now i don't know bjork right

i was always raised to believe that charity is somewhat devalued if you cloak yourself in it. example, i give £5000 to birmingham dogs home and keep my mouth shut, that's charity. i give them £5000 then mention in an interview that i've saved five grands worth of cute lil puppy, what i've effectively done is paid £5000 for good pr.

and whilst the dogs themselves probably wont care either way, some of that charity s integrity is now invested in my public image; which may work in the short term, but i'm clearly the kind of cunt who boasts about how charitable he is in an effort to appear cool to joe public so they'll keep buying his shit.

ah. hello there, music industry. .

i just want to say, i think at least half the fuss and clamour being made over the Sony/PIAS fire is bullshit. there. i don't want to play down the actual loss; some labels have had their entire stock wiped out and it's potentially catastrophic for anyone who lives on a shoestring and is involved with with physical music stuffs.

tough times all round - is an overused and unhelpful phrase, but when our industry is dying and our cities are on fire, tis probably justified.

BUTTTTTTT

this is the same industry that brought you "return to live aid". nothing drives sales better than a palatable tragedy, the only exception here is this tragedy is somewhat exaggerated for dramatic purpose. You know the warehouse was insured right? I didn't, i had to use the google, and 5 pages later i found someone who wasn't alec empire referring to it.

so eventually, all them records will be paid for. losses compensated. I'm not saying that there won't be huge logistical problems and dashed dreams occurring as a result of product loss and the time insurance companies will take to settle, but all the claims of "disaster! label x looses £x000 of stock" are pretty disingenuous. The industry has a chance here to convert thousands of unsold cds into digital sales, and they're gunning for it, they're just leaving the "insured against fire" part out.

here's alec empire from atr (and twitter):

"did you know that labels destroy physical product all the time to save storage costs? every month. all over the planet."

"simple: it's an unlimited supply of mp3s vs 1 burnt insured warehouse. If people want the music, they can buy it ANY time. no supply problem"

"sony said it already yesterday. Labels will make more money this way than with sales"

i'm never going to be as (d) hardcore as alec empire, but he makes a valid point; that insurance payout + charity sales drive = more cash than was sitting in that warehouse pre fire.

for the major players in this, it makes good business sense to play up the tragic angle as much as possible. I'm not saying there's no tragedy here, but if there is then it's of the smaller labels and artists who don't have a media profile and can't afford to repress right now, and the long term damage done to shops that can't restock, from lost customers who can't buy.

There's also a bunch of charity sites sprung up overnight, grand social media profiles and awesome pr with paypal tabs encouraging you to donate. fucking don't. if you feel like giving, give your money direct to your favourite affected bands and their labels. they have paypal too. these charities have no plan as to how there going to redistribute donations; and how could anyone? every band is in a different position, every record has different and changing sale value, every label has different budgets and can suffer different losses.

you can't quantitatively gauge the damage and impact of something like this. the insurance will take an age to sort out, and in an industry where timing of product on shelf can count for so much, most of the actual losses are completely incalculable. there's another side too - knowing my band as i do, i can say our cds, like 1000s of others, were there cos to be brutally honest, no one wanted them anywhere else. overstock. one article told a touching story of a lady whose album was sitting in there for two years cos EMI weren't ready to release it. AND NOW THEY CAN'T! um right. there were records in there waiting to ship sure, but also piles of unwanted stock/overstock/unsold and unsellable stock. maybe it's my uncles talking here, but insurance fire sounds pretty good. yeh, £5 a unit please. kerching!

seriously tho, it'd be horrendous business sense for our old, or any, label to repress records that were unshiftable (whatever EMI told the nice lady) at the time of burning. when those insurance cheques come in, it'll be like a massive version of that time pete from calories accidentally set his room on fire and brought a whole new different cd collection with the payout.

the spate of pias fire buy-lists and features also stink of industry dinosaur breath. we don't need excuses and sob stories to buy music, and it doesn't make it taste better. real life is not a simon cowell backstory. i'm all for any excuse to write music lists, and despite a few awesome, well written out collections that quietly urge you to buy direct or physical copies of stuff that may otherwise been lost to you, the vast majority lean to, surprise surprise, household name acts who're currently in the middle of a promo campaign. now, i don't know bjork but i'm pretty sure she'd rather any charity in you went to #riotcleanup, rather than rushing out and buying her cds cos there's currently less of them then in the country there was a few days ago.

worse, some of these, they link you to itunes. for bands, that's like a tab saying (ps - all proceeds go to satan). Itunes are on it themselves, rolling out there own little fire campaign, and, why not? hysteria over lack of physical product? potential charity demographic? They must be pissing themselves all the way to satanbank.

(actual nme quote - "even apple is helping out!")

d'you know how much a band/label gets from an itunes purchase? well neither do i. because it's an amount so small, only bono can physically see it.

it's not helping out, you shower of soulless cunts, it's called profiteering. the same with your dickfeed self important pointless charities and the dickfeed awful shoreditch wank bands and mainstream guffallos that will probably play their dickfeed pompous benefit gigs where all proceeds go to blindly to "the crisis"

WE DON'T NEED CHARITY. this isn't a real crisis, where we watch aghast and powerless and rely on organisations who convert our spare money to earthquake repair robots, or find homes for dogs, or convince cancer not to work, or otherwise use some skill or resource we don't possess. you probably already know which bands you like have been affected cos you follow them on teh social networks. so, surely the fairest, most even and morally correct response is, if you want to "help out", pick some bands and labels and go clickclick help out. whether you buy or donate, it'll all get absorbed into our bank balances, make some actual direct instant difference, and we'll all sleep a little better knowing humans can be a little kinder. you could do the same if you have local stores with smashed windows too. same principle.

imagine tho, the outcry if the whole riot aftermath had worked like that; big moneyed corporations with direct ties to mainstream media just steam in and say, hey, give us all your money and we'll do, um, something good with it. there'd be an outrage from independent businesses in the shadow and justifiable suspicion from the people who live there. no such outcry here, cos no one wants to piss off a dinosaur.

anyway, it sickens me a bit. not the fire, that's just shit that happens. and not even the charities and itunes, people will always find ways to eke more cash out of each other. i'm sickened by the mainstream music media, in such a tense period of social unrest blah blah blah, deeming insurance fraud and sympathy purchases to be acceptable weapons of marketing and commerce, and subsequently manufacturing a sense of charity to drive sales.

and i'm sickened to think that out there, there's people filling up those charity accounts, buying the horrors off of itunes and booking tickets to fund-raising shows to see the monkey legs and arsebiscuit orchestra at the fucking old blue last that are going to think they did their bit for the great pias disaster, and there's noone to tell them any different apart from crazy old alec empire. and me.

aaaand i'm sickened cos our name is being bandied round some of these pages as yet another band affected by this crisis. we have our own crisiseseses, thank you very much, and at the moment, making sure we have enough cash not to be evicted from our studio and master our record is waaay more of a priority for us than our old label raising money to reprint some old cds that may or may not have been sold in the next few months.

ok thanks for your time. and, just because i know someone's gonna be all like " imagine if you had your new record in there tho", this shit has happened to us twice before; once with the biploar friends single, and once with the you thought you saw ep. warehouse fuckup, third party disaster, whole boxes gone. and we just carried on, yknow? the songs and the demand still existed, and when it comes to points where we're financially affected by shit out of our control, we're open and honest about it. and i think everyone else should be the same.

my main objective is to be more effective

have you guys seen this? BULLSHIT

The NME prides itself on being some kind of cultural barometer, and to survive it has to cater to the mainstream yadda yadda yadda, im sick of people whining about the NME. that's what it's there for.

and then i read this and it made me more angry than any half assed reviews of half assed bands more popular than my own. Which i guess is a some kind of old school NME achievement, if the sentiment didn't piss over all those guys graves.

anyway, i wanted to write a clear cut concise piece on why this guy is utterly wrong and a terrible human being, and i just ended up shouting at the screen. so, sentence by squalid sentence, here is why i disagree with dickface. apologies to rob from topless robot, but, if you squint, it kinda looks like FFF.

If physical singles are finally dying out for good, then don’t expect me to send any flowers to the funeral. I don’t care about Record Store Day. I don’t even care if I never own a physical CD or vinyl record ever again.

really? you write for the biggest music magazine in the country and in yr opening paragraph you write off actually physically owning music. Fair enough if you don't like record store day, it really is just a niche for people who are interested in ltd run 7"s and exclusive music stuff. Wait, what's yr job again? This is the first sign of subtext that runs all the way thru this piece that reads - hey bands, go fuck yourself -

I got rid of 90 per cent of my CD-based record collection last year, leaving behind only the records I’d paid for before becoming a music hack. I don't miss them.

Honestly, that's probably a shit tonne of shit records you dumped there. It's a shame you didn't find, in your music journalist career, any music you wanted to keep, but i guess that's why yr a critic, huh. It's interesting to note you kept the records you actually paid for tho. As if you had some emotional investment in them. HMMMMM.

And here’s why: if you’re seriously bothered about the way your tunes are delivered to you, you’re focusing on totally the wrong aspect of what makes music great

glitter vinyl and skateboard stickers? What makes music great is melody, harmony, dynamics and rhythm. what makes bands great is everything else: style, lyrics, artwork, packaging, delivery. Seriously, all these things have been contributing factors in the modern music scene since the 40s. Wait, whats yr job again?

Let’s get a few things out of the way first: the death of the physical single won’t kill B-sides. Aren’t digital EPs and free pre-album taster downloads their modern equivalent?

this is the first counter argument he brings up... Wait tho, has anyone, ever, ever in the history of this thunderous digital music revolution, complained about the potential loss of the B-side? No. Of course not. There were several other ways for bands to disseminate "bside" songs in the pre internet age; import albums with extra tracks, fanclub only stuff, exclusive session cds on magazines. Pretty much all of these have modern day equivalents such as digital EPs and free p.. wait, PHEW!

If artwork is worth seeing, you’ll see it, even if it’s not on the cover of a CD or vinyl record.

WHERE? WHY? HOW CAN YOU BE SURE? will there be websites set up? will bands have to link songs to art gallery pages? this is such bullshit. There are hundreds of artists out there, whose work you've seen and loved, but you don't know their names. Record art is such a massive part of the industry, it has whole books and websites and archives devoted to it. Are you proposing that bands will be content to operate on pure songs alone, or be allowed to at least make a .gif banner or two? Them hipster girls would look way less cool if, instead of wearing a shirt with those sinister wave patterns, it was a picture of 4 drunk 80s manc kids. What you propose isn't artwork, it's advertising.

Next: you don’t need to own music to enjoy it

Noone ever thought you did. BUT you need to pay for music so the people who make it can keep doing so. you kinda forgot about that bit. it's important. For your job too, if you think about it..

I don’t sniff records.

Is this really what you think of people who like physical product? Like, we're trainspotters lining up on record store day to note barcode numbers. Are you basing this on people who populate the country, or characters you remember from high fidelity?

Buying a CD or 7” doesn’t make me like a tune any more than if I’d hear it streamed on a blog –

No-one in the history of having a brain has ever said that it did. People didn't buy singles because they thought it would improve them, they brought them to play when they wanted to. Also, and despite lack of mass sales like The Shit Old Days this still happens (sometimes this was because of hype and bs pereptuated by your magazine, and sometime because of genuine punka spirit) people brought records because they feel an affinity with the band. Singles, specifically, still are a totems, brought for what they represent, not the music encoded inside, which everyone will have on their ipod anyway. You don't understand any of this do you?

great music is great music however you hear it.

no its fucking not. this is such a stupid layman phrase, its like your parents telling you morrisons classic cola is the exactly the same as coke. mp3s don't sound as good as wavs. some records sound way warmer on vinyl than cd. most laptop speakers are rubbish compared to a proper stereo. songs recorded in studios sound better than on your phone at gigs. The relative values and merits of these will always be open for debate, but the basic principles are simple facts.

If you’re going to release something physically, make it spectacular, an event, something worth owning – an idea Radiohead have clearly come round to with newspaper release of ‘The King Of Limbs’.

NO WAY WHAT RADIOHEAD RELEASED A NEWSPAPER! BUT THEY@RE A BAND NOT A PRINTING PRESS. MENTALOS! fuck, thats an incredible idea. as if nobody thought of that before, ever, in the history of music. We could start a whole culture around this shit, lets call them FANZINES. I don't mean to sully radiohead but bands have been doing this for fucking years. Weirdly enough, it started as a reaction against things like NME filling pages with guff.

I find this point weirdly divergent from the rest of your arguement tho. So, it's ok to release singles as long as they're, like, more than singles? Something worth owning? Trust a journalist to say everything must be spectacular. anyway, how about like, a nice 7" glittery vinyl? A frisbee? A watch? Pottery? fanzine subscription? sticker set? elaborate fancy card packaging? THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. sorry, what was your job again? You write a whole piece trying to destroy records, rubbishing any level of artistic respect, then say, PRAISE RADIOHEAD, the only way out is, O WAIT ITS ALREADY HAPPENED NEVERMIND.

Do I miss going to record shops? Nope. The faceless high street stores I could tolerate, but local independents? In my experience, the stereotype is usually true: they’re staffed by socially-inadequate, sniffy twerps. Just ask Day V Lately:

what exactly is your experience? cos it sure as fuck isn't banquet, or rough trade, or polar bear. again, i think you have mistaken "experience" with "i have read high fidelity". I'm going to take the liberty of assuming, because you are a mainstream media cretin, that you live in LDN, which has more awesome record stores than anywhere else in the country. For sure there are still remnants, the music exchange that nick hornby wrote about, but the last few years have seen whole communities built around thriving indie stores. also, hot girls work there too. sorry, what was your job again? more to the point, why?

this is followed by an embedded commercial for yell.com, in which an imaginary 90s dj (Day V Lately) goes into a thinly disguised record and tape exchange and asks if his records are stocked. The staff, whilst in no way resemble the caricatures previously described, are unable to find his records, and all is saved when his daughter shows him the Yell.com iphone app. I don't know what this proves other than he couldn't find the belle and sebastian high fidelity scene and caption it - LIKE THIS, LOL!

If I was teenager today with meagre wages to blow, I wouldn’t buy CDs (like I did with my minimum wage spoils ten years ago) or waste my weekends in record shops. I’d download Spotify, keep my ear to the blogosphere and spend my dough on tickets to gigs and festivals.

HELLO THE TEENS, LET ME IDENTIFY WITH YOU HERE. If I was a teenager today, i'd buy my way thru the alcopop/bsm/smalltownamerica/toughlove/moshimoshi/audioantihero ETC back cat. I'd subscribe to Heat Rash and instead of buying the NME i'd read blogs without feeling the need to use some pretentious terminology, listen to music streams to form my own opinion, and spend my dough on online merch stores and all the weird little trinkets and mementos my favourite bands release. and i'd hold onto to these cheap tacky material possessions as proof absolute that these bands mean more to me than yours do to you.

Also, once again with the record shops. if you wasted the weekend, either you went to the wrong record shop, or you are so devoid of empathy for the culture and awesome bands and records that fill such places that you didn't know what to look for. ALL THOSE DIFFERENT COLOUR SLEEVES, MAN THATS SO CONFUSING!!!

I might even have some spare cash for a better guitar, amp or synth. Is it a total coincidence that guitar sales have increased in recent years?

Wait! Yes! Guitar sales have increased have increased because of Guitar Hero. They've increased because the general guitars vs synths mood of the mainstream music press is currently more guitary. They've increased because of cheaper manufacture, of better marketing from fender and gibson, easy online tutorials and fairer secondhand trading. Mostly tho, guitar hero. If fish were banned tomorrow, would you quit your life and go become a fisherman or just eat something else? People are not saving money on singles and spending it on guitars. digital literal single sales are increasing. Have you heard of Itunes? You should check it out, it'll BLOW YOUR MIND.

Of course, there’s the eternal conundrum of how you make this modern music consumption model profitable – and Spotify’s disastrous margins suggest that no one’s even close to finding it yet.

Way to shit on your teenage self and his subscription there. Anyway, lets carry on and pretend there's no itunes, why not have a website that you can sell your music on directly! Or have little boutique labels that can put love and care into awesome physical releases! Or, um, just radiohead up a newspaper? Once again, THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. Whilst profit is (radiohead get benefit of doubt) in no way the principle motivation of those who run these methods, it's a definite factor in why they're still here, and they're taking up an increasing share of the collective music industries and music - buying kidzz concious, cos, frankly, most of "your" bands are really fucking dull.

But, ultimately, the reason physical singles are being phased out by Mercury – and others will follow soon, if they haven’t already started – is that few people are actually buying them.

O wait, when you say others, you mean majors right? Cos, honestly, thats all you guys care about. Ain't no-one from our label ever going to pay for you to come on tour with us, bro. I hate to break it to you, but it's not just singles, its physical media all over. desperate times. these labels, you want to ask what their contingency plans are for the next few years. D.O.O.M.E.D.

I can sit on my comfy high horse and say this, because we're pretty separate from your world. 1) we've always been broke 2) we don't do this for the money, we do it cos we're proud of to be a part of this tradition, of peoples lives, and we want to leave loads of little mementos, sonic or otherwise, so people will know we were a cool gang to hang out with. Bands, man, they're just... like that. wait, what was your job again?

Bands regularly turn in pathetic physical sales figures, numbers in the low hundreds that would've seemed unthinkable in the days of million-selling Number Ones

I could so easily go on here about how our band regularly turns in low hundreds. and we're fucking proud of it. and we've been around long enough to know that sales figures, once upon a time and effective way to gauge a bands success, have had their machinery wrecked and pillaged by the interwebs.

I could instead preach polemic about how awesome music and awesome sales are only vaguely related to each other. drunk cousins.

but it'd pointless. you have completely missed the point of why bands are bands. of why records are records. you write like everything should be neatly encoded and stored into yr research node. I bet it would be in a file labeled "work". Bands, any band worth their salts, will always want to break out of that, to mean more to people than some melody in a recently added playlist.

Physical singles are a dead horse

"Or a spectacular newspaper. And that concludes the information i have gleaned from the 2 press releases i have skimmed today."

The less time and effort is spent on flogging them, the more money labels might have to blow on signing new bands.

Yep, thas clearly how that's working out innit. Can't move in LDN these days for new bands signed to major labels. s'like britpop2.0! You know what the next logical step here is? to eliminate the bands! labels simply buy the songs, hum them into itunes, and everyone has more money. eurgh. i hate this idea. imagine being in a band, singing to a major label, and being told you'd literally only produce music. no physical records, no memento, just some watermarked files. You wanted artwork? Have a thumbnail. Is this just me? OR ME AND EVERY OTHER MUSICAL ARTIST WORTH ANYTHING EVER..

– the ones formed by kids buying guitars, clothes and drugs rather than records.

MESSAGE TO RECORD LABELS: stop signing up bands based on long late night wistful conversations about mutual favourite records. In fact, stop signing bands who go out and buy records cos they're all living in the past. instead, go for the guys who've brought guitars, clothes, and drugs. HUZZAH the industry is saved.

The article concludes with an embedded video of the view. I can't be arsed.

from all of us here, fuck you bro. We're always going to buy records. It's part of us. Here's a short awesome story:

for valentines day, my girlfriend brought me the pavements trigger cut 12".

you think that's shit right? how can you even call that a story? at the same time, there's people going to read this who'll be like, WOW RAD. Cos they understand the innate value of bands is worth more than a bunch of noises, and these records, however small the run, or low the sales, mean a whole lot more than what they contain. They're time capsules, love notes, postcards, polaroids, and, arranged together in shoeboxes in my room, in vague order of when i brought them, they're a way more fun and vivid box of memories. Even if you take the artwork and the gimmicks away, you can't replace that tactile sense of personal history with a series of files. Unless you have NO SOUL.

We must seem so pathetic to you, pointless even. our cottage industries. our cheap gimmicks. our low hundreds. wall of hugs. new slang. heat rash. yr. cats in paris making cartoons, stagecoachs' christmas cards, eva tomassis arts and crafts, alcopop/bsms samplers, everyone's hand made sleeves. All these people working themselves to the bone, mostly happily, for shit wages and condescending journalism, because they're doing what they believe to be right, and they can see the fire in the eyes of those low hundreds that lets them know it's truly appreciated

That's whats missing from your godawful shite journalism. There's no sense of artistic value, of bands being capable of producing anything more than playlist filler, of indie labels and stores being anything more than unnecessary outmoded middlemen between you and music you seem to think you deserve.

Whatever. Late night rant. seriously doubt you'll ever read this, much less take any of it in. I don't believe in karma but i do know that me and mine, the bands, the labels, the stores, all the little guys that help out that you'd never know about, have brought 100000000x more happiness into the world than you ever will.

Press Release

I fucking hate press releases. There's nothing more embarrassing than the language of jaded PR guys trying to hype stuff to jaded press guys. It's like hyperbole top trumps, with modifiers for how bitter each player is.

I'm almost 80% bitter, and for a long time i found the best/worst examples of press releases hilarious. Sometimes they'd come from experienced adults convinced that a few snazzy adjectives and a very liberal approach to what exactly constitutes "national radio airplay" would convince, and sometimes they'd come from the bands themselves, a sort of desperate grammatical nightmare parody full of unfulfillable promises to outshine their idols. (ps our singers left now but WE STILL ROCK!!!!!!) I don't read them anymore. I did one too many, i read one for a friends (awesome) band that made me burst out laughing and something broke in my head.

What made it worse is that this band were not new or trying especially to break new ground. They'd just had the misfortune to have someone who employed someone who employed someone who thought it'd be best to sell them in time honoured hyperbole manner, and, as a result, everyone on their industry mailing list had been sent 3 paragraphs that made these gentle unpretentious musicians look like some bastard cross between lads-on-tour and improv feedback nights, when, y'know, they sound like pavement like the rest of us.

i think this is irony: the point of press releases is to show how ass achingly relevant the act is, but the language has evolved to the point that whatever they're promoting almost become irrelevant. It's the wave of hype and presales that drives the industry, and it's pretty much unavoidable.

So yeh, they're fucked from the outset cos everyone writing them has to outbullshit each other, and they're fucked at the end because the people that have to read them generally have a lot more experience reading them and dismantling the bullshit. All press releases should be standardised into a multiple choice questionnaire and being dishonest on it should mean losing a finger. Here you are, music industry, i've done it for you:

for the artist:

please clearly print the name of your act.

what are you promoting (tour/new music/rerelease/pretentious gimmick)

do you feel it's a significant improvement over your previous attempts

(yes/no/pretty much more of the same)

are you photogenic (yes/no/specialist only)

Do you have any media exploitable ties eg famous father/celebrity partner (yes/no/no but open to negotiation)

How important is this release in relation to sustaining a career (make or break time/doing it for the love/just a little something for the fans)

Are you aware of the power the press has over your career? (yes, we try do our own pr/whatevs, it's just about the music man/just try it darling i'm going to be star)

How do you take to public criticism (I ignores all my press/I will be snidey on my blog/I will blackball you and everyone you work with)

For the management

Am I going to gain social kudos by dropping this information into conversation?

(yes totally, a lot of people more important and powerful than yourself already are/maybe if you use phrases such as "underrated" or "up and coming"/absolutely not, people will think you're weird)

Do you think this venture is going to be a success?

(guaranteed money maker/bit of a gamble/i honestly couldn't care less)

What is the chance of any exploitable and quotable negative occurrence during this venture eg police arrest/drug overdose?

(nothing, all danger is carefully stagemanaged/might push a suicide attempt out if things go mainstream/it's like a fucking timebomb thats going to shoot out shards of tabloid-orgasm)

If i choose not to publicise this act, how will it affect future relationships between us?

(that's perfectly fine, one must be true to self/well don't expect any favours if things go well/i will blackball you and everyone you work with)

Awesome. Solving the problems of the music business one joint at a time. Unfortuate that we can't go back in time and plant this so it comes into effect at the point before i start finding things that used to be funny sad, and get all depressed that i'm getting old and am still impatient at the world.

Anyway, the point of this whole post is this: Long times ago, we decided that there should be one over-riding factor that should dictate how all press releases are written: you shouldn't be ashamed to show it to your fans. Cos they're the ones who'll see the most holes; who'll know which bits are exaggeration and whats conspicuous by its absence. If they can read it and not cringe, then you can be sure that the message yr sending is in on the same frequency as those meant to recieve it.

In our experience, at least 60% of press cuttings about our band come directly from our press releases. So yeh. We havn't really done one for a while, we're in a pretty lucky position, the first time since ever, of having a pr guy and a label and management that we trust to speak on our behalf. Until last week when said management suggest that, with all the regional press we've done and with New Fun coming up, we could probably do with one, cos, apparently, not everyone in the world knows who we are yet.

So, as per old dictum, here preserved is our official press release thing. Please read and not cringe.

Hello. This is supposed to be one of those awkward 3rd person resumes that read like a CV whilst attempting to convince you how vital and relevant the band is. I've wasted many curious, then morbidly curious hours reading band press releases; I guess if yr reading this then you have too, and you've long since become immune to the hyperbole and wary of the language of omission. There's nothing here that isn't google-able for more detail or opinions, and we'd hope to be judged on our band and not our ability to write convincing prose. So with that in mind, here is me trying to write an unbiased and neutral summary of something that means more to me and my two friends than anything else, ever, ever. Fuck the 3rd person tho.

Our band is called Johnny Foreigner. We're from Birmingham. You can read what you want into that. We've been a band since 2006. We've released 5 eps, 2 albums and 10 singles. We've lost track of how many shows we've played. We've toured in 4 continents, done enough major festivals to impress girls and guitar techs alike, been wowed and appalled by The Music Biz and we're still here, bedazzled by what we've achieved and in love with the future.

We play what we'd mostly describe as college rock, with occasional bursts of electronica or alt-country or anything else that seems like a good idea at 5 in the morning. We're at that 3rd album stage where we're learning to relax, but we're also learning to be more abrasive. I quite don't know why I feel so obliged to point that out; but so many of the bands we've loved have got to this point and lost their spark, and from our completely subjective viewpoint at least, we still have demons to exorcise.

We write songs about our lives and the things that occur around us. It's the same dull everyday (or mostly night) things that pass through everyone's mind, only more overdramatic. girls, drink, distance, closeness, hope and defeat. We don't think too hard about how songs are going to sound.

Our artwork is always drawn by our friend lewes herriot. You may have realised we have a theme.

We seem to garner a lot of press from the way we treat our fans and how open we are about the machinations of the industry we exist in. We grew up on limited edition glittery 7"s, american imports, record store gossip and pre-broadband downloads. Being young and in love with our favourite bands was like being in a gang, the shows like joyous drunken family reunions. Being able to soundtrack peoples lives is an amazing privilege, and the bands were always at the least courteous and friendly as we'd shakily mumble thanks for a signed setlist. We've been on the other side of the barrier for a while now and it never gets any less flattering. The best bands feel personal, and it's no parlour trick or marketing campaign. We're using the same channels available to everyone else, and I think it's pretty sad that we stick out mostly thru lack of competition; To our minds, this is what a band should do.

We release our records with Alcopop. When our last label became a mess of corporate facepalm, we avoided the subject for a year. We put a record out ourselves, paid for by presales. Like bitter divorcees, we talked about how we didn't need anyone else. We were right but we were lonely. We've always had respect for Alcopop and BSM, we're in love with many of their bands. We share some good friends and everything we heard about Jack made us want to be on their roster. He understands what we're doing and why, and, less personally, sees the decline of The Music Industry and value of songs as an excuse to put more effort and imagination and FUN into the end physical product. Alcopop are everthing we'd want from a record label apart from A Giant Bag of Someone Else's Money; but we've all been broke since long before we started this.

In as much as we plan ahead, this year we'll be touring the UK, then mainland Europe, then releasing our 3rd album. For once, the name has come first but it would be jinxing everything to tell anyone just yet. It's going to be awesome tho.

Thanks for taking an interest, I hope you are convinced.

ive just read this awful review of us

i mean, its not awful, the guy totally bums my guitar playing and appreciates our music FOR WHAT ITS WORTH LIKE. and he enjoyed our set, which is obviously THE POINT
but
(its about the free show we did at the flowerpot)

says he saw us "mincing around looking nervous cos noone was there" then we get a "rent-a-crowd" then "agree to go on when there audience is an acceptable size"

and at the end, i apparently have a guitar-trashing temper tantrum which is filmed for the feels like summer video. WHAT EXCUSE ME? as far as me and my guitar and the guy who made our video WHO WE DIDNT EVEN KNOW HAD BROUGHT HIS CAMERAHH this is all spurious lies that make us look like some poxy music biz band.

which is so much bullshit. like we could afford rent-a-crowds. or even tell the promotors when were going on. but really, the guy namedrops talking to me, like, whatafuckinghonor, and i feel like i was conned. i remember him, i think, i was drunk assss, and he seemed like a nice guy. apart from this wierdly cynical overimagination i'm sure he is.

i dunno, im all for people writing shit on the internet cos its ONLY THE INTERNET and other peoples opinions dont really bother us. especially when they're wrong. but that hideous style of writing, like, mock-cynical i-know-all-the-tricks really REALLY depressess me. one of the UNIQUE SELLING POINTS YOU CUNT of our band is we all have this stupidly naive attitude that people who like our band also like other bands we like, and therefore each show is a whole room full of potential friends. which is a super-flouncy faux punk statement worthy of jonah mantra, but probably the last bastition of anti-cynicism id stand by. we're not like, popstars, we're just as skint and sorry as everyone else, we weat the same tshirts, were on the same fucking side and we'd like to swap mix cds, we just happen to write good songs and weve had some good luck. simple.

anyway it was nice to be able to mince around YR OWN FUCKING SHOW without feeling like yr making a negative impact on yr press. where else are you supposed to mince round? the mincing rooms? god i have this image of him when i went to see if anja or gavin had arrived, or got a drink, or god forbid actually talk to people who like my band, staring at my back thinking "he looks nervous, he's a nervous mincer"

igsrhnvrahrevre

i only clicked on it cos there was a link for a review of feels like summer that said it started with a guitar riff that was stolen from a feeder song. and mentioned the t word. (twee. cos we're twee. HOW THE FUCK ARE WE TWEE YOU FUCKING IDIOTS. ARE YOU NOT SUPPOSED TO LEARN THE MEANING OF A WORD BEFORE USING IT JESUS FUCKING CHRIST PLEASE SOMEONE EITHER EXPLAIN HOW WE ARE TWEE OR LET US EXECUTE EVERY SELF PROCLAIMED MUSIC WRITER WHO DENOUCES US AS SUCH THANKS GOD. anyway she didnt like it, its a rubbish twee song, not as good as los camp, greaty, and thats good yeh? thats the sides i was ranting about before. doesnt like us but doesnt "get" us, so the actual opinions dont bother us. if we wrote music for everyone to get, then, we'd be rich. i mean, rubbish, not us doing what we love doing at getting paid for it. and, apart from rants like this, doing what the fuck we want has done us pretty well, and we know who our friends are k thx.

But, this mince-proclaimer, he likes us. i think. i mean, he's theoretically on our side, he liked the show, he likes our songs, i daresay we share loads of the same records. and that totally bums me out. im never talking to anyone ever again, goodbye forever.

(apart from the internet)
(or if you do the secret knock on our mincing room door)
(and on stage)
(im not really im just moaning, sorry if you thought this was going to be fun. bye)
(apologies are twee. FUCK YOU, everyone)

xlex