Once “cutting-edge”, now more likely to be cutting my hedges!

 

Lately, I’ve been a bit too fond of saying, “I’m practically sixty!” A couple of years ago, I was joking, clearly said a bit too soon, evoking smirks and “don’t be stupids” from pals, but as time goes on, the expressions become a little more serious, with a raise of the eyebrows, a tilt of the head and perhaps a “Well, yes, not long now, son…”

And I imagine, in the not-too-distant future, if I continue to use the phrase beyond its sell-by date, these same folk will be tutting and saying, “Whaddya mean, ‘practically’? That was ages ago!”

And so it goes.

But today, as I quietly and slowly approach my seventh decade (in my head, I remain resolutely, my emotionally-stunted 17-year-old self) I’ve just had a weekend, containing my absolute "fill" of those unbidden, “peak” emotional moments, all related to and induced by the simultaneous completion of my latest song recording AND a silly little self-shot & edited video to go with it - and after an extra special effort, late on a Thursday night, I managed to combine these events to coincide with great Umph, at the very midnight-moment the new single was released (at least, here in the UK) across all the usual streaming and downloading services. 

By midnight:05, I had sent-off said track, video and blurb to a couple of hundred playlists, reviewers and radio shows, a task that in the past had always taken me a couple of weeks post-release, to complete. (A sobering thought: back in the days of a physical CD album release, I’d still be working on the third or fourth promo-mailout - CDs, printed press releases and padded envelopes - a year later!)

So now, with minimum effort, maximum efficiency, spending as little time as possible and not undertaking ANY activities I don’t actually want to (“Link to us on your Insta…” No. I do not have such a thing. And nor will you have, dear reader, one day very soon) the tune and visuals are “out there”, a bet placed, a lottery ticket purchased. I probably won’t “win it”, but I’m once again, for a few weeks, definitely “in it”. 

After the really quite wonderful, emotional moment of release the other night, the obvious, expected lack of initial response (12 listens… 12?! Yep, 12…) is countered by instances of quiet satisfaction and future promise; joyous, personal reviews from music fans in Brazil or France or Seattle or Stoke-on-Trent, suddenly the promise of inclusion on 9, no, 29, no 69 Spotify playlists… global connections opening the mind to the possibility that my UK/US-centric view of my music as “Retro-2000s indie-guitar-pop-rock” is to others, unconfined by such strict genres, “great dance music” or “bright & lush, easy listening”, “post-punk pop” and SO on.  Just lovely to hear all these opinions. Even the folk who don’t quite connect, have great, constructive, interesting things to say. (Thank you again the “Groover” promotions company, by whom I am NOT sponsored!)

Anyway, the point is this: I may be getting old - I’m certainly older now than I’ve ever been before, eh reader? - but I’m making better music than I ever have, strangers around the world are seemingly loving it and dancing around their kitchens to it, and I’m personally gleaning deep satisfaction and a sense of purpose from making it and releasing it, however mutedly, however inconsequentially. 

And today, thrown clear of this particular song project, I’m almost giddy to get stuck into the next one, tonight! Now! Watch me go…

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.

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.

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?