Blood Red Shoes on their 7th LP, Support Bands, Crisps and Two Decades As a Band

0:00Back in the early 2000s, I took a strip to Brighton and I went to this great band called Cat on Form. They were a bunch of skinny lads, not wearing tops, playing music, which you could definitely tell at least one of them was a big fan of Fugazi, if not all of them. And I absolutely adored the band. They were like making, I guess, that like hardcore music I was into at the time, like bands like Blood Brothers. and I ended up working with a band called This Girl who I really loved. People just sort of deconstructing what rock music was again and probably in the same ways which went into Nirvana at the time.

0:39I got chatting to Stephen, the main guy in the band, and a year or two later, I bumped into him again. He was the sound guy at the Freeba and Brighton, which was this cool little venue. And he mentioned his new project, Bloodbred Shoes, who, as soon as I listened to them, I absolutely adored them. They are a duo with Laura Mary and Laura has done some great work outside of the band. She was previously in a band called Lady Muck. She released a fantastic solo record a year or so ago. And the two of them, Stephen on drums singing, Laura Mary on guitar and what sounds like demonic pedals. I don't really know how to explain the sound of Laura Mary's guitar, like My Buddy Valentine and all those kind of rich deep ends and high ends and full throttle sounds.

1:28Their music probably comes from a similar world as on the one end of the spectrum, the kind of self-titled Blur album and at the other, this like joyous kind of like Bikini Kill, Radio 4, like all these different sort of very fun, noisy rock bands. and they had giddy pop songs which ended up on daytime radio one and getting the band basically a fan base all around the world. Like they still tour to thousands of people in countries you probably never heard of and as we get into this conversation with Stephen, the singing drummer of the band, they have even been to places like Georgia in recent years and tour all across America and playing in small towns that are not normally on the tour routes or a lot of British bands when they go to America.

2:19So this conversation is a bit different, I guess, because I don't think I've interviewed anyone on the podcast yet that I've sat up drinking with until dawn before. And you might very quickly get a sense of that from how I get on with Stephen. He is a music obsessive. When he's not on tour, he is in the studio producing records. he is co-running the jazz jazz life label with laura mary um they've put out some fantastic records steven's production credits i will make a playlist as i do for every episode and i will include a whole bunch of tracks by artists he's produced artists like arx and saoirse and all sorts of sorry sirce um i keep pronouncing the name wrong c-i-r-c-e um i need to uh get better at my mythology.

3:11Anyway, this conversation is really about what it's been like to be in a band since 2004. The highs, the lows, the realities of being a DIY band, and I guess a little bit about the economics of being in a band, similar to what we talked about with Gareth from Los Camposinos a few episodes ago. And yeah, thank you to Polygon Portal in Soho for letting us record this episode there it's an immersive sound space listening room um with a really incredible high-end sound system it's coming back in october so i recommend looking at what they've got in their listings because they were playing like jeff buckley's grace and king crimson records through this incredible sound system in i guess what you'd describe as maybe a small cinema space um but it was all about the sound um so yeah they let us record the podcast there because we were doing it before going to a gig and um yeah it was great to catch up with steven um i hope there's not too much insider chat in this episode and that if you're really trying to understand what it's like to be an artist right now some of the way in which we talk about the campaign and sort of their ability to tour the world and things hopefully will open your eyes and ears so this is the drowning sound podcast brought you in partnership with kobuz if you go to drowning sound.org forward slash playlist you can hear the companion playlist to this episode and all of our episodes for the past year-ish with songs this week featuring Bloodbred Shoes and as I mentioned projects produced by Stephen Ansell and a few things on the Jazz Life label.

4:51Hopefully you'll get a very good introduction to the band Stephen and his world and what he's all about and yeah it's brought to you in partnership with Cobuzz and you'll find a 30-day free trial to the high quality ethical streaming platform at dranninsound.org forward slash playlists. Anyway, let's get on with this natter I had with Stephen Ansell.

5:22Hi Stephen, welcome to Dranninsound podcast. Thanks for having me. I was trying to work out, I think I've known you for 25 years since I first came to see Cat on Form play the free part when you were doing sound. Yeah. And then Bloodbred Shoes just reached 20. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which means I would have put a single out about 19, 18 years ago. Yeah. And we sat on the floor in your house. Yeah. Thank you. My tiny, tiny, tiny part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But hey, that was better than what we used to. I think at the time it was that or like the back of a van or Yeah. Like a lot of student halls of residence on the like shared kitchen floor in like a puddle of Polish lager.

6:01Being woken up by the fridge every 15 minutes. Like, yeah, that was how, was the only way you could get going. Yeah. And I thought I'd start this interview, how I finished the last interview I recorded. I don't know which order of these podcasts going out, but interviewed Jeff Barrow from Porter's Head on Sunday. And we talked a lot about a lot of things. we got ranting about Nigel Farage at one point which I expected to be far more of the interview but Quez when I interviewed him the producer and ambient musician he said that I've been asking these questions what do people hope music would be like in 2050 because 25 years from now and he said I want to be able to taste music so I've been asking everyone the question and Jeff Barrow said that Dummy tastes like Benson and Hedges so could you ever think about your catalogue Yeah, he's probably right about that.

6:51I think I probably would have guessed a similar thing. So what would you say if you went through the Bloodbred Shoes albums, what would they taste like? First one would taste like Sambuca because somehow we were completely flat broke for the entirety of that first period where we wrote those songs when we were sleeping on people's floors like yours. But somehow, even though we didn't really eat, we'd always just scab together enough money to buy a bottle of Sambuca. the entire record was written like sleeping in the back of vans not eating and just drinking Sambuca because it was like sugary and sort of fun and it kept us going so I think for me the overriding flavour of that record Sambuca was just kind of gross the morning aftertaste but like yeah we would wake up we'd sleep on the rehearsal room floor of where we rehearsed wake up in the morning drink some Sambuca and start writing songs to write that first album so that's 100 % Sambuca flavour second album ah that's tricky actually what would the second one taste like Red Wine because that was the record where we could now afford to buy some red wine and have a meal with it you know like we grew up a bit then they won't all be drinks they won't all be drinks third one would be what would the third one be third one would be Pistachio because we were like we thought we were being really elegant and fancy and Pistachio it did get pretty fancy with that record there was a lot there was long songs without like obvious choruses and yeah we were trying to be I don't think we quite knew how to do it yet but we were trying to be fancy and that's what this whole Pistachio wave is like it's actually not that fancy but it's trying to be it thinks it's fancy like this Dubai chocolate exactly that it's like ain't nothing special but it thinks it is that's probably what our third album is it's not that special but it thinks it was we thought it was fourth one would be cigarettes for sure because it's just like a complete reaction against the one before so it's really dirty scrappy we made it in Berlin where everyone's still smoking his sinus or like it's like an ashtray cigarette cigarette butts there's too many albums to think of isn't there Jesus Christ I've done that we've been around too long so I don't know who's allowed that yeah but there's gaps between them there's solo records and you've produced a hell of a lot of records in between yeah there's a lot I mean there's a lot generally so your fifth is the last one now you've got six fifth is get tragic get tragic is to me that's the record where we kind of wanted to zero out and start again i don't know what the hell does that taste like that tastes like maybe that's when you start drinking tap water yeah yeah yeah if it's all going to be drinks what would that be be like sparkling water i want a health cleanse yeah that'd be green You know what?

9:41It'll be green juice because the whole of that record was green. Everything was green, baby. Green juice. And we made it in LA where everyone's on the health fucking thing. So, all right. That was your ground up kale album. Yeah, that. Cucumber and kale. Then sixth one. I think the taste of blood in your mouth because I think it was very doomy and very apocalyptic. You know that feeling when you can taste some blood and you get that feeling like something's not okay. So metallic, cold, a bit like unsettling. I think that's what the album is. And what's the new, what's the flavour of the new one?

10:17The new one, new record, Salt and Vinegar. That's like our favourite, that's like on our right, Salt and Vinegar Crisps is like a staple in our band that we both love. And our new record is, to me, feels very like sort of homely or something. It's not, it's like, what's the opposite of grandiose? Yeah. whatever the word for that is humble yeah but you can't call yourself humble because you sound like whatever that is is how the album should feel and does feel to us we wanted it to feel homemade we wanted it to almost be a bit like you can see like the stitches around the edges and it's made we produced it we engineered it mixed it there's like nobody else touched it it's the most hands-on made record is that the first time you've done that with one of your own records yeah when we've produced stuff in the past we've handed it over to someone else to mix it yeah or take it away so we get some more perspective and this one there's no perspective there's just us and all the scruff of us and we've i think deliberately tried not to shine it up too much so it feels quite homely and to me salt vinegar crisps are really homely is that partly because this records you alternate i mean obviously on all your records you alternate lead vocals but like it feels quite like i always find interesting actually a lot of your singles are when you do a lot more both of you singing on and then the tracks that are not the singles are often the ones where it's one of you or the other right i was i don't know maybe that's me over analyzing no i find interesting what people see from the outside yeah because our band is is almost pathologically sort of instinctual and we almost never will sit and talk complete nonsense for hours but the thing we don't really talk about much and never have is what we're making yeah we just do it and we have a sort of instinctive understanding of when it seems right or wrong for someone to sing a lot of the time i think people assume that if i sing a bit I wrote that bit and if Laura sings a bit she wrote that we by the second record we'd started throwing that like to the wind or whatever you say but I can imagine there's also some bits if the drums are pretty intense it's probably harder for you to sing yeah I'm just like I can't breathe that bit yeah it's like Laura's gotta sing that bit with a weird unspoken understanding like there might be a bit where I start to sketch out a melody to a song and then I'll get to a point and I'll be like just hand the mic to Laura because it just feels like a Laura thing yeah And there's bits where she'll push me to sing it.

12:54And it might be that Laura's written all the words and that melody, and then I sing it because I'm like the right instrument for the job. Do you think that's part of the reason why your music, although you are two people with two different genders, lyrically, there's not an obvious love songs about girls or boys type of vibe, like to oversimplify. Like they often sound like they're to a person, not a gendered person, if that makes sense. Like I can't think of many lines in the songs where it feels like it's. Again, that's something I've never thought about. But yeah, I think you're right. I was listening to this record and you use pronouns of I and we and they.

13:33But there's not him or her or like as much. Considering if you think about what some of the subjects, some of the songs are. It's interesting because. That's funny, right? Because again, that's totally instinctual. Yeah. We've never done anything like that. maybe it is a weird side effect of just having yeah two i always thought the single most interesting thing about our band is that you have two two singers which like so few bands have two singers two different singers and two different gendered singers that's like that's kind of what the band is to me is that you get a duality and you kind of get almost at any point of any song two perspectives on the same thing, pulling you in slightly different directions.

14:16Maybe some weird side effect of that is that we ended up not using pronouns because it would seem weird to us. But I mean, we've never spoken about that. No, it's like, I was thinking, listening back, like there's a DNA to your songs, but I don't, it doesn't feel calculated and it doesn't feel like, it's not like you're going out thinking, right, if we have songs like this, they're going to like appeal to different bunch of people or like there's never felt like that with your band because I know where you've come from sort of like culturally and politically and like it's not like oh we need to make a Riot Grrrl song because that would be very We just make loads of stuff and then but there is a selection process the bit where we think like what you're describing and we do think like that because you're making records to share with the world right so you do think about where they're going you're telling a story to a person right so whoever that imaginary person is you do think about them you think about how you put the album what order what it looks like what it's what it tastes like yeah like so you do factor in other people but that comes in for us at a really late stage we make loads of stuff we throw loads of it away we pick out the stuff we think is really cool and we're really excited jam it all together and then we start thinking okay what are we saying what are these things overall saying it's like a really late stage we and then we do think about the list and we think about how it'll impact people and we think about like what song might be good to like lead before anyone's heard the record and so we that stuff yeah i don't know if you get that calculation but there is a bit of it it comes in after it's like what serves the body of work isn't it it's like yeah it's like there's a reason why there's the prince vault there's loads there's loads of music which just didn't fit the records or didn't fit that moment in time and it's to me it's all right you're a storyteller it's a form of storytelling making music and that means there is someone hearing the story so at some point you have to think about that person receiving the story yeah right if you're not thinking about them one bit then you're a terrible storyteller yeah but also if you only want to make music for your own pleasure that's totally cool but you don't need to release a record then do you you don't need to release it into the world it's just for you yeah so we do sort of calculate stuff later on there's a reason we pick certain things or we dress things in a certain way or we you know present certain images around it it just happens really later late after we've done this very childish stage of oh that's fun do that yeah you know so the new record let's talk about it a little bit i've listened to it a few times um it does sound like a bloodbred shoes record yeah good but it always will and it's and it's really interesting like like you said it feels like home and i i wonder if because i've spent so much time listening to your band seeing your shows yeah you've got a pretty good overview of our history there's like a softness to bits of it yeah is it two weeks the song that's halfway through the record yeah that one really felt like felt like a little bit of a shift from like something you've done before and I really liked it and it was like that's the like more apocalyptic moment in the record I mean trust me it's like the apocalyptic bit like yeah but there isn't really much of that on this record and the previous album I feel like was all that it was like heavy on the impending doom atmosphere and even though the world's definitely in a brilliant place and nothing's terrible so is there ever a sense of the escapism to the records you make or do you think the kind of music you make because it like you what you have also become like the fun band to watch at festivals and you've sort of become like your music's used in video games and things and like like i think if and it often sounds quite you're kind of universal and like the songs can still make sense in 20 years time like because they're talking about universal experiences and things often and like i don't know i'm probably over analyzing in a way that's it's no i find that really interesting though but i do think one thing i've noticed we have a tendency towards and have had for quite a long time is like i think we both like not being too specific we've both just generally as people since we first met and we are extremely different people but there's a certain sort of core thing we share in a sort of like it's almost like a value system or something but i think we've always been almost instinctively distrustful of anything that feels like a trend or feels cool right now We're the kind of people that will pig-headedly do the opposite on purpose.

18:55I think one thing we've always had with the way we write lyrics is we're not really concerned with explaining too clearly what we're saying. I think we both value leaving some wiggle room, leaving interpretation, leaving the listener to have some room to fill things in. Is that partly because your middle ground is Twin Peaks? Yeah. Leaving the audiences to be the inspector and investigate it. that is part of it but i i think part of the reason therapy session by the way but i know it's the couches man yeah i'm gonna shut my eyes i don't know i think we just for us saying something that feels like we're saying the truth in our songs which matters to us often putting too clear a word to it feels like you've got further from the truth than if you paint a picture of it and i think what that can mean is that you can listen back to things 20 years later and it can still mean something because it's meaning the feeling that was underneath yeah not the specific headline if i start writing a song being like ai sucks yeah it's gonna feel so dated and if you know like yeah and to me that's so kind of petty i mean it's not that's a huge thing but you know what i mean as a lyric it feels so small and petty and it too superficial that i can't get motivated to sing about it neither can laura i mean it's like the streets lyric about ultra vista feels very dated yeah but it actually weirdly makes it feel like part of the moment i mean i have that's the thing is i have no problem with other stuff that that does that yeah but for us it doesn't feel right if we did something that feels too on the nose like that too kind of clear or too contemporary for some reason we have an aversion to that and it's a shared feeling that if any one of us either does it we again we don't talk when we do but one of us might do a lyric and I'll just sit around and see Laura's face and I'm like that's a nice and I do the same she'll do a thing and I'll be like and she knows immediately she'll just like divert I wonder if there's like a form of jazz that's just like just from the corners of your lips of like how you reacted to a lyric yeah there's a lot of unspoken communication in our band we've developed it into a real private language I think you probably you probably couldn't write a band manifesto no no i don't think we have one or if we do we don't even understand it yeah because it's not an intellectualized thing for us everything we do comes from a kind of um a slightly mysterious place even to us but when i listen to it i'm just like it sounds exactly like us always every time we think we've done something we're like wow this is really different i listen back to a week later and i'm like it just sounds like us every time i'm sort of equally happy and unhappy about that because every time i think we've like broken new ground yeah i'm always like we haven't really but then also i'm like well that there's something cool about that because it just means we're being truthful to whatever comes out of us and also not forcing it somewhere i'm guessing because you're such a live band yeah to what extent is the studio and the fact that you know that you've got to go either play it as a duo or with kind of a couple of extra musicians yeah like shift where the parameters are like well we can't we can't suddenly use a bassoon because we'd never be able to take a bassoon player on tour i mean we never ever think about that when we're making songs not anymore okay i think early on we did and we were like how the hell are we going to play that just spin it off but then we just got restless with that so now i think also because over the period we've been a band we've slowly kind of built a way to work how we're most comfortable which mostly involves us having all of our kind of our own infrastructure so we have our own label our own studio space so we can kind of make things how the hell we want you are motown on a small level well yeah we're like a really uh low rent motown so now in beta we have a studio space we can just mess around and play and do what we want and we don't really have to think about anything so we can spend more time in the studio trying stuff without the financial constraints yeah which means also then at that point you're like why am i going to worry about what's on stage we've made so many albums we'll figure out how to do it live if you think of things cool just do it do you think as a band like the earlier days the songs would be written for the play live then you had to record them do you think you've become more of a studio band or is that being some from pretty early on like the way around it's been i think i guess we have i mean the first two albums we wrote while kind of playing live in tandem with playing live so we were kind of workshopping them and kicking them into shape by playing them and then you don't really get that like I guess we could we could go and go on tour and try out loads of stuff and figure it out on stage but it gets a lot harder to do later on because everyone's expecting you to be at a certain standard because you've played a lot of shows which you know hopefully are great and then you come out with a song that's sort of a bit wonky it's going to feel like a real letdown you can't do we wrote this in rehearsal earlier yeah maybe it's cool and then no one's going to enjoy it as much because they don't know it as one they already know and then it's going to feel weird.

24:01So you kind of have to become more of a studio band, I think. And we have, we've embraced it. And like I work increasingly as a producer, so. Yeah, when you're not on tour for 200 days a year, you're in the studio for 200 days. Yeah, both of us just do music 24-7 in one way or another. But we found we can be more expressive in the studio and now we understand how to work them better. Yeah. So I think we have become more of a studio band. And then we kind of work out what to do with the songs on stage afterwards. And if they have to change to work on stage, we just changed them we're quite ruthless about that now I don't think either of us really care if the song has a different edge I think that's actually kind of cool to be honest the song should evolve as well shouldn't they I find it odd when you see someone play a song and it's just like not changed from the studio version and it's like and you're like maybe you played a song like for 20 years and it's not changed I actually got told by I'm not going to talk about who it is because I don't want to shame anyone I don't want to come off like an elitist pig about this stuff but it's just a different world to what we're into but friends of mine who are musicians spend up work it's like mds for bands setting up their live stuff in the backing track and all that and a very good friend of mine told me that the record label specifically said to this md that they want it to be that when people watch the band they can shazam the song so it's so similar to the studio version which it is because it's all the backing track anyway they can shazam the song in the moment and i'm like that's grossed the out yeah so hard well for a lot of acts they're playing to the track as well aren't they so they can't really deviate it's the studio version i mean literally is a clone so but i'm saying by the track for some of our listeners who might not know what that means like often you have the string section or like an extra synth and stuff and you sometimes hear when stuff goes wrong on stage yeah the sound out the pa goes one two three yeah yeah yeah two three kick that's what doing that world chorus yeah and that's what people have got in their in ears yeah so you're just basically playing to the track not to the crowd like karaoke sort of you're sort of a karaoke robot because you're playing to a backing track with all the music and it's telling you when to do each thing and there's no wiggle room and there's no life and i think maybe in that more showbiz world fine that's showbiz that's what you do i don't feel particularly judgy about that stuff but that fills me with horror for what i make yeah because like you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway for the drums yeah i wouldn't hear it and also all of the things that we value is kind of we like sloppiness yeah i like that some days we'll play this song really fast and other days we'll play away slower and it'll take on a different energy and we'll like i know something might go wrong we have to jam a section so it gets all of that fluidity and all of that um kind of life of the thing not being the same each time is an important part of what we do for me and in our band so that whole thing it's what makes you a great live band though it's like is that we're a wonky life like i remember when you played at redding and i don't know what laura was doing to her guitars that day but normally when a small band plays like early on the main stage at redding they don't sound as good as you guys did and it was like there was something with the sound of the guitar that day that i've never heard before or since wow and it just sounded huge it was just like I don't know whether there's a My Buddy Valentine button on one of the pedals or something I mean that is basically Laura's favourite band I think sometimes we benefit from less is more because there's a really strict sound limit on a stage if you're trying to jam fucking the Arcade Fires level of like seven or eight people into that sound limit there's a lot more of a fight to be had but if you've only got two musical instruments and two voices you have room for all of those things to be loud at once and it can feel like there's more going on.

27:44I think every so often that sort of noise limit, a band like us can weirdly benefit from it because there's not really, there's one guitar. There's no one fighting that guitar. There's no bass. There's no other guitars. There's no keyboard. There's just one guitar. You kind of have all this room to be loud.

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28:46your sound since you started out has been emulated by others i think it's interesting it's been i mean royal blood literally like they've got the clues in the name like i don't know if they're emulating us i know they used to come see us yeah and i think like i think it's interesting there's more duos around in rock music yeah and i don't know whether part of that's the economics but part of it's like economics lack of people skills yeah i mean it's ideal like only having to be able to get on with one person i mean it's so normal to me i forgot what it's like to be in a band band yeah i mean there's people on tour with you sometimes it's almost more than the two of you yeah that's again because we're the whole backing track thing for us feels like um a bit too showbiz and a bit too stiff and we'll use little bits of it if we absolutely can't do a song any other way yeah but what we prefer to do is take some mates from other bands yeah pay them some money so they can actually keeping the money in like the musician ecosystem and have them come on tour and play all the extra bits so again it's life yeah so then if i speed up everyone speeds up with me and you know it's a real thing so touching on the economics of touring we interview gareth from los camposinos who's been really open with their like tour results and stuff.

30:05I love Gareth. Absolute superhero. He's so... Really inspiring, really funny, really sassy. Love that. He was so cheeky in the interview as well. There was a couple of bits where you can just see he started smirking because he knew he was about to say something that wasn't bitchy, but was just like, he's a bit like most people wouldn't say this. We met really, really early and Harry, who's in the original line-up, played on our first record. Oh, cool. So they're like real old like... They played with you at the Drowning Soundstage just on my sunday years ago i don't know whether that would have been right like we literally met in like maybe 2006 or 7 so early and we obviously had really similar very different music yeah and styles but we had a similar kind of attitude but probably good overlapping friends probably overlapping fan bases yeah definitely like a uh there's like a fragment of it there's people who like all like weird wonky american underground music like that's uh um so we got talking about the economics of touring and obviously you've already touched upon like sleeping on floors when you're getting started and but one thing you told me once um how grand theft auto allowed you to tour bits of america that other bands couldn't like i don't know whether i misunderstood that it wasn't grand theft auto was it not was it not kerrang radio that you run on there something i don't know i'm sure i remember what i said at the time but i might have forgotten i think i think maybe um maybe it's a different video game then but i'm You talked about there was bits of America that some bands can't always tour and you've been able to play there.

31:32There's definitely... This might have been after several bottles of wine, so I might have misremembered. Yeah, also, like, never trust the word I say. We've definitely had a few things that it's been interesting to us to learn how, like, it's got you to an audience and allowed you to go somewhere like that. Being in the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack, to this day, there's people, especially in the States and Canada, when we play it, that's how they found us and they've stayed connected to us all this time and it was that we didn't get to them through music world we got to them through sort of comic book or movie world and I think we've had a bit of the same thing with some games where we've got to people and I think it's happening right now again with a game and I know nothing about video games like I just don't play any of them like all I do is music and in between I'll have a meal and sleep why would you want to go sit on another screen after you can say screen making music I don't even have the time to I'm just like I'm asleep I'm not doing music I'm probably asleep like but video game culture has got to a really amazing inspiring place the thing that we've put a song in recently we went into the office and they showed us what they were making and I was like this is like the future it's like a horror movie type thing was it?

32:40it's kind of like a playable movie like a choose your own adventure style thing but the level of detail they go into with the storytelling in not just the narrative and the sort of script and the acting because they use real actors but in the way they shift like the colors the sounds the feel they're doing all kinds of stuff of like the background noises that they augment and shift based on decisions you make to make you feel uncomfortable like david lynch would do only it's real time responding to your choices yeah i was like this is a really amazing stage of like artistic development i had no idea what's happening we've got so we've got four songs one of those so portis head actually same game uh and we're finding just in the last month again people are hearing our band like how have I never heard of you because we've got to them through video game world not music world which blows my mind because we've been around so god damn long well it's also because the music world is imploded and like how are you going to reach someone when there's not like you said I don't know if we got it on tape before we started but you're talking about like podcasts and clips are a way in which you're seeing other bands and seeing that they're around doing stuff and video games are like a whole other space like like there's so much music i've got into from film soundtracks yeah same but i can't remember the last time i heard something on a film or a tv show that i didn't already know and like that's probably says more about me that the kind of music i like is probably all but i can't remember discovering something through a film yeah that's the thing is that's the thing i'm curious about now it's like where is the discovery place yeah like i genuinely don't know i think for a while social media was quite good for that yeah i found it quite good for that i could find artists and be like this is cool and i've got a sense of a bit of a sense their identity and and some music and it was enough to get you interested to then dig and now i that's gone i just think social media is a complete junkyard and i don't discover anything through that and also i don't know what i do unless it's someone in the real world just telling me have you heard this band like i'm not discovering shit on streaming services like i'm not randomly going to shows to see stuff and if i am i'd only be seeing bands who can afford to tour at a small level which loads of people can't yeah so like i don't know where the discovery place is now i feel like maybe that's something bubbling that's waiting to happen or maybe it is in weird places like movies and video games and it's just a really different environment of and it's a really competitive market to get stuff into but like weirdly i was thinking we're off to a show tonight and yeah i discovered one of the artists because she was at the european music academy that i was teaching on but then you were producing her record yeah yeah and then i'm everywhere and then i discovered alexa stuff because you were posting because you'd just been working with her and i think having that trust of well if you've got around to producing it then it's probably pretty good like that is one way but people don't post that much about music they're not working on or like an exciting...

35:40I only post completely self-interestedly. I don't share anything. I basically use Instagram as a business card or something like, and I don't know, are there like music curation places that I don't know about where people are posting all kinds of different stuff that people actually listen to and care? There's quite, there's a few really good content creators on Instagram and TikTok who just like, things I've heard in April that I really liked or like I went to this festival and I just saw something that's completely outside my music taste and they like... And the people listening. Yeah. Some of them are getting like 200 ,000, 300 ,000 views on their videos.

36:19I do think curation is something that people are craving because we've had none for quite a long time. And I think a bit of someone going, you might like this. I've taken, you know, a wheel down. It's like making a record when you've got loads of stuff and you need to filter it into the... Yeah. I think people are craving a bit of that. Like generally in life, actually. But the world was curated for us and people talk about gatekeepers, which I've always found a really annoying term. I saw an interview with Matty Healy once and actually, I love that guy, by the way. He often, he says loads of dumb stuff to wind people up, which I just think is funny.

36:53But also he's really smart and he thinks a lot about music culture and he obviously cares a lot about music culture and about the art form. And I swear I saw a thing where he was just like, bring back gatekeepers. Because they're like, they're dicks, but man, where they they really helped us have like the best of the things yeah you know like well whoever picked the music for that game was a gatekeeper yeah but they've they filtered and selected and know that and the fact that the audience are coming to you because they've heard your music and they like yeah it's kind of working yes that's when it works and like we're drowning sound obviously i've been deemed a gatekeeper right and like so i guess i get a bit of a heckles up when people say great we've got rid of the gatekeepers like no you haven't you've now got an algorithm at Spotify that's doing stuff or you've got an algorithm at a social platform that's deciding what you see and what you don't see.

37:40Or you've got people with fuck tons of money that can make the algorithm show people stuff. Yeah, you can get geased. Yeah. The, yeah, the geese, I could did, I went on a marketing podcast a few weeks ago talking about the geese thing. Right, yeah, it's currently your zone, right? Because you've always been really up in the tech side from really early on. Yeah. But they, like the thing for me, like it's not so much oh they've just created loads of fake fan accounts and like promoted the band yeah it's the this is happening in politics like I mean yeah and this is happening to like Amber Heard like that was Bot Farms yeah and that's how like we that's how Brexit yeah that's Brexit right there they just someone just took a shred of that and was like maybe we can use it for some bands I don't really personally give a fuck because most people don't have time and it's like if you've got 15 minutes to flick through your feed you're seeing all these comments going no we need Brexit or whatever it was.

38:34Like the Chapel Roan stuff a few weeks ago where apparently some Jude Law's kid was crying. Yeah, I don't care. The footballer dad posted. But Chapel Roan was being like completely smeared everywhere as if like she's an awful person. Loads of stuff was coming out about her childhood. And like, and it was like, and it was like a full on like smear campaign. And all that had happened. Who's backing that? Well, this is the thing. It's people that don't like women. there's people that don't like queer women right yeah so it's like they want austria and also she's very outspoken like she's spoken of artists rights she's spoken about palestine she's but like she is not a quiet kind of right so it's a it's a general way just to put you back in your box yeah yeah and the thing about it was when you actually looked at how that was working it's exactly the same as how bands are hyped like there's there's so many mediocre artists that can be like bumped up through the algorithms and things yeah but when you actually see it happen organically it's so different like and you can sense it like i came across something the other day there's something called flooderfly and you can basically i think it's a terrible name obviously but you can essentially pay for like a topic or a song or something just to be pushed right and it's like Like there are services.

39:55Oh, and then they just... Yeah, they just flood things. Right, yeah. Because we're in this era, we are in an era of like quantity over quality. Yeah. That works really well in the current stage of the internet. Yeah. It's just like sheer numbers, like volume.

40:16This episode of the Drowning Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Cobus, the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard that has high quality audio that has human curation which as a human curator is something that I truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms you can really hear the difference I know lots of places talk about the audio qualities and as soon as I moved across it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music which is one of the platform slogans if you're worried about your playlists you can use sound is it's a really good tool that's part of the sign-up process when you join Cobuzz.

40:56It just transfers everything across. If you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts, head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists, where you can hear not only our playlists, but get a free trial. You can also find these details in the show notes to this episode. And now back to this episode of the Drowning Sound podcast brought to you in partnership with Cobuzz.

41:32before we run out of time i want to ask you this question it feels like quite a good time to ask it yeah so i ask all my guests how would you spend 500 million to improve music partly that number because that's how music yeah like broadly so yeah if you want to talk about touring if you want to talk about studios access to music like the the main reason i asked this question is because that's how much spotify invested in joe rogan and i was imagining how as the music ecosystem they could have involved but thanks that's really helped um where our human culture has got to the biggest spreader of climate disinformation i'd love to go on that podcast actually I've got a few things I could say to him but like if someone said because 500 million it's a lot of money but also you can't solve everything with it like you could launch a well yeah but I mean solving everything involves dismantling global capitalism doesn't it so I'm not sure you can I'm not sure using money to dismantle money is the way fight fire with fire yeah that's what they say right which makes no sense you fight fire with water yeah unless it's an electrical fire then you do it with a wet blanket right that's true yeah this is not fire safety advice there's two people that aren't going to be any good at this what would I do 500 million I mean the closest thing right I can't talk about things that I don't know about and don't understand things that I do know about a lot I've seen become more difficult I think having a negative impact is increasingly hard to tour and my band's experiencing this right now in the we the first three bands that we bands we just were like love this band let's get them on our tour for our album tour the first three bands we've asked have all said no in a row because they can't afford it and it's exactly the type of tour that when my band started was how we learned how to be a band how we started growing an audience like it's that space where you just get good at the thing you can't become a great band unless you just get out there and start playing over and over and you can't learn how to engage with an audience unless you keep doing it and you can't grow an audience as we talked about online i don't think very well in a lot of alternative music space you need human connection and if and you also can't build that audience to come see you play your own headline shows without people seeing you as a support band and i don't know and i this does make me sound like really traditionalist and i think in a lot of ways i am um i don't know how you build that thing that's the simplest oldest most human place for music before it was recorded it was before it was people performing live coming together experiencing togetherness with music right that's like as old as any like human cultures and that thing there is a giant financial barrier from that happening as much so i if i had 500 million to something i don't know how i'd make it work i'd hire some people that understand it better than me but i think supporting people to be able to get out and do the thing yeah almost like an apprenticeship scheme because you can't the only way my band went we were terrible i've seen footage of my band early on i'm like it's laughable we were absolutely awful well i enjoyed it but we had enough of a spark that people could get something and we got invited on stuff and we played maybe two three hundred shows before we were any good at anything it helped us refine songwriting learn how to like be a unit as as people on and off stage how to engage people like how to be a touring band how to cope with long tours or everything and also like how to get to know people in different towns and cities yeah we traveled everywhere and just played and played and playing all of that without that i wouldn't be here i wouldn't have learned a lot of things and none of the things you learn from that you can learn on your off youtube or in a classroom or because some old fucker like me just tells you maybe try this it like you have to just go and do it and now the only people that can do that is people who've already got a ton of money in the bank that's not right so i would take it and fix the problem that i can see the clearest from my business from where i'm standing which is that you need to enable bands or solo artists or whatever to just go out and do your thing and learn it and suck until they don't suck anymore did when you went out and did your first like i remember you guys talked with metric one time did you have a label give you tour support things or anything we were sleeping on your floor anyone's floor and uh quite honestly shoplifting to eat uh and i think we had a credit yeah we had a credit card and we bought an absolute junkyard of a van like it just about worked on the credit card and then we would sleep in if we have to yeah and we just cut every corner we could to afford to do it but the joke of that is that we were paid 50 or 100 quid a night yeah and that was 2007 and the standard support fees they get offered to bands now are 50 or 100 quid a night it was the same in 98 or 99 as well yeah so it's been for some reason held there for 20 25 years the price of a price for pint going from like three quid to nine quid yeah and like there was a point where you could just but if you had a hundred quid you could just about get yourself to and from a show yeah like and also you could just about get like premiere in like yeah like for like the 48 pound in a book when we first got to have travel lodges we were like we thought we'd made it yeah we were so happy we was like it's a bed I remember Whiskers from Forward Russia once telling me he never booked a tour more than like three months in advance because he couldn't get the cheap rate at Premier Inn otherwise yeah I mean a lot of us from that era there was a point where they were like 25 quid or something yeah they were really cheap weren't they and now yeah you can't do any of that no but I mean yeah the idea that I produce artists I produce an artist called Lonnie Gunn incredible she got personally chosen to open for the Kim Gordon tour which is her dream tour yeah like that's one of her heroes across the whole of europe flatly just absolutely with any way they looked at it could not possibly afford to do that tour like 30 000 pounds or something yeah it was crazy and she did one show in london because that's all she could afford to do that's heartbreaking and it's entirely a financial problem right now so like i don't know who did it but and i even just been able to like do the merch like get the prs money afterwards it's like all those things they're not going to cover the shortfall yeah it's like um it's sort of a startup like seed money for business right because if a serious musician even if you got this money from our 500 million pool and it was even like a loan or something it's the startup money to get you going because then once it starts working you are selling merch you're selling records you're selling tickets and all of the things around this are keeping music going right and also like i found any festival where you got a pinch to zoom the lineup like you know when something comes up those bands are not being paid that's a really great way to think about it like you've got to do that to them they ain't getting paid no that's a great rule of thumb and like a literary with my thumb um so i think that there's something in all of this ecosystem and infrastructure that's like it's interesting quite a few people when i've asked the question they said probably do what they do in ireland and just put the money into like a universal basic wage for artists oh they do like ubi yeah um and i think i mean i think i'm pretty sure that that should just be all humans actually yeah but like the support band fee is a really big one and like it's something like i've often thought well since tour support is not there why is the live industry not investing in live music like the record industry used to invest because it's extracting we're at a point of like we're a stage of you know not to get too um like a lapsed marxist about it but like we're at a stage of capitalism where extraction is at maximum yeah to the point where it's um now yeah kind of suicidal pathological level of extraction because you're going to take everything out there's nothing there and i think there's that's kind of spiraling and the live industry all the ticketing side all of that stuff is just pulling so much out no one's realizing that that means there will be nothing to pull out after a while because everything will collapse because there will be no nurtured talent and not everyone is going to keep coming back constantly to see those like Harry Styles like that often and he can't make a record that often and then no one will have any money.

50:09And I don't think they've realised that's down the road for them yet. And it was the same with festivals. The amount of reformations at one point that were covering up the fact that weren't really headliners. Yeah, because they're not being generated. And there's so many talented people. yeah like i work a lot with gen z artists and like growing up with access to all music and and actually really kind of understanding it and jamming it together in ways that that like my generation hadn't figured out some extremely inspiring extremely talented people who have way more barriers than i've ever had to getting out there into the world and showing people the cool things they've made and telling the stories about the things they're experiencing like there's no lack of that yeah there's lack of the pathway to get them to the point where they can headline a festival in 10 years or you know yeah because that early stage like i don't know if you ever came into our office the amount of posts we used to get of cdrs when the cd when people got cd burners like that became a thing i was probably one of them sending you a band and like then you moved up to like the notch when like soundcloud was where people were sending the music out and now those tracks are just being released onto streaming platforms and put out into the world and artists are getting maybe a thousand two thousand people listening but they're dotted all over the world and they're not all going to turn up at the same show you can't tell if you're just that's that one song that they liked and that's that's all you mean to them or they play 60 seconds of it yeah you just don't know i don't know if it's a place to build connection on streaming services and i think you're like your experience of touring different countries i'd be curious what stuff we're not doing maybe in the uk that you've seen or like special venues you've been to where they run so differently and just feel different when you turn up to them i mean there's definitely it's not a universe in other countries but a lot of the european countries like so belgium netherlands france more so than others you do get a a lot of their venues feel like they're run by an arts association that's a not-for-profit or certainly like they reinvest a lot of profit yeah the whole there's a level of kind of built-in respect that you don't get in a lot of other places where they're like whoever you are you're going to get a proper meal yeah which like when we were a support band playing everywhere you didn't get that just basic things like that you used to get a really nice time yeah you would get like a proper a dinner see that mentality which i think starts from um a perspective about the arts right which is just that you're coming in to play music the least you should have is some basic stuff like a meal yeah you know and to be looked after backstage so you're you're like treated like a human i see that which that money is coming from somewhere yeah presumably some kind of government backing i don't know um but there's not beyond that there's not like a huge yeah difference i had the like places have places you can stay and things like that and i know the music venues trust has started building that into venues there are definitely venues in europe that have that a lot more when we started out we sort of grew out on a branch from the diy punk scene and that's a whole different thing because that's a self-supporting thing where there's always a place for you to stay and a lot of we played like a lot of squat venues where you can stay in the squat and things like that um and our music was wildly unsuited to that world so we kind of slid out of it but that's where we started that world kind of has it figured out i kind of feel like i would take the 500 million hire a load of punks that run the toy score binnies and just upscale it so that everyone else who comes from a wildly different musical genre can get that too because that actually works pretty great punks have figured things out way before most people for you know the last 50 years well we've not talked that much about stay lonely but i think we've touched on enough of it um we've run out of time steven that's okay was there any is there anything you wanted to say that you if you do planning and you want to get off your chest no no no i just think it's interesting to have conversations yeah and hopefully create some kind of meaningful stuff exactly in the cesspool of internet there's so many little solutions to things and like like i know the featured artist coalition for instance are putting money into touring and we actually had them on a previous episode and David Martin really talks about how that money is going to make a difference and that's coming from a pound on a Harry Styles ticket or a law ticket Right, which is something right in Westbrook's levy that's funding those shows so That's cool That's the kind of shit that we need Yeah Stephen from Bloodbred Shoes Thank you for joining us on the Drown and Sound podcast

54:47Really enjoyed catching up with Stephen and yes we went to a gig yes we had a few drinks and yes I really love the new record and I wouldn't have had him on otherwise because we could definitely turn this podcast into a podcast of bands I'm friends with and know of but I think Stephen as you can hear in that chat has a lot to say and think about the state of things and I'm actually thinking it'll be really interesting to interview Laura Mary and find out how similarly and completely differently she'll answer quite a lot of those questions because as Stephen said they're a very different pair of people which is what makes their band so special so this was Drowning Sound podcast brought to you in partnership with CoBuzz if you go to drowningsound.org forward slash playlists you'll find the companion playlist for this episode and all of our recent episodes and this week's full of tracks by Bloodbred Shoes, tracks released on the Jazz Life label, and a selection of tunes produced by Stephen Ansell, who was this week's guest.

55:54Thank you to Stephen for joining me on this episode. Thank you to Polygon Portal and Soho for allowing us to record there. And thank you to the team at Tell Studio for producing this episode of the Drowning Sound podcast. I've been your host, Sean Adams. You have been you. I will see you next time. Bye.

56:15Thank you.