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Eddy Says
Eddy Says: Turning Losers into winners
By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Monday 2 February 2009
As I write, my car is being buried under the biggest snowflakes I’ve seen here for years and I’m wondering if I’ll actually make it home from Losers HQ outside Reading and get to play this gig on Thursday.
Jim ‘Mountains Of Boutros’ Hanner (who won that Dub Pistols Remix competition back in the day) and his lovely girlfriend just texted me to see if I’d come and have a snowball fight on Hampstead Heath. God I wish I could, but Tom and I have decided to completely change the Losers live set for our first ever headline show and we’re deep in rehearsals. I know it’s making things more difficult than they might be, but we really wanted to make this show special. This will be our fifth gig, I think. The past shows since our debut at Secret Garden have been pretty much the same set – we’ve just dropped a song or two for the shorter club sets.
We’ve had some amazing feedback from these gigs from all kinds of people. Matty Infadels said he’d “give his right arm to be in a band like this”, Marcus Midimidis said the Reading show was “the best gig we’ve been to for years”. Even that buttock-clenchingly insincere woman who won X Factor’s manager said it was “brilliant and made total sense”. The only bit of negative feedback, more constructive criticism, so far came from Matty, who pointed out that because we haven’t released anything, or even put stuff up on MySpace yet, there is no familiarity in the set, and that’s what we were lacking.
So, we thought about this, took the advice to heart. Tom and I both felt inspired by Steph and Dave Dewaele’s Nite Versions live show and South Central’s laptop DJ sets enough to take a fresh look at our set and re-examine how we do it. Before, we just ran through some of our songs in their entirety. This time we are doing some of the remixes we’ve done for other artists live onstage, with live guitars and bass and some keyboard elements and, of course, a lot of live effects, manipulation and triggering stuff on Ableton. It’s given the set the familiarity it lacked, while the backbone of the set is original Losers material.
I know some of you are coming on Thursday. Thank you so much for your support, it really means a lot. Unfortunately the promoter of this show has only given me and Tom five guestlist places(!). So, a lot of people we know are going to have to pay to get in and we’re sad about that. Promoters of shows have their agendas and we have to respect that, but me and Tom really want to do a London showcase somewhere decent and at least get an unlimited half price concessions list, so we can offer the whole Remix community a ticket for way less than anyone else would pay. We’d give them all away to you guys but we’ve yet to find a promoter brave enough to do that. One day. Perhaps somebody reading this now will think, ‘mmmmm, I’d like to put on a Losers showcase and give enough tickets away to make the share of the bar worthwhile’. Food for thought.
If any of you see the show on Thursday, I’d warmly welcome any kind of feedback, positive or negative, they are equally valuable.
Biggups and snowballs,
xx eddy
Eddy Says from this edition of the CMU Remix Update.
