TO WHERE I AM NOW

So the website went down today due to “exceeding bandwidth”. Seems like the site wasn’t able to keep up with a daily blog with pics and occasional vids, which means, we have to pay more. Hosting sites like In Deep, my site, the Marty & Olivia site, Noctorum and the Songwriting & Guitar Guidance site is taking some financial planning (my favourite thing, ha ha). On this subject thanks to the people that have donated to the blog, because as you see, it even costs to write. You’d think that to write would be free. It is, but you need a channel, a server and a website to get it to the people. What a different world it is for everybody since the digital revolution. The mobile phone and the computer have made access to entertainment infinite. Photography has completely been turned on its head, Kodak went bust! What?

When the internet came along it opened up a lot of possibilities for the consumer and the artist. In the old system you were either signed and promoted or just playing live, it was hard to afford to make and sell records without record company support. The internet opened up the world to the unknown artist and it levelled the playing field. Remember Napster? Remember Metallica fighting them to stop some company giving their music away for free. For the bigger bands it wasn’t just about earnings and royalties, it was about affording to record in proper studios. The expense of making music has remained the same for many artists, but there’s also been a massive drop in income. Bon Jovi or AC/DC or Foo Fighters or Black Mountain can’t really make a record at home. My ex band’s most successful records would have sounded very different if we hadn’t been able to record them in a proper studio. (Apart from GAF with the crappy drum machine.) Some musical styles need a proper studio and a proper engineer, it sounds different than it does at home or in the basement. Different types of music have different needs, but as soon as you could reach the world from your bedroom without a record label using your own recording set up, everything changed. Any band with a drummer needs a place to set the drums up and make a noise which is probably not your bedroom. I wouldn’t like to hear Led Zep recorded at Mum and Dad’s. Equally there’s a lot of bedroom musicians that can make music that is easily made at home, look at Finneas and Billie Eilish (recorded at Mum and Dad’s) and look at their success. (Great album by the way).

As far as the cost of making records and touring – If we can’t sell records and we can’t play live as musicians, we really are in trouble. We struggle to sell physical records, we make nothing from Spotify and now we can’t tour because of the virus. The backlog of tours is now probably taking us into late next year before we can get out there. The merch is so important to us, t-shirts mainly, but get this, t-shirt profits are way higher than the physical album sales, because of the manufacturing costs. Luckily the internet hasn’t found a way to dress us in digital clothes – so far. Musicians have discovered that a lot of people are willing to spend $20 plus on a t-shirt but not $5 to $10 on a CD. When you think of the cost of making the CD, the recording of the album, the artwork, the months of preparation versus the copying of the artwork from the CD cover onto cloth, well it’s simply because you can hear it for next to nothing online. The vinyl buyers are few and the costs so high to manufacture that profits are small. Yet we all know that downloads are not so exciting as you can’t feel them, they have no texture, they have no smell and it’s hard to value them, hold them next to your heart, admire the details in the artwork. But the bottom line, the main thing for most people is that you can hear them if you stream it, that’s all that matters. The quality of their listening experience doesn’t even matter to a lot of people, the quality of the wallet does matter though and you can’t argue with the lucky public accessibility to millions of albums for so small a financial commitment. Music is so available and there’s so much choice that it’s pretty hard to get a mass of people to buy something physical. Then there’s the space in your home issue, I need space for records, I can’t see the advantage of NOT needing to have space for books and records. What is more lovely than your own personal library? A clean white wall? A dust free zone? I love that dust. The aesthetics of the digital domain are difficult to grasp for my generation. I suppose horse riders felt the same about the introduction of the motor car. You can imagine the rider saying “But what about the relationship with the beast that is your transportation? You can’t talk to a machine.” – But you know all this.

So the alternatives for the musician that is not as successful as Bono or as young as Billie Eilish are few and far between. Writing for magazines was always something of a closed shop and badly paid. For me, the blog and the Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions weren’t ever really thought of as another income stream, it was more a service that I had to charge for, that’s why it’s not mind-numbingly expensive. When I left the ex band I went and worked in record shops in Stockholm for a couple of years. A nice break, I enjoyed it immensely, but it ultimately led me back to musicianland as that’s where I met Nicklas from Anekdoten – and you know what happened next. Suddenly I was in Japan playing a sold out show with a Swedish Progressive Rock band. All this led into all the other projects, MOAT was also based in Stockholm. Anekdoten led me to a festival in Germany that led me to meeting and marrying Olivia and to us forming our duo. A duo with a German violinist I was married to, who knew? This led to spending more time in Germany which led to working with Jerome Froese from Tangerine Dream and Loom with a project on the way. Of course the Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions led to Jed and the Space Summit album that we are currently working on. So along with the Noctorum project with Dare, a constant work in progress, I find myself very busy.

I don’t have engineering skills, I don’t drive and computers to me are posh typewriters with pictures. I need help to make records, I need help to tour. I finally have an American agent, all was planned for the autumn, of course it’s all cancelled. Before having an agent, I’d do some super low key things in America because I was there. My friend Melani would find some shows and I’d play together with her husband Ed and some mutual friends. So now I have a proper agent who was booking a proper tour that would take us all over the country with Salim playing with me here and there. But upscaling your situation means upscaling your costs. To get an American work visa for Olivia and I to tour, it costs over $3,500, that’s up front before you earn a cent. Then there’s the air tickets and the accom. Luckily I have good friends. But start up costs for a small operation are crippling. Plus now we also have to see the damage caused by the virus on studios, record shops, record labels, these places were already struggling. Now it’s the venues that are under threat, too.

The great thing about a daily blog is that one day it’s this kind of thing and another day it’s about the stripy fish that swim in shoals in the pacific ocean or Japanese Psychedelic Rock. Or possibly even this next tangent. Classical music, who buys it? I remember going into HMV or was it the ex Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street in London and there was a whole massive department dedicated to just classical music. It was always empty when I was in there, a nod to its relevance but impractical in terms of sales. The internet must have destroyed the income for classical music almost completely. I could always find second hand copies of beautifully recorded and mastered Deutsche Grammophon records with amazing orchestras conducted by Leonard Bernstein or Herbert von Karajan. There would be Mozart, Beethoven, all the famous composers of history and mostly in perfect condition and often for just 50p each. So how could shops afford to have a stock of new Classical records? Perhaps there was once a market for them between the sixties and the early eighties, but surely not anymore. And by the way, you might need a real studio to record a classical orchestra, it’s a little cramped in the bedroom and quite dangerous with all those stray bow thrusts.

Which takes me to today’s music. New York Rock And Roll ensemble are surely forgotten, even though you know at least two members of the band. Michael Kamen worked with everyone from Guns N’ Roses to Kate Bush as an arranger. He sadly died in 1993 at the age of 55 from a heart attack after being diagnosed six years earlier with Multiple Sclerosis.

Martin Fulterman you also know but as Mark Snow. You’ve seen him on many TV theme credits including The X-Files. The band were all attendees at New York’s famous Juilliard Music School and had the idea to combine their Classical skills with an interest in Rock music. They released their first self-titled album in 1968, their second, Faithful Friends, in 1969 and more records into the seventies. The first was produced by John Linde and the legendary Shadow Morton. (The Shangri-Las, Vanilla Fudge, Janis Ian, New York Dolls producer.) Is it your thing? Who knows, it’s of its time and I find throughout albums like these that there’s oddly insignificant and equally great stand out tracks.

On the subject of the influence of ‘serious music’ in the Rock world, Gryphon were certainly made up of talented thinking musicians exploring new realms. Progressive, Classical, Rock, Folk, Contemporary, they are famous for being played on all four BBC radio stations in the same week despite them all catering to different audiences. Today Olivia picked a couple of records randomly from the selection. Their last album Treason (1977) and their 1974 album Red Queen To Gryphon Three.

Song Of The Day is How Come They Don’t Touch The Ground, recorded in my front room in my flat in Bondi Beach sometime in the middle of the eighties. This was the album where I used the Sydney Morning Herald as a snare drum and a Gizmotron invented by ex 10cc men Kevin Godley and Lol Creme for cello sounds. This was a true bedroom album recorded on a Teac 4-track tape machine. Ah, those were the days.

 

How Come They Don’t Touch The Ground

Even yesterday has gone away
Has tomorrow ever come
Will next week last forever
How come it’s funny but it’s not fun

Have the fingers slipped, has time been cut
Has the face misled the eye
Break the glass let me out of here
Why doesn’t six come after five

Turning, turning round and round
My feet are burning
How come they don’t touch the ground

I play a game on the paving stones
The cracks seem so small to me
I suddenly shrink and meet some insect friends
And need binoculars to see across what now is wide to me

They close the doors on another train
The windows dirty as the floor
You can play games with your reflections
But I don’t do that anymore

Turning, turning round and round
My feet are burning
How come they don’t touch the ground
How come they don’t touch the ground

I got up to leave
But something I couldn’t see stopped me, stopped me

Turning, turning round and round
My feet are burning
How come they don’t touch the ground

(Willson-Piper)
In Reflection (1987)