15 f Ranting & Reeling I


read with interest the feature on Do It Yourself music releases in the last issue of fRoots. It’s disappointing that my suggestion of a follow-up article called Don’t Do It At All was rejected. But I will continue my poster campaign targeting affordable record- ing studios with the slogan: “Is your album really necessary?”


If, against better judgement, you answered yes to that question then it might be a useful exercise to examine what led you to this undoubtedly incor- rect assumption. Are you perhaps being encouraged to unleash your ill-disciplined twanging onto the world because of sev- eral kind but insincere compliments from friends? Were you spurred into a week- end of home recording after that woman came up to you at Towersey Festival and asked when you’d be releasing an album? A woman who, now you come to think about it, had almost certainly mistaken you for Tim Van Eyken. Or is your ambi- tion to fill the shed with unsold digipaks motivated chiefly by delusion and a fear of dying? It is definitely one, if not all three of these insufficient reasons.


The dearly departing record labels were far from perfect, but they did at least sort some wheat from some chaff


(even if several companies appeared to specialise in nothing but chaff). The problem with Bandcamp and its upload- able ilk is they don’t reject submissions based on any measure of quality or via- bility. The egalitarian nature of online releasing forces the listening public to become their own A&R men or women; and it doesn’t take long to realise why the bulk of that profession never listen to unsolicited demos. Like other people’s children, pets and soft furnishings, most self-released music is very hard to love.


It’s all very well being able to hear before you buy, but what can be done to protect us from hearing it at all? Perhaps a subscription model could work. I’d gladly pay £10 or even £20 a month never to hear another shouted note from the Eton- educated, Libertarian, gobshite du jour Frank Turner, for example. My only fear is that this could be abused by major labels charging inflated amounts to prevent the release of yet more outtakes by The Doors. As a music lover I would feel obliged to pay whatever it took to halt the manufac- ture of any such box set, knowing my dis- cernment was being exploited.


To counteract such profiteering I pro- pose an annual event where several limit- ed edition 7-inchers of dubious merit


remain unre- leased, free of charge. Keen music rejecters could queue outside their former HMV on Record Stop Day, happy to return home empty handed.


But for


those still opt- ing for the


direct digital route, are you really so independent? Instead of your music being owned by Sony or Universal, your songs now make money for Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Simon Google.


If you really want to stick it to the man you need to take it offline. The future, as this writer sees it, is selling direct to the public at farmers’ markets. If people are willing to pay £2.50 for a dried up slice of banana bread, based on the notion it must be better if it doesn’t come from a shop, then just think what they’d be willing to spend on a CD you’ve made yourself. Not to mention creating a much-needed boost for the trestle table industry.


Tim Chipping


The Elusive Ethnomusicologist T


he 14 year old in our house has cancelled all her social media accounts. Off her own bat. Breaking the news, she said “I


just don’t want to judge and I don’t want to be judged, Mum. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoul- ders.” “Excellent,” I thought, with a burst of maternal pride. Just as the inter- net and computer technology have freed us to realise and disseminate our creative aspirations they have also made critics of us all. But simply having the means of production doesn’t make us all artists. Nor does access to everything qualify us a critics. And from what I’ve seen, teenage style-police are particular- ly harsh. Social media is very antisocial.


On the plus side, access to everyone all the time means you no longer need to know who any one person is. This is bril- liant for me. A vast tract of gauche inepti- tude has disappeared into the ether. When positive social signifiers (are you ‘cool’?) reside in knowing who our cultur- al luminaries are, or at least recognising them, I’m a spectacular failure. The oppo- site of ‘cool’, which in this case is not hot.


For example, in a burst of youthful delusion I auditioned for a band. At the appointed time, I took out my saxo-


phone and played along to chords banged out by the keyboard player. He was from Manchester. (As you read on every voice, apart from mine, has a strong Mancunian accent).


Kbds: “Right. What does it sound like if you take that thing off?” Sax: “What thing?” Kbds: “That bit on the end.” Sax: “The mouth piece?” Kbds: “Right. Just play that.”


And so we went to play a support at a venue in town. In the dressing room – a few chairs in the ladies loo – we all sat around after the sound-check, waiting for our early start. The desultory conver- sation amongst my new band mates cen- tred on the events of a recent Australian tour they’d undertaken backing a singer with a huge heroin habit. It involved guns on the bus and bodies being dumped and a man called Dennis who looked after everything. As the tales got wilder, Dennis loomed larger and more menacing in my mind.


Suddenly the door to the loos burst open and a huge man in a three-piece suit, with braces and a flat cap, stood sweating profusely in its frame. “Hello Chuckies.” The band’s manager. He had his arm around another huge bloke, who was toned where the manager wasn’t.


Big muscled biceps burst out of his t- shirt. It looked like he’d ripped the sleeves off with his teeth.


They filled


the entrance to the room. The band glanced up. No-one spoke. So the manager took up the slack. “Well, I don’t need to intro- duce you to my friend do I?” Still no-one spoke, not the drummer, not Sharon the singer, not the sampler whizz-kid with his picturesque snare sound (“This is the sound of me slapping Sharon’s right but- tock. And this is the sound of her left.”). Silence. A few glances were exchanged.


The atmosphere grew stranger. Beginning to feel nervous I smiled bright- ly at Biceps: then broke the lengthening quiet. “Hello. You must be Dennis!”


The keyboard player sighed. I felt the weight of judgement upon me.


“Lizzie, It’s John Cale.” Elizabeth Kinder

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