To Where I Am Now

Saturday December 28th 2024

There are changes afoot. There has to be. Tonight I was unable to do the Live Stream because I simply do not have the technical skills to do it on my own. I don’t have the knowhow, the brain, or the patience. I suppose being born in 1958 isn’t exactly an excuse but it doesn’t help. As some of you already know Olivia and I broke up this month (we are already divorced) and this means a lot of practical things beyond the obvious personal and tragic disappointment, have changed, and anyone who goes though this would know, many things simply stop. All admin, social media and technical skills in regards to computers, photoshopping images for In Deep and of course gigs as a duo are now gone. This means I need to find help to do some of these things because I simply cannot write, record, teach, produce, write lyrics, write songs and learn Portuguese whilst maintaining The Archive, keeping up with new releases and paying for them, paying the rent on the premises and having months of boxes to unpack and file away, all with a smile on my face. Finding a financially viable live situation beyond just me and an acoustic guitar will be a challenge. I know, I know, I’m lucky to have some of these problems but it's not exactly Everything But The Girl, and these events don’t happen in a vacuum. But in reality I need help, with such huge time consuming projects, I need to generate more income whilst keeping up with all the creative demands. The good old days of sitting around with a joint and a free afternoon to spend six hours composing a song as the sun bursts through the windows seem out of reach, especially as the bills don’t pay themselves.

So the first thing I will do is make everything I do generate some kind of income, and as unpopular as it may be, it will start with the blog. I have my Mailchimp mailing list transferred to my Substack page. I have 1,160 subscribers or members from that mailing list. When I send a post out, I get 50% views, which allegedly is good. It doesn’t mean 600 people read the blog, it means there are 600 views of the page but still it’s not bad. When I post on FB only I get 100 views but that’s ok too. The point is that of those 1,160 email addresses that I get to, over 600 of them don’t react at all or even open the post.

Of the 600 plus views that I do get, I have only managed to get 35 subscribers. So, who wants to spend 8 euros a month or 80 Euros a year or in another elite category 240 Euros a year (that’s 4 people, I call them In Deep Demons) to have me describe things the way that I do, sometimes with musical insights, sometimes with everyday observations and philosophies and sometimes with weirdo tangents that stretch the imagination. Well, we’ll see. But it seems I have no choice but to lose a lot of readers to generate a handful of more subscribers. So from January 1st, the blog will not be free, I’m sorry, I don’t want to lose you if you can’t afford it, but I’m searching for a way to make The Archive work into the future, and I’m doing it on my own now.

It seems that as musicians in the digital age that everything that you create is supposed to be free or cheap. Spotify kills us but it’s an amazing tool. I use it to find music that I will buy and generally new vinyl records cost between 25 - 60 Euros but I have The Archive so I can’t really not buy the new Smile record. Of course no one’s putting a gun to my head and in a world of war and pain, not buying that record manifesting as painful is pretty pathetic. But life goes on where peace reigns and I’m not a soldier or a politician, I’m a musician and I write, so I do what I can to make sense of the world with the skills I have…figuring out how to do a livestream on my own not being one of them.

So many people who support my music have no money to spare, and if a record is released, paying for it is a problem when it’s free on Spotify, on a subscription you already have for the history of musical giants. Then there’s the postage on top of the purchase and it doesn’t stop there, handling and the dreaded customs duty, who can afford all that?

Everyday domesticity takes all our time, we have to cook and eat and clean and wash. We have to sleep and in my case, I live in a country that has allowed me the luxury of being able to find a space which might be affordable for The Archive, (it would be impossible in most cities) but I don’t speak the language, another massively time consuming task that I have to address. On my last doctor’s trip, the receptionist really gave me the whole immigrant spiel as I didn’t speak Portuguese - my Spanish is good enough to make myself understood and her English basic, but good enough to understand that I had a 3 PM appointment with Doctor Thiago, but no, she had to lay into a 66 year old man who is hoping the doctor doesn’t give him any bad news. I complained to him, he was horrified, it wasn’t nice.

There’s always donations coming in and I’m so grateful that people see the value of The Archive and want to support me as an artist too. There are records coming, the mystery project is soon to be announced. There are sessioneer projects - No Fear Of Silence, Valley Of Salt, more Space Summit, more Blueburst and other collaborations that will hopefully see the light of day. Although I’m no longer involved with Arktik Lake, I suppose it will be released at some point. The album I made with Jerome Froese, that was finished right down to the completed artwork, hasn’t see the light of day, neither has the album I made in Liverpool with The Wild Swans but you never know, they may make it one day.

What I need is The Archive filing to be sorted, perhaps an acoustic lounge, an invitation only venue in the front, the street is too dodgy and The Archive too valuable for free entry. Maybe some support from the local government for this place as a culture centre that includes teaching, whether it be music or languages or both. I need time to help people with sessions which will also have to increase its fee as I lose percentages to Paypal and to income tax and higher social security the more I make, I guess everyone has to deal with this. So that will be up to 85 Euros, if I can figure out how to change it on the page. Electricity is really expensive here, so winter is 5 layers and the radiators are off. It’s not Sweden so you can do this without literally dying. Royalties are patchy and when they come from Australia I get hit with a nasty withholding tax and US income seems to go through Australia.

Patreon is an option for those that want to support the music aspect of what I do but as I’m not an engineer I‘m not really able to supply too much of anything - a work in progress? I suppose you don’t want to hear the demo first, you want to hear the finished version first and then some years later the demo that bore it. What else do people give to generous patrons on Patreon? You might have seen Kate Nash has been showing her ass on Only Fans to raise enough money to tour, I don’t think that’s going to work for me.

Music today has been XTC - Black Sea. One wonders how XTC made ends meet with no touring. Colin Moulding wrote a couple of the bigger hits - Making Plans For Nigel and Generals And Majors, Andy Partridge wrote Senses Working Overtime, Dear God, Mayor Of Simpleton, and The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead, these are all in their millions on Spotify, but one wonders how much money that translated into. This from the net:

“In 2017, Frampton discussed this song while talking to lawmakers in Washington, D.C. about inequitable revenue payments from streaming music services like iTunes and Spotify. "For 55 million streams of 'Baby I Love Your Way', I got $1,700," said Frampton”.

Music Of The Daze