Reviews

Well, first BBC Radio 2 airplay and now a really good review posted on Folk and Roots - http://www.folkandroots.co.uk/reviews9.html#allthings. We haven’t made a bad start to the album promotion!

It’s a strange feeling, opening up your work for other people to critique. It’s like opening your front door and letting people who you’ve never met before loose in your house, picking fault with things, expressing their loudest opinions about your choice of curtains or the state of your carpets (well, unless of course you’re a Z list celebrity who seem to welcome that sort of thing).

Granted, we’ve made a hugely positive start, but for every positive opinion – there is the likelihood that somewhere down the line there will be a person who isn’t going to like what we’re doing and are going to document that fact. It will be interesting how we react to that. Part of me hopes we take the view that a review is a review, and that one person’s opinion doesn’t mean everyone is going to think like that. That you just need to brush the negative views aside and concentrate on impressing the people that are in to what you are doing. That is the correct way to deal with it.

However, like any act – we’ve spent a considerable amount of time and money creating, honing, recording, mixing and mastering these tracks, and we’re pretty attached to them. Yeah, like anything we could look back and think we could have done this and that better. We’re sure we could have done more in the mixing but time was short. On the whole though we’re pleased with the product, happy it portrays us and the music in a positive light and believe it is a good representation of what we are currently about. So, the fact that someone could slate it is likely to be quite a hard pill to swallow – even if it is just one opinion.

Being a reviewer of folk based artists myself, I know of multiple big names in the genre that have blacklisted certain reviewers (myself not included) after they gave them bad press. However, unless you put your record out there, open it up for critique and take the hit if it is panned, not only do you never improve, you’ll never make any money – as without people commenting on your material whether good or bad, you’ll never get any publicity.

So, we’ll wait and see. So far, we’re very very happy. We’ll hope that it’ll all be positive, but as soon as the first negative one hits the web – we’ll be on here to rant about it! At least then it’ll be out of our systems and we can get on with things……

Gigs this coming week by the way are a short set at The Farnham Maltings tomorrow (Friday) at about 10pm. Next week we are in the capital for back to back gigs at The Station Hotel in Lewisham on Thursday 9th as part of The Icarus Club nights and then the following evening we’re in Leicester Square for a return to The Spice of Life.

Be good to see you at any of those.