So, yes, in about five hours I will be officially unemployed – dosser or entrepreneur, whichever you prefer. This is the last time I can skive off and write a post when I should actually be doing something else, because in future the writing of posts will actually be legitimate business.
I take the piss out of Proper Job, but contrary to what you might expect from someone changing careers entirely, I have always really enjoyed what I do. I have always needed variety in my life, and as a kid I was never able to entirely abandon either my technical or my artistic interests, so product design engineering was a pretty perfect mix. I’ve been doing this for ten years now, and it’s always been varied, engaging and enjoyable. Those who know me a little better will know that I quite simply could not have forced myself to do anything for this long if I didn’t enjoy it.
The actual company I’m at now has been amazing, too. I may not actually be Scottish, but there is a no-bullshit attitude here that I’ve found really refreshing. No internal politics, no fannying about, no nonsense. And for some inexplicable reason, considering how much work I’ve had to put into Toad things over the last few years, I’ve made it this far without actually being fired. So thanks guys, it genuinely has been fun.
So, yes, here we are and, quite legitimately, the question of ‘what next’ rears its head. Well as I have had to point out to Mrs. Toad, who occasionally talks like she’s expecting to gain a housewife, I already have a full-time job to do, it’s just that now I get to do it during office hours instead of at four in the morning all the fucking time. So actually you might not notice much change from the outside.
The label, for example, is already at capacity. The bands we are already working with are releasing enough material that we can’t really take anything else on. Never mind my personal workload, we don’t have the budget for it, and I am a little worried that our press friends might start to tune out if we send them too much more stuff than we are at the moment. There are a couple of things I want to do better, and I am going to have to learn to book tours, so that a couple of our new bands can start to play a little bit more far and wide, but in general not much is going to change.
Song, by Toad, on the other hand, needs work. The podcasts and video have been doing incredibly well recently, but if I am being honest I would have to admit that the actual blog itself has been treading water for the last year, and that is a bad thing. I never thought the label or the blog were anything like as interesting in isolation as they are together, but recently the label has very much dominated, and I would like to redress that balance if I can.
I want more interviews, more sessions, more video and more proper posts. And by proper, I just mean things that take a little time and thought. These things may not be the glamorous, hit-garnering work, but I think they are crucial if I want to be more than just a guy sitting in his pants firing any old nonsense out into the internets. And let’s face it, I do. I am not aiming to be big or famous, because this is always going to be niche, but I think there are opportunities out there at the moment and it would be nice to give things a bit of a push while they seem to be on the up.
The other thing which gets forgotten in all of this of course, is Mrs. Toad. She has put up with this increasingly demanding project for several years now, and has not complained when I use all my holiday going to festivals, when I spend all my money on gettings CDs made, when I sit up every night until the small hours sending off promos, or when I invite people into her house constantly, either to plot or just to get plastered. So we are hopefully going to get our evenings back, which I am really looking forward to. As she said to me recently: ‘What was it like when you had free time – what did we actually do?’ And the truth is, I don’t remember.
So it’s not just that she is shouldering the financial risk for this, for reasons best known only to herself, but also that she has for the last few years tolerated a level of deranged commitment and intrusion that no-one else I can imagine would ever have put up with. Simply, without her, there would be no Song, by Toad.
So in terms of what you guys see, though, things won’t change fast. It’s going to take me at least a month just to get on top of the admin, frankly, and even then I am not looking to make any radical changes. I just want to do more things better, more rigorously, and at a normal time of day. But for now I am off to Glastonbury to get absolutely fucking wasted!
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Dead Kennedys – Take This Job and Shove It
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So, erm, yes, this podcast should really have happened on Sunday, but it was so unspeakably bakingly hot (alright, in all honesty it was only about 28 degrees, but it felt much fucking hotter, okay) that there was basically no fucking chance it was going to happen.
