Screaming Into The Abyss

Already six months after my last technically-qualified haircut, some might say I’d started to resemble a slightly less-approachable 1955 version of Dr. Emmett Brown, (although in reality I’m nearer in age to his 1985 self.) The evidence in the smashing little video I recently made for the latest Bikini Test Failure single makes it clear my Hugh Grant-esque, youthful good looks are now a distant memory. Post-session with my Amazon-purchased clippers and wearing my severe, black-framed Ray-Ban varifocals, the best I can aspire to these days is a Once-In-A-Lifetime-era David Byrne.

Said single, “Are We Having A Good Time Yet?” has been out and about for the nominal couple of months and whilst it is essentially a remake/remaster of a BTF golden oldie, to the current audience, some of whom were barely born when it was first released, it’s effectively a “new” single and I treated it as such when approaching radio stations and music reviewers. 

After the hard slog it took to research and contact these folk in March-April about the previous single “Uncomplimentary”, I’d imagined those weeks of effort might be compressible into a few days of swift communication this time around, but whilst information about US radio is plentiful, with details of specific “Music Directors”, the patchy nature of my UK files led me back to re-research stations down to DJ and individual show level; if “Radio Knutsford” has an alt.rock show at 11pm on a Wednesday evening but no Head of Music to speak to nor serviceable submission system, I need to try and find the actual human behind it. Tricky and very time-consuming. However, whether contacts were firm or fuzzy, it’s been a universally poor response across the board.

I’ve chosen tonight to close this promotional effort and take stock. Simpler than it sounds, but I’ve picked some representative measures and counted up the plays, views, reviews, friendly radio stations and stuck them in a spreadsheet in an attempt to glean any pattern of “progress” since “Uncomplimentary”.

Sad to say, whilst views of my lovely homemade video compare favourably with “Uncomplimentary” at this point in its cycle, and streams, followers and written reviews are up, that old-fashioned, most-fundamental measure of promotional success, “radio plays” barely crept beyond single figures both here and abroad.

Granted, there’s a lot going on in the world at the moment taking people’s attention away from the latest Bikini Test Failure masterpiece, but even so, my initial “comeback”, zero-level-starter single ("Uncomplimentary") had twice as much confirmed radio attention.  

“Are We Having A Good Time Yet?” originally featured on the first Bikini Test Failure CD, the “Nobody Knows Anything EP” released in 2001. When promoted in the shadow of the esoteric title song, “Nobody Knows Anything”, “AWHAGTY” garnered plays on around four HUNDRED radio stations, playlisted on many of them for several weeks. I’ve written here before about shows that once boasted tens of thousands of listeners, now taking their shoes and socks off to count them on fingers and toes. But wake up, James! This is the new “normal” after all!

Throughout August, I listened to Daniel Kitson’s excellent midnight show on Resonance FM. One night, broadcasting via laptop and phone from his campervan parked outside his friend, poet Tim Key's house, Tim mocked Daniel for knowing he had “at least 69 listeners” (based on the emails he’d received when asking earlier if the signal was working.) 

“Screaming into the abyss!” declared Tim. Good name for a Bikini Test Failure album.

How Do You Eat An Elephant?

Gosh, this “starting again from a fan-base of zero” malarkey is hard. Once upon a time, one play on my local station, Piccadilly Radio, Manchester, UK would garner more listeners than my entire Spotify back catalogue has had in the past ten years.

But one thing is for sure: for every audio stream of my last single, “Uncomplimentary” released into a world-on-the-brink of COVID-19, the accompanying video was watched five times. This could simply be down to the enormous popularity of its creator and star, “The Ape”, AKA DJ Alf Kremer, from KTCL Radio, Denver or its videographer Bryan Bugfrog but I have to also conclude, people would rather “watch” music these days.

So with the release of my follow-up single imminent, (fortuitously delayed as it turned out - it hadn't occurred to me that my distributor CDBaby would be inundated with new releases from fellow locked-down songwriters), I got my finger out and made a video for it.

The idea was effortless and had been at the top of the pile for twenty-five years, waiting to be made: me, playing all the instruments, a bit of singing, the odd lyric plastered on top. Simple. Obviously a video idea I could only use once, but valid and no better time to make it than now, whilst stuck at home.

The single itself, a re-multitracked, re-produced, re-mixed, re-mastered, 2020 version of one of my first and most-loved BTF songs, “Are We Having A Good Time Yet?” came out of the work I’ve begun to do, saving my Old Masters from their now obsolete recording formats (Roland VS and Fostex D-90 multitracks) potentially to use them as part of whatever technological setup I end up with, whenever I end up taking Bikini Test Failure out on the road, whether solo, with a couple of musicians or as a full band. Somehow, that glockenspiel will need to be heard and I don’t think I can justify the expense of a dedicated glockenspielerist.

Five minutes into scrolling through those now-un-synched instrument tracks I realised some of these songs really should be dusted-off, given a polish and shown the promotional light of day again. AWHAGTY is the first off-the-line and between releases of brand new songs I’m planning to renovate a few more.

But OH! the video. 

I’d set my parameters: it would all be filmed on an iPhone i6 (either on a tripod or using a Hohem gimbal), and edited in iMovie. I’d written a shooting script of sorts, which had thrown up a few additional “B-roll” ideas (“slow-motion falling and smashing beer bottle”) and whilst I tried really hard not to fall down the rabbit-hole of watching TOO many YouTube tutorials, it quickly became clear that if I were to try and chop the by now more than 50 performance clips together, I’d need software with more umph than iMovie offered. 

A quick download of the free and very excellent "Da Vinci Resolve 16" from Black Magic Design (plus several MORE tutorials) and I was ready, six weeks after I started filming, to start the edit.

When you take those 50 video tracks and chop them into 250 beat-synched clips, you soon realise you’ve just given yourself 12,500 editorial decisions to make - and that’s before you consider jamming in the near-100 “B-roll” clips you’ve come up with (“Some sheep, looking at the camera”).

But it turned out really well. Have a look!

So how do you eat an elephant? 

Answer: one small spoonful at a time.

The End Of The Beginning

The polls have closed, the results are in.

It's the first week of May 2020 and I have FINALLY put my first Bikini Test Failure single in a decade, UNCOMPLIMENTARY, to bed, promotionally-speaking.

It's taken almost three months of dedicated, daily grind, finding and emailing as close to "all" the radio stations and music reviewers I could find, telling them not only about the existence of my new single, but in most cases about my OWN existence: the artist-who-goes-by-the-name-of Bikini Test Failure. 

It's no surprise that many of the recipients of my wonderful missives weren't born when I started making music; a lot weren't born when I released my first BTF album! Whilst a ten-year gap between releases was for me about two changes of car and five new t-shirts, to some of my new "fans", it's half a lifetime.

Like all amateur scientists, firstly I state my hypothesis ("release and promote a new single in this uncertain, digital world where money no longer changes hands and The Undertones are no longer the most important thing in anybody's world"), secondly I do my experiment ("single out, video out, radio and reviewers informed"). Thirdly, I record the results ("radio plays, written reviews, video plays, Spotify streams, lesser scores like, Followers, Twitter numbers"). Then finally I can write up my report and see if there is any conclusion to be made ("Just how much of an impact can a complete unknown, from a cold start, make on an uninterested and over-saturated world?") and if that might lead to a theory.

As with those same amateur scientists, so must I accept the results of my experiment, good AND bad and remember that ANY result is better than the NO result that would come from not trying.

So here, as good a place as any, I must reveal my "rewards" for three months of breaking rocks:

Radio plays: (drum roll...) of 1500 stations contacted, 42 played it. Of which 12 were US/Canada and 30 UK. Many plays, delightfully, were by stations or DJs who'd played my previous releases and like me, were still beavering away in this strange business without intervention from anything as silly as "common sense". 

And a couple of weeks in, many stations DID shut down/go to automation/stop answering emails, but that's no excuse eh?

And of course, that's just the 42 I know about; I'm keen not to do too much following-up, adding unsolicited email on top of unread initial email, but I suspect there have been a few more I'll not know about for a while. 

With virtually no other direct promotion, Spotify has had... 59 plays. Just the 59. Or perhaps, "Wow! 59 people have heard my new single! Fab!" It's hard to decide which.

The YouTube Video (another special creation by DJ Alf at KTCL Denver and his videographer pal Bryan Bugfrog) wins hands down, with 297 glorious views.

(The figures in the picture at the top of this are the latest viewing stats for the BBC "Homeground" telly programme my dad appeared in, back in 1981. It's clear that old railways and industrial archaeology have far more fans than cutting-edge indie-pop!)

So that's that. Perhaps no new theory, but some kind of conclusion to be drawn: that I'm not so much blazing a trail for my forthcoming releases as hacking a path through a rainforest with a blunt machete. It needs doing and it will slowly, surely build.

There's something masochistically comforting about starting from a zero base level. But in common with all the best school reports, James "must do better" and hopefully, next time, WILL do better.

A Numbers Game

It's been two months since the "release" of my first new Bikini Test Failure single in a decade. Possibly the worst two months in modern history in which to release a single.

However, because my "day-job" work (live events, here, there and everywhere, technical, corporate) collapsed a good month before the point when the bars and restaurants had to close, I'd recovered from the shock and embraced the odd reality of no income and nothing in the diary, for perhaps the next twelve months, before the Cheltenham Gold Cup had gone ahead and broadcast news had even started to lead with the story.

Now, April 2020, I'm in a daily routine, based on near-100% things I want to do, rather than have to do. And what better time to have infinite time on your hands than the moment you release a single and discover there are perhaps 2000 eligible indie radio stations around the world, any of which may want to play your song. If only you can look them up, find the right person and contact them.

Consequently, I've spent every day of these two months doing exactly that. A good day might find 100 new contacts, a bad one only ten, but one way or another, beginning with searching for my old radio heroes from Fleecing The Easily Pleased days in 2010-11, then Wikipedia's extensive lists and finally adding in the mighty resource that is The Indie Bible, I was able to locate, update and contact around 1500 stations and shows out of the 2000 considered, that might at least listen to my song.

That is, of course, if they're still open. 

Daily, as I sent out my beautifully researched, personalised messages, replies began to flood in, but like the rapidly increasing bad news numbers we see each night on TV,  they soon changed from, "Hi, thanks for the music, we'll have a listen and let you know!" to "We are operating an automated schedule", then "This station is closed for the duration". 

Undeterred, (actually I was VERY deterred for a few days) I decided that this research needed doing sooner or later; this first single, UNCOMPLIMENTARY is merely the first of a dozen in the current batch and, if I can avoid another ten-year-hiatus, the first of the next forty years of new tunes released. So rather than build up a list of contacts over several releases, I may as well contact every eligible person with this first single, blaze a trail for the future and generally start as I mean to go on.

And STILL it took two months! Imagine though, back in 2010, I had to find the right person, ask them if they'd like an album, package it up, mail it, wait a week, check they'd received it, follow-up two weeks later... no wonder I did little else for two years after the last album was released. 

And so, the other day, after a hard day "at it", I realised that was it! I'd reached the end of my radio list and my bloggers and reviewers lists. I opened a beer, toasted the Muses and clicked "Check New Mail". The stars were clearly aligned that evening because THIS review came flying in. Someone, (DJ Vlad from Canada's CJAM radio) had written a fabulous review for the Rock At Night website, based in Tampa, Florida. At least with this particular gentleman, I have managed to create the EXACT impression I intended.

I sent the review to my pal Jeremy, fellow music producer, former studio colleague and Music Director of my previous masterplan band, Blunder. He knows me well. He said, "He seems to have nailed YOU down to a tee!"

Even my mum agreed.

Please Release Me...

Well, I hate to say a pattern is developing here, but a decade between releases seems to be a habit for me. Two years after devising The New Big Plan and over a year of recording experimentation, practice, tutorials and generally getting-to-know the new all-digital studio, later, almost falling at the last fence when I realised, nine years on from last time, I'd need to get my ears back up-to-speed and re-learn how to mix a song, it's finished.

And here it is. I have to say I'm very proud of it:
bikinitestfailure.hearnow.com

Last blog, I mentioned news of a small dream-come-true; a decade of digital development might have had no impact at all on the eternal necessity for "good ears", but delightfully, it now means you can send your track to Abbey Road studios to be mastered, for (currently) just £90GBP. Sign-up, upload, email any instructions and what seems like minutes later I received notification it was done and ready for me to download.

If you're not in such a rush, you can even choose your mastering engineer; they are profiled on the site. Between the folks listed, they must have mastered my entire record collection. What a brilliant thing to be able to do. (For £250 they will MIX the thing for you too! Maybe next time...)

So. It's done. It's got a sleeve design. (I spent NO time at all considering that. I've learnt from past efforts that the photos I choose are automatically "Bikini Test Failure" in nature and when my simple logo, fonts and colours are added, it becomes simply the latest in the series, no matter what the subject matter). This week it's on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and the rest. But the question remains... what now?!

Obviously, one answer is: do another, quick!

And so I will. (And surely, it'll come to fruition in MUCH less time, this time!)

But before I do, I'll be conducting a bit of very old fashioned PR. 

Aside from a no-frills Twitter announcement, it would be ridiculous for someone as anti-social (and OLD!) as me to engage in the "here's-my-haircut-and-my-dinner!" hourly postings of the Instagranny/Fleecebook world so I was quite pleased to hear a CDBaby DIY Musician Conference 2019 seminar in which Rick Barker revealed the ultimate aim of such dribblings should be to move your "followers" from those sites, to your own, private mailing list. It was as if a light went on! As so many people have noticed before I did, nothing has actually changed, just the methods of delivery. 

Back in the day, late-'90s, my first "Masterplan" band, Blunder, had a physical address mailing list, started with Freepost return postcards, handed out by friends at gigs. It quickly grew to a couple of hundred interested and engaged early fans who, in return for filling out the card and mailing it in, received a cassingle (no less!) and quarterly, two-page newsletters. (A bit like this blog only with more NEWS in them...)

Imagine what a great start 200 engaged fans would be right now.

Next stop, Radio Stations. Do people still have radios?