The Coffee Spoon Addendum

(Companion to Ben's 'Binge'.)

Just recently, myself and two close and long-standing friends decided we'd take a break from the freakishly large small town that is Adelaide and spend a long weekend in Melbourne. For two of us, it'd be our first opportunity to see a city where stuff, not to put too fine a point on it, happens. For the third, it'd be a chance to show off his love for a now familiar place to two trusting and eager tourists. The plans were enticingly basic: soak up some atmosphere, forget about our respective jobs and troubles, and drink heroic amounts of alcohol.

As well as doing a pretty good job on these, we had a bunch of other entertaining encounters, most of which we could never have predicted. I could tell any number of stories: the girls we found in our double-booked room the first night (who, of course, were not only from our home town but also attended the same school as Ben and I), the joys of retro clothes shopping, a set of experiences in each airport that frankly made me despair for the entire human race. But there is one incident that, for me, is a shining beacon of delight in an already deeply satisfying trip. It happens on a Saturday night, somewhere around Northcote.

We've just left a concert, aglow with musical appreciation and a modest amount of alcohol, and we're looking for a place to continue drinking and, hopefully, start dancing. We come across a small, unassuming bar. The lights are low and the people look like our sort. There's no dancing, but it certainly seems worth a drink or two. And the music, provided by a rather handsome black lady on decks, switches almost supernaturally from hip-hop to Lennon as we get our beverages - two G&Ts, one beer - and sit down.

We won't be there very long. The bar closes at 2.00 am, an hour fast approaching. The lack of dancing aside, we've enjoyed ourselves. We've been very happy with the choices of our DJ, which include songs like 'Young American', 'Golden Brown' and 'My Baby Just Cares for Me'. At ten-to-two, the DJ gets ready to play the last song. She turns to us, practically the only people left in the place, and says, "Sorry guys, but I gotta play some Etta James to finish." We assure her, with drunken amiability, that this is fine.

A moment later, a familiar orchestral swell plays. We bide our time, and then all together lauch enthusiastically into the first line: "At laaast, my love has come along..." And no sooner have we begun then our mistress of the decks bursts into immediate, uncontrollable laughter.

I wonder what exactly makes her laugh. Is it that we three are obviously very, very tipsy? Is it that our singing can at best be described as loud, and at worst would not be described at all for decency's sake? Is it simply the way we have boisterously defied her preceeding apology? Or maybe it's just that we are conspicuously a trio of white boys? Whatever the cause, it doesn't really matter. Because it wasn't a mocking laugh; it was one of pure, appreciative joy. I have rarely seen someone so delighted by something that, to us, would be practically unthinkable not to do.

We never found out the lady's name; I don't think we even knew the name of the bar, if indeed it had one. At the time I vaguely considered trying to get a photo with her, but I realise now that this would have imposed a certain artificiality on the moment. It was a sudden, spontaneous delight. And it means something special to me. Because, though I have been known to make people laugh with a witty aside, an absurd non-sequitur, or sometimes - to my slight shame - a scathing put-down, it is a rare and beautiful thing to cause pure happiness just by being who you are. The reward is as good for the bringer of the joy as for the recipient, maybe more so. It's a priceless treasure. And - let's face it - I don't often get the chance to look that funky.

(In response to Henry's 'Flirting, With Disaster' post below.)

Rock-step, kick-step, kick-step.

Once you have the footwork in order, you can turn to your partner. Who your partner is, well, that's of no importance here. Make sure you feel comfortable. Turn to her and assume the closed position. 5, 6, 7, 8. Rock-step, kick-step, kick-step. On the next bar, a subtle movement of your left hand will show her your intentions. Tuck-turn, open position. Pass-through. Now you're playing the game, following the pattern. All the other people in the room, gathered in a circle facing each other, are playing the same way. New song, new partner. The girls stand still, while the boys shift one partner clockwise. New girl, same moves. A subtle movement of your left hand will show her your intentions. You're the boy, you have to lead. You know all the moves, and it's up to you. Whether she likes you or not, she'll follow. Whether she likes you at all, you'll never tell. New song, new partner. Dance as metaphor for life.

Of course, life never works quite that way. The boy may not want to lead. The boy may not want to make decisions. The boy may still be having too much trouble finding his feet, searching too hard for the kick-step after the rock-step, to choose the next move. Even as he makes up his mind, he may not be gifted with the subtlety that allows his left hand to show her his intentions. New song, new partner, a smile and an apology. Life as a metaphor for dance.

It was only a one-hour lesson, but it taught me something very valuable. Sometimes I will have to take the lead. Sometimes I will have to show my hand - only a subtle movement is required to show her my intentions. The lesson was on Thursday night. I had the whole weekend in front of me. It is now Monday morning, and over the last three days I think I might have turned a corner. But on this side, the world is full of madness.

I am currently single. To be more specific, I just recently became single again. There's a difference between being single for a long time and coming out of a relationship; it's like the difference between being constantly short of money - where you'd like to have more but you're used to doing without - and losing a fortune on the stock market overnight. So now I am, as they say, back on the market (somewhere in the bargain bins, I'd say). This is a place I really don't want to be, mainly because it means I'm grouped amonst other singles, and it seems the accepted way for singles to interact is to flirt with one another. This is a problem for me, because I can't flirt to save my love-life.

I can't say I've practiced the art much; they say if you've got it, flaunt it, but I never thought I had so I don't. But even assuming I had the bravado to go up to a girl I fancied and try my hand at impressing her, I actually do not know how to flirt. More than that, I don't understand the concept. That is to say, while I get its purpose, and envy people who can do it, I can't grasp the fundamental principles. I have no idea how to select those words that are flatter, entice, tease, even test the boundaries a little, all while making the recipient feel as if they are the most important person in the room. I love talking to people, but I'm more likely to discuss politics than tell them they're wearing a fantastic dress. To me, going up to a girl in a bar and flirting would make as much sense as attempting to broker a corporate merger on the dancefloor.

More than the words, though, I'm fascinated by the way two people who know each other only a little settle into their corresponding roles. It takes two to flirt, after all, at least to do it properly. How do guys and girls figure out the correct level of back and forth that separates flirting from, well, sleazing onto someone? Maybe it's because I'm not a very rhythmic person (as anyone who has seen me dance can attest) that it impresses me so.

Then again, maybe I'm not the only one. Not everyone manages it successfully. One person's red-hot moves are another's sad blunders, and I doubt anyone has a 100% success rate. Which leads me to wonder if you can flirt by accident. After all, if you don't know what you're doing, you wouldn't realise if you somehow got it right; a million monkeys on type-writers will probably bash out at least one line of Shakespeare. Find me in the right mood, on the right night (and a few drinks inside me will help) and suddenly talking to a pretty girl doesn't seem any harder than talking to my oldest friends. I don't know what kind of effect this has, but I've never had a restraining order put out on me.

And I'm always encouraged by, and appreciative of, those people who don't play by the rules. I'll long cherish the night I spent at a bar, drinking with some new acquaintances, when one of them said to their neighbour, in the middle of a completely different conversation, "You have such gorgeous eyes!" True, it was a straight (and married) girl saying this to another girl, but the fact that the comment was entirely unexpected, and completely genuine, gave me such a wonderful warm feeling inside. Because I'll never be good at flirting, like I'll never be good at spot-welding. But there's always fun to be had when you meet the strange people that make up this world and take them as they are.

Two years ago, Rickard Falkvinge, a Swede working for Microsoft, quit his job to establish the Piratpartiet: the Pirate Party. As its name suggests, the Piratpartiet is a single-issue party based around the issue of piracy, and in particular, encouraging legislation to decriminalise file sharing. At the 2006 election, it secured 35 000 votes in the Riksdag; not enough to win a seat, but enough to mark its place on the electoral landscape. Like any advocacy party, the Piratpartiet need not actually win a seat to pursue its agenda. Its electoral legitimacy - the potential for it to gain more votes in a subsequent election, away from the mainstream parties - gives it traction. Whether or not as a result of this traction, two days ago the Left Party reversed its support for anti-piracy laws, joining the Greens and the Centre Party.

Pirating copyright reform (On Line Opinion)
Left Party supports file sharing (The Local)

Of course, sharing of music was occurring long before the advent of broadband Internet. When I was a youngster rationing my pocket money, all I needed to do was borrow my favourite CDs from the public library, and then make a copy that would last me a lifetime. (I am still yet to own a copy of Nirvana's Nevermind.) File sharing has exacerbated a problem, of course, but exactly what is that problem?

The problem is that people are spending less money on CDs, and pay-per-file downloads are so clumsy that they are never going to reclaim that ground. There are two groups of people who are significantly disadvantaged as a result: record labels, and high-earning artists. When Metallica's Lars Ulrich successfully sued Napster, he wasn't just spoiling a party. Metallica is a highly profitable business able to attract a seemingly endless slew of new, young fans whose natural obsessiveness encourages them to spend every cent of their pocket money on the band's entire back catalogue. However, these kids are also fickle enough to not care greatly about the band's tactile art, and are unlikely to be interested in having the tangible package for its own sake. In the post-Napster world, one click and they're done.

Metallica, however, is in the minority. Those musicians whose work is entirely an artistic product and who attract a small but nerdy audience - Shellac, for example - will continue to sell their old albums on 180-gram, 12" vinyl. Bands who continue to release albums with relevance and vitality, such as Radiohead, can take advantage of the new distribution technology to actually increase their profitability.

The initial argument that less money on CDs will result in less music being produced is, as it turns out, absolute garbage. The myspace world gives us access to more music than ever before, more-than-occasionally of exceptional quality. So what is actually happening here?

Well, the same technology that makes file-sharing cheap and easy enough to destroy the music industry is also making recording cheap and easy enough to save it. Any fool with a computer can spend a few hundred dollars on a studio-quality microphone and record an album to match any commercial masterpiece. And they do: several of my favourite albums of last year, including El Perro Del Mar's amazing debut, were self-recorded.

(Trailblazers of this tradition were managing it in the 1980s: Big Black, for example, followed in the 1990s by Sebadoh and Elliott Smith. Electronic music then dominated the self-recording world, and with records such as Air's Moon Safari, it was well worth it.)

Many of the most prolific studios are housed in sheds or lounge rooms. Almost any band able to extract a sizeable record label advance - Radiohead, Wilco, dEUS, etc. - will no longer spend the money going to Abbey Road. They'll simply buy enough gear to build their own Abbey Road, wherever they like.

The effect of mass-file-sharing will not be the end of good-quality music - it will be the end of commercial monopoly. Over the last sixty years, a handful of large record labels has worked in concert with a handful of commercial radio stations to limit most listeners to only a handful of artists each year. The money they made from this was then spent 'finding' their next key artist; spending thousands of dollars buying the songs and the producers to make a 'quality' record; then spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing. Now the days of A&R tyranny are numbered.

The major labels are hitting back through the one medium which is still both popular and monopolised: television. Idol shows are simply easy ways for a major label to remain profitable through democracy.

For the rest of us, it is exceptionally cheap to record an album - once you have the basic gear, the unit cost per record is practically nothing. As for the distribution of music, and the potential of making a living out of it, the options there are opening wide.

I have spent the last six years writing music articles for independent magazines. For the last two years, I've been contributing to a magazine in a foreign city, having been recommended by a former home-town colleage. Two weeks ago, that colleague switched employment - as a result, I now write for a magazine whose entire staff are strangers to me. I realise that the days of getting 'care packages' consisting of new albums by Low, Arcade Fire, The Decemberists and The Hold Steady, for no reason whatsoever, are gone. I need to find another way.

And so I have come, belatedly, to blogs. There are an amazing amount of music blogs around, offering great diversity in taste, opinion, language and geography. Blogs can also support new distribution techniques. Denovali Records, a small Swedish label, offers downloads in lieu of attracting support for their operations. On the downloads page for French post-rock/metal band Celeste, is the following message:

" we have started the preorder for the new CELESTE - NIHILISTE(S) CD/LP to gain some money in order to pay for the pressing. But since you probably would not like to preorder a record you haven't listened to before, we have decided to make the full album available for download from our side. we support downloading music, especially as a way of getting to know unknown releases. But of course we are also record lovers, so if you want to be our personal heroes, you can preorder the record and help us releasing it faster."

Music can be art. Art can be loved. Money will still change hands - fair pay for fair art. File sharing may just open music up to the people, and allow mass audiences to be more discerning, and have more investment - financial and otherwise - in the music to which they listen. In the meantime, go searching - you'll be surprised at what you find.

I have decided to update the about me section of my Blogger profile such that it is actually descriptive. This is, of course, a pretentious exercise. But I think it's something we all should do from time to time.

I ride my bike to work, and always gather speed before the long downhill slide, so that the full force of the river's breeze will hit me. I'm easily distracted, but easily amused. I'm becoming addicted to Murakami, having briefly exhausted my addiction to Kafka. I listen to music, not for the beat, but for the force of the sound and the beauty of the poetry. I get ecstatically lost in noise. I'm beginning to identify with Mark Kozelek, just as I once identified with Holden Caulfield. I'm no smarter than anyone else, yet I feel my only strength is in intelligence. I do tend to brag, but never about the things that make me most proud. I feel I often lecture people unnecessarily, yet they really do need to be told. I involve myself in everything new, hoping that in doing so I will paste over old mistakes. I look for opportunities. I'd rather be honest than enticing. So I let most romantic possibilities pass like brief, alluring whispers I've pretended not to hear. I feel no victory in being compromised. I've never felt attractive, yet I've known love, and I trust I will know love again. I often live in memory. On weekdays I rise at dawn, yet on weekends I'm rarely home before sunrise. I long for night surprises. I'm happiest when alone, yet saddest when lonely.

Easter Saturday 2008: Humble Bee plays its first show, to an enthusiastic if perplexed crowd of friends and various associates. Its two members decide that, seeing as how they've now made the transition from wooden toy to real boy, they should offer all of their recordings to the world, and offer proper, respectable press releases. Here, then, is a first draft of a real, sensible biography of Humble Bee.

February 2007: At a small gig in a tiny venue, Ben, frontman of noise-pop act Meanwell College, escapes the racket and retreats to the beer garden. There he is introduced to various friends of friends, including a shy stranger called Carly.

April 2007: Ben and Carly continue to see each other throughout various places and times, brought together by a mutual acquaintance - for the moment, let us call him he - who, for varied and different reasons, is starting to give both of them the shits.

May 2007: A conversation occurs between Ben and Carly, which goes a little something like this:

Carly: You know, you should really write a song about him.
Ben: That would be hilarious. Although, it would make him rather too proud. Besides, he didn't really do anything to me. You know, you should really write a song about him.
Carly, cheekily: Well, maybe I will.

Later that week, Carly sends Ben an e-mail with the words to Perfect On Paper. Ben, bored and curious, begins the process of twisting guitar parts together, and using his incredible microphone abilities records the song and sends it back.

June 2007: Carly eventually records her lead vocal, takes it home, and creates a myspace page. She uses the name Humble Bee, which she reclaims from her previous, unreleased musical efforts. Seeing as he knew about the old Humble Bee, it would be easy to expect him to discover a Humble Bee myspace attached to Carly's own, and from there hear her scathing, vicious (but still cute and chirpy) song.

Yet, if he did discover Humble Bee that way, he decided to keep all of his thoughts to himself.

July-August 2007: Ben travels through Europe, occasionally stopping by Internet cafés to keep in touch with the outside world. By the end of his journey, he has received two more song/poems from Carly.

November 2007: Ben finally decides to get around to recording music for the next two songs, and they appear on the Humble Bee myspace. Carly finally gives him their myspace password.

December 2007: Ben and Carly sit in the beer garden of yet another cosy establishment, where Ben lets slip to new musical friends that the two of them are "in a band". Carly laughs so hard she nearly spills her drink. The others actually take them seriously, add Humble Bee as online pseudo-friends, and begin to talk about gigs. On New Year's Eve, Ben is actually introduced to someone as "Ben from Humble Bee."

January-March 2008: Despite this new attention, Humble Bee lies silently still, without doing or saying anything. Perhaps they were waiting in the darkness for a clear approach to attack; more likely, they were slack and careless and harboured no ambition whatsoever. More people, however, find the band, and all strangely assume that it is more than just a musical wooden toy created for their own quite nasty amusement.

In the meantime, he begins again to talk to Carly. In one angry conversation, he quotes lines from Perfect On Paper. Ben's and Carly's original mission is complete.

March 2008: The headlining band pulls out of the first ever Wish, an indie night at Producers' Bar featuring bands, DJs, videos and, given the season, the Easter Bunny. Rather than attract a new headliner, the event's organisers genuinely, seriously and fearlessly approach Ben and Carly as an opening act. At 11.30pm on a Friday night, Carly calls Ben, possibly wondering how they can get out of it. Ben, already quite drunk, instead insists that it will be fine, they can totally play a show in eight days' time, and to accept with glee.

This despite the fact that Humble Bee had only three songs, and that despite their recording prowess, Ben and Carly had never played a song in the same room at the same time, ever. Ben and Carly finally gather around, and in the space of one week write two more songs from scratch, record, and rehearse three full times. Carly begins to play glockenspiel, something neither of them had any idea how to do.

22 March 2008: In the face of adversity, Humble Bee's first ever performance is a rolling success.

To Be Continued. (Hopefully.)


Humble Bee on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/humblebeecarly. Humble Bee will be playing Popsicle at the Edinburgh Castle, Friday 6 June.