Life in the old dog yet

When the past few weeks have brought apocalyptic flooding and music festival wash-outs, you know you must be in the middle of a British summertime! Talking of the festivals, this is the first year for a while that I’ve not gone along to Reading, but looking at the line-up, I had a definite sense of deja-vu – Rage Against the Machine, Metallica, The Killers? Maybe it’s a bit of jealousy at not going, but despite there being some great bands on the bill, I’m pretty sure they’ve all headlined there before. My original thought was that this might be a sign that there’s not much happening in music at the moment (or, at least not much happening that excites me anyway), but that would be unfair. We still have the usual shite clogging up the charts, but I genuinely feel that the last year has been good for music, particularly for unsigned bands like ourselves.

Obviously all bands would secretly love to do it the old fashioned way – get a nice deal, join a roster full of your childhood heroes, go on tour, etc, etc – but as time passes I find myself caring less and less about ‘getting signed’. Two of our favourite bands, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have released albums independently, and for free, in the last year, and now everyone else seems to be doing it too. Nine Inch Nails look as though they’re going to continue without label support, as well. All we care about is making music that we’re happy with, and being able to distribute it for everyone else to hear too.

The state of the industry at present means that even if we did get offered a deal, we’d have to continue to juggle the band with day jobs anyway – this seems to be the norm for the bands we know who’ve been signed up. Making it as far as releasing a second album is then a whole new ball game with no guarantees! So I’m feeling pretty positive that any band or musician can do what they have set out to do – make music and get it heard – on their own. If it’s fame that you’re in it for, then I guess there’s always X-factor (whose return to the screens is another sign that summer is drawing to a close).

All of this brings me round to the fact that we have recently signed the ‘Evacuate’ album up to with a US-based distribution company, enabling us to bring it to a wider audience, who didn’t get to hear it when we released it in the summer of 2005 – there’s life in the old dog yet.