I can’t remember what I was looking for, but I ended up having a look through the box of abandoned ideas, random notes and drawings today. Whatever it was I was looking for was forgotten about when I came across some hand written scripts for the first couple of episodes of The Shoebox Collection, a proposed podcast series that I intended to record as a look back at the demo and promo CDs I have received over the years. After writing half a series I realised that this would have very limited appeal (this coming from the guy with a photo blog dedicated to Skittles on a plate) so drew a line under it and moved on to other projects. That might sound like I am caving in and chasing mass appeal, but there’s a difference between doing things that I like and hoping others do and making something simply out of self indulgence. I am aware that there is a pretty fine line, especially when it comes to some of my radio work (my Sherwood Radio show was sometimes a test of endurance), but I usually find an audience so either I’m doing something right or I’m doing something right or I’m doing something wrong and appealing to a lot of wrong minded people.

It was a funny coincidence (not ‘funny ha-ha’, I am aware of this before anyone thinks it needs pointing out) that I happened to find these scripts as earlier on I had tidied up those CDs into bigger boxes, so even if I decided to do the series after all I would need to think of a new name for it. The shoeboxes were looking a bit tatty so I put them into some boxes I have been using for all of my office filing. Every week or so I manage to rescue a box from the court offices that contained reams of A4 printer paper so they are the perfect size for putting various things in during the ongoing tidying up of my office (the only thing they are no good for is music magazines and my collection of Christmas Radio Times) and they stack up against the wall. One day I will sort these CDs into alphabetical order but for now at least they are neatly stored, a job that took a while due to my reading of notes and single sheet press releases. The fact that (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this already but let us recap) a lot of the bands only have a MySpace address and a fair few have Hotmail or AOL email addresses makes them seem as if they should be in a museum.

I haven’t listened to some of these for several years and probably only actually listened to them once or twice before making a decision. Most of these CDs hark back to the Sherwood Radio show when I was told initially that I had to have physical copies of each song I played for copyright reasons. It also helped because Sherwood Radio was unmanned (or indeed unwomanned) for the most part so there was never anyone around to load MP3s into the system for me. The CDs dried up when I joined Trent Sound as the opposite rule applied and everything had to be played through the same system in order to keep sound levels correct, although I did occasionally have to play a CD or even use Soundcloud.

Although I remember the names of the artists in my collection, I am still curious to know what happened to a lot of them. Some of them are still going; Jake Morley, Hadfis Huld and Calling All Astronauts are three names that I have ‘I played them before BBC 6Music’ bragging rights on and are still making music. Other bands such as Redtrack have split up and then there are names that showed promise but fizzled out. I am going to make the effort to sit and listen to these artists when I have the time to just sit and listen – too often we use music as background noise but nothing beats the feeling of listening to music for music’s sake.

Listen to The Sunday Alternative Saturday Bonus Podcast here.

Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.

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February housekeeping

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Today should have started with me announcing and pushing The Sunday Alternative, but alas I have had to miss a week due to my Internet issues. I couldn’t for the same reasons announce the lack of a podcast on social media so hopefully nobody was too disappointed. I have decided to make TSA a weekly podcast from now on, so hopefully this problem won’t rear its head again. Ratings are positive so I want to keep the Sunday Alternative name going as it is the thing I’m best known for and is well respected within the music industry, although like NottinghamLIVE it probably gets more listeners from the music business than it does from the public. At some point it would be nice to return to live radio and have live bands back in again, but for the moment I am pulling more listeners for a half hour-ish podcast than I did for the radio show on Trent Sound. I am contemplating a working holiday to London next year to try and pitch the show to a station down there as most of the PR companies are based in London and it would be good to get to some gigs there and try to nudge my way in. nudging is how I got to be a part of the Nottingham music scene, and my Nottingham connection might come in handy in the same way that DJs used to exploit coming from Liverpool in the 1960s.

I’ve been digging through my collection of demo/promo CDs as research for The Shoebox Demos (the finished article might have a different name) and found some gems. Some of the bands sadly have no trace whatsoever besides an old MySpace address and looking there is pointless because part of MySpace’s ruination plan was to remove all the information that people had previously put on. As a lot of promos are from 2009/2010 there aren’t a lot of Facebook pages as the facility didn’t exist for bands back then as MySpace was still the best of the social networking bunch.

Although some names have fallen off the radar it is nice to see that so many artists are still around. Jake Morley and Hadfis among others received their first radio play thanks to me, and many names are still making music.

There’s a good few Nottingham artists within the collection, which could come in useful for a proposed project that was mentioned in passing on NottinghamLIVE a few times. I won’t mention it here as it might come to fruition next year and I don’t want someone else with more time on his or her hands to steal my idea and receive all the credit (Broadway Cinema Syndrome is the official name for that happening). One of my favourite finds was a collection of discs and ‘single sheet’ press releases for Captain Dangerous dating back to 2009 advertising new singles that are now well known songs, an advantage of not throwing stuff out if ever there was one.

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