So, if you’re a full or part-time student, if you’re a full time musician who’s just trying to work on their craft while hustling to pay the bills, if you’re a disabled musician, from a minority background, unemployed or on a low wage, send me a message and we’ll see if we can work something out. It’ll be on a sliding scale, depending on the circumstances.

Lessons can be weekly, every other week, or monthly, and can be scheduled for either daytime or evenings. As well as bass, I offer tuition in improvisation and looping/live sound design. 

If you’re interested in lessons and aren’t in the category for subsidy, that’s OK too – just head to my teaching page for more info and we’ll get you booked in

OK, before reading or watching this from me, I’d recommend reading Dr Stacey Patton’s thoughts on this both on her Facebook and on Substack. She’s has a PhD in African American History, and has studied protests as part of her work. So yeah, way more qualified than me to speak on this…

This is part 1 of two versions of basically the same idea – the other one is a video that’ll be in the post after this (once I’ve got it off my phone and uploaded it to Flickr) with a transcript…

But here’s the blog post I wrote initially as a script for a video, but realised I was no good at reading scripts so just freestyled the video and ended up with two versions

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I’ve been thinking about protest marches, and in particular yesterday’s march against The Far Right.

I think it’s important to define what it is, ultimately, that we are marching against. I think it comes down to three things:

• Patriarchy
• White Supremacy
• Capitalism

The “far right” and even fascism are labels for the impolite manifestations of the above. As a number of scholars have suggested on social media, fascism can perhaps be best understood as a method, rather than an ideology. A brand of violent authoritarian control that can be attached to any or all of the above. So while there is absolutely a resurgent far right in British electoral politics, the “far right” behaviour that well-meaning liberals are now marching against has been there all along, it’s just that now it’s impacting white people. 

So the question of where the outrage is at stop and search, at racism in employment, entertainment, the music industry, advertising, in microaggressions, the housing market, social services, medical care, education… Those things have been there all along and “marching against the far right” does nothing material to fix them. It can, in fact, trick white liberals into thinking we’re doing way more than we are, to see peaceful marching in the safe cocoon of our whiteness as enough…

So when you hear black and brown commentators say that these performative, gestural marches don’t achieve anything, and you push back, it is understandably heard as “why aren’t you GRATEFUL?” which in turn is another manifestation of the micro-aggressions of racism embedded in liberal discourse.

It’s important to say that the march wasn’t monocultural – not only were there black and brown people marching, there were Caribbean, Arab, Jewish, Muslim and South Asian organisations with delegations involved. It’s important not to undermine what their commitment to an event like this represents, and to see that responses to this aren’t monolithic. Just as there are whites on the march who’ve been involved in solidarity struggles for decades, there are those who did it for shitty reasons of absolving their conscience, who still won’t deal with their racist relatives and coworkers. Performativity that is worse than useless.

So was the London march a good thing? Yes. As a piece of improvised street theatre, designed to counter the same from the flag-painting “patriotic” racists who filled London a few months back, it was very good. It shows (to who? good question, reader ) that racism cosplaying as patriotism isn’t perhaps a pervasive as the BBC coverage would have us believe. Indeed, alongside the recent dip in the polls for Reform and the political insurgency of the Greens, it helps put a celebratory, colourful face to that shift. The nature of the march was also important. Instead of drunk, angry white people daubed in red and white, we had a rainbow coalition, both in terms of race and in the colour of the flags and banners being waved. It also provided a way for the handful of Labour MPs who aren’t falling in line behind Starmer’s Labour party’s pivot towards authoritarian racist, transphobic policy making to be involved in something that marks them as separate from that. The ‘against the far right’ framing removing the awkward questions for them about their own party’s complicity in White Supremacy, Patriarchy and the Capitalist movitivations for so many of their current policy shifts.

But it’s important to acknowledge that the UK doesn’t have a good history of political change happening in response to peaceful, polite protest from white people. If it had been a majority black or Asian protest, the police response would’ve been different, the news coverage would have been different. Marching like this is easy. It was to all intents and purposes a lovely day out. Claiming allyship because you and your mates made banners and walked though London’s streets in the sunshine is pretty thin gruel.

So what do we do with it? Where does real change happen? I think that is perhaps best seen in who was represented on the march – trade unions representing millions of workers, faith groups, political parties and organisations – in short, the social structures that we interact with on a daily basis. Marching is fine, but deal with your bigoted colleagues, your family, friends, neighbours. We need to be allies when it’s difficult, when we’re the ones who feel isolated, when it’s awkward, when you need to call out people who’ll accuse you of disloyalty for it. And – crucially – to sit with the discomfort, dissatisfaction, suspicion and cynicism of those who’ve been watching this shit unfold for generations, who are tired of trying to work out who the “good whites” are only to find themselves turned on when they aren’t sufficiently grateful, aren’t the right kind of black, or are just sick and tired of inaction and ineffectiveness from those who are looking for a pat on the back and an invitation to the cookout.

To go with a gaming analogy, marching with people you agree with is political action in Minecraft Creative Mode – there are no real points to be scored, no real change to be had, and zero risk to yourself, but if it goes well you’ll start to formulate strategies, arguments and methods to counter not just right wing street theatre but the manifestations of patriarchy and white supremacy in the behaviours and utterances of those closest to you. Change is really hard. Marching galvanises movements but it doesn’t, on past evidence, convince anyone of anything.

So, I advise you listen to the critique of those who see marching as achieving nothing. They have reasons for saying what they say that we as safe white liberals and progressives need to listen to and not push back on. Sit with the discomfort of not doing enough and start to think about what “enough” might look like. Cos it sure as shit doesn’t look like complaining about black people not being grateful enough…

I’ve been trying to work out where the best place to host them for longer term access is, and realised that Flickr will host video up to 10 minutes, so have put this on my account there to test this out. Here’s some thoughts on why Social Media algorithms interfere with the way we communicate as musicians with our audience… Would love to know your thoughts in the comments x

(here’s a transcript, for those who can’t do video – loosely edited from the autogenerated closed captions in the Edits App…)

Why do we have to talk weird just to have a conversation with our audience?

This is a thing I like to think of as the tyranny of the algorithm. Or it could easily be Pavlov’s algorithm, because the algorithm that decides what people get to see sorts it based on a bunch of really, really bizarre criteria.

What happens is that there’s this drip drip effect on the way that people talk, the way they present, the way they manipulate video in order to expand their audience and their reach

But what dies in that is.. Nuance is expansive cultural expression is the opinions of people who are unsure that everybody is wildly confident and comes across as though they’re just making these massively declarative statements about the world and edits out all the gaps see me i’m stumbling on my words because i’m not this isn’t scripted i’m just chatting and

And I think part of it is that we’ve lost the joy of not going viral. I don’t want this or anything else that I do particularly to go viral. I want to reach people who actually want to have a conversation, I want to reach the people that I already know. Even reach is kind of an odd word – I just want to have a conversation. I don’t talk about reaching people by going outside. I don’t reach my students. I just talk to them.

But we have this really odd relationship with the robots that intervene between us and the people who might get to see what we do, so we’re making video – and music as well, but that’s a whole other question – we’re making video and editing pictures to please robots because they might then go and show them to humans.

That’s a mess! That’s a total mess we shouldn’t be doing that.

I’m gonna try and do more video on here and I hope that you get to see it if you are watching this you’ve got this far what with two minutes 15 into this if you get if you’ve got this far please do go and join the channel on my Instagram page I don’t post it very often but I will forward these kind of things to it so you actually get it as a message I’m not going to abuse that I’m not gonna I’m not I have no interest in posting to it honestly daily basis, I don’t think that’s a really healthy thing to do because your attention should be elsewhere. I don’t need and I certainly wouldn’t thrive on you sitting there waiting for me to post nonsense on Instagram every day

However, I do want to have a conversation and I’m not going to suddenly start shaking my phone in front of my face in order to convince a robot that somehow I’m exciting, I’m not going to put makeup on as a performative thing, I just, I suppose it’s important to say at this point, no shade on the people who do – I get that if, for whatever reason, content creation is how you make your money, pay your bills, or get a political point across. I get why you’re doing that, but I’ve always had a problem with the reduction in what, the metaphor that I always use is biodiversity

Our options are narrowing, that content is all becoming more of the same and that people won’t work ideas out in public anymore because everyone’s declaring their truth and we sort of surf between ever more shouty whatever. I don’t like the idea that we are getting like that.

and you’ll notive I’m not holding a microphone – I’m not sat here with something like a tin of sugar free mints talking to it like it’s a microphone. Maybe I should, maybe then the algorithm will start to listen to me… I don’t want the algorithm to listen to me!

My camera has a mic built in, my phone does, I’m sat in a very quiet room in my hose. It’s fine.

Anyway feel free to reply to this either in the channel or int he thing if you’re more interested in having a conversation than you are in having people shout at you and pummel you in the face with their big hot takes while shaing their camera and editing it to shit

This is a FB post from Feb 13th 2014 , it just came up on my stories and felt worth sharing here.

It has implications for those of us who teach and our conversations around influence and originality, how we guide students towards the ingredients of their best artistic self.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

some thoughts bobbling around inside my head this evening.

Everything is synthetic.

At least, in the sense that word means ‘born of synthesis’. Language, ideas, art, progress, stories… the degree to which we fetishise the false notion of ‘originality’ as an objective reality, and as desirable over and above the thing itself, is not helpful. At all.

Let go: if a thing looks or feels ‘original’ it just means that no one of its constituent influences is more apparent than any other. Or that you haven’t experienced those things that influenced it. The perception of originality is a subjective observational position, not an extant embedded reality in ‘the thing’.

We build ourselves from the beauty and strangeness around us, choosing to process the things we see and experience towards our own end. Make great things with what you have, don’t freak out about the things that aren’t in your palette for building YOU. Seek out the experiences, situations, people and influences that will make you the person you need to become. None of those require fame/success/riches. All are contextual, everything is meaningful.

Being an extraordinary stay-at-home parent is way more impressive/important than being a mediocre stadium rock superstar. the metrics of synthesis are about What You Do With What You Have. And even then, the perception of those things is wholly subjective.

But let go of the pressure for everything to be new! exciting! original! unique!

Instead, be good. Be kind. Be Generous. Be thoughtful. Take every opportunity to make the world better for those around you.

This has been part of how I teach bass privately for decades, to put any exercise in a context as soon as possible – to take a technical exercise away from the realm of ‘is this correct’ and into the aesthetic space of ‘is this good?’ as soon as possible, returning to the more analytical space when the contextual work reveals areas of weakness or a lack of clarity over elements of the work.

So back to exams – the work that we as teachers, tutors, lecturers put in to help the students towards true excellence is vital to the students finding the inspiration to develop a practice that doesn’t just pass assessment criteria but puts art out into the world that is worthy of attention and an audience. Every specific set of assessment criteria is an invitation to contextualise, to talk about what this means to us as creative practitioners, as professionals, as collaborators, as artists with an audience and engaged in the work of audience development. Without that context, we’re robbing them of the meaning behind the attention they’re giving to their practice.

The reasons for this are both obvious and manifold. Art produced solely to pass an exam is literally worthless, on a metaphysical level. What a moribund aspiration it is to aim solely to pass an assessment. The assessment should be a benchmark against which to measure a performance, a composition, an interpretation, the demonstration of ability to execute music to a high standard, but it’s the performance that matters, the composition that matters.

At the beginning of every new academic year I invite my students to be ‘open to the possibility of greatness’. Not as a pressure, but as a moment of recognition that greatness doesn’t happen by accident, and the journey towards it is what makes both education and creative practice worthwhile. There is zero value in intentional mediocrity.

So in what way is your work an invitation to the possibility of greatness? How are you shepherding them towards an understanding of both what it takes to be great, and what the payoff is of that work? The metaphysical purpose of showing up as your best self in a world that will so often attempt to rob you of your originality and value.

Like every area of education in the UK and beyond, music education is facing pressures of privatisation, economic extraction and the collapse of the journey of critical thinking that ought to begin in school and extend to PhDs and beyond… But while we’re in a room with a bunch of students, our task is still to try and inspire and guide them towards making meaning in the world. Anything less is a travesty.

So back to our initial frame – it’s imperative that every assessment is presented as an opportunity to develop practice, to perform, to imagine an audience and play to them. Practically this means thinking about staging, costume, introductions, entrances, exits. Make this a part of everything. There’s no reason not to.

And the associated benefit for us? We get to think about what makes OUR work meaningful, how do we perform? What are we doing to inspire them? Everybody wins.

The words below were posted to Facebook in January 2019, and are useful as an example of how my thinking about audience developed and nuanced over time. The end point of my PhD is that the subscriber audience are always present in my decision making as a non-present intended audience. The notion presented here that studio recordings are ‘for me’ is challenged, and evidenced in the commentary on the recordings that comprise the practice submission for the PhD. Anyway, there’s some good stuff in here regarding the impact of the live audience. Enjoy

Jan 16th 2019
My recorded output is divided sharply into live and “studio” recordings. The equipment and audio process are identical for them both but the presence of a live audience completely changes the experience. When I’m in the studio (such a professional sounding euphemism for “the corner of the bedroom”) my audience is me, my aesthetic decisions, my moment to moment assessment of what needs to happen to is made in relation to my own taste, in dialogue with my own history, with whatever I’ve been working on and the lingering shadows of whoever has been inspiring me of late.

But live, the audience are present on the music. I interpret their presence, I respond to who’s there, to the sounds and gestures that I’m aware of while playing, and to my projected imagining of what their experience is like. I play to them, and for them but also with them and I become them, projecting my own understanding of what my experience would be were I not the one with a bass in my hands…

Listening back to any recording is a fascinating exercise in time-shifting the audio record of that moment, live or studio, and re-experiencing it with its own extant nature as a factor instead of the sense of possibility that exists in the unfolding.

So recordings are a translation of that experience and its quite possible for something to “work” on the moment but not as a recording or vice versa to feel like a failure live and then blossom under scrutiny.

I’ve been listening to my latest solo album on the way to work this morning, which is without doubt my favourite thing I’ve ever recorded. It’s also the most “successful” thing I’ve released in many many years. I was trying to remember the experience of improvising it all and some of the performances are still vivid in my mind (aided by the video that exists on YouTube of the actual recordings)

Anyway, if you want to hear it, it’s here –
http://music.stevelawson.net/album/beauty-and-desolation – just remember that, first time through, you share the sense of becoming that I had as it emerged in the moment. Second time through, you’re experiencing something wholly new – improvised music that now exists in relation to the memory of itself.

Here’s another salvaged (and lightly edited) Facebook post, from Dec 2023. Now the dust has settled once again on the weird nonsense of Spotify Wrapped, and we can think about it without people feeling like their immediate and wholly positive desire to talk about the music they love is being undermined, let’s dig into some thinking around these two events that galvanise audience behaviour around music online and what Spotify actually represents in terms of the independent music economy.

Why I’m Not on Spotify

I’m in the fortunate position that I can decide exactly where my music goes. So none of it is on Spotify. Spotify ‘solved’ a huge aspect of music listening for listeners. It imposed a particular model of discovery on those who bought into its idea of ‘everything’ (clearly not everything, but close enough for the majority) and that became normalised through consensus. What it really didn’t solve, in fact it has made palpably worse for artists, is the question of economic viability for niche/small-scale artists.

As a place to listen to Taylor Swift and Chic, it’s amazing. The volume at which their music is streamed means that they make a decent amount of money and can, along with the extra info they glean from enhanced stats and data, pay the people involved in making the music. If your music has already made all of its money in the age of physical media dominance, Spotify is just free additional money that replaces people listening in a context where the artist makes nothing. There are no more copies of Abba Gold to be sold, but if you can monetise the listening, it’s a windfall.

For indie artists, it never worked. The Spotify model, being one that spreads out the earnings from listening over years (instead of front loading the recouping of costs with the significant per-person transaction of selling an album in any format), just doesn’t track with the costs and survival needs of independent artists. Telling someone who can’t pay their rent now that over the next 20 years, if people keep playing a record and it remains on platlists, they’ll make more than they would have on the initial release really doesn’t help. No-one can or should be expected to pile up debt on the false hope of a lottery win like that. It’s nonsense.

Why Bandcamp, but Why So Cheap?

So we need a better model, and right now the best there is for independent artists is Bandcamp. For the most part, it’s a tricky sell to people for whom their entertainment budget is already assigned to Netflix, Disney, Spotify and Amazon. That’s a big chunk of change each month, especially if you’ve got gym membership or some other kind of discretionary spending in there too. To then say ‘please buy all of this music at £8-10 per album’ makes little sense when people are struggling.

So while that’s still the broad consensus around pricing on Bandcamp, I’ve never charged that much. Individual albums are £3. The subscription is £30 a year, for more music than you’ll ever get through within that year. It’s genuinely abundant, and you get to choose the bits that feel most interesting to you, knowing that the rest of it is yours to dig into whenever you want. Happy to discuss ways of digging into the catalogue.

Why This Matters At Christmas

Christmas is a weird time for musicians. Same kinds of pressures as everyone else financially, enhanced opportunity to sell some music (CDs and Vinyl still make fabulous presents for a particular demographic, though re-pressings of classic albums are still the dominant transaction here) and for some, some much needed paying live work (Pantomine sustains thousands of British music careers through the winter.) Alongside this there’s a month off from university teaching over the holidays and into the new year, a tax bill coming up at the end of January, and the lightness of live work heading into 2024 (the beginning of the year is largely a gig desert once Panto season is done).

So, have a think about how and where you spend your money. I’m not organising a boycott of Spotify, but it’s worth having a think about the way that it was sold as the ‘legal’ alternative to file sharing but has in no way solved the economic problems that were identified (often mistakenly) during that period. It doesn’t help musicians, despite there being a few who’ve managed to make it work (this has always been the case with music economy models – it’s never been an egalitarian ‘everyone does OK’ space, but certain aspects of the ‘musical middle class’ have been decimated over the last 30+ years (Karaoke and big screen sports did the low stakes live sector in in the late 80s/early 90s, long before the internet chimed in).

Why Bandcamp Friday Matters

Anyway, if you want to help, Bandcamp Friday is when Bandcamp (despite everything, still the by far the best global platform deal for artists for myriad reasons) give their revenue share on every sale to the artists. It’s made a massive, massive difference over the last few years.

If I was on Spotify, my projected streaming stats would likely be netting me a few hundred quid, and that would be under the old system, not this new one where things that are played less than a thousand times don’t make anything. I’d be making very, very little under that.

As it is, Bandcamp pays my rent each year. I don’t make enough to live on through it, but it’s a highly sustainable model for building community around the music with a minimal audience, because enough people realise that less than a quid a week for the life’s work of an artist you care about is a helluva deal.

If you want to check out my Bandcamp subscription, click here.

Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Crapped (on artists)
Spotify (should be) Scrapped
Spotify Slapped (and not in a good way)
Bandcamp Friday
Bandcamp Payday
Bandcamp (gives us the) Whyday
Bandcamp Smileday
Bandcamp (no more) Cryday