All posts by Chris Patmore

interviews, music

OFFICERS Interview

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Leeds band Officers aren’t your average guitar and synths group. They have a big swirling sound that verges on the symphonic, and would be right at home behind an edgy indie movie. The band is also fiercely independent, releasing their music through their own Original Wall of Death label, with all the packaging designed, often in limited editions, by Stuart Semple. Music icon Gary Numan was so impressed with their music that he has had the band touring with him as the opening act, as well as recording with the band. We caught up the main forces behind the band, Jamie Baker (guitar) and Matt Southall (vocals and keyboard), before their show at London’s famed Forum in Kentish Town.

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How did you guys meet?
Matt: It’s quite strange because I lived across the road from Jamie, but we didn’t speak for about six months. We just used to glare at each other from across the street. One day my car broke down outside the house, and Jamie just strutted past with a smirk on his face and I remember thinking, “All right. Cheers. Thanks for your help.” A couple of months later we happened to speak through a mutual friend in the pub, and I asked Jamie to join my band, without even hearing him play, cos we got on so well. It kind of went from there.

Jamie: It was odd, because at first you asked me if I could sing.

Matt: Because I didn’t want to sing.

Jamie: We were talking about this the other day and Matt said we’ve been using the term singer by proxy, but it wasn’t really. In my eyes, from meeting, I could always see the potential that was there, not just via a voice, because you started putting stuff down on demos, but the attitude and the way a front man should look, which is something I’d never really had being in previous bands before. You used to see your favourite bands and think there was a brilliant front man, or he looks the part, and not only that he could sing. But often it was one or the other; they were either a really good singer, or they looked good but were shit.

Matt: And I can’t do either.

Jamie: But he’s always been like that, with that self-deprecating attitude, which is quite nice really, but I could always see the potential, but it was hard to push him to do it, at first.

Matt: It was weird because one minute I was singing on demos, then three months later we were playing for Alan McGee’s club night, with him watching us, then a month after that we played to 6000 people at the Coronet in London. Then I thought to myself, I’m actually a singer now, which was quite strange.

So, did the band take off quite quickly? Or was it a ten-year overnight success?
Matt: Early on we got a lot of attention from working with Jagz Kooner, whose just remixed a track we’ve done with Gary Numan. He was a big hero of mine when he was in Sabres of Paradise. Jamie struck up that relationship with him, so he was a big supporter of us, which obviously gained us a lot of interest, both industry wise and from his peers, such as Eddy Temple-Morris and loads of other people. So early on we had a lot of heat on us.

Jamie: We removed ourselves from that situation because, like Matt said, it happened so quickly. When we first started, we started putting demos together, which was around the MySpace boom, and we messaged Alan McGee on MySpace and said, “Listen to these tunes” and he said to come and play his club night. At that time we hadn’t even got a live set together, let alone a band, or even ever hired a van to travel to London to play a gig. We’d never really done it, we’d just done stuff locally. All of a sudden we had something to deliver, but we hadn’t even time to write anything that we thought was of worth, really. So we had to remove ourselves, and a lot of people said, “What the hell are you doing? Why aren’t you doing this? Why aren’t you doing that?” We could have taken a very different path, but if we had we wouldn’t be writing the quality of material that we are now, because we wouldn’t still be around because it would have been a flash in the pan kind of thing, which we never wanted to do. We wanted to build it slowly and foster those kind of relationships and…

Matt: …work with people that we care about, who respect us and who we respect back, rather than someone who is looking at the clock and being paid by the hour.

Jamie: We’re not doing it because a PR company said, “This’ll be a good hook up for you guys to do.” Or a record company that’s got another act on the label and thinks they’ll put these two bands on tour because they’ll sell more albums for our label. It’s never been about that. It takes longer when you do everything yourself, which is what we do. We put everything out through our own label. Matt produces everything. I look after the social networking, the visual and management side of things. We cross over at the point where it needs it, and finish each other’s jobs off. We’ve each got our thing that we do, but we can’t do it without each other.

Matt: It’s a real good relationship. I’m really lucky creatively in that I can pretty much say, “There” and Jamie will accept it and put a guitar part on, and that’s the song. It works quite well because we’ve both been in bands before. Since bands started they’ve always had the issues of creative problems, but Jamie’s good with the visual side of things, and it’s great that he gets involved with that with his friend Stuart Semple, who we’ve done the artwork collaboration with, and we’re going to continue to work with. It’s a really healthy way of working, and it creates a great product at the end of it because it’s all made completely in-house by myself, with Jamie and Stuart doing the artwork. We’ve got Tim and Dave Bascombe to mix the records, because it was a bit out of my depth at that point, in delivering a really good mix.

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Your sound is very rich so it’s going to need a lot of work for it to come out how you want it to.
Matt: It’s very symphonic, in terms of lots of layers and loops, and very precise in terms of how things work with each other. If one’s out, the other might sound a bit odd. I’m sometimes guilty of overloading parts, where Tim and Dave made those parts sit in more than I could do – “You don’t need that in there, it’ll sound better if it comes in there.” That’s great and it’s real healthy, and those guys were fantastic and they did it for… compared to the fees that they usually get, it was ridiculous, and they did it out of love for the music, which was great.

Technology has come to a point where it is much easier for people to do it for themselves.
Matt: It does, but I think that with technology being so cheap, it has created a lot of bad music.

Not only bad music, but also bad movies, bad design…
Matt: Everyone thinks they can buy a Mac and Logic, and they’re a producer. Sometimes it’s not the case. However, 15 years ago, our band wouldn’t have been able to exist the way we do things. On the live sets it would be very different. We’d probably have to have ten people doing the job our synth player does with some sequencers, plus what I play live on the keyboard, and certainly the guitar chains that Jamie has, it’s about 16-17 effects. It’s quite intense.

Jamie: It’s quite in-depth now. We spent a lot of time on it. Being the kind of geeks that we are, sitting in our room.

Your music is very cinematic. Would you like to get into film scoring?
Jamie: Last night we were talking about something I’m trying to put the feelers out for at the moment, doing music for an animation is something we’ve both wanted to do for quite a while, and scoring for soundtracks, we’d definitely love to move into that kind of world. We find it quite easy to do that kind of thing. I don’t mean it arrogantly, it’s just that if you enjoy doing it, you get lost in it. Because of the way we write, the way Matt writes and I come up with the parts, it is always inspired by visual references, which is why we have such a strong relationship with Stuart, so I think it would transcend very well on to film soundtracks, animation and a lot of the stuff we have online that I’ve put together via our favourite movies, footage and art projects. I’ve got in touch with people online and said, “Do you mind if I use this footage to put together a video for ourselves?” Editing in that way gives a different element to what we create. It’s definitely something we’d like to get into.

Matt: When I first started I had an Akai S20 sampler, a Tascam tape machine and a Korg Electribe. That’s how I started off making electronic music, because I used to be a drummer. Because I had a bad hand, I had to stop playing the drums so I had to find something that I loved. Bladerunner was always a film I’d loved, and that’s how I got into it, starting off scoring very simple symphonic pieces, and that’s been a big influence on the sound of the band. I can’t play any instrument well, only to a standard that is suitable for a recording, but enough to write a tune with. That’s how the sound of the band evolved, in that it was very loopy because that’s how I worked. I’d play something once on my guitar and loop it, rather than having to try and play it. It’s actually worked out very well, and back from all those years ago that’s how the sound evolved.

Jamie: It was definitely a really good learning curve for me as well because I’d come from the background of, you learn to play the guitar and there’s all this theory that goes with it. All these virtuoso guitarists, but if you weren’t as good as them then you weren’t a guitarist, whereas the way we started to write, it was impossible for me to play like that. I had to learn to play in a completely different way, which again was using all the techniques, which I’d been told was the wrong way of doing things – making the guitar sound like a synth. That was really good for me, it improved me because I was doing something that I shouldn’t have been doing, and that’s formed the way we do things now.

How did you end up touring with Gary Numan?
Jamie: Eddy Temple-Morris, the XFM DJ and a long-time supporter of ours, invited us to co-host one of his shows. We were having a bit of a sound clash; he’d hit us with a tune and we’d have to hit him back with one. Matt dropped Melt, the Ade Fenton remix, and Eddy said, “Wow. Gary Numan. I haven’t heard that track for ages. I think he’d really love your album.” So I said, make sure you get it to Gary. Within five minutes, a few people online had started Tweeting about it with the hashtag #getittogary. So a bit of a campaign started, and Eddy did put it across, and Gary came back and quite liked it. Actually he corrected me the other day and told me off. He said, “I didn’t say I liked it, I said I absolutely loved it and it was the best album I’d heard all year.” He said the other night that the track we recently wrote with him, he told us it was his favourite song ever, or one of his favourite songs ever, which is crazy. That’s how the relationship started. He invited us along on tour, which has been great for us. It’s been brilliant. Not just because the shows have been great, but the atmosphere between band and crew is a really nice family atmosphere. It’s going to be really sad when it finishes.

Those guys have been around for ages, so they’ve nothing to prove and don’t need to really come over with attitude.
Matt: True. And Gary’s an absolutely lovely man, and his wife Gemma is absolutely amazing. She makes us feel so welcome and at ease. She comes to all the shows. She’s always Tweeting about how much she’s looking forward to seeing us. It’s been great.

Jamie: It has been odd, in a good way, because, like you say, they’ve nothing to prove, there isn’t that kind of competition element you get with some bands. You speak to some band members with other acts you’re touring with, and they’ll say, “Caught your set”, and you’ll know they didn’t because they’ve been in the dressing room all night. The venues we’ve been playing, Gary and the band’s been coming out onto the balconies, and you look up and see them all getting into it. They genuinely want you to do well, which is a lovely thing to have because you don’t get it often in this industry. Gary’s put his neck out quite a bit. He could have had anyone from any record label who could have paid him any money to promote them to his audience, but it was genuinely for the love of it, and mutual respect. In the industry climate that we’re in, it takes some balls to do that.

Matt: It sums up his ethos, which is very similar to ours in terms of being an independent record company and being self-sufficient. He really likes that in us. He’s Gary Numan, he’s untouchable. He’s an amazing man and we’re at the very start of our career and he obviously wants to help us and steer us along the right path.

Do you like touring?
Matt: Love this tour.

Jamie: Because we look at in a completely different way from when we first started out, it’s been an absolute blast, and it’s going to be quite sad to see it finish. It’s been work, but it’s been enjoyable work. We could have ruined it for ourselves if we’d gone out and hammered it every night.

But that’s part of being professional.
Matt: Five years ago I’d drink a litre of vodka before going on stage. Now I don’t have any.

Jamie: The difference is people come up to you at the end of the show and say how great it was, and you remember how great it was the next day.

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Everything seems to be going great for you at the moment. Do you feel lucky to be where you are?
Jamie: We do feel lucky, because we know luck is in it, but part of me feels like we deserve it as well because we know how much work we’ve put into it. Everyone that’s doing it is because it is part of a relationship that we’ve got with these people. There’s a lot of emotional attachment to what we do. We’re not just some kids writing tunes that we want to put out and sell, it’s more than that to us. We do feel lucky, but at the same time, we’ve created it all ourselves, and we’ve worked damn hard to do it. We’re comfortable where we are, and we’d like it to grow even more.

In this web-obsessed world, there is surprisingly little to be found about you except your own pages on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Soundcloud, MySpace etc.
Jamie: That was always intentional. There’s so many bands out there and it’s oversaturated with, “We’re the greatest band in the world”…

Matt: To us it was, let’s direct our fans and a few likeminded people to a few places where they can see us.

Jamie: It’s there, and there’s something there for you if you want it.

Do you rely mostly on word of mouth?
Matt: This is the first time we’ve toured this record. The record was finished 18 months ago, and it’s taken us this long to get everything together. Something always comes from something, so we’re looking to take it as far as we can, but we wanted to keep things very simple for people, although they will always find thousands of articles on officers, of an army orientation, rather than the band. The profiles growing, so that’s great.

Jamie: It will grow, and it is one of those things where, because we’re self sufficient and we are just starting, we made a decision quite a while ago that we don’t need to chase a label. I think, when you’re younger and you’re inexperienced and a bit naive, from all the stories you read you think the way to become successful is to get a record deal, get an advance, become rich and that’s it. That’s not the way any more.

They’ve clearly been reading the wrong stories because if you do that you’ll be paying the record company for the rest of your life.
Jamie: When you’re younger, and you see these idols and you don’t even know what it’s like. As soon as we made the decision that it wasn’t about making the money, that’s not the end game. If we do, that would be absolutely brilliant. But if we can sustain ourselves making a living doing what we love doing. What we’re doing now, no one can ever take that away. We own it, and everything we make we put back into it to sustain what we think’s worthwhile and what people like. We can do that forever. We don’t need a record company to give us 150 grand to do it. We can do the record on a couple of grand. I don’t know if you’ve seen the stuff we did with the book sets with Stuart Semple. They’re a fantastic product, aesthetically pleasing and interactive. The person that buys it gets a really great insight into the creative process. You’re not going to get that from buying an album from HMV or downloading it, so we’ll always be doing that kind of thing.

You do need to do that now, so that people get a package that is something unique. The whole art of sleeve design has almost disappeared, but it can still be done in interesting ways, even with CDs.
Jamie: That’s one of the things we wanted to do with Petals, the track we’ve done with Gary. We could have quite easily put it out as a download, we wouldn’t have had to pay anything to do that, there would have been no overheads, and we know everyone would have downloaded it on this tour. But we didn’t. We restricted it to one hundred really special, limited edition copies. One track on three CDs, with information on how you can donate to a really important charity called CALM. We knew we could get press to raise awareness for this charity, and we knew that’s what it was for. Gary’s fans and our fans now have this really limited, special thing. There’s only a hundred copies in the world, there won’t ever be a repressing of that package. That’s something that’s really nice, and if I was a collector that is something I would love to have. We made it, we did it all and it’s there and they get a bit of the work we put in, for being a fan.

Do younger people coming into the industry need to look at why and how they are doing it?
Matt: There’s still an old school going around, and there’s a new school of people who are working in the industry, and the old school is panicking and struggling to catch up with all these new ways of doing things. As a young man, like Jamie was saying, we’ve both had record deals in the past that have gone belly up almost instantly. Having wasted six months of your life waiting for something to happen, there should be a lot more awareness that it’s not about that. You need to keep the band unit strong. The main thing is to get a core unit together. Know how it works. You need to know what to expect as well. Our management, Angus, has been great with us over the years; helping us, working with us, educating us and arguing with us about how to do it, or how not to do it. It’s a very volatile industry and it does ruin people’s lives because they get a taste of success or something, and spend the rest of their lives wishing, whatever. I think that if you do it all yourself it’s more organic and you can do what you want. It just depends at what scale you want to do it and what you’re trying to achieve.

Jamie: You’ve got to manage your expectations. If you think that because you’re in a band that you’re going to live that dream, get signed and make loads of money, you need to check in with yourself, and realise that happens to very, very few people. Even though the Internet has been great at giving people the tools to do things themselves, there’s so many more people doing it now, so the chances are even less. As a result of that there is even less money in the industry so there are less chances of being picked up. I remember when we first started, we were offered record deals and went to record company offices; Warner Brothers, Parlophone that have offices full of people, press departments, marketing departments. Now there are four or five people working in these companies. So you can see that everyone has had to scale it back, but like Matt said, you have to have a specific goal. There’s a lot of people out there that will help and give you advice, and help you get there…

Matt: You just need to build those relationships, with respect, and making a good product, and having a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve. If those people feel the same they’re going to help you because they’ll want to be part of it with you.

Jamie: Find out where the communities are, because they’re already established. There’s no point in becoming a rockabilly band and setting up in a rockabilly community because there’s already one there. Go there and find those people. There’s no point setting up a forum to do with guitar pedals, because there’s loads of them. Go and speak to the people in the places where these relationships are already taking place, and build your connections there. That’s how we did it. All the connections we’ve got are longstanding connections. We meet new people all the time, who are in to what we do, but the core of it is people who have similar outlooks, similar ways of working, who we met very early on. There’s a trust element. They’ve stuck with us and we’ve stuck with them. It’s like the relationship we have with Jagz, you have a period of time, like when we did the single with Jagz and you’ve finished working and that relationship doesn’t peter out, but you don’t see each other every day or every week, but you still keep in touch. Then, like now, as soon as you’re ready to do something again, they’re always there because you’ve got that trust with them. They know you can trust them and they know you’ll be there for them.

There’s a lot of musicians who have made a shitload of money over the years, do you think they should be setting up mentoring schemes for young talent so they don’t have to rely on the corporate side of the industry?
Jamie: I think it would be great because they are the real people. There are a lot of people that do it already. Jagz for one.

Matt: I think that’s the role of a producer now, in a lot of ways. To be a producer you need to have a lot of money and a lot of time to go and find these bands, and you’ve pretty much got to present a finished product. That’s certainly what Jagz and Tim Holmes did with us. They schooled us in the way of business, in the way of synthesis, in all sorts of different ways. If I could go back 15 years and do a course on music and law and music law and music management, and I wanted to be a musician, if someone had told me I needed to do that to be a musician, rather than be blasé, you’ll never be a musician. You just think. I’ll go and buy loads of guitars and loads of amps, and go and get a coke habit. There should be some kind of scheme, but, financially, is the government interested in the arts that much?

Not so much the government, but musicians that have more money than they know what to do with, to put something back into the industry.
Jamie: I see what you’re saying, but the people who have made a lot of money in the industry are coming towards the end of their careers. With the industry as it is now and has been for the past 10 or 15 years, it’s awfully hard to change culture or change a person if they’ve got their lot and feel they’ve worked hard. There are some good people, like what George Martin’s done in the past. I know he’s given a lot of advice to producers and people like that. There is a lot of information out there, but you’ve got to go looking for it: Musicians Union, PRS (Performing Rights Society), there are a lot of people that will give the advice. I do agree, some of the musicians and artists that have made millions of pounds should be investing in that. There are a few that do and a few that don’t. I think the people that are around now, our current peers, do what they can because they know it’s going to benefit them if they mentor someone who becomes successful. It’s such an unpredictable industry.

Where do you see yourselves going from here? Or do you just want to carry on as you are?
Jamie: We just want to carry on doing the best things that we can, for as long as we can. No one can take it away from us, so we’ll just keep doing it. We’re going to do our own tour, I think.

Matt: The second record is looking very strong, and a lot of the work is done on that already.

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interviews, music

YES SIR BOSS Interview

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Yes Sir Boss are a six-piece Bristol-based band that play an original, high-energy, ska-influenced music with a big, brassy sound. We first saw them in the summer, along with Dizraeli and The Small Gods, opening for another of our favourites, Molotov Jukebox. Both bands share a similar sound and their live music is impossible to not move to.

The band released their first album on 8 October, on Joss Stone’s Stone’d label – the West Country songstress features on their forthcoming single Mrs No 1, which will be released in the new year. The album was launched with a gig at the renowned Jazz Cafe in Camden, and it certainly proved that they are one of this country’s most exciting live bands. They may not be a household name yet, but once their infectious rhythms get better known, there’ll be no stopping them. Listen to (and buy) their album on Bandcamp. To find out about their forthcoming shows visit www.yessirboss.com/shows.

We caught up with band, or at least half of it – Matthew Sellors (guitar, lead vocals), Tom First (trumpet, keyboards) and Luke Potter (guitar, vocals) before their Jazz Cafe show.

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You’re a Bristol band…
Tom: We live there. We’re from all over. I’m from Yorkshire, and these two are from Devon. We met at uni eight years ago, at Dartington College of Arts in Devon and we made the move to Bristol just under five years ago.

Why did you choose Bristol?
Tom: We started in uni and had already developed a bit of a following in Devon, but we wanted to stay in the south west so moved to Bristol because it had good access to Devon and to London, and it’s a really cool city.

Matt: It’s got the south west vibe, and we’re all from Totness, where we met together at university. I think the south west vibe is like no other, it’s really cool and down-to-earth, fun time.

Luke: Also, in Bristol were all these bands that were doing the things we were trying to aspire to. We were just starting, and trying to figure out the kind of music we wanted to do, and this scene was already in existence in Bristol. When we got there, we got loads of help from the bands that were already there.

How much did it influence your music being there?
Luke: At first it was loads because that scene there with all those horn bands and reggae bands. Because it was really buzzing and going off, we fell into that quite easily. As we’ve grown up we’ve definitely tried to push ourselves in a direction.

Matt: From when we all started playing music together the music has evolved a lot, but it’s quite a natural sound that just ended up happening. But bands like Smerins Antisocial Club and Babyhead, who were really cool. First time I saw Babyhead I thought they were absolutely amazing. They were definitely an influence.

Tom: That was one of the really nice things, was the fact those other bands, it wasn’t as if they were rivals. They welcomed us, helped us out and got us gigs. We borrowed their horn players a few times, and become good mates with them all really.

Matt: That whole scene, there’s no arrogance whatsoever. Everyone’s really helpful. We’ve only done a few gigs with Babyhead, but the first time we played with them, which was years ago in Plymouth, and they were really keen on starting a little label and immediately they potentially wanted to do a single with us and sign us to their label. It’s always been like that. Everyone always wants to give each other a leg up.

Tom: The camaraderie thing, that transfers over to the festival scene. We do gigs with both Molotov [Jukebox] and Dizraeli [and the Small Gods], and a whole host of other bands, and they’re all our mates really. You see them at loads of different festivals around the country, and it’s really nice to have those friendships develop through being in bands. Shame it’s not the same within band. (mass laughter)

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It’s always fascinated me how, when bands get together, they gel. How did you guys get together and realise that you had a rapport and wanted to play together?
Luke: Drinking helps. Because we were at Dartington for that long, where we were all studying music, it was very much a case of; if you study law you want to work in law. If you study to be a doctor you want to be a doctor. We studied music so we wanted to play music. While we were at uni it wasn’t particularly realistic thing to think about doing, but as soon as you’re there you think you have a have a go at this. We did, and we haven’t stopped yet, and we’re still alive, and we still like each other.

Aren’t half the band missing?
Tom: They’re locked up in the other room.

Did it really help studying music?
Luke: I don’t think any of us wanted to be composers or teachers or anything like that. I think we all went to uni to get in a band.

Matt: I didn’t go there to get a distinction or burying myself in books. It’s an obscure uni; it’s not a normal one. I’m just like all the other fledgling guitarist wannabes, that was me and I just managed to blague my way into this uni for this degree, and I think it was the same for all of us. We got on to it and all we wanted to do was play music, get pissed and have a good time. And that’s what we did.

So it was like an art school where you do what you want to do and come out with a piece of paper at the end?
Matt: We had three years with no job, in the countryside, studying, playing music and having fun with your mates. It’s like, some people go travelling – we went to uni, dossed around and played music. Luckily, out of it we’ve got a band that’s still playing.

You managed to do it before all the big fees came in?
Luke: I don’t know. I think my student loan is earning about a million pounds a year in interest. It’s never going to get paid off at this rate.

Tom: Now it’s nine grand for a year or three grand a term. That started three years after we started, so we just missed out – luckily. I wouldn’t have gone. If you’re going to start out with 29 grand of guaranteed debt, before any of your living costs.

Matt: Especially if you’re doing music. It’s not like you’re guaranteed a job at the end of it. The only thing you are guaranteed is you can sign on.

Luke: Hey kids, go out and get yourself a guitar, a drinking habit and sign on.

That’s the way musicians used to do it.
Matt: A lot of them went and studied art. John Lennon studied art, Bowie studied art, Freddie Mercury studied art, and then they formed bands and were biding their time.

Back then, the music colleges were only teaching classical music, or if you were lucky, jazz.
Luke: That was the thing about Dartington, it was contemporary in every single sense of the word.

Tom: The course was basically what you made of it. They wanted you to become you as a musician or artist, and discover what area you wanted to specialise in. Ours was just booze really.

Luke: As long as you could justify it, they didn’t mind. If you could justify why booze was the most important thing at that time and that place it was OK.

Tom: But if you go to a conservatoire then you’re going to play properly. We didn’t.

Did you actually study composition?
Tom: I did. These two did performance. As I said, they allowed you to do whatever you wanted, and they wouldn’t discourage anything.

Matt: As long as you could justify it, that was the key.

It’s the same with art school. You could turn out any old piece of conceptual shit, but as long as you could justify it, they were happy. Saying that, having studied, has it made your music more sophisticated when it comes to writing songs?
Luke: Absolutely.

Matt: It’s a mixed bag really. If I could go back in time and not go to uni, and come back and tell you if it was more sophisticated, I would. I don’t think it does because I didn’t pay very much attention at uni. I think it helped me get where I am, but I don’t think I learned a hell of a lot.

But did it help with arrangements and so on knowing the proper structure…
Luke: I think it helped with musicianship, because there wasn’t a massive amount of people there. When you had to put on a show at the end of the year, which every student had to do, you only had this little pool of musicians to pick from, so everybody played everything. You had a go if you wanted to sing 45 minutes of soul records, and you’d play 45 minutes of soul records. If you had someone how wanted to sing 45 minutes of heavy metal, you’d play 45 minutes of heavy metal, or whatever else. You pick up all these things from other musicians that were around you, and it all rubs off. I guess the musicianship really, really helped. I think that when it comes to us sitting in a room and bashing out a song, you definitely learned.

Tom: You learn collaboration, which they tried to encourage. They teach you to be flexible. There’s six of us and it can be quite hard work when you’re trying to accommodate every single persons opinion within a piece of music.

Luke: But we definitely try.

Tom: And that has been influenced through Dartington.

Luke: We were very lucky to have that. There are a lot of bands out there where one person definitely takes charge. It’s their lot. I don’t think there is any one person in Yes Sir Boss that would stand for that, at all. Because of that, we’re giving and forgiving. Everyone listens and we get there in the end. That’s what you get with the music that we produce, is a real sense of every single person and a flavour of everyone’s personality.

Matt: I always wanted to make sure that everyone had a bit of ownership. If I ever write a song, then people write their own parts. Obviously people can have a bit of guidance along the way and help each other, but everyone can have their own parts. Everyone’s got a piece of it and they can feel a bit of attachment to the song, then everyone believes in it. If you get told exactly what to play, it’s going to be pretty soulless. You’re just being a session musician if you are constantly being told what to play throughout the process of it. That was important to us and it’s why we have quite a democratic approach to writing. It works, and makes us what we are.

As long as your names on the publishing… (mass laughter)
Luke: Even that is totally ridiculous. We tore up the rule book when it came to publishing splits. We’ve shown our partnership agreement to a lot of people and they’re like, “What the fuck is this? Really, you do that?” It’s complicated but it’s fair. It’s completely fair.

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Are you quite independent within the industry?
Luke: We got a deal. Joss [Stone] signed us up a couple of years ago, which has been really helpful in terms of giving us the opportunity to concentrate fully on the band. We all stopped working over two years ago. But she doesn’t interfere creatively. She is encouraging and supportive. She introduced us to an amazing producer, who happened to help us with this album, and he had God knows how much more experience than us. He helped shape it and managed the whole scenario really well, in terms of people and time and the music. He kept us all up like tiny balloons in the times we were there making this record, and he sculpted it into this beautiful thing that we are totally proud of.

Do you think it’s important to have a good producer behind you?
Luke: To have a subjective viewpoint from somebody who knows how to put their ideas and your ideas into practice is so vital.

Tom: And someone you can respect, to the point where they’re telling you not to play something you’re going to question it and obviously respect their opinion. It would be easier to get a mate along and them to say, “Maybe you shouldn’t do this”, but with someone that has that sort of authoritative personality, I think that’s pretty vital to get the best out of you.

Luke: It’s also so difficult when you’re in it because your vision is completely clouded. You’re in it and you’re feeling it; to everyone else, what does it sound like? Until you go home and stick it in your stereo, or put it in you headphones, you don’t actually know what it sounds like. If you’ve got that other pair of ears in there, and they go, “That sounds shit”, you can kick and stamp and scream as much as you want, but he’s probably right.

Are you going on tour to promote the album?
Tom: We’re just trying to push it out there, form ground level to get it to as many ears as we can, then there’s plans for next year to go overseas. To continent: Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and those sorts of countries.

They are very open to UK bands, probably more so than the UK.
Luke: They definitely are. There’s so much going on in England, there’s so many bands every night of the week. They say that 10,000 unsigned bands play in London every week. You go to Europe and they spoil you rotten. It’s very nice.

Would you like to go to the States? Your music would really be appreciated out there. It has quite an American vibe to it.
Luke: It has. It’s influences. It goes back to what we were talking about everyone’s personality in the music, and everyone’s influences of what they grew up on really shines through. A lot us are really into grunge, but also anything that came out of the ’60s and ’70s, the songwriters from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, everybody’s totally into that. There’s not one of us that doesn’t like The Beatles, The Stones, Bowie or Free, even if they are all English.

Tom: Then there’s the whole soul movement from that era, and I take quite a lot of inspiration from that. The arrangements on a lot of the Motown records are amazing. Smoky Robinson’s fabulous.

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Sinead O’Connor at St Pancras Church, London

Sinead is a rebel. Her quest for truth in both the spiritual and political realms are often a matter of public record, as have been some of her more personal tribulations, and these have always been reflected in her music. It seems ages since she did any gigs in London, and certainly a long time since she was headlining in major venues. Last night she brought her rebel music to a very intimate gig in London, as a warm up for her Crazy Baldhead tour happening in the new year (LSO St Luke’s on 17 January, Elgar Room at Royal Albert Hall on 15 February, and Barbican on 27 March. These gigs are to promote her new album How About I Be Me (And You Be You) and the single 4th and Vine (released 28 January 2013).

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Breaking Glass DVD review

“Video killed the radio star”, and if YouTube’s status as the world’s most popular music player is anything to go by, The Buggles’ 1979 hit song was more prophetic than they could have imagined. At the same time, as punk was becoming the more sophisticated and melodic new wave, an indie film about the music industry was taking shape under producer Dodi Fayed (yes, that one), and featuring upcoming musical star Hazel O’Connor in the lead role.

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Pepe Deluxé debut London gig

There’s something exciting about finding new music, even if that music isn’t particularly new. This isn’t a case of uncovering some old blues or soul singer from yesteryear. This happens to be a Finnish band making their first appearance in the UK, despite the fact they have been around since 1996, with their albums getting critical acclaim, as well as appearing in award-winning ads for Levi’s and Lee Jeans (but, ironically, not Pepe). They’ve even done remixes for the likes of Tom Jones, Eminem and The Cardigans.

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Breton play Scala London

Scala has been in Kings Cross for a long time before the zone became a hub of international traffic, but it still wears its badge of honour from the area’s less than salubrious past. Despite all the so-called regeneration it hasn’t become the hipster hive that Shoreditch is, which is somehow reassuring, and seems about as likely to happen as Streatham is of becoming as trendy as neighbouring Balham. With that in mind, it is almost reassuring to go to a gig in the area where there is still a remnant of danger.

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Yes Sir Boss Album Launch

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While the Jazz Cafe in Camden might not have the same kudos as some of Soho’s more illustrious venues, such as Ronnie Scott’s or Pizza Express, it has certainly built itself a solid reputation over the years and has been host to some of the more fringe elements of the jazz world, such as rap and hip-hop. This makes it an ideal venue for Bristol-based six-piece Yes Sir Boss to hold the launch gig for their long awaited album Desperation State on Joss Stone’s Stone-d label.

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Neurotic Mass Movement Single Launch

Neurotic Mass Movement, who played at our Free Pussy Riot Benefit in September, launched their new single Tragic Machine to a packed room at The Old Blue Last last night. While hundreds of Shoreditch hipsters were queuing in the cold autumn air to get into the latest fashionable (and overpriced) clubs, we were treated to four fantastic bands with no cover charge whatsoever. This was a gig patronised by discerning fans of quality, original independent music, and not people simply looking for a freebie on a Friday night.

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Cold Specks @ Union Chapel

After a long time on the film festival circuit I have recently returned to the world of music gigs for the first time since my twenties. I’ve seen a good variety of venues, from dingy pubs to more iconic ones that all seem to have O2 appended to them. My first visit to the Union Chapel in London was something of a surprise, principally because it is still a functioning church, so it was a totally seated event, in the church pews, which are not built for comfort. To add to the civilised nature of the event, there was even ushers selling ice-cream from trays, like you used to see in all cinemas.

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Beware of Mr Baker

Although The Beatles and the Stones dominated sixties’ music in Britain (and the rest of the world), their drummers were very much in the background. When it came to world of rock percussion there were three names at the forefront; Keith Moon, John Bonham and Ginger Baker. Ensconced behind their double bass drums and a sea of cymbals and toms they were the real wild men of rock, given to all manner of excesses. In Moon’s case, his infamy far exceeded his skills on the skins. Bonham was undoubtedly a master of rock drumming, but it was Ginger Baker, with his origins in jazz and a fascination with African rhythms, who was the greatest innovator of the era. Beware of Mr Baker, showing in the Documentary Competition at London Film Festival, follows the life of the rock legend (and the only survivor of the three) from his childhood in South London up to the present day.

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Maverick Sabre @ Brixton Academy

As if writing about music wasn’t hard enough, we feel the need to somehow label and classify it. like biologists do the flora and fauna. In less complicated days there was classical (orchestral), jazz, rock, pop and folk/country, but as music grew into an industry (as in business) those genres developed their own sub-genres and sub-sub-genres, then fusions and hybrids of those genres. With that in mind, trying to come up with a generic label for last night’s gig at the (O2) Brixton Academy was a bit tricky. Urban (whatever that means in musical terms) or MOBO would probably cover it in broad terms, but whatever it was, it was some of the best of what London and Britain has to offer, and Brixton, the home of Soul II Soul, was a fitting venue for it, even if most of the acts were from North London.

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Lucy Rose album launch

As the cold, damp autumn evenings start to settle in, there was a little ray of warmth as the English rose that is Lucy Rose launched her debut album. An enthusiastic crowd packed into the Rough Trade East store in London’s famous Brick Lane on Monday evening to hear a set covering most of the songs off the album. Made up of delicate, slightly melancholy melodies, they still have a hint of summer optimism, rather than a dark night of the soul that winter can bring, with Lines being one of the most upbeat.

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film, interviews

NINA PALEY Interview

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Nina Paley is a New York based comic artist and animator, best known for her feature film Sita Sings the Blues, a colourful, imaginative and humorous retelling of the ancient Hindu scripture the Ramayana, the story of the divine incarnation Rama who is exiled to the forest with his wife Sita and his brother Laxmana. Sita is kidnapped by the demon king Ravana and eventually rescued by her husband. Made in a variety of styles, it features songs by 1920s’ singer Annette Hanshaw to express Sita’s woes. The film also chronicles the artist’s own story that led to the making of the film.

The film was an instant success on the film festival circuit, and wherever it was shown, winning several awards along the way, but in an unusual move for a modern filmmaker, Nina decided to make the film available to everyone, releasing it under a Creative Commons licence. Dedicated to this distribution ethic, Nina turned down a distribution offer from Netflix, one of the biggest distributors of online films in the US, because they would not, or could not, remove the DRM that she is opposed to.

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Why did you choose to animate the story of Sita and Ram?
Oh my goodness, I was so moved by it, and I had this horrendous break-up I was going through…

As portrayed in the film.
Exactly. So I went to India and read my first Ramayana there, and was fascinated with it, and I went through this break-up, and I felt like everything I saw was the Ramayana. I couldn’t get away from it. I cheesy way to say it would be, “I didn’t choose the story, it chose me”.

How did you go about developing the style for the film?
The style for the musical numbers I started while I was in Trivandrum, but I had no idea I was going to make a film. I was just drawing as a way to process all the images that were around me, and I thought maybe I’ll just do a couple of little drawings, or a little comic book or something, and that style just kind of appeared while I was in India. The rest of the styles in the film – I knew I wanted to use a lot of styles because, prior to making Sita, all of my short film I’d made in different styles. I like to work in lots of different styles to keep myself interested. I was reading as many Ramayanas as I could, and looking at as much Ramayana related art as I could, and I know there is a huge tradition of Ramayana related art from around the world, and there’s all these different, gorgeous styles from different regions and times, and I wanted to put some of that into the film, and I guess that’s what I did.

There’s also the Amar Chitra Katha comics as well…
That was the first Ramayana I ever saw.

Were there problems with Hindu fundamentalists when the film came out?
Fundamentalists were opposed to it from the beginning, and they’re still opposed to it. I suspect they assume because it’s a feature film it has a lot of publicity and they can ride on that publicity, but the fact is the only publicity it has is word of mouth. They are actually generating free publicity for the film and probably benefiting the film more by complaining about than they would if they ignored it.

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You talk about the word-of-mouth aspect of promoting the film, is that the main way you’ve got audiences for it, apart from festival screenings?
Yeah. The film is free. I gave it to the audience in April of 2009, so it belongs to the audience and they share it with each other, and it spreads almost entirely through word of mouth. The audience includes all sorts of people and entities, and sometimes the audience includes movie reviewers, but I don’t have any paid PR people that are hitting up the movie reviewers. I’m still not sure how movie reviewers work. I know when the film had its theatrical run in New York, the New York Times was obligated to write a review of it. I guess certain papers write reviews of films that are running for a week or more in the city. So there’s word of reviewers, word of mouth. I would say the main way it is spreading is virally, where people see it, and if they like it they’ll send it to other people. I’ve met people in real life who’ve told me. “I loved your film and I’ve sent it to all my friends to see it”, so that seems to work quite well. Hopefully their friends will tell their friends.

What made you decide to make it a free film? Logically, it seems counterproductive.
It’s actually super productive. It’s hyper-productive. Basically, I wanted the film to be seen, and the existing models for releasing independent films lead to a lot of great films that just don’t get seen, because they don’t have a way to spread because of the way copyright works, and so-called intellectual property works, is by restricting people’s access to a work. You put a wall around something and then people can only get through that wall if they go through an authorised channel and pay for it. With small films, that tends to be really hard to do, it’s not really easy to find. It’s not usually worth the expense to keep it in cinemas, so even if people are happy to pay whatever to see the film, there’s not enough people that know about the film to actually have it running in the cinema. I saw so many films die in obscurity on the festival circuit, I didn’t want that to happen to my film. Of course, there was the whole issue of clearing the old songs.

The whole point is that people can see the film and the more that see it, the more the value of the film increases. When it runs in a cinema, the more people will pay for cinema tickets because we can’t afford the film, and they have to know about it some way. Seeing a film in the cinema is very different to seeing it online, especially as most people who have already seen it, have seen it in some other form. They pay to see it in a cinema for the cinema experience. None of this would happen if they weren’t sharing the film with each other, because no one would know about the film, and I’ve seen that happen to plenty of great films, and I didn’t want it to happen to mine. So I freed it.

You are quite outspoken about copyright, is this the same issue about getting the film seen and don’t want it controlled by corporations?
I want people to be able to see it. There’s cultural value and money value, and there’s price, which is something different from value. Cultural works have more value the more they are seen, and I need to distinguish free. Free has two meanings in English, there’s gratis, as in free beer, and libera, which free, as in free speech. I still charge money for copies. When it’s in cinemas I still charge money for tickets. We charge for any scarce goods associated with the film, it’s just that the content is free. Anyone can quote the film, copy the film, build on the film, and all that. It’s such a simple concept that we’re not used to it after a couple of hundred years of copyright. I think of my film as just like Shakespeare. Wouldn’t it be cool to be Shakespeare? It would be awesome to be Shakespeare. If Shakespeare came back today, would he be a pauper? No he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be getting royalties on his plays because they are in the public domain, but he would get enormous speaking fees, for example, if he wanted to speak. He would get gifts. All these fears that artists have about, “We’re gonna be poor, we’re gonna die on the street”, are just not true. But royalties represent price – they don’t even represent price. Royalties aren’t how most artists make their living, they’re not how I make my living. I wanted to free the film because I was worried about the cultural value of the film and I wanted it to have cultural value. What surprised me was I’d made significantly more money freeing the film.

In China and Brazil, for example, musicians don’t charge for their music CDs because they get pirated, so they make their money from live performances and merchandise, and they are two of the strongest economies in the world at the moment.
I actually charge for DVDs, but I charge for the copies that I sell, but I don’t charge for the copies that you make. It doesn’t cost me anything if someone makes a copy of my film. It costs me something if I make a copy, so if I make a copy I will sell it to you for money and what I am charging you for is the copy. Not the content, but the copy. If you make a copy, I haven’t lost anything.

Which is so wonderfully expressed in that song you did, Copying Is Not Theft.


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You’re also doing your own Sita merchandising…
Other people could certainly do that, but nobody is. It’s weird. Anybody could make Sita merchandise, but no one is. It makes sense because the only reason people buy merchandise is to support the artist and they want to know they are supporting me. Also, making merchandise is a pain in the ass. Who wants to go through that pain in the ass? If they wait long enough I’ll go through it.

What about those bags, are they being made in India?
The bags are made in India, but they weren’t my idea. The bags were the idea of an organisation called Ubuntu at Work that is trying to come up with projects that these women artisans can make and can have some control over. The Sita bags were just an experiment. I didn’t ask them to make them, they came to me, and I said, “Sure, if you make them I’ll try and sell them on my website”. I’m more excited about the Sita dolls that are coming up, which are going to the appliquéd and embroidered Sita part, but instead of being on a bag they’ll be their own stuffed thing and they’ll be less expensive and hopefully interesting works of art. But that project is to support the artisans involved, not so much me. It’s not royalty generation, it’s not for profit.

Is it the same ethic as the movie, to support the creators and not the distributors?
Somewhat. It’s sort of a new thing. It was just a surprise that this organisation approached me. It was just an opportunity that came up and I was like, “Sure, I’ll check this out”. I don’t really know what to make of it, except that it’s interesting and we’ll see if people buy the stuff, and if they do these women will have more work, and if they don’t, they’ll come up with some other product.

Do you think it is important for artists to diversify into as many different areas as they can?
I don’t think all artists are suited to it. I basically do what I want to do and it happens that I enjoy, even though it’s a pain making merch I enjoy designing things, so I’m suited to it. I really don’t think this is a model, or a box, that one should try and fit into. It would be very cool if there were services for filmmakers who didn’t want to do this kind of work, who could get merch or other ancillary products without having to set up their own stores, and without having to sign licensing agreements. Most of the business models around film only work with restrictive licences. Rather substantial publishers were interested in doing a Sita graphic novel, which would have been great except they didn’t want it to be open licensed, so there’s no Sita book. However, there are publishers that do open license books, but they don’t do pop culture stuff. O’Reilly does lots of books, so it’s a pretty solid business model, but these pop culture publishers don’t believe it yet and it’s probably going to be a few years until they do. That’s just one example of the kind of service that could exist to support artists.

So you haven’t thought about going on the self-publishing or print-on-demand route?
The potential for exploitation is much, much greater than what I’m actually doing. Again, I would love to work with publishers, I would love to work with other merchandisers, but I’m sure there are others who could make much more merch and sell it to other people, but they’re not, probably because they’ve never worked with an open license before.

sitasingstheblues.com
questioncopyright.com
ninapaley.com

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