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

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.

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

My concert spreadsheet

I am and at least I know this, a sad, stat-loving, spreadsheet aficionado, anally retentive, obsessive weirdo.

I know this because for the last few years I have kept track of all the live bands I’ve seen, be it at a gig or festival and stored them all, complete with 10/10 scores, dates seen, venues visited all in a big colourful Excel spreadsheet. It really is a work of art that I’m very proud of and would feel quite lost without. In one tab, the spreadsheet lists bands seen at gigs, including support acts. Each have been given a score out of 10 and some even have comments attached to remind me of certain events (like when I missed half of the Mars Volta’s set in Birmingham a few years back because for some reason they started at 8pm but still managed to impress enough in the short slot to score an 8/10). This first tab also tracks all my festival visits, naturally with scores out of 10 for every act seen. It counts bands seen, distinct bands seen, venues visited and how many times for each. The second tab lists these concerts in order of greatness whilst the third lists the counts of bands which I have seen more than once. … Continue Reading

The Post-Club Conundrum – Part Deux

Brimming with glee... or grinning and bearing it?

Continued from Part Une:

After what seemed an eternity, the four of us arrived back at my flat, paid the flap of cardboard masquerading as a cab driver, and watched him drive his rusted ensemble of misery into the distance. Now it was time to get this party back on track. I had already assembled a shortlist of potential songs from which I would choose the all-important introduction to our night part two. It consisted of a choice between The Who’s rousing ‘Baba O’Reilly’, the Fred Falke remix of the Whitest Boy Alive’s ‘Golden Cage’ [Ed - kudos], Underworld’s epic ‘Cowgirl’, Lee Scratch Perry’s ‘Jungle Lion’, or, for perhaps a more subtle approach allowing my guests to settle in, ‘Haiti’ by the Arcade Fire.

What a great tune to take your shoes off and get comfortable to. I was weighing all this up as I lead my friends up the stairs and along the corridor into my room. “Make yourself at home,” I triumphed with a broad face, as if I hardly knew them. Then, satisfied at seeing them take in all my cool stuff, I skipped along to the kitchen to fetch the beers and make that crucial decision. More songs came to me in waves of inspiration as I gazed into the fridge; ‘The Killing Moon’, ‘One Pure Thought’, ‘F.E.A.R’, ‘Last Post on the Bugle’, ‘Voodoo Ray’, ‘Float On’… oh the options! I was brought swiftly back from the realm of godly DJs by murmering from my room, and grabbing the six pack, I approached the arena proudly. … Continue Reading

1(b): Meaningless as aesthetic judgment

The debate about ‘the meaningless and the meaningful’ has a political and an economic slant. Consider hiphop: the great (racist) accusation is invariably that it ‘just isn’t music’.

James Brown

You don’t often hear anyone calling hiphop ‘meaningless’, which is a neat rhetorical trick – steering the debate away from the pivotal function: to demonstrate ‘lyrical skills’ even in the absence of a band, musicianship, or originality. Hiphop is profoundly democratic in its most basic (and affordable) formula: not even two turntables and a microphone, but one. Effectively, Hiphop is supremely meaningful in its central gesture: to assert the validity and audibility of its underprivileged, under-represented voices, which is why the main line of attack for critics must be on the musical front, where old soul records are recycled. (Arguably, there are complex semiotics here, too: using the records themselves suggests a knowledge of cultural history, unlike white musicians passing off black music as their own.)

Public Enemy

Music aside, to be meaningful is threatening: Public Enemy’s snapshots of black history made them targets for FBI phonetaps, although NWA’s exhortations to comparatively random violence (albeit in response to police brutality) made them inadvertent agents of normativity. Admittedly, Hiphop shades into meaningless (or inaudibility) when it adds to the chorus of black and white voices normalising consumer-capitalism. In the 1960s, black-owned record labels were at the vanguard of black businesses (see Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On), but the current commodity fetishism of mainstream hiphop is a massive debasement of the (already problematic) ‘Big Payback’ demanded by James Brown, referencing Martin Luther King. Is it subversive to make ‘art’ that’s so openly about making money? Or is it defeatist?

WEB DuBois

Still, there’s an underlying urge toward significance (or ‘being taken seriously as public speakers rather than entertainers’) that can be traced back to figures like Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, and MLK. White mainstream pop music has no qualms about meaninglessness in lyrics… although try telling that (as an adult or parent) to a teen or pre-teen who then complains “you just don’t understand”. I’d argue that the inanities of manufactured pop music are strangely comforting to parents who actually shell out for the stuff – contra David Cameron and others, there aren’t really all that many exhortations to flaunt your teen sexuality, spend lots of money, let alone challenge the values of your parents: just irritate them, which you’re bound to do anyway. (The day after writing that, I dug up a quote from Mick Jagger – in Doggett, 2008 – claiming that rock’n'roll was never about protest, just winding up your parents, and even that’s pointless when they listen to the same music as you; it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t being cynical, but despairing of the failure of the counter-culture.) … Continue Reading

Attack! Attack! – Honesty

Attack! Attack! - Honesty

Attack! Attack! are launching themselves onto the scene with new single ‘Honesty’ taken from their debut self-titled album. They are about to have their song ‘You and Me’ featured in the new Guitar Hero game, an endorsement which can surely promise a lot of attention, and have just been featured on Beverly Hills 90210, which leaves us thinking that these four Welsh wonders could be hard to escape in 2009.

But what of this latest offering?

Attack! Attack! have chart appeal and a sound which seems rather familiar. Think Fall Out Boy.

This band take off from where Fall Out Boy’s Infinity On High album left off. Where Folie A Deux lacked a lot for the American rockers, Attack! Attack! seem to have found the perfect essence to follow it up. Except we must remember that this is not Fall Out Boy…even though lead singer Neil Starr sounds suspiciously like Patrick Stump.

The start is simple, with building verses that burst into manic guitar riffs and create an all out rocking pop song. The story behind the song is that there is a guy who has basically been himself and honest, but reads the girl’s diary and finds that honesty does him no good; he feels that there is no hope. “Honesty didn’t get me anywhere/I know ‘cos I read it in your diary”. It does feel very American, but over the last ten years these “American-isms” seem to have become the “cool thing to do” amongst young punk rock bands. … Continue Reading

Recording a new Fireworks Night album #2

Fireworks Night

This is the second in a series of posts detailing the recording of a new Fireworks Night album; the series is going to follow every stage of our recording process, covering equipment, mic selection and technique, dealing with room acoustics, getting good performances, tracking, mixing and production.

I’ve been reading a fair few interviews with engineers and producers over the last few weeks, in preparation for the upcoming Week of Enormous Recording. I was already familiar with the sort of thing that producers would tend to talk about- recording techniques, what a producer’s role should be, how to get the best performance out of your musicians and so on (I didn’t, of course, know the details of what they’d say, but we’ll come to that later). What I wasn’t expecting was that so many producers would still have a distinction in their minds between ‘American’ and ‘English’ recording and production styles. … Continue Reading

Recording a new Fireworks Night album #1

Fireworks Night

This is the first in a series of posts detailing the recording of a new Fireworks Night album; the series is going to follow every stage of our recording process, covering equipment, mic selection and technique, dealing with room acoustics, getting good performances, tracking, mixing and production.

Excitingly, Fireworks Night are heading off to record a new album in a little under two weeks.  We’ve been working on new material since we recorded the A mirror, a ghost EP last year (more information on that here), and we now have 10 songs ready to go, a good proportion of which have been aired at recent live shows.  Because we have a limited budget, and our recent experiences of studios (while great in their own way) left us with a record slightly different to how we’d envisaged, we’ll be taking a week off work and recording everything ourselves.

For me, this is a particularly exciting time as, as well as playing on it, I’m going to be engineering (and potentially producing) the record.  You, dear reader, have probably noticed that I spend a lot of my time writing and recording music, some of which makes its way into the world through The Monroe Transfer, Fireworks Night or just by being posted on this here blog.  I’ve had quite a lot of experience of making music for various projects, but I’m far from expert; I’m looking at a steep learning curve with regard to several elements of the process, particularly recording good sounds from acoustic instruments (notoriously a tricky thing to attempt…)

I’m aiming to document the whole recording process as thoroughly as I can- given how many groups are in our situation, and want to make the best record they can on next to no budget, this series of posts might become a useful resource for groups wanting to record in a similar way.  As this is the first post, I’d like to talk about how I’m going about building up knowledge, and planning how we’ll spend our week.

So, at the moment, we’re in the pre-production phase: we’re gathering equipment, working out what other things we need to buy and, in my case, reading as much material as I can.  If you’re considering a similar project with your group, you should definitely be reading Tape Op - I can’t recommend it highly enough.  You can subscribe to it for free, and it will enhance your knowledge and understand of the recording process hugely.  It can be daunting on first reading, but it’s worth persevering with.

On the topic of magazines, I tend to buy something only if it promises a good feature on how to do something. I have next to no disposable income (thanks to unpaid work taking up most of my life), and so the gear reviews are of little interest to me- they just make me jealous, and undermine any belief I have in my ability to record something…

“How can I record even a half-decent record without the Pulmonizer 560 stereo compressor?  The battle is lost!”

Most magazines, though, have occasional great features in them, and I’ll happily buy those-  Tape Op had a superb one-page feature on mic technique for drum overheads, whose various techniques will form the backbone of the record’s drum sounds.  An old copy of Sound on Sound (August 2007, I think?) had a superb article on various different methods of micing guitar cabs which, again, is going to inform a lot of what happens when it comes to recording the Fireworks Night material.

A book that I thoroughly recommend is Howard Massey’s Behind the glass.  It’s what I think of as a ‘working book’, so I didn’t care about getting a roughed-up secondhand copy- it’s the information that I’m interested in.  Essentially, it’s a series of interviews with a number of famous producers (and by ‘famous’, I really mean ‘their records are famous’- hands up if you have a clue who produced Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, for example?  Thought not…)  The book contains a good deal of technical information, but the main thing I’m taking from it at the moment is the attitude that these people have- there’s a lot of humility, a lot of willingness to try things out, and a general feeling that the job is to capture a great performance, not have the musicians worry about stuff they don’t need to.  If our violinist Rhiannon is thinking about standing really still so that the mic is picking up the most sound, then she’s not going to be performing as well as she can; what I’ll have to do is minimise all these kinds of concerns, and make sure we all play as well as we can.

A brief preliminary word on equipment – it’s going to sound like a cliché, but the main thing to remember about equipment is that there is absolutely no substitute for a good mic, placed well.  And of these two, the ‘placed well’ is probably the most important.  I’ll go into much more detail on this later on, as it’s something that I’m learning more about all the time, but consider a few things now- a musician sounds different when placed in different parts of a room, a mic sounds different when it’s at a different place in that room, and mic orientation relative to the sound source also makes a difference.  Given all these different combinations of sound possiblities, it’s possible to get an enormous range of sounds without having to do anything to the sound coming into your recording device. … Continue Reading

1(a): The meaningful and the meaningless

For about as long as I’ve been writing about music, I’ve argued that there are so many literate, intelligent, profound lyricists out there – should you care to look – that no-one who truly loves music need ever waste their time listening to the trite, empty sentiments of lazy lyricists who happen to knock out good tunes, or be paired with a decent guitarist, say. … Continue Reading