I seem to spend a lot of my time in rooms that look like this. This one was in Cardiff on a reasonably pleasant Friday afternoon. Staged by the Welsh Music Foundation, the seminar covered a range of topics of interest to musicians. Pictured above is the panel session before mine, where Welsh broadcasters were explaining how they choose the music they play.
This entire section of the day was in Welsh, and the man you see to the right of the TV set with the headset mic on is translating live for the benefit of ignorant people like me who only speak one language. Quite a neat little wireless headphone setup. They must do this a lot in Wales.
The room was in a place called Chapter Arts Centre, and there was a nice bar downstairs where we all met up and had a beer later. No shortage of interesting people to talk to.
I met Rhodri Marsden, who spoke on a panel straight after me – and I was dead impressed by the fact that he’s a) a writer for the Independent; b) briefly one of the most popular figures on YouTube (250,000+ views of his music video) and c) a member of Scritti Politti!!!
He was there to talk about his project The Schema, which was a self-imposed challenge to record, distribute and promote a single from his bedroom in a 30-day timeframe. Not a bad bit of success, all things considered. Didn’t make a lot of money (none, actually), but built a really strong foundation from which he could have, had he continued after that 30 days.
Phil Cooper from Creative Cultures was there, and it turned out he knows Mark de Clive-Lowe quite well (Mark and I ran a record label together back in NZ and we stay in touch now that we’re both UK-based).
The afternoon was organised by Dai Lloyd (second from right on the panel in the photo), who will forever stick in my brain as the man who named his children Luc and Leia.
And once again, I talked about music on the internet to a bunch of people with really interesting things to say, a unique set of localised challenges and interesting projects that you just never get to hear about unless you get on a train and go and talk to people.