Blog: Martin Fry In A Caravan Park

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You find me today back at work after a DELIGHTFUL week in Majorca (which I shall tell you about in GRATE detail another time), sorting through various emails and also gearing up for the Still Valid promotional campaign, which began this morning as I posted the first few promo CDs out. There's a TONNE more that will be heading for the postbox over the next couple of weeks as very slowly this THING what we have been toiling over for three or four years gently reveals itself to the universe.

It's all very exciting, but also SCARY: what if we go to all this effort and nobody actually cares? Whilst on holiday we read The Times most day (it was the Least Awful UK Newspaper available) and one day I read a really interesting interview with Martin Fry out of ABC. In it he talks about the way that his fame DIPPED, as he stopped doing proper gigs and found himself singing along to backing tapes at holiday camps, then gradually worked his way back to doing new material at the Albert Hall via a string of nostalgia tours. It was REALLY interesting (as pointed out by The Words In My Article, this is not surprising as it turned out to have been written by All Round Marvellous Mr Mark Ellen) as this version of The ROCK Life Cycle is fairly new. In olden times bands would usually burn out after a few years then die poor, or sometimes get drug addled and reappear as if from nowhere decades later. Martin Fry and others like him seem to have done it differently, never giving up on performing, managing to work through the lean years while they wait for their core audience to grow up, marry, have kids, and then find themselves 20 to 30 years later once again looking for gigs to go to.

Apart from, as I say, being a fascinating read in and of itself it also made me wonder about my own, somewhat less auspicious career in ROCK. I've noticed over the past few years that gig offers have MASSIVELY declined - largely,I think, because I've stopped ASKING, but once you stop asking other people stop asking YOU - and there hasn't exactly been a MAD RUSH of people intrigued at the very IDEA of the new album. What if we're at the point now where, on our own scale, we go from Mega Domes to Caravan Parks? This is slightly worrying as playing Caravan parks would be something of a step UP for us - what would the equivalent be? Busking? Shouting out of the window?

This is probably all NERVES that come as part and parcel of the EXCITEMENT of finally having physical copies of the album - hopefully in a couple of months we will be sharing cocktails with David Bowie on Top Of The Pops (note to self: it's been a while, maybe check yr pop cultural references are up to date) then heading off for a Peel Session. Whatever happens, I can't WAIT for people to actual HEAR what we've done. I listened to it for the first time in over a week on the way into work this morning, and it sounds BLOODY GRATE!

posted 23/5/2016 by MJ Hibbett

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