SONGS AND SCRIPTS AND DUNKING BISCUITS

Every day tales of a winging-it creative

Category: song-writing

  • Yesterday at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in Hope Street, Liverpool, between the city’s two iconic Anglican and Catholic cathedrals, I attended the Music Career Industry Festival. The festival, being organised and run by Sentric Music, a music publisher founded and based in Liverpool but also with an office in London, is mainly for people planning…

  • This coming Friday I will be moving out of the house that I have lived in since I was eight years old. The biggest part of my lifetime has been spent within these walls and I am the only one of my family still living here. It feels like the right time; I of course…

  • Any creative process can be a question of trial and error, and that includes blogs. Not many of us write a piece in one flow, make a little tweak before considering it good enough to go and excitedly click ‘publish’. Well some may, but they have clearly made a pact with the devil. Or they…

  • All of us, myself included, to some level like to cultivate a musical identity that is eclectic, knowledgeable and a little edgy. Oh we’re in sync with what is happening right now. Too right we are. We may not like it, we may not get it, but we like people to know we are aware…

  • I am currently sorting through a houseful of ‘stuff’ ahead of a potential move in the next couple of months. De-cluttering is the modern phrase for it. Throwing out crap is what some may prefer to call it. Fortunately I don’t have much crap, but certainly a lot of stuff that should have been thrown…

  • I read somewhere recently that said attention span on social media is now down to a shocking 47 seconds per article or post. Ten years ago is was around two and a half minutes. And apparently, the average time spent reading blogs is 16 seconds. Which suggests that most people have given up on this…

  • I have just finished reading the enlightening and entertaining autobiography ‘Lightening Seeds, Football and Cosmic Post-Punk’ by Ian Broadie, the songwriter, lead singer, producer and beating heart behind Liverpool based band The Lightening Seeds. The Lightening Seeds had several excellent and memorable hits, mainly in the 1990’s, such as ‘Life of Riley’ and ‘Pure’. Broadies…

  • Down in the overcrowded shallow water of songwriting, which is where I exist, no-one really takes any notice. On any given day, between 60,000 and 100,000 songs get uploaded onto Spotify alone. That’s a lot of songs, and your own, no matter how much you believe in it, can easily be swamped and forgotten almost…

  • Just before Pink was due to perform at the 2019 Brit Awards after winning the Outstanding Contribution To Music Award, she turned to the camera and said “One of the reasons why I am successful is because I surround myself with people that are better than me.” Given the depth of her own talent it…

  • Paul McGuiness was the legendary manager of rock band U2 from 1978 to 2013. He managed them from seeing them in an arts centre in Dublin when they were known as The Hype, to become the biggest rock band in the world. He negotiated record and publishing deals that would stagger the rest of the…