Joff Winks in Oxford

Oxford. It really looks like this.

Well, as anticipated, there was a bit of a busy patch there, and there’s more to come. I’ve been out and about a fair bit and have gone to a couple of interesting places along the way. Rather than do a big catchup on the past couple of weeks in one blog post, I’ll just pull out a highlight for today’s post, and then I’ll focus on some other highlights later on.

I’m going to talk about Oxford. Oxford was great.

Sam (the other kiwi I work with) invited me to join him on a roadtrip to meet his friend Andy, who used to be the Programme Controller at XFM, and is now — among other things — the manager of an up and coming band led by a guy by the unlikely name of Joff Winks.

Sam, pensive, in his office. Note the KIWI sticker.

We’d just come to the end of the internal exam board process — a process that involves going through the entire student body in alphabetical order and making decisions about the future of each based on their academic performance to date. It can be fairly draining stuff.

But after tidying up a few loose ends, we jumped into Sam’s car and hit the road. And then we stayed there. There was an inexplicable traffic jam in North Birmingham that saw us standing still for the best part of two hours before we even hit the motorway.

Fortunately, Sam has a diverse and interesting stock of music in his mp3 player.

After this slow start, and then a fairly swift jaunt down the M40, we arrived, met up with Andy and had a wander around.

I took some photos:

There’s something weird about this being a cellphone shop

The courtyard at Hogwarts, I think

The slums of Oxford

Sam and I popped off for what turned out to be the best burger and chips I’ve had since arriving in this country (opposite the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, if you’re interested) — we’re talking Ponsonby Fish and Chips territory here — and then it was time to go and watch Joff’s band play.

They were really great. I’m a bit of a fan. A lot of Steely Dan comparisons because of all the jazz chords and weird time signatures in amongst the straight-ahead pop/rock packaging. Clever stuff.

Joff Winks band live in Oxford

Joff is tiny

I’ll be putting some of their music up on The Wireless (with their permission) once I get my copy of the album through Sam in the next couple of days. I think they’ll do very well, if they smarten up that website of theirs.

Also — I’d go with a band name. Joff might write the songs, play lead guitar and sing, but they are very definitely a band. I thought ‘The Bays’ would be a good option. It stuck in my head after I saw them play, and although I’m not sure where it came from, I think I’d buy a record by The Bays.

Not sure I’d ask for a Joff Winks record over the counter. That’s just me.

After the gig: Joff and the band relax

It was a really good night, and particularly welcome because I’d dithered so much about going in the first place. So many other things to do, but it was really nice to get out of Birmingham and see something I hadn’t seen before.

I took a lot more photos than this, and you can see them on my Google Photos page (I’m trying it out as an alternative to Flickr).

The very next day, my camera and I were in Coventry. That’s another blog post for another time.

What just happened?

I know I was making out that I had a lot to do in my last post, but I was not prepared for the level of craziness that hit on Friday and is still going on today…

I put up a blog post on New Music Strategies, just reproducing an email conversation I’d had with a local record label manager I know.

Some of the things he said in the course of that conversation were taken to be fairly outrageous by the readers of that website, and they took it upon themselves to go back out into the internet and then come back with all their friends.

In the last few days I have had tens of thousands of visitors to that website. It’s being talked about in some of the most read websites on the planet, and I’ve had something like 100 comments already on that one post.

In the meantime, I had problems with my web host, and the site ended up getting taken down for 12 hours on Friday night.

It’s been offline three or four times since that I know of, and I’ve had nothing but trouble with their technical, sales and support staff (essentially, one guy called Neil), who thinks it’s my job to find a coding problem on one of their servers and fix it for them.

The amount of time and energy required to deal with sudden, fleeting internet success and simultaneous catastrophic technical meltdown is substantial, and I had not factored it into the equation.

But still, the feedback has been wonderful, and I’ve had phone calls and emails from all around the world — including people whose websites I read for inspiration and indepth knowledge — which has been really cool. But I’ve hardly come up for air the whole time.

Lots of people have been downloading my free e-book, and some people have taken it upon themselves to give it away on their own websites and via their newsletters, which I actively encourage.

I’ve even managed to pick up a few extra and very interesting side projects along the way.

Y’know… to fill my spare time.

Just taking stock now, and it looks like my son has gone away for the week to hang out with some visiting German kids…

Things to do

I’ve been pretty busy recently, but it’s all been good stuff that I’m pretty pleased with. Some interesting projects have landed on my lap recently, and I just thought I’d list them here — mostly so I can keep tabs.

I’m in the process of putting together my PhD application. I have the paperwork, and between now and the end of next week, I’ll get that written.

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We’ve just had Arts and Humanities Research Council funding confirmed for a research project in collaboration with BBC Future Media and Technology, looking at how audiences use the internet to interact with music radio. That’ll involve going into the Beeb in London and working with the production teams for different music programmes.

Gilles Peterson and Zane Lowe are both on my list…

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Next month, the Radio Conference in Lincoln is taking place, and I’m looking forward to seeing Matt Mollgaard and Peter Hoar from AUT at that. I still have to write my paper, but I have a pretty clear idea about it. It’s called ‘New Radio Strategies’ (wring as much out of a single idea as you possibly can, I say…) and since the organisers at Lincoln are going to be publishing the conference proceedings, I’ll work that up into a decent article, rather than just a presentation.

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I’ve almost finished a piece for the Radio Journal. It’s about NZ On Air, New Zealand music, music funding and what’s happened to the idea of ‘New Zealandness’ in popular music on commercial radio. It’s in the hands of the editor to get some feedback and direction, but I’ll get it back with notes shortly, and then I can put the finishing touches on it (or rip it up and start again, if that’s the verdict).

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Just received a copy of the Communication Journal of New Zealand in the post. I have an article in it about ways of understanding radio history through the lens of changes in technology. It’s based on a chapter from my Masters thesis, so there was less writing than there was editing for sense.

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Waiting to hear if we get the funding for our Knowledge Transfer Fellowship bid, which will buy out half of my teaching time for the next two years to go and work directly with music businesses. We’re pretty hopeful — it’s a resubmit, the funders told us what we should change in order to be successful, and they kept the budget aside from the last round so they’d have enough in this one…

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New Zealand media pundit Russell Brown has asked me to collaborate with him on a strategy document for NZ On Air, concerning new digital and online broadcast technologies. Pretty quick turnaround on that one, so I should get cracking there…

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The free e-book I wrote and made available from the New Music Strategies website a few days back has been downloaded by over a thousand people now, and visits to the site have gone through the roof, comparatively speaking. Daily page views are being measured in the thousands now, rather than being counted individually (that’s a first for me), and there’s been some great feedback.

Here’s some coverage I’ve seen online:
- Fan Centric Marketing
- The Opinionated Diner
- Any Given Tuesday
- GarageSpin
- HomeTracked
- Louisville Music News
- Contract Worker
- The Entrepreneurial Mind

I think it’ll probably slow down again now, but the boost in attention in those few days will most likely increase the overall number of regular ‘repeat-traffic’ visitors. I have around 400 subscribers at the moment, which is hardly broadcasting figures — but it’s a milestone for me.

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I wrote a guest blog post on Hypebot, which is one of the more popular sites on the topic of online music, so that was nice — and Trevor Reekie’s interviewing me for Radio New Zealand National next week about the 20 Things e-book.

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I’m also going to be doing a bit of travelling (which I always love), presenting a couple of seminars about online music business.

28 June – Boost Workshops, School of Art & Design, Coventry
17 July – Boost Workshops, The Lighthouse, Wolverhampton
19 July – Musicians Union ‘Turned On’ Seminar, The Half-Time Orange, Leicester

…and I had a phonecall yesterday from the head of the Musicians Union in London, and he’s asked me to do a couple of seminars in London, Bristol and Plymouth in October. He’s getting back to me with dates. The cool thing about that was that he said the reason he got hold of me was because someone had sent him the e-book, and he’d ended up printing it out and handing it around the office.

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I’ve also got a seminar about online marketing for small companies from across the creative sector at Screen Media Lab in Digbeth on the 27th of July.

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I’m DJing a couple of times over the next week or so. Tomorrow night (Friday), I’m supporting Daddy G from Massive Attack, and next Friday (22nd), I’m on the bill with Quantic – both small gigs (100 capacity) at the Bulls Head.

Actually a bit excited about both of those…

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I went back to the drawing board on my old board game a couple of days ago. I haven’t played it for a while, and I’ve been thinking about getting a decent wooden set made. I was also thinking of ways it could remain challenging to people who had mastered the basic game, which takes a bit of time, but once you develop a good strategy and start to be able to think a few moves ahead, gameplay can get a little formulaic.

So I’ve developed a new ruleset that involves three different kinds of pieces that move differently and capture differently. It’s quite something to get your head around in play, and it’s going to require different kinds of counters (other than the standard black vs white it currently uses), but man, it raises the stakes in terms of strategy.

Thought I might investigate what it would take to get a set produced, and maybe set up a website and take orders. It’s been six years or so since I came up with it and built the first board, and there are online versions kicking about the internet. But it’s about time there were real (rather than handmade) sets in production.

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The classes for my Postgraduate Certificate in Education course has come to an end now. I just have a major assignment due in at the end of this month, and then I can completely remove that from my list of ongoing projects. I’ve enjoyed it, and I’ve picked up some good stuff about teaching — but it’s nice to have it out of the way too.
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Of course, in amongst all this, I still have a day job. It’s marking season at universities in the UK, and like everyone else who does what I do, I have a stack of student work to plough through, ranging from the inspired to the despair-inducing.

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When I lay it all out like that, it seems a bit intimidating — but still, it’s good to see it all in one place. Makes it seem like I have an interesting life, so when I’m powering through a boring bit of typing or marking a particularly inane essay, I can look at the list and think ‘actually — look at all the cool stuff I get to do’ — which makes it all seem better.
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Oh — and I almost forgot. Yesterday I spent a lovely day with Craig Hamilton and Antonio Gould. I was helping Antonio put together a podcast for 4Talent about music online.

We sat in Jibbering first, and then went out the back of Sage Wholefoods — Bobbie’s work — where there’s a community garden that not nearly enough people know about.

It’s lovely out there. Anyone can just go and sit, work on the laptop, chat with friends, relax, drink healthy juices and eat yummy seed-filled bars. And yet it’s Moseley’s best-kept secret. That’ll be my second home in summer…