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In praise of bedroom eccentrics

Many years ago, some friends and I had a great idea for a record label. It was to be called Bedroom Records, and it would release music by people who made music in their bedrooms. We dreamed of creating a refuge for those lost, eccentric souls who never quite managed to get a band together, or were too shy/ugly/incompetent to perform, whose music was far too weird or stupid or bonkers ever to be taken seriously by a record label but was still, in its own unique way, fantastic. We had met lots of people like this at university, and suspected there were many more out there.

We were right. We put a tiny advert in the NME, and received hundreds of demo tapes from all across the UK and far beyond, most completely unlistenable, but some absolutely amazing. Our idea, simple but brilliant, was to release compilations, 20 songs on each, splitting both the cost and the profit between the chosen “artists”. Even if each artist only sold a few dozen copies to friends, everyone would still make a bit of cash and know that lots of people, across the whole UK, would hear their music. In the end, though, we couldn’t be bothered, and just threw all the tapes in the bin. If you sent us one, we’re very sorry.

Every time I go on the internet these days, I think of Bedroom Records. Now, of course, the idea seems laughably quaint and redundant. Everyone who makes music has their own MySpace page, or similar, and unashamedly unleashes their madness on the whole world (or, in many cases, about ten of their friends, but in theory the whole world can access it) on a daily basis. A few months ago I became MySpace friends with an electropop trio who make music with Hoovers. Our producer James Locke, meanwhile, recently invented a fictional Japanese girl group in his spare time. He built a MySpace page, illustrated it with a picture of some random Japanese women he had found on the internet, and posted some vaguely Japanese music he had recorded for a laugh. The site proved very popular, and the girl group were offered gigs. The last time I spoke to him about it, he had got completely carried away and was attempting to find some real Japanese women so that he could actually play the gigs. The Go! Team, I have heard, were formed in a similar way. I could see the same thing happening at some point to our friend Ben Seal, a producer and sound engineer who occasionally does the sound at our gigs, and is currently filling his MySpace page with preposterous, brilliant songs that sound like Prince, only with very silly lyrics. If he sent them to a record label they’d probably decide he was certifiable, but on MySpace they stand a fighting chance of getting a cult following and making him a star. I do hope so.

After all, lots of proper successful musicians increasingly look like bedroom eccentrics made good. At the time we were forming Bedroom Records, we were inspired by the likes of Bis, Helen Love, Baby Bird and White Town, who had a fluke number one hit, I Could Never Be Your Woman, with a song he’d made in his attic, and was so alarmed by all the attention that he went into hiding. Now I can’t help noticing that the scrappy, knowingly daft electropop duo the Ting Tings, one of this year’s most hyped acts, are almost an archetypal Bedroom Records band (apart from the fact that they look really good and can actually play). George Pringle, a strange and slightly pretentious musician poet type who got a lot of attention last year – on the deeply stupid grounds that she, like Lily Allen, is also a girl and can string a sentence together, therefore she might be “the new Lily Allen” – is exactly the type of person we would have wanted on Bedroom Records. Kate Nash, Patrick Wolf, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly! and numerous others, while they have obviously expanded their sound once they found success, all share the same basic bedroom aesthetic – quirky, individual, often quite silly, indifferent to fashion, and somehow all the better for being wilfully self-indulgent.

The other thing I think when I look at the internet, though, is that pop music as we know it is probably doomed, and that this is probably a good thing. Here’s what we know already. Internet file-sharing is now so established, the notion that recorded music is something we are entitled to have for free is firmly entrenched in the heads of a whole generation. If you continue to rely on making money from selling recorded music, you are in trouble. Major acts like Radiohead, Prince and the Charlatans have recognised this and are cutting their losses by giving music away for free, and focusing their efforts on making money from live performance and merchandise. Record labels continue to live in denial, while only signing up acts who they are very convinced will make money immediately. That, on the whole, means safe, unchallenging acts who sound exactly like other acts who are already successful – and yes, I do include on this list all those white indie guitar bands the NME gets so inexplicably excited about – unless they get really lucky and manage to sign up a band who have already achieved a level of success on their own terms, but decide that they actually need a label to take it further (like Glasvegas, who recently signed to a major label despite, arguably, having no pressing need to do so). Meanwhile, vast amounts of music is being made and released from people’s bedrooms, mostly given away for free. And this, on the whole, is where the most interesting, innovative, boundary-breaking stuff is happening. Granted, much of it is terrible, rightly consigned to MySpace pages because no one would ever take it seriously in the marketplace, but much of it is not. In fact, bedroom musicians are almost certainly the future of pop music.

Here’s why. Once upon a time recorded pop music was the very opposite of instantly accessible. The Beatles discovered rock and roll on rare American imports. In the 1980s, the likes of Pet Shop Boys and New Order got into house music a similar way – to find the latest sounds, you needed to go to the right record shop, or the right club. It was exciting and exclusive. Rock and roll, punk and electronic dance music in turn all filtered into British culture gradually. Now everything is instantly accessible, there are no scenes, no exclusivity, no secrets. A sound like trip-hop slowly filtering out from one city, Bristol, as it did in the early 1990s, is unthinkable now. Every beat, every break, every sound, every style imaginable, is on the internet immediately. Much has been written in recent years about the baffling eclecticism of British pop. That’s because the people who make it are discovering every kind of music simultaneously.

In an environment like this, how will the next pop revolution, the contemporary, boundary-shifting equivalent of rock and roll or punk or acid house or drum and bass, reveal itself? What will it involve? There is, it seems more and more likely, only one possible answer. It will happen in the actual structure and techniques of songwriting, inspired by an increasingly pressing need to reinvent what is possible within a three minute piece of music. From Franz Ferdinand to Girls Aloud and Gwen Stefani, it has already been happening more and more frequently in recent years – pop songs that slow down after a minute instead of speeding up, pop songs that sound like three entirely separate songs, or in which the chorus doesn’t appear for two whole minutes. For this you don’t need a record label, or even a band, or even access to the kind of equipment that can create a particular, currently hip sound. You simply need imagination, and a website that reflects your personality to help reel people in. Who are you? You’re a bedroom musician.

Ah, you say, but for music to be popular it needs to be promoted too, via radio, print media, etc etc. All of that stuff is still needed to create a real, proper success. Maybe, but all of this is fragmenting, and it all costs money that is harder and harder to recoup. The era of Top of the Pops, of the race for number one, the hit everyone is talking about, is ending or already ended. And because people are discovering music through the internet more and more, live music is thriving as much in the small venues as in the big ones, as people stumble across eccentrics with badly tuned guitars, old broken keyboards and a funny costume, and adopt them as their own. Sometimes these bedroom eccentrics will simply be your friends. Sometimes they will be internet “friends”. Perhaps none of them is likely to make very much money, because nobody is paying for their music. Perhaps they will never become really successful, in the way that bands have done in the past and still do now, because there is so much else out there competing with them, and doing so more and more effectively thanks to the level playing field of the internet. In the future everyone will be famous for 15 people.

And perhaps that is as it should be. Success will not corrupt them or dilute their ideas. Tabloid infamy won’t cheapen them. Bands will, finally, survive entirely on merit rather than hype. And when they get boring, they can just change their name, start a new web-page, form a new identity.

I am, personally, quite excited by this. But perhaps I’m just showing my age. I am finally beginning to lose interest in the dream of the record deal and the yacht. It was always a daft myth anyway. At the moment, when I’m not doing Swimmer One stuff, I find myself getting very excited about the surf punk band I’m planning to form, called Porty Beach Wipeout. Once I find the time, I could have us up and running in about a week. One rehearsal, a four track, a digital camera, and bish bash bosh, we’re on MySpace alongside all the other lunatics. I doubt we’ll last more than one gig, but what a gig it will be.

Andrew

Permalink • Save in De.li.cious

A very astute piece of observation.
I am an unashamed “spare-bedroom” musician,but I remember the tingling thrill I experienced the day I first uploaded some of my songs onto a webpage (http://www.soundclick.com/logan5) and waited for the response.
It was far more positive and wide-ranging than I expected-I never sat back expecting the adulation and the millions to roll in,but I felt a great sense of pride in my work and also relief that it had beed let out into the world.

Posted by Logan 5 on 03/24 at 03:13 PM
A bit of a waste throwing away those tapes after collecting them. It might have made a nice profit.

Posted by Hannah Montana on 04/11 at 09:56 AM

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In praise of bedroom eccentrics

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