Day 30
Tuesday August 8
We come out of our morning gym session and are on our way to the car when Maja suggests we just go home instead of driving round Scotland for the next 10 days or so. Sure. Why not? Maybe we can work on the album. Or start gigging properly around Camden and London. Not a bad replacement. So that’s what we do. We turn the car back into a car again, and then we’re off.
Lunch is a fantastic spot in the small town of Jedburgh right across the road from its spectacular abbey ruins. Then it’s into a charity shop there to buy a few books and then out on the road again. The next stop is the border. We just have to. We get out of the car here into a very windy parking area with the Scottish flag on one side and the English flag on the other, both seeming to compete for which one can rip itself from its pole first. They’re still battling to a score draw by the time we leave. While there, we delight in walking from one country to the other quite a few times. And of course we have to stop and take in the incredible views of nothing but rough and rolling hills all the way to any horizon. After that, it’s time to get back to chasing our horizons.
Day 31
Wednesday August 9
Recovery day. Most of it is spent reading the books we bought in Jedburgh. We bought five. I’ve chosen to read the one about a guy who spent the second world war escaping from POW camps. Maja’s reading a book about international espionage. We didn’t delve into any of these books when we bought them. In the foreword of my book, the author talks about going on a journey to meet one of his sources – at the Edinburgh festival. Maja’s book contains a character who works for Camden council, and has another who lives in Kentish town, where we both lived before our move to Ireland. Even more specifically, that character lives behind Kentish Town station. Which is where I lived when I first properly landed in London. Damn. For that initial ridiculous drama, I refer to you to Mark’s Diaries.
Day 32
Thursday August 10
Oh dear. Maja is starting to feel sick. No idea where that came from. I don’t develop anything. She’s not majorly bad, mainly a sore throat and not much of a voice, certainly not if she really tries to push it. So yeah. For a vocalist intending to do some recording and maybe the odd gig here and there, that’s bad enough. That’s a bit like me getting a papercut on a finger. A minor irritation, if that, for most people. A potential out of action injury for me. And so Maja is. Out of action. Yeah.
On the drive back we concluded that our overall plan was very basic. Get back to the album and work to get that completed, open mics, and out and about socially in Camden. But with Maja unable to sing and not much more able to talk, nothing much is happening on any of these fronts.
Day 58
Tuesday September 5
Yeah. We’ve fast forwarded all the way to September. Not much happened in August. Just hot hot hot as well. We imagined doing a gig in that heat a few times and we were just, no. We did have an experience in Berlin once playing in very hot weather. Not nice. Not nice at all. So we didn’t really push it.
There are a few nights out though, the most memorable being a night in The Good Mixer when we get deep into conversation with a guy who’s been around for a long time. He’d seen us around and in here and was curious about us. He loved our story and what we’re doing here and invited us to join him at The Dublin Castle. Great. We were expecting a pint or two with some friends of his. Nope. Straight to the back of the bar and into the live music venue where entry was £15. Not for us. He got waved straight through. Then said, ‘They’re with me.’ In we went too. For a really fantastic punk type band in London from Germany. So yeah. We’re now meeting random people out and about who invite us to cool gigs for free.
And Maja’s also been following in the footsteps of Amy Winehouse and playing pool in The Good Mixer. I’ve not yet made it onto the table myself; unlike Maja, I’ve been put off the queue to play, which can be so long. I think I should just get over that.
Day 69
Friday September 15
This has been on the cards for a long time. Probably since around February when we first realised what we had after a casual listen to a gig from a few months before. I’ll go straight with the headline first. Today we push the button on our first EP. Five songs recorded live in November. At that gig we did at The Canal Turn in Ballymahon. Which resulted from what we thought had been a totally disastrous gig in Athlone. This week we finally got round to downloading it properly from the phone recording and importing that into our studio software so that we could begin the process of, well, processing it. It really is just a basic phone recording of a bar gig. So yeah, we really had to work hard to get it sounding as good as we’ve been able to. What came out at the end of it all was a great look at what the NOW hustles were all about and how they were received. This, for us, is our document of what we achieved in Ireland from scratch with our own songs and our own hit the street and just do it mentality.
The people in the bar that night had no idea we were coming, didn’t know us in any way, and had never heard any of our songs. For that, we would suggest that the audience reaction is the sixth track. People can listen to the songs, yes, and that is really important. But we are also now putting out what our songs and performance do to a room full of people experiencing us for the very first time. And not even a musical audience at that; these are not people who had gone out to see some unknown act with their minds open and expectant. These are people who had just gone down their local for some banter with their mates and then two people came in to play them a bunch of songs they’d written themselves. What happened next? Well, it’s now all there for everyone to see what usually happens whenever we just roll in and pop up.
The tracklisting:
0:00 I Like You (Better When You’re Naked)
2:50: Six Sense Lover
5:49: Make Me Shine
8:31: Rock’n’Roll Tree
11:40: How You Rock’n’Roll
It’s now on around 30 platforms, including Spotify, which is here:
And here on Youtube:
Day 70
Saturday September 16
After pushing the button yesterday, the EP is now up and live on a few platforms and will be coming up on others over the next few days. Around 30 in all through an online distributor. Apart from that, we are now talking about producing vinyl copies of it as well. Of course we could sell these at gigs, but our main thinking here is to get them into bars and cafes and other places that play vinyl as part of their appeal. A few ifs here, but if they do and if any kind of traction results in a given venue, we prospectively have a place to play with an expectant and ready made audience.
We also push the first button on something else quite significant today. Building a Japanese audience. We’ve been speaking about this for a while. Maja speaks fluent Japanese. Really; people speaking to her without images think she is Japanese. This is a part of our toolkit we’ve been keeping dry for a while, but now, with our first real product out there, it’s time. General livestreams in English will also be happening, but the initial focus right now is Japan. The medium we’re going to use is the livestream through a Japanese platform Maja knows well from her time in Japan. Another bunch of ifs, but if we’re able to build any kind of audience in this way, it could make a Japanese tour viable. We’re under no illusion that this is any kind of quick fix, if it could even be a fix at all. But we’re starting. Then, all we can do, as with anything else, is to keep on and keep on.
This begins late morning as we set ourselves up in our front room. Maja in front and me behind and off to the side. We bought a cool Camden tube station cushion cover a few weeks ago so that’s on display too. The next idea is to get a big Camden poster and use that as a backdrop. We know exactly what we want. There’s a bridge, right in the centre of Camden, which is adorned with faux graffiti stating: Camden Lock. That’s in reference to the lock of the canal which flows through the area. The actual lock is right inside Camden Market. That bridge and its logo is the backdrop we want.
The live stream is an enormous, exhilarating, joyful success. Although we’re only in our living room, from the very start we perform it as though it’s a gig. It’s late morning here, Saturday night there. Our audience peaks at around 40 with people coming and going, so our total audience is more than that. But what really makes it is the level of engagement and enthusiasm from those who find us, and a healthy number do stay from the moment they find us until the end. In between songs there are sometimes long stretches of conversation as Maja responds to comments that have come in during the songs. Then real time questions and thoughts come in as she speaks and she engages with them too. She introduces me as well, of course, but I generally just stand there and try to look charming. Or rockstar. Or whatever you can look like in your living room on a Saturday morning/afternoon. But yeah. As it goes on, we really do play into the occasion and as the audience involvement increases, that feeling that we are actually playing a live show only gets stronger. The live interactive element is a bit special. All questions and comments are written, and once complete are voiced by whatever female robot does those voices. So during a song, the stream can suddenly start speaking to us. And the other usual emoticon type things you can see during live videos such as love hearts and applause emoticons. We do this for an hour in two chunks of 30 minutes, as that’s the longest single stream you can do. At the end of it we are totally spent. You could say we’ve left it all on the living room floor.
The rugby world cup’s on and we’ve just done a gig. So we’ve done everything. Bar? Why not? The nearest place to us can be seen from the front door to our building. So off we go. Gig at home then off to the bar. Doesn’t it normally go the other way round?
Day 72
Monday September 18
Are we expecting big numbers from the EP? It would be nice but we’re really not. Not straight away anyway. It’s just important and great that we finally have something out there that we can point people to. It’s also a massively significant moment to finally have something we can use to announce to media outlets that we exist. So this week the push will begin to try to get some radio play, at whatever level, and whatever could possibly lead on from that. Then it will be on to more general music media as well. Blogs, podcasts, online magazines, real magazines, newspaper culture/entertainment guides. All of the above local, national and international. Maybe even TV. You just have to keep pushing. It really is an ongoing process, you just have to keep going. We have a story, we have a show, we have the stage presence, and we have the songs. If anything, we think that as much as we are trying to get in touch with these people, they are also on the constant lookout for something like us. It’s just that they’re bombarded with so much all the time, it’s so hard to pick out the sounds from the noise. They’re well aware of that too. All we can do, as I said above, is just keep on keeping on. I don’t think I’ll Diary too much of us putting stuff out. Just assume it’s constantly going on.
Back to the beginning. Do we think The NOW Hustle EP is going to be a hit and make our fame and fortune? No. Do we think it’s a good representation and product with the potential to take us to another level? Maybe not even the next level, but just another level? Yes. Absolutely.
One of its biggest values is that it demonstrates the kinds of shows we were doing during our time in Ireland and again, like I said an entry or two ago, we really have captured the sound of the types of shows were playing and what we can do to an audience.
The document we have produced and delivered is live. And alive. We have supreme confidence in our product and our project. It is ready. The album is also on the way and in pretty good, solid shape for where we are with it. So until we’re ready to push the button on that, The NOW Hustle EP is a great prototype.
Day 77
Saturday September 23
Second Japanese stream today and this time we get over 100 people in for our hour long show. This is just amazing live practice as well. Today’s show felt more fluid and just easier to play than last week’s. Because, let’s face it, we really haven’t been playing live that much lately and we definitely felt it last week, even if it might not have been visible to anyone. One of the most common questions today is, ‘Are these really your own songs and not covers?’ And yes, Maja has to say quite a few times, no. These are not covers. They really are our own originals. I don’t speak Japanese but I learn today that Japanese uses the English word original, at least in this context. And I hear Maja say it a lot.