People, people, people – I am overwhelmed. The support I am getting for my debut album, “Disarm”, both in link sharing/Tweeting/Facebooking and orders (physical and digital) is amazing. I am so appreciative and over the moon to hear people are loving the tunes. This has been a lot of work and time and effort and I’m just happy to have people listening.

If you haven’t listened / downloaded / ordered your homemade physical package please click here for all the options.

My wrist is hurting a little this morning after I spent last night writing lyrics on to postcards (handwriting is so old school!!) but I wanted to take a moment to say: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

I’m staying at my parents’ place for a few days and it’s been interesting explaining to them the costs involved in something like this. As the sole funder of everything, paying for stuff myself from whatever freelance earnings I can muster, I have full control over the purse strings in a way an artist on a label does not. Marina & The Diamonds has some wicked videos, but did she agree to spending £20,000 of her money to get just one of them made? My folks thought I was spending an obscene amount of money on all this until I told them about that…

True, my album could have cost a lot less than it did, had I recorded it myself along the lines of the home recorded EP I released in 2009, but I made the decision to make it in Myles’ studio instead because I wanted to do it once and for all, and I wanted to show people that indie artists could make a product with a quality of sound and aesthetics on a level with or better than those with label backing, at a fraction of the cost. By being prepared for the recording sessions (the songs were all written and arranged) and getting down to work in the studio rather than wasting time playing pool and drinking coffee you can get a professional sounding album made for a reasonable sum of money, and I’m happy I chose to work with Myles rather than added the pressure to become a good quality engineer to my already full plate. It made it worth all the not going out drinking and not going on holiday and not buying clothes to be able to save up for all this, too.

My videos so far have cost between £450 and £1000 apiece. While I save a lot of cash because I direct / creative produce and edit all the videos myself, I also try to pay people a decent amount of money for their time filming me, letting me use their warehouse and lights and making me look like a tree. There are still favours happening, and I’d like to be able to pay everyone more, but I think the great people I’ve been working with understand the situation I’m in and know that I hire people based on what they do and how they do things. I’ve experienced those freelance jobs where the client micromanages and takes away your autonomy so much that you wonder why they didn’t just hire a robot in to do the job, so while I know what I want to get from a shoot and (as with the album recording) I plan and design things beforehand to make sure that happens, the idea is that everyone gets a crazy little holiday away from the real world of work, gets to add their touch of flair to proceedings, gets the praise they deserve for being brilliant and walks away feeling proud and happy they were involved.

As artists, musicians and videomakers we have all the tools at our disposal now and absolutely no excuses not to use them. Gone are the days when bands could get away with saying “That’s not my job, I just make music” and expect to be handed opportunities. I prefer it this way having been stuck in a stingy record deal in the past with all rights removed, no say over the spending of money and told off by the label boss for asking too many questions (thankfully I hadn’t written the entire album of songs that got lost in the ensuing band / label split…), but hey, since I was a little girl I always wanted to be in charge.

The late nights and early mornings in front of the computer and the money spent on printing, videos, ribbon, glitter and suchlike is all time and cash well spent, in my opinion, in the quest to create my funny little world of art and music, and feels even more worth it when the reaction from the world is this warm.

You’re all brilliant, and I thank you, and please keep telling everyone you know they’re also invited to the party. Viral may be a wanky marketing term, but peer to peer recommendations have always been the way I found the best stuff to listen to, from the mixtapes my friends and I made for each other at school to the blogs I read now. If you like what I’m doing please tell a friend, or two, or ten, and let’s continue to create something interesting.

XXX

So, catching up on posting recent press links on the blog and archiving for my records, more website tweaks (usually done very late at night hence the recent hilarious addition of “Nail Gaiman” to the Disarm microsite), book design, email catching up and making more lists of kooky plans to make reality.

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I also want to take a moment to mention Tunited, a new music social networking site created by Midge Ure. My Mum saw Midge talking about it on TV a few weeks ago and sent me an email telling me to have a look so I duly signed up and uploaded some songs a few days ago.

In general I’m not interested in joining every new music related social networking site that pops up – I have limited time on my hands since the Tory government refuses to consider my petition for the 28 hour day – so anything I do choose to spend my time on has to be 1) useful in way the others I use is not, 2) fast and easy to sign up to and 3) actively engaging with users in cool ways, among other things.

So why did I sign up to Tunited? A mixture of great respect for Midge Ure and people like him who made music in that halcyon time when deliciously dark proggy synthy tunes got the mainstream attention they deserved, gratitude to my Mum for supporting me with my music and never asking when I’m going to get a “proper job” and geekitude – I love testing sites in Beta phase because I am very opiniated. What – you didn’t know that about me??

My sign-up experience was good. Uploading tracks was pretty fast and it was a relief that you can just paste YouTube links on the video page rather than having to upload those independently as well. It would have been nice to be able to paste an RSS feed in to the blog as I’m reluctant enough to cross post to MySpace as it is, let alone anywhere else, but I just posted a link to this blog instead. HTML doesn’t seem to be supported yet, but I would assume that’s coming soon.

So what of my other criteria? I need to spend more time looking around the site and figuring out ways to make it work for me, but I like its outlook already. Tunited is aiming to be a better version of the music side of MySpace, cutting out some of the noise by focusing its intent and gearing itself towards musicians and music fans only, building the community by encouraging users to recommend music they like to others – always the best way to find great bands. The claims to be able to connect musicians with industry bods aren’t particularly compelling – impressing label bosses etc isn’t a priority to me, working independently of the industry proper (whatever that is at the moment) as I do – but if genuine, and if the right sorts of industry people (those who love music not money), that could certainly be a good aspect of using the site.

This morning I had a nice taste of Tunited support and enthusiasm when I was featured in their Magazine. That there are staff dedicated to browsing through the site and highlighting and sharing the music they come across is fantastic, and naturally it’s handy as a musician if there aren’t already swarms of other bands using the site. However it grows, Tunited will have to maintain this sort of activity to continue to engage with users and make the site a compelling place for people to spend their time.

I look forward to having a good browse through Tunited myself this week to see what great music is lurking under its attractive exterior. If you’re already on there please paste a link in the comments and feel free to add me – my profile is here.

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Saturday 15th May 2010: 4pm. An empty car park, Shoreditch.

I am dressed as a unicorn in a fleecy all-in-one Kigurumi playsuit, white with a turquoise mane, crouched down inside a small boat constructed of balsa wood and papier-mâché. The heavy muzzle of the mythical beast is attached to the hood I’ve pulled up, despite the glare of the afternoon sun, and it keeps slipping to one side, obscuring my own face from the Canon 5D winking cheekily as I hastily rearrange myself ready for the next shot. I reposition my sparkly horn and lean forward tentatively, trying to maintain this position as I hit play on the iPod balanced inside my vessel. Staring past the camera I start to sing, surveying my shabby surroundings wistfully as the camera captures my melancholy.

Thursday 18th March 2010: 12.45pm. A music mastering studio, West London.

After a couple of hours of intense listening and tweaking I am handed printing CDs with my name on them. The album is finally complete: recorded, mixed and now mastered. The end product looks disturbingly unimpressive: the many hours of work and heartache distilled into files that fit easily on to a single shiny disc. In parting, the mastering engineer tells me he enjoyed working on the music because he doesn’t think it sounds like anything else. I grin all the way home.

I log these moments to keep me sane.

Read the full article here.

So, last Wednesday my face was on the BBC news homepage all day, as part of an interview I did a couple of months ago with Tim Masters from the BBC. Next to my face was the face of famous (and brilliant) writer Neil Gaiman, who also took part in the interview about Twitter.

How did this happen? I’ve made it clear that I’m working on all this music stuff myself, so how did the girl who refuses to pay a monthly fee to a PR company and has to cross fingers her unsolicited press releases and mailouts get opened get her face on the Beeb next to a famous and massively credible person? Why, the magic of Twitter, of course!

I recently gave a lecture on portfolio working at Leicester University (through another Twitter contact, naturally) and one of the areas I discussed with the group of music students was authenticity. It’s something that drives everything I do, and I stressed the importance of being the purest version of yourself as you can, because that’s what people pick up on. I also talked about treating people well no matter who they are – the real life example I gave was meeting Hal Ritson from The Young Punx in his studio a couple of years ago. I was there recording a topline for a couple of dance producers who were hiring Hal for the day as an engineer. Now, as the singer I could have swanned in there, given all my face time to the guys I was singing for, ignored the engineer and gone home, but because I’m not like that I got chatting to Hal afterwards, and that led to us working together, eventually performing together in front of 15,000 people at Yokohama Arena last summer. Crazy stuff.

Similarly, on Twitter I don’t spend my time looking for “important” or “useful” people to add to my stream. For me Twitter is a curious cross section of characters and experiences and I like watching that bubbling away. It’s not a place for aggressive marketing tactics – it’s all about authenticity. Tim Masters, the lovely man who interviewed me for the BBC article, had been following me for quite a while on Twitter and we’d exchanged tweets about this and that but I had no idea who he worked for because his profile didn’t say anything about work. One day I saw he’d tweeted about an actress he’d just interviewed and I shot a message over saying I’d love to send him some music some time to see if he’d like it. It was a completely off the cuff tweet which opened up an email conversation between us about setting up an interview to go on the BBC. We met at one of my favourite veggie cafes in Soho for a chat and that was that.

So, how did last week’s day of BBC fame affect me? As a result of the coverage my Twitter stream was deluged with messages from new people, retweets of the article and thumbs ups from existing followers and friends, and I gained about 200 new followers in the space of a day and a half. I replied to everyone, as is my way, so it was a pretty busy day all told.

The day after the article there were a few more messages and a whole bunch of people retweeting a key quote of mine where I said Twitter is “a bit like Facebook – but with people who actually care about you”. It’s interesting that only one person asked me what I meant by that and told me their experience was opposite to mine when I explained myself, most others seemed to concur.

The quotes Tim picked out for the article were a lot pithier than my full answers, as I tend to ramble (this is rather a long blog post…), but my point about Facebook versus Twitter is that of my 300-odd Facebook friends, all of whom I know personally, a pretty small percentage are likely to be actively supportive of my musical project and possibly less would actually choose to listen to it themselves. That’s because I’m not just friends with people who like the same music as me, plus there are a lot of old schoolfriends on there plus some family members. That’s why when I post about band stuff, or share links to my videos or microsites, I get hardly any “likes” or comments back.

When I post a link to something of mine on Twitter the response is astonishing. The Let This Be video had over 1000 views in four days largely due to people clicking on links from Twitter, and my followers always have something to say back to me. It’s great. For me Facebook is a place to keep up with what my friends and family are up to, and Twitter is where I meet cool new people and share experiences. People who use Twitter tend to be more chatty in general because of the nature of the medium. Whatever – I think it’s a great place to hang out.

The flurry of tweets has died down now and normal service is resumed, albeit with a chunk of extra people participating, hopefully, rather than just watching. That’s what it’s all about, after all.

Today I had a meeting with Judy Jacob to discuss props for next week’s back to back video shoots for “Scared To Capsize” and “I Am” (the next single). Her work studio is in a artistically graffitied tube carriage on top of a building in Shoreditch. As you do…

I caught these guys in action on my way up there…the work isn’t really to my taste but it was cool to see them creating it in front of my eyes – note the paint roller on a very long stick:

This is more my style…a bee stencil I found lurking behind the lamp post I locked my bike to:

From bees to flowers, naturally, because spring is in the air (or baking summer, if today’s weather is anything to go by):

Now to practise filming on this baby…

This is why there is no sign of a warriorgrrl remix on the Let This Be microsite, by the way. Grrrrrr again.

Aside from such bureaucratic timewasting this week has been great. On Wednesday night I attended the Association of Independent Music’s Women In Music and Entertainment night at Cargo, the highlight of which was seeing Geoff Travis and Jeanette Lee of Rough Trade chatting to AIM’s Alison Wenham on stage about their partnership. I got all excited and went up to Jeanette afterwards gushing a little and thrusting a card in to her hand. I do hope she looks me up.

I got a turn on the mic, too. We were discussing sexism in the music business and after my recent experiences at the hands of women, and knowing there were a number of A&R ladies in the room I asked Geoff and Jeanette if they were aware of sexism in other areas of the biz than just the labels. The collective gasp in the room when I told my little story (naming no names, because for some reason I am still *that* professional) made me feel a lot less alone, and speaking to some people afterwards it was obvious they’d never realised there was a reason you don’t get many women in session bands beyond there not being as many women playing in the first place.

I’d never been to an event like that, where the potential to meet someone ‘useful’ was so great. I’ve never liked the idea of working a room, assessing who’s the most important and ignoring other people in favour of sidling up to them. I value the conversations I had with a couple of music management students (lovely girls) just as much as the one I had with the A&R woman from Domino Records. Plus the chances of the students staying in touch with me is way higher.

I was struck by a little speech a woman in the row ahead of me gave to the room about how we can all create our own space in this business and how the traditional industry had no control over that. I’m really glad she gave me her card after she heard my sacking story because I looked her up when I got home and wow – it was only Gaynor O’Flynn, BFI Award winning director, musician and artist. Check her out, she does some very interesting things.

Last night I was supposed to go and see Amanda Palmer’s new musical project Evelyn Evelyn at Koko but decided to stay at home and write interview questions for Juliana Hatfield instead (for a music blog called Tuned-Out) – the EE show was switched to being an AFP solo show due to the volcano keeping her bandmate in the States and I wasn’t bothered about seeing MAdM support either. Some artists are better in theory than in reality.

This lady I would *kill* to see play live again (saw her at Brixton Academy on the Stories From The City tour):

Anywayyyyy…rant complete. I spent last night in indie heaven listening to Juliana Hatfield albums and researching good questions for her. Did you know she published a memoir in 2008? I didn’t, but have rectified this by ordering it. Her fantastic new acoustic album is out now, composed, arranged, performed, produced, engineered and mixed by herself. How appropriate for a woman so accomplished to make an intimate acoustic album with no obstructions whatsoever between her and the listener.

I can’t find much of her recent work on YouTube but came across this lovely live performance of famous track “Spin The Bottle” – the song that featured on the Reality Bites soundtrack. Enjoy the video and make sure you visit her website…

Isn’t it beyootiful?

So, the album is done done done so now it’s on to video treatment writing, website making, photo planning, costume designing busyness – this was yesterday:

Lots and lots of electric blue tulle plus the expertise of the lovely Maradoll equals one outfit almost ready.

Mister B helped of course:

Oh, and mastering commences on Wednesday.

I spent yesterday afternoon around Brick Lane visiting Spitalfields Market, the Sunday Upmarket and the Vintage Market upstairs at the Truman Brewery searching for key props and accessories to tell mini stories in my forthcoming photo sessions with Laura Ward. It was a fruitful and fun mission, helped massively by visiting Sydney dwelling friends Tim and Belle who listened to my wacky ideas as if they were perfectly reasonable. Friends, I love you for that ability!

A visit to Headmistress‘ gorgeous stall at the Upmarket led to a bit of soul searching and an interesting discussion on Twitter regarding the ethics of wearing feathers. Though I’m no longer vegan I’m still a strict vegetarian – no parmesan, no Bloody Marys (unless you take out the anchovy-filled Worcestershire sauce), no gelatine and certainly no leather or suede about my person – and though conversations about food choices happen all the time I’ve never discussed the wearing of feathers with a fellow veggie. I’d seen one of the beautiful Headmistress headbands on a girl in a club and really wanted one for the album photos, so went along to ask questions about where they came from. Big thanks to the girl on the stall for being totally honest about the fact that the feathers come from guineafowl and other birds that are raised for meat. So, they’re not killed for their feathers alone but the feathers are a byproduct of the birds’ death – they’re not collected while they’re alive. So, no headband for me!

As I walked away I threw the question out to my Twitter buddies: “Vegetarian ethics question: is wearing a headband decorated with feathers akin to wearing leather?” The majority of people said it depended on how the feathers were obtained – if the bird was still alive when the headband was made then no harm, but the likelihood of that scenario was going to be pretty slim. If I ate bird hopefully I’d have no qualms in making use of a byproduct of that food choice by wearing feathers – if the animal’s dead anyway then better not to waste anything – but we all draw our own lines in the sand and this is mine. Thankfully for the photos’ sake I found a Japanese couple in another part of the markets selling headbands with big glittery motifs on them and got one of those instead.

So, yesterday’s haul consisted of a glittery headband and green wool military cloak (both pictured), some vintage spectacles and a massive fake fur hat. Add some fluttery dresses, my new superhero boots and lots of face paint and I have some fun dressing up box moments ahead.

What are your plans for the week, dear readers?

- Getting snowed in to a nice cottage in the Scottish Borders, enjoying open fires and mulled wine and rescuing Benji from various scrapes including getting stuck in a hedgerow and falling through melting ice in to a very cold river. He’s clearly a city dog but had a whale of a time wading through the knee high snow.
- Hooping (hula) every day and trying to learn tricks from the amazing SaFire’s video tutorials.
- Getting stuck in to a great new bass job.
- Working on a couple of new SMW tunes for B-side / extra album track purposes.
- Checking album mixes and planning artwork.
- Listening to My Brightest Diamond, Hanne Hukkelberg and Wildbirds & Peacedrums.
- Giving up refined sugar on weekdays (surprisingly easy after the first few days).
- Fighting off the lurgy by starting up running again.
- Admiring my very own copy of the forthcoming new album “Mashpop & Punkstep” by The Young Punx – the first time I’ve seen my name in print as a songwriter

And watching hilarious videos on YouTube. Here’s my current favourite:

Bonbonbonbons!!