With the new Dodgy album 'Stand Upright In A Cool Place' recorded and in the can, now for the difficult bit - all the planning and cunning promotion so people out there know it exists. Of course you'll be kept up to speed on how our marketing and attention seeking schemes evolve.
With that in mind it was up to London town yesterday to meet a potential 'radio plugger'. For anyone who doesn't know, a radio plugger is someone whose job it is to help get radio producers to listen to our music and nudge them into putting it on the radio. As we essentially make our music to be listened to their job is one of, if not, the most important in our book. The plugger's job is not as exciting as it used to be in the payola days of American radio in the 70's and 80's, where the plugger would slip drugs/money/very small prostitutes into the sleeve of the record they were plugging. I'm sure it still goes on somewhere but there's a fantastic book to read all about those days called The Hitmen by Fredric Dannen. Of course there's no way I would even suggest that the fine boys and girls from the UK music industry ever get involved in using narcotics....... pause for dramatic effect and perhaps make one more book recommendation for today - Kill Your Friends by our old friend John Niven. If you get offended easily then don't read it.
Anyway, for some reason I arrived early so I was partaking of a cup of Earl Grey sat outside a Swedish cafe on Gt Titchfield St (that sentence sounds too poncey for words) when who should jump out of a taxi but Noel Gallagher, obviously on his way to an interview but still with time to bound over the road and say 'hello' to me. It was at this precise moment that I was hoping a gaggle of ladies were watching but unfortunately there was just a small, bald oriental chap. He was lovely, as always (Noel, not the little chap) and asked how Nige was, bless. We talked about our new albums, his and ours and the band Electric Soft Parade who are supporting him and us over the next month. We swapped email addresses and he asked me to send him some of the new Dodgy tracks, which I'll be doing over the next couple of days and let you know what the good man Noel thinks. Actually Dodgy and Noel go way back as Oasis supported Dodgy at the Academy in 1994 and two years later offered to return the favour by offering us a slot at their big Knebworth shows but apparently our reply was something along the lines of "No thanks, Noel, we'd rather get shot at in Bosnia" a previous commitment we couldn't and didn't want to change.
As it happens we travelled to Bosnia a total of three times between '95 and '97, you can actually see what we got up to one time here
As far as I can see, at least one of our new friends in this video ended up onstage with us at that previously mentioned Glastonbury performance in 1997. Which brings me nicely to the fact that on one of the trips to Bosnia we took the esteemed photographer Pat Pope with us and as it happens he's going to be doing a new photoshoot with Dodgy this during the day before our next gig on Friday (7th October) in Hertford at the Corn Exchange where again, Dodgy will play the new album in it's entirety and the following night on Saturday (8th October) we'll be in Bicton near Shrewsbury at the Four Crosses Hotel.
So until then,
ZBOGOM
xx
No comments:
Post a Comment