Picture by Martyn Boston
The morning after an event involving Nottingham music has in the past painted me as the bad guy for daring to go against the grain of Nottingham arse licking and say what I think. My review for The Nottingham Post is actually quite nice despite everyone's expectations, and although I have said that I will be posting an unedited version on IMHO I really don't see the need. As far as I am concerned the Future Sound of Nottingham is a self indulgent pat on the back for Mark 'literally' Del to show what a nice guy he is and once the first prize is over there is no further consequence. Last night's line up of finalists was certainly the strongest in recent years and the winner was a difficult call for the judges, (for some bizarre reason I wasn't asked again) although Ellie Keegan was the only the only one who would have truely benefitted from the boost that the top prize would have given her, the others on the bill being either already well established (Cheshire and the Cat & Josh Wheatley) and not really in need of a popularity contest.
Josh Wheatley is a talented musician who has worked really hard over the last few years, having done his first radio session for NottinghamLIVE in our early days (breaking NUSIC's rule about not being able to do a Future Sound session if they've done a radio session prior) and building up his live reputation. He goes out of his way to be nice to everybody which is why it was weird to see a posting on the Facebook event page from a woman who did not agree with the winners and singled Josh out for her disgruntlement.
Modified version of the post, taken from Josh Wheatley's Facebook profile.
Leaving aside the fact that a great many solo artists use a backing band, this was a strange post to plant on the event page for everyone to see. It has been removed from the NUSIC page but not before Josh had copied it to his page, attracting a shit load of comments in Josh's favour. I took the opportunity to comment about how refreshing it was to not be the villain for a change, and followed it up with a long winded comment that for some reason Josh has removed. I would be interested to hear Mark 'literally' Del's take on this but he has been rather quiet since last night, maybe getting over the unfamiliarity of being in a live music venue.
On the subject of new music, today I have been listening to music for the podcast and having a catch up. Because it has been off the air for the last seven weeks I will be dispensing with my usual policy of only playing upcoming releases and playing some tracks that were sent in during the hiatus. I am going to be doing two podcasts this week, a bonus edition coming out on Saturday and one as usual on Sunday. To go back to Nottingham musicians, I have collected a lot of music for my proposed end of year podcast so there will be more than one edition of this given that we're only in June. As I intend to release these Steve Oliver's Nottingham 2015 podcasts during the Christmas holidays I might go along with the tradition of making Christmas specials and record it now during the summer.
The Sunday Alternative will return soon.
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June housekeeping
The audio book of Bowie Day (a short story inspired by A Christmas Carol) will be released on August 31st. In the meantime the book can be downloaded to your Kindle from here.
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