Selby Riverside Gig.

So, I got a txt from Ginna of Slash Vagas and Phluid fame asking if we'd like to join the bill for the closing down gig for the Riverside in Selby. Too right we do!

Not much detail as of yet but its an all-dayer 12:00 noon until 12:00 midnight. Grinn will be on stage somewhere around 7pm and Slash Vagas somewhere around 9pm.

Mexborough Gig Bill Confirmed

So, the Mexborough gig on the 29th June we will be joined on the bill by:

• Former Child Star
  
• Outta Fashion

Check out their tunes - sound like its going be a damned fine night of punk and heavy rock - just the way we like it!

Good Gig News - for a change!

Most of the gig news recently has been bad - ether dodgy gigs or cancellations. Well the guys at the Gasworks (the erstwhile Bar 1 Twenty) have come through and given us a gig on Saturday 16th June.
We could be headline or support - it all depends on who else is available

Another Gig bites the dust!

Well, the Bradford gig is off. This was due to be at the New Bradford Rio's venue (not to be confused with the new Leed's Rio venue) but it appears that the venue will now not be opening until September - not than anyone from Rio's has the decency to let us know - I expected a little more professionalism I've got to say!

Its a real shame as we had lined up Slash Vagas to play with us. Slash Vagas are the new project featuring Gina, drummer with the excellent Phluid - one of my favorite bands on the planet.

I will try and set up another gig with them on the bill.

Falling like flys

So, the Hudds gig is definitely off due to the change or venue management - I'm working on finding an alternative date but there are no guarantees.

The all-dayer in Leeds on Sunday is also off due to an apparently missing confirmation email - oh I wish I knew something about how the Internet worked.

Barnsley Gig Review

The BOM guys seem to have got their act together down there at the Arches.

Its a great venue - a big square room with a stage at one end and a raised seating area at the other and a sizable dance floor/standing area in between. The bar is down the side, the punters weren't too thin on the ground and the PA was pretty good. I know quite a few bands who have played here and had a great time. The gig was videoed and a wacky visual mix (like a Hippy vomited into Quantel paintbox) was projected onto a side wall. There was a clothing stall and a raffle. I think technically if they had had a juggler or some dick chucking poi's about it would class as a festival.

Unfortunately we had a god awful gig - It wasn't pleasant at all on stage!
Though on a positive note, there is always a bad gig in any tour or gig sequence - I think we just had it.
We didn't play at the top of our game but by all accounts were still pretty tight - but the sound just wasn't there. On stage was an audio fog (nothing discernable to key vocals off of and despite the hand gestures to the sound guy the vocal fold back consisted mostly of a mess of delay so I could only really hear what I've sung a second ago - very disconcerting) and front of house was no better I hear. I'm not just some inexperienced kid with unrealistic expectations - I've racked up hundreds of gigs in my time and know what is possible. The rig as I mentioned seemed pretty good and our back line is pretty awesome. Really can't see why there was a problem.

I think we got a bit of a bad deal - the regular guy who seemed to be very good and have everything under control had business elsewhere so couldn't stick around and the resultant mis-organization put me in a girlie diva tantrum-esque mood and so wasn't in the best of mental states when we got on stage, but I'm professional enough to have tried to make a go of things - even getting dressed up and painting in my hidden panda. You can never tell from the stage what the front of house sounds like - but you could detect that it wasn't good.
I could rant, but I won't, at least not here.
Any hoo - The Western Front were pleasant enough and I really enjoyed Stan Williams and the Manifesto but in both cases their front of house could have been much better, the Western Front faring worst as their drums didn't really pop into the mix until half way through the set and the guitar sound was sooooooo thin.
Though neither band really seamed a natural bill mate for Grinn it didn't really matter.

Weird crowd - I couldn't really tell if they were into it; firstly because I had big ass spot lights in my eyes and so could only see 2 inches forward of the stage and so could not see into anyones eyes and secondly because they weren't very vocal - but they mostly stuck around so I guess that is something.

Any hoo - onward and upward. Thanks for everyone that stuck around to see us (sorry for being a moody bastard on stage, but the sound was doing my nut - I normally like to talk to the crowd and make some friends), thanks for BOM for inviting us to play and sorry you didn't get the best Grinn experience tonight. And although we only feel slightly responsible, it still weighs on our minds and we'd like to come back to Barnsley and rectify.

Huddersfield Gig may be cancelled

It is not uncommon when booking gigs at this lowly level for a venue or promoter to go out of business between the time at which the booking is made and the date of the gig. It looks like this has happened to our May gig at Bar 1 Twenty in Huddersfield.
Usually you'd expect to hear from the promoter to let you know but not this time, I just came across a thread on the Huddersfield Music Scene forum which tells the story. Thank god Jon of mighty Tetsuo fame started the thread or we might never have know.

This is a shame for two reasons:

1. I'd just printed the 'tour' fliers with the now incorrect Hudds gig listed
   
2. This gig was timed to take place the week before we hit the studio to record 'The Third Album' and would have been a great chance to knock out the last few kinks and also whet appetites for the new material on home turf.
   

So it looks like the venue will now be run by the same people who run the Gasworks live music venue in Bradford - the myspace for the new venue is myspace.com/gasworksbar2

I have no idea at this point if we will be able to rebook a gig as the venue will concentrate on Tribute acts and Touring bands - which is probably a better idea than the apparent previous policy of chucking any bunch of gits with 15 minutes of ill rehearsed material on stage to drive out punters before the headline act even change into their dancing trousers. Good luck to them!

We'll keep you posted.

But not to worry, there are many more gigs in the pipeline.

DRM on the way out?

In a joint press conference yesterday EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that EMI will offer all songs from its digital catalog(sic) without DRM.

These songs will no longer be tied to iTunes and the iPod.

Songs will be encoded at 256kbps AAC (current is 128kbps) and sold at $1.29 per song, $0.30 more per song than the current price.

Check out Tech crunch for more details.

This is a significant shift in the music industry.

Legal downloading has become very popular but the final bugbear has been the DRM - From the point of view of the publishers this is there to stop people buying stuff and then pirating it (which is a strange notion as the drive to piracy is normally about attaining free stuff), which seems fair I guess on paper, but what it has meant in practice is that the end user has had problems in replicating their previous CD based experience which would allow them to 'move' the music around to where ever they wanted to listen to it. This is what US law calls 'fair use'.

So if buying a legal download offerers the 'convenience' of an easy to use and well stocked repository coupled with a convince of usage
then the compulsion to use piracy methods is greatly reduced and the legal service wins out.

There is, I suspect a large difference between the understanding of the economics of piracy by the publishers and how they talk about it in public. For instance they know a certain amount of piracy is inevitable and they also know that a certain amount is beneficial - There are many albums I have bought simply because I've been introduced to a band when I friend copied me a CD and said 'You have to listen to this' - music taste spreads virally and low level piracy is crucial to this.

Also if a music publisher finds a 13 year old kid with 500,000 pirate songs on his computer they know that despite the fact that they will start a legal claim at the rate of $1 per song, that kid never had the disposable income to spend £0.5m on music - that the sum total of pirate songs does not reflect a true opportunity cost or loss of earnings.
What the publishers have in fact been doing (with some success) is trying to shift public opinion back to the same position as it took on the large scale piracy of CDs, Tapes etc. Remember when 'Home Taping' killed music back in the 80s?

Of course, a cynic may suggest that the killing of DRM was the plan all along and the whole adventure has been an exercise in unleashing a 'product' at an introductory price and then bumping it up, once a market has been established, with the promise of new features - i.e. the ability for fair use and greater quality.

It is important to remember that the 'standard' for the encoding bit rate for MP3 emerged in the dark times of dial up access - sure it is broadband which popularized its use and made mass sales (and mass piracy for that matter) practical, but I always had a problem with the generally poor sound quality of MP3 compared to source CD.
I'm no HiFi buff and would always prefer a decent song with lower fidelity than a perfectly sounding but soulless tune. However, even my ears which have spent much of the last 20 years in front of stacks of very loud speakers could detect the warbling and lack of clarity that excessive compression delivers.
Incidentally, why is it often the people with the best HiFi set ups who have the worst music collections?
But now the rapid delivery mechanism of broadband is ubiquitous and the notions of keeping files sizes small are also an anachronism as storage costs plummet.
So the EMI and Apple announcement probably says more about the state of the art of technology and the 'sensible' quality and size parameters for music files than the model for selling music in the digital space. In fact, many people have resisted using services like iTunes because the file quality is so poor in comparison to what is possible.

Personally, although I listen to music mostly on an iPod, PC or via my home media server, I still tend to mostly buy CDs rather than digital download - I like the packaging and the durability. If you are the same I'll pimp my friends Sleevenotez service once again.
Though, the biggest problem I have with legal download catalogs is that there are big wholes in them which coincide with my music tastes - Digital purchasing really should remove the barriers to the provision of back catalogue, but still the publishers continue with their policy of 'shaping taste' by 'limiting' availability - long tail anyone? Why can I still not buy the early Dogs D'Amour albums online?

For the record, Grinn and Monty Dogg records are perfectly happy for you to rip and distribute anything we publish. We just ask that you don't make money from it or claim it as your own!
Incidentally, you can get the entire Grinn back catalogue here for free.

So, all in all the Sony/Apple announcement it a very interesting and welcome step towards recombining the music industry's services and user expectations - lets hope this becomes the model rather than a failed experiment.

Barnsley Gig Promotion

Unfortunately 'Fallen from view' are no longer able to play the gig at The Arches on Friday (6th April) and so Grinn have been booted up the bill and will now take the headline spot.

After last weeks stormer in Leeds we are sooooooooooo up for this one.




All the other details remain the same, but here is a reminder.

Venue:
The Arches,
Pitt Street
Barnsley
Yorkshire
S70 1BB
(map)

Promotor: BOM Nights

Bill:

• Grinn (headline)
• Stan Williams and the Manifesto
• The Western Front

doors open 8pm, free free free entry no dress code!

Check out the links to hear music from the bands - it sounds like its gonna be a corker!