On Facebook, Russ of
Creevey Crisis and
Starfish and Stick, posted a note regarding Wizard Rock. Its main theme was to get opinion on how bands could stay in the consciousness of fans and how they could create new fans even if they were no longer together, or on hiatus. He was thinking in particular of those bands that led the way in the genre and yet were no longer known by a large part of the wrock community, i.e.
Hollow Godric and
Ginny and the Heartbreakers. I read Russ’ note with interest and thought I’d give my opinion as a more recent recruit to the world of Wizard Rock. Of course this is just my personal opinion so feel free to agree or disagree with what I’ve said, although I’m not up for an argument, just stating my feelings on the subject.
First I guess I should give a bit of background about me as this is what shapes my thoughts and ideas, likes and dislikes. Obviously I’m older (by some considerable way) than most wrock fans (and bands), but I am a music fan and have been since I was a toddler and good music, regardless of genre has always appealed to me. My extensive record/CD/MP3 collection encompasses many types of music, although I have to admit that in the Muggle world Rap doesn’t really float my boat, R&B (as it is defined these days) leaves me a little cold and Country & Western generally makes me run screaming for the hills.
I was a latecomer to just about everything Harry Potter-related – the fandom, fan fiction, podcasts, you name it...they all passed me by for a long time until the last book was over and done and everyone I knew who had an interest in Harry Potter had gone back to living normal useful and productive lives and no longer wanted to discuss plot points from the series or help me through my grieving for Severus Snape. Soon, I realised that this magical world which had so taken over my life for ten years, and was continuing to do so, was to my friends, nothing more than a series of interesting, if somewhat annoying books.
There were two things that marked a turning point for me – a particularly traumatic conversation, during which someone told me to stop daydreaming about children’s books and get on with life, because I was turning into a freak, made me decide to look on the internet to see if there was anyone else like me out there, which of course resulted in me finding the Harry Potter fandom in all its glory; and buying an I-Pod which meant I-Tunes and finding the hundreds of Potter-related podcasts.
Amazed, and somewhat relieved to find that I wasn’t alone in my obsession with Harry Potter – although possibly a bit older than others, I happily began downloading and listening to podcasts, mostly wishing that I’d known about them at the time they’d come out. How much more would I have enjoyed the books, had I have had Pottercast there with me? And I know for certain that I’d have felt less as if there was something wrong with me for queuing up with all those kids at midnight for a book and refusing to do anything until I’d finished reading it the following day, if I’d known that there were so many other people as involved in the whole thing as me. As a huge Snape fan I of course gravitated towards Snapecast and it was there that I first encountered Wizard Rock. The track was
Snape vs. Snape by
Ministry of Magic and I heard it whilst at the hairdressers. By the time I’d emerged with my new hairstyle I knew there was a whole new world of music out there that I just had to check out. Now I will admit that I had vaguely heard that a band called
Harry and the Potters existed but I had never bothered to check them out and had forgotten about them until
Ministry of Magic came along to shake up my world.
And so I studied the internet and found that
MySpace was the place to find Wizard Rock. I signed up and starting with
Ministry of Magic and
Harry and the Potters, I soon found myself delving deeper and deeper into the wrock world via the friend links. At the same time I had discovered the list of bands on
Wizrocklopedia and in the days when the
Wrock Wiki was still around would spend my lunch hour checking out info on the bands on there as I had no access to
MySpace. And then there was
Atriumcast, which also introduced me to a number of new bands (I had not, at that stage, discovered
WZRD). Evenings were spent downloading and listening to tracks by the bands I’d found, but there were so many bands out there, that I didn’t have time to delve too deeply into their backgrounds and if I’m honest, bands that allowed you to download their music for free (and not all of them did by any means) were more likely to be of interest to me than ones who didn’t. Over the last eighteen months or so I have amassed a huge amount of Wizard Rock (both free and paid for), and most of my time is still spent listening to it. However, as time has gone on, I no longer spend so much time looking out for new bands, although if, like the
Deathsticks or
Quickspell, one happens to come my way I’ll happily give them a listen.
As far as the bands I have already got music by goes (and I think at the last count that was something like 350) I have been working my way steadily through it and very unscientifically rating each band’s folder depending on how much I like 1) their style of music, 2) their singing (the great thing about wrock is that anyone can have a go and be accepted, the downside of this is that there is some quite appalling stuff out there) and 3) the lyrics of the songs.
Now I am a great fan of the comedy songs, so I love bands like
Peeved, The Blibbering Humdingers and
The Moaning Myrtles, I’m also a huge fan of decent female singers which is why I love
Split Seven Ways and her offshoots,
The Butterbeer Experience and
Romilda Vane and the Chocolate Cauldrons so much.
Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls, The Remus Lupins and
Marked As His Equal are just awesome. Bands like
Ministry of Magic and the completely wonderful (and yes I am a major fan girl of theirs)
The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office make music that makes me happy and want to dance and
Draco and the Malfoys just make me laugh with pleasure.
It is obviously these types of bands who I have concentrated on buying music by along with the many charity compilations that are always being released (after all I have a limited amount of money available for music each month and I don’t just listen exclusively to wrock) and of course I tend to listen to these bands more than the others. I do still find new stuff – hearing
The Common Welsh Green on
Accio Potter Wizard Radio a few weeks ago made me check out
The Quaffle Kids and I am now the proud owner of their excellent album
Bludgers and Broomsticks, but to be honest, when I find a band, I don’t know whether they have been around forever or have only started a few weeks before. I, for instance, knew of
Hollow Godric because I have a couple of their tracks, downloaded from
MySpace back in that first frenzy, but I had no idea that they were one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the genre. To me they were just another wrock band.
Also for me, these days I tend to prefer to download the albums where I can, both because of ease of doing so, plus the bonus of saving space in my already overcrowded flat. Shipping from the US can also come at quite a cost and I have had to wait anything up to two months for a CD to arrive, both of which are annoying when you really want to hear the album. Therefore I am more likely to buy albums by bands who have released their work on
I-Tunes/Amazon, than those who are selling hard copies from a link on their
MySpace page.
I think for a band to stay popular there needs to be a healthy balance between self-promotion and fan exposure. Band promotion would come from touring and regular blogging or perhaps with newsletters (as
Draco and the Malfoys and
The Whomping Willows have just started) even if just to remind people that they are still there. Now obviously this isn’t going to happen if the band is no longer active, for whatever reason, so perhaps, as is the case with the millions of defunct Muggle bands around the world, their fans should make the effort to spread the word in their place. Touring is not the be all and end all of becoming and remaining famous. After all most, if not all, of the current major US wrock bands have never played (and, sadly, probably will never play) in the UK and yet they’re as well known to the (admittedly smaller) wrock community as they are in the US.
Unfortunately, conversely the same isn’t necessarily true of UK bands like
The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, Peeved, Siriusly Hazza P, Shrieking Shack Disco Gang etc. although
RiddleTM are obviously doing something right in that department – they’re definitely well-known to the US community. And then there’s the rest of the world. So many places producing Wizard Rock and yet so much of it going unnoticed amongst the wider mass of wrockers, even in these days of
YouTube and streaming TV.
Why is this? Well because bands like
Harry and the Potters, The Remus Lupins and
The Whomping Willows get out there and tour regularly, and when you discuss with other wrock fans about albums that are worth purchasing, you are more likely to get a recommendation for their latest album than for an album by a band that haven’t released, or even played anything for years. This is the nature of music and will always be. However, with the change to
MySpace, the chances for finding the older bands is receding - or at least the chance to download and hear properly their songs. Since the initial major change which stopped downloads (this happened about a month after I discovered Wizard Rock) I spend most of my time on the site catching up with blog updates from the bands I’m interested in rather than trying to find ones that I know nothing about. To be honest if I hadn’t already come across
Hollow Godric I think it unlikely that I’d know anything about them, or would even know that they were there to search for. And even when you do manage to find the pages of these bands, many of the links no longer work, so unless they’ve stored a huge amount of songs on their player (and I seem to remember that a lot of bands lost the songs stored on the old players), you’ll never get to hear them.
Of course some bands seem to be able to reach iconic status regardless. I know Russ mentioned
The Weasel King – who I would agree is totally awesome. I too have no idea why he’s so popular – I just know that his music appeals to me. Generally though, I assume these bands reach this status because of some quirk. For instance, whilst there are several excellent wrock bands that feature members who are under the age of sixteen (and yes I’m thinking of
The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office again amongst others),
The Hungarian Horntails once again won the WRPCA despite, as far as I’m aware, not releasing a single thing in 2008. As someone who missed them when they came out, I can’t see why they’re still so popular, except that they feature very young children and this I assume gives them the ‘aah’ factor. Maybe if fans could find a way to give their own favourite band that little quirk these ‘older’ bands wouldn’t disappear from the consciousness of the masses.
Unfortunately, I found out about wrock too late to join the
Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club for 2007 (if anyone has a spare set they’d like to sell me I’d be eternally grateful as there’s several of the EPs that I would LOVE to own –
Ginny and the Heartbreakers Love Storm amongst them), but I did sign up for both last year and this year’s selections. I think they are excellent value for money and quality and are a good way to find out about bands you either might never have heard of, or would never previously consider listening to and I’m pleased to see that some of the less major bands are having a chance to record for them, thus hopefully ensuring greater exposure. Whilst I expect this will have no effect on future award ceremonies, nor will it do anything to make bands like
Hollow Godric more popular it does at least give a reasonably priced way to amass a collection of the very different types of music within the Wizard Rock genre. Perhaps the way forward would be for someone to produce a collection of the unknown ‘greats’ of the wrock world...although who would choose what should be on that is another question all of its own.
So I went and listened to
Hollow Godric again to see why I don’t have them on my wrock favourites playlist (that currently stands at about 250 tracks) and I found out that it’s because whilst they are obviously a good band, the tracks I have by them are pretty boring. Lovely sounding and well crafted to be sure, but I have plenty of music that’s like that. Unfortunately, there’s nothing about them in what I’ve heard that stands out to me as being better than the rest. When I’m spending my hard-earned money on music I’ll be buying something that I adore, like
The Butterbeer Experience, Split Seven Ways or
RiddleTM rather than
Hollow Godric I’m afraid.
