Wide Days

The second incarnation of the Wide Days mini festival/music industry event – an offshoot of the popular music business networking Born To Be Wide – has grown into quite an event.
Gatherings such as these are a regular appearance on the music calendar in Scotland, and are often in a sense, much of a muchness, with familiar faces making up both audience and panels.
Maybe it’s that it’s in Edinburgh, with the M8 trek from the Scottish music industry’s traditional heart putting off some attendees, though the dedicated veterans are still in attendance. However, the numbers seem to be bolstered by local musicians and promoters, who pack out the Teviot Hall in the city’s university area.

There’s a variety of panels, where representatives of Song By Toad and Chemikal Undeground debate the great digital versus DIY debate (verdict, a draw, apparently), and the radiomangetic crew offer a workshop on best promoting yourself online (Twitter and Facebook are unsurprising staples, though their specific advice will have sent a few delegates home to update their profiles.

There’s also a panel on getting your music placed in films, and doubtless a few CDs would have been pressed into the hands of the panelists who dispense advice on the best way to approach film producers, as well as on the quality of the recordings. Though the best anecdote comes from when the conversation strays into the area of royalties and composer Malcolm Lindsay relates how he and a pal request each other’s tunes for airplay on Radio Scotland, and sink a few beers when the PRS cheques come in.

For many of these showbiz veterans, rather than the wide-eyed students, the chat is the most entertaining part of the afternoon’s proceedings. The keynote Q&A is a case in point, as Barry Wright of Regular Music tells some tall tales drawn from his 40-odd years in the business, which have seen his company grow from club nights and punk gigs to stadiums and Hogmanay parties via mopping up sewage from Tina Turner’s dressing room. He also relates his part in the Velvet Underground’s first ever soundcheck, though – despite prompting from host Olaf Furniss – he keeps his story on Stevie Nicks, a straw and the unusual ingestion of certain substances on the sensible side of libel.

Of course, such occasions are – notionally – all about the music. And Wide Days has organised some free showcase gigs which means that the chat can stop and the listening can begin.
Letters open up proceedings at Sneaky Pete’s. Like most of the bands, from Edinburgh and like most Edinburgh bands currently, they’re not your standard setup. Precisely, they’re three guys with guitars, augmented by a female cellist who provides backing vocals. So what should be standard indie pop with an anthemic edge has just that wee bit more depth to it and some strong songwriting means we can see why they’ve been deemed important enough to appear in front of the crowded bar of movers and shakers.

Paws, I would have to say, may not have been taking advice from panels such as the ones earlier in the day. It’s common to start your demo, and your set, with your strongest tunes. However, the three-piece Glasgow combo instead opt for a guitar instrumental which is kinda sludgey and lacking any real character – well, until the final segment which sports some ear-catching chord sequences. However, they throw some vocals into the mix and the next four numbers pick up considerably – the band have some clear grunge leanings, but despite obvious comparisons to Dinosaur Jr (and the Ramones, oddly) they have enough hooks in their locker to, again, fully justify their place on this bill.

Which moves up the road to the Cabaret Voltaire. Rachel Sermanni offers a contrast to the full-on band sound of her predecessors. She’s returned from SXSW recently and copes well with being a solo act in front of a busy, chatty room. One of a gaggle of female singer-songwriters who have followed in the stead of Thom, MacDonald etc, her accent is not dissimilar to these, that slightly strangulated vocal style no longer a distinctive trait and one which makes any ‘punchlines’ in what is, we presume, a funny ditty about a burger van, largely incomprehensible. However, with some nicely soaring vocals a la Joni Mitchell, it’s again easy to see why she is being touted as a possible next big thing.

Another recent returnee from Austin is a newly-shorn Withered Hand, aka Dan Willson. He informs us that when he visited his new US label the boss told him he was the spitting image of his ex-wife. Cue shears. Willson is, by his own admission, the “Visa guy”, the subject of a campaign to get him to Texas to perform after US border guards deemed his music not special enough. It may be that he’s “just another singer songwriter” – who isn’t? – but when he has a full band with him, as he does tonight, he is capable of taking on the world. His five backing musicians include Neil Pennycook aka Meursault on banjo and Alun Thomas, formerly of St Jude’s Infirmary and The Leg, and quite possibly Edinburgh’s top drummer. Their backing is high on impact and musicianship, the perfect complement to the Withered Hand canon. However, Willson’s songwriting stands true and proud despite this esteemed company, and as the whole band holler “John Harvey Kellog doesn’t want me for a sunbeam” in ‘Cornflake’, even the chattering classes at the back stop and listen. Hopefully a few of them have brought their chequebooks with them.

For the budding musicians present, hopefully they’ve been taking notes too, as they have all afternoon.
My own notes say “Wide Days – same time next year?”