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by Guest Author February 14, 2022 9 min read
I’ve been running businesses for as long as I can remember. There’s a story my parents always tell of a teacher breaking up a fight between two kids in the playground and both kids pulling out a little bit of paper with “karate licence” written on it. A short interrogation of the offenders later and a 7-year-old me is in the headteacher’s office for, apparently, being a genius.
Ten Pence each I sold them for, exactly the price of a pack of crisps at break time. My punishment? I was put in charge of the tuck shop, running a team of 4, selling the crisps and drinks at break and doing the stock and take. We could learn a lot from Mr Patten.
The first business I ran that had anything to do with music was a by-product of being utterly fed up with the local music scene. Nobody wanted to book my band and I wasn’t willing to brown-nose anyone that potentially might, or ingratiate myself with the crowd, and so I did it myself with a little help from my friends.
While all the other lads from college were playing Pink Floyd covers and acoustic renditions of “Working Class Hero” for the tenth time that night down the local pub, we had booked our own function room to play in.
We played loud, we shouted a lot, and we had songs like “Countdown to Love”; a brash punk late-night booty call from Richard Whitely to Carol Vorderman, which had a 2 guitar, bass and drum arrangement of the last five seconds of the Countdown clock as the middle eight. There was also “Rocketfish”; a song about a fish with a rocket pack backpack who fought crime and apparently “shall never be dead-ed”. And then, obviously, we did the classic local band stuff; For Whom The Bell Tolls, Teenage Kicks, Where Is My Mind, Turning Japanese…all that.
We captured the hearts, minds, and spirit of fellow local moshers who were also trying to emotionally and physically navigate a deprived scouse spillover town filled with kids in trackies with names like “Danny Mac”, and drive-by abuse from happy hardcore hatchbacks with a hole in the exhaust. Zaney songs, fat riffs, fatter pants: our music brought them out in their droves. Our people were free and we turned our two-fish-and-five-loaves outfit into a steady diet of some of the best underground bands in the UK scene.
Before we knew what was going on, it had morphed into a walk-in crowd of 200-300 people every month. We had a police liaison, we were in national magazines, we’d made the front pages of the local papers for being a menace to society, and I had a full time job for 4 years. For any bands that were knocking around in the early 2000s onwards, Monsters Of Mayhem at The Quayside - that was me.
"The first night we set up where nobody would book our band": Marc, Soundlad Liverpool
From there, I have done equipment hire, studio consulting, live sound, dep’ing, function work…you just end up doing whatever comes up, and to be honest once you’re in, there’s no getting out. I’ve tried and here I am, 20 years later, writing a blog for a business involved in music about a business I run in music.
Most of the work I have done has been live sound, small venue stuff. I’ve mixed different bands of the same sort of genres in the same room (your “rock club” gig), the same band in different rooms (your “tour” gig), and then the same room with country one night and hardcore the next (the “live music venue” gig). You develop profiles in your head. A band walks in with a fiddle player, a lap-steel and 5 singers all holding guitars and wanting a mic, so you go, “right, ‘Callin’ Baton Rouge,’” and you apply that profile. I like to think of it as live production not sound engineering. It’s an imposition on the band at the end of the day but since there’s no objective route to a good sound - it’s bound to happen - you may as well bring something to the table. And you do, eventually. You start to develop a talent for being able to tease out the great things about the band you are working with that night; you learn how to present a cohesive and creative image that fits with the room for the people in it and eventually this becomes your reputation.
See, for most people there is a separation between your job and your hobbies, and music for the majority is a hobby. One night during the first week of a 72 consecutive night booking (with each night featuring three 45-minute sets), our singer was approached by someone who was in a band too, of course, who thought she lacked passion and should “give a little more”. And granted, when you have a further 65 dates ahead of you, your commitment to making sure you entirely encapsulate the spirit of Tina Turner in her version of Proud Mary at the start of your third set, four days into a 72-day gig may indeed seem a little lacklustre to the passionate amateur. The reality, however, for a professional is entirely different. Whether you like it or not, your voice has to last the course. Whether you like it or not, sound check is for 30 minutes and the doors will open at 7:30. Whether you like it or not, there’s other people’s livelihoods at stake.
Don’t get me wrong, nobody in this business got their job down at the local job centre or received on-the-job training from a conscientious supervisor. We all got into this for the passion and all through different means, but at the end of the day there’s a job to be done and the true professional hasn’t got time for all the indulgences of the amateur. The professional is married to their industry in a way the singleton amateur can’t understand - and that’s fine.
In another one of these famous stories from my childhood, I put two wires from my Tandy Electronics Lab in the neutral and live sockets of my bedside plug, secured them in place with my Thomas The Tank Engine night light and blew every fuse in the house when I switched it on. My Grandads fault. He was a huge radio enthusiast and a bit of a legend in the amateur radio world; he taught me everything I know. I’m going to let you in on a little secret now. Ham radio guys are like the illuminati of the electronics world. They’re embedded in every facet of the electronics and signal processing industry. They have little ways of spotting each other, little emblems they wear, and they have code names that start with things like “G1”, or “M7”, or “2E3”. The headquarters of the Radio Society of Great Britain are actually situated in a hut in Bletchley Park which, for the uninitiated or anyone who hasn’t seen “The Imitation Game”, was a top secret facility during World War II where Alan Turing created the world’s first computer to help crack the German codes. Turns out if you can build a radio you can build anything, and everyone in the business knows this.
Starting a pedal company? It’s in there somewhere. In our first year-and-a-bit as a company, SoundLad Liverpool has built nearly 750 pedals, an absolutely cracking start and we appreciate every sale. But in a wider view, we’re still quite a small outfit. From what experiences I have had so far, I think I can probably do the old man thing and offer up a couple of pointers, but I certainly couldn’t give a definitive guide because I’ve got no idea how it happened! So for the “skip ahead to the good bits” types:
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