Day 460
Monday October 7
I’m going to fast forward just a little and say that the results Charo produces from the photoshoot are absolutely stunning. Among them, in my opinion, is one of the best music photographs I have ever seen. This is the picture of us under the Camden Town bridge performing Rock’n’Roll Tree. We’re right among the Camden public going about their business as a classic double decker London red bus passes by providing an extra even more epic and perfect backdrop. It’s the only bus that passed us while we were in that location. And Charo captured it. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
Moving to today proper, and it’s a return to the King William IV in Hampstead. We get a massive boost as soon as we arrive and are met by Jimmy, the boss, who is just on his way out. ‘Ah, The Diaries,’ he exclaims as he sees us. ‘Fantastic. You’re back.’ He says he now has to make sure he returns soon enough so that he can get to see us again. Unfortunately, he doesn’t return, but this really is a great welcome to receive.
It’s a similar story inside as we meet Simon again and a few of the guys from last time, including Andy who really kicked off things back then when he entered the bar while we were on and launched into dancing. And yeah. It really is another great night and we do our thing with How You Rock’n’Roll, Sand Bang and Talk About The Weather.
Day 467
Monday October 14
We’ve been on it all weekend in the studio and also today. With that, we finish final mixes and masters of How You Rock’n’Roll and Insanity. How You Rock’n’Roll is similar in arrangement to Rock’n’Roll Tree. A big smash set song with loud vocals and full on drums. With this, a few studio discoveries takes the mixing and mastering to a new level, meaning a return to Rock’n’Roll Tree could well be on the cards and probably should be. We really have been working on these two new recordings in a kind of parallel fashion but Insanity is very different to the others. This is possibly our most gentle song and quite a while ago we decided not to have drums on this one at all, or even any percussion. Instead it’s got a kind of cool, vibey leadish bass part running through it complementing the picked guitar and vocal treatment. Maja’s off to Sweden again tomorrow and we don’t quite get these mixes or masters fully finished as we want. You also want to sit on them for a day or two maybe to see if you really are happy with what you’ve done. But we’ve just pushed it to the wall a little bit too much timewise. They feel done. They might be done. But also maybe not quite. There are things in both of them we really have to look at together so final decision and release will just have to wait another couple of weeks until Maja is back and we can have another look. But still, we’re fully confident we have the actual performances in the can and that in itself feels amazing. That’s three tracks down now and studio ability really pushing on and on. The other songs are now feeling very reachable indeed. After these three, I Like You (Better When You’re Naked) will be next, a song we’ve already recorded a bunch of times without quite getting it over the line. After that its into kinda new territory as we start to get to finishing all the others, putting them out one by one until all twelve are done and we can repackage them all as the debut album.
Day 475
Wednesday October 23
I’m going through a few videos that we haven’t got round to putting up on Youtube. Among them is a performance from one of Antonio’s Monday nights at the Brewhouse in Islington in August. We had a particularly enthusiastic front row I remember so it’s fun to watch this video again and get to relive the performance. But watching it now, I get even more. Just a reminder. For those shows we were playing two sets of two songs in each half of a comedy night. The first set featured I Like You (Better When You’re Naked) and Rock’n’Roll Tree while the second was Six Sense Lover followed by How You Rock’n’Roll. During Six Sense Lover, just around the one minute mark on the video if you want to find it, one member of the front row turns to another and says something like, ‘Did they really write all these songs?’ She’s met with an affirmative and after that just gets into the performance more and more. It’s a really great moment to have caught.
Day 481
Tuesday October 29
It’s Ten To One’s Ramshackle’s second birthday tonight so I decide to take myself down there to kind of represent The Diaries with Maja still away until tomorrow. It’s a really great night with a few people understandably asking me if it’s weird to be there and not be playing. I would have been asking the same question, and indeed I thought I would have a bit of the itch. But no. Not at all. I’m just really happy to sit back, watch the show and mingle and hang out with different people during the night. While all this is happening, Ant tells me they’re also celebrating the fourth birthday of Ten To One on Saturday. He says they’re having a bit of an open stage and we should come along armed with a guitar. Fantastic. So that’s a gig already for Maja to come back to.
Right. If you’re really paying attention I wonder if you noticed something just a little strange or notable there. If you didn’t, let me just nudge you a little. We’re in 2024. It’s Ten To One’s fourth birthday. Have you connected the dots yet? Yep. Ant opened his place in 2020, right in pandemic world through all the various lockdowns, tiers, not lockdowns, lockdowns again, bar restrictions – everyone should be seated, do you have to order a meal or don’t you? What does a meal even mean? Whatever the restrictions were at the time it really doesn’t matter. All that does matter is that on Ant’s menus is stamped the line, Ten To One, est. 2020. And that, in my opinion is absolutely epic. Who in any kind of mind opens a bar in 2020? And has it survive and continuing to be a successful business in 2024? Ladies and gentlemen, we know at least one answer to that question.
Day 484
Friday November 1
Maja was back late Wednesday night and last night we took ourselves out to The Dublin Castle for a few pints. Tonight we hit a bar or two and then go to Camden Market to visit
London’s Coyote Ugly. This bar/nightclub venue has become something of a guilty pleasure of ours lately. There are two of them in London with the other being just off Piccadilly Circus. We have another fun night in here and then leave to start the short walk home. As we’re making our way through the quiet Camden Market, other people are coming in to visit any one of the number of bars in here. From one of those groups of people, someone suddenly points at us from around ten metres away and calls out, ‘You guys are legends.’ Wow. Just where did that come from? But OK. Are we starting to get recognised by strangers in London now?
Day 485
Saturday November 2
A fantastic Saturday night at the Ten To One bar in Tottenham with a whole bunch of people playing, essentially a few of Ant’s favourites and maybe, just maybe, we can count ourselves among them.
Let’s just cover our thing. We get to the stage around 10pm and decide we’re just going to smash out three or four of our big numbers. We hit three, get a good encore shout and go again for the fourth. Make Me Shine, Rock’n’Roll Tree, I Like You (Better When You’re Naked), Talk About The Weather. Unfortunately we don’t get a video of tonight but something hit really big. Ten To One doesn’t have a backstage area as such, but there is a restaurant area at the end of the bar looking down from the stage. When it’s not being a restaurant it kind of serves as a prep area. Tuning guitars, that kind of thing. And a little refuge place to head to after playing to decompress or whatever. Some people even use it at times as a place to emerge from and play themselves down the bar, through the audience to the stage. We’ve done that ourselves a couple of times. It can be very effective.
This has been an absolute powerhouse of a four song performance and it really does take it out of us. Seriously. We go to the gym and do full on cardiovascular work to be able to do this stuff but we can still often find ourselves out of breath after even a short show like this one as though we’ve just sprinted up a whole bunch of stairs. It’s in this state that we retreat through a backpatting audience to the restaurant area and both crumple into chairs. As we’re catching our breath in what feels like a private de facto backstage area, or maybe it should be thought of as more a de facto green room, the father of one of the previous acts bursts in. His effervescent is practically luminous. ‘Oh guys,’ he explodes. ‘You guys are invincible.’ It’s possibly one of the most enthusiastic personal responses we’ve ever experienced. And we look at each other and laugh as we tell him, ‘We’ve literally just finished writing a song called Invincible.’ Yep. Hopefully we’ll be sharing a live performance of that soon.
After we’ve chatted to him for a while, caught our breath and returned to the bar, we walk into something of a hero’s reception. Tonight, it seems, has been one of the special ones. Ant, Ten To One, happy birthday.
Day 487
Monday November 4
Today feels quite momentous as we get back in the studio and put the finishing touches to How You Rock’n’Roll and Insanity. They are now done and out. Added to Rock’n’Roll Tree, we feel we’re really, and finally on our way with the debut album which has proved a far more difficult birth than we were even close to beginning to imagine when we began…ago. So yeah, it’s taken forever to get here, but we feel now that we’ve really got over the biggest hurdles the studio had to throw at us and we can start getting things out at something of a semi decent rate. For us, it feels just huge that we’ve got three actually finished and out in the world now.
Day 494
Monday November 11
If we thought it was momentous to finally have the debut album underway proper, we top that today as we finish the actual first book we’re going to put out as The Diaries. Once this is printed, it will also become our first significant piece of merch. Or maybe our first real piece. I’m not sure we can count beermats and stickers.
First actual announcement of this here. It will be presented as the first in The Diaries series and will be called called Music, Love and Impossibilities. It follows the first three months of our story, so right up until we’re making the move to Ireland. That may sound like spoiler, but if you’re reading this particular paragraph you probably know at least a few of the broad brush stroke details.
The book looks a lot more like The Diaries Diaries should look like than what they are right now, with both of us very much involved in the writing with an almost back and forth dialogue style. Right now it’s mostly me – Mark – because, well, Maja’s working on a computer every day in her actual job which is keeping all this going so the last thing she wants to do is to finish that each day and get back on a computer to write bits and pieces in here. And that’s besides all the other stuff that’s going on such as working on new songs, recording, getting out and performing and all the rest of it. And even then you have to factor in other computer work which makes up a big part of the recording process, especially when it comes to mixing and mastering which we’re both a part of but Maja, being a real engineer, is better at that kind of thing, certainly with learning and really getting into the tech and mechanics of it all. So yeah. Sorry if you’re mostly stuck with me in here. But to really get the full experience, go find the book when it comes out. By definition of all of the above, it contains a lot more than is in these online pages because Maja’s extra contributions, and other additions here and there, are just going to be in the book format.
As it happened at the time, we were both very much writing it at the beginning, including while we were in Ireland. But we did get quite behind and when the European tours and all the Ireland gigging and stuff started happening, we abandoned trying to catch up and just got on with writing about what we were doing there and then, which meant a very big time jump and a massive hole in the story. But even that was a stretch and we found ourselves in all kinds of catch up positions as we struggled – mostly failed – to keep up with ourselves. As a result, a lot of the early days was just left unwritten. I’m talking here about so much that went down in the first couple of months we knew each other. Just hadn’t been written, although there were notes from the time. At its peak we had around a year of unwritten Diary. Probably quite a bit more than a year. Going back a little further, even the first writings of The Diaries didn’t happen until a few months after this all began because we we both had to complete our own respective diaries until we could start with this. That process alone went deep into those first few months as we tried to fit in writing sessions alongside everything else that was happening at the time. Then of course we had the Ireland move itself. Then two weeks later the Sweden move for three months then back to Ireland, then all the songwriting and rehearsing as we began the process of thinking about and creating what we were even going to be musically and conceptually. Then our first gig. Then Maja immediately returning to Sweden again – the very next day. Then three and a half weeks later we met in Berlin to begin the first European tour which itself was disrupted by the resurgence of Covid then the war in Ukraine; we were just recovering from our own Covid experience in what was supposed to have been a short Sweden pitstop and making plans to head into eastern Europe to resume the tour when that began.
So, with our story beginning in February 2021, it wasn’t until early June of that year, and in Sweden, that the first writings of The Diaries began.
Now we return to that huge 18 month gap in the record which opened up as we were totally unable to keep up with ourselves. That didn’t begin to get rectified until late 2021 when Maja began that first round of job hunting which ultimately led us to London where we are now. But we could have ended up in a few other places. As we said at the time, there was also the very real possibility that she could have found a completely remote role and we probably would have just stayed where we were in Ireland with the option of moving somewhere else in the future just if we fancied it. This was a period when everything just stopped. Maja went into full time job hunting mode with so many rounds of interviews across so many different applications, and I went into full on writing mode, finally getting into the hugely daunting catch up. This is when I wrote most of my contribution to what is now the book that we just finished today. But of course, Maja had to write hers as well. And given all I’ve detailed above, exactly when was that supposed to happen? And this is without considering the whole process of the move to London, then Maja starting the job itself once we got here. And as we’ve said regarding the whole project during a few periods here, life has got in the way a bit. So of course that’s impacted on progress here too.
Now we’re back to today, and in the past few months Maja has been getting back to her own catch up of those first few months. At the same time we researched just how to put it all together as a book we could publish ourselves. We really should do a shoutout here to author and Youtuber M.K. Williams. We don’t know her at all, but Maja found her channel and it’s been massively useful for wisdom, advice and guidance. Through M.K. Williams we learned how to go about the process of actually physically putting a book together, discovering the software, where to download it from, and how to use it. This became a big project in itself and I got busy with the typesetting and what all the pages were going to be – you know, all the stuff at the front of a book – and Maja got on with her final pieces of writing as she neared her own finish line. The result is that today she completed the job – let’s take a breath here to consider the achievement and the import of the moment when an author writes that very last full stop – and I then pulled those final pages into the last typeset pages to complete the creation of The Diaries’ first book.
Oh yeah. I should explain something here that I didn’t know before beginning this process, so maybe you didn’t know either. I was hoping that you got your book template and just copied and pasted your entire book into it from its source and it all fell neatly into pages. Nope. You have to create a text box for each individual page. Then go to a separate editing page, paste into that what you think will fit into the given page, hit your green tick thing, which takes you to the page at which time you see if you’ve put in too much or not enough. Return to the edit page to add or delete as necessary. Repeat the process until you’ve got the perfect amount of words on the current page, at which point there’s another little process to make sure it all looks tidy. Congratulations. You’ve now completed one page of what will be around four hundred of the things. Go to the next page, start again.
The final printing of it is still a little way off as we have to put the cover together, but conceptually we know what the front, back and spine are going to look like and most of the heavy lifting has been done there too with design and so on. And then there’s getting the budget together to actually order that first print run.
Oh, and it’s Monday now, we’re out gigging tonight – more on that in a minute – and we’re off to Madrid for a week on Wednesday so tomorrow will be organising ourselves for that. I’m writing this on Friday November 29, just over a week after we got back from Madrid, and we’re off to Tenerife on Sunday for a week for an actual holiday. Yes, the Madrid thing was also a holiday, but we also took the guitar and amp and went out and played everyday apart from the last day, Monday, for which we were offered a gig but had the business of going to see Frank Turner to attend to, which was the whole purpose of the trip in the first place. We won’t be taking any guitar to Tenerife but we will be taking computers, so some writing and posting may happen, but not any last detail project stuff on the book.
As for what we expect when the book is finished and in our hands, our only initial expectation is that we will now have something to sell at gigs and something that will hopefully get our story out into the world a little bit more. We will be selling them mostly at gigs in London afterall. A whole bunch will be strategically given away but we don’t expect to be chasing a publishing deal. Not that we don’t want one, but we won’t be formally submitting; we’ve already been through that process, got absolutely no joy and every publisher and agent – as is completely correct and their right – requests submissions to be made according to their own preferences. Each one can take a lot of time. So no, we won’t be doing that. But what we will be doing is the Now Hustle and generally gigging and having them available. This being London, we are of course surrounded by agents, publishers and all kinds of other music and literary industry people, not to mention any other category of media person and you just never know when you’re going to encounter one, or indeed meet or play to – or sell a book to – someone who knows one. So yeah. We think we’re going to just have them ourselves to sell which will be its own form of income and advertising, with the possible potential bonus of what having a book ready to go could provide. We’re not even seeing this as self publishing. It’s self printing, although it will have an ISBN number for whatever may happen going forwards, and we’ve just discovered that’s a whole extra issue and considerable cost in itself. But essentially, right now this is no different to designing and ordering business cards that you then give away, although of course the bonus with a book is that you can actually ask for some money before you give it to someone. But then hey, if we happen to meet a publisher or agent who’s loved our show and subsequently loves hearing our story – which happens all the time with audience members in general by the way – we have a business card plus plus plus to simply give to them.
When we first started thinking about the possibility of finding a publisher, or selling this in any way as a book, we were acutely aware that the whole package had to live up to the story. If it didn’t then the story, and indeed the book containing it, would be irrelevant. Could we write the songs? If we could, could we then take them to the stage in a captivating live show? Then, if we could do that, could we produce recordings that were good enough to take the whole thing forwards? As of last week, we got ourselves to the stage of having three completed studio recordings. To follow that up, we have the rest of the debut album written with each corresponding recording almost completed. We have the second album written and partly recorded and we have the third album almost written. Songs, live show, performance, experience in different cities and countries, track record of great reactions in different cities and countries, check check check. And now, as of today, we’ve completed the book. All that’s left is a few small pieces of admin.
Right. People really really have to stop saying this. We’ve proved beyond doubt at this stage that it is just wrong. The cover thing raises its head again tonight. You have to play a cover or two to get the crowd going.
We’re at King William IV in Hampstead tonight for the third time. We get a great reception from the regulars, with Andy in the lead, coming and saying hi almost as soon as we walk in. Then when our turn comes the whole bar becomes our crowd as it transforms from polite open mic territory into The Diaries’ show. Here again, Andy leads the cheers as our name is called. His friends, who have seen us a few times, all join in, and after that the place is ours.
By the time we come to our third song, How You Rock’n’Roll, the whole place it seems is up and jumping. It’s been an absolute triumph of a show.
Then, about five minutes after we’ve played someone comes up to me and, in all politeness and love of course, suggests that we might want to try a cover or two at times. You know, to help get the crowd going. I’m sorry, but did you not see what we just did? You were even in the crowd. To be fair the person does seem to row back the comment a little with that as they realise, oh yeah. That did happen. I think it’s just become a default position. I understand people saying it to us before they’ve seen us, and certainly if they’re just meeting us for the first time and have no idea what we’re about. Fair enough. But come on. Just after we’ve finished and totally conquered a place? Playing nothing but our own songs that many people haven’t heard before? Surely that’s when you step back and think, you know, I may suggest this thing to almost everyone else, but maybe, just maybe, not these guys.
I’ve done the whole spectrum of cover scene. In Ireland, which has an incredible standard of performer and a huge respect of the concept. And in London with my first band here, and with my own duo The Insiders, which did some really great shows. In Ireland I was a band member, then band leader, and then even became an agent. Right now I can remember eight cover acts I played with in Ireland and the two in London. So ten. Being on the scene in general I also saw a huge amount of other cover shows. I have never seen any cover band get the reactions we get playing exclusively our own songs. And I’m talking here about shows where we’ve gone in and played to audiences who have never heard of us and never heard any of our music before. And we have smashed those rooms again and again and again. All over Ireland, Europe and London,
So may I politely, and possibly not so politely, say to everyone past present and future who may want to make the suggestion, no, we do not need to play covers.
