Putting a foot down to get a leg up.

Do you know what sucks? the holocaust that's what sucks. Also on a slightly unrelated note playing to a bunch of people who don't care that you're there sucks. During my earlier months my plan was to get out and play whatever gigs I could so that I could get exposure and experience doing this solo thing. Amazingly now I feel much more comfortable on stage on my own, the almost crippling fear I was feeling having to be the sole person desperately trying to hold a crowds attention has dissipated now that I have done it enough times to find myself a rhythm I'm comfortable with, and thanks to some rather kind feedback from friends I have a good idea what works and what doesn't.

That means that those earlier shows were in no way a waste of time but now I need to start paying my reputation attention again. I think begging for shows each month and playing to crowds who aren't really into the kind of music I play is gonna be damaging for Red Rag Front as the loss making enterprise that it is. I don't expect people to know all the words to my songs, but I expect people in a crowd  to maybe own a Chuck Ragan album or the like and to have an appreciation for the style of music I play. These were excellent lessons I learned playing in Worthing last month and I have come to a decision regarding my gigging future.

No more will the Red Rag Front be darkening any generic acoustic evenings, it was by pure luck that I had one acoustic show with Andrew Maclaughlin which turned out to be excellent due to our similar taste in awesome punk and playing with real punk bands made me understand that that is where I belong full time. I'm fully willing to only play a few shows in a year as long as each of them are as fun and rewarding as that Worthing show.

I put this sentiment out there via Facebook this week and was truly happily surprised to get a response back from the Recluse Club guys. They are super awesome and people should go check out their Bandcamp if they don't believe me. This is the type of thing I wanted to be doing when I started Red Rag Front. I don't want to have my name in bright lights or to have a huge following, I just want my punk rock friends to know that they have a solid fun opening act for their shows any time the space is available.

So here goes the next stage in my Red Rag career. Will it all fall to pieces around me? maybe, but I've kept myself going for a while now and I'm gonna enjoy all of it whilst I can.

The return of the great white hope for the Red Rag Front

So before I get right into things I'll just quickly mention the fact that I haven't written anything in a while, also my last post was a bit of a downer. That's mostly because as an artist, I can't help but want to feel some recognition for what I'm doing and previously was descending into a spiral of silence and unappreciated shows. Watching the fact that no one is listening to your music is a tad disheartening and it seemed to me like it was already time to call things a day in the Red Rag camp, that camp being me sat on my own in yet another venue!!

The tale of my redemption and subsequent reignited love for what I do started last Saturday and a small slightly smelly practice room on the polar opposite end of London. It was there that I had a super awesome jam with the musical loves of my life Demon Smiles. I've been threatening to do so for a while now but what with things getting in the way hadn't gotten around to it. Almost immediately after the practice phone calls were made and I was added to a bill for a show down in Worthing and as fate would conspire I could make it so it was on like Donkey Kong!!

Even a cancelled acoustic night the evening before and some truly british summertime rain couldn't put a dampner on my mood as I made my way down, full of beans and ready to rock. Not only was I about to play my own set, but I had also ingratiated my way into a couple of DS tunes too.When I turned up things were a hell of a lot different to my usual story (in a good way) and because of these key differences I am back in love with gigging (and i guess blogging).

Firstly a serious shout-out needs to go to Recluse Club, who as well as being the third act on also engineered the night and were responsible for me being there in the first place. Now usually when I turn up for a gig I spend around thirty seconds sound checking (no change there) and then sit on my own for the remainder of the time waiting for the show to start/someone I know to arrive (big change here). Instead of that though the RC guys and I had an awesome time getting to know each other, being that one of them had a Blink hat that I own (always the consummate conversation starter) and from there out it transpired that we also had everything else in common. I forget sometimes playing alongside such wildly different people from myself usually that there are people out there that do the same as me that also share the same interests I do.

Second on my love letter to the Worthing punk scene are the punks who populate it. This was the first show that I have actually played to my target demographic and let me tell you it has made me realise that I would rather only play a show a year at a punk gig than carry on playing to people who don't really want to listen to me. The crowd, although mostly made up of other bands and the few people drinking in the bar anyway, really got behind the set and it made a huge impact on my peformance, then went knocking out my covers (a 5 songs in four minutes rancid medley and my ever favourite Dammit cover) i couldn't actually hear myself playing over the rowdy singing of the crowd. That is an experience I've dreamt of ever since I first watched the Dashboard Confessional unplugged dvd and saw it happen to him. It was everything I dreamt of an more.

Last and by every means best were my DS collaboration songs. I played on two of their songs and I was pretty much the nuts!! I have missed playing with a full band and to play with a bunch of people I like and admire so much was a dream come true for an old punk like me. Playing with them is like the most obvious thing in the world. When I walked into the practice studio it was like I'd always been a part of the band, and because we are so close outside of the musical world I guess I have. We click musically extremely well and it was a pleasure and a joy to share a stage with them. This having worked so well opens up a world of opportunity for us both and the possibilities are huge for us.


So there you have it. Welcome back to a positive and enthusiastic me. Let's see where this leads me now.....

Missing that Magic...

So another Friday another show and I'm starting to feel like something is a tad out of place. Now don't get me wrong the show went well, I even stuck in a new song and the audience that was there enjoyed things, thing is though apart from the three friends that made it down the rest of the audience was just the rest of the bands that were playing. This seems to be about the size of crowd I can seem to expect doing gigs at the moment and I can't help but feel that I'm somehow missing some piece of the puzzle.

I'm fairly certain that I'm not a horrific musician, the odd bits of feedback I get are pretty positive, and the people who are giving it don't seem like the types to be just patting me on the head and saying it because they don't think I could handle being told I was awful. The demo I made I think was pretty ok for a first go, that I did for free in my spare room in an afternoon, I wasn't expecting it to go into the top forty or anything but I at least enjoy listening to it. Hell even this blog gets a small amount of regular interest even though it's mostly full of nonsense and waffle. But despite these things I feel like I'm dragging along Red Rag Front against it's will and that people really just aren't interested at all.

Now people not wanting to listen to me isn't much of a problem, I wont ever stop playing music but I feel like maybe there is a better outlet than begging my way onto a stage that no one really wants me to be on. It seems to me like there is a fundamental piece of the puzzle I have overlooked, and I have a feeling that piece is networking. I don't go to a lot of gigs and shows and I haven't made friends with any promoters, asides from the shows I played. I had thought this would be enough to generate some interest in the band, and then having the EP up for people to listen would help cement some interest but it just hasn't worked out that way.

Is this just what all new start ups go through? Certainly doesn't seem that way from the friends I have but maybe the real missing piece of the puzzle is that they are exceptional and I'm not.

Becoming a stat junkie and getting eclectic!

So the demo has been kicking around for a week or so now and to be honest I am ever so slightly underwhelmed at the reception it got. My new obsession has become the stat recorder on Bandcamp, and what I see doesn't set me on fire! The issue with being able to see exactly who is listening to your sounds means you can see just how little people have listened to it too. Not that I'm saying that literally no one has checked it out, but the amount of listens it got kind of blew. For a comparison I will use regular Acoustic Pop Punker name check Demon Smiles. By looking at their Bandpage section on FB and their Soundcloud account I can see that just on these two accounts they have had around a thousand listens over all the tracks. To put this into context I would have to to take my entire amount of listens, times it by four just to get the amount they have on one song. Maybe I just need to accept that acoustic pop punk is too niche a musical market for people to check it out, or maybe I need to accept that the EP wasn't as great to everyone else as it is in my head. Either way I am glued to those darned stat pages like an alcoholic locked in a Jack Daniels distribution warehouse!

Having a poor to mediocre reception to the EP hasn't stopped me playing some pretty awesome shows though. Last Friday saw me take part in The Songwriter Sessions, a jam night put on by The Jam Club, a great little enterprise hosting these types of evenings a couple times a month. The tag line in the flyer promises the best singer songwriters in London, and although I wouldn't say everyone (including myself) could live up to that lofty description there were certainly several who would wear that badge pretty well.

Notable acts in the evening were a girl (whose name escapes me, sorry awesome girl) who was frankly incredible. I have only heard one other female acoustic artist that has impressed me so much and she played my wedding song!! Also in the category of most original/super mega awesome was an appearance of the front man of Jesus Hooligan, who played us a song by beating the snot out of a stool with a massive chain, whilst growling out the coolest viking core lyrics I've heard in a while. But the topper of all was the final act on (sadly not me, I faded into relative obscurity even whilst pumping out my greatest hits) was MC JC, a piano playing rapper. But not just a piano playing rapper, one who was pretty much a better piano player that anyone else I know in real life. Not just that but the kid was BLIND!!!! yep that's right, after all of us got up and sweated our way through 3 - 5 songs this blind kid in a hoodie schooled the goddamned hell out of every person there on what being a musician is all about.

Even though my own stamp on the evening didn't make waves like some others I was truly grateful to have been a part of such a great evening and it also reminded me of why I started all of this in the first place. Not to get the most listens or the biggest turnouts or the coolest shows. But to give myself a chance to experience music in a way that I could never without being a part of it.

Next on my list of things to do in the coming months is play at least one actual punk show and also to start working on ten songs I'm going to put into an album. So far I have thought of a witty title/cover and decided it'll include at least some of that long talked about collaboration with Demon Smiles but that's about as far as I have gotten.

Overambitious Expectations

Have you listened to the the River Jumpers debut EP? If not I'll wait.......

Amazing right? yeah I know, it was on constant repeat for most of my 2012 and as first recordings go I'd say it's round about perfect. It was largely because of this that I decided that I would get back in the game and fire up my strumming arm again. In the back of my mind I thought "goddamn yeah I'm gonna have a Debut EP that sounds as good as this.

Then at some point last year whilst getting very heavily into acoustic punk written by guys who used to be in more established bands I came across a split album called Acoustic featuring Tony Sly and Joey Cape. It pretty much blew my mind with regards to what I expect of an acoustic album and is now easily one of my favourite records of all time.

So with these two points in mind I kind of got it into my head that in order to be in any way successful I needed to make this super epic perfect production incredible demo otherwise it wouldn't count. In my mind this equated to having a tonne of junk going on in every track. I scoured my shoddy memory for everything I could do musically and ended up with bass, keyboard, violin, drum, harmony and in some cases ukulele parts for every track on the EP. Not to mention I decided I wanted a clip from a Louis Theroux show to be included on a track just like the Ataris are wont to do. So in my head I was totally set to make the acoustic punk recording of the century.

Now a few reality checks came into play once I started piecing this epic undertaking together, namely that I can't play the drums for toffee. Also not in my favour was that I have never played the violin and it turned out that just buying one and expecting to pick it up with no instruction straight away was a stupid idea (also the violin I bought had no strings). The last issue was that I am also terrible with harmonies so slowly but surely the amount of junk on each track started to diminish.

One of the last things to make me realise I was being a bit ridiculous was when Demon Smiles unleashed their demo on the world. It's raw and beautiful and doesn't give a good god damn about whether it's highly produced. It's sounds exactly as it should and sounds like it was produced on pure excitement and love of what the guys were doing. That really helped pull my head out of the clouds and again I cut back on extra airy fairy junk on my own offering.

Last came when actually recording the thing. Whilst listening back to the base instrumentation it finally struck me that, just like DS demo, it sounded just how it needed to without anything too over the top going on. I even cut out a whole song just because it didn't seem to flow on the day. What came out of that effort was something that worked on just the right level for who I am as an artist and I'm pretty proud of having had that revelation before I started filling up peoples ears with superfluous junk added just for the sake of it!!

Anyway keep your ears peeled for the second Red Rag demo (the first was a cassette Tazz and I created for someones Birthday and is currently lost to the mists of time) it'll be up on every concievable online media outlet soon.

Hitting Stride.

Way back in the mists of time, before digital photos were a common thing, there existed a bunch of out of focus teenagers that started a band based on the fact they wished they were Blink-182. They had one or two gigs and the biggest show they played was at the Trinity bar in Harrow. They even had to sneak in their 15 year old drummer in. That was around 12 years ago. Last Friday led me back there for my next swing at playing a show in their upstairs bar.

There were a number of things that led this to be one of my favorite ever live experiences and I'll go through them in no particular order:

The first thing that springs to mind is the guy who supported me. When playing entry level shows like this it's incredibly rare to be paired with other artists who are even in the same high level genre as you. Because of this it was awesome to meet Andrew McLaughlin, who not only shared half my greatest bands list, but also played similar covers to the ones that I play these days and started off playing when the continuation of Red Rag Front was just a idea floating around in my head.

Andrew was new to the gigging game but is already a much better guitarist than me (not that it's too hard) and had a voice that perfectly complimented acoustic versions of some blinding songs like Bad Religions "You" and Rise Againsts "Savior", which was my favorite of his set. He already sounds great and I think with a little coaching from an old punk who dropped out of a music performance degree then he will be one to watch out for pretty soon.

The next best thing was having an awesome turn out from my friends and family. Nobody can make it in this business without support and to have a whole bunch of people make it down, several of which had already seen me this month, really inspires confidence and helps blow away memories of empty rooms. Of special mention of course is that Shelley my wife also came along, which is nice because half my songs are about her and Summer. She thought I was great, which is pretty much as good as a platinum album to me. I'm truly grateful for any person who takes time out of their lives to support me and if someone happens to like a tune I play along the way then hell that's all the better!

My actual set was a balancing act of positives and negatives. On the one hand I still seem to manage to fuck up and forget lyrics all over the place, however on the plus side I am ready for these moments now and I'm fairly certain I managed to hide the majority of mistakes without crowd members noticing too much. I made a small mistake in buying a set of metal picks to play with too and found that metal picks + sweaty palms do not go together particularly well. The biggest positive though came from having friends, family and my wife there, meaning I had the confidence to really go all out, which I did, and it was quite easily one of the most satisfying and rewarding shows I think I've ever played, even if little things like getting paid for a show are still a far distant milestone for me.

So now I'm on gigging hiatus until I have an EP/the weather cheers up a bit. As far as re-igniting a musical career goes I have achieved even more than I ever thought I would. Not only do I have songs that I and others like, I have also managed to get my gigging mojo back and more importantly have gained friends along the way. I couldn't have asked for a better start to all of this and I look forward to what the future will hold. 

Bad luck or a sign of the times?

I was pretty hyped for my show in London's Nambucca. It's one of those venues that everyone seems to know and everyone has at some point been to. Plus from a practical point of view it is a ten minute bus journey from where I work! So I jumped on a number 43 over there and arrived only to find out I couldn't get in to the place. Now this wasn't exactly right, I could have got into the venue if anyone from there had given me some information in the five days I had to get ready, but the email giving me details only arrived on the 12th, not too useful for a gig on the 11th!!

Not taking this as an omen or anything I ate some food at the bar over the road and tried again half an hour later. This time luckily there was activity in the name of One Fell Down (fellow act) having a cigarette outside so they showed me how to get in and I got myself set up and listened to a pounding sound check from Seethe, the nights headliners.

Now I knew full well that friends of mine weren't going to be at the show. Nobody ever  goes to see the opening act, hell my name isn't even on the flyer! If I were a social person I may have gotten a bit lonely or tried making small talk with the other guys there but hell, I have a PS Vita and I quite happily busied myself waiting around for the doors to open and a bunch of metalheads to come flooding in.

But that didn't happen. Not a single person came through the doors in the hour and fifteen minutes between them opening and when I was due on stage. So I was called over and had to start playing....

...to no one!

Most people have had one or two or twenty of those gigs where there are like five people in the place and they aren't really that bothered by you but you play anyway. Being an opening act means people almost definitely didn't come to see you play and will mill around in the bar area and a few stragglers or drunks may come in and see what racket you're making. But no. There was no one in the place to watch me. I played the first four songs to the sound guy (who to his credit applauded at the end of each song) and then a few of the other band members came in and watched and we joked accordingly about the spectacular turn out. My biggest worry before playing the show had been playing a crowd of hardcore metallers who wouldn't appreciate my upbeat lovey dovey pop punk musings but there was literally no one to care!

 So I finished and packed my stuff up and asked the One Fell Down guys if there was just a bunch of people in the adjacent room, but there was not. They went on and as you can see here, again it was just them and other members of bands that they played to. Now for me a turn out like this is water of my back, I have an oyster travel card so any journey  within London doesn't cost me a penny more than my usual work travel expenditure. But for these guys, they had come from 90 miles away, so they had done a 180 mile round trip and wouldn't even get back their petrol money!

I find this amazing considering they are what I like to think of as an "established" band, they have an album out and music videos and a merch stand and all these things that bands take a long while to procure. So whilst this is a mild annoyance to a guy with nothing to his band but a guitar bag and stand, it must be a massive punch in the nuts for five guys who had to squeeze themselves into a tiny van for two hours to get there.
So how did I end up playing to just a sound guy? Maybe it's because it's January, and it's cold, and people are generally a little strapped for cash? But then surely since these things are advertised so far in advance they would be well aware of a poor crowd attending a show, the promoter contacted me to fill a slot five days before so surely he would have seen that the show would be bad and would have decided to forego a first act? I think all of the above points may have factored a little but more so I think we live in a world where events like this are almost exclusively advertised on social media and all of us are constantly bombarded with invitations to join this and that and after no time at all we just kind of switch off to it. Now that at the click on a button we can send out invites and people can choose to either click on them or ignore them we find ourselves detached from any commitment to the decisions we make virtually.
I'm sure a lot of people just kind of forgot that the show was that night or never really planned to go or maybe found themselves without the means to go even though online they said they would. Such is life these days, when you don't even need to go onto a persons online profile to wish them a Happy Birthday. We have removed any feeling of loyalty to an event invitation by the over-saturation of them in our news feeds.

But anyway, now I sound like an old man rambling about better times, like when you got some poor shmuck to stand on a street corner handing out pieces of paper only to watch the closest bin fill with them!!!

So what's next, well I have a show in Harrow coming up but beyond that I think I'll hang off actively pursuing  gigs until the weather brightens up.

To fill the space in between I have decided I should be a true one man band and build an arsenal of instruments, all of which I can play (badly) and to use them to excellent effect on a recording I can truly be proud of. I would also like to write a song with friends who are in the process right now of recording their own EP. So now I'm looking to be doing vocals/guitar/bass/keyboards/drums and whatever else may come to hand. I'll see how it goes and keep you updated on progress.



If you have any opinions on the state of music promotion, or can think of any extra musical instruments I can play then sound off in the comments.