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

Digital versions will be available on a pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth basis from 1st September, with a special live EP available for donations of £10 and upwards (extra generous people get more stuff!).

Four different physical packages are also available, with the CD, DVD with a whole heap of video content and an exclusive making-the-album studio film, a live EP download and a gorgeous photo / lyric book up for grabs, plus one-off hand decorated photo postcard sets, badges and whatever else I can cram in, lovingly tied with ribbon by my own fair hands.

Click here to listen to the tracks on Bandcamp, read more about the four packages and make your orders.

Thanks so much for your continued support – this really is a completely independent project, funded and driven by this one busy lady and her passion to make music and art and great content for you lovely people. Enjoy – and please sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date with all the forthcoming video releases, too!

As always, check out the She Makes War website for all the latest video content, photos and contact details.

* SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MUSIC – PLEASE TELL A FRIEND ABOUT SHE MAKES WAR!! *

I need your help!

To get in to the next stage of the Max It Challenges competition to win £20,000 I need you to vote as many times as you can until 11th July. You can vote every day from your Twitter / MySpace / YouTube / Facebook account, which means if you hold all four accounts you can actually vote four times per day. The awesome “Scared To Capsize” video, a collaboration between myself and Judy Jacob, starring my friends Bennycrime, Bass and Kat Bax, currently stands in third position and I truly believe it deserves to win!

Here is what I plan to do with the winnings:

TOTAL SUM: £20,000

£1000 = split between two charities – Red Cross and Madre
£3000 = pay off part of album recording and associated costs
£2000 = bump up the pay for all video cast and crew so far, who have all worked for free or low pay because they’re lovely and supportive and like what I’m trying to do
£3000 = travel costs, food and lodging for my planned European tour in September (two of us are travelling on InterRail)
£5000 = in the pot for future recording, the plan is to do a series of EPs starting with one in October / November

That leaves £6000 left over to use on the remaining ten videos to accompany the album tracks plus to pay for duplication and printing of approximately 200 copies of the album and associated videos on CDs/DVDs with fancy artwork to be given away for FREEEEEE along with other expressions of my gratitude including a series of webcasts, posters, photographs and other goodies.

Independent artists rarely get the opportunity to work with sums like this, and it’s tantalisingly in my reach. I would be soooo grateful if you gave me that chance. I do my very best to continue to produce quality content for everyone interested in my music to enjoy for free and will continue to do so regardless of whether I win this competition or not, but it would be so much easier with a bit of capital behind me.

So please…vote now!

The last couple of weeks have been a blur of freelance odd-jobs, from photographing builder’s renovations to a mental hospital to taking portraits at a beautiful birthday party to filming male dancers rehearsing to facilitating workshops on geeky web tools to teaching guitar to kids to Audiobooing political discussions. I’ve been here, there and everywhere and my brain is full of apertures and framing and creating shot sequences and is feeling a little overwhelmed at this point. I’m hoping to get a proper day off everything soon, but not until I’ve got my teeth in to the edits for “I Am” and “Scared To Capsize”, the video I shot with Judy Jacob and assorted talented friends on Saturday.

The premise for this one came from the Kigu costume I wore in Let This Be. Kigurumi is the name for performers who wear costumes which represent cartoon characters, often animals, and I found out about them on Twitter in the coldest part of winter when I was complaining about how freezing it was in my house. Apparently this Japanese craze is starting to catch on in the UK with people buying suits to wear around the house – I just had to try it.

I thought wearing a Kigu suit would be a great way to try and cheer up the sad clown in LTB and wanted to build a whole video around them for STC. I was lucky enough to find The Die Mortal Room, a small arts workshop that make weird and wonderful handmade Kigu characters to order and was able to hire a unicorn, badger, lion and penguin for the day. Big thanks to Ceridwen for being so amazingly helpful!

To the story – I knew I wanted to be in a paper boat, lost at sea, heavy of heart and searching for likeminded souls in a lonely world, and Judy created a beautiful, melancholy and heartwarming story around that simple starting point bringing in supremely talented propmaker, costume designer and performance artist Aste Amundsen to create the boat and assorted paper props my animal friends would carry on their quests. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what she’d made, it was so much more amazing than I ever pictured and the footage is really stunning.

I lucked out with my co-stars once again. Kat Bax and Bass you might remember clowning around in Let This Be, this time playing an Amy Winehouse-esque Badger and a sleepy Lion respectively, and I was very pleased to get to work with Ben James who threatened to steal the show as icy superhero-in-waiting “The Benguin”. There was much hilarity all day and though wearing our animal suits around Shoreditch was largely ignored by the general public (bit too Nathan Barley for them, perhaps?) we thoroughly enjoyed romping around and I had a lovely time hanging with the 3D people for the first time in what felt like weeks.

Happily the Benguin found time in our busy shooting schedule to make a few announcements to the nation, please click the links to watch and make sure you visit Ben’s website too:

The Benguin

Benguin Doctrine

Benguin Attack!

Check out the full set of stills here. vBlog episode to follow shortly.

Images 1 & 2 in this post courtesy of Dina Karklina, image 3 by me.

Please download it for free here and share with your friends – and if the government send you a letter telling you off for downloading stuff you tell them to come and talk to me, ‘kay?

What excuses are there not to take a trip to your local polling station today? I mean, what good excuses? One of my favourite bloggers, Penny Red, puts it very well:

“…if you don’t get out there and tick whatever box you need to tick, right now if you’re at home, or as soon as you can get out of work, I shall consider whatever happens tomorrow your fault. And you should too, because it will be. Turn in your internet license, you’ve got no more business ranting at empty cyberspace if you can’t put your shoes on and engage with hard copy the one time it matters.” [read the full, excellent, post here]

I just can’t understand how anyone, particularly any woman, can be so blase about not voting. We haven’t exactly been doing it for very long – it was only in 1918 that women over 30 were allowed to vote, and universal suffrage wasn’t implemented until 1928. So that’s just 82 years of being allowed to vote equally alongside men. I don’t see any good reason not to take advantage of this hard won right. Women died for this!

We get precious little opportunity in this society to affect the powers that be, but if every American citizen in 2008 had decided they couldn’t be bothered to put their cross in the box the world would be a very different place. We don’t exactly have an Obama in the running, but we do have evil lurking and we need to bat it away with whatever means we have. Or we could all not vote and let Nick Griffin continue to be taken seriously as a politician.

So me, the Boy and Mister Benji are off down to the local primary school to put crosses in boxes and cross our fingers for change. I will be voting Liberal Democrat again today and I hope my fellow lefties turn out in force, but better to vote anything (except BNP, obviously) than not at all.

So go – vote! Let’s do it!

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…

Photo by Jonny Hughes

It’s been a pretty bad week, all in all, kicking off with being fired from my shiny new session job (more on that shortly) and ending last night with my house being burgled while I was out performing at LDNtwestival – thank you Twitter buddies for watching me play, Twitpiccing me and sending me lovely messages post-burglary. You’re the best.

They took all my really important filming gear (Canon XH A1 plus Rode NTG2 mic, batteries etc), my Canon 50D, some lenses and my Macbook Pro, which thankfully I backed up really recently – very unlike me. I am insured, so fingers tightly crossed there aren’t any problems replacing the stuff. What upset me was that my dog Benji was home, and when I couldn’t get in because the chain was over the front door I had to wait for the police to come and force their way in before I could give him a big cuddle. He was really upset but not harmed, and today he’s bounced right back.

There’s a nice end to the week though, with She Makes War getting its very first mention in the national press. Jude Rogers wrote an awesome article for the Guardian about angry women in music and I get a mention alongside luminaries like Kristin Hersh, Kathleen Hanna and Joan Jett. This is a girlhood dream come true for me!

I feel very privileged, but I need to clarify my statement a little: the comment I made about problems as a female session musician comes from an experience I had a few years ago when I was booked in to audition for Alesha Dixon’s band. The audition got cancelled at the last minute and I was told it was because her management were “not interested in female musicians”. This Monday I was let go from my job with the other female singer mentioned in the article and was told it was because she wanted an all-male band. So, on Monday I made sure the Guardian knew that I was no longer playing in the band so they wouldn’t call me “Laura Kidd of [said band]“. I have since been told there were also other reasons for the sacking, and as there are a zillion reasons, spurious and non-spurious, that session musicians can be fired on the spot AND as there are no proper agreements, contracts or severance payment schemes (yes, ouch!) there’s little else I can do about the situation except to make it clear that I am unhappy with being told I’m fired for being a woman. I am certainly not courting publicity on the back of it, to be honest I just can’t wait for this week to be over.

Funnily enough, that comment about Dixon was a very tiny part of a largely upbeat and breezy set of answers to the interview questions. When I wrote the responses a week and a half ago I was feeling really good about being a woman working in the music biz – if I was answering them this week my answers would be quite different.

But hey, in the spirit of focussing on the good things, I’ll leave you with a bit of last night’s Twestival performance, filmed by @b33god – I’m off to file some insurance claims.

[The parts in italics are what I would have added if I didn't care about them getting pissed off and ignoring my whole email...also read Seymour's post for God Is In The TV for his delightfully verbose message.]

Don’t Close Down 6Music! PLEASE. You idiots – how is this not obvious!!! You will deny people with non-mainstream musical tastes from being given the opportunity to hear amazing material from lesser known but more vital bands than those who are peddled to us by the majors – how much more watery weak British R&B can the nation stomach? How many more documusosoap singles must we scream along to, clawing at our ears in pain and frustration? – plus those smaller artists (myself included) will be denied the opportunity to reach those potential new fans. 600,000 listeners might seem paltry to you as a big institution but is a life altering number of people to someone like me. There are numerous obvious ways for you to cut back in other areas of your operations which will more than cover the relatively small running costs of this vital station – I for one would happily forsake much of your appalling display of “comedy” programming in return for a decent radio station, BBC Three is a waste of space and this really is stating the bleeding obvious but you know Mark Thompson gets paid a lot, right? - I hope you see the importance of doing so.

Yours sincerely
Laura Kidd
She Makes War

It’s been a relaxing day so far with much-needed time to catch up on emails and other web-based stuff, including catching up on uploading photos from the trip so far – you can see them all here but these are some of my favourites:

Once again I’m bowled over by the friendliness and generosity of the Mexican people. Watching from the van as we drove from Toluca to Aguascalientes yesterday it’s clear that everyday life is constantly on display and there’s no hiding from the fact that poverty is normal here. Harsh concrete blocks with no roofs house whole families, kids play in the dirt and pet dogs wander freely, left long ago to fend for themselves with mixed results – it’s the saddest roadkill I’ve ever seen – and yet the people smile and chat and thank you for visiting them.