I Hate Mornings

In a bizarre twist of fate I’ve ended up playing Hammond organ for Little Fish. This is a good thing. Little Fish rocks, I love playing the Hammond and I get to play the Royal Albert Hall.

The backstory is rather convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it short. It begins at the Zodiac in 2001…

I went to see the Roadworks Songwriters Tour at the Zodiac. There was a guy called Jont who was great and wore no shoes. I went to his monthly gig at the 12-Bar Club a few times and drank a lot of tequila.

Over the next five years I went to loads of his gigs. Some of them were UNLIT (a mixture of a house party and a gig), and eventually I put on an UNLIT of my own at the Gardeners Arms in January 2008. Jont played, I did a set at the piano and Stornoway played acoustic. Jont noticed that I could actually play, and I started to play piano at some of his gigs. We played a load of house concerts, small gigs and festivals around England (and a couple in Paris) through 2008/9.

Last year Jont put together a band he likes to call The Infinite Possibility (a 7-piece with bass, electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, backing vocals, percussion and my brother on drums) and we recorded an album, produced by Nigel of Bermondsey. A couple of weeks ago we were down at Rotator rehearsing for a final recording session (Jont wrote a new song that’s going on the album). JuJu from Little Fish turned up to sing some vocals on the new track. It turns out she had been looking for a Hammond player for almost a year, and I’m a Hammond player.

And now we’re supporting Them Crooked Vultures

It’s slightly insane. In a couple of weeks I’ll be sitting behind a beautiful Hammond XK-3 and staring wide-eyed past JuJu with her 50s Gibson and Nez with his immaculately tuned drum kit, into a 3-storey sea of Them Crooked Vultures fans. Not bad for a Monday night.

Unfortunately it’s all sold out (in – like – 0.3 seconds), but we’re playing another half dozen gigs around the country in the next couple of weeks (Bristol tomorrow, then Portsmouth, Oxford, London, Nottingham, Manchester). You should come and see us!

Being good at music is not interesting. It’s boring. As a musician (or any kind of artist) you need to earn people’s attention. It’s not good enough to write good songs, practise for ages and record a good album. It’s not good enough to gig five nights a week. It’s not even good enough to get signed any more. All of these things are useful, but none guarantees you people’s attention.

When you play live, you enter into a negotiation with the audience. You start by putting in the effort to promote the gig and get them to turn up. In return for that, they arrive. And they promise you their attention for about 3 minutes.

So what do you do when the spotlight is shining in your face, when you have one chance to transform a moment of fleeting attention into a long and beautiful relationship between your art and its audience?

You have to entertain people

That’s your half of the deal. You entertain people in return for their attention. Like it or not, you’re an entertainer. All musicians like it on some level: there’s no way people would put that much effort into playing music if they didn’t want some other people to hear it. But a lot of musicians persuade themselves that they don’t like it at all. They want to hang on stage like a masterpiece on a museum wall and be appreciated.

For reference, the following are not in themselves entertaining:

• Virtuosic playing
• Baring your soul
• Beautifully poetic lyrics
• Playing in time
• Singing in tune
• Dressing cleverly
• Being loud
• Tuning up
• Having a funny band name

If you’re not convinced, remember this: people aren’t choosing which gig to go to. They are choosing how to be entertained. Your competition isn’t other bands. It’s widescreen TV, pubs, clubs, dinner with friends or a good book. I’ve seen gigs by very good bands that were less entertaining than reading a chapter of Titus Groan with a cup of tea. And those bands have now lost my attention. I know they’re good, I know I enjoy their music. But I’m not engaged any more. I don’t have time for bands that aren’t going to entertain me.

Let me be clear about what I mean by “entertain”. I’m not talking about cheese, I’m not talking about audience interaction or variety shows. And I don’t mean “funny”. You can be entertaining and moody. You can be entertaining and quiet. You can be entertaining and serious. You can be entertaining without talking. You can be entertaining without moving. But like my old friend Nick used to say, “Funny is always better than good.”

To entertain an audience is to hold their attention and give them enjoyment. The word “entertain” can also mean to receive someone as a guest, and that’s a good way of thinking about it. By making music and putting it out there, you have invited a bunch of people into your musical home. It’s now your responsibility to make it a good party. If people sit in silence listening to you tell six or seven stories then leave, it probably wasn’t a good party.

Ben’s Big Gig was all about entertainment

We made sure Ben’s Big Gig was entertaining. Whenever there was a decision to be made there was one final criterion: “Will it be entertaining?” I dropped some of my favourite songs from the set list. I put the band together. I had the Funky Llamas play an interval set instead of being a support band. I gave the audience the Twitter screen so they could heckle. I booked George Chopping to compère. I booked Tom Greeves to do a whole stand-up set in the middle of the gig. I put two shrubs on stage. I got Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to endorse the gig. All in the name of entertainment.

I knew the music would be good. But I also knew that if I just walked on stage and played sixteen songs back to back people would be bored out of their skulls.

Music has a universal appeal. Most people will enjoy most music given the right context. If you entertain the audience, they will like you and your music. They will abandon all preconceptions about your musical style and your character. They will have a favourite song. They will tell their friends about how great a time they had and how great the music was.

Steve Lawson knows this. He plays solo bass guitar. Nobody in their right mind hears the phrase “solo bass guitar” and rushes to buy tickets. It’s a hard act to sell, if that’s the way you try to sell it. Luckily, Steve doesn’t do that. He has interesting conversations with people. He talks about how great house concerts are. He tells people about the exciting stuff he does with social media. He earns their attention. Then when he mentions months later that he’s putting on a house concert tour, or playing a gig somewhere, people turn up. And they enjoy the music. A lot. Steve’s a brilliant musician, but in a way that’s a bonus. The audience turn up for him and for the event.

Sell it on the story

The bonus of having an entertaining show is that you can sell it on its entertainment factor, not on the quality of the music. When the audience arrives and hears how great the music is they will want to buy CDs, sign up to mailing lists and tell their friends about you. But that’s not what gets them in the door.

You can’t get people excited about a show by telling them how in tune the singer is, how perfectly the band replicates the sound of the album or how efficiently the band can set up and soundcheck. People get excited by the prospect of entertainment. That’s why circus posters say things like “Death-defying leaps!”, “A woman with the head of a chicken!” or “Monkeys!” instead of “A really well-rehearsed band accompanying an seemingly dangerous acrobatic performance for two hours with a short interval”.

That would be boring.

And speaking of funny…

I just finished editing the video of Dressing Up from the Big Gig. Nothing makes me happier than the sound of 200 people singing “on a t-shirt, yeah, yeah”. ;)

Why are you spending time trying to get reviews from local hacks? In this article I look at how you can use social media and real life people skills to create your own reviews from casual audience responses.

“Did you see his name in the local paper?”¹

You write great songs. You practise over and over. You play your heart out on stage. And all for what? So you can open the local music magazine three weeks later and see your picture alongside a glowing hyphen-heavy description of how your gig was quite good. A good review validates all your hard work. Doesn’t it?

Yes and no. Mostly no. For a modern-day musician who is interacting with people around the world using all kinds of new and exciting internet technologies, a review in the local rag is almost worthless. Which is lucky, because if you’re a modern-day musician doing lots of exciting stuff on the internet your local music press won’t have a clue who you are or what you do.

val(localReview) = ?

Gig reviews in the local press just aren’t relevant any more. Think about why they were useful in the first place:

• they describe the live experience in (hopefully) an interesting and colourful way so you can decide if it’s the kind of thing you would like;
• they compare the band to other local bands, establishing a spectrum of local music with a particular pecking order so you can decide which bands you like;
• they act as a filter and a recommendation system, reducing the thousands of bands and gigs in your area down to a manageable few so you don’t get overwhelmed when you’re deciding who to like.

Maybe it’s just me, but none of that seems relevant or necessary given that even the most technophobic bands have at least a Myspace page these days. We don’t need a description of the gig because we can look up live videos on YouTube. We don’t need to know the pecking order of local bands because our appreciation of music isn’t limited to our local area, and we can compare bands from around the world in a few clicks. And as for filtering and recommendation systems: I trust recommendations from people I actually know, and I get them from people sharing their favourite tracks and bands on Last.fm, Spotify, Blip.fm, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

So stop worrying about getting the local review. Start thinking about whether your friends and fans will share their experience, and whether you’re giving them the opportunity and tools to do so. I know most audiences won’t be as geeky as mine. They won’t all bring their own cameras and upload photos and videos as soon as they get home. So do it yourself. Get a friend to video a few songs at each gig, and post them on YouTube. Then tell the audience at the gig that they can see themselves on YouTube and share it with their friends. Easy.

How do people know who to trust without reviews?

Why do reviews have to be written? Why do they need to be published in magazines? Why do they need to take effort and time to write? Why do they need to be so formal?

Vox pops (one-sentence interviews of people in the street, from ‘vox populis’ – the voice of the people) have been a mainstay of television news for decades. People implicitly trust the random statements of the “man in the street”. Unlike the smoothly rehearsed newsreaders and the clever, slimy politicians, the man in the street isn’t trying to trick you. He has no agenda. We probably (although we don’t admit it) think he’s too stupid to think of doing anything except blurting out the truth when faced with a shiny video camera.

Use responses instead of reviews

So make your own vox pops. I’ve used 12seconds.tv, but almost any online video service will work. Or just film them on your phone then edit and post them later. Put them on your website, or your Myspace page. How could people not like you when they see good, normal people saying how cool you are, or how much fun they just had watching your gig.

And you can extend the vox pops idea in all kinds of ways. At its core, it’s just a casual review. And casual reviews can come in many forms. If your fans are on Twitter, check what they tweet during your gig, and feature the tweets on your website. If they upload photos, that’s a great testimonial in itself – they enjoyed your gig enough to take photos, edit, upload and tag them. Stick them on your website too. And how about the friends and acquaintances who email you the next day to say what a great time they had? Use it all!

People want to connect with you

If people really enjoy what you do, they will want to let you know. The medium of congratulation will vary with the audience: teenagers like to loiter at the side of the stage while you coil leads then grunt something unintelligible but positive; students tend towards a handshake and “That was so good. Really.”; and the oldies prefer an email or maybe a floral card with their address printed on a little gold sticker on the back. All of these can be captured with a little confidence and ingenuity.

At the very least, prepare a quickfire question to catch them off guard. Something like this:

Teenager: “Uh, thx dude. ‘s rul gud. Yeah.” You: “No problem. How would you describe the band in three adjectives?” Teenager: “Wha? Uh, dunno, like… Uh, maybe ‘indie-prog-folk’, uh, ‘intense’ and, uh, ‘beautiful’?” You: “Perfect. Thanks. That’s actually really insightful. Come and get a photo.” Teenager: “Uh, ok.” You: (putting your arm round them) “Ok. Smile. Ready? 3…2…1… Brilliant. Good to meet you, man. What’s your name?” Teenager: “Gary.” You: “Hi Gary. Hey, listen. Write down your email address and I’ll send you a link to the photo.” Teenager: “Oh. Sure.” You: “Cool. See ya.”

Gary’s gamble has paid off, and he has a story to tell his mates. You have a photo, a response and an email address. Everyone’s happy.

When someone goes to your website to see if you’re the kind of band they will like, they will find all this evidence of other people, real people, who enjoy being your fans. And that’s better than any 5-star review from the local music mag.

Geeks respond publicly

Geeks like all kinds of music. But they tend to like other geeks more than non-geeks. So it doesn’t matter what style of music you write or what scene you’re into. When you start publishing stuff on the internet and using social media to communicate your ideas and news (which you absolutely should if you want to survive), you’re going to get some geek fans. And you’ll quickly find that there’s nothing better than having geek fans.

Geeks respond publicly. They respond quickly. They tell other geeks about what they are doing and thinking in an intelligent and efficient way, and their responses are searchable and shareable. Let me give you a few examples.

Ben Werdmuller: the quickest reviewer in town

It was the day after Ben’s Big Gig, and I was lying in the park trying to make inroads into the Guardian Saturday cryptic crossword with Xander and our ladies. I thought I had at least 24 hours of quiet before the storm of responses, emails, phone calls, blogging and video editing started.

So I was shocked, and indeed stunned, when Xander noticed that Ben Werdmuller had already reviewed the gig. And not just in a casual way. This was a serious, intelligent, eloquent review packed with hyperlinks and references. It even had the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall photo at the top, and the live video stream embedded at the bottom. Go and check it out now. This is gold: Ben Werdmuller’s review of Ben’s Big Gig.

Garrett and Adrian’s videos

Later in the week Garrett mentioned that he had taken a few videos at the gig on his Flip. Although I had heard good things about Flip cameras I assumed the sound quality wouldn’t be up to much, so I was planning to use some little bits of Flip video edited in with the main Bambuser stream from the gig.

I was wrong. The Flip video captured the audio and the atmosphere of the gig amazingly well, and gave me a whole new perspective on the event. Like Xander said, “It looks even better from the front ;)”. I posted the video of Turn It Off And Turn It On Again later that evening, and there are more to come.

As if that wasn’t enough (and this is where Twitter comes into its own), Adrian noticed me posting the video and casually dropped this bombshell:

“Wondering if I should upload some of the 3GB of video I took at #BensBigGig”

Once I get hold of Adrian’s video, and Garrett’s, and mine, and the Bambuser stream, and the 12seconds audience responses, and the Flickr photos, I’ll be able to knock up a brilliant highlight reel of the Big Gig, and even edit together some multi-camera live versions of some of the songs. God bless the geeks.

Phil Campbell is a one man video streaming army

There’s a whole other post about Phil and his video streaming magic in the pipeline, but I couldn’t miss him out of this little geekfest. Because he didn’t just sort out all the live video streaming and the Rezpondr page. He recorded no less than 10 AudioBoos about it on the day and followed up with a review of the tech the next morning, providing a perfect talking point for the post-gig tech conversation.

Conclusion: “Get the net”²

It’s not difficult to draw a conclusion from all of this. But in case you’ve skimmed the rest, here are the take-home points:

• Stop caring about the local music press. Waste of time.
• Turn casual responses into usable reviews.
• Embrace the geeks. But not physically. They aren’t used to that. ;)

Footnotes

1. The Kinks: Did You See His Name? (from The Kink Kronikles, 1972)
2. Wayne’s World, 1992

Ben’s Big Gig was ridiculously successful.

We sold out a 200-seat theatre and had an online audience of about 300. The sound was great, the people had a good time, 500 Twitter messages floated past on the big screen, and I almost remembered all the lyrics.

Wandering through the lobby after the show, I saw a lot of smiles. It was a feelgood gig, and I can’t help but think that part of that was due to the feeling of involvement everyone got from the Twitter messages coming in from the outside. Everyone felt part of a bigger event.

Some very cool people pulled through.

I’m amazed by the goodwill and generosity of all the people who helped out with the promotion and production of the gig. There are way too many to mention by name, but I have to thank Xander Cansell for writing emails, posting videos, enduring rehearsals, editing slideshows and keeping everything running smoothly backstage. And Phil Campbell for putting together the Ben’s Big Gig Rezpondr page, dealing with blocked ports and broken video mixers, interviewing, AudioBooing and taking responsibility for the video streaming. Both legends.

We pushed some boundaries

I saw the Big Gig as an experiment from the start, and because of that I made some tricky decisions about the technology we used. If the gig was a success, I wanted it to be something others could use, recreate and build on. So I went for the DIY approach wherever possible. A couple of weeks before the gig, I was approached by Streaming Tank, the company who broadcast the “DIY” Sandi Thom sessions to see if I wanted to use them. They seem like a nice bunch, but I opted for Phil, Bambuser and some hectic last-minute network testing instead.

Phil has already posted some thoughts about the streaming setup, and I’ll definitely be blogging more about how well it held up and how we would do it next time.

So, what’s next?

The day after the Big Gig was fine. I relaxed, told stories, relived the glory moments, did the crossword in the park and enjoyed the quietness where the internal monologue of todos and tasks used to be. But there’s an empty feeling you get a couple of days after finishing something that big. Xander and I were both feeling it:

quitexander: @ihatemornings dude. Suffering slightly now from come-down after #bensbiggig! Feeling this may last a while :) You free for a chat tonight?

ihatemornings: @quitexander Also working in pub (JT). Also suffering #bensbiggig comedown. Let’s talk later. ;)

So we did. And there was a lot to talk about. What do you do after a Big Gig? A bigger gig? Some smaller gigs? Something else? We haven’t figured that out yet. But what we know is that we learned a lot by putting on such an ambitious event without a label, a manager, a promoter or a sponsor. And part of the Big Gig plan was to share that learning with the community so that musicians (and others) can build on our success. So we’re going to take some time to write some good blog posts, put together a website that links up all the online artifacts of the gig, and answer a lot of questions.

I think blogging comes into its own when there’s actually something real and interesting to talk about, and I hope that Ben’s Big Gig will provide some conversation-fodder for a little while. Leave your messages and questions in the comments, and let’s talk. ;)

[photos by Garrett and Phil]

[serialposts]

I am as guilty as most webheads of assuming that the rest of the world knows as much about new web technologies as I do. I often find myself being astounded by talk of CD players and record companies as if these were relics of a lost era. Eventually I turn to tell this story to my friends and realise I’m alone with a laptop. Again.

I was getting carried away with the enchanting world of Social Media and reading a little too much into the Twitter song’s meteoric rise to Youtube’s bargain bin. I needed to find out what I was supposed to be doing in the real world. So I asked. My wonderful newsletter readers took time out of their busy days to fill out a survey for me, and I present the results to you here, as a reminder that most of the world doesn’t give a fig that you have just signed up to twenty three more websites and figured out how to watch yourself recording demos in the future live on your phone.

You’re smart people, and you can read your own interpretations into the data. I will only point out that the top answers feature words like CD, shop, radio, and friends. So let’s not get carried away with our web-savvy muso selves.

UPDATE: The best way to look at this is to view the full screen slideshow on Flickr. Or just click on a graph below.