The Music Industry Is Great! by Holy Roar

Rather than being completely unoriginal and moaning about illegal downloads, how independent music press is dying (we will miss you Plan B!) and so on, I have decided to write about how fun running a small independent music label/management company can be and the fun things that happen to me! Hopefully it will be insightful and informative and not too self-indulgent or gloat-tastic on my behalf! I just think that a bit of positive mental attitude in today’s music industry/economic climate doesn’t go amiss……and, to be honest, I’m a firm believer in the theory, or ethic, that the more you say or do something the more you believe in it and the more it comes true! So here goes….

The biggest myth that a lot of people seem to hold about Holy Roar and other small independent labels is that we must have an office in London and be sat here with at least 5-7 employees. This, unfortunately, is very far from the truth. Ellen Godwin and I run the label, with occasional help from an intern called Max. I ‘work music’ full-time, splitting my time between the label and the three bands I personally manage (Rolo Tomassi, Youves and Throats - with no involvement from Ellen or Max on the management stuff). Ellen has a full-time job and so contributes to the label as and when she can, with all business decisions being made equally between us. Max was doing one day a week for us until recently, but due to geographic problems for both him and me, he is temporarily out of the picture. There is no office – all of this is run from wherever we happen to live. Hopefully this goes some way to showing that we do not have oodles of money or cash reserves. I literally scrape by, regularly maxing out my overdraft, whilst Ellen has never drawn a penny from the label, and Max the intern gets expenses/lunch paid on his one-day-a-week, when active.

So you’re probably thinking right now ‘why bother?” when you consider the current profile of some of the bands we have worked with, such as Ghost of a Thousand, Rolo Tomassi, Gallows, Devil Sold His Soul, Dananananaykroyd et al. Well, admittedly, it really is a labour of love and you truly have to love the bands you work with, as there are no realistic big financial incentives. We are a label built upon personal relationships in the vast majority of cases. We have made a lot of good friends and artistic (artwork, screenprinting, promoters, the list goes on….) contacts through the three years we have run Holy Roar, and this outweighs any financial gain tenfold. It’s a nice feeling to know that I always have a place to stay with people in various bands on the label, or that I can go for a beer/coffee/shopping with many of them and have a great time as friends and not even have to talk about the label or their band.

There are and have been a multitude of other perks and praises too, which makes it all the more worthwhile and exciting on a tangible level. Very early on we had a whole page label feature in Dazed and Confused magazine which was both flattering and an early indicator of people understanding what we are trying to achieve. In other words, we are not just some ‘heavy label’ – we like to think we can be appreciated by a wide cross section of people who may not naturally approach the heavier end of the music spectrum. We have tried to strip away the macho bullshit by putting care into non-clichéd involving music, visuals, packaging and presentation. Dazed and Confused was not a one-off though – we have done label features for Drowned in Sound, Plan B, Rocksound and a load of webzines. It’s consitently an amazing and humbling thing to do.

This year it feels like this awareness and acceptance of our wide-focus, non-genre specific approach has reach the live arena too, with a good portion of Holy Roar or affiliated acts playing Offset Festival in September (lets not forget their motto is to “take risks and put on credible, forward-thinking music to passionate audience”, which is certainly something we feel a kinship with), being asked to co-curate a stage at South-East In East festival in late August in London (again, being based in South-East London we certainly felt at home with this idea!) and finally the icing on the cake – being asked to curate a stage on the Saturday night at The Great Escape in Brighton. We were worried that with this being a predominantly indie festival and with us being hugely overlooked in any festival preview articles, that we might have had a disaster on our hands putting on Ghost of a Thousand, Throats, Youves and Battletorn. These fears proved to be unfounded with a queue of people waiting to get into our stage (despite a choice of about 30 or so venues) before doors opened, and all the bands playing to a packed, enthusiastic audience. Lets chalk that up as another forward-thinking success. … Continue Reading

In conversation with Dananananaykroyd

Dananananaykroyd

Earlier this month in Brighton, we caught up with two of the finest live acts in the UK, let alone central Scotland, before they performed on the Levi’s OnesToWatch stage at Audio. First up were Dananananaykroyd’s Laura and Duncan.

Muso’s Guide: So were you here last year for The Great Escape?

Duncan: We were asked to come down but we didn’t have the money so had to pull out quite late which was a real shame so we are doubly excited for it this time.

It was my first time last year, so much going on that you usually have three or four options to go elsewhere if you can’t get in to something. … Continue Reading

Maxïmo Park, London Brixton Academy

Maxïmo Park's Paul Smith

April 27, 2009

If you’re expecting a review in the typical sense, take a deep breath and forget about it.

Yesterday I realised that this Brixton Academy show makes for the 10th time I have seen this clearly dearly beloved Teesside five-piece live. Over a five-year period starting with a Futureheads support slot, I have less-than-gradually succumbed to a point where I hoard a collection of B-sides, demos, covers… look, I’m obsessed with Pavement and other such but this is different. It’s now.

From the umlaut to the stage quirks, Maxïmo Park are the sort of band it’s natural to fall in love with. And gone now is the book prop of the early days; it’s been replaced with something far more big-scale, namely professionalism. I can recall figureheads for every single one of the nine shows: Brixton Academy in 2007, A Certain Trigger is played in order, Paul Smith almost (I think ‘almost’) cries after playing ‘Acrobat’ for one of the first times; a cover of The Go-Betweens‘ ‘I Haven’t Seen Her In Ages’ at The Forum last year, in the encore; ‘Once, A Glimpse’ at the Vinyl Factory in London with different lyrics read from a book (nameless, I think).  Let’s not even get into the scissor-kick/falling-less-than-gracefully-into-a-heap-on-the-floor incident at Camden Barfly in January 2005. … Continue Reading

Classic album: Mr Hudson & The Library – A Tale Of Two Cities

A Tale Of Two Cities

Ahead of the forthcoming hype that there will be regarding Mr Ben Hudson’s second album, Straight No Chaser, executively produced by a certain Kanye West, I thought that I would take some time to recall the first Mr Hudson album.

… Continue Reading

Without further ado

This is frustrating. I am mute. I am not usually mute. However, I am occasionally afflicted with a vanishing of my voice. Not your common or garden croakiness, more like a vocal chord extraction – you cannot tell I am trying to say anything unless you look at me. And even then, I’m likely to have to repeat my silent utterings. The average person’s lip reading skills span to telling when a footballer has forgotten the cameras are live as they spew vitriol at whoever has upset them.

When lip reading fails, I am left with the time consuming method of writing everything down. This strangely has sometimes been met with a similarly written reply – I can still hear, much as just because I am inaudible it doesn’t mean you have to whisper to me! My other option is I can become a mime artist. Which, unless you have actually taken the time to learn the proper, recognised sign language and are trying to commune with a similarly learned person, is kind of like inventing your own language and expecting everyone to decipher the crude cryptography created on the spot to convey our wants and needs. This is extremely frustrating, as not everyone thinks the same.  Ergo, leaving you very open to misinterpretation. This is very frustrating.

Stag and Dagger, Glasgow: Take One

Marnie Stern

May 23, 2009

I’m not, by nature, a festival goer – too wary of getting covered in mud from top to toe, shelling out £10 for a half-cooked burger and all the other cliches/urban myths, but the idea of an indoor, city-wide(ish) festival appeals big-scale so off I trot to Glasgow on a Saturday afternoon in line with the second Stag and Dagger progressing from its first Leeds date to its first Scottish one.

The earliest shows are on at The Captain’s Rest, namely featuring multi-instrumentalist local duo Over The Wall. Rather bizarrely, they suffer a string of technical mishaps similar to the only other opening act I’ve seen at the same venue, also a local two-some (see here for more). … Continue Reading

Musoings with Jeremy Warmsley

Jeremy Warmsley

Jeremy Warmsley is a bit of a Muso’s Guide favourite, at least round these parts. How We Became is such an inviting record, so full of sonic variation yet with this very real, wholesome core of honesty. So it was our pleasure to speak with its purveyor on the phone for this very interesting conversation on opinion and such like. It went a little like this:

What are your favourite albums?
The Dreaming by Kate Bush. It’s a great example of someone who’s moulded as a key pop artist, someone who’s really tried to make something completely confrontational and difficult, and in fact very beautiful. A lot of people would’ve written Kate Bush off. Another one would be Richard D. James by Aphex Twin. People got used to the idea that Aphex Twin was difficult, but then he came up with this album which is really melodically good. It’s just so simple and beautiful. Recently I’ve been playing the Fanfarlo record a lot – it’s produced by Peter Katis, one of my favourite producers, it’s got great songs, great arrangements. And I’m going to be joining them on guitar on the tour coming up. Another is John Martyn’s Grace and Danger. … Continue Reading

Of Montreal: the European success story

Of Montreal

A continued conversation (first part here) with Jamey Huggins of the glamtastic American band, Of Montreal: this week read about the band’s almost overnight success in Europe, opening for Franz Ferdinand, and life on the Of Montreal tour bus.

MG: of Montreal just played over in Europe—how was the response different over there?

JH: Uh, well, it’s a weird thing, you know? Like, in England it’s such a hard thing to get an audience. And then suddenly, the last time we were there, or the time before this last time, we were really struggling for some press. And we played a show for like 200 people or something, did a couple of interviews, and then the last time we were there, we sold out this like 1,500 theatre and had to turn away like 300 people who were trying to get in. It was like overnight we were suddenly like legitimate in London after we’d been playing there for years at these really small clubs. And then like, the Franz Ferdinand concert, we opened for them and did that.

MG: How did that show go?

JH:  It was kind of a nightmare, actually. Nothing to do with them, you know, they’re absolutely great. They were really kind and everything, the band, but we had to go on in this really small space. And for of Montreal to do an opening set for anyone, it’s kind of tricky. So we played like six or seven songs, and we had a major technical meltdown where our in-ear monitoring died, so no one could hear what they were singing, we couldn’t hear each other. We fixed it after a couple of songs.  But still, it was great. And then we went to France and had a fantastic show in Paris. For some reason Paris loves the new of Montreal stuff. We sold more copies of Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping in France than all of the rest of Europe combined.

MG: Why do you think that is?

JH: Well, I don’t know, the French like electro. And those records are very much, like, beat-driven. Um, but also I think we have a really great press team there. We just happened to get lucky with some really great, super enthusiastic, super influential people. And I guess, they told us this one story about this really popular TV host who has, like, several million viewers, and does this show, and apparently she made some little statement where she held up Hissing Fauna on her show and said “This is the best record of the year, and if everyone watching the show doesn’t go out and buy this tomorrow I’m gonna stab my hand with this…” She had like a knife, and was holding up the record with this knife, and was stressing how emphatic she was that France needed to listen to this strange American band.

MG: I guess it worked, then.

JH: Well, I’m sure that’s part of it. But it’s weird, cause in France, they play us on like regular radio, you know? More of like the Clear Channel rock station or something. So it’s like weirdly somehow more legitimate or something. They don’t have the sense that we’re like an indie band.

MG: So will there be more crazy costumes tonight? Any family members making cameos again?

JH: Yeah, you know, it’s always a revolving cast, depending on who can do it. I mean, if we had our way, we’d have them all every night. People have been kind of trading off, taking legs of the tour. So like we had Nina [Barnes, Kevin’s wife] in New York, and we even had Alabee [Kevin’s daughter] on stage. … Continue Reading

Of Montreal: on-stage battles and solo projects

Of Montreal

We had the chance to chat and dine with a red skinny-jean-clad Jamey Huggins from Of Montreal before the band played the first of two sold-out shows at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club. Read on to find out about on-stage battles, the bustle of being on tour, and Jamey’s new solo side project as James Husband.

Muso’s Guide: So the tour’s been going well so far?

Jamey Huggins: Um, yea, all the shows have been sold out; audiences have been enthusiastic, if not maybe a bit misbehaved. We’ve had a few ejections.

MG: What happened?

JH: You know just, them jumping on stage and getting drunk and stage diving. A couple of our people got hurt [laughs] because of our own antics on stage, fighting. Not really fighting, but choreographed fights, a couple of bumps on the head, you know. I’ve got some wretched calluses. … Continue Reading

Gig behaviour

Sharing the thrill of live music with a respectful and buzzing crowd can be an infectiously excellent experience. Sadly, on the flip side, a noisy and inconsiderate crowd can not only put a dampener on gig proceedings but taint it to the point of total spoilage. A question I ask myself time and time again is why do people pay £20 to come and see a band and then spend the entire time gassing with a friend. Why not play the band’s latest album at home with a mate, perhaps serving up some watered down lager to make the experience more realistic.

I admit that I can be a bit of a live music menace to other gig goers because of my tree-like stature. At six foot four, I’m likely to be blocking someone’s view, at least partially but I do make every effort to stand near the back, always checking behind me to minimise this view-hindrance. It’s all about consideration for your fellow appreciator of music in its best format. I recall at one gig, maybe an hour into the show, feeling a tap on my shoulder. I span round and then looked down to see what I can only describe as an angry munchkin who, without any preamble or even that magic ‘P’ word, demanded ‘could you move!?’. I may very well have accommodated the request if perhaps the poisoned dwarf had used those manners that people used to use when I were a lad, or and this is the crux, if she’d not chosen to stand behind the tallest person she could find. … Continue Reading