A Little Bit More of My Story...
How the Indie blog launched my music journalism career
Welcome back to my fortnightly newsletter Music Is The Answer, I’m Marcus Barnes and my aim is to present you with personal insights and writing on topical issues, monthly reviews, recommendations and archived content from platforms that have disappeared from the internet.
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How Did This Happen?
I turned 39 this week. I’ve been employed as a writer since I was 21, leaving university and going straight into a freelance with lad’s mag FRONT. I started there mid-2003 so it’s been 17 years since I got started with all of this writing malarkey.
I think it’s important sometimes to think back and analyse key moments in your career so you can 1) appreciate how you got to where you are and 2) pass on your experience to others. Pretty much all of my steps forward were facilitated by someone taking a shine to me and giving me a chance to prove myself. I’m always so thankful to those people that saw something in me that I may not have even seen myself.
If I was to go through every single key point in my career I’d be here all day, so, this time, I’m going to focus on a real watershed moment, and one that I’m sure a lot of people who are familiar with my writing will be aware of - my blog for The Independent.
When I left uni I never could have imagined writing for The Independent. It’s funny, because I pretty much fell into writing, I never really had any clear ambitions. I went with the flow and took pretty much any opportunity that came to me.
2011 was a pivotal year for me. I’d finally merged my journalism skills with my love of music. As I mentioned in my first newsletter, I got a gentle nudge into music writing from my editor at The Sun, Carl Stroud. While I was there I received an invite to Snowbombing from a PR company. I pitched it in to Carl and he was game - the headliners in 2011 were The Prodigy, but the lineup was full of Sun-worthy acts including Chase & Status, Tinie Tempah, Magnetic Man, Example, Ms Dynamitee-hee, Professor Green and loads more. That year Volvo were the sponsors and across all of their events listings the festival was titled ‘Volvo Snowbombing’.
Our Sun-branded car pictured just after we arrived in Mayrhofen
I’m not sure how many of you know this but every year Snowbombing organise a ‘gumball rally’ style road race from the UK to the festival site in Mayrhofen, Austria. Anyone can enter, and participants are encouraged to don fancy dress and have a silly team name. Amazingly, the PR offered to get me on the rally and give me a Sun-branded Volvo car! I can’t drive but luckily my best friend Emma was also going to Snowbombing on behalf of Notion magazine, so she offered to be the pilot.
Long story short, the UK side of the rally was tons of fun but we didn’t have a sat nav and got seriously lost on the European side. It took us 14 hours from Calais to the first stop-off in Frankfurt. It got so bad that we ended up in some ghetto part of Frankfurt, I think Emma ended up crying and we had to pay a taxi to guide us to our hotel. It was so bad. We were pretty much the last team to arrive at the hotel, so we comiserated by having a boozy night out at Cocoon, where I was shocked to find the music was mostly cheesy chart hits. I didn’t realise Friday was commercial night, but we had a laugh anyway. Emma and I could have a laugh in a morgue, it’s that kind of friendship. The festival was outrageous fun, a seriously debauched week-long session which involved lots of activity that can’t be repeated here. While I was there I met Laura Davis, who was Blogs Editor at The Independent. I think we were both waiting while Emma interviewed Skream & Benga, got chatting and stayed in touch after the festival.
Benga crowdsurfing during the Magnetic Man show
Skipping back to pre-Snowbombing for a sec. Only a few days before Emma and I hit the road to Austria I’d just got back from my first trip to Miami for WMC. When I got to the airport on the way home I realised I wasn’t going to make it for my first shift back at The Sun, so I called up Carl to let him know. His response was, “Actually mate, bad news, you don’t need to come in as you’ve been made redundant…” I was numb with shock. I called my mum to let her know (as I was living with her and paying her rent at the time) and belled up Donna McConnell, who was my editor at the MailOnline. She said to shout her when I’m back in London and she’d see what she can do. I spent the whole flight wound up, unable to think clearly and wondering how the hell I’m going to sort my life out. I could tell that call really rattled my mum as well, I didn’t want to let her down.
It was a bit of a mess. The Snowbombing trip was supposed to have resulted in a daily diary type piece for The Sun, but since I no longer worked for them, that didn’t happen. I fed them a few stories - the magician Dynamo had a crash and totalled his car during the rally, which made the paper. But Volvo were none too pleased about the negative press. I had the PR on my back asking to get stuff in the paper as promised but they weren’t taking any of my stories. In the end I think they printed a quote I got during an interview with Mark Ronson about his love of grime and I got a small review of The Prodigy’s headline performance on the website, but it was deeply unsatisfactory for the PR and myself. Sadly, it was completely out of my hands as much as I tried. (She ended up hating me for ages after that, which I had no idea about until a few years later when a mate tried to sort me guestlist for a Mercury Prize after party she was running and he was told I was ‘bad news’!).
After Snowbombing I called up Donna at the MailOnline and she welcomed me back on to the Showbiz team there, PHEW! The Daily Mail and The Independent are owned by the same publisher, Associated Newspapers, and operate out of the same building. One day as I was coming back from lunch I bumped into Laura Davis outside the Associated offices, got chatting about my redundancy etc and she offered me a blog. “What can I write about?” I asked. “Anything you want,” she replied. That was it, as simple as that. She signed up me with an account and I was away.
My old blog profile, when I was only eight years deep..
I already had a toe halfway through the door, as far as the electronic music scene goes, but the blog helped me completely smash the door down. The Independent rarely covered the kind of electronic music I was writing about so my profile skyrocketed and I had access to pretty much anyone I wanted. Resident Advisor shared a lot of my interviews and it snowballed rapidly, with my blog picking up hundreds of thousands of views and my posts regularly topping the Blog section’s ‘Most Viewed’ weekly chart. My first post was a two-parter covering Benoit & Sergio, one of my favourite acts at the time. From there it was Guy Gerber, Brandt Brauer Frick, Pete Tong, Tiga…
The Tiga interview was a very memorable one and typical of the ‘journalist lifestyle’ that I had become acquainted to. The MailOnline sent me to report on the MOBO Awards in Glasgow in November 2011, where I ended boozing until the morning getting wrecked, having a champagne breakfast with Katy B and a few others. On the day I got the train back I’d scheduled a face-to-face interview with Ren Harvieu for Wonderland and straight after that was my interview with Tiga. I slept the whole train journey back to London, dashed to a photography studio in Old Street to interview Ren and then traipsed around Shoreditch trying to find somewhere quiet to call up Tiga. In the end I had to knock on the door of a cafe that was closing up to make a special request for them to let me in and do my interview.
The Tongy Ibiza round up did really well, I recall
I never got paid for any of the 200+ interviews I did for the Independent blog but the effect it had on my career as a music journalist was immense. Not only was I thrust into the limelight and able to prove myself with a long list of quality interviews, but I also met, and befriended, so many people who have helped me on my way.
In the end it became a bit of a curse though. I tried in vain to quit the blog but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t have access to many other prestigious platforms at the time, so PRs would often ask, “Can you get this on the Indie?” and if I couldn’t, then it was often very difficult to convince them to let me write about whatever they were working on. So it was always a fallback and I just couldn’t stop, even though I really resented writing for free all the time.
In 2015 the Blogs section was hit by a malware attack and disappeared. It was a blessing in disguise, though I was slightly distraught that I hadn’t saved some of my most recent posts. There was no more reliance on the blog, and I had finally had to push myself to find new places to pitch to instead of having the easy option.
Fortunately for me, Wayback Machine has stored all my old posts so I’ve salvaged the whole lot, which is why I’m reposting some of the best ones here in my newsletter.
So there you go.
I’ll be sharing more stories like this in future editions, so stay tuned…
Indie Blog Archive 005: Tiga on ZZT
Since I mentioned the Tiga interview, I thought I’d share it here. It focuses on the ZZT project he did with Zombie Nation.
Album Recommendations
Every fortnight I’ll recommend a couple of albums that I think are worth spending time with.
Nabihah Iqbal - Weighing Of The Heart
This time around it’s Weighing Of The Heart by Nabihah Iqbal. We met a few months ago when we were both on the judging panel for the AIM Awards (which is taking place next week - 12th August, more information here). Afterwards I sent her a copy of my book Around The World In 80 Record Stores and she sent me her album on vinyl. It’s such a lovely LP, I’ve listened to it loads since she sent it but I had a deeper listen last Friday when I was home alone. I ordered a takeaway (curry, as standard), put the album on and lit the Japanese incense that came with it - for the full “multi-sensory experience” hehe. I don’t often get to kick back and fully absorb albums in this way anymore, having a baby and such a busy working life so it was a rare treat and I’m glad I gave it the time.
Augustus Pablo - Earth’s Rightful Ruler
I grew up with reggae and the melodica vibes of Augustus Pablo provoke a particularly strong sense of nostalgia. For me, it’s absolute genius that he combined that instrument with reggae music, it’s the perfect combination. I picked this album up in Baltimore when I was there last April, from a lovely little record shop called Hare's Breath in an area called Fells Point. The owner was a bloke from the UK, who’d relocated and got himself set up over there. Very pleased to have this album in my collection, highly recommended.
My Radio Show
Had a belated birthday celebration on my show last night. Played a load of my favourite tunes and had a good old dance in the absolute sweatbox of a studio! Had to close the door on the tiny container and turn off the external speakers as there was an alfresco dinner party at Netil Market and they didn’t want my music blaring out while they had a nosh... Shame, they would’ve enjoyed it I’m sure.
Balearic Playlist
Earlier this week my pal Ryan O’Gorman posted on Facebook to ask his friends for their favourite Balearic tunes. Now, of course, Balearic is not necessarily a genre, more a feeling - often subjective feelings, though I guess there is a commonality throughout most music we’d class as Balearic. Anyway, due to this subjective nature the thread brought up a wonderful array of music and I decided to put all the tunes into a YouTube playlist.
Check it out here - perfect for the blazing hot weather and warm evenings we’re having in the UK.
That’s It For Now…
I’ll leave you with this image posted by Jumpin’ Jack Frost on Instagram, which really resonated with me.
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