And yet you cannot find the new words if you do not shatter the old words – Carl Jung

During the summer I did a number of seminars about songwriting at festivals using techniques such as cutup which was pioneered by William S Burroughs. This is the technique that David Bowie made famous in a documentary in the 1970’s which described how he wrote songs. There are lots of possibilities with this technique; the idea is to allow a creative approach which is accidental and synchronistic in order to come up with ideas. Apart from the now famous act of cutting up magazines into phrases and you can do crazy things like create new words out of old, playing around with the meaning of words.

One technique takes famous phrases and then by twisting those around making them mean something else. Sometimes to create something new or have a new approach in the way that you invent ideas or run your business requires you to break your existing ideas to do something different maybe by doing the reverse of what you are currently doing.

So instead of teaching one-to-one you should teach in groups, instead of teaching from your own house you should travel to other people. Sometimes doing something completely different for a time may open up other possibilities for you.

Doing something habitually is not necessary always going to lead to a good place, so much of our behavior including the choice of words is a habit which needs to be shaken up for change to happen.

There has been a lot of research into language and how it frames thinking, is it possible that thinking in one language can make you comprehend certain things that another language will not? It is interesting that Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Sigmund Freud were all German (or Austrian) whereas the existentialists tended to be French was it possible that for deep analytical thinking you had to be German or certainly speak the German language because that deep analytical thinking is difficult in French? Maybe French tend towards a more poetic lyrical thought process which is fine for existentialists.

Frank Zappa made an interesting point that rock music was more suited to Germanic based language than Latin-based language and I would agree with him on that. So use language wisely because it could be the road to success in any venture from the marketing of an idea to the lyrical design of a song and it only takes one song to make your fortune.

And if you cannot find the words invent them.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in a rock band with the tricks of the trade

What to do if things get difficult and the work dries up.

Sometimes things get rather tight and we need to make opportunities happen. As a friend of mine said once, ‘the trick to money was having some’.

So what to do?

1. First seeing the problem coming from a distance. Easier said than done but some of these things will take time so give yourself time for things to happen and act fast.

2.Think of a number of possibilities that open the floodgates to bring working, sell things, do other related stuff for instance sell equipment, do more lessons, get gigs, do talks, fix instruments for people and get your name out there.

4. Lock them together; does one thing lead to another? For instance a new pupil needs a new guitar, books, others to play along with. Create a chain reaction; later they can go to your gigs et cetera

5. Can you broaden your area of market, travel more, teach on the Internet, work at another school college et cetera

6. Peter Drucker the business writer said that there are three ways to expand business all other things are an expense. You need more customers, who buy more, and more frequently. Think about this it is really the only way

7. Build alliances, there are people that you can help and by extension they can help you. Cooperative ideas of offers from other businesses to one another can really do amazing things. We can expand on this greatly in another article

8. Referrals possibly the best way to expand. Ask then reward.

Remember the best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. So build up your resources when things are good to tide you through the rough weather. Think guns and butter; hard resources versus soft buy things that have value instead of things that melt away. Think about this when you’re buying things have they resale value? Interesting areas here are second guitars and second-hand music books that you can sell or even rent. In the case of guitars this is a really good way of trading because it doesn’t matter how battered they become or are they just need to be playable and then they become a continuous form of income.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk next year’s camp will be in the last week of July so get in early.

Keith Richards once said in an interview that songs were out there all around you, all you needed was to reach out and grab one.

 I like this idea along with the possibility that we do not have thoughts but thoughts have us. How else to explain the memes and ideologies that surface and then infect people from the great political thoughts and theories to what we become obsessed with and makes the news. I often ponder what happened to the flasher and the streaker, it seemed literally to expose itself in the 1970s. They all just go away? What possessed people? Some form of trickster maybe?

Often turning things around, thoughts having us making thoughts manifest and having some form of agency or spirit is powerful as it breaks the creative sensor and allows us to write. I like the NLP phrase about ‘it doesn’t matter if it’s not real, does it work?’

We need to open our minds for new ideas to enter like the muses of old to infect us, we need to be irrational willing to take ideas and turn them around; black needs to be white, white needs to be black the unreal needs to be the real and the real needs to be the unreal.

Scientific method is great but it is a tool, but scientism is like believing in the redemptive quality of an electric drill. I believe in the redemptive nature of the guitar (but I’ve seen the light, glittering of the machine heads).

Maybe we can change our lives by writing songs, following the idea of life mimicking art which is an idea that has infected people before but are strange examples of musicians and artists whose lives started to follow work they had produced. This has happened to me on a number of occasions which is taken me from ‘that is funny’, to, ‘that is odd’, to, ‘that is crazy’ to, ‘I had better right songs’.

The old blues men knew that songs had power to change things and that is why most old blues songs were active in things being able to change. In other words if my baby don’t love me no more, I know her sister will.

Blues camp this week and it is the 10^th anniversary. Lots of fun……………..

Some people be featured on an album but they don’t know it yet.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Give something back that hurts a little – Steve Martyn

In this society of risk adverse behaviour this is something which we have to embrace in order to achieve anything that moves us beyond where we currently are. Our society is full of legislation, attitudes and belief systems which move us away from anything that hurts or is even uncomfortable.

The foods that are good for us tend not to be the most tasty, certainly not the sweetest so that has led us to obesity and all the diseases that attach themselves to that condition and those which weirdly are a form of malnutrition due to us not consuming a wide enough range of foodstuffs, considering that we are in an affluent society we eat less diverse but more in a rationalised choice.

To become a great musician or an athlete you have to put in the time forsaking other things that may be sweeter in your life, like the computer game, or all the partying (if you have a life). The hours that a good musician puts in hurt and the fact that playing the guitar for three or four hours hurts your fingers and stretches the muscles to the point of cramp let alone the disappointment of not getting it right which does your brain in.

In a way it is a form of courtship with the spirit of music and creativity and should be viewed as such. There is no plan that works in courting a prospective lover you may know what you think you are doing but unless you adapt the plan to fit the person you are not going to get very far.

Making an offering or gift in courtship must be something that has value to you and them not something that you actually want to get rid of. When you give something like that it hurts a little.

In the past the great artists and players did not have anything to lose by taking a risk because life was shit anyway so it was worth the gamble. But from our perspective of comfortable, convenient lifestyles these risks are not undertaken, to our detriment. The reality is death is going to come and get you anyway so you may as well make the most of it while you are here.

A number of the young pupils that I teach come out with remarks such as ‘there will be a cure for cancer soon’ (I remember that being said when I was a young)’ In 20 to 30 years’ time we will be travelling to Mars et cetera et cetera. All this stuff is a dream to keep us going because when we get to Mars it will not be as good as we were told. it will be like it has always been, sold to people the suckers that will be populating it will be like the people that populated America and took it away from the indigenous people.

They will be indentured labour, people that are basically slaves bought and sold by land owners, that is how it was is done in the past and that’s how the future will play out but this time it will look like you have got a work contract with a big multinational company.

Think of the things that you’ve been promised in your life and they never quite work out to the utopian vision that you’re given and yet we fall for it over and over again. Why is that? If we looked at the hard realities and realised that anything that was worth having we have to work for and pay for in sweat and a bit of pain. So ladies and gentlemen pick up your guitars and play just like yesterday get down on your knees and pray, we won’t get fooled again.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days playing in a band learn the tricks of the trade.

The Germans know how to get the dust out of cushions

In the pursuit of the weird I spent some time in Berlin with a yoga group. As with all things creative I find that there is something to be learnt from other disciplines that can shine a light onto the musical world and on top of that I am looking for interesting venues to run Bluescampuk projects from in the next couple of years.

I have never been to Germany before and the possibility of going to the Kreutzburg area of the city was a great possibility as the graffiti art bohemian aspect seemed pretty cool to me.

The Germans seem very concerned with making sure that the rules are followed and that all things are undertaken seriously including following the instructions for the dynamic meditation that we found ourselves involved in. The deep rapid breathing was fine and then we came to the section where we were supposed to let it out. At that point the room was full of Germans beating the living crap out of the cushions and pillows and screaming at the soft furnishings. It all reminded me of Richard Bandler’s description of meeting Fritz Pearls for the first time. Pearls was the originator of the Gestalt therapy which Bandler described as someone beating the shit out of a harmless looking chair whilst the assailant screamed insults at the furniture as though it was his father.

I think that playing and writing music is a good release of the inner demons and is more beneficent to the furnishings of the house. I quite like the resident spirits of my cushions and chairs and I am sure they are happier that way with me serenading them to happiness than beating them into submission whilst I undergo some form of primal therapy.

Berlin outside of the Yoga Centre was fun and I enjoyed the vibe a great deal and I would certainly go back there, not so sure about the music in Germany in general as there seems to be a time warp quality to the listening from American AOR to retro reggae and punk mixed with some Kraftwork style stuff .

The euro pop style is also still quite a thing and it makes me realise how we can never again write a Euro Vision winner we just do not have the mindset for it.

The history of music and its impact on government control is something that we in the West find difficult to understand but in East Germany music was one of the main contributors to the fall of the communist regime.

Punk was one of the driving forces in youth culture that absorbed the Stasi and it trying to control the minds of the young. Enormous risks were undertaken by teenagers not just listening to the music but smuggling bands in from the West and forming their own bands and playing in secret places often churches in the East.

That relationship with music that we had in the UK in the 60s for change has lost much of its power that needs to be re found in the music that we create, but maybe without the Germanic sensibility.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

We trade shelter for comfort. – Martin Shaw

Discomfort certainly makes you remember things; go back to some your earliest memories and they may be something like falling of your bike or having an accident which hurt. If you reflect upon those times you will remember in detail elements such as what somebody said to you, what the weather was like and what you were wearing. All this is pretty amazing because you may have only been five at the time and it doesn’t matter how old you become you still remember that event. I would say that music created with some sort of trade of discomfort has more impact the music that is not traded in that way.

The trouble with modernity and the problem with technology is they exacerbate the human trait for taking the easy and most comfortable way, it was never always like this, once being creative went with the need to suffer for your art. Now I do not say this lightly because it sounds a little tongue in cheek if not insensitive to the likes of the great artists who die young.

The above quote from Martin Shaw a great storyteller and myth rememberer is in the trading of shelter for comfort something dies in us because they lack meaning. The trading of something that causes a little pain really connects you with the work.

Maybe this is the problem we have in society that we all become a bit soft and we do not like to take a risk because it makes us feel uncomfortable. I am not suggesting we will go around whipping ourselves(or maybe we should have a whip- round) but I think that we need to be more aware in a tactile sense of the world around us without ‘skin in the game’ nothing has any real value.

Getting out of a financial fix involves pain, changes in society nearly always do, changing habits that lead to environmental damage involve us being uncomfortable with feelings like ‘why spend so much money on personal care products’when you are eating rubbish and you are overweight and no one really cares about you anyway, kind of uncomfortable.

Think of how much money you would save if you could embrace being uncomfortable about what you wear, and what someone else thinks of you. Think about how that would affect your work if you could embrace that maybe you may not need to work in order just to make money maybe just doing something you enjoy.

The problem is that we have been conditioned to look for comfort and not shelter when we get a car we are encouraged to get the one that shows status same with holidays how many of us have gone to Disney because the children have to go.

The best time for contempory music seems to be when things are difficult, the aftermath of the war which culminates in rock n roll and the blues boom and then the sixties, the rise of the heavy rock and metal in the depressed 70’s then punk, hip hop etc. Compare this to when things become more comfortable the real feeling is lost again, the music becomes complex but lifeless.

Remember a good song is a good song on just a guitar and vocal we don’t need the latest gizmo, or the London Philharmonic Orchestra .Whatever it is that you can envisage keep it simple, try to keep your life simple for instance when you teach you do not need to teach in a fully equipped recording studio. If you have one fine but it is not a prerequisite to becoming a good teacher.

So let’s get uncomfortable and go and create something amazing.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk Rock Summer school for all instruments ………

Magic has been drained out of history by the historians. Gordon White

There has been a fundamental omission in the telling of the past not just our past history but also in the way that we understand music and it is the role of magic within that story. It is difficult for us to reconnect with the fundamental belief in magic that our predecessors had and that it was infused in everything that they did and by extension music and art was used to connect with this otherworldliness. I would say that today music that is disconnected from this otherness has no inner energy this is why root styles of music frequently have to come back into the popular music arena in order to re-energise even if those musical styles are disguised as punk or grunge there is something innately visceral and otherworldly about those sorts of animal.

One thing that could be said about modern pop music is there is nothing really animal about it. It is so computerised and quantised that any essence of energy has been removed and replaced by something sterile, however if the computer becomes the servant and not the master the essence of the DJ producer can be bound into the songs, dance is a good example of this. I think the deciding point here is, were any risks taken? Producing a song by a Rihanna or a Katy Perry maybe more a case of not getting it wrong because of the big budgets involved.

We find it very difficult to be able to think in a mediaeval style because we have been told that the many of the things that they believed in are rubbish but obviously they did not think that, however if you ask yourself a question why something like ritualistic behaviour and magic systems seem to have been unchanged over a period of 2000 years then you have to ask why did they keep doing something that did not work? The logical answer to that is it did work but is only us that have rid ourselves of one of those tools from the toolbox.

I am suggesting that by looking back at styles that may influence us musically and getting to the root of what it is that drives it we can reconnect with what the music is all about and derive something from it for ourselves, if only to reanimate the music that we play. You do not have to believe only suspend your disbelief to lock into something. I would suggest Blues or Flamenco or the English folk music tradition and see what sort of weirdness you can find in there; Mojo’s, Dances of the spider, impossible tasks asked of ex-lovers etc. pull on that tread a little and see where it takes you.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk Summer school for budding rock stars.