A gig, a beast and some progress

Long time no write. Hope everyone's well and the year is treating you well.
Here at Morbid Towers we've had a slow start to the year but things are chugging along now and I have a couple of updates to share with you.
Firstly I have excellent gig news. A couple of years ago the good Doctor and I opened the Limetree Festival and, amongst the various ska and reggae acts, the band of the weekend was a group from London called A.h.a.b. I'm very happy to report that I was asked to open for them at Stereo on May 10th. Sadly Hils can't make it for this one so if anyone has any requests for any of my older or solo stuff, stick it in the comments and I'll add it to the set list. Logistical details in the gigs link to the right.
Secondly (and sequeing (is that even a word) neatly on) the chap who got me this gig is a very talented singer / multi-instrumentalist named Phil Simpson. He runs the really fun jam session at The Habit on monday night where I have been lugging my beast of a double bass for the last few weeks. So if you fancy a sing-along and you're at a loose end on a monday night come down and laugh as I try to wrestle with four strings instead of six.
Finally, for the moment, having finally got all the boxes unpacked after the house move I've got all the gubbins set up for recording and have started putting some tracks down. You can hear a couple of the first drafts on my bandcamp site but the next step is to get Hils over and apply her genius and then I'll have to work out how to do some pseudo-mastering-type-stuff.
It's going to take a while...

So that's been the year for me so far, well, the interesting bit at any rate. Sadly the bit between 9-5 on a weekday has been extending its reach a bit too much, but, meh, these things happen.

Of swings and roundabouts

So I've been off work this week, partly because i've not had a proper break since the end of september, and partly so I could do some recording.
The first part of this has been achieved.
The second part, partially so.
It's been an education; I haven't used cubase for about 4 years (why bother when I had free access to the studio and an excellent engineer?) and I've got a new input box that has its own software. So a lot of time has been spent looking at screen a swearing in perplexity.
But we have made some progress so I thought I'd share a couple of rough drafts with you:
http://drewstephenson.bandcamp.com/track/goodnight
http://drewstephenson.bandcamp.com/track/the-song-of-the-henchman
The first is a track that owes a massive influence to Tom McRae's A Summer of John Wayne. I didn't set out to rip it off, I had the cd in the car, had listened to it once, wrote this a fair bit later, and then it came round again (I don't use the car much and it has a 6-cd changer) and I realised how similar it was. So call this a homage if you like, to one of my all time favourite musicians. I hope he doesn't sue.
The second one is an attempt to address a balance in popular fiction whereby the henchman traditionally gets it in the shorts whilst the hero gets the girl. Terry Pratchett started it with his book Guards! Guards!, Mike Myers continued it in the movie Austin Powers and now it has life in the form of song. I suspect it will have less exposure...
Anyway, both of these tracks are just rough drafts, they haven't been mastered so you'll need to crank the volume up, and, most importantly, they haven't had any of Hilary's genius applied.
So enjoy, but bear in mind there's much improvement to be wrought.

Of course all my positive feeling about this has been completely undermined by sitting here listening to Anais Mitchell's Young Man in America which just makes me feel completely useless.

New Music Coming Soon

Well, trying to get a gig at the moment is not easy when you play our kind of music. And especially not when the day job is readying up to eat your life.
Fortunately I have a week of holiday coming up wherein I shall be recording some music and posting it online to share with you.
I don't know what I shall be recording yet, or even how far i will get with it. But something will be recorded and something will be shared.
Any requests?

2011, an interupted year

Well, here we are at the end of 2011, and firstly I'm going to look back at my predictions from January and point out that I got 3 out of 4 right (shame Northampton couldn't do the business or I'd have had a full set).
Having had this kind of success rate I'm not going to make any predictions again and refer to my previous good results forever more. Forevermore? For evermore? fuck it, you know what I mean.
It's been an up and down year, starting on a low with the closure of the record label which, in retrospect, definitely had a bit of a downer on the music side of things. This wasn't helped by the decision to move house and the effect of a falling market dragging this out for three months. Still, we've been moved in for 3 months now and things are going swimmingly so, work aside, things have picked up at the end of year.
Having had a bit of a haitus on the creativity side I'm hoping to start writing and recording again in the new year, so keep an eye on the site for updates and occasional splodges of music. Hopefully we can get back into some regular gigging too.
2012 is going to be an interesting year away from the music as well. In the UK we have a barrel of financial regulation coming that's going to have quite an impact at work (with a potential knock-on impact on my free-time). In Europe we have a bunch of bureaucrats driving an agenda that's sole purpose is to prolong their pet project rather than benefit the citizens they're supposed to be serving (how long will people put up with that?). In the states we have an election year and, as soon as the holidays are over, we're going to have SOPA and PIPA to deal with (if these bills get passed the internet could look very different by the end of the year).
So I've come up with a cunning plan to deal with it all. I'm going to hide in my house, rugby club and local pubs with a selection of instruments, booze and friends and ignore the whole bloody lot.
Beer, music, sport. Repeat.
Happy new year!

Name your price!

All our music is now available to download on a Pay What You Think It’s Worth* basis.

Over on my YAMDAC blog I’ve been harping on for a while about alternative business models for musicians and how the biggest challenge for an amateur musician is not piracy but publicity, so I’ve now decided to put my money where my mouth is and try one of these alternative models for myself.

For a long time the gatekeepers of content have tried to force the prices of digital content to match that of physical copies but it just doesn’t make sense. So what is the correct price for a download? Well, I guess it’s what the market decides is the right price. You’re the market, this is a chance to help decide.

So as of today all our music downloads are available on a Pay What You Think It’s Worth* basis (including “Free”) from our Bandcamp site**.

Personally I’d rather that more people heard and enjoyed our music than that we extract every penny from anyone who might like it. So please feel free to pass this on to anyone who you think might enjoy it (in fact, please please do that!) or anyone who writes / talks about music and the music business and might be interested in the experiment.

I put “Free” in inverted commas because if you go for Free then I’m going to ask you for an e-mail address and add you to my distribution list. You can opt out at any time and I don’t e-mail much stuff out anyway, I reckon that’s a fair trade.

N.B. the physical cds remain at fixed prices I’m afraid, because they cost a fixed amount to produce and I have costs to recover. If you download the stuff and then decide that you’d like one of the CDs (plenty of EPs left, a couple of handfuls of the Album) then I will happily knock off anything you decided to pay for the download.

Similarly if you’ve previously paid the full rate for the download and are now feeling ripped off (I really, really hope there aren’t many people in this category!) then drop me a line and we’ll see what we can sort out. I mean this, I’d hate for someone to be sitting there thinking that I’ve pulled a fast one on them.

* there is no good acronym for this.

** I’m working on setting up the same mechanism on other platforms.