F1 fans who follow the many pundits on Twitter may have come across Lewis Hamilton’s ‘Spring Layers’ shoot for GQ, where the Formula 1 Championship driver poses in various (some may say ill-advised) outfits.
It was only a matter of time, but the photoshoppers have started: take a look here. My favourite is the knife-throwing one…
The other night I was discussing an impending album release from a local band: as is invariably the case with skint unsigned acts the CDs would be duplicated by the band themselves and sold at gigs. I was offered a sample CD to take home but with the caveat “but it’ll still change”. A bit of discussion ensued and we came to the conclusion that left unchecked their album would keep on changing, evolving, and effectively no two batches produced would the same: comments from listeners such as ‘oh the drums are a bit loud’ might result in a balance change, or ‘that cowbell doesn’t fit there’ could mean an arrangement alteration. Put simply: there would never be a ‘final version’, even after the album launch gig, and it would be a perpetual ‘demo’.
Now, I am a firm believer of a release being ‘a point in time’ for an act, a snapshot if you will. When you bite the bullet and submit your track to get an ISRC (basically a barcode) you need to submit the exact track you are releasing, and when you have physical media duplicated then that’s where you draw the line: a hundred copies are etched and that’s it, no going back, no ‘tweaks’. Effectively you as a band or act are forced to draw that big black line on the mix, warts and all – that’s what separates the demo from the release.
Yet with home manufacturing it’s all too easy for a band to change things after-the-event, and it does a great disservice to the people who have been to (say) your launch party and bought a copy. Many new performers and young acts are too impatient to release their new tracks, so version-upon-version is published to Soundcloud (or whatever music-site-du-jour) spoiling the impact. As a band/act you’ll never be completely happy with something because after all your tastes evolve and your hearing changes, but that’s no reason to rewrite history.
There are some wonderful examples of ‘slightly broken’ performances out there – off the top of my head Minnie Riperton, David Bowie, The Beatles, Barry Manilow and even Scott Joplin have recorded imperfect versions which have a charm to them. Many of those would have been lost had it been easy to ‘evolve’ a track and I think we’d have been worse off for it.
As an extreme case I can cite an artiste whose second album consisted 40% of slightly reworked/reproduced versions of tracks from her first album. Her third album was 50% reworked/revised tracks from her first and second albums. Goodness knows what the fourth contained but I’ve stopped buying her albums now – I might as well wait for the seventh or eighth so I can hear some new work.
Mind, I’ve not been exempt from this in continued adventures with Obvious Pseudonym: 18 months ago we released The Six Noises EP, then a week after I’d the master copies had been dispatched I tweaked it into a ‘Special Edition’ version correcting lots of little mistakes I’d noticed since the band listening-party. Thankfully the original run of CD production was cancelled so we didn’t have to deal with physical copies, but still the iTunes version was different from the CD version in small, subtle ways (I believe the CD version is superior but you may have a different opinion). Nowadays I sit on a mix for at least a month and will go back and listen to it with fresh ears some weeks after it’s been mixed or frequently longer, eg. I noticed a slight mis-timing in the piano track on Baby Baby just the other week… 16 months after I recorded it.
In short? Don’t rush a release, give it time, but draw a line and wave goodbye to a recording once it’s flown the nest – don’t keep picking at it. Your fans will – eventually – thank you.
Edit: As @mattbluefoot points out: ‘This could be paraphrased as “don’t be George Lucas”‘. 
Not a link to my own father’s pics (you can find those on his Flickr photostream) but instead a link to a blog called My Dad’s Photos, dedicated to photographs taken by the maintainer’s father John Hendy.
I arrived there by following a link to 1973 photos of Kings Road in London, but there are photos from the 1962 Monaco GP and some British Grands Prix from 1958 onwards the Motorsport archive.
It’s a fascinating wade through, especially if you’re an F1 fan and a photographer.
Via the medium of Twitter I discovered a letter from John Steinbeck to his son on the occasion of the latter ‘falling in love’. Quite lovely.
I always enjoy reading food blogs, especially when they’re local – but I was exceptionally chuffed to see Leeds Grub blog heading down our way to review Deli Central in Wakefield, just off the Bullring. More of that please!
Remember record players? Records? It’s trendy to call it ‘vinyl’ nowadays, isn’t it? My mate John’s got a house full of it, we often joke a river of black tar would flow through Walton if his house burned down.
Last Saturday my brother and I went digging in our loft at home to find all the records which had been stashed there over the years – boxes of them which I’d been given, or acquired through Freecycle, or inherited from various relatives. Tim used to collect them and upon my father’s emigration his collection ended up shoved at one end of our loft so there was quite a bit for us to go through.
When we retrieved the boxes the musty smell was overpowering – even though cased the slight damp had pervaded the sleeves of some Freecycle-sourced discs, giving the illusion of being older than they actually were… smelling of 1940, released in 1985. Cross-legged, we started sifting through, ditching Music-For-Pleasure compilations of Perry Como hits and laughing at the tastes of someone-random-from-Freecycle who’d bought a copy of The Reynolds Girls one and only hit.
It only took a few minutes before I hauled the Technics record deck and preamp downstairs so we might listen to some of them – a bizarre Sex Pistols disc called Some Product featuring cut-up interviews and the unmistakable mark of Malcolm McLaren’s odder side, followed by unidentifiable death-metal which when played at 45rpm rather than 33rpm sounded like Daffy Duck singing Rammstein. “Swing Along With Martin Dale”, recorded live at Wakefield Theatre Club (latterly the Pussycat Club and now a bowling alley on Doncaster Road). Fun.
We almost came to blows over a first edition vinyl of Joy Division’s “Substance” album (FACT250 [sic]) but I let it go; there will be other opportunities. We listened to the first couple of tracks of an early-80s Deanna Durbin compilation, swaying almost subconsciously; the imperfections in the pressing giving it analogue character.
And that’s the rub really – I never understood the beauty of vinyl until now. Tim suggested were we to own these on CD or MP3 we probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought but the hypnosis of the spinning turntable and positioning the needle made it an event, the cover providing further visual stimulus as the tracks went on, sitting together and listening.
Tim took his share of the booty and I sincerely hope him and his missus enjoy it. The following morning was taken up listening to a Transvision Vamp LP while Ben watched, fascinated. Maybe he’s understood it too.
Since then I’ve wandered into charity shops, looking for interesting records to take home. No dice yet, and sad that Headingley Oxfam charge so much for records in such poor condition. Still, there are plenty of other places to dig around in old boxes and maybe one day I’ll be able to rediscover that Tribe Called Quest 12″ I lost or even the copy of David Bellamy’s one and only novelty song “Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me”… I’d love to know where that went to…
In fettling the blog and dusting it off I took another look at how people were finding it via Google.
Alongside the usual searches for Wakefield, Trinity Walk and coffee percolators there’s some really bizarre search terms in here, including:
…and a pile more really odd ones.
Christ knows what you lot are up to…
When I was 7 I bought myself a film camera from Wakefield fleamarket – a Halina 35mm camera purchased for £1. I took it all over the place and went through the first couple of films like mad (mostly taking photographs of the sky or the floor because I couldn’t get the hang of the viewfinder). My father was processing film at the time and started loading the occasional spool of B&W in and that’s how I started out in photography… once we’d moved to a larger house he took over the cellar and we did prints too.
Almost 30 years later I’m using digital for my semi-professional work: I carry various Canon pro digital bodies around and a complement of lenses (a partial kit-list is on my Flickr profile), and I post-process using Lightroom on the Mac. An average gig shoot for me results in about 200 photos per act and I pare those down into about 40 or 50 shots for a client, all of which is a far cry from 24 frames on film.
I recently did a contract in Halifax (good lord deliver me) as part of my dayjob. Lunchtime wanderings uncovered a camera shop near the market (Janet Green Photographic, I’d link to a website but they don’t have one) where there was a window full of second-hand photographic kit – everything from mid-1950s medium-format bodies up to low-end digital, and so a germ of an idea formed – get an old film camera and learn to develop my own photos again. I pressed my nose to the glass almost daily in the hope that a suitable camera would be on display. Christmas drew closer, the end of the contract loomed, but less than 2 weeks before I’d be out of the area one appeared in the window for just £29: a Canon EOS 500N, one of the more recent 135 Canon range. I bimbled in and after verifying it would accept my Canon EF lenses I walked out as the proud owner of a film camera body, some chemicals and a few spools of Ilford FP4+ film.
The first thing I noticed was that I was conscious how many photos I wasn’t taking using film. I assumed I’d go through film like wildfire but it took me the best part of 3 days to blow my first 24-exposure film (the second film took a little less time principally because I was out in sunny Halifax getting some gritty industrial images 
). This did make me realise that although I scattergun at gigs I am more inclined to take time to set up a shot elsewhere.
Once home and in the kitchen I mixed up some developer and spent 20 minutes lightproofing the understair cupboard. Every last LED from the wireless base-station, burglar alarm, central heating system got double helpings of gaffer-tape. Hallway lights went off, the cracks around the door stuffed with scarves. Total darkness, hooray. I turned the safelight on, loaded the film into the canister and went off to develop it.
Right. Safelight. Yeah – about that: there’s no safelight for film… I’d forgotten that bit and overexposed it. I had also been using a dodgy thermometer, not that it would have made much difference. The second time I was a lot more careful and some success ensued, having processed a spool of Ilford HP4+ (ISO400) in Ilfosol-3 developer: this resulted in quite a chunky grain which you can see on the Flickr page for the photo. Still, not bad considering I’ve been trying to remember how to do it all based upon vague memories of watching Dad.
As a sidenote: I haven’t been doing any printing, instead using a slide scanner from Maplin to throw the negatives into JPEG files; it’s only a cheap thing with a lamp which shines the slide onto a small CCD and auto-compensates for exposure etc. – the results aren’t very good. This one will do for the moment as long as I put the images through Lightroom, at least until I find a USB slide scanner I’m happy with.
Subsequently I walked into Halifax and blew off a spool of Ilford FP4+ (ISO100) – you can see the results here including some self-portraits taken on long-lapse outside Dean Clough Mills at dawn and dusk; I think the contrast on them is quite nice. I haven’t tried pushing the film yet, I’m taking baby-steps and since Christmas I’ve been using it as an occasional ‘grab camera’ to play with rather than anything serious.
Most of my supplies are coming from Amazon marketplace sellers (RK Photographic are sending me most of it including a black bag, a load of FP4+ and a film spool opener). Locally Dale Photographic in Leeds sells chemicals and film which is useful in an emergency and if anyone wants to buy me a present they have a secondhand Hasselblad MF 6×6 120-roll camera with a couple of lenses for £1500… thought not!
Tonight though the 500N gets a proper run at a gig using Ilford Delta 3200 film (ISO3200) which I will probably process using Microphen developer later on in the week and post to my Flickr stream. I’m hoping to replicate some of the more iconic Kev Cummins film shots from the early 80s – somehow doing colour-to-B&W in Lightroom feels like cheating and I’m hopeful of good results. At least I don’t have to worry about red/yellow saturation 
(The photo is me aged 8 with the Halina – my Dad took it when we went on a photowalk in Wakefield; the courtyard is round the back of the old Post Office, and it’s now known as ‘The Latin Quarter’.)
Update: Julian (aka @liquidsquid on Twitter) said that this was his idea. If I’m going to be perfectly honest it was discussions with quite a few folks which led to this, not least @leica0000, @john2755 and my landlady in Milton Keynes towards the end of last year who gave me a box full of old Patterson developing kit. That said, the Delta3200 was definitely Julian’s idea.
I finally got sick of the blog spam under my very hacked up version of Nucleus, so I’ve shifted myself to using WordPress. Apologies if the RSS feed has just given you the past 10 articles as being ‘new’, or whatever.
Anyway, in porting all the data from Nucleus I happened upon nucleus2wordpress.pl which purported to be a hack to shift all the posts from old versions of Nucleus into, er, WordPress. It didn’t work first time since the categories system within WordPress has changed so I’ve frigged it to work with the new WordPress taxonomy system.
You can download my updated version (which works with WordPress 3.3) here – no guarantees implied etc. and it depends on your Nucleus database being the same as your WordPress database (I just copied the tables over and then removed the Nucleus ones when I was happy). Enjoy!
I’ll be back blogging soon. ‘Interesting times’ over the past six months have taken priority…
Addendum: After running this script and becoming more familiar with the concepts involved in the WordPress database, I discovered the comment counts were incorrect (even though the imported comments themselves appeared within the posts). To correct this, run the following on your WordPress database (remembering to back it up first!):
UPDATE wp_posts wpp
LEFT JOIN
(SELECT comment_post_id AS c_post_id, count(*) AS cnt FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_approved = 1 GROUP BY comment_post_id) wpc
ON wpp.id=wpc.c_post_id
SET wpp.comment_count=wpc.cnt
WHERE wpp.post_type IN ('post', 'page')
AND (wpp.comment_count!=wpc.cnt OR (wpp.comment_count != 0 AND wpc.cnt IS NULL));
This worked fine on WordPress 3.3 and corrected the comment counters on the front page and search results.
I went to the Rhubarb Bomb Issue 2.2 launch last night at Chantry Chapel in Wakefield. As well as drinking far too much Speckled Hen (it was a BYO gig) and talking drunkenly to a fisherman on the bank of the Calder, I participated in the Mix CD Exchange (I say ‘exchange’, I actually forgot to pick one up – you can blame the beer for that). Anyway, it’s meant to be anonymous and I don’t know who got mine but I can exclusively reveal that I haphazardly chucked it together 30 minutes before leaving the house, and it comprised:
A bizarre mix of course. Not quite sure it works (well, I’m pretty positive it doesn’t) – my brother is much better at this sort of thing!