem. A collection for a local homeless mission sees buckets passed through the crowd as Murdoch and Jackson busk a new Christmas song.

Mayfly, with it’s Stylophone solo, highlights their influence on a generation of bands who force too many instruments into their line ups. B&S use this novelty sparingly, a quality exemplified by Stars Of Track And Field and The Boy With The Arab Strap’s recorder solo; never has one been greeted with such enthusiasm.

Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying proves to be the perfect B&S song even though by now Murdoch’s voice is flagging. Monica Queen reprises her vocals for a driving version of Lazy Line Painter Jane.  Only an impromptu audience rendition of The Beatles Daytripper, inspired by Jackson’s expanded intro to Legal Man can top it. Class dismissed.

St Deluxe, King Tut’s, Glasgow, 19/12/10

The Glasgow fuzz pop quartet channel the robust spirit of 1990s American alternative rock into their noisy yet tuneful repertoire. They draw a loyal audience who tonight display extra fortitude by showing up at a very cold King Tuts, but the chill keeps the band keen and a new drummer adds momentum and focus to their sound. Our plaid-shirted heroes play with commitment and spark, even if they can sometimes be a little whammy bar-happy.

A couple of the new songs they play tonight sound less derivative alongside their older tunes. It’s a torch they’ve been burning for a while, a descendent of shoegaze with feedback soaked vibes that is currently being indulged in by bands such as Yuck and Crocodiles.

At their catchiest, Slip Away with it’s pounding riff, they can recall Sebadoh or Dinosaur Jr and they’re at their best when they keep things spiky.

A mutual love of the music of Spacemen 3, demonstrated by a cover of Losing Touch With My Mind, proves that when they have the courage to drop the pace they can do hypnotic just as well as they do noisy

Singer Jamie assaults his guitar with a pen, a screwdriver and the mic stand, anything to get a noise going, while guitarist Martin takes on his amp in pursuit of the cause. They close with a version of Johnny Cash’s Big River that transforms it from clattering country blues into a distorted, dark twisted tale of debauchery and doom.

St Deluxe give an assured performance tonight, a promise perhaps of a more consolidated direction in future, and an affirmation of their ability to damage eardrums in the best possible way. 

St Deluxe's website

Come On Gang, Capitals, Betatone Distraction, King Tuts, Glasgow, 16/12/10

Trio Betatone layer their sound with synths and distortion but their electronics never feel like a gimmick. Compared to the barrage of laptops presented by Capitals they have personality too. Come On Gang’s singing drummer Sarah multitasks her way through some punchy punk pop, more urgent live than on record. Such doubling up limits the band to a single style and turns every song into a headlong rush to the finish. Single Fortune Favours The Brave demonstrates this straightforwardness and her admirable amount of puff.  But when she introduces “another stompy one”, they sound too polite to be a proper punk band.

Yuck, Captain’s Rest, Glasgow, 11^th October 2010 3.5 stars

Yuck comprise drummer Jonny with his sphagnum crash helmet of hair; nonchalant bassist Mariko; singer Daniel, and guitarist Max who both look like they need to eat more pies. With scuzzy melodies cribbed from early Teenage Fanclub and Sonic Youth, their influences are about the same age as the band themselves. The presence of a chump with a paparazzi flash distracts the audience but is indicative of the buzz around the band. New single Rubber, coming soon on heavyweight vinyl, is a fuzz-drenched, slowed down jam making use of their bank of pedals. If they consolidate their sound in time for the release of their debut LP next year they might just be worth the hype. 

All photos by Michael Gallacher, more at Twistyfoldy.net

Life After God.

I've reached 1998 in my reading for on my other blog, Not Rock. Further to my previous post about Douglas Coupland, I've found a paragraph from his Life After God that I wrote in my diary that seems to still be affecting the way I think:

"Everyday each of us experiences a few little moment that have just a bit more resonance than other moments - we hear a word that sticks in our mind - or maybe we have a small experience that pull us out of ourselves if only briefly. (...)
And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them... we would see certain trends emerge from our collection - certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn't even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real - this chunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of out lives."