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.

Does Anything Actually Matter More Than Music?

Well this one has been a while in the gestation… not because it’s been a difficult write, rather that I’ve been busier than a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest over the past few weeks. 

Oh, and I had The Covids of course…

As inevitable as an iceberg breaking off the Greenland sheet at the same time the Titanic left its Belfast shipyard, when my mother was admitted to hospital in December following a minor fall, at the end of nine months in which she and I had so assiduously kept her (and me!) “safe”, it seemed predestined in her brief home-release at Christmas that she’d develop “a bit of an infection”.

It was Coronavirus of course and (after passing it on to me!) she sadly died on New Year’s Day, ten minutes before all her octogenarian friends received their first dose of the vaccine. Such is life (and death).

Besides working every job the so-called “Live Events Industry” could throw at me in this new Virtual World and looking after my Ma until her unfortunate demise, back in December, I’d scheduled the release of my new Bikini Test Failure single, “Kiss Me Like You Mean It” for the end of January.

By the time the big moment arrived, my plate was so full I barely noticed and honestly just thought, “Oh, forget it!”

But then something extraordinary happened. Somewhere in that (rare) moment of emotional extreme, far from ignoring the only truly creative, stress-relieving thing I’d done in the previous weeks, I decided to put it front and centre; grieving, funeral direction, house-clearing, work, could all go whistle and find their own place in my schedule; I had this lovely new tune to unleash on the world.

Then, perhaps predictably, the world of music took me over, calmed my soul and diminished any horror that was going on. Not for the first time my own musical outpourings, or those of a select few others instantly gave me that godlike perspective which is usually absent in times of personal distress.

And what’s that? Two people in Stoke-on-Trent have retweeted the link to my new video? Ahh. All better now.