How to sabotage your own band
I have decided, as of today, to stop describing Swimmer One’s music to people as ‘pop’, despite having made a big point of doing this for years. The fact is, despite some very enthusiastic reviews for our album and other things we’ve done in the national press, we continue not to be popular. Not unpopular, is in disliked, just not popular, as in hardly anyone has heard of us.
Ok, this possibly has something to do with the fact that we currently only play live about five times a year, and spend so little time doing basic things like ‘adding’ anyone and everyone to our MySpace page (mainly because I find this an utterly depressing and desperate activity), or flyering, or postering, or pestering, or bothering promoters for gigs, or hanging around with influential and important industry people, or generally promoting ourselves at all. I also write blogs like this - 1600 word essays in which I do not, at any point, say ‘go and buy our music’ - once every couple of months, instead of, say, a daily blog where I go on excitedly about a song we’ve just written, and then post said song so that people can actually hear it. And we are also, of couse, on a tiny label that most people haven’t heard of. So I probably shouldn’t be surprised in the least that radio stations are not fighting over who gets to put us on their playlist first. If I want this to happen, I should just get off my arse more.
Thing is, though, I am beginning to suspect that our continued obscurity has as much to do with the music itself as anything we are doing - or are unable to do, given our circumstances - to promote it. We are simply not making the kind of music that is generally popular. We are not making pop music. I’m fairly confident that we are making GOOD music (our reviews, and the very positive reaction we generally get every time we play live, back me up here). And we have managed to attract a small number of devotees who obsess over every detail of what we do. But I don’t think we are ever, even if we had loads of money thrown at us, going to be big.
I have long suspected that this might be the case. Despite constantly banging on about how much I love pop music, and defending those who attack it, all the music I have ever loved - as opposed to merely liked - is by musicians who not many people have heard of. And I’m not talking about ‘cult acts’ here, bands who remained obscure in their lifetime because they were pushing the boundaries of music or taste, like the Velvet Underground or Throbbing Gristle, and won an audience later, over time. Neither am I talking about obviously specialist music that is only ever likely to appeal to a particular audience, like certain kinds of jazz or electronica.
No, it’s just that, for some reason, I absolutely love things which simply aren’t very popular. My all-time favourite bands are, in no particular order, Kitchens of Distinction, American Music Club, AC Acoustics, Furniture and Rollerskate Skinny, all bands who generally won/win good reviews and a small number of obsessive devotees but were/are ignored by the public at large. My favourite albums of all time are things like Winterland by Emma Townshend (Pete Townshend’s daughter - check it out if it hasn’t been deleted, it’s beautiful), Laughing Stock by Talk Talk (their least popular album), McAlmont by McAlmont (his first album, now almost completely forgotten despite being absolutely beautiful, especially My Grey Boy and Unworthy) The Blues is a Minefield by V Twin (it’s amazing, up there with Screamadelica in my opinion, if no one else’s), and Virgin and Night Fold Around Me by ROC. I could go on. In fact I could probably just make some up and most people wouldn’t notice, so obscure are my tastes.
I have never, I honestly believe, been deliberately obscure in my tastes in order to look cool. In fact I HATE people like that, which is why I spend so much time defending pop music. I love the Pet Shop Boys, Franz Ferdinand, Girls Aloud, Pulp and New Order too. The first band I really got into was A-ha. But there is a definite pattern throughout my life, I have noticed. I much prefer Momus doing synthpop (on his fabulous Voyager album, for example, or on Don’t Stop The Night) to the Pet Shop Boys doing it. I LOVE Kenickie, but much prefer the second album, the one that ended their career when nobody bought it. I love Kate Bush but much prefer Jane Siberry, who is very similar, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s related to the fact that hardly anyone in the UK has heard of her. I prefer Goodbooks to Bloc Party - they are very similar, but Goodbooks are more esoteric and far more interesting. I completely lost interest in Coldplay after their first EP. I am a Divine Comedy fan but much prefer Promenade to Casanova. I love Siobhan Donaghy, a former Sugababe who has made two flop albums now, but have no interest in the Sugababes. Almost every band I adore on first hearing disappears into obscurity almost immediately - Ten Speed Racer and The Servant spring to mind.
As a music journalist, I have been utterly, comically hopeless at predicting the next big thing (I thought Campag Velocet would be as big as Primal Scream or the Stone Roses and once wrote a lengthy article for the Big Issue saying so, which I will regret for ever). For a while I started worrying that I would put a curse on a band merely by writing about them. I wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, thinking I have ruined the fortunes of Luxury Car, whose first album we released on our Biphonic label, simply by going near them (they have been continuing to make absolutely brilliant, mostly ignored music ever since).
I do realise that I haven’t mentioned Hamish in all this. Far be it from me to claim sole credit for Swimmer One’s lack of commercial success. I am going on about this only because I always thought of myself as the one who was bringing the ‘pop sensibility’ to the partnership. I’ve always been the one going on about how great Girls Aloud are, while he rolls his eyes and tries to get me to listen to To Rococo Rot or Suicide, music which I patiently sit through while attempting not to yawn too conspicuously.
Well, I hold my hands up. I have failed to bring any pop sensibility to Swimmer One at all. I’m not exactly sure what I expected. I remember, when our first single We Just Make Music For Ourselves got played on daytime Radio One, thinking that we’d accidentally written a modern pop classic. But a couple of plays on daytime Radio One is as high profile as we’ve ever got, ever since. And this is despite us writing songs which we think have catchy choruses and memorable lyrics. Mainstream songs. Pop songs. Not because we wanted to be pop stars particularly. Just because that’s the kind of music we wanted to write.
Why is this? I am, I appreciate, inviting the answer ‘because you’re not very good’. On my darkest days I think that this is the only possible explanation. Most of the time, though, I suspect it’s because, unconsciously influenced by various obscure bands throughout my life, I am unknowingly sabotaging ideas that are potentially popular.
For example, when Hamish came up with an absolutely fantastic shufflecore backing track that sounded exactly like Train by Goldfrapp, at a point when Goldfrapp were hugely popular, I suggested we call it Largs Hum and add a list of small Scottish coastal towns, thus making a potentially sexy pop track as unsexy as humanly possible. We then wrote a song which sounded a bit like the Killers, also very popular, and then I decided its really catchy chorus should appear only once in the entire song, that it should be called The Balance Company, of all things, and that the lyric should sort of suggest that working for a company, doing your best for your bosses, is on the whole a good and honourable thing, which is about as far from rock n roll rebellion as you can possible get. We then made neither of these songs fast enough to really dance to (I have, recently, found myself obsessively playing one of our tracks and then one of Hot Chip’s, and kicking myself that we didn’t make everything about 10bpm faster). More recently, while working on our second album, I decided that a really catchy piece of minimal, very poppy and uplifting electronica Hamish had written should be called Psychogeography, have no chorus, and be about people drowning.
For this, we are rewarded with numerous four and five star reviews talking about how clever we are, and absolutely tiny audiences. I don’t feel very clever at all though. I feel quite stupid, in fact, for writing things which are ALMOST mainstream pop songs, but not quite. I wonder if we are falling between two stools - not pop enough for people who like pop, and not leftfield enough for people who don’t.
And yet, despite all this, I don’t really give a fuck. Every artistic decision we have made has been made, ultimately, because it felt right for us, because it felt right for the song, and because we thought we were creating something beautiful. The one time we have written something very deliberately with Radio One airplay in mind, the result was our second single Come On, Let’s Go!. God, I went through so much angst with that song. I HATED the title, but it seemed ‘mainstream’ - simple and memorable. I then - possibly in some unconscious attempt to make it less like a pop song, even though I thought I was doing the exact opposite - wrote a lyric that ironically played with the idea of this being a mainstream pop song, a kind of hate letter to DJs that referenced Samuel Beckett, and compared dancing in a club to standing by a tree waiting for Godot. The chorus even quoted Beckett’s The Unnamable. Still, the result, to me, sounded like exactly the kind of thing that should be a chart smash - it had a catchy guitar riff, a bit that went ‘doo doo doo doo’ like Gypsy Woman by Crystal Waters, and a big ‘Come on let’s go!’ chorus at the end. I thought it was pretty rubbish, but that it might give us a breakthrough. Hardly anyone played it. Or wrote about it. Or bought it.
And I was fucking furious with myself for compromising pointlessly. Ever since then, I’ve been stubbornly incapable of making music in a particular way because I think it would make us popular, or even just hip and cool. To make myself feel better about the fact that we are neither, I daydream about us becoming one of those obscure bands who suddenly have a big hit due to some weird twist of fate, like an advert for peas. We are possibly going to be on the soundtrack to quite a big movie next year so maybe this will actually happen. (Although I can quite imagine us being dumped in favour of Snow Patrol at the last minute, so I’m not holding my breath.)
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to write songs exactly the way I feel like it, and write blogs the length of novels. And, you know what, I feel ok about it.
Phew, glad I got that off my chest. Will hopefully bash out another blog in time for Christmas.
Andrew
