Manchester has ‘Elbow’, Sheffield ‘Pulp’ and Southampton has its own band who’ve stuck at it for many years before getting a deal: ‘The Family’ (picture by Stephanie Ross)

Formed over ten years ago they’ve slowly morphed from a psychedelic band to, as guitarist Ash told me, “a blues band with pedal steel guitar as lead.”

It is the strength of friendship that keeps this band together and ‘The Family’ are back on the circuit following a six month enforced lay-off and looking for a deal.

Its not that they aren’t handy with all the marketing tools available in this ‘MySpace age’, they just: “Want a deal!” bass player Aiden told me, and his reason: “The people in the company know what they are doing.”

Sharing music and influences is what ‘The Family’ love best and they would rather spend their time making and performing their excellent music instead of dealing with the promoting and managing that band’s are expected to deal with these days.

However they have never been short of a good descriptive quote from a journalist and my favourite has to be: “swaggering, bourbon-drenched, cosmic country”

But someone will have to come up with a new tag line for ‘The Family’ as they are shifting their sound towards the British blues of the 60’s which the Stones and The Who are famous for.

Add a manager and the band could be quickly back to their habit of selling out The Joiners and Soul Cellar and filling 52 seat coaches to London.

Hear The Family here: www.myspace.com/thefamilyonline

Congratulations to Matt and Jon from SoCo on Monday’s victory in the People’s Millions competition.

The win is a massive boost for the Southampton music scene and in a few years time we’ll no doubt be listening a brand new group of musicians inspired by SoCo’s project.

By then we might also know what ‘making it’ actually means in this internet age of MySpace/YouTube/Spotify

As Paul Campbell, the founder of Amazing Radio, pointed out in a recent blog, “The musical world has shifted on its axis, and the shockwaves have destroyed the traditional music industry.” (Bringing Home The Bacon)

This ’shift’ has left the old companies focusing on their back catalogue while new bands, with all the music making and marketing tools at their finger tips, struggle to shift their creative mind to a business head.

But within this conundrum Northern Irish singer Eamon Nancarrow has highlighted a different side to ‘making it’.

Now I must confess a personal interest in this next part as I am the publisher of his autobiography

‘Holywood Star: The life and times of a rock and roll misadventurer’. It’s a very funny book about his attempts to make it during the 1980’s.

However, during an interview with Maurice Boland on ‘Talk Radio Europe’, Eamon gave us another reason for being in a band: “The music was the passion but deep down it was all the friendships that we made, and the relationships that we had, which far far exceeded any success we had with the music.”

Links

SoCo
Amazing Radio
Eamon Nancarrow

This Monday we’ll be voting for SoCo in the People’s Millions. If they win, Thornhill wins a new £50,000 arts centre giving Southampton a brilliant opportunity to involve more people in the making of music.

One area SoCo tries to have an influence is asking youngsters, who are inspired by the UK’s Grime scene, to write positive lyrics.

As good as they were at rhyming and flow, they find it hard not to fall into that scene’s stereotypical subjects of violence, guns and drugs. This is why SoCo should meet Shirley based MC and lyricist ‘LST’.

LST is a vocalist who thinks his approach is right: “I’m there to get into your consciousness and make you see that there is a right way and a wrong way and hopefully you pick the right way.”

This positive attitude inspired local film maker Andy Jones to create a mini documentary around LST which was recently shown at the Falstaff International Film Festival.

The film is named after the LST track ‘Cherish Life’ which was written following the tragic shooting London teenager Michael Dosunmu. “When I saw that I felt there’s got to be something I can do.”

It was not only the grief of the family that got to him but the nagging feeling that the negative messages in the UK’s grime scene needed a positive counter-point and LST was going to provide it.

He’s made a great start, on a long journey but, as his album title suggests, it’s time to “Change the Game”.

Links

LST on MySpace

Michael Dosunmu