Skip to main content

More Ways To Make Your Band Believe They Are Going Somewhere

By
Music is great, isn't it? There's music for every mood and every occasion. From the delightful counterpoint of Bach, the swirling emotion of Wagner, to the twee pop of Sandy Shaw and the gut-wrenching angst of Megadeath. There's so much to choose from. Some of us choose just one genre and revel in it. Some of us constantly explore the moving musical landscape and change our allegiances like socks. There's good music, and there's bad, but the choice as to whether it's one or the other is entirely subjective. Many people will hate it, but somebody, somewhere, will like it. So, in a very real sense, there's no 'bad' music at all.

But there are bad bands, right? Yes, you know who they are. You've seen them play live a million times. You've frowned (or laughed) at their Facebook posts. You've cringed at their embarrassing and immature hype. Maybe you even played bass for them once!

So, what is it that makes them bad? Not the music of course, which is all good (although there are degrees of 'good' bordering on 'bad'). No, it's usually their attitude, their gimmick or their propaganda. Of course, the world would be less interesting without them, and we love them (kind of) for their unswerving faith in themselves (and their blind denial). Hey wait, are you even one of them?

If so, and you've already mastered the 15 Ways To Make Your Band Believe They Are Going Somewhere here's another 12 things you can do to make yourself (but no one else) believe you are 'the bees knees'!

1. Assume that you will make it as big as band 'X' by carefully emulating exactly what band 'X' sound like, what they write about, how they look, how they talk, how they walk, and how they serve customers at Maccy D's.

 2. Assume that getting an idiotic haircut (think Morrisey or Jared Leto, maybe), or dressing like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Amanda Lepore, not only makes you cool but is sufficiently distracting that no one will notice your band are crap.

 3. Assume you can make it big by reinvigorating a (thankfully) forgotten genre of music, even though said genre was knuckle-bitingly awful the first time 'round. Really, The Darkness were a once-in-a-million fluke, and rightly so!

4. Assume you are still living in an era when music executives actually frequented live music venues and instantly snapped up any serious talent with a swish of their pen. And it's only a matter of time. Honestly, there's no one frequenting live music venues, let alone music executives!

5. If a venue ban you for playing too loud, or giving them attitude (or not actually showing up at all), have a serious rant on Facebook against said venue and its management, decrying the fact that they know nothing about good music or what music fans really want. All ten of your fans will undoubtedly support you!

 6. Announce to the world that you are in negotiation with a major label for a 3 album deal when in fact you just sent your bassist down to London on the train clutching a copy of your home-produced EP and some vague directions to Virgin EMI Records, in Kensington, or somewhere...

 7. Have a regular rant on Facebook and Twitter about the state of the music business and how you are single-handedly going to reverse the decay and subjugation of real musical talent, like yourself, for instance...

 8. Insist that you are (and bill yourself as) 'the best band in the world', or 'the next big thing', or some such nonsense, even though the evidence is clearly and irrevocably to the contrary.

 9. Ignore the fact that, despite your huge, loyal following, you still have to beg your fans to 'vote' for you to get a slot at a minor local music festival or win an X-factor-style talent competition (thinly veiled as a 'battle of the bands'), and even if you are successful at either of these, only three of them will actually have turned up to watch.

 10. Buy inexpensive flight cases and stamp them with your band logo and a made-up equipment coding system, in the mistaken belief that people (including venue staff) will believe you are professional, hardened and successful tourers, even though you just wheeled the said flight cases from your Dad's garage round the corner.

11. Believe, and state publicly, that your lack of dollar success is merely because you are 'too eclectic', or you are an 'underground movement', or you are 'misunderstood' by the mainstream music press, despite irrefutable evidence that you are, in fact, simply 'shit'.

12. Assume that achieving points 1-11 gives you the right to act like a complete tosser.

Comments

Post a Comment

Feel free to argue with this post...

Popular posts from this blog

Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

By
An engraving by R. Graves entitled 'The Ghost Story', circa 1870. In his first full-length novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Charles Dickens gave us a peculiarly Victorian view of the Christmas tradition. The host of a Yuletide gathering, Mr. Wardle of Dingley Dell, informs his guests that “Everybody sits down with us on Christmas Eve, as you see them now — servants and all; and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories”. So begins a long association of the traditional ghost story with Christmas-time; a tradition that has largely died out, but one that should be revived. Of course, the tradition of telling spooky stories at Christmas is much older than Dickens. It was already well-established in the early nineteenth century. In Old Christmas (from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent ., 1819), Washington Irving describes a busy Yuletide fireside with the parson “dealing forth strange a
9 comments
Read more

American's Guide To Pronouncing British Place Names

By
You all know there's some minor (though understandable) differences between British and American spelling. For example, we have 'colour' for 'color', 'favour' for 'favor' and 'harbour' for 'habor'. We have 'centre' for 'center', 'fibre' for 'fiber' and 'litre' for 'liter'. And so on. These don't usually cause us any problems, especially since they are normally pronounced the same (although with differences in accent, which is an entirely different subject!). But, British spelling idiosyncrasies go far beyond these simple examples, and never more so than in our emotive and quaint place names. British place name spelling is about as intuitive as the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics - for the non-scientists among you, that means 'not at all'. Actually, it's not the spelling that's odd (they usually retain a perfectly logical spelling based
2 comments
Read more

The Fastest Things In The Universe

By
Gravitational waves can't actually be seen as in this simulation. When gazing at the night sky from here on Earth, it’s easy to picture the Universe as calm and unhurried. But in reality, out there in space, things move fast – really fast. Putting aside particle accelerators and the like, the fastest-moving man-made object was the Helios 2 spacecraft launched in the 1970s. It reached a top speed of 68.75 km/s (153,800 mph) on its mission to the Sun. But this was just a leisurely stroll compared to the fastest things in the Cosmos. So, where do we find the real speed freaks of the Universe? Here’s a run-down of the top five. 1. Expansion of the Universe Speed: Greater than the speed of light! The Universe is expanding. But the Universe isn’t filling up ‘empty space’ as it expands because it is ‘space’ itself which is expanding. Although the laws of physics say that two objects can’t move faster than light speed with respect to each other, there is no such restricti
8 comments
Read more

Who Was Ghost Story Writer "Mary E. Penn"?

By
The identity of Mary E. Penn, a late-Victorian author of ghosts stories and crime and mystery tales, is a complete enigma. Scholars of the macabre have been unable to discern any details of her person, origin or character (assuming she was indeed female). We only know that from the 1870s to the 1890s this author published a number of stories in periodicals, most commonly in The Argosy (Ellen Wood’s monthly publication). Some of her early contributions were anonymous (later attributed to Penn in The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals ) and her name only appears from 1878 onwards. Her first story, At Ravenholme Junction , was published anonymously in The Argosy in December 1876, but was later ascribed to Penn on stylistic grounds by eminent supernatural fiction scholar Richard Dalby. Her other ghostly tales were Snatched from the Brink ( The Argosy , June 1878), How Georgette Kept Tryst ( The Argosy , October 1879), Desmond’s Model ( The Argosy , December 1879), Old Vanderhav
1 comment
Read more

Black Holes 101

By
Artist's impression of a black hole. With new blockbuster movie Interstellar now in cinemas, there's a flurry of interest in black holes and wormholes. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the production and insisted that the depiction should stay within legitimate boundaries. Apart from the odd bit of artistic license, of course! Black holes are scary, right? They suck in everything in their path. They devour whole planets, stars even, ripping them apart like mere wisps of smoke. They condemn anything that confronts them to an unknowable oblivion. It’s the stuff of nightmare, or at least a bad disaster movie. But I think black holes get a bad press. They are misunderstood, misrepresented. The truth is they are fascinating creatures, if confusing, and not a little bit weird. So, relax for a moment while I give you my quick and dirty guide to black holes. The Black Hole 101, if you like. Let’s start with a simple definition of a black hole
Post a Comment
Read more

The Anglo-Saxon/Latin Rule, Again!

By
It's one of those rules we're often told as writers. Don't write in Latin, write in Anglo-Saxon! This so-called 'rule' has been around quite a while. In Politics & The English Language (1946) George Orwell wrote "bad writers... are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones". But, what does this mean? Do we have to check the etymology of every word we scribble down in our manuscript books, weeding out the obnoxious foreigners and replacing them with good, solid, stalwart Germanic conciseness? Or does it mean we should write in an archaic style and pepper our prose with lovely words such as erstwhile , forsooth and threap ? Are we banned from using words such as obfuscate , perambulate, egregious and impecunious ? Well, let's think about this for a moment, with a couple of examples. Here's the opening line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's book Paul Clifford ; It wa s a dark and stormy nig
Post a Comment
Read more

Flat Earth Fallacy

By
I'm an accepting kind of person. I generally allow people to think what they want, believe what they want and (pretty much) say what they want, within reason. But occasionally an opinion is so far-fetched, insulting or incorrect that it debases human intelligence (all human intelligence, not just mine). And then I feel I must speak up. One such 'opinion' is the belief in a 'flat' Earth. Although this topic has a substantial history (see for example Christine Garwood's Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea ), it has so far not been publicly contested in any great depth. Even Phil Plait, author of the ever-popular  Bad Astronomy Blog , declined to give such a preposterous proposition any real air-time. And I don't blame him. It really is the most absurd idea. But it should be denounced, for any number of reasons. The basic premise of the 'flat-Earth' protagonists is that ancient cultures were right, the Earth is flat , a circular disk bo
10 comments
Read more

Does Today's Music All Sound The Same?

By
What's wrong Simon? Is this music too interesting? Recently, whilst out shopping, my young son asked "why is all the music in these shops exactly the same?" He had a point. Every neon-illuminated consumer-hovel of fashion we visited was pumping out the same insidious four-to-the-floor musical effluent. There was no variation in rhythm, tempo, timbre or anything else. Absolute tedium. You've heard it said over and over again: "all today's music sounds the same!" It's something that your parents probably say about the music you listen to. Or you say about the music other people listen to. It was probably also something your grandparents said about the music your parents were into. But who is right? Are any of them right? Does today's music really all sound the same? Or is it just generational crankiness? If you're on the ball, you'll already know that the music industry doesn't have your best interests at heart when deciding w
3 comments
Read more

The Date Of Christmas

By
I've said this many times before, but astronomy effects our daily lives in ways of which we're often unaware. For example, you may be surprised to find that the date of Christmas is almost certainly down to our ancient forebears' astronomical endeavours. Imagine you’re a prehistoric farmer. You would have little understanding of what we today call science. But you would almost certainly know a lot about the motion of the Sun, Moon, stars and planets around the sky. In fact, these motions would be very important to you. Why? Because they mark the passage of the seasons and the seasons dictate what sustenance is available to humankind. Your survival depends on them. If you want your crops to grow, your livestock to survive, your hunt to be a success, you need a good knowledge of where you are in the yearly cycle of life. And it is the skies which give you that knowledge. So, here's the science bit (as people annoyingly say!). In the morning, the Sun rises in the
2 comments
Read more

Are Indie Authors Destroying The Market?

By
You're probably aware that we are drowning in an ocean of mediocrity. Yes, I know, there's mediocrity all around us; the TV, the music business, in fact everywhere you care to look. But I'm talking about mediocrity in 'literature', as if that term actually means something these days. Once upon a time, not so long ago, 'literature' was a respectable part of the art world. Authors were mysterious intellectuals, removed from society, tortured souls poring over their foolscap notepads with quill in hand. They were just names, often widely-known ones, like A-list celebrities with no public face, controversy or paparazzi. The authors' agents, dark figures sifting through their ever-growing slush pile of tales, held sway over a global industry from behind locked doors. The authors' publishers were equally elusive, a forbidden realm for those with literary aspirations, with the ability to put their clients names right into the homes of the reading public
14 comments
Read more