Right to Reply

I have to confess I thoroughly enjoyed following the Leveson enquiry, particularly watching the press squirm whilst trying to defend the indefensible. Just for once, those wronged by these cowardly bullies who thought they were untouchable, were able to bite back without fear of reprisal.

We heard a great deal about the need for a free press trumping everyone else's individual freedoms and indeed their human rights, and even I, who loathes the press would not wish to see it become the puppet of the government of the day. The simple fact however is that the newspapers are the only arm of the news media that is not already regulated. TV news is subject to regulation, as is radio, and you do not often hear complaints of the Sky, the BBC or even Talk Sport towing the government line. Government regulation is clearly not the answer, but there are a whole world of options between that and self regulation.

I would favour an independent regulator made up of people from all walks of life. Not merely a bunch of lawyers and media grandees, but also a few ordinary people. Teachers, Bin Men, The Unemployed, Sports people  Farmers, Policemen. Anyone who is or might be the subject of a press story is entitled to have a say on this subject.

A final word has to go to the most unabashed piece of indefensible grandstanding I have ever seen. Step forward that pompous arrogant twat Peter Preston. I saw him interviewed at the end of a day when we had heard endless harrowing stories of people being brutalised by reporters for no other reason than that they were good at whatever endeavour it was they had chosen for themselves. Mr Preston, bless him, actually had the temerity to complain that it was all very well for these people to make accusations against the press, but that it was unfair that the papers had no right to reply.

I swear, you could not make it up.

What a Pillock.

Peter Preston

Shovelling medieval sewage..

I have often said that managing bands can be both the best and worst job in the world.

If you are lucky enough to have a successful band then there is genuinely no job quite like it. Your clients will of course have convinced themselves that their creation of a work of unparalleled genius is solely responsible for their new found largess, but no matter, because their agent will actually return your phone calls for a change, your bank manager will become a real person again (as opposed to being an Asian call centre), the youngsters at the record label may actually remember who you are for once and you will suddenly find you have a large and interesting circle of new friends.

When things are not going so well however, being an artist manager is a little like being a medieval sewage specialist: lonely, labour intensive, hazardous, smelly and ultimately pretty unrewarding.

I have been lucky enough to experience both sides of the job, although like most of us rather more of the latter than the former, and what follows (with my tongue firmly lodged in my cheek) is a distillation of some of the lessons I have learned.

1. Nigel Lawson once said that there are only 2 kinds of Chancellor: those who get fired, and those who get out just in time. Same thing applies to Managers.

2. Management is a risky business. The odds that your act will cause the BBC to suddenly remember that their job is to play decent records as opposed to championing the latest bunch of musically incompetent teenagers masquerading as the industry's newest buzz band (god how I hate that term) would give any self respecting adrenaline junkie pause for thought, yet most of us stand loyally by our acts through thick and thin until... well see 1 above.

3. It is ALWAYS your fault. There are no exceptions. Get over it.

4. If you are expecting a pat on the back when things are going well, you will be waiting for a very long time indeed. Once again, get over it.

5. An accountant I used to know once said to me "If you are talking to a merchandiser, imagine he has a large red neon sign above his head. The sign is flashing and spells out the following message: I am stealing from you. You cannot stop me you can only limit the damage". This piece of advice took on ironic significance some years later when the accountant in question was convicted of embezzling large sums of cash from several of his clients to feed his drug habit. You really could not make it up.

6. Get a signed contract with your artist before you lift a finger, take a call or draft an email. Resist your natural inclination to get on with the job whilst your deal is being agreed. Remember, anything you manage to achieve on your artists behalf during the negotiation can only weaken your position. The more successful they become thanks to your selfless diligence, the more you will find yourself desperately trying to defend terms which your client and their lawywers would have agreed to without a second thought had you not been so trusting.

7. NEVER EVER represent your friends, because after the business relationship breaks down (see 1 above) you may find that you feel very differently about the people concerned, no matter how long you have known them.

8. Always issue your invoices on time and make sure you get paid. You may think that you are helping your act by deferring money which you are owed, but all you are doing is providing an unsecured loan to a business which (statistically speaking) is almost certain to fail.

9. In management, he who makes the fewest mistakes wins. The odds against your act succeeding are so steep, and there are so many ways they can fail which are beyond your control (to quote John Malkovich), that to add to them by arseing up stuff which IS within your ambit is careless at best and flat out suicidal in most cases. I once stupidly upset a very powerful promoter and it cost me my business. No matter that I had been ill, or that my wife was in hospital, nobody cares, and rightly so. The odds are just so long that you simply cannot afford errors. I made a mistake and I paid for it.

10. Hunter S Thompson once said "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side". I have always tried to be neither a pimp nor a thief, and on the whole I feel I have succeeded. Whether or not I've been a good man is for others to judge, but I certainly feel, in so far as my dealings in music are concerned. that I have occasionally been treated like a dog, even if I have not as yet died like one.

Mum

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog about my father. Recently I was looking through my old documents and I found the following tribute to my mother which I wrote after she passed away, and read at her funeral. At a time when my life seems so full of anger and disappointment, I felt the need to spread some love, so I would like to share this with anyone who cares to read it.

"My mother was the bravest person I have ever met.

During the last 25 years of her life, she endured a bewildering succession of life’s cruellest tricks, whilst maintaining, at least outwardly, a quiet but stubborn sense of optimism, and, given some of the blows she was dealt, a quite remarkable lack of bitterness about her lot in life.

Most of the people who knew her during the last 10 years of her life will remember her as a kind, sweet, funny, caring, lovable, occasionally feisty but endlessly entertaining person. Someone who was full of life, and full of fun. Very few of those people however will ever have seen the depths of despair from which she repeatedly extricated herself with nothing more than sheer will and cussedness.

For myself, I would not say that I really knew my mother in any normally accepted sense of the term, until 1986. Even then, it was not until I had lived through some very difficult times with her that I truly began to appreciate either her strength of character or her incredible ability to bounce back from seemingly hopeless situations. It was during those first few years of getting to know her well that I learned something which helped both of us on numerous occasions. I found that if I could make her laugh, no matter how grave the situation seemed, she would generally be back on her feet in pretty short order. In fact it was only when I realised ten days or so ago that she could no longer raise a smile, that it dawned on me that this time there may be no way back.

I have to confess to not being any sort of an expert on the etiquette of these occasions, having thankfully not had to attend too many, but when I read through the cards I received both from Mum’s friends, and indeed my own, it struck me that it might be a nice thing to do to share some of those people’s thoughts with you.

With that in mind, here are a few examples:

“Dorothy had amazing spirit and determination and loved being surrounded by people. She had the ability to make friends with people of all ages because she was genuinely interested in what they had to say. She was warm and sincere and liked to laugh”.

“We are very glad that we had the chance to meet her, and were full of admiration at the way she coped with her illness… She was so full of fun and good spirit it was hard to realise how ill she really was”.

“You Mum was such a great woman, so wry and sharp, amusing and inspiring. We miss her”.

“Your Mother was a wonderful friend to me and I already miss her”.

For myself, I am happy to say that I have an abundance of great memories to treasure, amongst them some of the funniest and most memorable times of my entire life. Some of my fondest of them concern her unique talents. For example, her ability to sustain a conversation, seemingly for days on end, by questioning me on the minutiae of the restaurant menus I encountered on my business trips abroad was genuinely awe inspiring.

I think though that if one story sums my mother up then this is it.

One Friday afternoon, probably around 1994/5, when she was living in Dymchurch, I got a call at the office. “You have to meet my friend”. “Oh, OK” I said, “who is she and where did you meet her?” “I picked her up in my cab”. “Ah.” It turns out that during her days as a cabbie, Mum had arrived at Charlton station in the pouring rain to collect a fare. Unfortunately whoever it was had long gone, and the only person in view was a young woman in floods of tears. Having established that this person (a) was not her fare, and (b) she did not have any money or place to stay, anyone might have been excused for making the appropriate sympathetic noises and driving on. Not a bit of it. “Well you’ll have to come home with me then” was the predictable response. Ingrid remains a close friend to her to this day, having invited Mum to visit her in Vienna on at least a couple of occasions.

I know of very few people better at making and keeping friends, and none who are or were more universally loved by those close to them. In her own gentle way, she set me an example which I hope I can live up to, and I certainly would not be half the person I am if it were not for having known her."

The emergence of the Musical Middle Class

Whatever your views of the iniquities of the record industry (and mine are pretty strong it must be said), the fact is that business to all intents and purposes is ancient history. In the 10 years since the peak of the record business in 1999, it has been steadily dying and now it is dead. Not dying, dead.

This however should be a cause for celebration for anyone who cares about music as an art form and as a business, because it means that the whole process of making and discovering music is back in the hands of the people that matter - the artists and their audience. Clearly the few remaining people in major labels would disagree, but frankly I cannot get too upset about them - they who spent much of the last decade spending millions and millions of pounds on terrible records that never saw the light of day (Jo Lean and The Jing Jang Jong anyone?).

So why is it such a cause for celebration?

First, it is much easier to make "records", but this can be both a blessing and a curse. The upside is that people who have talent are able to express it far more easily, and with far fewer distractions, and thus more great music gets made. The downside is that all of those people from the "unmade bed" school of inspiration who think all music is art no matter how lacking in talent the perpetrators may be, or how awful the noise is, clog up the digital pipes with a lot of that sort of nonsense.

Secondly it is far far easier to make money as a musician. Now I realise that this may sound counter-intuitive, but that fact is that there are more and more simple ways for music creators to connect with music consumers on a commercial basis, and the process is truly democratic. If what you create is any good, people will want to listen to it, and you will find an audience. If you have an audience de-facto you have a business. For an example of what I mean take a look at www.topspinmedia.com

Thirdly as the traditional music institutions crumble, so the artist is able to retain and "collapse" his own copyright. Now this is where it starts to get really interesting commercially. Best way to explain this is to give an example:

I work with a new band called The Union who have a small but committed and growing audience. The band made it's first single available to anyone who wanted it as a free download. At the same time via their website (using Topspin) they offered a digital EP featuring the single plus a live track and an acoustic track for £1.99. Crucially they also offered the digital EP with a T Shirt as a bundle for £14.99 and over 30% of the transactions took the t shirt option, giving us more than £6 per transaction. Within days we had generated £1,000s of pounds of income for the price of printing a few T Shirts. This may not be as sexy as lear jets and fancy hotels (which was always a nonsense anyway), but you do not need to go much further along than that before the artist is making a living doing what they love. Also, as I said earlier, the democratic nature of the web means that the more people like what you do, the more money you will make.

In short what we are seeing is the emergence of a musical middle class.

It is true that it is now immeasurably harder to achieve global commercial success, but that is not such a bad thing in my book, as hopefully now all the idiots who become artists dreaming of the rockstar lifestyle will bugger off and become hedge fund managers instead.

It is of course utter nonsense to say that bands will stop making "records" or that their audiences will not want to listen to them. You only have to pop into your nearest Apple Store to see what utter tosh that is. What has changed forever is the entire physics of the commercial relationship between the artists and their audiences. This is excellent news for both the producers and the consumers, and the end of the road for all of the middle men and rights owners, and frankly - good riddance.

Some great new music from a proper Rock N Roll band

Amazing soda shop

I thought this video was amazing. I could not help but be struck by the parallels between the soda business and the record business.

People like this guy are heros. I urge you to take a few minutes out of your day to celebrate a guy who is fighting to make the world a slightly more interesting place.

Next time I am in LA I am going to pay him a visit. Be sure you do the same.

You will find him at 5702 York Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, 90042

Sound advice

I'd never heard of Michael Masnick or Techdirt until recently, but Mike's presentation to Narm earlier this year is as good and compelling a case for the new direct to fan models in our industry as I have seen so far.

If you are in a band and are serious about having a career this is essential viewing.

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

The Cult Of Mediocrity

A few months back I attended a live show. The headliner were White Lies, the then major label cut-and-paste indie band de jour, and had sold out the mid sized venue with ease.

As I watched in a mood of indulgent and slightly bored bemusement, a number of things struck me: - Firstly the band were ok. Not great, not inspiring, not life affirming.. just ok. They were just about musically competent and they had one or two decent tunes, but to be truthful, the whole thing was a little dull. The second thing that hit me was the crowd. It was quite extraordinary. They behaved like robots who had been told that this was something they should like, but to a man they seemed more interested in looking around at the other members of the audience to see which other scenesters were present and what they were wearing.

It was truly bizarre.

After about 30 minutes I had had enough and I left, musing that if that was the best that our major labels had to offer, then no wonder they were in such deep trouble.

Fast forward to early July and I attended another show by a band who have not been industry darlings for the best part of a decade and a half - if ever. Thunder (for it was they) have decided to call time on a distinguished career after 20 years of being largely ignored by the vast majority of the mainstream press, radio and TV, and this was their farewell headline show at a totally sold out Hammy Odeon.

The contrast could not have been more marked.

The audience was not so much cheering as worshipping, with a dedication and fervour that was genuinely moving, even to a cynic like yours truly. The band were astoundingly good live (as in fairness they have been for their entire career) and at the end everyone in the audience was handed a petition put together by some of the bands more dedicated fans begging them not to quit. As I left, a journalist came up to me and in all seriousness said "You know, I think this is one of those bands we have all taken for granted, and that none of us will really appreciate until they are gone"... to which my response was a barely civil "you think?".

I went home wondering how on earth we consistently get it so wrong.

The reason our record industry is in the toilet has nothing to do with illegal downloading, the internet, CD pricing or indeed any of the other spurious excuses the labels love to trot out. It is because the people who have run it - the labels AND the media - have made consistently bad judgements about what music to support and invest in as well as catastrophically lazy assumptions about what their consumers would like to hear.

I for one will not shed a single tear when the business of music returns to the hands of the fans and the bands, where it belongs.

The best joke ever

I have to admit this made me giggle..

A scientific experiment was carried out a few years ago to test the hypothesis that dogs adopt the behavioural characteristics of their owners over time. The three dogs used for the experiment belonged to an architect, a mathematician and an A&R man. The dogs were each given a plateful of dog biscuits, shut in a room and observed.

The architect's dog used its biscuits to build a fully accurate scale model of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, complete with flying buttresses and fabulous rococo gargoyles.

The mathematician's dog made skilful use of its biscuits to demonstrate at least three basic flaws in Einstein's General and Special Theories of Relativity.

The A&R man's dog ground up its biscuits, snorted them, f*cked the other two dogs and went home early.

Broooooce...

Bruce Springsteen is one of those Marmite artists. People either love him or hate him.

I used to be in the latter category, but after seeing The East St band on the Born in the USA tour at Wembley Stadium in the early 80's I became a convert. The thing that I found so astonishing about the show was the fact that you could not see a single person - including all of the security staff, and even the police - who was not smiling and happy. It seemed to me to be a quite astonishing achievement. I also remember that the songs which had sounded a little pedestrian on record, came alive in concert in a way that I did not think would be possible. His ability to turn a stadium into a dancefloor and turn the audience into the show is a trick which any number of pale imitators have borrowed since.

That show prompted me to investigate his records a little more deeply, and I became drawn in by the seductive combination of the everyman appeal, the amazing skill of the band and the power of a lot of the songs.

Springsteen's remarkable ability to empathise with the man on the street comes across in the songs time and time again. When you bear in mind that this is a man who has not had to concern himself with the price of a pint of milk for over 3 decades, it seems even more astonishing.

A couple of examples to illustrate what I am talking about: -

"End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes,
And you'd better believe boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight
It's the work, it's the working, it's the working life".

(Factory - Darkness on The Edge Of Town)

"10,000 tons of metal a day
And now you tell me the world's changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name"

(Youngstown - Tom Joad)

You may wonder why I am blathering on about this, and I am getting to the point (albeit slowly).

Here's the thing. I went to see Bruce and his band in Hyde Park a couple of weeks back, and remarkably I left less than halfway through his set. "Not much of a fan then", you may well feel, but that was not it. The band were on great form. His voice was it's usual gravelly self, the songs were just as moving.... but sadly only seemingly to me.

Wherever I went I found myself surrounded by drunken redneck yahoos, who were clearly far more interested in drinking and talking utter bollocks with their equally drunken friends than they were in watching one of the truly great artists in popular music history.

In the end, I left because I could not hear above the cacophony of crassness, mediocrity and stupidity that surrounded me, and because I was ashamed to be a part of it.

Sorry Bruce. You deserved better.

11.59 - by Rick Wilson DMD

I came across this posting on a closed network I belong to and I enjoyed reading it so much that I simply had to share it. It was written by a dentist in Philadelphia called Rick Wilson and was originally in two parts, but I have edited them together in a way that makes it read coherently.


"For the next 3 years, it's 11:59. All the time.

And in spite of all odds, January was a good beginning for us. Because we made it so. Laser focus, people, that's the key. Full-throttle sense of purpose. Nothing less will do in these times.

Trust me, though. You can do it. Si se puede!

I just mean that I'm going to work as if it's the last minute, even when it's not. Like my partner, Dr. Sukoneck, always says- "You have to work as if the waiting room is full of patients- even when it's empty."

(I'm playing Blondie's "11:59" as I write this!)

I've set goals and I'm determined to rock out in spite of the overall economy. Operating within Seth's philosophy which so far is working beautifully. It's not fast, not a quick fix, but I'm just beginning to see real long-term rewards.

I believe that each business should identify their own "Four Horsemen of their Apocalypse". Maybe three, maybe five, but some tangible things that hold us back. I also firmly believe that it's hard to see your own challenges clearly, and that it helps a great deal to look at other industries or fields that are different than your own. Then draw parallels and learn and apply the lessons to yourself.

Wanna hear mine? The last will surprise you. OK. Essentially all I need to experience growth are a certain number of new patients per month. Leave the rest up to me and my wonderful staff, we practice Edgecraft etc. and treat people in Anne's Visceral manner, very I-You. All I need is to have enough folks find us. We'll handle the rest.

So my Horsemen are:
1- People who move away. Our society is a very mobile one. I still miss folks who moved away a long time ago, and recently we've had such fine patients go far away. It's sad, and also of course it drains away a little part of the practice each time it happens.
2- Patients who pass away. (No, not in the chair Tom!) Our practice has a large elderly population. Even sadder than when they move, of course, and same effects in losing potentially more than we can gain with new patients.
3- Patients who say, "My insurance changed, I can't see you anymore". But Tom, you have to say this out loud in that exact voice that Jerry Lewis used when he screamed "Laaaady!" ;} Here's the irony- they are usually folks who are healthy and have very little dental needs besides maintenance, and it might cost them, say, $140 per year instead of, say, $57 per year. I can understand changing doctors when thousands of dollars in some reconstruction might be reduced, but these smaller amounts do leave me bemused.
4- Here's the interesting one- people get healthy! If patients are reasonably compliant and listen to health advice, we can reduce cavities and periodontal disease to very low levels. It has been said that dentistry is the only major business that is constantlly trying to put itself out of business.

I post these in detail because, again, it takes a lot of deep thought to truly identify the challenges in your own business, and I find going far afield helps to figure it all out. So maybe someone here who does something quite different than me can use this, and will see something that they missed before.

So, in my case I need Marketing. Not Advertising, which is broken, but Marketing. So we Embrace The Cow, we use Edgecraft, I recognize that we'll always serve a crowd but also we can lead a tribe within that; I reflect on and use Anne's Visceral Business and Blatant Integrity concepts. I'm a bit fortunate that way because Dr. Sukoneck practiced that way instinctively since the 70's, before it was ever called that.

So, bringing in an appropriate number of new patients and treating them with excellence is what I need to do to counterbalance my Four Horsemen. As long as we stay focused every minute as if it's 11:59 we will continue to grow. The best thing about using Seth's concepts as opposed to "Y'all come" advertising is this- nearly all of the new patients who are referred by our existing patients are fine people with whom we can have a good mutual relationship, and this is simply because they were referred in by similar people who are already in the practice. We rarely have an extremely difficult, cantankerous new patient these days because it's not a random selection process.

Oh boy I'm on a riff here Tom, but I'd say that the above summarizes what I've learned form Seth, from Anne, and from all of you fine folks here on Triiibes. It's my Manifesto!

So, everyone steal from it and use it and have success in 2009!"

Rick Wilson DMD

A note on filesharing

When people (almost always record label people) start to ask those questions about stopping or controlling filesharing, I always reply by asking them the following question:

“Does the name King Canute mean anything to you”?

Facetious I know, but I find it hard to resist. The fact is that on this issue people are asking entirely the wrong questions, questions which are framed by their knowledge and experiences of how things have been done to date, not how things are now.

A chap called Ian Rogers from a company called Topspin says it best: “The physics of media have changed”. We therefore need to think in a different way.

Here is an idea. I am not suggesting that this is the best way, or the only way to look at filesharing, but for what it is worth, this is how I view it.

People are going to visit filesharing sites and download music for free. No point wasting any more brain space worrying about that, but if you knew who those people were and were in a position to talk to them (with their permission), would that not be a powerful thing? Could you maybe encourage them to come to your shows, buy your t shirts, read your blogs, subscribe to your fan club..? I would argue yes you can.

If you could find a way to extract the email addresses of some, or even most of the people who download your tracks, you would be taking a huge step towards building a community of people who appreciate your art, and guess what? You can.

Music glue (http://www.musicglue.com/) provide a free service where you upload your music in whatever resolution you like (the higher the better) and they then distribute it to all of the main filesharing sites instantaneously. The really clever bit is that when someone goes to download the track they receive a text, audio or video message saying for example say “Hey, we know you are downloading this track from XXX site. That’s totally cool, but if you are interested in the band give us your email address and we’ll keep you up to date” or whatever.

This way you are able to harness the data traffic and build yourselves a fanbase.

As I say, just an idea.

Don't be a stain on the carpet

Some of my best friends work in the live music industry, which once a year convenes in London for the International Live Music Conference (ILMC). At the most recent of these shindigs back in March, I found myself involved in any number of fascinating conversations with a variety of agents and promoters from all over the world. These are the sort of masters of this peculiar little universe who move and shake with abandon, and on whose whim careers can made or broken, in much the same way curiously, as might have been said of record moguls in the past.

Interestingly, I found myself thinking that a lot of what I was hearing could just as easily have been said by those same record industry bigwigs 8 or 9 years ago, when they were still riding the crest of the tail end of the CD boom and believed themselves to be bulletproof. I heard talk of the search for the next global superstar (have these people really not read The Long Tail yet?), of a business that was secure in its own invincibility, of reckless profiteering in the secondary ticketing market without considering the consumers perception of the artists, the longevity of their careers and certainly without concern for the long term damage to consumer confidence that such behaviour will certainly cause.

As I heard all of these things I found myself thinking "have these guys not been paying attention"? It was PRECISELY this sort of arrogance that brought the record industry to its knees, and there is no reason to think that exactly the same fate might not befall the live business.

This is what I know. In the music business (in fact in pretty much ANY business), the ability for fans to have a direct emotional and commercial relationship with the artist changes EVERYTHING. The value chain has not so much been shortened as blown up.

There are a plethora of middlemen and gatekeepers in our industry. Record labels, publishers, the media, collection societies, booking agents, promoters, sponsors, merchandisers, aggregators, distributors.. I could go on and on, but here's the thing: None of these people have a divine right to earn a living, or even frankly to exist. In a direct to fan world there are only 2 people who matter. The artist and the fan.

Everyone else in the value chain who is not actively adding value is merely a stain on the carpet and should be wiped away without a second thought.

Babe Ruth

Some years ago I was attending a worldwide sales conference in Chicago for the software company I was working for at the time. The President of the company William Nelson III was giving his keynote speech and during it he said the following:

"Babe Ruth is considered by most Baseball fans to be the greatest player of all time. During his career, he set the record for the number of home runs in a single season, a record which stood for decades. What is less well known is that in that same season he also set the record for striking out.

Why am I telling you this? Well the lesson it seems to me, is that to succeed you have to take chances and risk falling on your backside. Or, to put it another way, the only reason I am the president of the company and you are not is because I have made more mistakes than you have".

I have heard similar sentiments expressed many times, but never quite so succinctly.

Simplicity is genius.

I was idly browsing Topspin Media's website today and I came across this quote from James Lamberti, their VP of Marketing and Artist Services:

"Data is my A&R agent, Viral Marketing is my radio promotion, Direct-to-fan is my retail store".

I was moved. Take a bow mate.

My Father Alan McKenzie

My father is a great man.

He doesn't think so. Great men never do.

My father taught me what I consider to be the important things in life. Respect, honesty, integrity and most of all love. Love of life, of poetry, of nature, of beauty, of music (of which more later) and of family.

He toiled all of his working life to provide for us, my mother, my brother and I, but for all of his efforts I never once heard him complain about how hard he had had to work to put food on the table. Then when the weekend came he would work from morning till night to build a better home for us all. Carpentry, DIY, decorating - he once built me a beautiful chess table which I am proud to say I still have.

I owe my love of music almost entirely to him too. When I was 7 or 8 he would sit me down to listen to Mozart, Brahms or Beethoven, and he would be happy to spend as much time as it took to help me appreciate the sublime genius of the great masters works. I particularly remember one time when we sat and listened to Beethoven's 7th symphony together, while he patiently explained what terms like Scherzo, Adagio and Allegretto meant, and why they were important in the context of the symphonic form. Even as a 7 year old I could not help but be moved by his passion for the music he loved.

Many years later when I tried to return the favour and educate him in the finer points of Led Zeppelin, Ben Harper, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan and many others, to his great credit he managed to suppress his firm prejudices about popular music and return the compliment.

This is my small tribute to him.

Thanks Dad. You ARE a great man and I love you.

ITV

I have been watching the travails of ITV with a mixture of great sadness and just a touch of amusement.

It is obviously sad when a lot of people lose their jobs, but much like the labels, it staggers me that they did not see it coming. The company has obviously been badly mismanaged for some years now (err.. football rights anyone), but when you look at some of the tosh they trot out these days its amazing they have got this far without going the same way as Woolies.

I actually find it astonishing that ANYONE still thinks it makes sense to advertise on ITV or Channel 4 these days, but hey, what do I know.

I do know this. We get the television we deserve, because if we did not watch it we they would not show it.

Try this: Next time one of the networks start peddling some bit of trite reality TV rubbish to boost their flagging telephony revenues - DON'T VOTE, or better still don't watch it. Start a campaign to get crap like "Big Brother" and "I'm a 'D' list nonentity" or whatever the hell its called off our screens.

Imagine if BB had never happened, how much better the world would be. No Nasty Nick, no Heat Magazine, no idiot papparazzi stalking the more attractive parts of London looking for pictures of people you have never heard of but who are apparently "celebrities" because they had sex with a wine bottle on national television, no Chantelle (whoever she is) and so on.

I cannot believe I am the only person who feels this way.

Perspective

Like most people who work in London, I take the tube to work. Most days I sit and read the paper and try to ignore what is going on around me. Occasionally I take whatever book I happen to be reading at the time.

Once in a blue moon I put on my ipod.

This may seem strange for a man who makes his living in the music business, but having suffered at the hands of fellow travellers who inflict their cheesy house music on everyone within earshot - seemingly without any understanding of the irritation they are causing, I tend to excercise restraint in my listening habits.

Once in a while however I feel the need to commune with a few of my tunes, and the thing that strikes me whenever I do is the extraordinary power of music to alter your perspective.

Want to seethe in private - stick on some thrash metal. Need to hark back nostalgically to your teens - Led Zeppelin every time. Feeling sad and lost - get that Sarah Mclachlan playlist on, want to smile - stick on a bit of ELO.. you get the idea.

Now I know that this is not exactly revolutionary thinking, but it struck me that with such a significant percentage of the public lost in their own musical wilderness for such a large part of the day, it might be an idea to promote our bands in those terms.

Hmm... this requires more thought. I'll get back to you.

The Twits

There is a great quote in an otherwise unremarkable movie called "Other People's Money". Danny DeVito plays a master of the universe and is commenting unemotionally about a small business he is about to buy up and destroy.

"Fastest way to go out of business?" he asks.. "Take an increasing share of a decreasing market. Slow and steady. Down the drain".

I was reminded of that watching the conspicuous consumption by the record industry tonight at the Brits. How we can celebrate such dreadfully mediocre tosh as The Ting Tings and Duffy is utterly beyond me.

Thank god for Kings Of Leon and Elbow (nice one Phil).

Tears in my eyes..

Its late and I am sitting here listening to Bob Dylan with tears in my eyes.

I have never really been a fan, but sometimes a particular song can resonate with what is happening in your life and this is one of those times.

"How many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind..."

I can not remember ever feeling more sad..