Updates from May, 2010

  • Building a Website In A Day - The Centre For Creative Collaboration

    Steve 8:38 am on May 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , geek

    If you’ve been to Tuttle over the last few months, you’ll at least know where the Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC) is – it’s physically a building near Kings Cross. A former sculpture studio that acts as a fabulous multi-purpose space for the kind of open ended fun and games that drive the thinking behind the Centre.

    The idea is that it’s a ’safe’ space for collaboration, firstly between the different colleges within the University Of London – UL covers a huge range of subjects, most of those are siloed even within the colleges, let alone across the various colleges that geographically cover a BIG area of London. Like so many other big academic institutions, collaboration is often an after-thought, in a world where the race for funding, accreditation and dominance in a specialist field drive evermore-focussed specialisation, with little room at the margins for the serendipitous goodness that happens when, say, a musician and an architect meet up to swap ideas. Or a physics undergrad gets to talk to an environmental scientist about the application of their work in eachother’s fields.

    It does happen, but it’s pretty rare and the terms are often loaded.

    So what happens when you create a neutral space for such things, one that’s well resourced and has a dedicated team making things happen there? Well, that’s what the project will find out.

    And today, in the collaborative spirit that drives the entire project, we’re going to assemble a website in a day. And by ‘assemble’, I don’t just mean ‘install and design’, I mean concept, content, everything.

    ‘We’ in this instance is a collaboration between C4CC and Amplified – so the web monkeys that are doing the back end and design stuff are Ben Walker and Xander Cansell, the co-ordinator is Brian Condon (who straddles both worlds, running C4CC and being a core Amplified person too), Laura Kidd, Debbie Davies (co-opted in from the amazing pool of creative collaborators that gather at the C4CC for Tuttle on a Friday morning) and me, with the incredible Lucy Windmill making it all actually happen, as is always the case with Amp stuff.

    So, follow the #C4CC hashtag today on twitter, or each of the participants, and before too long, we’ll post the URL and you can hopefully see it all happening before your eyes. The content will start diffuse, existing in each of our own web environments, but Twitter is the place to look for the links…

     

  • The X Factor - the death of real music?

    Lisa Harding 11:48 pm on December 12, 2009 | 7 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: our price records, real music, x factor

    My first post on here (yes i finally got round to it!)!

    I spend most of my time blogging profusely in my main cyber home (http://spiderplant88.wordpress.com) but thought that this post might be relevant here and I was motivated enough to throw the missive out there for comment!

    I finally relented this evening and put the X Factor final on. Boy do I wish I had not bothered. What a travesty. None of the final three acts were in any way outstanding and worthy of the attention that is being thrown at them from all quarters of the media, music and otherwise. Now call me a musical snob, but there is a lot to be said for musicians working their way up the music tree and earning their stripes in the pubs and clubs of the land until they make it to a larger audience. There are hundreds of hard working musicians around the country plying their trade and trying to use every avenue open to them to get their music heard by the masses.

    The Internet and the growth of social media has made their challenge a little easier in some respects and meant that they no longer have to rely on the major labels to get them into peoples ear space. For far too long the major labels have dictated who and what we should listen to. Years ago, when I left college, I couldn’t get the job I wanted in the design industry (took me ten years to get there) and instead i took a job with my second passion and worked for Our Price Records in Waterloo Station. In those days though the labels had a lot of control, we were still able in our stores, to lay out personal spaces for music suited to the demographic of the area where our store was. I worked in a number of stores as i worked my way up the ranks from part time sales assistant to store manager including Streatham, Wood Green, Covent Garden, Waterloo and Victoria Stations, Heathrow Airport and East Ham. Each area had a different musical ear from Reggae in South London to mainstream pop in the stations. It made it interesting for us trying to gauge what people listened to and making the sales walls relevant to each area. Each of the buyers knew their area and market and ordered stock based on what the public wanted to hear and requested in the store. It was a great time.

    Then in the mid 90’s Our Price head office changed their strategy and took the control away. Ever harnessed by the major labels and their buying power, the store took the decision to standardise the range in all the stores meaning that local requests didnt count any more. It was the death knell for the chain and so proved to be. Within 6 years, Our Price was sold to Virgin Megastores and a little gem was gone forever. My passion for live music remained and by this time i had found a job working for a design agency and was doing the job that i had trained to do and was passionate about. I was struck by a certain irony that whilst i had finally been given the chance to do what i had always wanted to do, there were hundreds of music artists out there that didnt have that chance and although we only helped in a little way promoting local artists, yet another avenue for promoting them was gone. As i watch the X Factor churn out yet more manufactured pap that has no individuality and no creativity to speak off, I am reminded of how great the music industry used to be. The live music scene in London was something else. On a Friday night i was never happier than taking myself off to a small venue to see an unsigned act or a larger venue to see a favourite act.

    Nowadays its all about how much money you can get from the act and the music is lost. As they are forever saying on the X Factor, its not just about the singing any more its about the whole package. To me that is garbage. I don’t care what an artist wears, i don’t care who they are seeing in their private life or what footballer or model they are shagging. To be its about whether they can sing or play their instrument well and entertain me. Today that is all gone. All the bands that grace our stages sound the same, the market is flooded with boy bands and girl bands whose only job is to titlate and half of them actually cant sing a note in tune in the first place. Tonights X Factor final was exactly as i thought it would be. Olly Murs the cheeky chappy from Cochester who relies on his charm when his voice fails him, Stacey Soloman the barbie doll from Dagenham who can hold a note sometimes but is a balladesque one trick pony and the stage school drop out Joe McElderry who pulls at your heart strings with his puppy dog eyes.

    Its a travesty and not what music is about. I miss the says when playing or singing in a band and writing your own music made all the difference. That died a death years ago and this the drivel that we are left with.

     

  • Post-Tour Musings

    Sam Hallam 8:48 pm on October 18, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Bass, learning, playing, rock and/or roll, touring

    Well, for those familiar with my previous post you’ll know that I just finished the second of three tours across Europe with the blues-rock band I play bass for. Many exciting things went down from playing a 5 hour gig to a packed out audience to playing to an audience so indifferent I’m fairly certain they weren’t even aware we existed, all with the odd rock and roll story I’m sure I’ll be still telling mates about in the pub months from now.

    But what was by far the most interesting to me was how all this constant gigging affected my playing. I tend to manage a semi-regular gigging/rehearsal schedule with other musicians but in the weeks leading up to the tour most of my efforts were focused on nailing the tunes for the tour, not really having time for much else so to actually realise these tunes in a gigging situation was something fun.

    First was the fact that I didn’t know the tunes anywhere near as well as I thought I did, as soon as I got a chance after the first few gigs I buckled down with my ipod and ran through everything again, really trying to get inside them. That helped a bit, but it still took quite some time before I managed to be comfortable with most of the songs, still not quite there but I don’t think we’re far off.

    Outside of the tunes themselves, my playing in general has become exponentially better in the last 7 weeks, I feel much more confident about attempting things that I maybe wasn’t so before, and everything in general seems much more solid and confident than it was before I left. It’s also given me a lot of flaws I’ve noticed that I can now buckle down and hone over the three weeks I have before the next set of dates, mostly rhythm exercises that I seem to have neglected far too much in the past.

    But anything that can push me to do more is got to be a good thing. I’ve never seen the point in not being bothered to learn something more, what’s the worst can happen? Of course, it’s a bit of a blow to the ego to realise you’re not as good as you maybe thought you were but if you can overcome that and do more, then that’s just spiffy. :)

    As for the road life, well that’s a different kettle of fish all together. The drummer for the last tour decided he couldn’t handle most of the day in a van, only to be faced with the prospect of hauling some gear around for the next hour, and so decided to leave the group. But all this comes with the territory, and if that’s what it’s done to my playing then I think that’s definately a fair trade off.

     

  • Sampling vs plagarism

    Dancing Monk 8:48 am on October 7, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: greed, plagarism

    Reading the current flurry of comments on the blog has got me thinking about how music is shared but then I saw in the news yet another band that has been sued for sampling another’s work. Although this is a form of copying rather than redistribution I wonder whether this tight control by the original artist is a sign of a musically secure/mature artist or an insecure/greedy record company. In the past composers often lifted tunes or reworked whole works and it was often a mark of respect to the originator’s skill, now it seems to be taken as theft & an opportunity for money to be made.

    To further add to the confusion artists now seem to sue if they hear something even vaguely similar to a tune they wrote. Naturally this trend only appears to be when a lesser known artist hears their motif in the song of a famous band.

    This leads to wonder whether
    a) composers are too precious about their music
    b) If the whole motiv of writing has been taken over by the desire for fame & fortune
    c) Modern composers can no longer take a compliment.
    d) How many different ways can 12 notes be written to ensure originality each time
    e) what’s the chance of two musicians writing similar style of music coming up with a similar tune

     

  • A weekend among friends

    John Sargent 8:27 am on September 5, 2009 | 12 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Greenbelt 2009,

    (Or how a sceptic faired at Greenbelt ‘09)

    Suddenly two weeks before the event we were going to Greenbelt, a festival that I knew little about, apart from the name. The “we” being my wife Judith and two of my children, Jessie (13) and Rosa (11) and me.

    We were camping with members of 3 other families from our village and from the moment we arrived I felt that I was going to have an astonishingly good time. I just hadn’t grasped how good it could be. The mix of thoughtful people, campaigners, music, talks and more on offer looked good before the event. It turned out to be simply inspiring.

    A little context may be useful here. I am not a believer in any deity while Greenbelt is firmly in a different place. This has been a recurring theme in my life though. As an active campaigner on a variety of causes over many years I have often found myself in meetings, events and demonstrations alongside the more politically radical elements of different faiths. I have many friends who are believers and have often noted that, apart from a belief in one God or another, my views and theirs were remarkably similar.

    One piece of advice I read about Greenbelt was that if you miss what you wanted to go to don’t worry as you will probably see something better anyway. On the Sunday evening I was heading from seeing Duke Special on the main stage towards an event when I decided to drop into “Last Orders” a kind of late night review show. As I arrived Miriam Jones, who is always a pleasure to listen to, was starting a short set. The next couple of hours included comedy, an inspirational talk on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Duke Special again for a couple of numbers on piano and a first glimpse of singer Karen Grace.

    Musical highlights of the weekend included Foy Vance doing some astonishing things with a guitar, his voice and a looping machine, the aforementioned Miriam Jones and Duke Special gigs and Calamateur who played a memorable set in the Performance Cafe. Other good things were, in no particular order: the g-source tent which was full of campaigning, charity and organisation stalls, using twitter and social media tools organise meetings and to disseminate content, talking to large numbers of thoughtful people about issues that matter, being able to let two girls aged 11 and 13 and several of their friends have the run of the festival without having to worry for a minute about them. Add to that feeling able to leave 2 video cameras, an iPhone, a DSLR camera and lenses in a tent without fear of theft and you have something that is genuinely unusual and wonderful.

    Perhaps the most unexpected aspect for me was how I absorbed rather than ignored the religious elements of the event. I even went to the Taize morning service. Lying back on the floor listening to the chanting and quietly reflecting on things was delightfully relaxing and inspiring at the same time. Talks with my Baptist Minister friend Chris and others reaffirmed my affinity with radical thoughtful Christians and opened new avenues of understanding of beliefs. I am still a non-believer in any deity but my belief in the ability of people to organise society in morally sustainable ways has been strengthened hugely.

    I was left wondering how on earth I had managed to miss this festival for so many years. It wasn’t deliberate avoidance, although I am sure that in my more immature moments I would have dismissed it as God-bothering nonsense. How wrong I would have been and how wrong anyone else would be to do the same. It sounds twee and trite but we really do need the values that Greenbelt represents spread far and wide. The world faces huge challenges. The theme of the festival was “Standing in the Long Now” which is in stark contrast to the instant Big Brother / X Factor view of the world that sometimes seems omnipresent. We need to take the values of Greenbelt out from the festival to challenge people to face up to the realities of life.

    My advice? Whatever your faith get yourself to Greenbelt next year. Enjoy the music and other arts. Listen to some speakers, chat to some people and feel the astonishing power of the event. Then marvel at a festival with clean toilets.

    Here are a few of my images from Greenbelt.

    Here are lots more using the greenbelt09 tag at Flickr

     

  • Gene Robinson at Greenbelt - live blog

    Steve 1:26 pm on August 29, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply

    I’m going to be live blogging Gene Robinson’s interview at Greenbelt, which starts in a few minutes. (Live blogging a sermon is an odd experience, given the kind of language that’s used, but Gene’s a pretty unique dude, and a pivotal figure in so much of the dialogue around gay rights as well as more specifically he dialogue between the church and the gay community)

    [1.29] Gene is Bishop of New Hampshire, and I’ve really enjoyed all the writing of his that I’ve read. I’m really pleased he’s here at the festival.

    Intro by Martin Wroe: there’ll be loads of time for questions at the end. “Rumour has it that bits of the church are upset that a Bishop can be called Gene – some people don’t think Bishops should have girl’s names” (laughter, followed by massive applause for Gene.)

    [1:32] Gene starts by praying – standard form for a Bishop ;)

    “I’d rather you thought of this as a conversation, what I’m going to say is my own experience. Your’s will be different, and your own. All we have is our own story. We get in trouble when we tell people what their story should be.”

    Gene’s Story – how to stay calm in the eye of the storm. The storm in question is when Gene was put forward for ordination, and a load of lies were written about him being involved in porn etc.

    [1:39] Anyone attempting to live the Christian life, will get in trouble. The boxes we try to put God in are always too small. If you preach that, you’ll be in trouble.

    The beatitudes are radical – all the blessed conditions in the Beatitudes – mourning, hunger, persecution – are things we really don’t want. Why are they blessed? because it’s when we’re stressed and troubled, we know our need of God. We lose our false sense of total control.

    [1:43] For Jesus, that mistaken behaviour involved Justice. Good news for the poor, sight to the blind, Jubilee. In the same sermon, he says that God’s love is bigger than just for the people of Israel, he got in trouble – God was too loving, too compassionate, to merciful.

    [1:46] Gene starts to describe growing up gay in conservative Kentucky. Homosexual was a word that was only whispered. No Will & Grace, no Ellen, no positive role models, definitely no-one who was Christian and gay. You were totally on your own. There was no way of talking to your parents about it – 2/3rds of the homeless kids in LA are there because they’ve been thrown out for being gay or lesbian.

    Gene went through therapy (the ‘ex-gay’ movement), and even got married… stayed married for 13 years, then went back to church to end it, with a eucharist service, asked each other for forgiveness. They returned their wedding rings. A wonderful and healing experience.

    If God intends anything for us it’s to live with integrity – for our inside to agree with our outside. If there’s a disconnect, we do God a disservice.

    [1:52] It took Gene ages to discover that God’s love could include him, a gay man. God called him to be whole, to come out, to be whole. He ‘knew’ that in 1986 his ordained life in the church was over… until the late 90s, he felt called to put his name forward to become a bishop. He knew it would be difficult… just not this difficult (laughter). Had no idea it would last this long.

    He was phoned up by arch-bishops telling him not to do this, but instead waited for God to tell him. He just walked forward, trusting God to lead.

    “God calls us on a journey and we don’t have the luxury of seeing the other side (x-ref Moses and the parting of the red sea) – we need to trust”.


    The call to become bishop was followed by death threats, which continue to today. When you see the note that has a picture of you and your partner, and they’re covered in letters cut out that spells out ‘I have a bullet for each of your heads when you least expect it” – at his consecration, he and his partner had to wear bullet-proof vests. It scared the crap out of his daughters. He had to tell them that not living your life was a worse thing than death. He didn’t want to die, but if it happened, he would be fine.

    “when people ask if I regret what’s happening, I have to say no, not at all. Because when God feels that palpably close, how could you regret that? Learning to count on God was a good thing not bad.

    When evil comes your way it’s so tempting to return evil for evil, that the only way to deal with that is to be silent. Rather than resort to that. The Psalms have a lot of this…

    [1:10] “my spiritual director told me I talk to much in my prayers. Also made me aware of the possibility of impersonating God’s voice, to get the answers I want. I was encouraged to do nothing, but just imagine being a child of God, being loved, and feeling that love as warmth. Just allow yourself to be loved, let God do what God does best”.

    God want to love. all of us. And wants us to love the rest of us. We live our lives with a line drawn around us, separating us from them. What God wants for us is to draw the line ever-further away, until there is no ‘them’ only us. The christian life calls us to treat our enemies like that. to never allow ourselves to treat them as a child of God, no matter how much I disagree with them.

    “Our job is to be continually be reaching out to those who’ve been marginalised, disrespected, abused, disregarded, vilified. God is not there to make it easy, but will be with you. There’s no greater reward than that” (massive applause).

    -oOo-

    [Steve's note] – Gene talks the language of a bishop, but he brings a message that has its roots as much in the experience and history of Ghandi, MLK, Wilberforce etc… The call within the God-stuff for respect to be extended to those we hate, for dialogue to continue, for acceptance, respect, grace, is SO vital, so important, for all of us, believers, or not, sceptics, doubters, atheists… He’s a pretty radical voice, but one with a soft tone, and an amazing gentle soul. It’s been a privilege to listen to him.


     

  • Getting That Gig

    Sam Hallam 3:31 pm on August 17, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply

    I don’t know about you but i’ve read countless articles on how to act/behave/play once you’ve got yourself a gig. That’s all very good and there’s some great advice amongst it but really, that’s the easy bit. Learning not to act like a tool shouldn’t be too difficult, the hard part is finding the gig in the first place!

    I’m far from an expert on the subject, but I’ve recently landed myself a few european tours as a sideman with a blues-rock cover band; i’m getting my expenses covered and paid on top of that, not alot, but I won’t be out of pocket and i’ll be doing alot of playing.

    This particular gig I managed to get from a posting on a music classified website (I think it was musofinder.com) by complete chance, just googling to see what turns up. And most of the time, not alot does but as this demonstrates something good does appear once in a while ( As an aside most gig’s I get offered come from people I already know and work with anyway, so this is a bit different from all that).

    What worked for me was having the confidence that I could do the gig, regardless of anything else. The ad stated they were after someone over 25 and in the Yorkshire area. I’m neither, but felt like I could do the gig  and was willing to do what it takes.

    It helps to have a sample of your playing on hand, even if it’s pretty rough. I sent them a youtube video of my group playing Autumn Leaves, nothing over the top, but just to show I could function in a group setting. I don’t think 8 minutes of Billy Sheehan-esque shredding would’ve gotten me too far;  but I digress.

    After sending them all this information along with a little history of my bassing thus far I got a reply. The VERY first thing that was commented on was my appearance, apparently I look like Berry Oakley. This, as it turns out, was one of the reason they gave me an audition!

    All of the info thus far is stuff that gets reiterated thousands of times by pretty much every successful musician. And they were right, who knew?

    That’s getting the audition. Now for actually doing it.

    I try to be as flexible as I can with dates, I think there was only one date that I was definitely not able to do. Everything else could be shifted around with varying degrees of difficulty, as for the tunes themselves I had 16 songs to learn in 12 days, quite alot maybe, but not impossible.

    I made the decision to really learn, memorise and internalise all of the tunes. It seems a much greater first impression if you play those tunes down cold as well as you would on a gig and also means you don’t have to be fumbling around with bits of paper with hastily scrawled notes written on them.

    Fast forward a few days and i’m heading up to Hull for the audition. I live in Northants, so this is a £50+ train journey, I don’t really want to have that wasted, another incentive for getting everything down!

    The audition itself was a 3 hour affair, longer than i’m used to but with 16 songs it makes sense. By this point all the groundwork should be done, it’ll be obvious whether you’ve done the work or not and there’s nothing that can be done by this point.

    The songs were run through, I was given the full list of tunes (a good sign) and told they would be in touch. The next day I got an email saying the gig was mine if I wanted it! Very nice.

    Most people know what they need to do to nail an audition, it’s obvious, you play the songs well with good feel and tone, make sure you act nice and that really does seem to be it, the appearance thing is helpful but I don’t consider it an essential, just an extra bonus.

    As for finding the gig it’s a healthy mix up of searching everywhere you can think of and having a good group of friends who will hook you up because they know you can do the gig.

    Those four criteria have worked for me, so that’s what i’m sticking with!

     

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