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Do we really have to play live? Oh, ok then
When Hamish and I started making music together as Swimmer One, way back in 2002, we had no interest whatsoever in playing live. It just seemed like too much grief - carting heavy gear around, spending months playing to tiny numbers of drunkards who don’t care who you are, having to deal with annoying people like drummers. Much more fun to stay at home, eating biscuits and making exquisitely crafted pop masterpieces. Anyway, didn’t the Pet Shop Boys manage to have a number one record despite never playing live?
A few things have changed since then. There is, first of all, the small matter of the entire music industry having been turned on its head. In 2002 there was no such thing as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, or Last.FM, downloads were not chart eligible, and the idea of properly famous and successful musicians like Radiohead giving away entire albums for free - and being hailed as mavericks for it - would have seemed preposterous. The general consensus in 2010 is that the days of musicians making a living purely from recorded music are gone forever. Most people, it seems would rather not pay any more for your songs than they would for a packet of crisps. In fact they’d ideally prefer not to give you any money at all.
If you want people to fund your musical adventures, then, you appear to have two choices.
1. Put on a really fantastic live show that people will want to pay for, and will enjoy so much that they’ll buy music off you afterwards as a souvenir of the experience, being so overwhelmed (and probably drunk) that they temporarily forget they could just listen to it for free an hour later when they get home.
2. Buy into an idea that is now exerting a tight hold on the industry - that in order to prosper as a musician you need to spend huge amounts of your time interacting with people through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, daily blogs etc etc, and that this will generate ‘fan loyalty’ which will somehow (nobody seems exactly clear how) persuade your most loyal fans to give you their money in other ways. Perhaps they’d like to help your write your songs on Twitter, or help design your artwork, and will therefore have a stake in what you create. Unfortunately we’re not that interested in this. Don’t get us wrong. It’s a neat, fresh idea, blurring the boundaries between artist and audience, and it’s something Laura and I are currently exploring through a big theatre project we’re developing, but when it comes to Swimmer One we’ll write our own music, thanks very much. We’re quite old-fashioned that way. And we can’t actually be bothered Twittering and blogging and Facebooking all the time. We’re just not that desperate for your love, I’m afraid. If our music speaks to you in some way, that’s wonderful and makes us happy. If it doesn’t, well never mind. We could start a clothing or perfume range, we suppose, but we’d be rubbish at that. All we really want to do is make music.
So, we’d better figure out how to do number 1, then.
So far, this has been problematic for us. All of our songs were written and arranged to sound good as recordings rather than as live performances. We’ve done our best, over the past three or four years, to translate what we do into a show - basically stripping back the studio arrangements and playing as many parts live as we can over a backing track on a laptop - and people seem to like it, sometimes. Laura joining up in 2007 helped a lot, but it still doesn’t feel like we’ve overcome the fundamental problem with our live show - that we’re trying to reproduce something else (the recordings) rather than making something new. Which isn’t particularly creative or fun or, in the end, very effective, which may be partly why we haven’t done it very often. Ultimately, you think of your live show simply as a promotional tool, you’re never going to be a great live act, because where is the art in it? Your live show should be as much of an artistic statement as your recordings, otherwise why are you doing it?
So, in the next few months we’re going to go back to basics, and take a fresh look at how we translate music that is a peculiar mix of big and epic/small and intimate and electronic/guitar-driven into a live performance. It may be that the results sound absolutely nothing like the versions on the album. Maybe we recruit a live rhythm section. Maybe we do everything on laptops and have no live instruments at all. Maybe we ‘remix’ the songs on stage. Maybe we do the whole thing unplugged.
Or maybe - and this is a big maybe, but let’s see - we reject the whole idea of doing a ‘gig’, and deconstruct the music we make in some interesting theatrical way. Maybe the only place you’ll be able to see Swimmer One play live in future is the National Review of Live Art.
As I write this, Laura and I just got back from the British Dance Edition festival in Birmingham, and my head is full of things like this…
A beautiful show by the Bonachela Dance Company. Hmmm, we should have dancing in our live show!
Liz Aggiss’s Guerrilla Dances. Hmm, guerrilla performance.
Liz Aggiss and Charlotte Vincent making a performance about performance. Hmm, interesting.
Watch this space for updates…
Andrew
