The Postman's Hut

 There's something infinitely poetic about a small corrugated iron shed positioned seemingly at random in the corner of a field or for that matter a pillbox listing gently one a sea shore. Despite the privations that living in one of these structures would entail some part of me quite fancies the idea. Well it turns out that in the case of the corrugated  shed for a couple of hours a day that's just what postmen in rural areas did in the aptly named postman's hut. 

The postman of yesteryear hard a hard life they would set out either on foot or if lucky on a bicycle with often both a very large weight in their sacks and a wide area to cover to deliver the mail. The rural postman's role involved not simply delivering but also collecting and as such there would often be a lengthy gap between the delivery of the last item of post and the time of the last collection. What to do to keep warm and dry during this time - enter the postman's hut or shelter.

Lets quote from Hansard and the debate on Friday 24 February 1899 of the of Rural Postmen's Shelters. "What has been offered is to put up a hut for any walking rural postman who may need it at the end of his outward walk, provided that he is required to wait for not less than two hours, and that he undertakes to use the shelter provided. This is contemplated as the normal arrangement, but in cases where the outward walk ends at or near a post-office, it is sometimes found that the postmaster is able to provide the postman with shelter on his premises, and for doing so the postmaster is to be granted an allowance not exceeding 30s. a year. Stoves are provided in the huts, but the postmen are expected to find their own fuel. Some of the men are able to earn money by doing other work"

The postman's hut it would seem survived well into the 20th century and was a common sight in the countryside. One or two example still survive today. Here is a Postman's hut near Asterton photographed by Jeremy Bolwell. 

Another fine example complete with GPO sign near Birtley, Herefordshire by Michael Dibb.

And lastly one in Cwmystwyth (via Google maps)

Just what is a music release?

So a welcome start to the New Year in the form of an upbeat review of my Passionate Particles CD in the Sound Projector. The CD was released almost exactly a year ago and a 12-month gap between release and review might seem quite lengthy but it helps conjure the question for today’s post of what exactly is a music release in 2023? 

The word ‘release’ implies something pent up that is then let loose like a horse from out the stables. Time was in the heady days of pop music pomp that that was indeed a reflection of how the industry worked – there would be a build up to a record’s release followed by a blitz of media interviews, live appearances, poster campaigns, radio plays, pluggers working their patch, adverts and reviews all within a week of the disc coming out. 

 

This was for the lucky few of course at around this time in early 1972 (Jan 7^th) the single Changes by David Bowie was released in support of the LP Hunky Dory that has been released in mid December 1971. RCA were apparently wary of spending too much money and energy on promoting the album aware that an image change for Mr B was in the works nonetheless a December and January release were the sure way to bury a record.

 

Arguably today for the big hitters little has changed a new release by the carrot topped one will be marketed in a very similar way albeit using social media in all its permutations. With so much to divert our attention a record company will have to work just that bit harder as the attention window has contracted. The intention now though is not so much to shift discs, which are little more for major artists than a nice sideline but peak streaming which is the only sort that makes money. 

 

But outside of the chosen few how has the model changed? For artists not in the top 5% physical sales are important and each week as the weekend looms the myriad of online stores will trumpet the release of a batch of new records with fancy die cut sleeves, coloured vinyl anything and everything to attract one’s gaze. The weekly music press so influential up until the early 1990s has evaporated and outside of the Wire music magazine the monthly magazines are retro focussed so who will write about a new release? Websites such as the Quietus have to some extent stepped into the void left by the demise of the music press. The Quietus claim to be independent but how and why certain releases get written about and others don’t is opaque they don’t even publish an address you can physically send a copy of your shiny new LP to. 

 

The Quietus does however produce original copy in contrast many music websites run on a shoestring are little more than fronts for online stores and don’t review releases so much as regurgitate sometimes verbatim the press release. Everything is of course brilliant and a must have purchase. 

If the written word doesn’t have the impact it once did what other ways can one get a release to have any traction. There are a myriad number of ‘radio’ stations, podcasts, Twitter feeds, YouTube channels, Instagram, Bandcamp pages and so on all of these will need to be worked to stand any chance of selling 5000 physical copies of anything. This number is coincidentally the initial disappointing sales of Hunky Dory before Ziggy. In most cases nowadays a couple of hundred copies will be shifted with warehouses groaning with unsold stock. 

 

But does any of this matter? There are in truth too many releases chasing the small number of people who still buy music either digitally or physically as opposed to streaming it. Right about now there will be an article somewhere championing the increase in vinyl sales and yes every year the sales do increase but from a very small base. Unless the internet collapses neither vinyl or CD sales are ever going to return to what they once were. There is also a very restricted capacity on new vinyl production and a large percentage of that is given over to repressing old releases. If you want to put out your latest effort on pressed plastic expect to wait almost a year.

 

So we return to the original question what exactly in 2023 is a release?  From the afore mentioned one can see that the industry maintain a digital facsimile of what was once mainstream practice but does that have much relevance to anybody else making music especially in the more left field fringes. 

 

From my own (anecdotal) experience with recent release ‘audience’ is quite a fickle thing. Releases on labels which have worked all the social media bases such as my On One of These Bends LP put out by Séance Centre have sold 300 copies fairly quickly whereas releases on other labels have struggled to get much beyond the 100 mark. Snatch Tapes has in the last three years put out cassettes (once more) but these despite good reviews have achieved (?) little more than sales of 30 copies. A digital only release will be lucky to gat to that number in terms of sales though in both cases streaming of tracks usually via Bandcamp is much higher and in many ways constitutes the audience.  

 

In this context the physical release then is more of a pretext to get/let people hear the music than to sell anything. Two or three plays of a track on WFMU will reach a much larger audience than the physical copy will. One guy who regularly does buy Snatch Tapes releases goes on to then post a track on his YouTube channel this has no noticeable impact on sales but does mean another couple of hundred plays. So a release that has negligible sales may over time reach and audience of a few thousand via various channels and in that context a review a year after release makes as much sense as one a week after.

On Repeat

Looking at the Snatch Tapes Spotify Artists page the other day I noticed that a couple of songs had had in one 24 hour period quite a few plays – oh but hang on this wasn’t the seeds of a viral spread that would rival Kate Bush (only jesting) these were all attributed to one listener.  For a moment I wondered what madness might cause one person to want to listen to any track let alone one of mine over and over again before recalling that that was exactly what I used and millions of other people did and still do in their youth.     

Playing a song on repeat is in inherent feature of pop music. In days of yore it meant buying a 7-inch single and literally playing it till it began to wear out now one can just set the digital stream to loop. Whether analogue or digital the option for repeated playback of the same track is technologically determined. Before the record there were of course popular songs that musicians would repast on request. The family or wider social group might gather round the piano and go through favourites old and new. The number of times a song might be repeated was however limited by the musician’s willingness or physical ability to play a tune over and over. Technology changed all of that one could play a song 30 or even more times a day if one so choose and often as a teenager when a new release by say T.Rex was released one would do just that and no doubt contemporary youth might play Adel’s latest in just the same way.

 

But what happens during the process of repeated plays?  There are various stages – firstly there is getting acquainted – learning the ins and outs of the song its melody verse chorus and lyrics. These underlying musical fundamentals are filtered through the delivery and production of the track, the grain of the voice, the particular twang of the guitar or the drum break before the final chorus, etc. 

 

Most pop music is itself quite repetitive sticking whatever the genre to a verse/chorus/middle eight formula and so one is repeating something that is already quite repetitive. Getting to know the song and the nuances and inflections of every groove might only take five to ten plays and then what? 

 

The pleasure derived from the playback – and one wouldn’t be listening in the first place if the record wasn’t in some way intoxicating becomes mildly additive. No sooner is the track over than one wants to repeat it again and again though the rush can quickly diminish into a dull fix that barely maintains the high. 

 

Eventually the hit is dulled and one moves on to the next song. The groundwork has been laid however and with a little space and time hearing that same song again indeed even the opening bars many years later can re-trigger many of the same emotions. It is a form of self-indoctrination and guarantees some artists an income stream from plays of a song decades after they have been recorded as we want to hear that son just one or two or three more times. Noddy Holder has mentioned in interviews that the Slade hit Merry Christmas Everybody he helped pen is in effect his pension scheme as every year it provides a surprisingly large income. 

Playing old hits live can also be highly lucrative though one can see in the faces of some artists the pain in having to play that tune just one more time as they become a physical embodiment of a looped playback. “Please let me play something different, heh look I have a new album out” all falls on deaf ears as the crowd wait for the songs they know and played on repeat way back when. And lets not think this is just limited to the likes of Paul McCartney I recall a Faust gig where we nodded appreciatively through new material until almost reluctantly the band broke into It's a Rainy Day...

Happy New Year and is that pop itch finally scratched?

So a happy new year and all that. Anyone paying attention will have noticed that in the last 9 months or so the Sanderson Snatch Tapes output has gone all 'long form', shifting away almost completely from the 3 minute pop song based format of Rumble of The Ruins and Closest Friends to a more musique concrète focus on noise sound (to use the Russolo term). 

 

Though this hasn't come completely out of the blue - the Ice Yacht releases have been all instrumental you could make a case that this is a return to something - maybe the more electronic days of early Storm Bugs but I'd prefer to see it as a forward rather than reverse gear. In truth the noise sound thing has been there all along but to get to the current location the pop itch had to be scratched. 

 

For the first ten years of my life music played very little part. There were no instruments at home aside from a mouth organ on which my father could play a tune but rarely did. My mother watched Top of The Pops and there was a mono dansette but it rarely got switched on, my parents had maybe 20 LPs - probably less. My convent primary school which I attended from 1963 to 1971 had many virtues but music education was not one of them. 

 

Come eleven  and a a move to a new school, mix in some stirring hormones and I rapidly became intoxicated by pop music. I can recall a party at my next door neighbour's hose in 1972 in which alongside ice cream and jelly a couple of T.Rex singles were played over and over. Soon I had a copy of Slider and the infatuation was in full flow. 

 

Of course one wanted to not only consume pop music but be consumed by it and make one's own. This remember was when Ziggy Bowie shaped the agenda and when pop music offered not only the three minute rush but the promise of a total reinvention of self. "Gotta make way for the homo superior" 

 

I was bought an acoustic guitar for my birthday. it was a spanish classical guitar with impossibly high action and a wide fretboard which I could barely get my hands around.  There was also a guitar book that promised you the pleasure of after a couple of weeks being able to play Greensleeves. I did learn the basic chords but the acoustic guitar didn't really inspire or rather I was more captivated by the idea of pop than learning how to play scales. 

 

There was also something else going on and that was a nascent interest in sound and electronic music. There wasn't much to go on. Stockhausen may have recorded Kontakte in 1960 but you'd be hard pressed to find a copy in the Medway Towns or anything else similar. What one did have was Faust, Neu, Kraftwek and of course Eno all radical in their own way though perhaps more musically conventional than one thought at the time. 

 

Alongside lamentable strumming on the acoustic guitar I also began "plugging inputs into outputs" experimenting with old reel to reel tape machines bough at the market and making the first steps towards something. Without any guide aside from what sounded interesting to my ears I began recording some nascent noise sound tracks. These were decidedly not pop songs even if that was the wider frame of reference or the field of activity. I had already recorded quite a few 'noise' pieces before hearing Throbbing Gristle but it is fair to say that TG made a sense of it all, somehow melding electronics and song.  

 

And thus we have the ingredients for Storm Bugs 1978-81 a sometimes curious combination of sound exploration colliding with or tainted by a pop sensibility. There was an early peak with the Second Storm Bugs single a kind of industrial rockabilly powered by a drum loop, but a ridiculous sleeve, non existent marketing and an absence of live gigs meant it all but disappeared without trace. 

 

Steven Ball (my fellow Storm Bug) and I took things a step further in the early 1980s when a session to record a local (to the Medway Towns) guitarist to play along to a VCS3 track we had made at West Square ended with almost a year spent making jangly pop music as Swoon Baboon. And so it would continue throughout the first half of the 1980s - on the one hand I would make occasional forays into noise with David Jackman and the boys from Alien Brains and The New Blockaders but then would spend the best part of 1985 working on pop songs in a flat in Islington with one of Nigel Jacklin's old school chums.

 

Ironically the best music from this period wasn't the pop music (which was with the exception of one or two tracks was mostly just competent) but the little bits of film music I did for arts school friends.  By 86 I had tired or even exhausted myself trying to make pop music and/or become a pop persona. Experimental film and then installation projects beckoned and I made no attempt at pop music for another ten years. 

 

But still the itch needed scratching and when I got a Mac in 1997 and began again to make music for its own sake though the majority of the output was short electronic pieces I was to an extent still beguiled by the three minute song, a soaring melody and a rousing beat. 

 

So in the last ten years the odd song began to creep in both with the rebooted Storm Bugs project and my solo output.  By 2000 with Rumble of The Ruins and the 2001 Even my Closes Friends the releases were predominantly song based. It is too simplistic to say that this was the music I had been striving to make in 1986 for there had been a lot of listening to all manner of songs in between. I had always know that pop music is inherently simple even simplistic but that is part of the beauty and appeal. It just took a long time to make something I was happy with.

 

Neither Rumble of The Ruins or Even my Closes Friends was any kind of commercial success and maybe just as well as I would have had to tour my sorry self around venues playing them and the whole live thing always seemed a lot of work - not the playing to an audience per se that can be quite enervating, but all the arranging/travelling/staying in hotels stuff. So the afore mentioned releases are not really pop as really pop music should be on some level popular but musically they finally scratched the pop itch to my own satisfaction - it only took 40 years. 

 

Since then it has been a process of clearing my head and making the space for some new noise sound music.