For those of you who can't get enough of my musical masterpieces (that would be a majority of you, I'm guessing) there's good news. I've created my very own music channel on YouTube, available via this link.
The idea of creating a YouTube channele came from regular commenter, TropicalRob - it hadn't occurred to me before seeing what he'd done. The reason for creating the channel is that Google's Blogger (the system I'm now using to create and publish this very page) doesn't allow me to import audio files. I've no idea why they've decided on this restriction, but it means the only way to share my music with an eager world is to turn the songs into videos and upload them to YouTube (which, unsurprisingly, Google also owns), and then either point readers at the relevant url or embed the video in the blog page, like this:
That, by the way, is the first song I created on Garageband last year - I was still working on the bass sound. If you're wondering who The Fulminators are - well, they're me, obviously. I didn't use my own name in case I made a complete arse of myself technically (which I did, of course, but which I've since corrected).
I've uploaded all the tracks which I previously featured on the blog (including a guest slot for The Flying Bastardo Brothers' excellent cover version of "Close Up the Honky Tonks") - and have added a few more of my own for luck, including this tuneful ditty:
Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for a record company mogul to discover this treasure trove of talent, and my retirement will be swinishly comfortable - but I can't even indulge in that particular fantasy, because I simply can't figure out how anyone makes money from recorded music any more. My son - a keen music fan - never buys any, and I'm sure none of his friends do either. Not only is there Spotify, plus endless legal and illegal file-sharing services, but I've just discovered that you can turn YouTube videos into MP3 files at the click of a button: just click here, stick in the url of the YouTube video you want to convert, and it'll be in your iTunes folder in under a minute - I know it works, because I've tried it on my own stuff.
I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for record company execs: they brought a lot of this on their own head about ten years ago by being too arrogant to understand the threat posed by the internet to their basic business model - but how they're supposed to get anyone under 40 to pay for anything for the stuff they churn out is beyond me.
So it looks like I'll just have to eke out the pension after all!
I'll leave you with another of my early works - "Cool in D". I was still trying out all the bells and whistles at that stage. The guitar is slightly out of tune, but I quite like the effect:
When Rolf Harriss starts playing his wobble-board in the Churchill Insurance commercial the camera cuts to the great bull-dog who utters a quiet "Oh,no....".
ReplyDeleteAnd what, precisely, is wong with Rolf Harris (with or without two "s"s? I can still remember the enormous pleasure I derived as a nine-year old from "Sun Arise", on which the Aussie maestro used eight double basses to mimic the sound of a didgeridoo (an enormous instrument which he had not yet learned to handle).
ReplyDeleteJealousy, Concerned Bliog Fan, is a corrosive emotion.
I suspect the reason you feel comfortable about praising Rolf Harriss is that Baroness Thatcher once famously said that "Two Little Boys" was her favourite ditty.If memory serves, he used a couple of Flying Gibsons on the recording? To accomodate the current regime Rolf is currently re-writing this song under the title "Two Little Tossers". Gordon Brown was a great Arctic Monkeys fan and Alaister Campbell used to hang around furtively at Britney Spears concerts on his own. I believe old Ted Heath used to don his leathers and chains sometimes and bash out the odd Village People medley or two on the organ at Salisbury Cathedral. Great people all but strange musical tastes.
ReplyDeleteThere's some really good stuff here. If it's that easy to set up I might do one of my own.
ReplyDeleteAs CBF is obviously a Rolf Harris completist, he might want to check out the great man's backing vocals on one of the worst recordings ever to make it on to a piece of plastic, "Why am I living" by Jess Conrad. "Why indeed, Jess" is the only possible response. The producer obviously thought that the moody atmospherics of a song analysing the meaning of life would be enhanced by having a bearded Antipodean chirruping "Doo dumma yip yip, Doo dumma ding a ding" in the background.
You failed to mention "dolalashangbimshoola" and "longlongdoobyah". I'd never heard the record before finding it on YouTube just now. It is even worse than the classic "My Pullover". Jess Conrad was a very tough cockney geezer - he famously once tried to bite Heinz's nose off - so how he managed to keep a straight face while droning out this dross (the lyrics sound as if they were written by the Archbishop of Canterbury in one of his less lucid interludes) is a mystery. Who could possibly have believed anyone would want to buy it???
ReplyDeleteSetting up a channel on YouTube is, I assure you, ridiculously easy - or I wouldn't have managed it. What's amazing is that some people out there in the real world have actiually found it and listened to some of the songs! You just have to turn your MP3 song into a video (using iMovie or whatever) by sticking a title on the front and a still, stills or video in the background, export that to your desktop and then import it into YouTube using their handy "Upload" button. It takes a while the first time, but you get the hang of it in no time. And it's all anonymous, if you so desire.
Conradologists disagree on the vital question of which, with so much to choose from, is Jess's worst record. My vote would probably go to "Cherry Pie" for it's combination of off key singing, tunelessness and utterly banal lyrics. There is a particularly memorable moment where he tries to inject an erotic charge into the line "Give me some Cherry cherry pie" that once heard can never be forgotten.
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