“You’d best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner... you're in one!”

 

Regular correspondents will be aware that I have been managing a music related project in a combination of PM, A&R and Producer roles recently. We find ourselves in need of artwork, and so much of the discussion around AI that has been prevalent this week (my local MP, a gig promoter and a music forum have popped up on my feed only this week, and there is this today - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2026/may/28/ai-art-is-boring-soulless-theft-visual-artist). Contributors to LinkedIn are routinely asked if they want to finesse their work (in the interests of full disclosure, I have not*.)

As a survivor of the Eighties indie wars, I remember that gig posters – or the most effective ones at least - involved a good deal of (literal) cut and paste, trips to WH Smith to buy Letraset, and copious use of the County Library photocopier. By then, Jamie Reid’s signature cut up newsprint was already passe. By the time I needed a cover for a cassette however, I outsourced that to someone who knew what they were doing and – crucially – had access to one of these new-fangled desktop computers that were being introduced, which made word processing and art design much more of a streamlined operation than had previously been possible. At around this time, crucially, the Musician’s Union were suggesting that synthesizers and drum machines should be banned as they were putting actual musicians out of work**.

Detractors decried the output of these machines as soulless, lacking in creativity, and homogenous, generic machine generated slop. Anyone could do it. Analogously, these are the very terms being applied online to the wave of local gig posters, caricatures and bands like (fairly IMHO) The Waterboys for one. The familiar trope of four band members all looking at somewhere slightly different on the horizon while trying to remember if they left the gas on while one of them stares steely-eyed down the barrel of the camera has been replaced by a plethora of Indiana Jones-adjacent stylised images of Collosi bestriding imaginary stages. It’s better than Comic Sans, I suppose.

I think that where we are now is at the Depeche Mode Speak and Spell phase of AI ‘art’ and design. Sure, it has been democratised, but whereas anyone can type “make these lyrics into a CD single cover” the new skill is going to be crafting the prompts you use to get the image you need without all of that messy recourse to airbrushes, batique and three expensive years at art school. Before too long, we will be at the Songs of Faith and Devotion phase, with those with the aptitude and skill producing fusion work, and those on the village hall committee having refined their technique to the point where their poster doesn’t look just like everybody else’s, overcoming the limitations of their imagination as we conquered Microsoft Paint before them.

Yes, there will be a shift in how we (or they) do things, but David Hockney paints on an iPad, and the Neat Records back catalogue was designed by humans, so let’s not jump right to judgement yet. For the record*** I am not using AI for the cover design – it is going to be based on a photograph which I took on my phone. And used some filters on. And some of the music has had auto tune applied to it, which corrects the pitch of the note using a computer. And digital reverb, which electronically recreates the effect of (say) Simon and Garfunkel’s engineer hanging a microphone in a lift shaft and then banging a drum at the bottom of it****. Where does it start? Where will it end?

 

 

*” Clearly,” you’re probably thinking. 🤔

**As is so often the case, Barry Manilow was the pebble that set off the avalanche.

***Hah!

****As per ‘The Boxer’, from Bridge Over Troubled Water.

The Spirit of Radio.

 A notification arrives that the BBC Introducing holding page for my band is shortly to archived, unless we sign back in and refresh our content. To this, I am disinclined to acquiesce. The reason we have one in the first place is as part of a small experiment from some time ago, where some of the exciting new hosts at our local radio station were heralding the joys of uploading our/your material to the homepage, shortly after which the talent scouts would sift through the submissions and summon you to a showcase session and possibly even tip the wink to (say) Tom Robinson to get you some national play. Previously, of course, we’d had to simply rely on the prior wave of DJ’s – now largely replaced by the hip young gunslingers on the late night airwaves - actually going out to local shows, checking out touring musicians and responding to hot tips from trusted sources rather than them sitting crouched over a warm laptop waiting for something to gift itself to the hard drive.

Naturally, being an East Angliacana band with a combined age of about three hundred (if I am being generous, and I am being generous) we did not hear anything back. I never expected to, I did not rush to my notifications gnashing my teeth at each empty page, and I certainly did not resent anyone else getting any airtime, whether they seemed like the sort of people who paid their TV license fee or not. I did, however, keep the BBC Introducing page on my social media feeds, and was interested enough to respond to one of those “How are we doing?” updates they occasionally ping out.

In a spirit of 360 degree feedback, I mentioned that we had submitted a number of tracks, a couple of photos and a biography as requested, but we hadn’t had any response – not so much as a ‘thanks but no thanks’. In passing however, I noted that interestingly, according to the ‘Introducing’ playlists on the iPlayer, there seemed to be a number of artists doing recurrent sessions including one who’d been a regular at Ipswich Music Day for at least the last six years*. Not, I pointed out, that this was a criticism, but if you are going to rebrand your live performance cupboard and launch a show with the bold claim that this could be one’s passport to unimaginable fame and wealth – or at least a night time play on Three Counties Radio – then not simply booking your mates on a regular basis might be the way forward.

In fairness, I got a genuinely nice reply, asking what the name of the band was, when we had sent our demo, and what they should listen to once they had dug it out of the recycle bin**. There was also a warning included that they could not listen to everything, and that of course they were going to book people they were already familiar with (which I thought was a PR misstep, frankly) and they thanked me for my interest. I mean, it is not the worst response the BBC has ever issued to a concerned listener, I think we can all agree.

So anyway, apologies to everyone who was relying on the BBC to offer them updates on our new material***, we will keep the semaphore operator primed and the string between the tin cans taut. Keep watching the skies.

 

 

*I checked.

**I am paraphrasing.

***We are recording it now.

Sorted for Cheese and Fizz.

 In the Spring, a person’s fancy turns inexorably toward the festival season. Whether you are camping, glamping, day-tripping, or intent on losing yourself in a foreign field which is comfortably sorted for cheese and fizz, there is something out there for everyone. On our very doorstep (comparatively) we have The Maverick Festival of Americana at Easton Farm Park, near Framlingham, which encompasses everything from the boot-scootin’ to the swampy; the high, keening, and lonesome to the vaudevillian; the Cajun to the ragin.’ It is, essentially, a collection of the finest musicians and songwriters you have never heard of and I, in my capacity as curator of The Travelling Medecine Show, get a front row seat at the feast (to mix metaphors very slightly).

And by ‘curating’ I mean ‘get handed a list of who’s playing and wait for someone with a guitar case, boots and (frequently) a hat to show up looking slightly lost’, for The Medicine Show is an off-menu attraction which is not on the site map, not in the programme, and is where the talent comes to blow off steam. As a result, I’ve witnessed first hand The Bondurants, fresh off the main stage and channelling their inner Kenny Loggins with a storming rendition of ‘Footloose’, the mercurial Lachlan Bryan performing a chilling ‘Red Right Hand’ and Our Man in the Field play a starlit set that could have come straight from Big Pink. If none of these artists mean anything to you, do not worry unduly, they were all just names on a clipboard to me once too.

Seasoned festival goers still talk in hushed tones of the time that local hopeful Ed Sheeran rocked up to play the talent show (he came third). When Billy Bragg was allowed to go over curfew because the parish councillor sent to ensure that we were sticking to our licensing conditions was a fan, and my friend Helen told him in gushing tones that he was “Every boy I’ve ever loved.” Billy Bragg, not the man from the council. There is a best-dressed dog competition, and goat yoga on the Sunday morning soundtracked by a gospel choir. Yes, you read that right.

Side players get the chance to express themselves away from the shackles of their headlining employers, impromptu collaborations spring from nowhere, there’s an open mic on Saturday afternoon which anyone can sign up for, and occasionally a passing plus-one throws their hat into the ring and I am rewarded with (say) a set of Beatles covers performed by Robyn Hitchcock. I cannot tell you what has been planned for this year – I simply do not know – but I can guarantee that when the Medicine Show opens for business this July, there is nowhere I would rather be.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/shane-kirk/the-maverick-diaries/paperback/product-nv9yddj.html?

 

 

Who knew?

To St. Peter’s by the Waterfront in the heart of swinging downtown Ipswich, where Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs have been engaged to be the house band at a wedding celebration with our tried and trusted combination of folk, country, pop, rock and roots music or, if you will, East Angliacana*. We have scoured the set list for appropriate material and in turn have discovered that very many of our songs involve sadness, romantic disappointment and in at least two cases, an unfortunate series of events involving a wedding. In fairness, most of the former are mine, but we are where we are. As one audience member is heard to remark “For six apparently well-adjusted individuals they do seem to be carrying quite a lot of collective emotional baggage.” In the discreet seats at the back my wife (Kelly Brook) is explaining to some of our friends the background, understanding and interpretation of some of the numbers in performance. “I like this one…it’s not about me, thankfully” she concludes at one stage.

As we are close to at least one satellite home base, we are able to conduct an issue-free soundcheck thanks to our redoubtable sound man Joe and then retire to a nearby kitchen table to enjoy a pre-match supper and the convivial experience of band downtime in comfortable surroundings. We return to the venue and regard the now equally well-appointed former church, which has been arranged in cabaret seating form, with jars of fairy lights, wedding favours and complementary key fobs adorning the tables. Our audience, it happens, include very many translators, polymaths and a large party of Brazilians. We feel that we must apologise for merely singing in English. At one point Mr. Wendell earns a generous round of applause for saying ‘Obrigado.’

As it happens, the guests are well up for the shared experience of – as Otis Lee Crenshaw posited – “…taking all this pain and misery and turn(ing) it into cold, hard cash” and we find ourselves being spontaneously clapped along with during songs and heartily applauded afterwards. They really are the most charming people. Toward the end of the second set we do a version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero (No Limit)’ which La Mulley starts acapella and which has previously brought a Friday night pub crowd to a respectful silence, and so hearing it in an eight hundred year-old church where you could hear a key fob drop is really quite the experience. So entranced am I by the slow build of the verses that it is not until the third that I look to the audience, who it transpires have collectively decided to hold and sway with their phone torches, several jars of fairy lights, and at least one lighter. It really is quite magical.

Before we give way to some very, very loud music (Plastic Bertrand, Jon Bon Jovi, your Spotify royalties are on the way) for the purposes of frugging we have time for a special cover of a Bob Mould song for the bride and groom ( again, ‘If I Can’t Change Your Mind’ is hardly ‘On The Street Where You Live’ in lyrical terms, but they like it) and then yet another short tale of misery and desperation, albeit one set to a rousing singalong-friendly I-IV-V folk-tinged chord sequence which rarely lets us down and which closes the performance. Sure as eggs is eggs, there is sufficient swayage, arms-aloftness and cheering to reassure us that we have performed our function as best we can, and to retire to the (free) bar to toast our good fortune. The Present Mrs. Kirk takes a break from bawling the chorus to ‘Mr Brightside’ at top volume to compliment us on our show. “That was great, Babe” she purrs complimentarily “and I’ve actually learned something this evening. Who knew? You can dance to this shit.”

 

*Mr Wendell mentions that he has spent most of the intermission discussing The Clash, and suggests that if Joe Strummer were still with us, this is the sort of thing he would be doing. Mr. Gibbon has been chatting to Joe at the sound desk about Ed Sheeran. No-one seems to have a bad word about either of them.