I have recently been told by a
third party that a certain pocket of the Nottingham music scene is refusing to
work with me because of my opinions and comments. This shouldn’t be a problem
to the good musicians because I only criticise the crap ones and blacklist the
ones that act like twats. A two year old blog has been posted on Facebook by
someone with a grudge and although the comments underneath it run along the
lines of suggesting that I am not a real writer, and that I’m just a small time
hack with nothing to say, it increased traffic to my blog for a brief moment of
the poster acting the victim. Nobody has said to my face that they have a
problem with me, which speaks volumes about some of the people round here to be
honest, and I haven’t noticed anyone refusing to work with me. These people who
refuse to work with me are probably among the people I wouldn’t fucking ask on
to my show in the first place. PR companies from around the country send me
music all the time for The Sunday Alternative,
and Nottingham musicians know that I am a passionate supporter of the scene
with radio shows dedicated to Nottingham music in the UK and in America, so
wherever the problem is it doesn’t seem to have had any effect on me.
Adam Clarkson was my musical
guest on yesterday’s edition of The Sunday Alternative,
and we had an off air conversation about this. His band, Captain Dangerous have
always been popular but have never exactly been media darlings in Nottingham.
At one point in the early days of the band, there was a website set up
dedicated to hatred of the band, called something along the lines of ‘Bunch Of
Cunts’, Adam wrote about it on the old Captain Dangerous blog. He brought up
the subject of my feud with a bottom of the scale music venue in Nottingham
that started with some less than flattering comments I once made in a review
for The Nottingham Post, and said that as a
journalist I should be entitled to my opinion.
During the course of this
conversation we both name checked people who we weren’t particularly keen on,
and the fact that the local press are too scared to say anything even vaguely
negative, to which I replied that even though Captain Dangerous are far and
away my favourite local band I would say with honesty if they came out with a
shit song. He also brought up the fact that I was among the very few
broadcasters and journalists that actually makes the effort to go to gigs. His
live session comprised three brand new Captain Dangerous songs; ‘Hang Your Head
In Shame Darlin’’, which has been heard on stage, and two others, ‘Down And Out
In Kenilworth In Nottingham’ and ‘Richard the 4th’ that had never
been heard anywhere before. I was flattered that he’d chosen my show to premier
these songs on, and during our on-air interview he said that I was the only
person to show continued support for the band. After a couple of weeks of
negativity flying in my direction, it was reassuring to hear.
The songs were great by the way;
if you missed them you’ll have to wait until the band start including them in
their set, something I personally can’t wait for.
I asked how they deal with
taking old songs out of the set to make way for new ones, which must be a
difficult task given their popularity. There are obvious ones such as ‘Everything
Beautiful Reminds Me Of You’ that everyone knows, but there are songs that he
personally doesn’t enjoy performing. I know that there are ‘ditched’ Captain
Dangerous songs out there, and when I got home I found several in a dusty
corner of the Internet and gave them a listen. As they are available as free
downloads I now have them safe in my Nottingham music archive, I’ll buy Adam a
beer in lieu of payment. A lot of their songs have been around for a long time,
I filmed them doing ‘Everything Beautiful Reminds Me Of You’ and ‘I Am The Wind’
in 2010, and their album The Empire Never Ended was something of a ‘greatest
hits’ collection of the band so far. However there are other songs available
and I would love to see a live show where they performed the likes of ‘Mapperly’
and ‘Great Having You Around’, even if for the very last time. In fact of all
the bands I know, Captain Dangerous are the ones I would most like to make the
subject of a film documentary. Combining the live ‘greatest hits’ show with
documentary footage would provide the world (or at least Nottingham) with a
time capsule of one of the best bands this city ever produced.
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