Me and my band The Hermanos – or my band The Hermanos and I - are launching our new single in Whelan’s, Dublin, this Saturday night so I thought I’d write about what goes into preparing for a gig like this…
“The Merchandise”
So, our singles arrived in the post yesterday. In the nick of time…
Hugh from the band has been doing our artwork for the last number of releases. Like many creative processes, this usually starts off with us doing a brainstorm. The title ‘Rearrange’ triggered ideas involving jigsaws, puzzles, etc. Hugh finally hit on the Scrabble-tile effect for the text on the front cover. The lyric ‘Went away without you’ put us both in mind of a holiday or trip abroad.
Something we’ve tried to do with our last few projects is get friends on board and get a kind of cottage-industry feel going so we sent the word out to our friends to get some of their holiday snaps to us. Our friend SP sent us on a great one and Hugh treated it to give it a retro and sun-kissed feel…
Obviously them only arriving today didn’t leave us much time to get the singles out to radio in advance of Saturday’s gig. Late last week we decided to do up promo copies ourselves to get in the post sooner. We hadn’t really thought it through…
“Friday the 14th”
Because ‘someone’ had been emailing the wrong email address, our regular printers weren’t going to be able to get us the printed wallets we were after in time.
To Plan B, which involved a printing shop and a scissors. Would we be able to get the covers printed up and folded, the labels and press releases written and printed and the CDs mixed and burned by 5pm ie. in time for the last post? Probably not but we were damned well going to try…
4.30pm –“Hugh, where are you?” “Still at the printers”
4.45pm - “Where are you now?” “Still at the printers. You?” “Just burning a couple more
CDs. You?” “Still at the printers”…
4.55pm – “Are you on your way?” “I quit the band” “No, you can’t” etc.
In the end, and after some last minute cutting and folding in the local Post Office, we got them in the last post. Which turned out to be at 7pm.
“The Merchandise”
So, our singles arrived in the post yesterday. In the nick of time…
Hugh from the band has been doing our artwork for the last number of releases. Like many creative processes, this usually starts off with us doing a brainstorm. The title ‘Rearrange’ triggered ideas involving jigsaws, puzzles, etc. Hugh finally hit on the Scrabble-tile effect for the text on the front cover. The lyric ‘Went away without you’ put us both in mind of a holiday or trip abroad.
Something we’ve tried to do with our last few projects is get friends on board and get a kind of cottage-industry feel going so we sent the word out to our friends to get some of their holiday snaps to us. Our friend SP sent us on a great one and Hugh treated it to give it a retro and sun-kissed feel…
Obviously them only arriving today didn’t leave us much time to get the singles out to radio in advance of Saturday’s gig. Late last week we decided to do up promo copies ourselves to get in the post sooner. We hadn’t really thought it through…
“Friday the 14th”
Because ‘someone’ had been emailing the wrong email address, our regular printers weren’t going to be able to get us the printed wallets we were after in time.
To Plan B, which involved a printing shop and a scissors. Would we be able to get the covers printed up and folded, the labels and press releases written and printed and the CDs mixed and burned by 5pm ie. in time for the last post? Probably not but we were damned well going to try…
4.30pm –“Hugh, where are you?” “Still at the printers”
4.45pm - “Where are you now?” “Still at the printers. You?” “Just burning a couple more
CDs. You?” “Still at the printers”…
4.55pm – “Are you on your way?” “I quit the band” “No, you can’t” etc.
In the end, and after some last minute cutting and folding in the local Post Office, we got them in the last post. Which turned out to be at 7pm.
Comments