Don't suck and don't give up
This week we held the first in a new series of 'Featured Artist' workshops for young people attending our Accelerator and Get Vocal programmes. Our special guest was Itch, former frontman for ska/punk/hip hop band the King Blues, who has recently launched his solo career, playing every state of America on the Vans Warped tour.
Itch has been a guest artist with acts such as Faithless, Kate Nash and Scroobius Pip. His spoken word poetry has been commissioned by the BBC and shown on Channel 4. His band the King Blues released four albums and headlined many sold out major tours in UK, Europe and Japan. He's been on the front cover of Kerrang!, Rock Sound and the NME. He's currently touring the UK as main support for Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip.
The 12 young people who attended our workshop included bands, DJs and singer songwriters, aged 13-16. Itch had a natural rapport with the young people and REALLY listened to what they had to say. First he got us thinking about how important it is for upcoming artists to know WHO you want to be and WHY you deserve success.
WHO - Who do you want to be? Eg. A fun all-girl indie-pop band playing festivals and touring the UK and Europe.
WHAT - What is your audience? Eg. Indie kids, students, 14-30 year olds, intelligent free thinkers, people who like to explore deeper than mainstream music, cool, creative people.
WHERE - Where are your audience from? Eg. Cities, schools, universities, independent venues.
WHEN - What is the timescale for achieving your your goal? Eg. In the next 5 years.
WHY - Why do you deserve this? Eg. Because there is a gap in the market for young female singer/ songwriters, we work really hard, we rehearse every day and write brilliant well-crafted songs.
Being armed with this information will keep you focused - and help you write songs which will connect with YOUR audience.
Then we put together our 5-year plans, thinking about what we can achieve, broken down into realistic chunks. Here's an example for our all girl indie-pop band.
EACH DAY - write 8 lines of lyrics and 2 riffs
THIS WEEK - write a complete song, get 5 new likes on Facebook
THIS MONTH - put 2 new songs in the set, play 1 gig, get 20 new likes on Facebook
THIS YEAR - 10 great songs in the set, play 10 gigs, 200 new likes on Facebook
IN 5 YEARS - a headline tour, regular festival appearances, cover of NME
In doing these exercises, we picked up lots of vital info along the way.
Itch's top tips -There is no such thing as 'overnight success'. You need to build a career that will span many years and survive changes in fashion by growing your grassroots audience - through sheer hard work.
Don't jump on anyone else's bandwagon - it will take a young band a few years to break through, so by the time you are ready, that bandwagon will be abandoned on the side of the road with a flat tyre. Be yourself and try to predict what people will want in the future - music goes in cycles.
The artists who get managers/agents/record deals are the ones who don't really need them - because they've already built their own audience themselves, got gigs, booked tours, released music. No one wants to represent an artist with no fans.
Think about writing songs for other people as well as yourself. Get into writing lyrics even if you're not the singer. There's not much money in selling records anymore, so song writing can be a good way to generate income.
Songwriting - try to write something every day. You will improve by just doing it a lot. And we mean A LOT.
To get really good at something you need to do it for at least 15,000 hours.
There are really only 2 things you need to do to 'make it' - 1) Don't suck. 2) Don't split up.
LINKSCME's Accelerator project http://www.cme.org.uk/projects/Accelerator iTCH http://itchsmixes.com/