Blog
Blogger Of The Week: The Mad Mackerel
As you might have gathered from last week's newsletter, the ABoF team absolutely love blogs! One of the blogs we've been enjoying over the years is The Mad Mackerel, who not only provide a cracking read, but feature some great artists, and have been more than a little supportive of our artist roster. We managed to catch up with John Grain for a quick chat.
Tell us about how The Mad Mackerel got started.
Mad Mackerel got started because we rediscovered our own love of music via music blogs. And because we were finding and listening to so much good music through them and discovering stuff all the time via Hype Machine, it all seemed really exciting and we wanted to be part of it. Also, there just wasn’t one blog that was exactly what we wanted it to be, so like all these things we thought we’d make one by nicking the best bits of the blogs we liked. And of course, like most music bloggers I guess, who doesn’t like the idea of inflicting your brilliant musical tastes onto someone else...
There are so many music blogs nowadays, how do you keep the blog fresh and different?
I’m not sure we deliberately think about trying to keep the blog fresh and different as a specific objective, it is more a case of still wanting to share what we are excited by, what new stuff we are discovering that is good and wanting to do new things and features for our own satisfaction. We do try and post something everyday as we think it is important to have regular posts, but we try and retain our own voice and personality within Mad Mackerel too, rather than chase after whatever is the latest buzzworthy post from a popular band. While we think our tastes are relatively broad, we do have a particular niche too so people who come back to the site regularly know they are unlikely to get offered the latest in soul, r&b, house, electro or similar - not because we think it is crap, but because it is not our thing and we don’t know enough to have a valid opinion. Lots of blogs do that stuff far better than us anyway. It is for that reason too that we rarely, if ever, post remixes as we rarely, if ever, listen to them.
You've quite an unusual name for the blog. Where did it come from?
The blog has its name mainly because of our naivety when we started. We had the picture of the fish which was one our seven year old son (at the time) liberated from an angler on the beach and returned to the sea to swim another day (much to the annoyance of said angler) and so we thought we would use ‘Fish out of Water’ as our blog title (imagining we had distinct and unusual tastes at the time that would set us apart from the majority). Of course we were about six years too late to register a blog of that title, but by then we were quite wedded to the image so it became the Mad Mackerel instead.
When you started the blog, was there anything special you did you get the word out there about it?
When we started we didn’t know anything about how to get the word out about MM and probably still don’t really. We started by pleasing ourselves pretty much and have carried on using that as a yardstick for what we post ever since. Over time we have slowly built up a bit of a reputation and obviously we have the genres of music that we particularly enjoy and that is reflected in the music we post and the people who consistently come back to MM presumably share some of those tastes. For the first few months after we started in early 2009 we only got a handful of site visits every day, but we persisted and now it is gratifying to get stats that show many thousands of site visitors each month.
With Twitter now a prevalent social media tool, has this changed the way you blog and promote the links on Mad Mackerel?
We’re aiming to get better with Twitter! Like lots of music blogs out there, Mad Mackerel is a labour of love and sadly doesn’t pay anything at all so regrettably has to be a hobby rather than a business. It means finding and making time to develop the site and content is pretty precious. It helps using the widgets in Wordpress and they improve all the time in terms of capability, so now having the automatic updating of posts onto our Twitter account is good, but we could do lots more with it and with Facebook - we just to need to find the time!
How do you find out about new music?
In our opinion, finding new music (and sharing it) is one of the most enjoyable and fun things there is in the world ever - no question about it. In fact if there is one thing better than having a music blog it is probably being a music consultant suggesting the music for cool TV shows, but until that happens we have Radio 6 on constantly in our office and at home, we have lots of other blogs we love and read everyday, we read all the (decent) music press we can, we follow Twitter feeds and subscribe to all sorts of e-newsletters from bands and labels, we use Hype Machine, Elbo.ws, Shuffler FM and Spotify, we subscribe to e-music, have lots of artists and labels that we have posted about previously that contact us direct now with new songs and releases which is great, and we get lots and lots of brand new submissions in via MM which is great too. We probably make at least ten different, big digital mixes per month just to listen to while walking the dog or driving. More time to listen to everything properly would be nice, but when that’s the biggest problem we have there isn’t much to complain about really!
Are there any ABoF artists you've heard that float your boat?
A Badge of Friendship has some great artists and a nice eclectic mix meaning it is always worth us making time to listen whatever is sent through and there aren’t too many labels like that out there! Particular favourites have been What Would Jesus Drive (who made it into the MM Top Ten of 2010), The Blood Arm, who we’ve loved for a long time, IndianRedLopez and more recently the wonderful Birthday Suit. Lots of good stuff!
Any artists that you can see making an impact on the remainder of 2011/early 2012 (signed or unsigned)?
Artists that definitely will make an impact compared with who we would like to see making an impact are probably two very different lists. Personally, we would love to see Deer Tick and The Felice Brothers go global and if there was justice and fairness in the world, Hooray For The Riff Raff, Wooden Wand, Forest Fire and Howling Owls would become household names in the worlds of Folk and Country music. Closer to home Grass House, The Sunderbans and Gaoler’s Daughter would get the NME adulation they deserve too!
Finally, top tips for running your own music blog?
Not sure we’re smart enough to offer top tips - there is loads of things that we would like to do better and loads of ideas we would love to have the time and money to implement properly that would make MM far better. Until then though, for us the two main things are a genuine, honest belief that what we are posting is what we would want to hear and passes a basic quality control test (i.e. we have actually listened to it before posting it), and secondly having a voice and opinions that visitors to the site know is really ours and not copied from elsewhere.