From the archives.

Being in a band is great, eh?

All you have to do is find three other best friends who are amazingly talented and who you can easily share ten years of your life with while living in the same house, eating the same food, living out of each other’s pockets and having sex with the same people.

You’ll have exactly the same aesthetic sensibilities and will be generous and fair with each other when it comes to sharing interview time, guitar strings and practice space money. You’ll even all agree on the same band name and things like envy, jealousy, drug addiction, alcoholism and writer’s block won’t affect you at all! You’ll all be millionaires and live in country houses by album three! Won’t you? I mean, that’s bound to happen, right? What could go wrong? Ummm. How about EVERYTHING?

FORMING THE BAND

You HAVE to have some kind of common musical ideas. Often student bands are formed around a bunch of half-talented egomaniacs with totally different tastes who think their diversity bonds them together. For example, the Godspeed You Black Emperor fan cellist is fucking the singer who wants to be like if the guy from System Of A Down was a rapper who lives with the drummer who worships The Prodigy who used to go to school with the Franz Ferdinand-obsessed bass player who dates the tambla-player’s Beta Band-loving sister in Bradford, who used to be a backing vocalist but got replaced by the R&B singer from Hull who is an expert in “mixology”, who’s now got the hots for the new total idiot guitarist who lists Aphex Twin, late-Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley, Dizzee Rascal and The Kinks as his influences. The overall aim of the band is to sound like a Far Eastern-influenced Killers but with drum ‘n’ bass beats, grime MCing, “fucked up shit”, a “Klaxons rave vibe” and early-Velvets, mixed with funk metal, lounge music and homophobic dancehall.

Oh shit, my ears just killed themselves.

BUYING INSTRUMENTS

Goodbye student loan, hello instant-ticket-to-virtuoso-musicianship-and-instant-blowjobs-24-hours-a-day. Maybe. Avoid the local music shops and their rude staff laughing at your outfit and their over-priced Epiphone guitars. The best people to buy guitars off are the desperate, broke third year students who’re about to split up their band because they’ve realised they have no talent whatsoever and Alex, the singer, is “a complete wanker”.

YOUR IMAGE

Like we said, you need a common bond here. Simplicity is best. Nobody likes bands that dress above their station or have outfits that don’t really correspond to the clothes they wear in public. Because your first gig will be under the microscope of everybody you know in university, your image, both on and off stage, should be seamless or everybody will think you’re a big phoney.

YOUR BAND NAME

This also has to reflect your members’ aesthetic interests, i.e. if you’re all self-obsessed outsiders who dwell on Situationism and wear grey cardigans (67 per cent of all bands), you don’t want to be calling your band “Chocolate Tits”, “Anal Chinook” or “Ultraviolet Booze Catastrophe.” Naming yourself after a film you can hire at Blockbuster is also banned, as is anything outside the most obscure book in the world. We get sent 5,670 different MySpace band pages every day and you can separate the wheat from the chaff purely by their names. True.

WRITING SONGS

Ohhh yeahh. That. Buying eyeliner and vintage My Bloody Valentine shirts on eBay is easy. Learning to play your instruments and crafting songs that will make angels weep slow-motion tears of blood that trickle into their vaginas is quite a lot harder. Unless you are in the 0.14 per cent of the population that’s a genius songwriter, here’s where outright plagiarism becomes your best friend. Hint: Read the music press and find out what records people in successful bands are plugging when they do those “What’s on your iPod” featurettes. Buy the records and rip off the basslines to the best songs that weren’t singles. That is literally how 99 per cent of most people write their first song. And unless you’re highly skilled, it’s easier to write a song on a bass than on a guitar or a piano. Fact.

YOUR FIRST GIG

Many bands decide to open their first gig with an “intro”. This is almost always a mistake. For some reason, the intros are usually overblown and totally incongruous with the rest of the set. And I’m sorry, you are not a “tortured musician” if you are on your first gig. Nobody will believe that you are so moved that you will have to pull off your guitar strings and leave the stage to 26 days of wailing feedback. Leave that to bands who’ve been going for 20 years and have lived through multiple deaths, squats and ill fortune. Like, say, Neurosis. For the first six months you should be playing 20 minute sets maximum.

RECORDING YOUR DEMO

Try and befriend somebody who’s already in a moderately successful band that can recommend a good place to do your demo. A friend with a four-track at home is better than turning up at a budget studio with a Rastafarian sound engineer who hates your music and is used to eating handfuls of weed and recording reggae bands playing one bass riff over and over again for three months.

MYSPACE

Sorry but it’s compulsory. Even extreme power electronics groups from Africa have Myspace pages. There is nothing “punk” about not being on here. Again, keep it simple. Bands who resort to flashing lights and animated GIFs receive less hits than people with easy-to-look-at pages. If you’re ugly wear masks or stand in the shadows of the pictures.

INTERVIEWS

If you get as far as being interviewed by somebody like the NME, it’s important to have some sort of well-rehearsed schtick to give the journalist. If you utter the phrase: “We just make music for ourselves and if anybody else likes it, it’s a bonus” to an NME journalist, you run the risk of having your New Bands feature dropped. Have some outrageous claims planned or be prepared to slag off your potential contemporaries so the sub-editor has a good pull-quote to put above your picture. Something like: “The album’s going to blow Exile On Main Street out of the water” or “the guy from Editors’ voice sounds like Alan Partridge doing an Interpol impression” or “Futureheads are basically the same band as Flying Pickets” or “Snow Patrol pee themselves on stage and drink it at the aftershow.”

I guess the main thing we’re saying here is that musical talent is about 40 per cent of the game. There are plenty of alcoholic buskers with more musical talent in their little fingers than everybody in NME this week. Still, you don’t see them being paid £40,000 to play the main stage at Reading, do you?

A large part of rock and roll is having the ability to attract as much attention to yourself as possible, by any means possible, even if it’s by being the biggest cunt in the world. If you want your shitty band to last more than a year, start practicing.

SIGNING A BIG DEAL

There are so many pitfalls and ins and outs of this process that it would take a thousand more pages to even cover half of it comprehensively.

The main thing here is, you will be expected to dedicate your every waking moment to the record company / your band up until the time you’ve made enough money to pay back your advance or you are dropped. This can be fun if you’ve got a good work ethic, have balls of steel and are prepared to spend half of the year locked up in a tour bus, eating shitty food and getting STDs from girls with floppy tits. 90 per cent of bands crumble after three or four years in a mess of drugs, depression, self-loathing and working for their dads. Be careful what you wish for.

ANITA CRAPPER

Tagged: bands, Music
October 21st, 2009 @ 11:14