I’ve just spent four days in Belfast hanging out with musicians, sleeping on their couches and spare beds, going to gigs, doing a spot of consultancy and speaking at a music industry seminar. As you’d expect in Ireland (and under those circumstances) there’s no shortage of stories to tell.
I thought I’d start with one told to me by Walter the Goon from the band John Shelly and the Creatures. It explains the origins of the band’s name in a bar in Berlin some years earlier.
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I stayed the night at Walter’s house, watched a bit of Glastonbury on TV, ate Chinese food and drank American beer. The next morning, we did the full Ulster Fry breakfast including farls, strolled through the Botanic Gardens and finished off with a pint of Guinness at a very traditional establishment, before I jumped on the bus back to the airport.
NZ readers might be interested to learn that John Shelly and the Creatures were the support band of choice for the Brunettes when they played in Ireland.
Lovely man - and very hospitable. If you ever want to go freeloading in other countries, my tip is to seek out musicians. Here’s what the band sounds like. The single ‘Angeline’ is coming out in September.
My friend Ian Wallman and his friend Jim Ryan (who owns Miss Moneypenny’s) get together and do a spot of producing under the name Zoned Out. They tend to do a lot of remixes.
Here’s one of their latest ones. It’s for someone called Ashanti.
Wikipedia thinks she’s famous.
I’m so not down with the kids. But I like that ‘people-I-know-and-like’ get to work on top end stuff and, presumably, get paid for it. Go the Birmingham lads.
I’ve always been a little bit obsessive about music consumption. I love records and I have a large mp3 collection. They suit different purposes - and the best way I describe the difference is that I say that mp3s are for having on, while records are for listening to.
But that overlooks the fact that I will quite often pay a good deal of attention to my digital music files. And of course, music consumption is about far more than just buying and listening to music. Anyone who’s ever put their records in alphabetical order will tell you that.
So while I obsess more over my vinyl, and treasure it more highly than my digital music collection, there’s a hell of a lot more music in the mp3 collection than the record collection and I take it pretty seriously. Roughly 5,000 albums in the iTunes library - and it needed a bit of a spring clean.
I collect records. I accumulate CDs. There’s a difference.
I love vinyl. I buy it and I treasure it. I don’t have a great deal of it (certainly not by my standards) but that’s because after having collected for the best part of 30 years, I got rid of everything - thousands of records and CDs sold, given away, thrown out and handed on. Then we moved to another country.
Now we’ve been here a few years, I’ve started buying the records again, but I have laid off the CDs. I don’t like them. At least, I don’t like owning them. I used to have over five thousand sitting on shelves. Now I can carry the ‘keepers’ in one hand. To me, they’re just unnecessary clutter, when all that music can just be stored in the same thing I’m currently typing on.
I mean… it’s already digital music, just in a really inconvenient package.
