HAVE I “Still Got It”?

In the blink of an eye, it’s suddenly the fifth anniversary of my first Bikini Test Failure post-music-industry, post-everything single release, “Uncomplimentary”, in March 2020, about a week before You-Know-What arrived and the world shut down for a couple of years.

Before that, in 2017 I’d begun to blogpost here, more as a way of combating perceived pressure amongst the DIY Music Community to involve oneself in all those social media promotional activities, the pressure itself, mostly coming from those same social media. No, my way would be different; I’d shun the obvious channels, write longhand and at length about my musical process and progress, tell it like it actually was, not how I’d like it to be. For those of you who no longer read anything longer than a hashtag… well you probably aren’t my target market… and you won’t be reading THIS either, will you?

Five years gone, five-eighths of The Beatles’ entire recording career, in which time I’ve managed to scrape together just eight half-singles (when a single was traditionally TWO songs), three of which are actually remakes of oldies. So, FIVE new songs, in five fast years. (A sixth may appear on a phone near you before Christmas). It’s an improvement on the zero songs I released in the previous decade, but still pitiful.

I’d do well to remember that, next time I’m bemoaning the difficulty I feel in covering all bases in my otherwise pretty splendid, artistic lifestyle, spinning-up all plates to similar RPMs, yet less satisfied or rewarded by said lifestyle than I’d imagined I would be and that fundamentally, I still “Must Try Harder”.

In the same way that those ripped abs won’t just appear by themselves, I mustn’t lament the lack of a folderful of new songs, eagerly queuing up to be recorded (as I once always seemed to have), without first noting that I haven’t done a single sofa-based songwriting session in the last six-months.

It’s possible, as with my music-listening habit and even watching films or reading, I may have just “lost the bug”. Whenever I do make the effort, my usual, lazy, can’t-be-bothered-ness seems fortified by the more worrying feeling that I’ve heard, seen and read everything I want to, often too many times, so, nothing old please and as for “new”… I’ve no idea where to start.

I’ve played every chord sequence 100,000 times over the past 45 years, forwards, backwards and sideways. Lately, I’ve sprinkled in a handful of new-to-me jazz chords – which themselves have now solidified into a few hackneyed phrases. Lyrics, forget it. What I want to say is “Jesus! I never saw THIS part of life coming!” but that seems a bit self-indulgent.
A Beatles podcast once replied to a critique of solo McCartney’s awful lyric-writing, that it wasn’t “authentic” or “truthful”, by saying that if he wrote about what he actually got up to in real life, his songs would be exclusively about touring, vacations and his family.

But I can’t start making things up now. I never have. Sure, once you need a rhyme for “plethora”, the rulebook is out the window, but I’ve always had to inject that spark of reality into the beginning of a song. For years I kicked around a couplet about a (once-young) partner’s tiny but incredibly heavy head, near-crushing my shoulder each night until I’d awake in a panic with a dead-arm. Years later, I found another lover whose similarly-propertied head did the same thing! I put it down to clearly denser-than-average brains, given the small head-sizes.

I’m pleased to say, that resurrected-lyric idea eventually made it into my previous “new song” release, “But I Still Love You” in November 2022 (I skipped 2023 entirely!) By then it had morphed into “Leave you there asleep until my arm goes dead, ‘cos you’re probably out of your tiny head” alongside zingers like “I’ve wished you under a bus by now” in what I’d like to think is one of my finest Love You/Hate You songs. Sometimes these things just need to take as long as they take. But once cast in digital vinyl, every time I’ll hear it or even sing it, such flashes of “reality” will resonate and elevate my feeling about the finished song from “satisfied” to “utterly delighted”.

My published-author-pal Mark once told me, art, his art, my art, all art, is our way of explaining our experience of life to ourselves. Without really trying to, I’ve currently neglected all my usual ways of sneaking-up on creativity, ignoring the “craft”. By simply waiting for lightning to strike, I’ve clearly missed a trick.

Maybe I’ll just go and strum a Cmaj7-chord for an hour or so and see what happens.

Feelin' Groover

I’ve done a "thing".

Disappointed (to seriously understate the unravelling of a 35-year-long assault on Mount “Music Career”) with the dwindling response rate of my promotion campaigns for recent Bikini Test Failure releases, I was delighted last month, (December 2022) to bring the year to a close and begin the new one, with some rare and unexpected musical “success”.

As you know, since relaunching myself after a decade-long break, just as the pandemic hit in 2020, I’ve struggled to find the best balance between promotional effort and tangible or noticeable reward as I’ve painfully extracted songs from my soul, at a rate your average racing snail or blood-donating stone would scoff at, before letting them loose on a howlingly indifferent world.

My carefully tended and constantly updated mailing list of global radio stations, DJs, shows, bloggers, magazines and playlisters numbers about 1800. And where once I’d receive near that number of replies to my personalised emails, I’m now lucky to achieve a hundred positive outcomes, hence these days I choose the easy life and just keep in touch with those hundred “friends”.

The lives of such people (as with all of us) must have changed enormously in the twenty years since an email-offer from me, to mail you a copy of my latest CD single, contained any novelty or provoked any desire.

Spotify’s 100k new uploads per day must by now have made my recipients’ inboxes unnavigable. And whilst I assume song “quality” has always varied, the redundancy of the compact disc medium removed what was for many an insurmountable hurdle to getting their music out there. Couple that with everyone’s iPhone now containing a Neve 8048-with-full-recall and every bus-stop-whistled-demo can become a Jacob Collier-esque production built by thumbs alone, by the time said whistler gets their morning cappu-frappa-cino en route to their desk at the call-centre (or wherever people work these days) and "You're just a drop in the ocean, Sunshine!" doesn't begin to cover it.

The excellent CD Baby DIY Musician podcast, usually a source of warm, communal support, and occasionally career-bending enlightenment, recently mentioned they had partnered with Paris-based promotions company, Groover and gave them a glowing review. 

Since hiring pluggers and publicists back in the late-1990s, to visit radio stations and music journalists in person, clutching a bagful of my singles (imagine that!) I’ve not spent a penny on “promo”. “Facebook ads” and “Twitter boosts” seem ridiculous by comparison with a full-page advert in the old NME.

But Groover is a cut-above, reminding me of those old-fashioned publicists, people who knew people you didn’t or couldn’t know. They have set themselves up in that most-vital of roles in such a free-for-all, vanity-, dream-, whim- and delusion-led non-business-business as today’s self-released music world: a Gatekeeper.

If I email a Midwest-living, teenaged indie playlister with half-a-million followers and ask them to consider my new track, I don’t get past their spam filter (if I can even locate their email address.) If I pay Groover a couple of Euros to contact them for me, I will get a reply (often within the hour!) And if not an offer to add my music, then at worst a very kind and detailed opinion of the song, production, emotional content, voice, lyrical humour, you-name-it, and exactly why they won’t be sharing it. How wonderful.

For an old-timer like me, used to personal, ongoing chats with similar-era radio DJs and Music Directors around the world, this resumption in communication has felt like a new lease of life. And, because I like to think my music IS worth playing to the world, lo and behold, I'm delighted to find a significant number of these new-media-folk agree! The previous release (“Nip And Tuck”) struggled to reach triple figures of streams, radioplays and playlists. The latest (“But I Still Love You”) has rocketed (by my standards) straight into four figures, back to the level at which I felt most comfortable and fulfilled ten and twenty years ago, when I’d happily spend a few thousand quid mailing my CD albums and promo sheets out to anyone who wanted one. 

What happens to my music once the few hundred approving “influencers” I’ve now contacted through Groover get hold of it, is out of my hands; they may have thousands of followers, readers or listeners, but will those people “engage” in turn? I find myself not really caring. For now, I’ve found my audience in Groover’s “curators”. And through them, both vindication and reward for continuing to produce and release music.

Music out-ranks life-events once again on Friday 25th November 2022

 

What to do when your “life-partner” of a decade-plus, ditches you for some random idiot they meet in a bar? Release a new song about it of course! As Bill Shankly never said, “Some people think relationships are a matter of life and death. To me, music is much more important!” And so it proves itself to be, once again.

 

An homage to the favourite bands of my childhood - late-70s, early 80s guitar-driven power-pop. The Cars, Vapors, Undertones, Buzzcocks, Police, Boomtown Rats, Knack, Beat, plus more than a dash of the ever-topical Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing”. I first owned Revolver in 1978 and in my young mind it fit seamlessly with the charts of the day.

 

At the point of my last release, the daily Spotify new-song-count was estimated at 60,000. The latest has risen to 100,000. Per. Day.

 

Even if two-thirds of those are still “archive tracks” (sooner or later, they’ll all be released?) my jolly little bittersweet love song will emerge unnoticed by anyone, no matter what efforts I make, save for the handful of glorious and enlightened humans who have chosen to “follow” me.

 

Hence, this time around, my many lessons learned, I am questioning every move I now make in relation to anything that can be considered as “promotion”. Virtually anything I do, save those things that give me personal satisfaction (e.g. writing a blog, creating a little video to go with the tune, telling my 20 friends on Twitter), is an utter waste of time; perhaps time I could spend feeling genuine fulfilment, for example, by beginning a new song, or weeding my lawn.

 

So if you’re a radio station who played the last one, or a blogger or journalist who wrote about it, expect an email. The other 2,000 on my mailing list, those who used to play my albums back in the era of CDs, but who now don’t even reply to me, I will now happily ignore, safe in the knowledge that anything else would be a waste of electrons and my oh-so-finite heartbeats.

Failed Musician Rants About Social Media Shocker

 

Call me a jaded cynic...

I’ve been rather hoping everyone in the DIY musician community would see the light soon and the whole thing would just “go away”.

Hasn’t the medium taken over from the message? Isn’t an artist lauded now as “a success” when their previously unknown tune becomes the soundtrack to the latest small-car TV commercial? Remember when artists didn’t want their music to be used to sell cars? Don’t they seem to write songs now with little else in mind? Number One album? No, incidental music on a Netflix series please!

Surely, for the 99% of us who are NOT that handful of actually, globally successful, big-budget musicians (nor ever will be) when our chances of selling a thousand CD albums for $10 each, to a thousand dedicated and engaged fans, evaporated (when was that... 15 years ago? iTunes launch?) the entire game was up; it’s just taken 15 years for everyone to notice. Views, likes, streams, comments - just a teaspoon of sugar in the teacup of life: a short-term serotonin hit and some long-term damage. Cut it out and feel better about yourself.

The musical department of social media is like a fight at the town butcher for the last chicken in the window. “Look at me! I won!” Yes you did, Well done! Now what exactly what did you win...?

After 30-plus years of “serious” effort, I’m at a stage in life where my songwriting, playing, recording and production have never been more accomplished; I turn out the sort of catchy (but sophisticated!) guitar pop I could only dream of creating back when I’d pay $200 every few months, for a day in a 16-track studio.

David Byrne (in his book “How Music Works”) asks, if you truly make music just for the sake of making music, then why “release” anything at all and tells the tale of a deceased chap whose home was found to contain shelves of cassette albums he’d quietly recorded and told no-one about. I’m convinced I only keep releasing songs now to see if I can make a pal of mine from those studio days raise an eyebrow at a hook, or force an involuntary chuckle at a well-crafted couplet.

I, we all, have near-instant, gate-keeper-less, global distribution of the kind I used to dream about every time I got embroiled in yet another six-month-long fall into the rabbit hole of “major-label interest”.

My iPhone makes better pop videos than several thousand dollars’ worth of camera crew and video editing suite-time did in the 1990s and gives me the same direct access to the hearts and minds of a billion potential “fans” that back then, a global record company’s yearly marketing spend wouldn’t come close to achieving.

So what’s the result?

Nothing. Nothing happens. Nobody listens, watches, reads, reacts. Nobody cares, nothing matters any more.

U2 release a new album. Nobody notices. U2 don’t release a new album. Nobody minds.

Social media for musicians is over, because far more importantly, The Music Business for musicians, (the 99%), is over. The music business we can all see, the Big One, over there, we are not in. Yet the little independent one, in which we used to thrive, has now vanished. All that’s left is a social media-generated echo of a Big Bang that happened long ago, like a photocopy of a photocopy that bears no resemblance to the quality and value of the original.

Any flurry of interest an artist creates via their iPhone is about as useful or valid a spectacle as dropping a handful of one-dollar bills in a crowded shopping mall; as time-consuming and pointless as trying to fish out a dime that’s rolled into the fluff under the vending machine. Oh, and there’s a hundred others there chasing the same dime!

You could say, “’Twas always thus!”

In the ‘90s (or ‘80s, or ‘70s) did the bass player in your favourite band ever really make enough money to live off, let-alone buy the Rolls Royce and the mansion in the country? No of course not. They just about scraped their rent together for the two or three years they remained musically active then when the second single from the second album failed to chart, their game was up. And like us today, it will have taken them a few years to realise it, to put down their bass and go and get a job in IT or radio jingle production.

Ultimately, it’s more of a “game” now than it ever was; the stakes are so low that anybody (and seemingly everybody) can (and does!) have a go, like some free-to-enter lottery where the prize is... a ticket for next week’s lottery (no doubt with a burger-outlet’s advertisement printed on the back.) Spotify recently confirmed they upload 60,000 songs every DAY!

So. Why not stop "playing the game"? Delete the apps, stop logging in and Just Make Music. Yes, put it out, tell your friends if you must, but then go and make some more, better than the last.

If you’ve enjoyed this rant please subscribe, “smash” that like button and ... no don't. Really. Just don't.

Three Hundred to One?

 

It’s been a while, as usual…

Another three-month epic of a recording and mixing process for this latest Bikini Test Failure single, Nip And Tuck, but I’m happy to say only about ten days to make a little YouTube video for it; I’m clearly getting faster, if not better, at some things.

It was undoubtedly during a Word In Your Ear podcast that I caught writer/broadcaster David Hepworth repeat something he’d overheard, namely that you can always tell when someone’s “had a bit of work done”; they have the look of the permanently surprised!

Funny in itself, if not entirely fair or accurate, it clearly tickled something in me. For decades, again unfairly and certainly in ignorance, I’ve been aware that folk who “have a bit of work done” tend to look everso slightly ridiculous in one way or another and rarely “better” than they did before – whatever “better” means.

I can infer, of course, that for every oddly altered person it’s possible to spot, there may be dozens who go undetected, their subtle alterations serving them well in their finite battle against clock and calendar.

So a bit of hearsay and my low-brow pondering, triggered a very satisfying and productive bout of songwriting, which after only 20 minutes, resulted in all the lyrics I would need to complete the song and sadly, quite a few more I was unable to jam in.

Nip And Tuck is the 14^th release of Blague Records, which I started in the mid-‘90s. As time has revealed, a vanity label for my own music, nevertheless begun with serious intent and huge ambition. Like all aspiring indie label bosses, I subscribed to the UK’s trade magazine, MusicWeek (Billboard seemed an unnecessary extravagance!) In it, you’d find a complete list of that week’s single and album releases.

I would always feel swamped by the sheer number of competitors: 300 new singles per week. Many were from major labels and most of the others surely had larger budgets than mine (which was near-zero) but I was still proud and pleased to occasionally make it into MW’s review pages, perhaps one of only ten chosen that week.

It’s been clear since my Great Comeback last year, that the small-scale Indie Music Industry is not what it was; there was never much money sloshing around – now there aren’t even any sales to fight over.

It might seem obvious, but it’s worth stating: streams are not the equivalent of old-fashioned record sales! They’re far more akin to radio-plays. And where once my little BTF tunes might be played on a local, community, college or commercial radio station, here in the UK or across the States, Canada, and even Australia, each time to an audience varying from a few hundred to tens of thousands, (and earning performance royalties as they went!) I find that my virtually-free, modern-day streams can only limp slowly through double-figures before finally collapsing, exhausted in the low-hundreds. It’s quite devastating really.

I shouldn’t be so astonished. The aforementioned Mr Hepworth also recently pointed out that Spotify uploads a total of, wait for it, sixty THOUSAND songs a DAY! Apparently two-thirds of those are “back-catalogue” (meaning two or more years old). So that leaves a mere 140,000 new-new singles to compete with. That week.

I should have made my millions back in the day when it was just me and 299 other hopefuls!

 

Giving Thanks and Getting Back

Delayed November 2021 blather

It's been a while, largely through too much work and not enough brainspace, just like the bad old days. Sadly. "Let's build back better" is currently proving to be "Let's build back exactly the same but slightly more stressfully!" Horrible and quite oppressive. I'll come up with a "work less" (or possibly work-less!) plan to trial Jan-June '22. See if I can't redesign 200 years of corporate conditioning. 

Meanwhile, here's something I meant to publish TWO MONTHS ago before real life took over... Around the edges I'd been wallowing in the self-indulgent joy I can always derive from the latest Beatles renovations: film, book, multi-disc reimagining of an old album, YouTube clips and commentaries, Winter of Discontent, a podcast analysis of January 1969 to rival all podcast analyses (I'm on episode 21 and we're only up to 10am on the third day...) 

Consequently, I've caved in, done something I'd very definitely planned not to do, and subscribed (1-month-only, £7.99! (Oh, now it's three...)) to a thing called Disney+. I now have access to FORTY-FIVE documentaries all with the word "Shark" in their title (I'm not kidding!) but crucially, sometime this week, (Nov '21) three films, eight hours' total, edited down from 55 hours or so footage, of the Beatles musical group, tiddling around for three weeks, making, performing and recording some new tunes. 

I do feel like this particular global content-provider company has won and I have somehow lost, but I didn't feel I could wait an indeterminate amount of time until a Blu-Ray version perhaps appeared in the shops (which shop is that?! An email in my inbox with a “Buy” button in it is probably what I mean) - for which, incidentally, I would have to also buy a Blu-Ray player - so, I crumbled and subscribed, however fleetingly.

These things "air" (?!) over three days Thurs 25th - Sat 27^th November 2021, dates chosen I assume, to accord with the US desire to Give Thanks. What day is Turkey Day? Thursday? Day-off work? Back in on Friday?

Now, being new to this modern way of consuming my question is: when such things are "released", are they like "old telly" and will appear on the front page of the "site" each day at, say 8pm, thus creating some kind of old-fashioned communal experience opportunity? Or are they just "there" from midnight+1-second? (Future ed.: I think the latter is what happened.)

Either way, I've got some daft idea to attempt to watch the three films as the same time the rest of the world does and indeed, cook some vegetarian poultry (and sweet potatoes and grilled squirrel, right?) on whichever day is Turkey Day. Y'know, "join in!"

Next week I Get Back in the studio (see what I did there? Always thinking...) to finish my new tune, meanwhile, Happy end-of-November, The Americas!

Now why DID George walk out…?

 

It was 20 years ago today!

It’s that time again…

My last Bikini Test Failure release, February’s Kiss Me Like You Mean It, seemed to be a bit of a watershed; for the first time since I began releasing music again last year (after a decade-long break) before I’d even begun to promote the track, DJs, playlisters and pundits picked up on it via Spotify and the usual channels - a most welcome change.

Over the next few weeks, I went ahead with my usual, old-fashioned radio promo plans, but beyond that initial flurry of interest, I mostly met with the usual, blistering indifference. The fans and champions I’d previously gained in Radioland knew about it already and despite a couple of thousand well-intentioned emails, I managed to add but a handful of new ones across the US and UK. I suppose there could have been a couple of hundred extra plays I never heard about but the truth is more likely to be that I never made it past a thousand Junk folders.

Not like The Old Days, eh?

So. THIS time around, as I released my latest single, Nobody Knows Anything, a 20^th anniversary, remultitracked, remade, replayed, remastered version of my first ever Bikini Test Failure song, (the title track of my first CD EP), I conducted an experiment:

NO PROMO!

My solitary Tweet was something like, “Shh! Bikini Test Failure is 20 years old! Here’s a new single…” Otherwise, just sit back, relax, see what happens.

Well, the results are in; what DID happen?

Somewhat surprisingly, absolutely nothing!

A handful of loyal listeners got in touch or playlisted the new song, but the respectable flood the last single self-induced was sadly missing.

It’s hard to know why. Did people prefer the first 30 seconds of the previous song more than this one? I doubt it. More likely, that was on a cold, dark Friday evening in February when staring at your phone was a more attractive prospect than it is in long, sunny evenings at the end of June. Can’t be sure though.

The writing was soon on the wall so I leapt in and quickly emailed my couple of hundred good friends in radio. Thankfully they instantly responded with plays, posts and playlistings. Release week had been rescued.

I've learned the lesson: whilst my audience and relationships are clearly growing, they're nowhere near the critical mass required to get off the ground. 

In short, as my pal from the studio days Parisson (and Curtis Mayfield!) says, keep on keeping on.