For those not quite familiar with it, Tidal is a new(ish) music service which specialises in high-quality audio and falls under the banner of mega-star rapper Jay Z. It’s received a lot of press recently, having been promoted with huge publicity events at which the highest and mightiest of the music industry, such as Mr. Beyoncé himself, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Daft Punk, Kanye West and many others, have ostensibly signed up to it (Madonna seemingly needed to climb the table to do so; probably her sciatica - my mum’s got that, and she’s getting really fed up with it). It’s been touted as an epic, game-changing, revolutionary, historic, momentous, ridiculously superlative new way in which we consume music, apparently, and in no way at all is it simply just a celeb Spotify or Deezer, no siree.
However, in spite of this obscenely overboard, glitzy fanfare, Tidal is not doing well, it seems. In fact, it’s doing incredibly badly, and will probably go down in history as an abject failure, as this report by Forbes appears to suggest.
Promotion is the life-blood of consumer media business, so why is such a heavily-touted project tanking so dreadfully? A quick view of the promotional video put out on YouTube (which has 1.5m views, rather tellingly) could shed some light on this, both in terms of content and delivery:
That’s right: our debut EP is now available for all our fans to purchase over the internet. Over the next couple of weeks, it will go online at all major stores, such as iTunes, Google Music Store, Amazon MP3, and so on, as well as numerous streaming sites, like Spotify, Deezer, and many more.
It’s been a long time since we updated this, but we’re back with a bang! We’ve got a lovely new logo:
and, most importantly, we have an EP:
Yours truly were booked by London promoters HotVox to play a launch gig for our 4-song EP at The Workshop at Roadtrip Bar on Old Street, Shoreditch, and there were lots of people there to hear the news and show their support. All very much appreciated.
The venue itself is great, with lots of ambience, a sweet sound set-up and enthusiastic patrons, so it felt like we fit right in. Certainly made it easy for us to throw ourselves into our performance, to which we got a good reaction.
The set list:
1. The Speed Of Trees (cover, Ellis Paul) 2. Worth (original from the EP) 3. The Londoneer (original from the EP) 4. Echoes (original from the EP) 5. Something True (original from the EP) 6. Trusty Chords (cover, Hot Water Music) BONUS: Wake Me Up (cover, Aloe Blacc/Avicii)
That last one was courtesy of the very kind folks at HotVox, who seemed to be rather enjoying our set as well. Much appreciated, people!
Quite a number of people picked up copies of the album, which we had there in CD format. It’s currently still only physical, but watch this space as we’re in the process of sorting out online availability, which should be coming very soon.
A big thank you to everyone who came out and showed their support, to HotVox, and to the lovely guys at The Workshop; it all combined to make a fun night that was certainly memorable for us!
Ben: Where to start? A lot of South America, for a start - Peru’s been on my list for years, and I’d love to visit Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador. Canada looks beautiful, and Shanghai looks amazing, as does Hong Kong, Bali and New Zealand. Australia is a definite.
Really, I just want to travel the world. I’m already massively jealous of Sunil, whose house is festooned with souvenirs from all the places he’s been.
To those who were waiting, my apologies for the late report. Long story short, I decided to celebrate last night by getting drunk and mixing drinks. I’m at an age now that I just can’t do this any more with impunity: my body, without fail, punishes me for it, and I don’t seem to be able to learn my lesson. Consequently, I’ve spent most of Sunday hung over. Living the rock star life already!
Anyway, there was plenty of cause for celebration: this was probably our best gig to date, in one of the best venues we’ve ever had the privilege to play in. We’d played Proud Camden, in the famous Stables Market, once before, last year, and we had a great time. It’s a lovely venue, with great acoustics, a professional and skilled sound crew, and lots and lots of people giving it the kind of atmosphere performers live for.
One of the more common questions that comes up is “What are your influences?" I admit, not particularly often, but it does come up. As with most things, however, there is always more than one answer, and with The Dark Coast, that counts double. Sunil will be talking about his soon, but in the meantime I’ll discuss some of mine.
The main influences aren’t actually other musicians, but ideas, or, rather, ideals of how I want my music and The Dark Coast’s music to sound. A lot of it comes from other musicians, but sifting through all of them has given me cores of ideals that become guiding principles for my song-writing. Other musicians are a subject that I’d like to deal with later, because each one has affected me in some way or another, and I’d like to do them due honour by discussing them separately and in depth. For now, it seems to me to make sense if I discuss the general concepts they all coalesced to form in my head, and consequently guide my writing.
We’d been looking forward to this one. I (Ben) had been probably driving friends and acquaintances mental on social media with my tweets, re-tweets, posts, shares and just general banging on about it. But this was going to be our first time at Arch 635 in Clapham, which is still a schlep for most people, despite becoming much more popular as a party area in recent years, and getting better transport links. Therefore, we needed to make sure not just that people knew about it, but that their attendance was a big deal to us.
We’re getting up a proper head of steam here, it seems. We now have two gigs booked for the next week, playing at the Grafton pub in Kentish Town, the details of which can be seen here:
Well, we’re off to a decent start. Having played a “pre-debut debut” trial run at the Open Mike Night at the Grafton pub in Kentish Town, we’ve got ourselves another booking today (Sunday, 18 Aug 2013) at the super-cool Bar Vinyl in Camden. It’s at 20:00, so if you’ve read this in time, come on down!
If you like what you hear, come down to our gigs! We intend to tell the entire world (well, those listening at least) the moment we book them, so keep watching this space for updates.