Is unsigned the new signed?

To Brick Lane, for the Recharged Radio Awards at 93 Feet East. Recharged Radio is an internet station that exclusively plays unsigned bands. We are up for a gong for Gig of the Year for our quarterly Cirque de Crème Anglaise event. When I get there I discover that one of the four finalists for Best Gig Photograph is actually a photo of The Furbelows, taken by Nick Morgan (the same one that I use for my Blogger ID, in fact). Sadly it has been pinned up on its side, for some reason, but I'm sure that didn't influence the judges.

There seems to have been a groundswell of sites, services and outlets for unsigned bands—plus the innumerable Battle of the Bands competitions, in several of which we seem to be embroiled at any one time. I'd be curious to know if the actual number of bands has increased, or whether it's just that, with the growth in illegal downloading and the punters' general unwillingness to part with money in exchange for music, the distinction between signed and unsigned is increasingly irrelevant. (And wily entrepreneurs realise they can make more money from bands' aspirations than they can by fulfilling those aspirations and selling records to the public.)

Certainly the norm now seems to be that bands just "release" their own records. I'm forever finding myself at "single" or "album" launches (such as the excellent Paul Hawkins and Thee Awkward Silences last Saturday at the Brixton Windmill). These are essentially pub gigs with a rickety table from which you can buy CDs the price of which is written in marker pen on a scrap of paper.

And why not? Some time very soon I hope to finish a batch of Furbelows recordings and then I plan to put together a CD of 15 or so numbers. I don't think I'll have them manufactured—probably just run them off myself. In this I am partly motivated by some cool CD blanks I've found which look just like black vinyl records, complete with faux grooves and a small "label" section in the middle that you can print on to. OK, little things please little minds.

Then we can have a launch party.

We didn't win anything at the Recharged Radio Awards, but it was nice to be nominated. They are doing a great thing and I find the station a lot of fun to listen to—because it's nice not to know what you are going to hear next. They keep adding new shows, so listen in some time: you may hear them playing something by The Furbelows...

Down and out with the Great Unsigned

To Hayes in Middlesex for the London heat of something called Live and Unsigned—yes, essentially another “battle of the bands”. The schtick this time is that they don’t listen to any demos: instead you turn up and audition live. I imagine that it’s modelled on these Simon Cowell-style talent searches.

My band, The Furbelows, gamely tackle the mission of getting there. The venue, The Beck Theatre (we are surrounded by yellowing black and white photos of luvvies in productions of The Cherry Orchard and Blithe Spirit) is miles from the nearest tube station and few buses seem very keen to get close. I receive a string of increasingly plaintive phone messages from Neil, our guitarist, as buses pugnaciously zoom past the bus stop and whisk him off in the other direction. Alex is only two hours late, which isn't bad considering he has no money and usually tries to walk to every gig from his lair in Brixton.

The downside of this competition’s format is that they can’t let you play for very long. We turn up, wait for two hours then are finally ushered into a disappointingly small room with disappointingly weedy amps, plug in and play for two minutes. In fact it may have been less that two minutes—I know that this was the maximum anyone was allowed, but we had already learned that plenty of people are gonged off before this. Anyway we play until the panel of 12-year-old judges wave and beg us to stop. After that we have to wait in the corridor until a runner comes out and tells us that we’d been given a thumbs-down but wishes us good luck with our music. Then it was back to London.

You might well wonder why we went there in the first place: after all, an event like this is going to be searching for an act who have a good chance of making it big, thus increasing the chance that their success will reflect well on the competition, please the sponsors (and they had lined up some impressive ones) and build a reputation as a contest that really can put bands on the map. From that perspective, they are clearly going to be after something pretty commercial—which, with the best will in the world, is not how you would describe The Furbelows. But I always feel that it’s worth having a go at most of these things, because You Just Never Know.

And I must say that I didn’t really find it dispiriting. It was quite well organised and a lot of musicians had turned up—especially when you consider that this so-called “London” event wasn’t really in London and the venue was so hard to summit. Yet they came, contestants of all shapes and styles. Nervous youngsters in carefully thought-out band uniforms; relaxed, shaven-headed older and more cynical musos; sunken-faced grey-haired rastas; cool young jazzers sitting on the floor blowing out mellifluous sax runs like streams of bubbles; spotty, gangly ones with directional haircuts earnestly practising choppy riffs on their shiny new bass guitars. I was pleasantly struck by just how varied the styles and appearances were. It was a bit like the canteen scene from Star Wars crossed with the bustling arrivals lounge in heaven in A Matter of Life and Death. There were hundreds of them, they’d all put blood, sweat and tears into polishing whatever it was they wanted to polish—and the vast majority would leave empty-handed. And they knew that, but they did it anyway. On the way in I met popstrels coming out who wished me good luck. As we waited a taxi arrived to take another hopeful away. This hinterland of spirited diversity is the iceberg below the water, supporting the commercial, packaged bit you see. I left feeling rather uplifted by it all—perhaps not least because I realised that however oddball (and clearly inappropriate) we might be, there are many, many others out there doing equally oddball things. A toast to them!