Live At Leeds - The Unconference

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been very busy helping to book and organise the industry event that will run alongside the Live At Leeds all dayer. The event is a collaboration between Futuresound (Live At Leeds promoter's) and Leeds Met University and is hosted at the latter's Old Broadcasting House on Friday 30th April

We've aimed to make the day informative and ripe for inquisition. It's mainly panel based, with each session hosting a wide range of experience and opinions on a given subject, with questions welcome every step of the way

Our 'main' guest is Sean Adams - founder of Drowned In Sound, who over the last 10 years has also run his own record label and is now a guest contributer to The Sunday Times Culture magazine

I'm also incredibly pleased of the wide range of local contributors we've assembled, with representatives from all over the local music spectrum. We've tried to make the event inclusive to all experienced organisations / business' as well, by offering space to showcase themselves at the event

Most importantly the event is about everyone in Leeds with an inquisitive nature of the music 'industry' - not just, or even primarily the mainstream industry, but the experience you can tap in to from the people involved

The Facebook event for the page, with updating information is here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115121958512389&ref=ts

And you can download the latest version of the programme for the day here:

http://www.liveatleeds.com/LAL-Unconference-Programme.pdf

Soundtrack to this post: Blur

The Whiskas Story

As mentioned as a frequent amend-um to talk of studying my Masters degree, I have also been known to partake in the odd guest lecture at LMU and infact a few other educational institutions. Traditionally these have been my anecdotal recollection of how I started Dance To The Radio, and talking about Forward Russia.

In the last few weeks, however, I've been lucky enough to talk on a variety of specific subjects, such as production techniques, label / producer relationships and songwriting. However, I still got wheeled out to talk on what LMU dubbed 'the whiskas story'

The idea behind this lecture, as part of the music industry module, was to give an idea to the students of what you can achieve through building connections, and also that sometimes you need to pursue a variety of different paths to make a living in the music industry. LMU filmed it and stuck it on YouTube - so I thought I'd write a bit more about it and put it in context.

I've never actually thought about what I've been doing, and quite often just doggedly followed a path that I've ended up on, and in hindsight, a lot of things come across a lot more thought out than they were at the time. As I say in the lecture, it isn't telling people how I did something, it's not me bragging about what I've done - it's a story about what I did with a few ideas and some friends I guess

Watch the full quality version here

Soundtrack to this post: Johnny Cash

My Leeds Festival 2009

This year I've felt a little too self absorbed to induldge myself in Leeds Festival properly. I spent the Friday & Sunday bed down in House Of Mook perfecting the mix for You Animals forthcoming opus, and setting up for recording some Honour Before Glory tracks on Monday

I did have a great day in attendance on the Saturday, though as usual it was the social aspect as much as the bands that made it the occasion it was.

I started the day watching The XX, who's album has quickly become a bit of a favourite of mine. It was an odd entity live, I wasn't expecting it to be that much more than it was, but I still thought it was a shame there wasn't more to it. Still, it's made me listen to the album today and I've enjoyed it all the more.

After The XX, I wandered around the site a little bit and checked out the BBC Introducing Stage, caught a little bit of ex-Loiner Anna Prior in Metronomy, before watching the Grammatics in the Festval Republic tent. And very good they were too

Later on, we camped out on the main stage to catch Vampire Weekend (who reminded me more than ever of Gracelands), bits of Bloc Party (very festival) and then Radiohead.

Radiohead was a bit of an odd one as not the set per se, but the whole set-up seemed very hard for a casual observer to 'break through' - and what I find odd, is why a band that was doing a sponsor-less tour in their own tents, was headlining such a 'corporate' festival?? With the 'arty' set up of video screens and lighting it was hard to connect from a distance, so I lost interest. I'm sure if I'd have been in the mood for an intense Radiohead set it would've been outstanding. I guess it was the festival equivalent of The Wire - not one for the casual observer. But that's what I go to the festival to be.

Two brief links / mentions:

1) To the festival volunteers who are actively getting involved. Great work if you can get it:

http://festvolunteers.blogspot.com/

2) Check out highlights of loads of bands on 'death of independent journalism' website the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/readingandleeds/2009/videos/

Keep an eye out for Faith No More covering the Eastenders theme

Many thanks to the kind people at Festival Republic though for letting me attend again. Hopefully next year I can do something worthwhile to attend

Soundtrack to this post: Wilco, Fever Ray