21/08/2008 by ville.

It gives us great pleasure to introduce to you our young proteges Smudge www.myspace.com/smudge

We’re putting out their debut EP StayFeelRegret next month, the guys are headed for a pretty amazing looking UK tour, getting great write-ups, plays on radio and TV - all nice things to come back to from my holiday.

Listen to them here www.theanimalfarm.co.uk/stayfeelregret.mp3

And view the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m5C47b0Br4

Go see them at one of these

And if that was not enough, it appears that The Animal Farm is nurturing the UK’s next guitar hero. Total Guitar magazine have picked up on Liam from Esteban and are featuring him (and the band) in the current issue. Esteban’s single has excited many in the blogosphere and BBC 6 Music have played it in their podcasts. Apparently their tour of Cornwall’s surf spots caused a few waves (I know, I know…) with packed out venues and CDs selling out faster than you can say Santiago www.theanimalfarm.co.uk/santiago.mp3

 Here the guys are enjoying a quite stroll through Piccadilly Circus.

Check out the wonderful photography of Craig Marston, who took the above masterpiece at http://www.marstonphotography.com/

Rosalita have announced their autumn tour

It’s shaping up to be a busy autumn.

Rock!

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01/08/2008 by ville.

In Philip Roth’s book American Pastoral the main character is well to do businessman who in his youth was a high school quarterback, a great looking young buck with perfect teeth and a lantern jaw. His take on irony was that winners didn’t need it. Irony is a get out clause for losers.

A manager I once knew had hung out with Eddie Vedder at a party. His assessment was that Eddie had the confidence of a guy who’d never had to compromise.

Many seasons ago when I entered the building that is the music business, I went in through the door that said “Teenage Rock Bands”. That’s a door you can get through if you’re a teenager in a rock band doing something that people in the building think they can make money with. Many seasons have come and gone and they still haven’t thrown me out of the building. I must be doing something right. Perseverance goes a long way.

Back in those days I would of course dismiss anybody that didn’t have at least stratospheric levels of fame and fortune. Like many others I, too, thought that my music had a divine right to be popular around the world. An artist’s unshakeable belief in the undieniable fact that he was put on earth to create universally popular music is, I believe, the driving force behind the music business.

The other day I was walking to the tube station after a long day at the studio and caught up with my mate Glen who is a fellow musical traveller, a producer with a long career and many records under his belt. Asked him how his day had been. Glen said: “Just when you think the music business has disappointed and hurt you in every possible way, you have a day when it finds yet another way to fuck you”.

Chris Martin of Coldplay was asked how he kept level headed considering the enormous amount of success he’s had. Said Chris: “I listen to The Beatles”.

Bi-annual thought gatherings….

So, here we are, just over half way through the year. Any minute now I’m off on holiday. The first half of this year has been super busy for us. The next half is already booked up with projects. Been a great ride but I can say with confidence that I’m sooooo looking forward to a break from music and a break from squash. (Although, I think I will pack my squash bag, just in case I can sneak in a few games while I’m away)

How do you define being a success in these changing times? Sign to a major label? Hmmm… sign half of your life (=earning potential) away for an advance that is probably gonna be equivalent to less than minimum wage when you factor it all in? Have a top 10 single? Nah. Who remembers what was number one last week? Besides, it’s not even beer money.

Where have all the good times gone? asked Ray Davis of The Kinks. (David Lee Roth of the mighty VH reiterated this point on the fifth VH album. Highly recommended listening, though not their best work…)

I read an interview with Paul Simon, one of the all time greats. His dad was a musician, Paul grew up in soundchecks and studios. His take is that back in the day a musician was a guy who earned his daily bread by playing music. He’d go out gigging at night, go out on tour. Do a season here. Move on when the season was over. It was a lifestyle centered around the art of playing and performing music. It wasn’t about this pirate attitude that “we’re gonna raid the business and by June we’ll have our own line of designer flipflops so that we can retire on an island in the Caribbean and eat steak twice a day”.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been poor. A quite literally starving musician. Now I’m not poor anymore it feels much better. Making money is great. But the point is this: guys whom I consider my peers will make music for a living even if that livelihood is a bit patchy during some seasons. We make it because we have to. Nothing else will do.

If looked at in the right way, this new music business that is unfolding in front of our eyes is a place in which you have the tools to do your thing, build a business and help it grow. You don’t need to sell half a million records straight out of the box. You don’t need to be on R1 to make a living. And I bet most artists want just to make a living out of making music.

Here’s an interesting idea that a mate of mine, who does a&r at one of the majors, had. I think he was just as surprised as I was to hear him say it. He said that maybe it’s good for artists to have something else in their lives besides music. Maybe if they just supplemented their income by making music, if it was kinda like a glorified hobby, we’d get better music made, artists would be happier because they weren’t on the treadmill of having to deliver commercially plausible records, which so often means records that sound like other records that have already been successdul.

This ties in nicely with another mate’s ideas. He’s a life coach. Goes around businesses telling people how to be happier. His message is: lower your expectations. As in, dude at so-and-so plc is unhappy because he’s only pulling in £100k a year. He kinda sees himself as a Richard Branson or in the very least a Duncan Ballantyne. My mate goes in and says things like: “Why waste your time worrying about stupid shit like that? Lower your epectations and you’ll be happy.” Though, to be fair, he does it way more subtly and eloquently than that.

I know I know. Most people, like me, who’ve got the rock’n'roll bug, want to get ring side seats and we’ll do everything we can to get them. Maybe the hunt keeps us happy.

These are my tips for happy and fruitful hunting:

Be a great craftsman. That means: practise, do scales, learn about your instrument. Explore it.

Say something interesting. The world doesn’t need just another song by just another band. But it sure as hell could do with a fantastic song by someone captivating.

Be a great entertainer. You are the entertainment. The audience is there to be entertained. It’s not a swear word, you know? If you entertain them, they will keep coming back to your gigs, season after season.

Make great recordings. Here’s the truth: when you put something out into the public domain, such as myspace or something, you are in competition with everyone else that’s out there, including Coldplay. If your recording sounds like shit, you don’t stand a chance of entertaining whoever is listening. They will spend their listening time on someone whose stuff sounds great.

Work hard. That means doing those gigs in front of 3 men and a dog in dead end towns. You have to get out there and campaign. Find fans one at a time if necessary. Real fans. Imaginary friends on digital networks are nice, but Real People in Real Life feel much nicer if you get lucky enough to find a place to stay… especially in dead end towns! ;-)

Do anything to make it. Take that literally. None of that Meat Loaf stuff of “but I won’t do that.” You really must be prepared to put everything you have into it. The other day, a band who approached us about a production said, after a few meetings, that they couldn’t afford to hire us. That’s fair enough, but when the conversation moved on to their cool holiday destinations, I thought: ”Er… remind me again, how important is this music lark to you?”

Enjoy the ride. Have fun with it. Challenge yourself artistically. If you get stuck in a rut go back to whatever it was that made you want to pick up music in the first place. That’ll soon remind you how cool music is, how exciting it is.

And then you can find some new things to get into. Last night I watched a program about the songwriter Randy Newman. I laughed out loud when he discussed his song Sail Away which is written from the point of view of a slave trader who is trying to convince Africans that the good ol’ US is a brilliant place to go to. Check out the lyrics http://www.randynewman.com/tocdiscography/disc_sail_away/lyricssailaway 

He also wrote the song Leave Your Hat On, with which Joe Cocker and Tom Jones had hits. Randy wrote the song from the point of view of a complete moron, so he says, and was surprised how sexy the two singers managed to make his character.

I’m going to get into Randy Newman. He had so many cool things to say about writing and music. Just the kind of thoughts to take away on R&R….

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