Diary Of A Musician

An hour before, I was a skint musician with few prospects, but for now and for at least a few more minutes it appears that I am a skint musician who is ‘famous’. “I’m f**king famous!” I shout at my 11-week-old daughter. “Dad is f**king famous!” “Gahhhh,” she replies. I get texts and Facebook messages for roughly the next four minutes, and then both are quiet again. I decide that this is four minutes from my allotted 15 and, now I’ve got the taste for it, I will use the next 11 minutes, whenever they appear, carefully. For these four brief minutes of fame, though, I will just punch the air and shout. In the eyes of my father-in-law, I am not as bad a bet as he originally thought, and for that I am very grateful to the tastemakers of American TV.

A few days later, we have a band meeting and our manager comes in with some good news: our label has offered us a new album deal. We are thrilled. With the current state of the music business, we were expecting to be dropped, but it seems as though our album sales, while not through the roof, have been OK, and the label are keen to keep the momentum up and release another early next year. I am flooded with relief. Being employed in the music industry has felt at times like one of the polar bears on the global warming adverts, perched precariously on a tiny ice cube while everything around us melts away. We’re being given a few more blocks of ice here, and we appreciate it all the more.

More than anything, the opportunity to write more songs is awesome, and I’m filled with a new sense of purpose. To be constantly in fear of unemployment is an awful feeling and one I’ve been carrying around for the last few months, so when I’m told that for the next six months I can concentrate on writing songs, I feel the weight lift off. Our manager also tells us that we have almost broken even on our latest album as well, which is good enough news to get in a second round of drinks. I am almost as pleased with this news as by the news of another record.

Our manager tells us that another musician, who has sold out gigs across Spain and is playing to over 1500 people a night, has only sold 300 records there. Almost every person at his gigs has downloaded his album, so while the gigs are just breaking even, his record is at least 100 grand in the chute with no prospect of ever making back the money that’s been spent on it. “It’s unsustainable,” she says. “The whole thing is teetering on the edge.” Thanking our lucky stars, we get one more round in. For us, at least for the moment, things aren’t looking so bad. An album that has almost recouped, a new deal on the table, and an American tour at the end of the month. “Here’s to it,” we toast.

I try to set up a couple of gigs with some promoters who’ve sent us emails on our MySpace site. I had spoken to one of them six months ago and he was pretty insistent back then about the fact that we had to bring 30 to 40 people down. Even though we’ve been going for a while, I just don’t feel like we could muster that many ‘fans’. It seems we’re caught in this vicious circle of not being able to play enough gigs to build a fan base, but we haven’t got the fan base to get the gigs that require a large audience following. The promoter, while well meaning and helpful, also breaks the record for how long he can talk to me on the phone.

Another promoter sends me some dates, which I email to the boys. The drummer can do one, but the bassist is busy packing for his new flat and can’t do any of the three options. “I think I’m going to keep it quiet for a while. It just seems that I’m always saying ‘no’ to you, that’s all,” continues the bassist. I’m sure he can sense my frustration, especially as I’ve sent him some dates before that he said he couldn’t do.

With nothing going on, the drummer and I meet up in a favoured bar of ours for a taste of the establishment’s fine selection of ales and crisis talks about the band. It has been talked about for a while that we want to record, perhaps with an eye to making an extended EP, or maybe an album, that we can send round various record companies. Seeing as the drummer has a degree in music production, it’s only right he should take the reins of the mixing desk. All we need is to find somewhere to record the drums with some special mics his friend has and record the drum tracks, and then we can record everything else by going through his computer.

I imagine romantic scenes of recording in a barn à la Neil Young, but I figure it’ll probably be a practice room. Slowly enjoying our second pint, we discuss the bassist. He is clearly too busy moving house and getting married to play with us anymore, and effectively said so in that email to me. The fact that he said I “took the band too seriously” at the last gig we played also signals to me that we aren’t pulling in the same direction. I’ve arranged to meet him for a pint to suggest that maybe he’d be better off without the band in his life. He’s a friend as well, so I don’t want him to throw his toys out of the pram, get the hump and not speak to us again.

As the third pint is ordered, we now face the predicament of recording without a bassist. Sure, I could play the bass lines; I just haven’t got a) the instrument or b) the natural flair to play it. While I’ve played it myself before on recordings, if this new batch of recording is going to be an album that we’re going to circulate around record companies, we don’t want it to be a ‘rough job’, as it were.

On top of this, a best friend has asked me to play at his birthday in two months’ time in the local working men’s club, do a few originals and do a few covers to keep the club’s more senior members happy. It’s a great idea. I’ve just got to assemble half a band. And the bassist? Well, we never do meet for a drink; he emails me to say that he is too busy...