Archive for September, 2011

“I did not contemplate death. Not even for half a second” – We Were Promised Jetpacks’ guitarist on conquering cancer

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Earlier this week, We Were Promised Jetpacks guitarist Michael Palmer published a lengthy post* on the band’s website documenting his battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, which he was diagnosed with in January at the age of 23.

I have known the band for a good few years now (here is a review of the first time I saw them play in 2007) and Mike is one of the most amicable and down-to-earth musicians I’ve ever met, so it was with much relief that he announced he was on the mend.

Typically, he was kind enough to answer a few questions about his illness.

What were the symptoms that led to you being diagnosed?
“I had a swelling on my neck. I also had a lingering cough and what the docs called ‘night sweats’. The swelling on my neck was my lymph node swelling, and after all this I still don’t really understand what a lymph node is. It wasn’t until I got a blood test that the doctors worked out what was going on.”

What was your reaction when you found out you had cancer?
“My doctor phoned me and asked me to come in right away, so I knew it wasn’t great news. But he was really good at telling me. He essentially explained what the illness was before he told me it’s name. So I was completely relaxed and calm before the word ‘cancer’ was even mentioned.”

Were you given odds on the likelihood that you would make a full recovery?
“The doctor told me that in his 20 years of practising, he’d seen 15 or so cases and all of them made a full recovery. I understand that they can’t ever say ’100%’ just in case, but it was as close as he was allowed to say. When I and my family started telling people, loads of folk had stories of friends or family who’d had the same illness – and every story had a happy ending.”

Could your situation have been a lot worse if the diagnosis was made later?
“Yes and no. There are three stages of lymphoma and I had stage 2. But the impression I got was that the diagnosis of the stage of lymphoma only really relates to the kind of treatment you receive. So for someone of my age, even stage 3 wouldn’t have been a whole lot worse in terms of outlook. Having said that, completely ignoring it probably wouldn’t have been that great an idea.”

Did you ever contemplate death?
“I completely did not. Not even for half a second. When you hear that statistic about one in three people developing some form of cancer in their lifetime, I was actually thinking, well at least that gets that out of the way while I’m young enough to handle the treatment.”

There was a gig We Were Promised Jetpacks pulled out of back in January for the Dirty Hearts Club’s 5th Birthday Party at Snafu in Aberdeen, with Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit stepping in on short notice. Was that related to your illness?
“Yeah, it was. We also had to cancel a show in Dunfermline around then too. We didn’t know exactly when my treatment was going to start, so we couldn’t risk having to cancel at the very last second. We probably could’ve played them as my treatment didn’t actually start until February but, again, we didn’t know that at the time.”

Did you feel a wee bit left out when the rest of the Jetpacks started their Hairy Area side-project without you?
“Not really! It was OK as I was keeping myself busy without them doing remixes and things. But I got to do that in my house with a sick-bowl next to me while they had to lug gear around outside. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.”

How hard was it to put into words what you went through and make it public on the Jetpacks website?
“It was OK actually. It was quite tough to get the tone right. I didn’t want to cheapen the experience or the illness in any way, but I also wanted to get across the fact that it was just a thing that happened to me and didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I know I could’ve made less of a big deal out of it by not putting it on the website at all, but then I would just feel like I’m hiding it, and I don’t want to do that.”

Are you completely cured or is it something the doctors will have to keep an eye on?
“I have doctors’ appointments every three months for a year or two. It’s tough because nobody has any idea where lymphoma comes from, so it’s hard to say it’ll never come back. But at the same time, there’s no reason to think that it would, so I’m not waiting around for it!”

You can hear a stream of We Were Promised Jetpacks’ second album, In The Pit Of The Stomach (out October 3), below. Human Error is my favourite track.

We Were Promised Jetpacks – Moving Clocks Run Slow (demo)

October 1, Tolbooth, Stirling (Reloaded Fest) (sold out)
October 6, Liquid Room, Edinburgh (tickets)
December 16, ABC, Glasgow (tickets)

*The band seem to have removed Mike’s original post from their website – here is a copy of the text

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“You automatically want to guard what you have when you feel it’s in danger” – why Siobhan Wilson swapped her friends in France for Friends In America

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

I’ve been desperate to write a proper feature about Friends In America for most of this year, seeing as they are one of the best new Scottish bands around, but I’m holding off until they’ve finished recording their debut EP, which will provide all the evidence I need to convince you of their greatness.

In the meantime, I’d like to introduce you to their bass player, Siobhan Wilson, who, it turns out, has an intriguing story of her own.

The 23-year-old returned to her native Scotland six months ago after spending the last five years in Paris, the last four of which as a signed recording artist with My Major Company, a fan-funded label in which ‘producers’ are invited to invest in a handpicked selection of musicians in return for a share of their album sales. When a French singer called Grégoire sold more than a million copies of his debut album, fans recouped at least five times their original outlay.

Siobhan’s experience, however, was one of frustration and exploitation.

Siobhan grew up in Elgin and left for Edinburgh at the age of 15 to study at St Mary’s Music School. After turning 18, she went to live in Paris as an au pair.

In the hour I spend in her company, the Gallic influence is stereotypically comical. When I turn up at her flat in Glasgow city centre, she’s running back from the shop after buying a slab of pungent cheese, which she carefully slices onto little round biscuits.

When she asks me to type something on her laptop, I’m completely bamboozled by the French keyboard which leaves me trying to figure out where the hell the letters ‘A’ and ‘M’ have gone.

And, bien sûr, Siobhan is a smoker.

“French is a beautiful language, isn’t it?,” she asks almost rhetorically. “It’s the kind of language that you want to learn. I can speak French now but when I first went over there I didn’t really understand anything.”

The move to Paris also saw Siobhan move further away from her classical cellist background in favour of writing songs on the guitar and an unexpected education in jazz.

“The house I was staying in when I was looking after the kids had this massive music collection,” she says, her eyes aglow. “There was a lot of Ella Fitzgerald; I’d never listened to Thelonious Monk or any kind of jazz before, I didn’t really know it existed. As soon as I heard that it was like, ‘There are better things in the world!’.

“At first I just wrote little songs on the spot for the kids I was looking after. Julia was six years old so if she was sad about something, I’d write a sad song with a happy ending.”

It wasn’t long before grown-ups were paying attention to her talents too. When she began singing with a gypsy jazz band, one of their friends, Simon (now her boyfriend), recorded her singing in his flat and submitted it to CQFD (Ceux Qu’il Faut Découvrir, translated as “those to be discovered”) – a talent contest held by respected French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles - who then posted her music on their website. My Major Company liked what they heard and convinced Siobhan to sign to them at the age of 19.

“You upload your photo and demos and if people like you they put money on you, sort of like betting or an investment,” she explains. “And with that money you record your album. After a couple of months, 894 people had invested a total of €70,000.”

That was enough for My Major Company to fly Siobhan to America to record the album at a studio in Woodstock, New York, and pay for marketing and advertising, such as putting up posters in subway stations.

Her debut album, Songs, a hybrid of acoustic pop and elegant string arrangements, was released in June 2010, but wasn’t promoted outside of France and only sold 3,000 copies. What bothers Siobhan most, though, are the compromises that My Major Company wanted her to make.

“I regret signing with them,” she admits, lighting up a cigarette. “They started telling me to write songs with three chords and stuff like that. With record labels, essentially what they’re doing is exploiting the artist, not in a bad sense necessarily. But if you sign a contract it means you agree with that method of working. I went through a phase of thinking that anyone who could possibly work in a company where humans were being used as products must be an alien because I just couldn’t imagine how they could sleep at night. Now, with reflection and a clear head about it, I realise they’re just doing their job.

“It did affect me for a long time, though, just the feeling of being restrained constantly, but I don’t know if that came from them or from me. You automatically want to guard what you have when you feel it’s in danger if someone is making suggestions that you know are irresponsible – in the sense that they won’t help the development of new ideas or beautiful things, just producing the same thing that everyone’s heard millions of times. I became introverted and defensive about it, guarding what I knew was a good thing or a good way of being.”

Siobhan describes her time at Woodstock as “the best two months of my life”, but as a novice thrown in amongst the company of esteemed producers and experienced session musicians who had toured with the likes of Simon & Garfunkel and Peter Gabriel, she found it virtually impossible to control the direction her album was taking.

“I was completely intimidated because of the respect I had for them,” she says. “I was welcomed very warmly by them. They all got into the music when they were recording it and it was a really nice feeling. That’s the dream, more than selling 20,000 albums – having those guys say, ‘That’s a really wonderful song’ and actually mean it, actually care about getting nice counter-melodies in the guitar parts and trying to make it sound even better. I let everyone do their thing because I felt a bit lost. The centralised point of the album, the concept, my personal preferences and taste, it all got lost a bit.”

Did you realise that as it was happening?

“Yeah. But by that point it was just like… gone. There was a presence of commercial success being worked on that I was always completely against in my head. I was more like a silent rebel, trying to find little ways of keeping it real without causing a fuss. I’m a lot less shy now than I was then. If I did an album now, I’d direct the whole thing and I wouldn’t be self-conscious about it. Overall I’m proud of it but there are some bits in it that I hate. I could blacklist most of the tracks.”

Siobhan picks up the album case from her desk and scans a finger through the song titles on the back.

“My actual preference goes from the end to the beginning,” she says. “The ones at the start are the most commercial and worked on, whereas the ones at the end are the most true to what I actually like.”

Does the fact that few people know who you are in Scotland bother you?

[long pause] “Uh-huh. I think I’m a modest person generally and if I’m not, I really try to be. I definitely have a sense of self-confidence and self-assurance that I didn’t have a couple of years ago. Knowing that people [in France] knew some of my songs and came to my gigs helped me feel really confident and really good about what I was doing – not in the way that I loved everybody knowing who I am and loving my music because I totally love myself, just in a practical level to overcome shyness and stuff like that. And now in Scotland it’s really difficult actually. I wouldn’t say that to a lot of people unless they asked, but it is weird.”

Siobhan’s parents, her brother and sister, and her boyfriend all live in Paris, but the charms of Scotland – and Glasgow in particular – is keeping her in her home country for the time being.

“People are really nice here so I want to stay,” she says. “That’s why I totally love playing bass with Friends In America, their stuff is really good. But I don’t know if I’m going to be doing it for the next two months or two years because I’m not really sure where I’m going to be. If a Scottish label wanted to do something I’d probably say yes, but if a French label offered me something I might go back there. However, in terms of living, Scotland is awesome. There’s so much good music that goes unnoticed because it’s just a way of life.”

Siobhan Wilson – Mother’s Eyes

Siobhan Wilson – Getting Me Down

Friends In America play MILK at Flat 0/1, Glasgow on October 5

All photos © The Pop Cop except subway one

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Rocktoberfest 2011

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

There are only really a couple of recurring features on this blog – one is the monthly Music Alliance Pact posts; the other is the annual Rocktoberfest, now in its fourth year… IN MY MIND.

If you have no idea what I’m referring to, it goes a little something like this: October in Glasgow is primetime for the city’s gig calendar – the festival season is done and dusted, there’s a rush of bands touring new album releases and musicians need pocket money for their Christmas shopping.

I published posts in 2008, 2009 and 2010 in which I picked out one gig worth seeing for each day in October and wrote an open letter to Glasgow’s Lord Provost, Brian Winter, asking him to consider making Rocktoberfest an actual promoted, branded event that would lure music-loving visitors from afar – in much the same way that beer-loving tourists make a beeline for Munich when Oktoberfest comes around.

Rocktoberfest 2011 is brimming with highlights – we’ve got about a dozen Music Alliance Pact alumni, the multi-venue Oxjam Takeover extravaganza, one of America’s most refreshing rock bands (Manchester Orchestra), the creator of quite possibly the year’s best single (Kyla La Grange) and much, much more. So much more, in fact, that there are two other interesting events happening that I didn’t manage to put in these listings: the Scottish Independent Record Fair at Platform on October 1 and the MOBO Awards at SECC on October 5.

October 1: Zoey Van Goey + Kid Canaveral, Stereo (tickets)
October 2: Bombay Bicycle Club + Dry The River, Barrowland (tickets)
October 3: Manchester Orchestra + The Xcerts, ABC1 (tickets)
October 4: Cage The Elephant, The Garage (tickets)
October 5: Blue Sky Archives + Friends In America, Flat 0/1
October 6: The Miss’s + Little Eskimos + Baldego, Black Sparrow (free)
October 7: Beerjacket + Reverieme + Michael Cassidy, Oran Mor (tickets)
October 8: Martin John Henry + The Seventeenth Century, Stereo (tickets)
October 9: Band Of Gold, The Admiral (1am)
October 10: Blochestra, Bloc (free)
October 11: Seasick Steve, Academy (tickets)
October 12: The Moth And The Mirror + Open Swimmer + Rick Redbeard (The Phantom Band), Stereo
October 13: The Big Apple Award final, The Garage
October 14: Ed Sheeran, ABC1 (sold out)
October 15: Kyla La Grange + Boycotts, The Captain’s Rest (tickets)
October 16: Oxjam Big Day Out: LightGuides + Make This Relate + Cherri Fosphate + The Mode + Melisa Kelly And The Harmless Thieves + The Tenemants, Harleys, Ayr* (tickets)
October 17: Little Comets + YAAKS + Bwani Junction, Oran Mor (tickets)
October 18: The Dykeenies, Oran Mor (tickets)
October 19: The Joy Formidable, Oran Mor (tickets)
October 20: Kitty The Lion + Bear Bones + Chasing Owls + Bella Spinks, Stereo (tickets)
October 21: Foreign Office, SWG3 (tickets)
October 22: Oxjam Glasgow Takeover: More than 30 acts including Acrylic Iqon + Aerials Up + Café Disco + Fiction Faction + Gillian Christie + How To Swim + Shambles Miller + Skippy Dyes + Suspire + The Black Hand Gang + Tragic O’Hara + Verse Metrics + Vigo Thieves + Where We Lay Our Heads, G2/Bloc/Box/ The Griffin/Buff Club/Nice ‘n’ Sleazy/Flat 0/1
October 23: Elliot Smith tribute night featuring David McGinty (Endor) + Monoganon + The Big Nowhere + Male Pattern Band, Mono
October 24: Wilco, Royal Concert Hall (tickets)
October 25: James, Royal Concert Hall (tickets)
October 26: Meursault + Crayons + Sebastian Dangerfield, Bloc (free)
October 27: Michael Kiwanuka, Brel (tickets)
October 28: Sons And Daughters, ABC1 (tickets)
October 29: RSNO Mozart Requiem, Royal Concert Hall (tickets)
October 30: PAWS + Young Aviators + Cities & Skylines, Flat 0/1
October 31: Ben Howard, King Tut’s (sold out)