1: How the devil are you today and where are you?
I'm actually lying in bed with the flu and was feeling pretty sorry for myself until I looked outside. I live opposite a church and there's a funeral going on outside my window. That's certainly put this flu in perspective. The poor bugger.
2: Where did the name Modern Painters come from for the band (any thoughts of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the time?)
Jeez, this is going to sound so pretentious, but I think originally it was more of a reference to the Modern Art magazine called Modern Painters, and the John Ruskin book of the same name. I guess we wanted a band name that suggested some kind of vaguely artistic approach to sound; I've always liked band names that were in some ways representative of the sound of the band. Afterwards I realised that it was pretty similar to the Jonathan Richman thing, and thought that was a nice reference.
3. What inspired you to take the music path as a career?
It was just what I always wanted to do; from a young age. I think it's the same for everyone in the band really. It's almost like it chooses you rather than the other way round!
4. Manchester has an unprecedented history for the creation of bands, how has the vibe of the city influenced your sound?
Yeah, the heritage is there, for sure, but when you actually live here it's a different kind of thing compared to how it looks from the outside. The majority of us in the band came here for university around 2001, and even by that time, the whole
I think a lot of people from Manchester feel the same as well; you only need to look at the kind of reaction Peter Hook is getting now by touring the old Joy Division stuff, or opening up the FAC 51 venue - he's getting a lot of flak for that, and I think part of the reason is because Manchester's always been a very forward-looking place, musically; it's not really interested in the nostalgia trip.
The vibe of
5: Which bands or artists from that part of the world should be on our radar?
Off the top of my head I'd say Dune, Air Cav, Ninetails, From the Kites of San Quentin, Vei, and Ghosting Season. A lot of these bands are championed by the excellent local website ManchesterMusic.co.uk - that's a great place to start.
6: What is your advice to new bands out there - record label or do it yourself when it comes to getting your music heard, and does that also mean giving your music away for free these days?
I don't think you can get the former without putting a bit of effort into the latter, to be honest. The days of labels being willing or able to invest in a band with the vague hope of "breaking" them somewhere down the line, are mostly over. These days you have to put in the heavy lifting yourself first, and then maybe after you've done a couple of singles, or an album, and booked some of your own shows for a while, hopefully someone will express an interest in putting out your records. There's all kinds of pros and cons to that, but I think one of the benefits is that it does in some ways separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of people getting involved in music for dubious reasons, like instant fame or financial reward.
7: Are you a fan of the social networking phenomenon for music promotion or do you think it has a limited shelf life? Any platforms that you think are really primed for bands and musicians?
It's hard to tell isn't it? I mean, we're still kind of in the early days of the internet in some ways; the whole thing is still in flux and things change rapidly from year to year, and social networking itself is in the even earlier stages. You only need to look at what happened to something like MySpace to see how impermanent some of these things are; a few years ago it was almost impossible to build up a career in music without it - all of our early shows, radio contacts, fan base and so on was built up via MySpace, and it was the most effective way of getting the band name out there.
In some ways we probably wouldn't have had a career if it hadn't have been for the networking potential of that site. It seemed of monolithic importance, especially after it was bought out by Rupert Murdoch. But look at it now; it’s a ghost town, it's become like the Betamax of social networking, or something.
I think Facebook’s won out in some ways, but it's not the most user-friendly tool for bands; if Facebook could find some way of incorporating the functionality of things like Bandcamp and Big Cartel into Facebook pages in a more intuitive, personalised, and embedded way, I think they'd be on to a winner, but it's still very clunky at the moment and that leaves a massive gap in the market for someone else to come in and exploit.
8. I won’t ask your musical influences, but if you were on stage in another band’s T-shirt, which band or artist would it be?
Predictable answer, but I'd have to say the Cocteau Twins. I'm actually having this kind of daydream fantasy right now in which they reform, and need a backup guitarist like they did in the old days... sigh. I hope Robin Guthrie's listening!
9: Any particular instruments, effects, or recording techniques that you would like to share with your fellow musicians’?
I don't have any interesting thoughts about gear or effects really, but I do spend quite a lot of time thinking about creativity, and the recording process, I'm always recommending to bands that they give up paying for studio time and instead invest in a bit of equipment so that they record at home in their own workspaces or whatever.
I've seen it time and time again, bands saving up money to go into a studio, only to find that the engineer doesn't have a clue what kind of sound they're going for, and because they're novices to the recording process, they don't have the vocabulary to be able to say what they want, or why the results disappointed them. And then there's the issue of time - in a studio, you're paying for time, so you only have a limited number of hours, so you tend to maximise the time by recording all the stuff you know very well, rather than using the record process as an opportunity to develop new ideas or whatever.
There's nothing wrong with studios per se, but I just think it's a bit of an own goal for indie bands, or bands that are just starting out, to spend loads of money on them, when there really isn't much difference between that and the kind of results that you can get at home if you know a little bit about the recording process. The great thing about recording in your own space is that you can record whenever you're feeling inspired, rather than when you "have" to, and that kind of looseness and exploration and excitement can have a profound effect on a record, I think.
10: What was your favourite album of 2011?
It's quite hard to say because most of last year was spent working on the album, we were pretty busy and it sometimes took a few months for things to filter through. But I was really impressed by the PJ Harvey album; I thought that was a pretty major piece of work. I really liked Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" as well, although that seems to be a bit of a controversial answer in some quarters, hahaha!
The second albums by Toro Y Moi and Sarabeth Tucek were really good too. And at the risk of namedropping, I was lucky enough to hear the album by Ulrich Schnauss and Mark Peters as that was coming together last year, mainly due to my involvement in Engineers. I thought it was an exceptionally strong piece of work, and it was on heavy rotation. That's just been released recently though so it should probably go in this year's, really!
Daniel Land & The Modern Painters return are set to release their second album, The Space Between Us, via Club AC30 Recordings on 28th May 2012
