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.
Yep, that slide really says ‘Better Blogger Workflow’…
So… the conference. I went to Chicago for a conference, not just to go to jazz gigs, wander around and look at public art, travel on the local rail (it’s called the ‘L’ train because it’s short for ‘Elevated’ - who knew?), drink in bars and buy records.
From an outsider’s perspective, this was about as geeky as it’s possible to get. A room full of bloggers, discussing blogging, all of them with their laptops open, all of them learning how to blog in such a way that they don’t have to do anything else in order to make a living. Just blog.
Tristan answers a question “No… it’s not working yet.”
So I didn’t quite get to Chicago yesterday.
I arrived in Manchester around 11am, just in time to see a plane take off in the distance, which may well have been the one I was meant to be on. I put the call out on Twitter (sort of like a micro-blog that you can do from your mobile phone): ‘I’m in Manchester - what’s going on?’. Within minutes, there was a message back from Tristan from BBC Music and Audio Interactive — “We’re at Futuresonic. Contact Theatre’.
After a little bit of digging and a quick phonecall to Jez, who’s doing a lot of really helpful admin and project support stuff back at the university, it became clear that Futuresonic was a fairly significant digital music and social media conference and music festival that had completely escaped my notice. And Contact Theatre is the name of the place, rather than (as I first thought) an instruction from Tristan to get in touch.
I found my way there and registered through their (rather pleasing) ‘pay what you can’ delegate scheme. The price of the conference was kind of steep, but they had 10 day passes available that could be bought on a ‘name your price’ basis. I saw that most people had paid between about £5-£20 (rather than the £30-odd it was supposed to be for the day rate) and I went for £10 as that’s what I had in my pocket and this was an entirely spontaneous time-filler for me.
I hung out with the BBC Radio Lab guys, who — over and above the presentation they were going to be making — had somehow let themselves get talked into inventing something live in the lobby while the conference was going on.
I’m in Leeds at the International Jazz Conference, hosted by the Leeds College of Music. I presented a paper with Tim Wall about how jazz music fans interact online. We think it’s interesting stuff.
But the best thing about this place is the sheer overwhelming talent of the students, who seem to burst into song at every opportunity. Like an episode of Fame or something.
There were a couple of dull papers this afternoon (about jazz! No, really!) and so I came to retreat across the road at a bar called The Wardrobe, where you can find live music pretty much every night of the week. One of the many student bands was setting up and soundchecking for a gig they have on tonight.
I think I’m coming back to hear them do a proper set. They were pretty great. But more importantly, they seem indicative of all the other activity that’s going around this place all the time. They’re not exceptional. This is what it’s like every day of the week here - or at least, that’s what we’re led to believe.
