Martin Atkins, drummer from Public Image, Killing Joke and Nine Inch Nails wrote a book called Tour Smart. He does a good bit of public speaking, and we’re on the same wavelength about a lot of stuff. In fact, people have described him to me as “New Music Strategies with swearing.”
He was on a panel at Un-Convention and I grabbed him for a quick moment for a chat. I put him on the spot a bit, but got him to do a top 5 Tour Smart tips.
Un-Convention Salford was, of course, a great experience. All the more so because it brought together some of my favourite people from all over.
In fact – there were so many cool people at Un-Convention, it was hard to get around them all and spend as much time as I’d like to with each of them.
One of the people I was lucky enough to get to spend a reasonable amount of time with was Steve Lawson (otherwise known as SoloBassSteve). He’d been on my ‘Outside the Box‘ panel – which was amazing, entirely because of the brilliant insight of the amazing people on the panel (I was merely moderating – they provided all the awesome).
After lunch today, he grabbed my Flip camera and turned it on me for my impromptu roundup of the weekend.
I’m in Manchester at a music industry conference called Un-Convention. It’s one of those events where you know quite a few of the people involved, and the ones you don’t, you get to know quite quickly.
After the last band played last night, a bunch of us went across to the pizzeria / chip shop across the road for a bite to eat. My Belfast cousin Tracy, and Brad from Bolton band Merchandise were talking about Brad’s album and how that was coming along.
‘Nearly done – just have some mastering to do. Finished a video for the first single, but we’re not going to do any more. Don’t have the budget for it.’
‘Let’s make one right now,’ I said.
So, armed with my digital camera (a still camera, actually, but with a video setting) and with the song on Brad’s ipod, we just did a one-take shot. No rehearsal. Not even any discussion about what the two of them would do.
The only real shame was that it’s hard to see what Tracy wrote on the base of the pizza box at the end of the video. It reads ‘You suck.’
An hour later, I went to bed while this was uploading to Vimeo.
Music video budget? We don’t need no music video budget…
Unconsultancy in Manchester went well, I think. I certainly had a good time meeting some amazing people. Thanks to Andy from Indielab for organising it, taking me out for dinner, and letting me sleep in his house. Brilliant job all round.
