FACE 2 COX

Barry Aldridge (of 'BarryAldridge' fame) wrote a blog the other day talking about his 'Face 2 Face' interview series on Youtube. I left a comment that said "When do we get 'Face 2 Cox'?" Because I am (as I'm sure most of you are) eagerly anticipating the fulfilment of the promise Barry made - to give the people a JohnCox88 channel recommendation. Granted channel recommendations as we knew them are finished, but John Cox and his legions of fans have agreed that a 'Face 2 Cox' episode will suffice.

I received the following DM on twitter earlier today.

Hey Dave, I had to delete your comment from my latest blog entry because of Face 2 Cox comment. If my family saw that that would be upset.

I asked why, given that Cox is just a name and was told,

I know but the thing Face2Cox sounds like something else and some people would take it the wrong way thinking you maybe taking the piss.

I know right. Take the piss... Me?! And as for what this "something else" might be, I'm none the wiser. But I assure you, the fight for 'Face 2 Cox' will continue until our demands are met, and Barry's promise is kept!

Keep the faith.

xxx

p.s. There was another Aldridge gem on his facebook status this morning, may as well stick it in here...
"I hate waking up to rain, it's like waking up to hell.' I love you Barry.

Fuck

I hate letting people down. I hate it more when they lay a massive guilt trip on you.

I was only trying to help out someone else and then they let me down, so I had to pass it along. I even covered for them, don't ask me why. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just stopped doing things - if I hadn't offered to help in the first place everything would be fine.

New rule: Only help people if it doesn't require getting someone else to help too.

Fuck the to-do list.

/vent. Sorry.

Summer

Today had a very 'first day of summer' feel about it.

The last football of this Premiership season was played, it was properly hot with not a cloud to be seen and we had a BBQ for the first time in over half a year. I also made a playlist of summery songs on my ipod.

Of course I got nothing done because I was outside all day, I'm gonna have to work on that.
My cousin was round the other day though to have a listen to my EP. She was very complimentary, which made me really pleased/relieved because she knows what she's talking about. She also showed me a few things that can help with the sound and now I'm almost ready to let them go. It's strange, I've been making tiny adjustments for as long as I was writing and recording instruments and soon I'm going to stop and they will be set in stone.

Oh, I don't know why I started writing this, I didn't have any news... Just that it's been a lovely day.

I'm gonna make a to-do list for tomorrow in case it's sunny again. If I don't I'll just read in the garden all day.

- Finish tracks for EP (and try to think of a name)
- Finish half written song
- Answer some questions for an interview
- Look for a laptop for my parents
- Read in the garden (but only for a while)
- Write a blog describing how well the to-do list went.

Goodnight. x

p.s. all this talk of summer and itunes on shuffle keeps bringing up Christmas songs!

I am

Fucking inspired right about now to be honest.

I hope I still feel like this tomorrow because I'm gonna crash soon.

The songs are sounding good though, and I'm writing a few new ones as well. The world is all right. Also keep the 10th June free if you fancy a trip to Nottingham, but don't quote me on that because it's not fo sho.

Peace out, A town, word to your mother.

x

Good news!

First off here's a video I uploaded to my second channel earlier. Go ahead and hit play so you can listen while you read on!



It's just a guitar style I've been practising with the last couple of days. See I saw two minutes of this film called 'August Rush' and they were playing a song in some open tuning... I liked it so I stopped watching in order to watch it from the start next time, but I went and stuck my guitar in open D for a while. Might record something properly with it tomorrow.

The good news is that my friends Rook and the Ravens - the second best band in the world - have started up a youtube channel. These guys are good on a ridiculous scale - Like if you think I'm good - LOL. They've been gigging since they were about ten years old and it shows. They've just recorded an album so I can't fucking wait for that.

Earlier Tom blogged about his three favourite youtube musicians, I said Tom Hall, Greg Holden and The Nunes. Well The Nunes just got bumped out of the top three, that's how serious I am!

It's weird though because they're offline friends and now it's all mixed up. Ah well, mixing stuff up is good, just look at fruit salads - they've gone from strength to strength.


I've been doing more Summer in the City organising today, starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. All I know is it better be the best fucking day of my life, or there will be trouble!

Here, click on this sentence to go sub to RatR. I guarantee good times.


Goodnight. x

24 hours in London

On Friday I left for London. I got into Derby really early... For some reason when catching trains I always give the bus half an hour to get there, even though it takes about ten minutes. So I had a little wonder around Derby and ended up sitting on one of the comfy chairs in the new shopping centre where I started re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. Apart from getting up to walk to the station and on to a train that pretty much continued until London. I headed to Waterloo to meet Paul and Sophie (and Chris Lomas briefly!) and we headed up the Jubilee line to visit a potential venue for Summer in the City. The guy in charge was cool... He reminded me of a guy I know that runs a pub in Glossop, mostly because they both run gig venues and are Scottish, but still. The place looked great and hopefully they will have us... I still have to persuade him to let under 18s in, but I think he'll come around!

After that we went off to get food, but only found drink. Had a pint in Camden before asking the very foreign staff where KOKO was... One of them kind of knew and gave me directions that sounded rough but turned out to be very accurate. We got there a bit late - missed most of the support who sounded pretty good. It was the first time I'd been to KOKO, which is a wonderful venue - not very deep but there are a few layers of balconies like at a theatre, which I imagine it was originally. It also has one of the biggest glitter balls I've ever seen.

Ben Kweller, who I realise I haven't mentioned yet, though he was the reason we were there, came on and played some tracks from his new album Changing Horses as well as quite a few from all of his older albums. They worked quite well together considering his new album is very country, whereas the old stuff is more indie/rock/I'm no good with genre names.

I've seen him plenty of times before so I knew what to expect. The first time I went, my friend sent a text to someone to describe the show and he just wrote 'This is talent.' Kweller is an immensely talented man and he surrounds himself with great musicians. But the one thing that stands out about him is how much he loves what he does. I've never seen anybody more comfortable on stage, he absolutely loves it!

The rest of the night involved a few more drinks, getting a hi five from some random woman because I unplugged the speaker that was drowning out our conversation, going back to Sophie's where we met Ian and Lex, and cooking pasta, which was the first thing I'd eaten in about 15 hours.

The next day we had to get up fairly early, which none of us are very good at, but we managed it. Even though Sophie made us miss one train we got on the next one and went to see a hostel. I'm trying to sort something out with this hostel for Summer in the City. It's quite a complicated situation and I'm going to think about how best to work it later on today, but the place is beautiful and Renee who I've been talking to over email and who showed us round was really nice. Then I rushed back towards St Pancras, while the others rushed back to Waterloo. I made it on my train back with about one minute to spare, which is always a good feeling!

So that was my day in London. There was some more Catcher in the Rye on the train home, but not much more as I could barely keep my eyes open.

Still tired now, but good times had.

xxx

Cheeky Bastards

Lately the media in England have been going crazy over the amount of money MP's have been claiming on their housing expenses. See they have to be in London a lot, as well as with their constituencies, so they get a second home allowance, and some of them have a second home about five minutes away from their first, some aren't living in their first homes for long enough for it to be a first home, and a hundred other things that I won't tell you because you don't care. I don't care. I've yet to meet anyone who cares beyond saying, 'Cheeky bastard' on hearing the latest story and moving on.

But we keep being told how much we care and it's starting to bother me. Aren't these the people who are running the country? They're supposed to be speaking for us, deciding what is best for the country, if you go high enough, which this 'scandal' appears to be, they are the people who run everything - school, hospitals, police, housing... they can send us to war! Don't they have things to do?

I agree some of them have been cheeky bastards but did anyone expect anything else? So sort the system out, have them pay back money, do whatever... Just leave it out of the headlines because I don't give a shit. It was the same with swine flu for about a week until this came along. I tell you what, if they hadn't latched onto this they'd still be banging on about the flu. And they'll be talking about this until the next thing I don't care about comes along.

I don't mean I don't care at all... I do care about the news in general. I like to be informed, just not about the same thing everyday when it just isn't that important.

So basically, the media pisses me off. If I had a paper it'd be a different length everyday, depending on how much interesting stuff actually happened.


In other (more interesting) news, I started work on a new video today. It's using split screens but in a new way (for me!). If you track my split screen videos so far it goes the Promise, Saves the Day, Coldplay, then this. I think the previous three are some of my best videos and they've improved each time, so I'm hoping this one will continue that trend... I know this much: it's ambitious! It'll probably drive me crazy, but I'm taking it slowly because it's for one of the tracks on the EP which is at least a month away.

Alright then.

Oh, I'm going to London to see Ben Kweller for the... Fifth(?) time tomorrow. I'm very excited.

Bye then!

xxx

Three at once.

The four tracks I have recorded for my first EP have been sent off to my cousin for her approval and advice before they are uploaded. I think they will be going on itunes and amazonmp3, those were by far the most popular choices by commenters on my latest video. So for today I can't really do anything on it. That means I can do some work on the acoustic tracks that I also want to make available to download soon.

It's got me thinking about how I'm going to need to work in the coming months and years. Since I don't have an audience large enough to sell thousands and thousands of whatever I release, in order to live off my creativity I will have to have quite a high output. As such I think I'll always be working on three things at once;

1. Current songs - those which have been written and are being recorded.
2. Old songs, which will actually be new to the audience - songs that are recently available to download... Making videos for them will be the most important part of this category.
3. New songs - I'll need to be writing songs to get started on as soon as the current ones are done.

Supposedly itunes takes about a month to process songs, so if in that time I can get two or three videos done ready to promote the songs, and get a good start on recording the next thing I should be able to keep things moving nicely.

Of course this will all fall apart because I'm useless, but it's good to have a plan.

The strange thing is the idea of consciously keeping my youtube channel a month or so in the past, because I will have to wait for songs to be available before uploading videos for them. I like to share things as soon as I write them... I suppose I can still do that, maybe just a rough version of new songs on my second channel, or I might find some new ways to get stuff out there... More secret ways! I can show people who read this blog some of the demos or something. That way the people who really care can keep up to date.

Hmm, sorry - just thinking out loud (*in type).

Well anyway, it should be fun!

Too long to tweet.

There was some discussion on twitter yesterday regarding Summer in the City. I missed the fireworks, but I thought I'd add a word or two in a place not confined by a 140 character limit and at a time slightly out of the heat of the argument, which I hope will allow for a more level headed approach.

The background to the story is this. Davey (aka daveyboyz) entered an online video competition a few weeks back. The prize was £100,000 (I believe only £20,000 was cash, the rest in 'sponsorship'). Davey announced that if he won he would give £2,000 to help cover the cost of the gathering already being organised by myself and a few others. Whether this move was intended for the good of the community and the gathering, or as a way of gathering support for the video, I'll leave for you to decide. What I will say is that he didn't make any contact with any of the organisers before he did this.

I remember seeing a lot of my friends helping out on twitter, asking people to vote for the video for the good of the gathering, but in the end it wasn't enough, Davey didn't win that prize.

However, and I don't know exactly how it works - I think there are competitions every month and Davey's video was re-entered into the next competition, and it won. The prize is significantly smaller, I believe £5,000.

Now here comes the argument (isn't it always right after the money comes in?!) Tom, who's helping to organise, assumed this meant Davey would be sticking by his promise of a £2,000 donation. Davey said it was a different competition with a smaller prize so he would be keeping all of the money himself.

The point of this blog is still to come, and it's not to voice my opinion on what would have been the right thing to do, but I'll let you know that now just for the record.

I don't think it would be fair to ask for 2 out of 5 grand, when it was originally supposed to be 2 from 20 (plus all the sponsorship).
I also don't think it's fair to give nothing when a lot of people were voting for the video under the assumption that a percentage of the winnings would be going to the gathering.
What I would have done is given the same percentage - it was £2,000 out of £20,000, so I would have offered £500 out of the £5,000 winnings - 10%.

If I were in Davey's place, that's what I'd have done. But let me be clear, I'm not asking for £500, or any money. First of all I don't think even I could persuade Tom to accept it now, secondly Davey posted the following tweet earlier:

"if I do give anything to the gathering, I will decide people i give it to - its not going anywhere near you guys, sorry"

So I don't imagine asking for any amount would be fruitful.

But most importantly, and here we've finally got to the point... We don't need it. (Sorry you had to read all of that to get to a four word point. Still it could have been worse, I think Tom's was four letters.)
We've planned this gathering well, spent a lot of time considering options, searching for places and thinking about ways to finance it. Though there's still work to be done, we're in a good place.

I wrote this post last night, and at this point I took a break and watched X-Men 2! When I came back there was another tweet from Davey that read,

"Ok well i dont mind giving some, but i wont be giving directly to you organisers."

I think I've said all I need to as an organiser of the event, namely that planning is going really well and we are happy to continue without any 'help'. So I'll leave this last paragraph for my personal thoughts - this is my blog after all.

I was quite insulted (though not surprised) that Davey made the announcement without consulting any of us. Those last two tweets have magnified that considerably. I don't know where he would plan to send money if not to the organisers, but I feel as though he's undermining the huge number of hours we've spent discussing, researching and planning this gathering. On the plus side, nothing has changed! I'm still really looking forward to August, in a couple off weeks I'll be in London and I'll be looking at the probable venue for the Saturday night. There's also a sample t-shirt on it's way to me, we'll be selling them to help with the funding.

On another note, did you hear... The UK is forecast a long, hot summer. I'm very ready for that!

xxx