From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V6 #162 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Monday, June 25 2001 Volume 06 : Number 162 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Alloy: [OT] Baily's been trying to write again... [Paul Baily ] Alloy: New search ["Krzysko, Bill" ] Re: Alloy: New search ["Robin Thurlow" ] Alloy: Great TMDR Interview [Russell Milliner ] Alloy: oops [Russell Milliner ] Re: Alloy: Great TMDR Interview [Russell Milliner ] Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part II [jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 15:49:39 +1000 From: Paul Baily Subject: Alloy: [OT] Baily's been trying to write again... Hi y'all, I know, I have no shame, sorry for the plug. Want to see what happens when perfectly good characters go bad? Warning: influenced by an old Daffy Duck sketch, a lack of sleep, and a weird frame of mind. Three more proper snippets are actively in the works but I'll hold off inflicting them until I'm a little happier with them. To unsubscribe from these announcements, simply reply with "Oh just RACK OFF PAUL!!" in the body of the message. :-) cheers, Paul. This message powered by part of the soundtrack to Myst III: Exile. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 08:39:50 -0400 From: "Ian Gifford" Subject: Alloy: Re: alloy-digest V6 #161 Kate Wrote: >Quite another when your own children play your own music again and again. All I got to say, being a mother, is Kids will be Kids. Ya gotta love em!! I recorded a disc for my family two Christmasses ago. It had a bunch of holiday type tunes on it. One was a tune awrote called "Groundhogs Day Carol". My sister called me up to say Thanks (albeit... sarcasm was rich in her voice) as her daughter (4) had gotten into that song and was dancing around the house to it over an over and over. An internet chum from North Carolina also told me that his son who is 6 also love Groundhog's Day carol and asked if they could call me on the phone. Wen they did I was met by this sweet 6 year old voice singing the tune to me and saying "when are you coming down south to play this for us??" I don't have kids of my own, but they are quite a trip it is true. Ian _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 09:48:48 -0500 From: "Krzysko, Bill" Subject: Alloy: New search This is kinda neat. Google now has an image search. Try this. http://images.google.com/images?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&q=thomas+dolby&meta=si te%3Dimages ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 12:12:08 -0400 From: "Robin Thurlow" Subject: Re: Alloy: New search Bill... this is a great link!! Thanks so much for forwarding it. I've got to go back and read details of the "Wall" show in Berlin. Great photos! I wonder who chose them? I noticed the one they selected from my 'Images and Interviews' page, one of my favorites of Thomas beside the sea... must be someone else's favorite too :) xxxx Robin T - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Krzysko, Bill" > http://images.google.com/images?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&q=thomas+dolby&meta=si te%3Dimages ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 20:52:28 -0400 From: Russell Milliner Subject: Alloy: Great TMDR Interview It appears TMDR was interviewed by Keyboard Magazine recently. You can read the interview online. Wow...I found an interview with him where they dont mention Beatnik! http://www.keyboardmag.com/features/thomasdolby/index.shtml - -Russ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 20:53:52 -0400 From: Russell Milliner Subject: Alloy: oops They do mention Beatnik. But only as a 'what is he doing now' thing. - -Russ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 20:56:27 -0400 From: Russell Milliner Subject: Re: Alloy: Great TMDR Interview Also here is a quote from the article: "The nice thing about my fans is that they don't mind waiting a few years. You go into the internet groups, and there's still people in there, daily, interpreting song lyrics and talking about what sounds I used, even though it's been nearly a decade since I released anything!" - -Russ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 00:06:55 +0300 From: jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com Subject: Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part II Hi all, I am now on vacation for two weeks so here is the next part of the Alloy Q&A. Thanks for all the positive feedback on and off-list. It was really a pleasure to do and I'm sure that the revelations will continue for a while yet! (oh if you only knew what was coming!) Continued... This was where we left off: Jon: In some of your songs, in fact quite a number of your songs there are references to bucking the system and acting independently. I assume that you still adhere to this point to view today. If that's the case then there are some artists that are now selling directly as opposed to through record companies - which I know you have a lot of affection for! - I would hedge my bets to say that it is likely that you have some previously unreleased material somewhere... Thomas: Hmmm, you would be surprised. I actually have very very little unreleased material... Jon: Oh no! That's not the right answer! Thomas: ... the reason is that it is either good enough for public consumption in which case I finished it and I got it out... or it's not good enough for public consumption and I would never release it. There is not a ton of stuff like that that. If it wasn't going to be good enough I probably didn't finish it. I probably just axed it. There's practically nothing really. Jon: If you were to consider making another album, I know that you are very busy here. [at Beatnik] You said a long time ago that you were going to concentrate on this now and that's the way it is. If you were to do it would you sell it direct or would you again go through the, er, sometimes turbulent and difficult relationships with A&R and marketing and so on? Thomas: It's really hard to say, I think that I would enjoy myself much more if I went the direct route but I don't know that a huge success selling direct could economically be as viable as a moderate success going through the system. In other words if I commit to an album it's committing to a year's work between writing it, recording it, going out and promoting it and you have to fund that so the record companies' position has always been that 'we'll fund that and if you do really well you'll make the investment back and some more on top of it'. But then what they do is they make sure that it's virtually impossible to ever recoup what they have advanced you. As a consequence even signed artists, the vast majority of them, get very downtrodden by the system because they feel constantly that they are in hock to the label and the label increasingly over time will use that as a lever to try and force them into a mould that they define. That's the danger. Jon: There have been several comments made [on Alloy] and one in particular from '97 from Crackers, Cris Cracknell in Canada, saying that he would love to hear the music that you were making when you were recording with your Portastudio in your apartment; before you had any commercial success; your audio sketchbook if you like. Thomas: You would be surprised because on my Portastudio I basically completed seven or eight songs and you know what they are. The very first one that I ever did was New Toy. I got my Portastudio when I was on the road with Lene Lovich, the Portastudio had just come out and that's what I did in my hotel room on my afternoons off. Then I went home with it and I recorded 'Airwaves' (the version that came out on the compilation cassette "From Brussells With Love), 'Flying North', 'Sale Of The Century', as it was then called, which turned into 'Wreck Of The Fairchild' and one other... one other song, I think it was 'Therapy/Growth'. Those are basically the only Portastudio demos that I ever made. Jon: I think a lot of people imagine that you have this huge vault full of them! Thomas: No, I'm not like that. Prince said that he has got about 300 unused songs... Jon: He must have been really busy then! Thomas: He was very busy but he's also... not very big! (laughing) You need 300 Prince songs to get 10 great ones in my opinion! Jon: I have a few Prince albums because I like a few of the tracks. I can't remember the last time that I listen to a Prince album all the way through. Thomas: Yeah, true. I think there are a couple that you can listen to all the way through but you basically want to make compilations of Prince stuff so you don't have to sit through all the other stuff. "Purple Rain" and "Sign of the Times" are absolute genius though, with very few bad tracks. Jon: I hope that he won't read this! We did this thing for War Child; when you baked your tape. Would you consider doing something like that on an annual basis for War Child or another charity because it was something that really touched us that you have taken the trouble to do it. It was really something. 'New' material from you is unfortunately like rocking-horse shit! Or even if you have something that you are working on at the moment, just and idea or something we would very much like to hear it and if we could make some difference for a charity through doing it, it would be great. Thomas: Yeah, there is very very little. I have been thinking about it and I think there is a couple more things there that I could make available but there is precious little really. The other thing is that I have got probably six or seven new songs that I would consider to be the core or a next album project - if I make another "album" -and I always thought that I would balance those with completely new stuff that I wrote from scratch. But these are ones that have sort of fallen out of the last few years; almost by accident. I have a few of those demo'd in rough form but I wouldn't naturally share those at an early stage. Jon: It's your prerogative as the artist to chose when they are mature enough to be heard. Thomas: Yeah, the other thing is you know, Paddy McAloon generally demos his songs, or at least in the old days, used to demo his songs with just an acoustic guitar and voice. Those performances are so fabulous that I could see a case for putting those out even though he then went into a studio and spent months doing a big production for them. With mine; if I just sit down at a piano and play and sing it doesn't really amount to much. It's not really who I am. It doesn't really take shape until I am in a position where I can orchestrate the whole thing. Jon: I'm surprised to hear you say that as you have often said that you have enjoyed when you were playing jazz-piano and you could imagine... I don't want to quote you but you once said that that if everything didn't work out that I could see myself going back to just me and a piano in a small club playing those kind of things. I am however, quoting you from well over ten years ago... Thomas: Yes, I would agree with that but then I would have a license to be mediocre...(laughing) you know, I'm my own harshest critic in many ways and I hold up very high standards for myself. I think I can get away with just singing in a small club but I don't think I'm anything even approaching world-class. I think in order to do something that is really outstanding I need to bring in multiple skills that I have including orchestration, engineering, production, lights, performance, video and all of those things so that I can bring all of those things together and create something that is really stunning. Jon: Does that [statement] preclude you ever having a couple of nights in a club when you just sit down at the piano and do what you feel? ... end of part II . To be continued. ... so Thomas thinks that he has a license to be mediocre! Hmm not sure whether I would agree with THAT entirely... Also I'm sure that you all also noticed that a future album possibility was mentioned and that there are a couple of other things gathering dust in his drawer that could possibly be made available at a future date. Hurrah! The end question leaves unanswered the question about possible future dates... so there is a god afterall! Part III follows next Monday if I can get my mobile connection going from the forest. What do you think then? Six or seven new tracks! The man has new material!!! There is lots more to come. Comments? Cheers all! Jon ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V6 #162 ***************************