Writer Trevor Locke

Category: Live music in the UK

  • Local Music

    Promoting Local Music Events

    22nd October 2021

    by Carol Leeming and Trevor Locke

    Today, 22nd September 2021, Carol Leeming posted a comment on her Facebook feed: ‘Now I am really looking at how local music, musicians are promoted & supported in LESTA’.

    Carol’s post was about how local musicians can promote and advertise their shows to attract an audience. A subject of the utmost importance both now and in the past. It is an activity that has never been easy and following the Coronavirus lockdown, this has become even more difficult. As more and and more venues begin to open and more and more shows are put on, it is more important than ever to let music fans know what is going on. Carol’s post attracted a lost of interest and comments. Trevor’s comments, made while composing this article, are shown in italics.

    To Carol’s comment, Grant Decker, a local musician, responded by saying, ‘I think an event similar to Simon Says/Summer Sundae is vital for Leicester bands to gain confidence on bigger stages and to gain exposure playing with larger acts. Be lovely to have something like that in Leicester again to give local acts that confidence.’

    Simons Says and Summer Sundae were weekend festivals that took place at the De Montfort Hall. They attracted a national following as well as large numbers of local music fans. These were events of national prestige. Apart from putting on big name acts, they also provided a platform for local artists. They were an important part of the music scene in our city both to fans and to local bands and artists. Local bands saw a performance at these events as a significant step in the right direction.

    Carol Leeming replied, ‘Yes I completely agree Grant. I am finding out about promotion in Leicester (after a long period) as I have a gig coming soon in Leicester. I too wish we had a big platform as you suggest but also I posted a video on my timeline from 2009 when I worked on Oxjam in the city centre – it was great the support all the music bands artists had with venues and promoters working together would be great to see more of that in these strange times… as well for me its about our Leicester City Council, the Leicester Mercury, Cool as Leicester, Bid Leicester and other organisations getting behind bigging up Leicester music scene to promote Leicester music musicians. Bands venues far more and importantly more culturally diverse music musicians bands, as we are such a diverse city you would not think so looking at all the print online media about music in Leicester – it is very white and only certain genres types of music!’

    The problem is that even when there were big events, like Summer Sundae Weekender, it was not always possible for local artists to get on them. Organisers of large festivals could be very selective about who to take on their line-ups. Wanting a platform is one thing; being able to get a ready-made one is another. Oxjam attracted local music fans but few came from outside the local area (because there were Oxjam events all over the country.) Demand for performance slots at Oxjam was very high. Despite the large number of stages, some artists were disappointed. Leicester has always been blessed with very large numbers of bands, groups, singers and rappers.

    Luke Broughton, a musician and singer, came back on this: ‘Carol Leeming it is very homogenous in places. In my experience it is often quite a fractured scene where people often want to protect what they perceive they have rather than collaborating to grow it. Programming can be very repetitive. Open Mics are cornered by very few people doing the same things putting on their friends. There are things I get asked to do that other people don’t. On the other hand there are things I never get asked to do that the same people always get asked to do. E.g. Despite being a prominent mixed race musician in the city I’ve never been asked to play the Cosmopolitan Carnival. Is that because my genre is unexpected of my ethnicity? There are lots of conversations to be had. I’m up for having them!’

    Luke was right in saying that our local music scene is fractured. It is split up into genres and styles and gigs and concerts. These in turn attract only those people who follow those genres. That has cultural consequences in that some groups of people fail to attend certain types of music events, because they do not reflect their interests. Stages offering a diverse line-up might succeed in addressing this issue. But there are those music fans who dislike ‘diversity’ in music because their tastes are very limited. The Cosmopolitan Carnival attempted to provide a highly diverse mix of music and art-forms but its appeal was limited even though it had many strengths. It was a free festival held in the city centre and thus exposed members of the public to performances they would otherwise not have experienced. It had many good points but also some bad points. This event was fairly well publicised both online and physically, with some assistance from the Council for some years that it ran. Nearly all the musical acts on stage were local rather than of national significance with only a very few exceptions. It did however provide a platform for new and rising local artists. Cosmopolitan was an important part of the city’s summer arts programme – and continues to be to this day.

    Carol Leeming expressed her views. ‘Luke Broughton. Yes you have made some very important points and I agree; that’s why I posted the Oxjam video because the music was so diverse widening and folks working together plus I remember working also as a programme on BBC Music Live Festival in Leicester 2000s that was also very culturally diverse and fantastic of course.’

    The BBC (Radio’s) support for local music has been very patchy over the years. A few presenters did manage to feature the music of local artists on their programmes. In this respect the work of presenter Herdle White was exceptional. But today, there is little on the local channels that consistently represents Leicester’s talent, unlike Nottingham which has a whole Freeview channel in which its local talent and arts is represented. Other parts of the BBC have sometimes promoted the work of Leicester musicians, such as the programme BBC Introducing. Broadcast media has generally been very bad at presenting the work of new and rising local musicians and singers because they think that people will not have heard of them – a ‘catch 22’ situation if ever there was one!

    Luke Broughton picked up this remark by saying, ‘Carol Leeming I think diversity is important of course. Not as a tokenisation but as to provide a true reflection of the cultural mix of the city. I’m sure you’re aware that both Leonie and I have made this a priority in any programmes we have put together. Her Ceremony events strive to include a range of genres, artists of multiple genders and ethnicities. Our first Avant Garden event was put together with this ethos central to it. We are still seeing Main Stream festival line-ups being dominated predominantly by the Middle Aged white patriarchy. This can only be challenged at grass roots level up in order for a different looking kind of bill to become normalised. Would be good to talk with you about this some time.’

    Leicester is one of the UK’s most culturally diverse cities. Its artistic offering is unique, although there are many characteristics of the Nottingham arts scene that are similar; the same could also be said for Birmingham. One problem that has dogged Leicester over the years is its proximity to Nottingham and Birmingham. In some ways, Leicester has failed to make its voice heard in the arts and music industries. Today the digital media and even some broadcast media supports diversity in the arts more than ever before (though probably still not enough.) The drawback with this is it tends to court popularity more than what is avant-garde. The established media has been dominated by white men, traditionally, but this is changing now that people from diverse backgrounds are gaining entry to it more than ever before. As the cultural makeup of the UK’s population changes, the traditional offering of white-middle-aged entertainment will not do. It is not what audiences crave any more.

    Musician Stan’ley’ Samuel commented, ‘Luke Broughton it wasn’t always like this. We seem to have gone backwards. That said I’m up for helping to change the mindset because Leicester has and has always had a wealth of amazing talent.’

    They have a point about festivals being dominated by middle-aged white people. Oxjam Leicester was perhaps the exception to this because it was run by young women, in its later years. Music In Leicester magazine is probably regarded as being run by white, middle-aged males. Which it is. It has not succeeded in attracting women into its editorial ranks. As my ‘legacy’ (that of my musical enterprise) it does in fact represent a legacy of failure in that regard. The current editor has tried hard to utilise women reviewers but for whatever reason has not met with a great deal of success. Some ethnically diverse writers have made contributions but they are in the minority. The challenge facing the magazine is for the white male writers to understand what readers want to see. The magazine must also appreciate the diversity of its readership.

    Carol Leeming agreed, saying, ‘Great Stan! Count me in. We have boss talent really and truly I’m interested also the communications to build audiences i.e. the promotion online offline, print, broadcast media and the development partnerships between musicians promoters and venues e.g. the Cookie now Called Big Difference e.g. is re-opening with Comedy and booking Live bands we need to see where we can make the win/wins.’

    The whole of the arts is in a state of flux as far as media is concerned. There is still a demand for real-world, face-to-face shows but online and digital command a lot of attention. Use of the Internet continues to increase, but there is still a lump of people who refuse the Internet and expect the world to continue as it was in their parent’s day. Sadly, that lump will eventually die out. Very soon, the whole population will be connected to the Internet and paper-based will no longer be of any real value other than to nostalgia enthusiasts and historians. Hence, comments about the value of posters are time-limited. We are very close to digital promotion being the default. Nearly all of the live music events I have attended in recent months have been booked through online ticketing. No paper has been harmed in the production of these events.

    Stan’ley’ Samuel said, ‘Everybody knows from back in the day when Multiplex ran The Abbey Park Festival Archive how Leicester used to roll. In my experience when the Council gets involved it’s the beginning of the end.’

    Under the captaincy of Sir Peter Soulsby, the local authority has had a very poor out-turn. The arts and music have been largely ignored on his watch. But would other political parties have done better? Where is the evidence? The Council has supported history far more than the arts and entertainment. Tourism is seen by them as being a higher revenue-earner for the city. This contrasts strongly with comparable cities whose arts and music offerings far outstrip anything available in Leicester. Tourism earnings might not be the sole determinant of the value of the arts but they are seen as being important to local economies. Musicians are not paid a living wage. Venues are over-taxed. Festivals are being priced out of the market. Arts are not regarded as being economically viable. This will change only if the voting public – the electorate – realises that there is more to life than trade and commerce. Man cannot live on bread alone. Artists and musicians have done a great deal to help and support people who are homeless, living in poverty, alone and alienated, discriminated against and victimised, made to feel unwelcome in their own communities. The benefits of all this are enormous to personal well-being and community stability. That is something that politicians would do well to appreciate.

    Carol Leeming continued the thread, ‘Stan’ley’ Samuel Yes Stan.. what I really meant the LCC should promote us more online and in print on broadcast media not necessarily onstage although why we can’t have an annual city music festival for LESTA featuring local music I don’t know- instead of digging up all these roads!’

    Most road works are funded by central government or the County Council. Local authorities cannot vire funds from one budget to another, willy nilly. But, where there is a will there is a way. If the Council wants to support arts festivals it will find a way. If the will to do this is not there then little or nothing will happen. The whole business of local government funding is deeply flawed and decades out of date. Only national legislation will change anything. The present system through which local government is funded – the Barnett formula – was obsolete years ago. Cities need a whole new strategy for funding the arts, music and the night-time economy. It currently needs a mixed economy of private and public backing. Now we have left the EU, vast quantities of money have stopped flowing into local infrastructure, culture and the arts. Cities are forced to spend huge amount of cash pursuing European prizes they might or might not win. Leicester was denied its claim to European City of Culture and a lot of money was wasted competing for it.

    Gaz Birtles, a prominent local musician and promoter, joined in, saying, ‘We need free poster pillars all around LEICESTER for everyone to poster their events. LEICESTER looks like a cultural desert out on the streets. No sign of anything happening anywhere. But the council obviously deem it to unsightly. Bring back postering!

    This idea has been put forward before. Music in Leicester’s editor Kevin Gaughan got involved in this very idea some years back but nothing came of it because the council has not interested. Our local authority has done almost nothing to support its live music scene. Postering is not the answer. A much more inclusive and multi-layered approach is required. One attempt was made to produce a paper-based booklet that brought together all venues, all music events and all gigs in one place. It worked for the very short time that it was operated (by a commercial enterprise.) Putting up posters tends to focus exclusively on one show, at one time, in one place. It therefore has to be repeated extensively and most promoters do not have the funds to do this. Plus the fact that the more posters that are displayed the less people become aware of any one of them. It is a very inefficient use of resources. With very few exceptions, posters alone have failed to sell tickets or put bums on seats to any great extent. Many years ago the local paper used to list music events. This stopped when the Leicester Mercury ceased to be produced locally and its production was moved away from the city.

    Andrea Kenny, a local singer and musician said, ‘I found this a bit when I was out putting up posters yesterday… not many places seem to have them since Covid also’

    Covid has devastated live entertainment and also the ability to publicise it in the real world. In the post-Covid era, we have to adopt a new approach to the promotion of live arts. Online is the answer. As I have already argued, paper-based publicity is on the way out. Too few people are left for whom paper is the only way and they will not fill the venues. There are several places on the Internet where gigs in Leicester are listed and anyone can look at them.

    I talked to Andrea Kenny about her comments; she told me: ‘Promoting an event is hard fucking work… I have felt this keenly over the last month with the event I am putting on (the one Carol Leeming is also performing at). I agree with all of the sentiments already expressed but I believe there is something else to add and I would say this with a caveat in place that I am also guilty of the very thing I’m about to express.. and upon the realisation will aim to change this. Acts and artists could go along way to to help promote and re share other acts events/nights… I don’t know why there isn’t more support or this isn’t done more.. maybe people think it will draw attention away from them or their night or fan base?? The fact is if everyone cross promoted everyone else it would create a culture of musical camaraderie and community and it all helps doesn’t it?! As promoters and bands and artists we shouldn’t have to feel like we are flogging a dead horse just to get our name out there or our event some attention! Let’s all support each other a bit more… I’m not saying this is everyone as I know some bands do help promote other bands but .. we shouldn’t have to ask or beg.. can you please share this?! If you see an event re post it on your page! Share the love share your fan base! Create a community! That’s what I’m gonna do from now on!’

    Kevin Hewick, a celebrated doyen of the Leicester music scene, added, ‘Gaz Birtles I find it pretty hopeless now for flyering and posters. There are few places you can. put anything up… And the city has never looked more barren, bleak, dark, and (as I found last night walking from. Charles Street to Regent Road for the Regent Jazz Pianorama event) menacing. I know that’s not unique to Leicester but… Even the councils beloved ‘Cultural Quarter’ is lonely and forlorn looking.’

    Kevin is right. I have not seen the council produce anything like a ‘COVID recovery plan.’ * The lockdown has devastated the cultural life of the city centre. The council has not yet begun to do anything to get the city out of this situation. Politicians might even consider this to be premature; there being no guarantee that the lockdown will not be repeated in the future. The city centre is, as Kevin suggests, bleak but the Council has largely abandoned the plans it laid down around twenty years ago to revitalise the night-time economy. Late night transport is largely non-existent around here; there are no police officers on the streets. Public transport often stops running early in the evening. More daytime events might work these days but will not be the only solution to attracting audiences. The night-time economy is still important but not as all-important as it used to be.

    • LCC did produce one post-COVID document – https://www.leicester.gov.uk/media/1zdbxyrl/3912-lcc-covid-19-re-opening-city-plan-brochure.pdf (June 2020.) There was no mention in this of music or the arts.

    Kevin Hewick responded by saying, ‘I often feel much warmth and connection between Leicester musicians. We are quite supportive of each other but so often we play to ourselves, to other creatives. The wider audience is hard to find. I seem to tick a lot of seemingly negative boxes – white, male and rather old now lol but I totally agree about diversity and cultural mix, in a city like Leicester we should be attaining that but there’s not as much crossover as I wish there was.’

    Cultural diversity has always played a key role in the development of Leicester’s music scene. It is one of the city’s great strengths. As our population changes, so too must our offering of arts, music and entertainments. Sadly, and I regret having to say this, many of those who run our small live music venues will have to retire before there can be a sea-change in the programming. For years and years, venues have given us the same-old, same-old. Outside the world is different to what it used to be when they started in business. A new, younger generation of venue managers and event promoters might see things differently. In my view, we need to gather new blood together and work out how best to attract new audiences for new experiences.

    Joe Doyle, a musician, said, ‘Radio & press. We could certainly do with more journalism promoting and exposing local artists to new audiences.’

    I agree. Leicester has only one magazine specialising in music. There used to two or even three, some years ago. I ran a highly successful website that promoted new bands to the UK generally. That went down the pan and was never replaced. BBC Introducing has promoted some new Leicester acts to the national level but is far too over-focused on Nottingham. What Leicester needs is a website that can promote its local music artists to a national audience.

    Kevin Hewick, responded by saying, ‘Joe Doyle Things like The Mercury and the BBC don’t seem to reach out so they? Musicians and events are quite visible but they seem to have no curiosity about it, it has to come to them. And then when they do give coverage it’s the facile “City Band Hits Right Note” type stuff.’

    The Leicester Mercury is dead. Newspapers are redundant. Is this about local media reaching out? Or is it about national media reaching in? I have written before about the lack of interest in Leicester taken by the national music industry. Why has this always been the case? Our offering of local talent stands firm against Nottingham, Coventry and Birmingham. But we are overlooked. Why? Carol Leeming agreed with Joe and Kevin.


    Conclusion


    This thread on Facebook was and is important. The right issues are being discussed. Many of the comments have been discussed before but that does not mean they were ever resolved or that they have ceased to be crucial in the post-COVID situation. The success of our local music scene depends on people talking and raising concerns. But people who have the power to make changes need to listen. Our city has to recover from the pandemic. Our music industry needs to get back on its feet in a world that has changed dramatically over the past two years. Paper-based advertising still has a role to play but it has declined dramatically in recent years and will continued to decline as a method of attracting audiences. Today, the arts scene is dominated by social media. The question is, how effective is this is in selling tickets to gigs and shows? It can only be effective if promoters and venues are offering the kind of events that people want to buy into. Who those people are has changed in recent years. That is where the focus of change needs to be, in my opinion.

    Carol Leeming, MBE, FRSA, is a multi-award-winning poet, writer, director, performer and vocal and dialogue coach. Trevor Locke writes for Music in Leicester magazine.

    This article was previously published on my old blog.

  • Leicester Music History 2

    The Rise of the Internet.

    11th February 2020

    2003 to 2004

    The impact of the Internet continued to affect bands and rock music in the UK generally and in Leicester. It could be argued that the rise of the Internet was one of the most influential factors that allowed unsigned, amateur bands to start up and flourish. Music fans also took to the Internet in large numbers and discovered and listened to a wider range of music than those of the pre-Internet age. So, how did the Internet change music?

    First. Some background. Websites need an address and the key to this is the domain name, a string of characters ending in .com or .co.uk or some other suffix. In 2004, the domain name arcticmonkeys.com was registered. The Sheffield band Arctic Monkeys, which formed in 2002, was signed in 2005 but before that, they established a sizeable fan base on MySpace, an early social media website popular with music fans. Reverbnation was launched in 2006, as a site for the independent music industry. Soundcloud was started in Germany in 2007 and between then and 2009, it began to challenge MySpace as the main site for distributing music tracks. Bandcamp was founded in 2007.

    This then was the period during which several websites became prominent in the music world and many of them are still going today. The domain name kasabian.co.uk was registered in 2002, one of the earliest domain names to be used by a band that originated in Leicester. Someone registered thescreening.co.uk in 2004 for Leicester band The Screening. These were early adopters of the do-it-yourself breed of Internet users. The AIDs, forerunners of Skam, also had a domain name registered for them in 2004. The band Maybeshewill registered their domain name in 2004.

    By 2014, almost all of the musicians in Leicester’s rock bands had grown up with the Internet. Utilising it for their music was not difficult. Many of the city’s recording studios did well from this easy access to DIY outlets. Anstey-based pop-punk band ICTUS registered their domain name in 2003. The Attik was also a popular destination for bands and their fans and many people still have happy memories of the place. It closed in 2006. Many pubs put on live music from time to time. In 2004, I remember going to a pub in Hinckley called Northern Territories where I saw ICTUS performing.

    Thriving music industry

    Businesses grew up to service this market – such as companies specialising in the printing and replication of CDs. A Leicester company called Horus Music provided technical services for the publication of music. In a city with a thriving music scene, it was inevitable that support businesses would also thrive. There were stores doing a busy trade in guitars and strings, drums and drumsticks. Printers worked hard to keep up with the constant demand for posters and flyers. Rehearsal rooms were nearly always full.

    By 2014, access to the Internet had become almost universal in the UK. The advent of mass ownership of mobile phones (connected to the Internet) began to replace the use of computers and laptops as the main devices that people used to connect to social media sites. Whereas access had been through computers connected to broadband, now people were spending their time on social media via their smartphones and a variety of hand-held devices. This increased the utilisation of social media and led to increased flexibility in the kind of platforms people could use when interested in music. Local live music venues began to get details of their gigs and shows onto the Internet.

    The impact that this technology had on popular music was fundamental and far-reaching. It would be wrong to say that the Internet brought an end to the CD and the vinyl record but the significance of these media declined; music had become mediated through streaming and downloads from websites such as iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and Bandcamp. These were being increasingly used to provide the tracks that attracted the attention of music fans. They became widely used by unsigned bands and start-up music artists.

    The Internet had a profound effect on music of all kinds. Music venues and festivals depended on social media to attract fans and to make ticket sales – at a minimal cost. Most social media was free to use and this made it possible to put on a concert and sell tickets for it at almost no cost. Gone were the days of having to print tickets and pay for expensive advertising using paper-based media such as posters. Now bands could organise their own gigs, if they wanted to, and advertise them to a widely spread audience without having to lay out large sums of money. Even so, the city was awash with posters advertising gigs and bands. Not everyone was on the Internet and there were always people who needed to see things on paper because they were not connected to the Internet.

    Paper-based music magazines and newspapers began to close down in favour of online versions. In Leicester, The Monograph was published on paper for a relatively brief period of time. Even though the paper was supplemented with a website, its days were numbered. It could not be sustained as a physical product in a world where advertising revenues were increasingly gravitating towards online publishing. The same can be said of paper-based newspapers and magazines generally. Paper is very expensive to print and distribute. The cost of setting up an online newspaper was tiny in comparison to the huge start-up costs of paper periodicals.

    Talent scouts

    Record label A&R scouts began to work more on the Internet than at music venues. Whereas music scouts once depended on attendance at venues to see and to discover bands and singers, they now had only to sit in their offices and log on to Facebook (founded in 2004) and Twitter (founded in 2006) to find what they were looking for. Bands and artists could be discovered by talent scouts and many of them began to take notice of how many friends or followers were seen on social media sites.

    Website hosting became increasingly inexpensive up to 2014. Domain names could be registered for a few pounds and the emergence of content management services, such as WordPress, allows websites to be constructed without recourse to the expensive fees charged by web designers. Having a band website became an increasing possibility for even the smallest of unsigned groups. Although social media platforms provided the mainstream of Internet presence, bands and singers continued to maintain websites as part of creating a professional image. Even today, bands and singers maintain their own websites in addition to their content on social media.

    Running a band could be an expensive hobby for most amateur musicians. Promoting your band became increasingly feasible as more and more music fans used the Internet to find the kind of music they sought. Going to gigs did not decline because of downloads and streaming. You cannot download the live experience and streaming does not confer the full experience of actually being there. If anything, these procedures reinforced the desire of fans to actually see the bands that made the music they liked. People continued to attend music festivals where they could see the bands they liked so much when on the Internet. When I went to gigs in 2003 and 2004 they were nearly always full. A large proportion of the audience was young people. Teenagers. A lot of the musicians were also in their teens.

    Festivals

    There were some significant music events from 2003 to 2004. One Big Sunday was held in Victoria Park, from 1 to 4 pm, on Sunday 20th July 2003. Many readers will remember this event; it seemed that most of Leicester was there, as the whole of Victoria Park was a sea of faces. One of the bands that appeared that day was Busted. Others included Athlete, Daniel Bedingfield, Kelly Rowland and Mis-Teeq. Another of the BBC’s One Big Sunday events had been held in Leicester in 2001. The BBC put on these huge outdoor events to build its audience of music listeners. The Abbey Park festival started to gain importance as a launchpad for local bands. On Victoria Park, Summer Sundae Weekender established itself as a major part of the annual cycle of music festivals. Having started in 2001, the festival became an important event and began to attract fans from all over the country. The festival was held in the De Montfort Hall and its surrounding grounds and lasted from Friday to Sunday. Though not a festival, as such, 2004 saw the foundation of the Original Bands Showcase (aka OBS) as a showcase for local bands and musical talent. Its heats led up to the grand final, always an important event in the city’s music calendar.

    Venues and gigs

    In April 2005, I put on one of my first ever live music events. I promoted a gig at the Jam Jar, near Braunstone Gate, and for this, I booked Ictus, The AIDs, Patchwork Grace and Nemisto. Notes, made at the time, suggested that 41 tickets were sold. This took place on 14th April. The Jam Jar was the same venue that is now called The Music Cafe. The AIDs was a band that evolved to today’s group, Skam with its lead singer Steve Hill. ICTUS was a pop-rock band based in Anstey. This was a trial run for a bigger event I organised later. By this time I had been attending live rock gigs on a regular basis so I had developed a feel for how things were done. A venue in Millstone Lane was known for its music events; in 2004 I knew it as The Firefly. Today we call it Firebug.

    Leicester had several well-established permanent live music venues. The Shed was opened in 1994 and the Musician in 2000. In Oxford Road, The Charlotte was going strong. Andy Wright had taken over the tenancy of the pub in 1989 and a few years later it was extended to form a larger area for the bands and their fans. Over the years, the Charlotte saw many of the country’s most famous rock bands playing on its stage including the emerging Kasabian and the legendary Stone Roses. The Charlotte became the ‘must play’ venue for all of Leicester’s up-and-coming bands. New bands had certain venues in their crosshairs and were determined to play at them as they climbed the local ladder of musical success.

    Night clubs also attracted fans of rock music. Mosh opened in 2003 and began to appeal to students and young people who wanted to hear their kind of music being played by DJs. The Fan Club started in 1985 and that too was a big pull for people who liked rock and roll. In the Haymarket Centre, there was a nightclub called Baileys and they sometimes put on live bands including Showaddywaddy and Slade.

    My own experience in live music gives clues as to what things were like in those days. I put on a Rock Night at the Music Cafe, previously called the Jam Jar, on 29th April 2005, with ICTUS, the AIDs, No One Knows and Glitch. Tickets were £4 each. Members of ICTUS were Adam Gent, Chris Byrne and Aaron Murray. The AIDs were Steve Hill, Matt Gilmore and Kieran Gilmore (aka Meatpuppet). Glitch was Kristian Tate, James Hoggar, Andrew Winfield and James Hawes. No One Knows were Neil Bennett, Andy Goulter, Rich Rainbow and Adam Tozer. Doors opened at 7:30 pm. Tom Stoppard did the ticket desk. The compère was Paul Cowper. The photographer was Trevor Sewell. Tim helped with the advertising and designed the flyers. Double-sided A6 flyers were printed in full colour at a cost of £216. The accounts showed £325 in ticket sales, and £240 was paid out to bands, leaving a profit of £85. That event was branded as being provided by my business called Get Your Band On. That was a more successful enterprise than anything else I did in Leicester.

    The GYBO project was contacted by bands from all over the UK and had one of the most successful rock music websites in the country at that time. The project was based at my office at the LCD Depot in Rutland Street. I considered that show to be a resounding success musically and in terms of the number of people who were there. Financially, it was not very rewarding. I was to find out that financial failure would be a similar situation throughout most of my work as a promoter of live music events. Making money out of gigs was very difficult but that was not why I did it. My income came from other sources and being involved in music was simply a hobby, for me. The people who could earn a living from putting on music shows in Leicester could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

    Later, in 2005, I held another gig at The Music Cafe in New Park Street with leading Birmingham rock band Blakfish, local bands Emperor State, Own Worst Enemy and The Landaus from Hull. The night was again promoted by Get Your Band On. I sold 30 tickets at £3 each. I made a loss on the event of over £45. That was on 14th October. Having Blakfish there was a real coup because they were, at the time, an up-and-coming band achieving national status. A press release at the time said that Blakfish’s music was ‘… progressive, driving indie rock sound mixing punk and spazz in an intense cocktail of modern rock music.’

    In 2005, I thought it would be a good idea to jump on the bandwagon and start a boy band – a singing group that might make a name for itself. So I hoped. I recruited five of the best male singers in the city who agreed to take part in the project. We called the group Horizon. The group rehearsed for many weeks before its first public performance. Horizon did one public performance and then split up. An interesting idea while it lasted. At least I learned something about the music industry and its artists that I did not know before. I wrote later: ‘All of the singers were solo artists in their own right. That is probably why the whole project failed.’ Solo artists do not always make good group vocalists. Each had his own solo career and saw little value in being part of a group. The group lasted for as long as it did because its members were all friends, to some extent. I very much enjoyed organising their rehearsals and helping them choose which songs they would sing.

    I continued to put on live gigs in 2005 and managed to gain access to a night club then called Original Four, or just O4, for short. The building used to be a social club for city council workers and trade unions, on the apex of King Street and Wellington Street. It was later called Superfly. Using the room on the first floor, I put on a series of Wednesday gigs and managed to book a line-up of top Leicester bands to play at these events. The shows ran from 9 pm to midnight and entry tickets cost just three pounds. Bands I remember being at these gigs included Method in Madness, The Daniels (from Wolverhampton), Emperor State, Amber Means Go, The AIDs, 2nd to Last and The Displacements.

    Further reading

    Music and the Internet, Going to Gigs Round 11, Wednesday 15th November 2017, Music in Leicester magazine.

    Bands from the Noughties, Music in Leicester Magazine.

    It’s all about the music. We look back at Leicester’s greatest hits. Going to Gigs. Round 13. Music in Leicester magazine, Wednesday 29th November 2017.

    Battles of the bands, Music in Leicester magazine, 2017.

    © Copyright Trevor Locke 2020

    Read about the background to this series and see what articles are available.

    See our Photogallery for pictures of bands and gigs from this period.

  • 1990 to 2005 part1

    Chapter 2 – Music and the rise of the Internet – 1990 to 2005 – part 1

    by Trevor Locke

    This article forms part of a series called The History of Music in Leicester.

    Chapter 1 of this series Music Today has already been published and covered the period from 2014 back to 2005.

    This is part 1 of Chapter  2.

    Part 2 looks at the 1990s.

    In this chapter, we look at the period from the early noughties (2000 to 2005) to the 1990s (taken to be the start of the Internet, roughly speaking.) As was noted in Chapter 1, all music of a particular period had its roots in the past;  the music of an era cannot be understood without looking back at the roots that nurtured it at that time. Hence, our journey back through history to see how music has changed and how people’s musical tastes have been shaped and formed by what was happening to them and the people before them. The outstanding feature of the period 1990 to 2014 was the growth of the Internet.

    The Rise of the Internet

    All kinds of music has depended for its growth, development and distribution on the technologies available; music in pre-technological society was exclusively live and its distribution was dependent on the printing of sheet music. Before that, it was all about oral traditions being handed down from one generation to another. All this changed with the invention of the gramophone player, the radio, television, the CD player and then the Internet. Technological development changed the way people listened to music but it also changed the musical tastes of the majority of people by giving broader access to music. This is covered in more detail in our article Music and Technology.  Peoples’ access to the Internet had two parts of it: email and the World Wide Web. In the early days of the Internet, these were the two services that most people used.

    The noughties and the ‘web – 1990 to 2005

    The growth of the Internet, particularly from the late 90s onwards, brought huge changes to the way that music was distributed.  It also allowed bands to reach a wider audience, through the medium of the world wide web. This period saw a growth in music festivals and live music venues. The advent of personalised music-playing devices, from the Walkman in the 1970s through to the iPhone’s launch in 2007, allowed listening to become a personalised experience. By contrast, the rise of the big festivals, raves and the construction of high-capacity arenas, brought back a social element to the experience of music, one not seen since the demise of the music halls in the early years of the twentieth century.

    One other thing, that the rise of mass Internet usage brought about, was the ability of bands, musicians and singers to publish their own music, challenging the industrial supremacy of the record labels.

    Mass broadband and the popularity of first MySpace and then Facebook enabled the rise of the DIY artists – those who could record music in their bedrooms and reach a large market, usually very cheaply. This revolutionised the means of musical production, compared to the days when the production of gramophone records was prohibitively expensive for the unsigned group or individual. YouTube, Reverbnation and Soundcloud further aided the rise of self-production of music.

    In 2005, Arts in Leicestershire was founded. The domain name was registered on 22nd February; this was soon followed by the publication of the early version of the Arts in Leicestershire website, which later became a magazine. The site published content on all forms of art but half its content was about music. By its heyday, over 600 pages existed on the site (covering all genres of music) and, at the height of its popularity,  it had over 28,000 readers per month. The first gig reviews were published on it in 2007. This was made possible by the availability of inexpensive hosting services.  In 2013 the music content was transferred to a new site called Music in Leicester.  When the music content of the old Arts in Leicester website was removed from the Internet, I began making plans to re-publish the gig reviews as a book. Fortunately, I archived the whole of the Arts website to disk and then extracted all the gig reviews, hundreds of them, to a separate file and arranged them into chronological order. The resulting ‘book’ was given the working title A compendium of Leicester gig reviews; it contains a year by year account of many of the music events that took place in Leicester from 2007 through to 2013 when Music in Leicester started. The only other publication to comprehensively record live music over a period of time was The Monograph. Live music is an ephemeral phenomenon and evidence of what happened quickly disappeared. Anyone wishing to research music will find it difficult to extract material from verifiable sources.

    At Leicester University, the Oral History Archive has recorded over a thousand interviews with local people and in some of them,  they talk about music, gigs and the shows they went to. Music journalism often misses an important side of life – what people remember about their experience of music events. Today, music fans post their thoughts and experiences on social media every day but this rapidly disappears and there is no easy way to gather and store it for use by the researchers of the future.

    Apart from social media platforms, independent websites were set up that provided information about the Leicester music scene. In 2009 Alan Freeman published a list of Leicester rock bands on his website. Arts in Leicester maintained a listing of local rock bands for many years; this captured the names of bands that were playing and sometimes where they came from and style of music they played. Analysing this data enabled Arts in Leicester to claim that ‘Leicester had more bands per head of population than most other cities of comparable size.’

    It was in the mid-noughties that Facebook began to challenge MySpace as the ‘must-have’ presence on the ‘web for bands, singers, rappers and music artists, alongside countless thousands of music fans who followed them.  There were some early adopters, from Leicester,  such as the singer and songwriter Kevin Hewick who opened an account on it in 2005. Trevor Locke also joined Facebook in the same year. Val McCoy, who was the promoter of the OBS, joined Facebook in 2007. Twitter was launched in 2006 and as its presence grew in the UK, bands started to open accounts to tweet about their activities.

    Bands too began to register domain names and to use them for their own websites. Kasabian was one of the earliest UK bands to register its own domain name, in 2002, as we noted in chapter 1; Leicester bands like ICTUS, Autohype and The Screening were early adopters of free-standing websites with their own tailor-made web addresses (i.e. domain names.) Maybeshewill band registered its own domain name on March 2004.

    Stayfree music, then based on offices in Conduit Street, was home to a web hosting service that its own servers in the same building.  Many local bands used this service at that time.

    Whilst there were a few content management platforms, a lot of websites, in those days, had to be hand-crafted using HTML code. Software, such as Dreamweaver, made the task of designing websites easier. Having been created in 1997, Dreamweaver was taken over by the Adobe corporation in 2005. It’s killer function was its ability to write code whilst presenting the page in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get format. Also at that time, Microsoft provided its own proprietary software called Frontpage. There were plenty of people around who could make websites for bands and artists but some musicians were savvy enough with the Internet and computers to do it themselves. The Internet provided people with a means to communicate on a mass basis, something which, in previous periods,  was limited to the printed page and newspapers, along with the broadcast media.

    Music in the noughties (2000 to 2005)

    This section looks at the period we call ‘the noughties’ before moving on to the 1990s (in part 2)

    The period 2000 to 2005 saw much activity on the Leicester music scene as bands formed, gigs and events took place on a regular basis and there was a high level of activity across all areas of the city’s music industry. The growth of the Internet, from 2002 onwards,  brought significant changes to the way that music was publicised and distributed; it also allowed bands to reach wider audiences, through the world wide web. This period saw considerable growth in music festivals and live music venues. One other thing that the rise of mass Internet usage brought about was the ability of bands, musicians and singers to publish their own music, challenging the industrial supremacy of the record labels. The mass use of broadband and the popularity of first MySpace and then Facebook enabled the rise of the  DIY artist – those who could record in their bedrooms and reach a market very cheaply via the Internet.

    Leicester developed a vibrant live music economy as venues, bands and festivals began to grow. The number of live music venues increased, adding to pubs and clubs as places where live music could be performed or listened to. The small venues allowed bands and promoters to put on their own gigs, hiring the venues and selecting their own line-ups of acts. Gig promoters were usually individuals who had a passion for live music and would hire bands to play in a variety of local venues. Some of them also secured bookings for bands to play outside of Leicester.

    Apart from the weekly round of gigs, several large-scale events took place in Leicester, including One Big Sunday, which was organised by the BBC’s Radio 1 and took place on Victoria Park on 20th July 2003. It attracted an audience of over 100,000 people.

    In February 2000, a big show was held at the DeMontfort Hall ‘featuring the very best bands from Leicester’ and ran from 2 pm to 11pm.  On the advertised line-up were Saracuse (later to become Kasabian), Pendulum,  Last Man Standing, The 13twelve, Marvel, Slider, Fusion, The Incurables and several others. The first Original Bands showcase was held in 2004. The band that won that year was The Dirty Backbeats. The OBS is still going today (2015). In 2006 we saw the beginnings of the Fringe Festival with its mammoth Fringe Thursday, an event that had its beginnings as the Summer Sundae Warm Up party. On Fringe Thursday, buses transported music fans around all the live music venues in the city.

    It can be argued that such series of shows supported the local music scene and encouraged people to see bands, who might not otherwise have bothered. The value of serial events, such as the OBS, is unclear, in a long-term perspective, but each year they have created live music opportunities for large numbers of acts and the fans who went to see them. Taking part in something like the OBS is enough reward in itself, it could be said. Leicester has not developed any kind of awards recognition institution to celebrate the best of its local music; in fact, as far as amateur local music is concerned, only a handful of cities in the UK have established annual awards ceremonies. Awarding music band and singers is something that was done at the national level. This might seem odd given a large number of TV programmes devoted to singing and entertainment competitions that enjoyed massively big audiences. Perhaps local recognition is not so valued as that conferred at a national level. Things like Battles of the Bands have occurred regularly in Leicester throughout the noughties and 90s. As a way of organising live music, such series of gigs attracted considerable controversy from bands and fans alike. Leicester bands participated in the national competition Surface Unsigned, often with considerable success.

    Compact disks and vinyl records were popular in the noughties and Leicester supported a range of retail outlets for them.  Ainsley’s record store, once a popular retail outlet, closed in 2004. It was situated opposite the Clock Tower. Wayne Allen was the manager of the store between 1983 and 2001.  He is credited with bringing some of the biggest names in music to the Leicester store, including Englebert Humperdinck, Radiohead, Del Amitri, St Etienne, Stereophonics, Shed Seven and Bananarama. He died in 2012.

    We looked at record shops and stores in Chapter 1. With the growth in digital media, sales of plastic sources of media declined but many fans still value the ability to own CDs and vinyl records and bands continue to provide them for their fans.

    Leicester has never been noted for its music industry agencies but in Horus Music, established in Birmingham in 2006, later moved to Leicester which is where it is now. I ran Get Your Band On from June 2005 to November 2009; it acted as an agency for rock bands, providing training, bookings, management and bookings. GYBO worked with a number of bands from Leicester as well as supporting bands and artists from all over the UK. During this period, several people became promoters, putting on gigs and events; in most cases they were individuals. Alongside those who worked with rock bands, there were several entertainment agencies that provided a range of artists for music-related clients. What Leicester lacked in modern times was band management; people or agencies specialising in providing management, bookings and publicity services have been few and far between, given the very large number of bands and artists that have existed in the city. The majority of bands and artists had to do all these things themselves.

    Venues in the noughties

    The year 2000 saw Darren Nockles take over the Bakers Arms in Wharf Street South, a public that had been active since the 1970s, turning it into the venue we know today as The Musician. The old Musician closed its doors on 31st December 2004 only to re-opened in 2005. The Donkey, a pub in Welford Road, became a music venue in 2005. In the following year, Gaz Birtles began work there as a promoter. Many will have fond memories of the small venue in the city centre called The Attik. It ran from 1989 to 2006. Andy Wright, who ran The Charlotte remembers that on “16th January 2009, the police shut the doors to stop any more people getting in and shut the bar down .. was fun that night.” Concerts were held at the University of Leicester, mainly in the Queens Hall and the DeMontfort Hall continued to put on performances by rock bands and orchestras playing classical music. Several large music events were held at The Granby Halls (demolished in 2001 to make way for a car park serving the nearby Tigers Rugby Club.) The Who played there on the opening night of their 1981 tour on 25th January 1981. Churches, including the Cathedral, also provided music-lovers with concerts of music; they kept alive Leicester’s choral tradition which started in the middle ages. It was not just venues that grew over this period. Nightclubs were also popular for those who wanted to hear DJs playing recorded tracks. MOSH nightclub opened in 2003. ‘Red Leicester’ was The University of Leicester Students’ Union Wednesday official night out from 2004 – 2014.

    Festivals in the noughties

    The first Summer Sundae festival was held in Leicester in 2001. It became one of the most important events both for national bands and artists as well as for the many local acts that played. It attracted an audience from all parts of the country.  A festival was held in Abbey Park in 2002. The Abbey park music festivals played a seminal role in the development of Leicester’s music, from1981 until their demise about twenty years later.  In 2009, Leicester band Autohype played to a crowd of over 20,000 at Abbey park’s bonfire night. A similar-sized crowd was present in 2014 when rising pop stars The Vamps were the headline act, supported by local artists Jonezy and Curtis Clacey. Glastonbudget Festival started in 2005 (as mentioned in the previous chapter) and has continued to run every year up to the present day. Strawberry Fields festival started in 2010. Quite a few small local festivals were organised, sometimes on a one-off basis. In 2009 and 2008 Arts in Leicester reported on Summer Sundae, the Big Session festival held in Victoria Park, Glastonbudget, Fristock, and regular events that included music in their programmes, such as Gay Pride, Diwali, Caribbean Carnival and the Belgrave Mela. Just over the Leicestershire border, Download attracted large numbers of people from our local area and Arts in Leicester listed the bands that played there. Batfest took place on 21st August 2010 near Ibstock and was organised by Elliot O’Brart. Batfest was an annual event held for charity in the tiny but pretty village of Battram. The festival was primarily a music festival with a couple of stalls selling homemade cakes and a raffle stall [Arts in Leicester magazine] This was typical of a large number of local music events that took place in the city and county during the noughties. Other examples included Cosby Big Love, the Braunstone Carnival (which usually featured a music stage), Glastonblaby, and the Oxjam festivals.

    Bands of the noughties

    I cannot speak from personal experience about Leicester’s live music scene much before 2005.  My very first reporter’s notebook goes back to 2006. I did not start writing about local music much before 2001; in that year I started a website called Travel to Leicester which had a section about the entertainment which visitors to Leicester could find and which mentioned gigs, bands and venues. During the 1990s I wasn’t living in Leicester; my home was outside the city in Blaby district and in those days we didn’t come into the city at night – unless we had to. It was not until November 2002 that I went to The Shed for the first time. Hence, I missed out on music, as far as Leicester was concerned, in the ’90s. I did, however, attend One Big Sunday, on Victoria Park on July 2003.

    It was in 2005 that I started Arts in Leicestershire, a website that took over the content about the arts, including music from the Travel to Leicester website. I have written about the history of this Arts website, now called a magazine [Arts in Leicester] and have covered its history [Arts in Leicester]

    From 2005, I really got to know the local bands. Under a heading ‘2007’ I noted many of the bands that were popular at the time. In May 2007, an extensive listing of gigs was well underway. This page showed some of the promoters that were active at the time, such as 101 Promotions which was run by Paul Matts (who previously managed the Attik live music venue.) As far as I know I wrote my first gig review in 2006, the same year that I joined Facebook; in just ten years the Internet had gone from being a fairly limited system to one that offered an array of services, many of them multimedia, and new platforms were coming on stream on a regular basis. I started to write gig reviews for Arts in Leicester magazine, together with collaborators such as Kevin Gaughan; at one time there were as many as 600 amateur bands based in the city and the county. ‘Leicester is home to over 400 working bands, playing all styles of music. Here we give a guide to our pages that are about bands in 2012’ [Arts in Leicester magazine, 2012]

    The magazine also featured local bands in its Band of the Month, pages and listed all known bands in the East Midlands from 2011 to 2013. Here is the list of bands that were given featured (band of the month) status:

    The Manhattan Project, Backline, Messini Assault, Beat Club, The Utopians, Breek, Subdude, Full Circle, Forty More Autumns, Razmataz, Smoking the Profit, The Heroes, The Truth, The Chairmen (Oct 08), Kids in Cars (Nov 08), Formal Warning (Dec 08), The Steptoos (January 09), The Pennyhangers (February 09), Project Notion (March 09), Skam# (April 09), Shortwave Fade (May 09), The Waits (June 09), Kill The Batman (July 09), The Fazed (August 09), Autohype (Sept 09), Weekend Schemers (Oct 09), AstroManiacs (Nov 09), Azidify (Dec 2009), Kicking Habits (Jan 2010), Drive By Disco (early Feb 2010), The Stiggz (late Feb 2010), Iziggy (Mar 2010), Third Time Lucky (May 2010), Neon Sarcastic (June 2010), Silent Resistance (Jul 2010), Ashdowne (Aug 2010), Go Primitive (Sep 2010), The Black Tears (Oct 2010), Us Wolves (Nov 2010), Maybeshewill (Dec 2010), Skam# (Feb 2011), Glassfoot (Mar 2011), Aphtershock (April 2011), The Boobytraps (May 2011), SuperEvolver (June 2011), Rassoodocks (July 2011), The Chairmen (August 2011), Midnight Wire (September 2011), Muleta Smiles (October 2011), By The Rivers (November 2011), Arms of Atlas (January 2012), Raptusound (February 2012), Resin (March 2012) No band of the month in April, May and June 2012. Vengeance (July 2012). Smokin’ The Profit (August 2012), Axis Mundi (September 2012)

    The very early Band Of The Month entries have been lost but were very limited (just a highlighted mention and not much more). Covers and commercial bands were listed separately. The magazine also published pages about new bands that had started and young bands. The news sections reported on local bands, venues and music events. Two sections specialised in coverage of African and Asian music (the latter being edited by the late Harjinder Ohbi.) There was also a page about underground and alternative music. The old website – Travel to Leicester – included details of where karaoke evenings took place. In those days these frequently featured high-quality singers who attended them and sang for fun; some of them were professional artists and others were simply very good vocalists. Rock was not the only type of music to be covered; the website also had a page about jazz in Leicester and this content was carried across to the new Arts in Leicester web site when it was created in 2005. Bands mentioned in 2007 included The Eaves, Tommy’s heroes, My Amour, Taste The Chase, Ictus, Quaternary Limit, The Iconics, The Jack of Hearts band, The Beat Club, M48, Drumlins, Screwloose, The Chairmen, NG26 (from Nottingham), Proud to have met you, Manhattan Project, The Utopians, 1000 Scars, Killquicks, Sub-Rosa, Firstwave, Kid Vicious, The Codes, Aisle 13, The Elite, Backline, Silent Devices, September Flaw, Messini Assault, Half of Nothing, Rise as one, Black River Project, Internal Conflict, The Authentics, Pink Strip, Blue Light District, Breek and many more. Most of these were local bands, a few were out of town bands that regularly came to play in the city.

    In September 2004, Kasabian released their debut album.  Having started life as Saracuse, they played one of their first gigs at The Shed, in 2009. The name Kasabian became associated with Leicester,  in much the same way as Arctic Monkeys was associated with Sheffield and Oasis was associated with Manchester. Engelbert Humperdinck said ‘It’s so wonderful to know that we have another up and coming big name on the horizon from Leicester.  I am proud to be from  Leicester.’ [Shooman, 2008] Five musicians, most of them from Blaby and Countesthorpe, formed a band called Saracuse which made an early appearance at The Shed in September 1997. The band also played at the Three Nuns pub in Loughborough and later performed at the town’s University. They also played at Princess Charlotte in Leicester, in 1999, the same year went back to play again at The Shed. In 2005 the band performed at Glastonbury festival on the ‘other stage.’ It was Kasabian’s third single Club Foot that brought them chart success in 2004. The band won the best live act award at the 2007 NME ceremony. The band became signed to Sony Music. [Shooman, 2008]

    Leicester band Roxum formed in 2005 and went on to become a very popular act on the local scene. The year 2008 saw the formation of a clutch of local bands including Neon Sarcastic, Little Night Terrors, The Chairmen, Axis Mundi, The Boobytraps, and many others. In 2009 we saw the emergence of Formal Warning, The Furies, Arms of Atlas, The Weekend Schemers – all of these bands went on to become popular on the local scene and had active careers in music.  Because Arts in Leicester was an arts magazine, it could cover a much wider scope of music than rock and pop; concerts of classical music, opera, ballet and musicals were also reviewed and it made some attempt to report on music from ethnic communities, such as the Indian community. Several local bands achieved national notoriety and success. Among these, we would include By The Rivers, The Displacements, Midnight Wire and These Furrows. Many other acts achieved notable successes. For example, The Heroes played at the Glastonbury festival in 2009. Other Leicester bands to play at the coveted Glastonbury festival included By The Rivers.

    In July 2008, The Heroes won a competition to be opening band on the main stage at the Summer Sundae festival. ‘Thousands of you voted and the results are in… The winners are… Leicester band The Heroes are to open The Weekender in Leicester.’ Guitarist Alex Van Roose went on to form Midnight Wire and lead vocalist Alex Totman went on to form Selby Court band. [Locke, 2015]

    Rehearsal rooms and recording studios in the noughties

    Several recording studios have come and gone and some are still open today. Deadline Studios, in Aylestone Road, started in 2001; others include Quad Studios, in Friday Street, Yellow Bean Studios (from 2010), in Western Road, (another studio Western Studios, operated in the same premises in around the year 2006). HQ in Charles Street opened in 2012, providing a small recording room. Some Leicester bands went to Nottingham to record their music and some even to London and places further afield. In 2011 Flat Five Records was set up by the Potts brothers, in honour of their father the legendary jazz trumpeter Mick Potts. They published the work of many important bands of this period, such as Kenworthy.

    Trevor Locke

    References

    References are given on a separate page.

    See also

    Introduction to the series History of Music in Leicester

    Chapter 1 – Music in modern times

    Music and technology

    Pictures from the origial article have been removed fromthis version.

  • History Music in Leicester

    The History of music in Leicester

    a series of articles by Trevor Locke

    See below for links to the articles in this series.

    Introduction

    This series of articles traces the music that was heard and played in Leicester from contemporary times backwards. These articles are to be published in the magazine Arts in Leicester. The articles are concerned mainly with popular music; although classical music is not ignored, the focus is on the music of the people.

    All music is a reflection of the time in which it was made; it is part of the community; it is a cultural manifestation of the values, preoccupations and tastes of the people in whose time it was performed. Hence, we have to describe the life and times of a period to fully understand its music.

    The articles, therefore, annotate the life and times of the city of Leicester through the lens of its musical activities. It is both a contribution to local history and a timeline of the development of music.

    My plan is to work backwards from the starting point of 2014. How far backwards? Well, in my original plan I go back to the time of the Romans; that being pretty much the start of written history. Anything before that period would require the results of archaeology because we would then be talking about pre-history, about which not a lot is known.

    Articles already published

    The music of today (2005 to 2014)

    1990 to 2005

    Part 1 – the noughties (2000 to 2005)

    Part 2 – the 1990s music and the rise of the Internet (1990 to 2005)

    Articles in preparation

    The era of radio and records (1940 to 1990)

    At some point in the future, my plan is to published a book about the history of music in Leicester. This will include a much fuller and more details account that the brief annotations in these articles.
    My hope is that, by publishing brief articles, people will offer details and contributions to the final book.

    See also:

    Chapter 1 – Music in modern times

    Chapter 2 – part 1 – The 2000s

    Chapter 2 – part 2 – The 1990s

    Music and technology

    References (referred to in the articles)

    [Pictures from the original article have been removed from this edition]

  • Bands And Singers

    23rd October 2014

     

    This is an archive page

    10 Essays on Bands and Singers

    Bands and Singers:  Ten essays on rock bands and singers.

    By Trevor Locke.

    Over the years, music journalist Trevor Locke has seen and listened to thousands of bands. Not just bands but singers, rappers and acoustic artists.

    In these ten essays, he looks at some of the fundamental elements of being a successful music act and what is needed to be a good band or singer.

    He also looks at the business of live music; however good an act is at performing music, they have to make it in the real world of venues where music provided.

    Some of the essays are published in this document for the first time;  others have been re-edited from articles he has previously published on his blog. These have been updated for this publication.

    Ten Essays on Bands and Singers is published by Arts in Leicester, in a digital format.

    2014, 30 pages, provided in a PDF format, sent by email, price £2.50

    Contents

    1. An X Factor for Bands? (revised and updated)
    2. Band Promotion. (New)
    3. Promoting Artists. (New)
    4. What do we learn from the obsUnplugged?  (revised and updated)
    5. The Economics of Live Music in Leicester.  (revised and updated)
    6. What Makes a Good Band?  (revised and updated)
    7. Entertainment. Should Bands be Entertaining? (New)
    8. Teamwork (New)
    9. Talent. Is Talent the Key to Everything? (New)
    10. Why do some venues make us pay to play there?  (revised and updated)

    Originally published on 23rd October 2014 on Trevor’s Music Blog.

  • New bands starting up

    17th August 2014

    New bands.

    How do bands cope with the pressure of starting up?

    Watching a new band playing on stage for the first time, I asked myself ‘how do they cope with playing at their first gig?’

    When you watch a band playing on a stage, you are looking to see how they appear – are they relaxed and confident or are they nervous? Are they enjoying being in front of people, playing their own music? Some new bands look like rabbits caught in the headlights. As a writer my task is to observe musicians intently and try to feel what they are feeling. In a way, this is about trying to empathise with them. I watch for the signs: what do I see on their faces? Do I see excitement or fear? Or both? Do I see a bunch of guys who are confident, relaxed, exited? Or, do I see a group of people who are nervous, fearful, worried? Being under pressure does not mean that they will make mistakes or play badly. When they get on a stage and lights go up the adrenaline kicks in. They probably can’t see the audience in the glare of the stage lighting. Their hearts start to beat twice as fast; their minds start to work at a furious pace. They have a lot to concentrate on, whether it’s singing, remembering the lyrics, remembering the tunes they have composed, watching the strings of their instruments to see where their fingers should go. Determination sets in. It might not be until the last couple of songs, of their half-hour set,  that they really get into the swing of the music.

    You can tell when a band really wants it. Their faces and the way they perform on stage show how their ambition is burning. They want to be successful. They want their fans to love them, they want to win over people who have not seen them before, they want to leave the room with adulation and their reputation secured. They want to play a set which is going to mark them out and make a name for their music on the scene. If they are to win over audiences, they have to really want it. They have to win over the sceptical and the curious. People who might be hard to convince. People that are not there to see them. These are people who are watching closely to see what this new band is made of.so when they start to play they all have to say to themselves ‘let’s ‘av it.’

    How do young, inexperienced musicians cope with that kind of pressure, at the start of a music career as a performing band? Can they get to that level of stage craft where they can portray themselves as a strong, confident, determined group of people who believe in themselves and their music? How do they do that? Maybe that is not what they are actually feeling on the inside, but what do we see on their faces? As a group of people, do they all share the same level of commitment? Do they want it, individually and collectively? Are they really ready to make the sacrifices needed to become a serious band?

    When you watch a band performing on stage, it is not always easy to tell what is going on their minds. Some musicians have a knack of smiling and looking happy, whatever they are really like on the inside. Do they look like they are just playing another gig or is this a special event for them? Are they feeling the crowd and are they getting that buzz, that reaction,  that is flowing on to the stage? The older a band gets in its musical career, the more difficult it is to see what they are feeling. Mature musicians tend to get used to live performances (just another gig) and have a professional manner that hides anything going on inside. If something goes wrong,  they joke about it and carry on. It’s just what happens to bands. It comes with the job. They appear as polished professionals, doing a job, well rehearsed, steadily working away at their chosen craft. Some young bands can also look like this.

    You can never really tell what’s happening on a stage. You might be able to watch carefully and write about it in such a way as to convey (to readers) what it was like to be there. But all gigs have layers of experience, seams of reality, and you can never really report everything. Fifty people might go and see a band; they will take home with them fifty different reactions and experiences.

    (Written at a festival in July between gig slots)

    Origininally published in Trevor’s Music Blog, 2014.

  • Local music: does it matter?

    Trevor Locke asks if local music really matters

    If you watch the television you might choose to watch a programme about rock music in the 70s or 80s. If music is your thing, there is no shortage of programmes in which famous musicians are interviewed and clips of bands and singers playing songs of the time are shown. These programmes are very interesting and informative but they are all about the big bands that made it into the charts.

    What is largely neglected by both the media and by historians is music at the local level. It is assumed, most probably, that anything about live music in one town or city will be of interest only those who live there. Unless of course it is about Liverpool and the Beatles or possibly even Sheffield and the Arctic Monkeys or Manchester during the days of the Hacienda. These are subjects worthy of programmes or books because, in the opinion of their producers and authors, they have had an impact and influence on the national music scene.

    I want to argue that music at the local level is both fascinating and important, in its own right. I would say that, wouldn’t I? After all, I have spent over ten years of my life writing about the music of Leicester for the magazine I created and now am compiling all that work into one enormous book on the subject.

    Given that I am engaged in writing about local history, why is it that historians largely ignore music when they analyse and discuss the life of local communities? Local history has established itself as being an area of study that is credible and interesting, as much as the history of the nation as a whole. Local history of any kind is not just of interest to people who live in the area; those who research and write about local history like to consult works by others who are engaged in similar projects. Local history is a legitimate branch of learning in its own right. The life of any nation is not just about kings, politicians and battles. No understanding of a nation is possible without an awareness of the culture and life of people whose daily lives creates that nation. We cannot understand England without understanding the ordinary common folk who comprise it.

    People who write about local history often focus on the areas of human activity that have been established in the accounts of the nation as a whole: commerce, industry and economics, politics, transport (trains and roads), women, race, battles and armies, etc. You do sometimes get studies of art or culture at the local level and that, by and large, concerns itself with pictorial art and sculpture. That stance on local history is often bolstered by the view that something at local level is of national importance. That take on history pivots around the assumption that something must have that magical national significance to justify it and give it credibility. Who arbitrates what is of national significance?

    My interest is in music; my two great passions in life are music and history. So, writing about the history of music would be completely natural for me. The shelves of libraries are well stocked with books about periods of musical history, accounts of specific bands, studies of specific genres and so on. If, like me, you want to read about music in a town or city, you will have to search extensively to find anything. The shibboleth about local needing to be national haunts music and art history as much as anything other aspect of life at the level of street and town.

    This situation needs to change. Historians and musicologists alike need to recognise that music has always been an important part of the life of any local community. If you want to understand what daily life was like in the past, as now, you have to look at the music that the people in a community were listening to. Art is about painting and statues, but it is also about music – and not just classical music. There are endless books about the great classical composers but almost nothing about the work of the countless men and women who have made music, composed and invented it throughout the ages at the local level. History is organised around notoriety. It is the legacy of how academia has been organised since Greek and Roman times that only the great artists and composers are worthy of study because they have defined the cultural landscape of The West, Europe, England … well of course that is true but I want to see credibility given to the study of the art and culture of common people, everyday country folk, the people, the masses, what ever you want to call them – the people whose lives come and go but leave little behind them. Historians tend to work with what is stored on library shelves. What gets on to library shelves is arbitrated by the shibboleth of national significance.

    Archaeologists however are much more likely to unearth the remains of everyday life. Modern approaches to history are becoming increasingly concerned to reveal what life was like in the streets of a village, town or city. We can have a fairly detailed view of what happened in the streets of a Roman town, how food was produced and distributed, how people were housed, the tools they worked with, what people ate, how they dressed and cooked, how they were entertained and, to my mind, what music they listened to.

    Delving into the history of music can be very difficult; the further back we go the harder it becomes to find remains because music just happens and unless people at the time wrote about it, nothing survives from music-making, apart from a few instruments or fragments of them that happened to be preserved in the earth. Such investigations become easier in recorded history when we can find manuscripts, writings, music scores, accounts of concerts or festivals to give us an idea of what people listened to. With the advent of film, recordings and the Internet, there is now a huge amount of material to work with if we want to write accounts of the musical culture of today or recent times.

    At the local level however material about music is ephemeral and volatile. Vast quantities of videos, tracks and gig flyers flood through the pages of social media but few people see all this as being grist to the mill of historical research. Like many with an interest in music, I spend many hours of every day on Facebook, Twitter or websites watching what is going on, mainly in my own locality but also at national level. As a music journalist, my task is to watch, record and annotate musical culture in my local area.

    The present is what is happening now. What happened yesterday is history.

    Music, in my view, is an integral part of local history, just as much as food, buildings, clothing, work, politics, trade or anything else that forms an understanding of the life and experience of a community. This is not a perspective that I see in the output of the majority of local historians. Local history, I would argue, is the poorer for its lack of recognition of the significance of music to accounts of what happened at the local level in the lives of everyday people.

    Anthropologists, who went out to study and research the life of tribes, cultures and peoples in foreign countries often recorded and noted the music that they made. They, like archaeologists, got down to the nitty gritty of everyday life and they found music in every social group they visited. Anywhere in the world. Whether it was part of religion or ritual, part of social gatherings or the transmission of culture and collective memory, or the expression of collective identity, musical activity was found everywhere that anthropologists went. From the Trobriand Islands to the high mountains of the Incas, anthropologists went to see people living their ordinary everyday lives and to record what they saw, whatever it was, and they all saw music being made.

    Academically, local history shares many interests and sources with anthropology and archaeology. It is therefore somewhat odd that local historians have neglected music as much as they have in their understandings of the life of local peoples. Researching the history of music in an area can be challenging and difficult because of the dearth of source material with which to work. The further back in time that one wishes to go the less there is to work with and the harder it is to unearth. Yet, the more fascinating and informative it becomes. Music is an activity that tells us a lot about the people who make it and those that listened to it or took part in it, through religion, ritual, dance, social gatherings or just plain old entertainment. Music is a key definer of social identity; what music you like marks you out as a person. The gigs you go to are part of your social identity. The kind of music that is found in a community defines much about its culture, belief systems and cohesive tissues. The lyrics of songs are capsules of what people believe, celebrate and remember. The status given to music makers tell us something about the way a community is organised. This is as true at the local level as it is at that of the nation state.

    Even when not focussing specifically on music, local history is incomplete unless it has tried to account for the everyday life of a community and that must, I argue, include how people were entertained, fed, clothed, educated and how they socialised. Music should be a topic that is always included in accounts of life at the local level. Without an account of a people’s music, the picture is inherently incomplete.

    Trevor Locke

    9th August 2014.

     

    About this article

    It might appear that I have assumed that no one has ever written about local music. I know that not to be the case because I have found studies in my own area of Leicester and have searched for and read material relating to other towns and cities in the UK, both in the form of books and articles on the Internet. The present article forms a précis for a more substantial article that I have planned. I offer it at this stage to see if I can evoke some comments or even make contact with like-minded individuals who share both my agenda and my interest in this topic.

  • When should gigs start?

    At what time should venues start their shows?

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    Last night, at the meeting of the Leicester Music Forum, someone talked about the time at which gigs start, here in Leicester  7:30 pm is the standard time for nearly all venues to open their doors, for the majority of gigs. They all start at the same time, bar a few events that begin at 9 pm and some that take place on Sunday afternoons.  Is this good?

    One contributor thought not.  I also agree.  Venues should network and collaborate to give the ticket-buying public more choice as to when they can go to a gig if they want to be there for the start. By staggering the start time of their shows, venues might see an overall increase in the total audience going out to ‘see a band’ on any given night of the week. Well, that is what was being suggested.

    Will this work?  As someone who goes to a lot of gigs in many venues across Leicester, I frequently notice that at 7:30 – 8 pm there are not many people in the house. The room fills up by 9 pm and a raft of fans turn up for the headline set at 10 pm.  This suggests that a lot of people make up their own minds when they can get there and certainly don’t go to see support bands.

    On another point, it was also said (last night) that it is common for a large group of fans to go to a gig to see their favourite band and – when that band has played – they leave. Various comments were made about this well-known phenomenon, including “it is very disrespectful to other bands playing.”  This might be due to public transport and parking issues but I suspect the truth is that those fans came to see their band and were not interested in enjoying the music of other bands, that they did not know. It remains a vexed issue for bands and promoters alike.

    Well, you might take the view that if they have paid to get in then they can make up their own minds what they want to see and how long they want to stay for. Some of the more street-wise promoters play the card of putting the band – likely to bring the most fans – on last. In contrast, I have also been to gigs where the crowd has arrived on time, stayed for the whole night and enjoyed all the music. It does happen.

    Do promoters put on too many bands in a line-up?  It is not uncommon around this city, for there to be 4, 5 or even 7 to 8 bands playing on a line-up.  Most music fans find this too much to take in on one night. Gone are the days when you go out to “see a band”, that is, one band that is going to provide the music for a whole night. Such events are limited to covers or tribute bands that play pubs. The typical venue gig these days is made up of a series of bands that play 30-minute sets, one after another.

    Let me indulge myself in opinion – the best gig is one played by 3 bands and no more. Two support slots and one headliner. Gigs that follow this formula are likely to draw the biggest crowds and to be the most enjoyable. Generally speaking – because there are exceptions, such as metal or punk nights or acoustic evenings.

    So why do we get these huge line-ups?  In some cases, it is because promoters want to maximise their ticket sales for the night. If each band brings 10 people then 7 bands might equate to 70 ticket sales. I can see the logic of that argument, even if I believe it to be flawed.

    Three well-chosen bands – including a well-chosen headliner – should be able to fill a venue. Let’s look at gigs and see if a three-band show starting at 8:30 pm works as well as a 7 band line-up starting at 7 p.m. What would aid this investigation is collecting data:  look at a sample of gigs, note their start-time and record how many tickets were sold.  Speculation on the basis of personal experience is fair enough to give us a clue about what might be happening, but it is only when we get data that we can begin to analyse what actually works and what doesn’t.

    If our local music Forum achieves anything, it would be to challenge music providers to think about the way they do things and to objectively analyse what works best for the music-going community in our local area.

  • Classic rock is dead

    Classic rock is dead

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    Published in 2013

    The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought about an unprecedented feeding frenzy of analysis and reflection on the state of current British politics. Politicians and journalists have this week been frenetically picking over the life and times of 1980s.

    Will we witness anything similar when we inevitably celebrate the death of Ozzy Osbourne or Mick Jagger or David Bowie?

    Well nothing to the same extent, of course, in the mainstream news media. Yes, we will see the expected obituaries for a day but media like the BBC will not recognise music or entertainment as having anything like the significance of the passing of a politician. What changes the soul of a country more – its politics or its music? This is a challenging question but one for another day.

    Also last week we saw reports that scientists have ‘discovered’ that listening to new music is good for your health. Notice that the use of the word ‘new’ in the headlines. Can we follow through the logic of that analysis by concluding that listening to classic rock is bad for you?

    http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/69706

    I would like to argue that it is. Classic rock was, like Margaret Thatcher’s period in Downing Street, an era of contemporary British history. The era, in which huge crowds of people avidly followed AC/DC, The Clash, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Deep Purple, was a great golden age of the twentieth century. Many people have moved on from the 1980s, both in politics and in the world of modern music.

    The mid twenty-first century is an exciting time for popular music. Music lovers now have a much wider choice of genres, styles and tendencies than their parents or grand parents had in the middle of the last decade. Young people are now listening as much to dub-step and hip-hop as they are to rock and musicians have begun to merge and cross-over these musical styles, much more so now than ever before.

    Just as jazz and blues had a fundamentally formative influence on the emergence of classic rock, so now contemporary musicians are bending their ears to the world of hip-hop and urban music for inspiration.

    The music which excites me is that which moves the boundaries of popular music tastes. The music which bores me is that which harks back to the bygone age of rock and emulates the musical styles of bands that have passed into history.

    Classic rock is dead but like the current celebration of deceased political leaders, it is a death that had brought fresh energy and enthusiasm to those who look back to the great golden ages of the past rather than to the bright horizons of the future.

    Bands that are recycling classic rock do not rate highly in my lexicon of contemporary notoriety. There is no shortage of people who want to go to festivals that celebrate and tribute the old school of rock. I look at the crowds standing in front of stages joyfully celebrating a band that is recreating the musical traditions of the past. I see a group of men and women who are largely the same age as the musicians whose outpourings they continue to admire.

    Yes you will see some fans whose ‘discovery’ of classic rock’s musical offering pre-dates their own birth dates by a decade or more. We can acknowledge the timeless appeal of classic rock and no, I am not arguing that it’s completely over, so let it go. What excites me far more are bands that have their fingers very firmly on the pulse of contemporary music, those who are doing today what the great bands did nearly half a century ago.

    I know that some bands who are devoted to the revival of bygone musical traditions are contributing something valuable to musical heritage. My boat is floated far more by musicians who are trying to forge the music of the current time rather than looking back to a great golden age that has passed into history.

    New music is about struggling to define where we are now. Heritage rock is about looking back to where we have been. We know where we have been. The generation that applauded AC/DC, Led-Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Motorhead, The Rolling Stones, Iron Maiden, did so because the music they heard then reflected something about their contemporary culture and life style. Bands making new music now are doing exactly the same thing – reacting to and being part of the world around them, reflecting the joys, tribulations, passions and anxieties of the youth of today, just as the rock legends of the past did when they were the headline acts of their era.

    One other recent comment sticks in my mind. The lead singer of a contemporary rock band complained that old bands, like the Rolling Stones, are keeping new bands off the main headline slots at major festivals.

    At the time he came out with his comment, my immediate reaction was to congratulate him for his point of view. Would I want to pay some ridiculous amount of money to go and see The Rolling Stones play their last ever live gig? No. I know what they are like; these old bands have been recorded in films and audio in a may which their precursors were not. The musicians of the 1930s, 40s and 50s had nothing like the extent of archival footage accorded to the generation that grew up in the glare of the then newly emerging mass media.

    Even the rise of the Beatles in the 1960s is extensively filmed, photographed and archived in a way not matched in previous decades.

    Men and women who are now in their 50s and 60s and even older, long to relive the experiences they had when when they were 20 somethings. This older generation of rock-goers seems intent on spending what ever amount of money it takes to relive the past, going to tribute and fake festivals to see bands that attempt to re-create these by-gone legends or pay even more to see the very last vestiges of the live performances of these really old bands.

    It is perfectly possible of course that in 20 or 30 years time we will see grey-haired music fans queuing up to see the final performances by the new bands of today reliving the glories of their past and indulgently re-living the heights of their achievement in the mid-twenthieth century.

    Popular music and rock in particular is for me one of life’s great voyages of discovery. The reason you won’t see me in the front rows of this year’s festivals, rocking out to these heritage bands, is that I came into rock music long after their time had passed.

    My youth was not about rock music. I was well on the other side of my fifties before I began going to rock music gigs. I trace my passion for rock music back to the first festival I ever went to – Reading 2001 – well past my fiftieth birthday.

    My youth missed out on the live experiences of the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Guns n’ Roses, Queen, Megadeth … my life-style was taking place in another country. I was going to see live symphony orchestras, opera and ballet but not rock bands. The only live music I ever saw in the Albert Hall was The Promenade Concerts.

    What got me into rock music was Linkin Park, Marylin Manson, Green Day, Manic Street Preachers, Papa Roach, Queens of the Stone Age, Eels, Ash, System of a Down, Slipknot, … so after a life-time of classical music, I discovered rock when I went to the Reading Festival in 2001.

    Over a decade later would I want to go and see all these bands again, to relive the wonderful experiences of those now far-off days in 2001? No. Music continues to be a journey marked more by discovery of the new than an indulgence in nostalgia.

    Yes I might well blow the dust-off my CDs of Hybrid Theory, Meteora, Dysfunction, Volume three of the Subliminal Verses, Mesmerise and listen again to the sounds that excited me so much well over a decade ago.

    That would be a rare event for me. I spend much more time listening to the latest CDs of bands that are playing now. I celebrate the music that today’s bands are making now and not that of bands that have had their innings and whose music is dead – even if it won’t lie down.

    In a world where there is so much wonderful and inspiring new music, do we really need to re-live the heritage of the past? Yes, we need to understand where new music has come from but the sources of that historical perspective are all out there on the YouTubes, CDs that are still being traded, the TV documentaries that bring it all together so well. If I am going to spend time standing in front of stages listening to live music, then for me that is time well spent if it brings me the music of today.

    Trevor Locke is writing here in a personal capacity and views expressed here are not those of Arts in Leicester magazine

    Postscript
    Ah ha! It looks like I am not the only one – read Jim Fusilli’s article about Rolling Stone Magazine

  • Thoughts on singing

    Trevor Locke reflects on what he (as a member of the audience) learnt about singing when he attended the obsUnplugged programme of Acoustic shows in Leicester in 2013.

    Performing covers

    There are three kinds of covers

    (a) Karaoke

    (b) Just singing the song as it is in the original version – what pub singers do

    (c) Taking a song and putting the artist’s own, original stamp on it, giving it a unique interpretation that has not been heard before.

    When I listen to a well known cover (performed as part of a singing competition or vocal showcase), I would be looking for interpretation – what the performance of that song tells me about the artist in front of me and whether their unique take on that song shows me something about the singer. The better known the original song or artist, the more important this is. For example, Wonderwall by Oasis is a very well known song and I would prefer to not hear it sung karaoke-style, or as  just a faithful rendition of the original recording.  I would rather want  to hear what the artist in front me can do with it, to bring out aspects of the song that might never had heard before. I have listened to some very remarkable interpretations of well known popular songs, where the singer has taken the song and made it their own, producing a version that is markedly different to the original and given me a whole new insight into that song, using exactly the same lyrics and most if not all of the original melody.

    Putting together a set list

    If an artist is  given an allotted period of time in which to perform, he or she  can probably do about five or six songs.  In a showcase event, the  goal for,  a  performer, is to illustrate the range of their repertoire, demonstrate  vocal and instrumental skills and entertain the  audience.  A good performance is not one in which the artist sticks to safe, comfortable songs, any more than going for the really hard, challenging stuff,  throughout the set. The singer should open with a song which they know they can perform well, which is likely to capture the attention of the room, engage the audience and prevent people from going for a smoking break, the toilet or to
    the bar from a drink.

    Keeping them and holding their attention is the tasks of the opening song. The last song should be a vibrant, robust number that rounds off the set with something that will cap the set’s achievement and illicit sustained applause.  In between, the singer  has to show those in the room  what the artist is  capable of.  Things to avoid: too many songs which sound the same in tempo, style and content – most listeners appreciate variety – and too many covers that every one else is doing (yet another Ed Sheering song, oh no not Lady
    Gaga’s Dirty Ice Cream again!)

    Performing the songs

    What engages audiences is feeling – the singer’s ability to get inside a song, believe in what the lyrics are saying, understanding what the song is about and then living the song,  while  on stage.  Inexperienced artists learn the words, the melody and the instrumentals and think that is job done.  It’s not.  Excellent artists spend some time trying to get into the role – just as actors have to get into the role of a character and live the part, so too singers should be thinking long and hard about the lyrics, the meaning of the song, what they are singing about and how best to portray the whole piece on stage. That might even mean deciding when and where to make gestures and facial expressions, the requirements of piano, forte and pianissimo passages and the internal dynamics of the piece. Whether
    it’s their  own original song or their own original interpretation of a well-known cover, it’s about singers putting yourself  into the songs and acting it out on the stage.  An excellent singer will get this just right; one who is less good will over act.

    Telling people who you are

    It is unlikely that the audience will be sitting there with a programme.  They might or might not have read the running order (if there is one) on the way in.  Most of them will have no idea who the singer is. The job is make them aware of you – your name and where you come from.  Either announce yourself to the room before you start singing or after you have finished the first song. It’s no good telling them your Facebook address – they will not remember it – but if you have cards or flyers with it on, leave them around the room.

    Between songs,  you can tell them the title of song and something (briefly) about what’s in it and(if it is your song)  when you wrote it or, if it is a cover, why you like it and who originally performed it. Don’t just say “I am now going to do a cover by Ed Sheeran” and leave it at that.  Interesting though that might be, it still tells people nothing about why you are singing a song by Ed Sheeran and what’s significant about it.

    People do not want to hear long speeches, anecdotes or stories between songs (in a six song set) but a little bit of personal chat helps people to relate to you as a person. You are not a singing robot. You are a person trying to make a room full of people like you and remember who you are (and, hopefully, will then want to  see you again at your next appearance.)

    Solo singers with guitars

    Should you sit down or stand up? This is a vexed issue and there are strong opinions for both options.  Singing coaches say stand up because that is the best position for breath control.  Others say sit down,  if that is how you feel most comfortable and relaxed.  Singing at your best is not a comfortable experience,  even for professionals.  When I see an artist sitting down to sing, I tend to think they are newly starting out amateurs (that might not be true but there is always a tendency to assume this if you have not seen this artist before.)

    If you are  going to play guitar to accompany your singing, tune the instrument BEFORE you go on stage.  If you put in a new set of strings, do that several days before the performance and allow time for the strings to settle in.  We have seen artists break strings on stage and then ruin a good act while they restring  or waste time borrowing an instrument from someone else.

    Make sure the audience knows you have finished

    Some songs can have abrupt endings and if so, it is better to say “thank you” into the mic,  so that people know that the song has  finished.  At the end of your set, there is nothing wrong in thanking the artists that have been on before you and how much you enjoyed their songs.  It is a courtesy that is noted by judges and by members of the audience.