I’m involved in a research project that will see me going to 13 British cities in 18 days. Maybe we could have a chat.
Having just returned from a week away attending a conference in Lincoln, conducting workshops in Wolverhampton and giving seminars in Leicester, my first job is to sit down and plan three weeks on trains, planes and buses.
In August, I’ll be travelling around the UK chatting to musicians and the odd independent music business.
To simplify matters, and to make sure I’m getting a nice cross-section of the music/musician business, I’m particularly interested in examining different scenes in different towns. Say… dance music in Glasgow, reggae in Birmingham, folk in Bristol — that sort of thing.
Perhaps we could meet up, or you could recommend some ideal people to get in touch with.
I’ll be going through some contacts at the Musicians Union to get in touch with people I’ll be hooking up with for some of my meetings, but if you think there are people it would be foolish of me to miss while in their town, do please let me know.
I’ll try and make it as pleasant and painless as possible, and there’ll be no tricky questions. Just ‘what do you do?’, ‘how do you do it?’, ‘would you like another beer?’…
Here’s the schedule:
30 July – London
31 July – London
1 Aug – Oxford
2 Aug – Bristol
3 Aug – Cardiff
4 Aug – Swansea
7 Aug – Birmingham
8 Aug – Birmingham
10 Aug – Belfast
11 Aug – Belfast
13 Aug – Glasgow
14 Aug – Edinburgh
15 Aug – Newcastle
16 Aug – Leeds
17 Aug – Manchester
18 Aug – Liverpool
If there’s someone in one of those towns that you think I should really have a conversation with, then feel free to put me in touch and hopefully we’ll be able to accommodate it.
Drop me an email, and we’ll take it from there.
And if you want to catch up while I’m in your town, then I’ll see what we can do — but the main priority will be to get the research done, and if I can work with clusters of musicians and businesses in each location, it will make life a good deal simpler.
I’ll also be after recommendations as far as the eateries and cheap accommodation is concerned.
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New Zealand readers: In unconnected travel news, I’ll be in Auckland the first couple of weeks in December — though I’ll be taking it fairly easy, I hope.