total. fecking. gone. blog.
a few show updates to be had...
The house show in Southampton on the 31st of March I believe is now with -
Mercury League
Attack! Vipers!
Gordon Gano's Army
Little Flags
... amazing.
If you want to come, i'd get in touch with Little Flags via myspace as Andy from the band lives there... do it. we are hoping to have a few surprises in store for it too, exciting stuff.
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we are now also playing on the 4th of April in London at the Dome in Tufnell Park with -
fast point
the deadswans
cop out
the outpatients
headfirst
jailbait
hardcore-o-rama! i can't be arsed to do all that fancy html linking thing this time, sorry, it'd probably take you about 5 minutes to find all these bands by typing myspace+"name of band" into a search engine of your choice anyway.
I believe the Outpatients we played with in Guildford once, when they were un-named and they're ex-Raise the White Flag, so that'll be dead good. We also played with Cop Out in sheffield and they're bloody fantastic.
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We just agreed to a show in Reading too, on the 14th of July with -
Chief
Little Flags
Once Over
This is at the Face Bar and is a long way away... don't panic.
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Also, we had some good news this week... our 'industry insider' said that we're going to start getting a lot of coverage in more of the mainstream alternative press in the upcoming months.
I believe the NME have shown some interest in an 'upcoming' type article and Kerrang! are hoping to start building up coverage in their pages, putting a few good live reviews in there (i think they're coming to the Dome show) and small articles here and there to get us into your subconsciousness then the full media onslaught will commence.
We're hooking ourselves up with a switched on manager in a week or two to see ourselves through this, thankfully he's had experience in this sort of thing before, he was even at the 100 club show to see the sex pistols in '79, he knows his punk rock. With his knowledge we'll be able to break some untapped markets in the UK and hopefully spread our influence overseas too.
He'll start whipping the major labels into a frenzy for us. I think the plan is to get the major to create or invest in a DIY label to release some 7" and things, just to retain some credibility within the punk scene and then re-release our album (with added extras and stuff so you'll have a reason to re-buy it). Although our album might not be of a major label standard in sound, he thinks we can spin it to our advantage, citing its 'raw-ness' and making it a point of it being 'punk'.
We realise that all these changes soon are going to be putting pressure on us as a band and as people so in the next few weeks we're going to be holding a vote to see which members of The Steal are the most expendable. We have to go with the populist vote if we start to have 'musical differences' I mean i'm all for changing our sound just a tiny little bit, cleaning it up and that, especially if it means we get our message out to a wider audience, but others many not.
Oh, that's another thing we're working on, our message, or 'selling point'. Everyone has to have an angle these days... we might continue with the 'positive' thing for the time being but i don't know if that will catch the attention of the youth (there's always been a big market for disaffected teens ). We might have to go for something a bit more nihilistic, you many even hear mark say "i don't give a fuck" onstage at some point, it is punk after all.
