The speakers included Mark Shuttleworth, Simon Phipps, Ronan Kirby, Tim Willoughby, Tom Mackey, and David Coallier.

There is also a tar file of all seven OGG files, and a zip archive of all seven MP3’s.

Note: Simon’s lapel mic was acting up (poor mini-jack connection), so we swapped him over to a handheld around 14:10.

At FOSDEM ‘10 I sat down with him to talk about Micro-kernels, Embedded systems, and the state of MINIX 3.

Transcript to follow…

His FOSDEM lectuer can be seen below (XviD AVI download):

The audio (source) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

He spoke about the future of the Music industry, the band’s changing attitude to piracy now that they own their latest record, and explored some of the meanings behind his lyrics.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We decided to get some musician’s to share their thoughts on music piracy. The resounding response was that piracy helps them sell live tickets, which is where their real income is.

We spoke with Torsten Kinsella and Lloyd Hanney of God Is an Astronaut, Mary-Kate Geraghty and Jamie Fox of Fight Like Apes, Conor J. O’Brien of Villagers, Industry, Jonas Erik Altberg (Basshunter), Mayer Hawthorne, and Erez Eisen and Amit Duvdevan of Infected Mushroom about Piracy (among other things).

Over the last year I’ve interviewed a number of bands, often posing the quesion “What are your views on online piracy?”. While Aslan have clearly pinned their colors to the mast, others aren’t as quick to lash out, some saying that without piracy they would be unable to make money.

Labels and lobby groups have traditionally been the one’s keeping up the anti-piracy pressure. In light of the following comments we wonder, “Is the ongoing anti-piracy fight really just a last stand?”.

First we have Torsten Kinsella and Lloyd Hanney of God Is an Astronaut speaking about their views on piracy.

---

Lloyd: Between online downloads, illegal downloads, record companies are at a stage where they don’t know really what’s happening aswell, everything’s up in the air at the moment. Over the next few year’s you’ll see some kind of solution coming in.

David: On that, what are your views on online piracy?

Lloyd: At first I was like “We produced this music, it’s our music”, but over time it has turned around. You use your CD’s to promote your music and you try to make money from your live shows.

Torsten: That is really it. I see a lot of debate online, it’s never as black and white as everybody wants to look at it [sic]. When someone takes your music for nothing and put it onto their [iPod], it’s neither right or wrong at this stage, it’s just a fact of life you’ve just got to accept that. I mean, everybody does it, everybody.

---

Torsten and Lloyd there, sharing their views, that recorded music is an advertising tool, a way to promote their live shows. Next let’s hear from Mary-Kate Geraghty and Jamie Fox of Fight Like Apes on what they have to say about piracy and how they’re using new technology as a band.

---

Jamie: At the moment we’ve got Spotify which seems to be the fairest to me. It’s a streaming streaming website which looks like it’s going to overtake iTunes in a few years. It’s really cool, money goes into the artists pocket and you can stream anything. At the end of the day, we’re not going to be the ones complaining about not getting enough money, we’re not that cynical about the industry. We’ve grown up in this industry, as opposed to growing up as Metallica, turning around and complaining that the world’s changing, saying “Oh god, my ‘07 Jaguar is the old model”. At the end of the day, any money is a bonus.

David: But this is still your 9-5, so you’ve got to make a living out of this.

Jamie: Absolutely.

Mary-Kate: We’ve talked about this so much, especially since we’ve realised that this is the thing we’re hoping to make money from. We have really quite casual chats about it, anyone who says they haven’t downloaded something illegally is lying, I don’t accept this moral high-ground thing that people take, that’s why I think Spotify is such a good idea, because it’s a way of taking something for free without owning it for free, without pissing anyone else off. I think if someone downloads our album and likes it, they might come to a gig, buy a T-Shirt, and that’s where we might earn money from them downloading something illegally. Someone might listen to it and not like it and that’s fine. When we released our album first we put it on-line, streaming for free for a week. I think that was our way of saying we just want people to hear the music, we’re not going to make our fortune off records, we’re probably never going to make a living off record sales alone, that’s why I don’t really mind. If they like it and download it I don’t really care.

---

Fight Like Apes are taking control of their cashflow testing a variety of online services to make money.

But more importantly, the want people to hear their music. Conor J. O’Brien of Villagers held a similar view.

---

David: What do you see the future of the music industry panning out to? In terms of Piracy, New Media, people downloading your stuff? For example, are you pro people downloading your music?

Conor: Yeah, I don’t care, it’s cool. Like, I do it. It’s a really natural progression in the music industry, it’s just a tip in the balance of power. It was always going to happen and now they just have to deal with it. There’s just a lot of grumbles about it, because people are loosing money and stuff, it’s always going to happen. Life’s to short to be worried about that kind of stuff, it’s awesome if people hear your music, I don’t care.

---

Like Lloyd, Conor also spoke about how the music business is changing.

The aptly named band Industry also spoke about how the music business is still finding [itself] and how a happy medium needs to be discovered.

---

David: What’s your view on Piracy? I imagine as teenagers you downloaded one or two tracks, but now that you’re on the other side what are your views?

Donal Skeehan: The music industry is changing so much. At the moment the industry is finding itself and the issue with piracy is going to resolve itself. There has to be a happy medium for both artists and people who want to listen to music. It’s going to come with time, the recent case with The Pirate Bay is going to really have an impact on the music business as it is right now. It’s a matter of time I think, but we’d like people to be buying our records.

Lee Hutton: That’s what keeps it going, obviously there needs to be money coming in. But there’s two sides to a story, music does allot for people. And a way to get it is to download it.

Donal: It’s so available at the moment. If you ask a kid whether they’re going to pay or not… Well, it’s a temptation, it’s there: would you not take it?

---

Irish rock and pop acts are not the only ones who share these views. Jonas Erik Altberg, you may know him as Basshunter, is an artist whos’ Swedish songs often told stories relating to technology, online gaming and internet culture. He told us that his success comes from piracy, without it he would be an unknown artist.

---

Jonas: You can never stop the download or upload, never. I mean look at me; without the internet and downloads I would be a fart in the wind, It’s true. I think the future is like iTunes, they were the first [to] put out songs for sale very cheap. Some songs, you download 10 versions and it’s just shitty copies. This is like 320Kbps [VBR]. Exactly, everyone follows. So I think that’s the future, you just order things on-line to your laptop and transfer to your iPod. No one uses portable CD players or anything.

David: Will people continue paying for music, do you think?
Jonas: I think people will continue paying for music, yeah. I know [what] it’s like being a student, I’ve never had a job in my entire life, I couldn’t get one, I don’t know why, I tried. I know [what] it’s like, you have very little money to spend. Imagine if there is a new album out by your favourite artist and you cant buy the album for 3 months. Is that going to prevent you from listening to the music? No. Of course I think it’s more than right that this person should download it.

David: I know that as a student I would much rather spend money on a live show, I would much rather buy a ticket to a gig of an artist I like and get the music for free on-line.

Jonas: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

David: This way, hopefully, the artist gets more money. Rather than getting screwed by a label.

Jonas: Basically all artists today, I mean artists in general, their income is from the shows, not the sales. There aren’t many artists today who produce and write their own music, but I do, so I get the whole cookie. As long as you can pay your bills and rent, put food on the table every day, that’s my goal. Everything else is just a bonus. If people like my music and want to listen to my music I don’t care how they get it, as long as they like it and are having fun.

---

Mayer Hawthorn, a soul musician and multi-instrumentalist, spoke about how artists need to find new ways to generate income.

---

Mayer: The main thing is that there’s nothing you can do about it. You have two choices, you can either be Metallica and yell at everybody and be pissed off all day, or you can say “Hey, that’s how it goes” and figure out other ways to makes money. That’s the way that I go about it.

David: Hence why you’re touring extensively?

Mayer: Yeah, get on the road and have a good live show and people will respect it.

---

Moving from soul to Psychedelic trance, I caught up with Erez Eisen and Amit Duvdevan of Infected Mushroom. Like Basshunter they spoke extensivly about how online file sharing has helped them, with only worries that their album would leak before its official release.

---

David: People obviously download your music alot.

Amit: Yeah!

David: What are your words to people who do download.

Amit: This has helped us from the beginning. We used to come and play in Mexico for 5-6 thousand people. We never sold a CD over there. They used to download it in Napster, back in the day. This is the main thing that broadcasted Infected Mushroom to the word, illegal downloading. We don’t care about it. We care that you come and pay a ticket to see us.

David: That’s what get’s money.

Amit: That’s the main income [for us], so if you download our music I don’t care. For us, we only care before the album is coming out, we don’t want it to leak. But the album is coming out in one month, in two weeks you’re going to see it leaking on the internet. It’s still unsafe but people are going crazy for Legend of the Black Shawarma, so if it leaks, it leaks. Then if people download it, there’s nothing to do, it’s cool.

---

So, twelve artists, telling us how piracy is helping them, how live music is how live music is where they make their money, and the new services they’re trying.

With artists supporting piracy we wonder if anti-piracy campaigns make any difference and if the money spent on such campaignes could be put to better use.

Thanks for listening.

So, where does your moral compass point you? If you downloaded an album and liked it, would you then see the band live and buy a t-shirt? Leave your views below.

The audio and text of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

This show originally aired on Tuesday February 16th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:45pm.

We spoke with Marie about the new Act in light of online communities and bloggers. We asked if the new law would give the Garda wider search and seizure powers for those found guilty of Blasphemy. We posed the question, “Is a blog a periodical?”

An excerpt of this interview aired on Wednesday January 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway), during ITFreely, S2E7.

The audio (source) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

Transcript to follow…

We spoke of their upcoming album, the loss of visuals in their live set, a new mixing desk that will let them replicate their studio sound live, record deals, booking agents, national attitudes to their music scenes and how to gain a following.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Terry is the author of the best-selling Discworld series, a comedy fantasy series which often parodies classical literature, while still maintaining interesting and original characters and plots.

His upcoming book I Shall Wear Midnight will conclude the Tiffany Aching story, that of an apprentice witch’s maturing and moving to “the big city”.

Terry also showed how dangerous (legally) fan ideas can be, with an example of a letter he received advising him to film his movies in the UK and not visit Hollywood.

Like many creative people Terry has had a close relationship with technology, soldering together his first computer, a ZX81. He spoke about how it was possible to extend it, and add your own functionality. He even built what could today be seen as an elementary web cam. It became obvious where much of his inspiration for the sprawling Hex (a computer run by wizards in the books) came from.

Terry has also recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers. He spoke about how voice to text technology has been helping him, as his typing has deteriorated. He even went so far as to say that should his typing skills return he would stay using the voice technology, exclaiming “Hell, this is Star Wars shit! This is what we’ve been dreaming for!”

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

DD: So, we’re here in the Falls Hotel in Enistymon and I’m here with Terry Pratchett. Start with the books, will you be exploring Tiffany Aching or Sam Vimes further?

TP: Oddly enough, Tifany Aching is in I Shall Wear Midnight and that’s the last of the Tifany Aching books. And while I’m actually doing, it’s also become the most adult because she’s got older throughout the years and nearly 16 in this book. So the book will actually bridge the Tifany Aching series and the main Discworld series, she will certainly meet one or two minor characters out of the major Discworld series, because that’s about right, it’s not time for her to go into the big city, there are things that need to be doing. For heavens sake, she kissed the winter and brought summer back. After you’ve done that you cant spend all you time just bandaging people up. I don’t know how many more books I’m going to write, we can come onto that a little while later.

TP: I like Sam Vimes as much as everybody else, but on the whole, with the books that come up, I write what turns up and asks to be read, like for example, Nation. Nation was like a cuckoo in the nest, I put off the idea because I had it about four months before the big Asian Tsunami, and I thought, “I cant write this yet”. So I left it a year or so, and by then it was in my head so much that I just had to get it written. I don’t know what the next adult book is going to be, but I do know I’m writing “I shall wear Midnight” for Tiffany Aching.

DD: Where do your ideas and inspiration come from?

TP: And there was me thinking you were an intelligent young man!

DD laughs.

DD: Apart from satirizing the real world. For example, do you see yourself and your mannerisms in any of your characters?

TP: I see [myself] in my characters because all the characters must, in some way, be derived… You are the only testbed you’ve got for how human beings think although after a while you get problems to understand the commonality at the time[sic]. So I think I’ve answered that, and if I haven’t I probably did want to.

DD: Which tidbit of your contribution to culture do you think will last the longest, for the most centuries?

TP: Centuries: nothing.

DD: That’s being very modest.

TP: I think Lord of the Rings will survive for a very long time.

DD: But that’s not yours.

TP: No, that’s the point I’m making. I think most books are lodged in their time and place. Having said that, people read Jane Austin. Will people read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a hundred years? [DD: I'd say so.] I don’t know. Bear in mind a hundred years is a very long time in history, I’m thinking the same about Discworld. You’re talking more or less between the Wright Brothers and the Man on the Moon, lots of things changed. There were lots of best selling authors in the 1930’s that no one’s every heard of now, lots of very good children’s authors, like E. Nesbit for example, who’s still just about heard of, Richmal Crompton who used to write the Just William books, huge children’s books writes in those days who will disappear very soon.

DD: You still have C.S. Lewis, you still have [The Chronicles of] Narnia. You still have a number of books.

TP: Absolutely right, Narnia has been a movie which is an important thing. Some do, some don’t, but I don’t know what [the future holds].

DD: The Discworld MUD, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, have you played at all, have you been involved with the MUD?

TP: No, I don’t know anything about it, I know nothing about it at all, I’ve never played it, I’ve never been in it, I know nothing, who is this foolish man MUD? That’s what you get when you mix water and things. If I knew about it, I’d probably have to worry about copyright and things, so I don’t about it. Don’t talk to me again about anything to do with water and dirt.

TP: As Douglas Adams once said: Lots of people come and ask me to do things, by and large if they say “Can we do a play of this”, sometimes you have to say no, when you’d like to say yes because if it goes pear shaped… these days people send me their manuscripts, “please can you read my manuscript”, “no”. I always write back with a polite letter saying “No. The reason is that one day somebody, not you, but somebody is going to turn around and say, ‘In his book, Terry Pratchett does xyz, and he got that from my manuscript’”. It’s never going to be the person I’m writing to, obviously. But some day, someone will because it will be worth money to do so, or God heaven help us, I might read that manuscript, and something might stay in my mind. It’s just not worth it. But it’s a great shame, remember that JK Rowling was accused of plagiarism, and that was all over the newspapers. In a sense, for a little while, accusation was consider to be fact. As they say, mud sticks. It’s a shame that I have to think that.

TP: We got this letter, quite a few years back now, was another letter, and the cover letter said “This letter has been copied to my solicitors”, “Oh no no!”. “I have got a wonderful idea for Discworld that will make you lots of money and is a sure fire, it’s in this envelop [...] this is what you should so”. The fact that he had copied it to his solicitor rather led me to believe, that was not a good thing for us to do. So we wrote back with our standard letter that we do for the kids with the manuscripts and we said “Thank you for this, we have you letter here, it’s not been opened, and it will not be opened, and in the fullness of time it will be thrown away. The reason is…”, for the reason I’ve just said. A little while ago I said to my PA, “Dig it out”, I got curious, I’m prepared to take a risk, “and I want you to read it. Just you, and on your honor not to tell me anything about it, and if you say ‘Oh, crikey’ then I’ll read it, but it must be that I never know what [it says]“. So he opened it up and said “You will not believe this”. It said “Mr. Pratchett, here’s and idea, don’t go to Hollywood, get Discworld filmed by lots of well know faces in the UK, and they will make very good films”. That is not an idea, that is just as plain as the nose on your face. If I’d opened it, what would I have done? By then we’d already done a couple of films. No court would actually do anything about that because it’s such an obvious thing.

TP: It worries me that you have to worry about these legal things, and it’s the as some stuff on the Internet, it’s like Fan Fiction, you know it happens and fair enough. If you ever see Fan Fiction some people put a copyright in their fanfictions.

*TP makes a sound of displeasure.

TP: In a sense yes, but in another sense no. I tend to keep out of it, and if something dirty has to happen Colin goes in with the knife.

DD: Moving on, Hex in the books had some great tech in-jokes, feeding cheese to your mouse, and there was a lot of tech references in there. What’s been your relationship with technology?

TP: I actually soldered together my first computer, it was a ZX81 which was a kit. The nice thing about ZX81’s was that you had to understand stuff to make it do anything sensible. There were masses and masses of things you could add to a ZX81, I had a ZX81 that could tell the difference between light and dark and make decisions as a result of light and dark, and recognise the difference between a cross and a circle. I made a very very primitive optical system for it, and this is on a ZX81 that had practically no memory whatsoever. I followed the tech all the way up, always sort of doing things. Then really I got into the writing as soon as there was a word processor I could afford. I tried to word process on a ZX81 there was an Amstrad 464, that had floppy discs, and it had a decent little word processor with a spell checker. That was it, end of Terry the tech, here’s Terry the writer. But we still have a big tech room in our office.

TP: This is where we segway nicely into the Alzheimers. A firm called Talking Point have got together with the people who make Dragon and they put a kind of front end on [Dragon] which makes it easier and more sensible. I am both a difficult subject… I said online “I thought the latest Dragon was pretty good, but could use some work”, and these guys phoned me up (they’re fans) and said “we are doing this”. They came and showed me their stuff and I bought it there and then. I went through some minimal training, then the first thing we did was we dumped all my books into the algorithms, so it knew my vocabulary. It has quite a number of different ways of teaching the machine you personal pronunciations and new words, which I seldom have to do now. The upshot of it is now, it is so useful to me now, that if my typing ability came back I would sill talk to the computer because, hell, this is Star Wars shit! This is what we’ve been dreaming for, I might not have my flying car, but at least I can talk to the goddam computer.

DD: One final question to finish off. Since you’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimers do you feel that you’ve been viewed as a patient? Have people’s attitudes toward you changed?

TP: No, not really. I’m behind Dignity in Dying, I believe that terminally ill patients should be allowed to die (within reason) when they want to, in their own bed if necessary, it’s what the Victorians did. I’m not particularly keen on the whole assisted suicide thing, [it's] a bit weird, and if you read the guidelines (how the UK government would consider it) even discussing with my wife the issue of assisted dying is illegal. Come on Mister Plod, *claps* come on if you’re hard enough! How damn silly can you get? Because something like that, you discuss it with your relatives, but you mustn’t because they would have financial interests in your death, and it’s silly.

TP: People come up [to me] about that and about Alzheimers. People come up to me in the street all the time, and they have done while I’ve been in this country, and that’s only been since yesterday, and they talk about their mum having it, and their gran has it, and you can see the fear in their eyes and lots of neighbours who’ve been carers tell me that they… Five or six ladies who’ve been nurses have told me, a stranger, that they’ve hoarded poisons (shall we say drugs) that they know how to use, to ensure that if they get a seriously ill disease they’ll be able to kill themselves. I’m not necessarily pleased that this is the case, but government is way behind what the majority of people think. More than three quarters of people agree with my late father who died about six years ago. He said to be before he died “If you see my lying there with pipes and tubes coming out of me and you know there is no going back, tell them to switch me off”. And I did, but of course they weren’t allowed to. What was the point?

DD: Thank you very much, I think you’re very quickly having to rush off.

TP: I am but a servant of the people.

Mayer is very much an artist to watch. He’s immensely capable technically (producing his own work) and has shown promise in both soul and hip-hop. We discussed his recent signing to Stones Throw records, pursuing your passion, the need for production (but not a producer) and collaborations (he’s not aiming low).

We also talked about twitter and his secret reasons for touring. It’s not about the music.

Enjoi.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

DD: I’m here with Mayer Hawthorne.

MH: How do you do?

DD: Just about to do a gig in Galway, Ireland.

MH: Yes sir, my first time in Ireland.

DD: Really? When did you arrive?

MH: This morning.

DD: Have you been enjoying the rain so far?

MH: Yeah, it feels like home.

DD: Where are you from?

MH: I grew up just outside Detroit, MI. It rains there all the time.

DD: Looking forward to the gig tonight?

MH: Yeah, defiantly. I wish my voice were in a little better shape for you guys, I feel bad but that’s how it goes sometimes.

DD: Sure, you’ve been touring for the last week or so, and it looks like you’ve got a pretty impressive line-up in front of you, The US, Europe, and Australia at the end of the tour.

MH: We actually just did the whole US, we’ve just finished 30 dates in the US and we’ve been in the UK for about a week now.

DD: How did the UK go?

MH: It’s been awesome, every show’s been sold out and the crowds have been really good.

DD: You recently signed to Stones Throw, tell us a bit about that, how did that come about?

MH: I moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago to pursue music as a full time gig, trying to lose that day job, and I bumped into a gentleman named Peanut Butter Wolf who is the CEO of Stones Throw records, I met him at a party in LA. I got introduced to him by a mutual friend, she had heard my Mayer Hawthorn demos, which at the time was just a side project that I didn’t take very seriously.

DD: While you were haircut?

MH: Yeah, I’ve always been Haircut; Mayer Hawthorn was really just something for fun I was doing on the side. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that would take priority, and that I would have a career singing soul music. I was a hip-hop DJ and producer, that was my main focus at the time. Wolf seemed intrigued by my soul demos, he wrote me back [sic] and said “Hey, this sounds great, but what is this, what am I listening to?”. I said “Well, there my songs”, he said “What do you mean they’re your songs? You have the rights to them?”. He thought it was an old record that I dug up that I was going to re-issue, and I was like “No, these are my songs, that’s me singing on there, and I wrote the song, and I played everything on it, and produced it myself, and recorded it in my bedroom”. When he found out the real deal he was just blown away, he asked me if I would record a whole album of that material for his label. Which, you can’t really say no to that.

DD: You mentioned that you’re self produced, and that you produce your own stuff [I do, yeah]. Do you think an external producer is necessary for a band, for the quality of the record?

MH: I think it depends on who’s in the band. Somebody’s got to produce it, but I don’t think you necessarily have to have somebody else come it. You do have to have a good producer though, but alot of times somebody in the band can be that good producer.

DD: It’s not necessarily a fresh set of ears that’s necessary?

MH: I don’t think so.

DD: Yeah, it works for you. Do you a future for big labels, for mainstream labels?

MH: I defiantly think major labels are going to be around. As far as me being, in the future, with a major label – it’s a possibility, I don’t shut it out as a possibility, I’m fielding offers at the moment for a lot of different major labels, and we’re going to hear everybody out. If there’s a deal that comes along that’s right for me then I’ll take it, if not, then I won’t.

DD: Good luck with that. What advice would you give to upcoming artists? You mentioned that you were passionate about one thing and this side project took over and became what you are now making money from. What advice would you give to people who are now coming up?

MH: I would say, don’t make music for other people. Make music for yourself, and have as much fun as you can making it. People will find it, people will find [what you’re passionate about], people will love it. People will be attracted to your passion. Go for what you want to do, and be creative, be original. That’s my #1 advice; don’t do what everybody else is doing.

DD: Speaking on collaborations for a moment, I noticed on your twitter page yesterday you were exchanging views with Dita Von Tesse.

MH: Yeah, that was a trip. I don’t actually know that much about her, but she’s got 100,000 followers on twitter. I know a little bit about what she does. That kind of thing has been happening all the time on twitter, that that’s one of the great things about twitter, I really like twitter as a social media forum.

DD: Yeah, you seem to use it, actually, genuinely.

MH: I do, I love it, and I tell everybody to follow me on twitter.

DD: Excellent. A lot of artists are using it as a promotion/media platform, they have a ghost writer writing stuff, but you, genuinely, it’s in your pocket.

MH: Oh yeah, I’m on it. Ask the guys in my band, I’m on it all the time and almost everybody gets annoyed with me, with how much I’m on there.

DD: About remixing and collaborations, do you have any other offers in terms of collaboration, serious potential?

MH: I’m working with Snoop Dogg on some stuff right now, that’s going to be awesome, I’ve been talking to Ghostface Killah about doing some stuff, I just did a track with Freeway for his new album.

DD: So you’re still very much in the Hip-hop space as well?

MH: I guess it’s just sort of been happening that way, that’s actually a really good point. It’s not that I’m out there particularly going after hip-hop artists to collaborate with, but that’s who has been coming to me.

DD: You do also see strange crossovers, I mean, Mark Ronson’s been interested in you, and even in his music there are odd crossovers between Hip-hop in his earlier stuff and Jazz.

MH: Yeah, I guess people can defiantly hear the hip-hop influence in my music, that’s attracted them.

DD: Speaking of, soul is quite old, originated in the 50s, and you mentioned [Peanut Butter Wolf], who thought you had dug up this old record. How are you using modern recording techniques, technology, to bring a more modern sound to soul?

MH: I think a lot of my modern sound comes from me not even being alive in the 60s and 70s. I grew up in the 80s and 90s listening to Public Enemy, LL Cool J and the Smashing Pumpkins. It’s kind of impossible for me to know what it was like back then, when people were recording music. I can only use [the] techniques I’ve learned in my lifetime. I’m an indie artist on an indie label with no budget, and I’m using equipment that I have available to me, which is the cheapest shit I can find and I think that adds a lot to my sound. That’s just the way that it goes. Honestly, if I had all the money in the world, I’d probably do it the same way.

DD: Just to finish up, we mentioned earlier big labels, remixing. What are your views on music piracy?

MH: Music Piracy. The main thing is that there’s nothing you can do about it. You have two choices, you can either be Metallica and yell at everybody and be pissed off all day, or you can say “Hey, that’s how it goes” and figure out other ways to makes money. That’s the way that I go about it.

DD: Hence why you’re touring extensively?

MH: Yeah, get on the road and have a good live show and people will respect it.

DD: Any big gig’s you’re looking forward to? Where you’re saying “that gig’s going to be great”.

MH: London was awesome, we just did two sold out nights in London, I was really looking forward to those, they were great. I’m really looking forward to Ireland, just because I’ve never been here, I’ve never performed here. Same thing with Spain, we’ve got some Spain dates. I’ve never been to Spain. I’m always looking forward to places that I haven’t been and places that I haven’t tried the food, because I’m a really big food guy. That’s part of the fun for me, honestly sometimes I have more fun with the food than I do at the shows. It’s really the “Mayer Hawthorn Lonely Food Tour”. I just pretend it’s about the music, really I’m in it for the food.

DD laughs.

DD: Brilliant, thank you very much, and good luck with the rest of the tour.

MH: Thanks very much man.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

Transcript to follow…

Sascha, project leader, spoke with us about what Eventphone do and what their kit comprises of.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (BY-SA).

DD: I’m sitting in the Burlington in Dublin with Jono, who has just started with Ubuntu Sprint. How’s it been going?

JB: It’s been really good. Every six months we have the Ubuntu Developers Summit, where we get together with the community and we have 280/300 people come along. In between each UDS we try and get our company together and it’s an opportunity for the company to bond and the team to bond and we don’t really do anything new we just basically sit in a room and work together and it’s been really good. This is the first day, I was in yesterday for a management sprint which was really productive but this is the first day of the proper sprint and it’s been really good so far.

DD: Ubuntu has recently released 9.04, cloud computing APIs. What future technologies are Ubuntu pushing? What do you see Ubuntu being in a year or two years time? What are you working towards?

JB: Many areas, there’s lots of UI stuff. We’ve got this incredible new design team that’s joined and they’re working very closely with the community to identify improvements and innovations in the desktop. The desktop has not really changed all that much in the last five years and as part of project Ayatana, which you can get to online, there’s many… Ayatana is like a Buddhist word which means “fear of consciousness”, and it’s basically all the things around you, and that’s what the project focuses on. It’s like a series of technologies that we’re releasing and working on and contributing to the open source desktop. It’s really funky what they’re doing. There’s also new work gone into the cloud and participating in the cloud revolution that’s happening right now, it’s still very early days but that’s looking really good. Our view with Ubuntu has always been to basically embrace technology and release the best open source software that we can.

DD: Of course, and you recently open-sourced LaunchPad, which was a huge thing for your ex-colleague Matthew Revell.

JB: Well, he’s still my colleague. He’s still there. Ex-cohost. The open-sourcing of LaunchPad was a phenomenal contribution.

DD: We thought it was never going to happen.

JB: I’m on the LaunchPad team so it was really nothing to do with me. Various people in the company were making various noises about whether it would be desirable to have an open-sourced LaunchPad and obviously it would be. You’ve got to point the credit squarely at Mark Shuttleworth. Fundamentally that guy invested millions of dollars in the software and he open-sourced it.

DD: In fairness, he was taking all the flak when people were coming to him saying why isn’t this open-source, you’re an open-source company with a closed-source product, this is the core of what you do. Yeah, fair play to the guy, he stepped up to the critics and said, right, we’re going to squash you and this is now open-source.

JB: Absolutely. LaunchPad is an incredible project and there’s many components in it that are so useful and so fundamental to Ubuntu development and I think it made sense. Open-sourcing big chunks of code is a long and laborious job. There’s lots of very uninteresting details that have to be straightened out before it gets out there, that a lot of people are never aware of. The LaunchPad team worked really hard in getting that together and Mark Shuttleworth set the ball rolling and he made the commitment and it’s our there, and the response has been very, very positive, I’m very happy.

DD: I can imagine. Speaking of teams, and you’re pretty much the team manager of all the teams, how have the LoCo teams being going around the world recently?

JB: So good, I’m so proud of the LoCo project. I helped co-ordinate some of it but it’s really been the good work of the people involved in the different LoCo teams. We have over 200 LoCo teams all over the world. People get together and they’re passionate about Ubuntu and they spread the word and they organise booths and organise shows and all kinds of stuff. I’m really proud of the efforts there and it’s continuing to grow, I mean it’s continuing to grow all over the world, we’ve got LoCo teams in pretty much every populated part of the world right now.

DD: Is the main thing LoCo teams do translate?

JB: No the main thing they really do is advocate.

DD: So like street teams in media.

JB: Yeah, they go out and they give out flyers and CDs and they encourage people to go and try Ubuntu. A lot of LoCo teams do translations and that is definitely a core part of it but advocacy is definitely the main thing that people are attracted to.

DD: This seems to be one thing that Ubuntu are really on the ball on in terms of Linux distros, in terms of really connecting to people. They’ve got the, and I hate to use the term, the marketing side down to a tee, and they’ve got – what we need to connect it to people, in order to connect Linux to human beings. I suppose you’re partially if not fully responsible for that.

JB: I’d definitely err on the side of partially. The Ubuntu movement is a big movement. The thing about open-source is a lot of it is top-down. You find inspiring characters who inspire other inspiring characters who inspire other inspiring characters, and every step of that layer is very important. You could say at the top of that layer is someone like Mark Shuttleworth who is the inspiring character of the Ubuntu world, but I think it cascades in many ways. I mean, every day I meet people and I talk to people who just inspire me. There’s people in different LoCo teams and different projects, in Ubuntu and outside Ubuntu that are the glue that holds everything together. It’s very tempting for us in the Ubuntu camp to be proud of what we’ve done and kind of get a little bit self-congratulatory, but if it wasn’t for X and it wasn’t for FireFox and it wasn’t for OpenOffice and it wasn’t for the Gnome project and the KDE project and BinUtils and all these.

DD: Okay but in fairness this is what every distro does, you could say the same about Fedora, you could say the same thing about Slackware, Gentoo, right? So how does Ubuntu set itself apart from these? I ready know the answer but…

JB: I think why Ubuntu is so successful can been a commitment to the ethos which has been it ‘Just Works’. Right at the beginning of the project, I remember when I first heard of Ubuntu I heard random South African dude was interesting in making an operating system that used Debian at the core and build on top of it to make a really easy to use operating system. I’d been talking for about two or three years that I felt this was the way forward.

DD: We all have, everyone who uses Debian has.

JB: It wasn’t because I was insightful, it was because it just made sense. I wasn’t the only voice, but this guy made it happen and I have a huge amount respect for that. It’s the integration and the commitment to integration and detail, and ease of use, across the products, across the server and desktop, UnR, I think that’s what’s made it happen.

DD: Is there much, I suppose, tight knitting planned between Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server? Let’s take a wild example in the closed-source world, the likes of Exchange Server/Outlook inter-knit. Is there that kind of knit planned for Ubuntu Server/Ubuntu Desktop? Is there an advantage for me to install Ubuntu Server on my server if I have it on my desktop?

JB: I think so, if you’re familiar with Ubuntu Desktop then Ubuntu Server is going to be easy for you.

DD: Over Debian Server?

JB: I’d say so. I mean there’s slight changes in Ubuntu that are going to be in Ubuntu Server. I don’t think there’s a huge difference, I think Ubuntu Server is going to be useful for anyone coming from an open-source background. It’s a really great product, it’s a really powerful product. I don’t think there’s necessarily any particular benefit from installing it if you’ve got a Ubuntu background, just a lot of elements of it are going to be free, the feel of it will be very familiar.

DD: Moving on a little bit, you recently published a book, or at least it went to the printers, what, last week?

JB: Yeah, about two days ago in fact it went to the printers. I got an email saying they said “Yep, it’s gone, it’s done.”, which on one side is really exciting cos it’s like it’s gone to the printers, it’s done, no more book, and on the other side it’s like, oh my god, no more opportunity for changes and edits.

DD: Did Leo write the foreword for it?

JB: Yup, Leo wrote the foreword, Leo Laporte, founder of the Twit network.

DD: Yeah, and we’ve been seeing you on FLOSS recently, quite a bit.

JB: FLOSS weekly’s been a lot of fun, I went on there about three or four months back.

DD: Have you been itching to get back into podcasting and live media?

JB: I have to admit, yeah, I’ve been excited about it. LUGRadio was a lot of fun and I miss it. I’m really proud of what we achieved in four years. You know, Aq, Adam and Chris and Sparks.

DD: Are you purposefully ignoring Ade?

JB: Ade’s got nothing to do with it. Ade was just a hanger on. How could I ignore Ade. And Ade. We had a lot of presenters. I’ve been drinking a bit tonight, that’s probably why… I’m proud of the achievements we made and I’ve kind of been itching to do some podcasting again.

DD: It probably doesn’t hurt to get the word out about Ubuntu.

JB: Yeah. FLOSS has been good, it’s a different beast though. It’s fun, but it’s way more formal.

DD: It’s American.

JB: It’s American yeah, it doesn’t have that Monty Python kind of LUGRadio humour. I mean that fact we were making jokes about Richard Stallman buying a kipper, I mean kind of sums it up.

DD: Rather than making jokes about Miguel de Icaza.

JB: There were a few jokes about Miguel, but he’s a good guy, he took it in good stead. I mean, making jokes about wearing his skin is, ah…

DD: Excellent. So you released Art of Community under Creative Commons license. What does that mean for people who want to get an e-book of it, people who want to get it off Amazon?

JB: The reason why we did it, was when I was interested in writing a book about community management and community building, I though it was really important the community had access to that book. When the book is complete and it’s ready and it’s proofed and complete, we need to provide people with access to the information. Saying the only way you can get access to this information is if you pay $36 or $39, seemed unreasonable. It’s not within the spirit of community, you should provide people with access to the information. What we should also provide people with is the ability to support the project, the ability to to step forward and say “I’m going to stick my $39 down on the table to support the idea of a creative commons book.” so that’s basically what we did. And O’Reilly were very, very, very open to it, and credit to them.

DD: O’Reilly are a very forward-thinking House. The other creative commons project you worked on recently was Severed Fifth. Explain Severed Fifth in a nutshell.

JB: So Severed Fifth in a nutshell was, I was hearing all this talk about Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and how they’ve embraced Creative Commons and how this was changing music and all the rest of it.

DD: Was Radiohead creative commons with In Rainbows? I thought it was just free. I know Year Zero was CC but not In Rainbows.

JB: I thought it was CC, I may be wrong. I was hearing about some established artists who were talking about how they were licensing music under a free license. It’s very easy for them to say that because they’ve built their reputation on the traditional music industry. I was thinking, what happens if you’re a completely unknown artist like I am. My idea was to write an album and to see how far we can push it, when I’m completely unknown. So I bascially wrote ‘Denied by Reign’ which is the first Severed Fifth album. I wrote the songs and then recorded them in my home studio, all the guitars, the drums, the bass, the vocals, did it all myself and then basically released it under the creative commons license, the idea was then to push it hard and see how far I could push it. The problem is that just as that project had kicked off, that’s when the book came along, and I couldn’t turn the book down. So Severed Fifth was sacrificed a little bit in order to write the book, but the book’s done now, and I’ve just started writing the second album.

DD: I don’t mean to insult your musical prowess, but how much is a producer needed in the process of creating an album? How much is it necessary for any genre of musician to have a producer, and therefore that follow on is, is it necessary for them to have a record label?

JB: I think it’s really important to have someone who can produce a great album, so you really want to have a good producer. You hear some free music and it’s just crap, and some that’s really good. With Severed Fifth, I produced it myself just because I knew I could get a reasonable result and I didn’t have to invest money in a producer. But yeah, if you’re going to release an album, make sure it sounds good, and that might mean paying going an paying someone $250 a day to record it, or €250 or £250 or whatever.

DD: Sure sure sure. Are you personally going to be touring with the album?

JB: The plan was to with the first one, but with the second one I’d like to. I don’t know how far. Because I wrote it at a solo album, it’s very difficult to play everything at once, live.

DD: Maybe you can do it at book signings.

JB: Yeah! The plan is to put together a band and start playing some gigs. I starting playing about three or four weeks back with a guy locally, Phil, on guitar, and he was learning a bunch of the songs, it sounded great.

DD: Brilliant. Definitely looking forward to it. To finish up, I’ve heard rumours that Mr.Shuttleworth is fond of roofs in hotels.

JB: Fond of what?

DD: Roofs in hotels.

JB: Roofs?

DD: Roofs, as in, get on the roof.

JB: Okay.

DD: I’m not asking you to confirm or deny this, but do you have a similar perchant for getting on the roof of a building, when you’re somewhere new?

JB: Getting on the roof?

DD: Yeah! Is this a Canonical thing?

JB: A, I have no idea about Mark getting on roofs.

DD: I’m not asking if you do.

JB: He may do, he may not, that’s news to me, but it terms of me… it’s a roof. I don’t have any particular affiliation with a roof I mean I’ve never really intended to get on a roof. I like to get on a roof if there’s a nice view or if it’s warm outside, but no. So where did you hear this? Where did you hear this rumour?

DD: Someone drunk in the pub last night, some drunken Texan. I’m not going to reveal names.

JB: Some drunken Texan? Does he work an Canonical?

DD: Yes.

JB: He works at Canonical. So I know who that person is. And he says he’s got a thing about roofs?

DD: Yeah, apparently. He was chatting about how “Mark’s gonna kick my ass if I come in drunk tomorrow.” and I was like “Oh, what’s Mark like?” and he says “That guy, all he talks about when we get to a new hotel is ‘I’ve got to get on the roof, have you been on the roof yet? Have you seen the roof of this place?’” and apparently, very third-hand at this stage, Mark is a fan of the roof.

JB: Well, good to know, I had no idea, that’s news to me.

DD: Thank you very much, and I’m sure I’ll chat to you again.

JB: No worries, thanks.

We had a chat about signing to Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto label, fan remixes, on-line distribution, and their upcoming album Legend of the Black Shawarma.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

Photo by Hugh O’Brien
dd: We’re here in the Ministry of Sound in London with Duvdev and Eres. How has the tour been going so far?
duv: It’s been really great, massively touring the United States at the moment, and that side of the world, now coming to Europe a little bit, it’s been great so far, most of it live. As you can see here today there are a few DJ sets this year and yeah, it’s been good time.

dd: Do you prefer the live sets or the DJ sets?
duv: We prefer the Live set, this is what we’ve done lately, for the last three or four years, a massive live set with all the crew. It’s kinda weird for us to DJ now, because it’s only me and [Erez], travelling like back in the old days. But it’s fun as well, it’s a different approach. We like both.

dd: I head that you play 190 night a year?
duv: Well, 120 live sets a year, sometimes…
dd: Are you insane? That’s a huge amount.
duv: It’s crazy.
dd: Do you get to go home much at all?
duv: well we basically play weekends, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday. Never mind where we are, we spend 2-3 days at home and go again out. So it’s not a conventional kind of touring way but it’s worked for us and it’s kinda good.

dd: So moving on, Vicious Delicious was a huge success and I suppose that what alot of us know you as, and you came to the mainstream a lot with that. We’re all looking forward to Legend of the Black Shawarma alot. But with Vicious Delicious came a lot of fan remixes and a lot more interaction with fans, fans taking your stuff and remixing it. Have you seen much of the stuff that’s been made? Have you seen many of the YouTube videos say?
Erez: Yeah, we get remixes all the time, from our website or myspace. We always get a lot of remixes.

dd: And you’re happy that people are remixing your work?
ez: Yeah, [they're] not official remixes, they’re not proper ones but it’s still cool that people try and make their own version of our tracks. It’s cool.
duv: As long as it’s being played as Infected Mushroom we don’t care, it’s more people having it, it’s more liking it. It’s cool.

dd: On that, you say it’s not an official remix. I know that for example Nine Inch Nails recently released an album, then fans remixed it and then [NIN] released the fan remixes. Would you consider doing that? Would you consider releasing a Legend of the Black Shawarma: Fan Remixes.
duv: Sure, you know this is something that we really… Me an Ez are really critical about the releases, so we really need to like all the remixes. But if we do, why not? NIN had a good idea with this, and brought a lot of fans trying to remix that. I think especially if you go to the fans and tell them, “Let’s do an album of remixes” then will come much more remixes and much more to choose from. So yeah, it’s a cool idea.
ez: The same for Depeche Mode, we did My Remix, you know this Nokia thing?
dd: No…
ez: So we gave files to people to remix.
duv: It’s for phone, but everybody who has a Nokia can do it, download Smashing the Opponent, the new single, and mix it. We’re all for people doing it in their own way, music should be reachable. If people want the file, we’ve done with them, after we do it, it’s done. It’s cool.

dd: You recently signed to Perfecto, Paul Oakenfold’s label. Does this open new doors in terms of collaboration? How do you see this enhancing Infected Mushroom?
ez: Well Paul is helping us a lot in any direction, we see alot of movie offers, to make stuff for movies, meeting a lot of people we never been able to meet before. And it’s just so helpful since we just met him, before we’d been signed. It’s amazing
duv: Yeah, Paul is really connected, in a mainstream base in the US, because he has been there for so many years, so he knows the major key players, stuff that was not open for Infected Mushroom and now is. Beside him we have alot of people working for us at the moment in the united states, not only Perfecto, we have Rocket Science, which is a company that service the label and does all the work, that did Prodigy, the did Crystal Method. There are a lot of people working on the new Legend of the Black Shawarma. So it’s been great.

dd: Excellent, how do you see the music industry panning out? A lot of people are no longer going for big labels, they’re going for smaller independent labels. A lot of people are trying digital downloads, the likes of Coldplay and Radiohead are giving away albums free. How do you see the music industry overall panning out over the next few years?
duv: There’s two approaches to that. Allot of people say I wont go to a major label because the major labels are afraid to sign new and upcoming bands because they industry today is falling down. And the big bands like you said, Radiohead and stuff like that, they don’t want to be with those labels any more. So there are two approaches, going in the same way. Today, to put your music out there it’s easier than ever. There are so many sites, there’s so many ways to sell music, you don’t need a label. But, there reaches a point that you do need one. So there’s two different approaches. There way that music is going in the future? I think because of Apple and iTunes becoming such a key player, people in the world listening to MP3, and downloading is so easy, I think the labels think it’s going to be over soon. People don’t consume music like they used to. They don’t go and buy a CD. It’s sad, and it’s reality, because a CD sounds really better than an MP3 on your iPhone. But on an iPhone, if you want a song now, you sit here and say “I like this song”, you hear it, you click it, you have it. It’s amazing. Both of the approaches are great, but this is the future, the future goes to that direction, and labels are not going to survive.

dd: People obviously download you music alot.
duv: Yeah!
dd: What are your words to people who do download.
duv: This has helped us from the beginning. We used to come and play in Mexico for 5-6 thousand people. We never sold a CD over there. They used to download it in Napster, back in the day. This is the main thing that broadcasted Infected Mushroom to the word, illegal downloading. We don’t care about it. We care that you come and pay a ticket to see us.
dd: That’s what get’s money.
duv: That’s the main income [for us], so if you download our music I don’t care. For us, we only care before the album is coming out, we don’t want it to leak. But the album is coming out in one month, in two weeks you’re going to see it leaking on the internet. It’s still unsafe but people are going crazy for Legend of the Black Shawarma, so if it leaks, it leaks. Then if people download it, there’s nothing to do, it’s cool.

dd: Legend of the Black Shawarma is an album about food. Why?
ez: Well we travel a lot and our main fun on the road, one of them, is food. So we are really fanatics about food, we like good food. Everywhere we go we look for the best, whatever local thing. So if it’s really amazing, we give it some respect, and write it on the album. So it was only a stupid funny concept, nothing too serious.

dd: Ok, that;s it, thank you very much. Look forward to the set, and I’ll see you again.
ez: Thank you
duv: Thank you very much, thanks.

IT Freely, Episode 5 : Open Source Software & VoIP, featured a brief snippet of an interview with Patrick Collison (homepage, twitter, Facebook) and has a chat about Tech start-ups in Ireland (based on his Irish Times article) and iPhone App School (homepage, twitter).. If you want to hear more, the full interview is available for your auditory delectation here. Check it out.

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

The full interview is available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 3.0) license.

DD: Hello, I’m chatting to Patrick Collison who’s back in the country for, what, only a week?

PC: Yeah, a week, heading back to San Francisco on Monday.

DD: Okay, it’s a terrible life.

PC: *laughs*

DD: I suppose you’ve hit the press recently a few times. One of the things was an article that you publishing the Irish Times in respect to Startups in Ireland. One of the things that it highlighted, one of the things that stood out to me, was that the government should take fifty million and give it to each of fifty startups. Do you think that’s actually a viable thing that they would actually go ahead and do?

PC: I have no idea is the honest answer. I mean it’s worth pointing out in this idea that it’s not actually mine originally. Having said that, I certainly think if done, it would work, it would almost have to work. It seems there isn’t too much doubt that if you offered it, startups would take it, and you know once fifty or whatever number of startups did take up the offer you really would be one of the bigger startup hubs in the world. As to whether the government would do it? I certainly think they should. Ultimately in the context of the governments finances, despite the recession it’s not a huge amount of money, especially compared to the benefit it would bring, I mean you only need one of these companies to do fairly well for them to make their money back. There was a report that came out yesterday that was suggesting €5.7bn in cuts I want to say. And €50m out of that is only a percent.

DD: Yeah yeah, of course, but people are always going to shout and say venture capitalists are risky and can we really trust out tax-payers money to risky startups?

PC: I think we have to, and I think a big part of the problem with investment as it’s done in Ireland today is that it’s NOT trusted to risky ventures and I’ve heard [investors] say one of the things they’re most afraid of is investing in companies that fail. That’s just a really bad mindset, I mean as an investor if you don’t invest in risky companies you’re going to miss out on the really successful ones. It’s important to remember that both Facebook and Google could not raise venture capital the first time they tried to raise it. I mean, they were seen as so risky they could only get danger money. And so, if our own state bodies are having a lower threshold than [Venture Capital companies], they’re almost guaranteed to miss out on the good companies.

DD: Both Facebook and Google started in Universities and a lot can be said for the academic sheltering that they had in their first early days. Google have the stories where they’re working the IT department, robbing a PC once a week saying “Yeah, yeah we’ll image that for you.” and using that as the initial Google search engine. Might it be a better route to approach to say we’ll put money into creating spin-off companies in Universities, take the talent from the University and create a spin-off from it. Would that be another route to take?

PC: I certainly think it’s a decent idea, I mean obviously an awful lot of successful technology companies have come from the Universities in the States. In Facebook’s case I think it was arguably incidental, certainly I don’t think the academic community in the university had much of a role to play, perhaps the social cache of those it was exposed to. I don’t know, I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on Universities to be honest. Like I said, there have been many succesful ones, I don’t know what Universities can do to encourage it. I don’t know of anywhere that has made some kind of explicit decision to change things, which makes sense.

DD: So, along those lines, what else do you think would be needed to create a really sustainable startup culture within the country?

PC: I guess at a broad level the most important thing we have to do is firsty recognise that the goal of having startups here is a valuable one and really focusing on it, and once people accept it as important and once we can agree on the sort of startups to encourage I think a lot will automatically follow from that. I think another thing that is easy to miss, is we tend to focus on the Irish aspect of it and we tend to focus on Irish startups and Irish entrepreneurs, and all the rest, which I think is entirely the wrong approach. I’m all for encouraging Irish people and Irish startups, but if we solely focus our attention on that aspect of it, we’re not going to do too well. It’s important to bear in mind that very, very few of the founders, in fact almost none of the founders of the successful Silicon Valley technology companies actually came from Silicon Valley. If you think of Silicon Valley is around the same population size of Ireland, and if Silicon Valley had only encouraged people native to the Valley to be successful, we’d never have heard of it. All of the successes came from people who moved to the Valley. I think Ireland needs to concentrate on becoming the kind of place that people from France or Germany, India or China or wherever want to come to set up their companies. Of course, Silicon Valley hold a very dominant position here and it’s not going to be easy for anyone to compete, but we need to recognize we’ll have to succeed their to have any success to building anything comparable to the Valley.

DD: Okay, I mean we’ve already done this with the Shannon Free Zone. I mean, the Shannon Free Zone attracted the likes of Intel, the likes of Analog Devices to start their European arms of their tech companies in the country, and the main thing was non-taxes. Do you think non-monetary incentives might be another way. For example, if we take an incubator type thing, have you been keeping tabs on Evert Bopp’s GreenHouse Incubator?

PC: I have, yeah. Personally I’m not a huge believer in incubators. Lots of people have tried, not many have succeeded.

DD: I think the angle I’m trying to take is, except money, what else can we do to attract people?

PC: I think a really important one, and I mentioned this in the article, is immigration law. It’s hard to overstate just how much harm US immigration laws are doing to the country right now. I know countless people who’ve had to leave the country due to being unable to get a visa and have become sucessfully employed elsewhere or started their own companies employing tens or hundreds of people. I guess a local example is Liam Casey who couldn’t obtain a visa into the US and moved to China and now employs eighteen hundred people out there. It’s almost crazy how much the US is shooting itself in the foot here and Ireland to absolutely capitalise on this and not just give a visa, but give a passport to anyone to people who look like they might set up things here.

DD: Does that go for tech companies or does that go across the board? I mean the first criticism you’re going to get is that suddenly the wave of Nigerians we had back in 2000/2001 are going to turn up on our doorstep again if we start offering free visas and free passports.

PC: I think people worry a bit too much about that.

DD: Haha, the health board would say otherwise, with them paying the rent and all.

PC: Of course there are, quote, “risks” here, and I’m not advocating blinding giving out passports or visas or anything like that. But, to give a counter-example here, Ireland used to have a reasonably good name in, I don’t know how you want to define it, the English language 3rd Level education sector, say Britian, the US, Australia, New Zealand etc. Back a couple of years ago we had a 1% market share globally of non-English speaking students coming to English-speaking universities, students from India, China and all the rest, and this figure is actually declining. A big reason for that is the perceived and real difficulty for a student wanting to obtain an Irish visa, and actually the approval rate is something like 60% as compared to something like 94% or 95% in the UK. This is just crazy, these students are profitable for us, they’re generally hard working people, because of the selection bias these are people who want to go abroad, are willing to live abroad, learn another language, study another language, etc. These are almost guaranteed to be good people and yet Ireland is turning them away in large numbers and most importantly creating this perception of Ireland not being a country welcoming to these hard-working, industrious people.

DD: Saint and Scholars and all that, yeah.

PC: Right now we’re committing the same mistakes the US is making, except the US, because of their dominant position, can afford to make them, we can’t.

DD: Okay. I mean it’s something we could really capitalise on here. I suppose one or two bullet points to slap in front of a minister would be really useful. Like you said, fifty million, one to each startup would be one. I think I can imagine a large amount of criticism that’s going to be levelled will be along the lines of administrative and you know, is it worth the amount of effort we put in. If we’re essentially employing 20, 30, 40 civil servants to keep tabs on this hub of innovation, are we going to see enough returns to pay those salaries, in order to actually sustain the effort that goes into it. You can’t say yes or no, it’s very, very likely but it’s probably going to require probably one or two bright sparks like yourself to hand-pick and say “Look, these companies are great, these guys have got real good vision, motivation and direction.” and go with that.

PC: It’s important to remember that even if the initial 50 companies did not produce profit for the government, that doesn’t mean the programme would be a failure. The point of doing this is only partially to bring these particular companies to Ireland, the real point is to turn Ireland into the kind of place where other people would like to come. The real value for Ireland would not be in the first fifty companies we bring, the value would be in the other thousand companies that come because there is this cluster of fifty companies in Ireland.

DD: You’ve lived in San Francisco, and I’m sure there’s an awful lot of auxiliary, social, nerdy type things which we don’t have here. I’ve visited briefly, but I noticed stuff like, on the most simple level, an Apple Store, we don’t have one here, but there they’re all over the place.

PC: *laughs* Compu-B might beg to differ, but I know what you’re saying.

DD: Are there other things like that? I mean, you’ve got a variety of sctreaming alternative music stations in San Francisco, you’ve got a variety of lifestyle things to back up a tech startup culture. What along those lines could be developed and built on here if we want to draw young startup types here and say “We’re [as good socially] as Silicon Valley.”.

PC: It’s a good question for sure, and the honest answer is I don’t know, but it’s certainly important. I guess what I wonder is whether it’s necessary in the beginning or will it just naturally follow if we do all the other things right, and I think it might be the latter. Silicon Valley, when it started out, wasn’t any hive of youthful creative activity, it was a fairly sleepy little place. It’s easier for Silicon Valley to grow organically, something else is going to have to grow a bit and Silicon Valley has all these advantages already. The one thing I would say, is I think it’s really important in attracting people to have really good universities. I don’t have too much to say on the whole fees debate except that there’s very little evidence that you can have both world class universities and free education. We should at least be realistic that the choice is between one or the other. Maybe we decide that we don’t want world-class universities, that we’d rather have free education than the best colleges in the world, and maybe that’s where we want to be but we should at least be honest with ourselves that this is the choice we’re making.

DD: Yeah. Agreed, that’s a good point to make and one that I’ve never really fully considered myself but it’s a good one to make. Moving away from that a bit, I’m sure we’re going to have long discussions about it in the future, one of the things you’ve been involved in recently has been the iPhone App School. How’s that going, when’s that starting?

PC: That’s starting on Monday in the Castleknock Hotel in Dublin.

DD: Brilliant.

PC: It’s an outgrowth of work I was doing in iPhone applications myself and just generally seeing how well it can work out, not for big companies, but for a guy who can afford to spend a few hours a day spending on something. Especially in the current economic situation in Ireland, something that people might really appreciate.

DD: I’m going to have to challenge you on this one. You’ve just thrown in the words “Individual” and “Current economic situation”, and yet you’re charged €1500 a pop for the course. It doesn’t compute with me. Personally I’m interested in developing for the iPhone, but I don’t have a Mac, I’m going to have to shell out a grand for a Mac.

PC: App School provides rental for €100.

DD: If I wanted to develop myself on this in the future, realistically if I going to want to continue developing for this if I’m going to get use out of my investment, I’m going to have to shell out for a Mac.

PC: And an iPhone or an iPod touch.

DD: And an iPhone which I don’t have. So it’s a total investment of about three grand. Where’s your average developer going to come up with that cash?

PC: I agree it’s a problem that people have to spend money and it’d be much nicer if they didn’t have to. Ultimately it still costs us to run App School and we can’t provide it for much less. What I will say it’s that it’s still an awful lot cheaper that almost any other secondary income stream that you might want to create, you know if you might want to set up some sort of website where you take subscription payments or whatever it is, you’re going to have to pay for servers and probably a designer and merchant bank accounts and blah, blah, blah.

DD: I agree to all this, the area I disagree on would be, would it not make more sense to target this at corporations and say, look, you guys can put down the three grand investment and now easily develop an in-house application for your payrolling, you can develop an in-house application for getting out news updates to your sales team, every time there’s a sales update, push that out.

PC: You know, you might be right, but we’re not approaching App School as a way for ourselves to make money, or certainly much, it’d be nice of it made some. It’s more to help people like us. I would have loved to go on this course back when I started doing iPhone Application development, and really this came out of “How can we get people like Daniel and myself up to speed quickly with iPhone applications?” It may not be the theoretically optimal solution to how to do iPhone training in Ireland, and maybe someone, or maybe even us will decide to focus on that a little more.

DD: Okay, on that, if you’re planning courses in future are you limiting yourself to iPhone or are you planning to go towards Android, Symbian, Blackberry?

PC: Again, we’re kind of playing it by ear at this stage, the first course still hasn’t run and we’re interested in seeing how the reception ends up being, and we have a second one planned in Limerick in about two and a half weeks time now and we’ll see how those go and after that we’ll make some decisions in regard to what’ll happen in the future.

DD: Brilliant. One final thing on that, is there has been some controversy recently in regard to lack of freedoms of applications on the App Store. For example there was a podcaster App which was taken down because it duplicated functionality, there was a Nine Inch Nails application which was taken down because it distributed songs for free.

PC: It was announced yesterday that any application which embeds a browser or provides unfiltered access to user-generated content will have to receive an 17+ rating on the store and you will not be able to distribute promotional codes for it.

DD: Right, I mean what would you say to people planning to go on this store if they have an idea and it falls into one of these categories?

PC: There’s not a whole lot I can say I guess. I think it’s utterly stupid. You keep thinking there couldn’t be yet another ‘what the fuck’ moment and then another one comes along. I guess the only consolation, maybe, is that I don’t know of many applications where the developer went and built something and they were not eventually able to get it into the store. In all the famous cases that attracted publicity that I know of, the applications did eventually end up in the store, perhaps with some modifications or a different rating or whatever. So even though it’s stupid I don’t think that the problem is actually that significant. It’s more morally repugnant than actually commercially harmful.

DD: Sure sure. It sounds like a fantastic idea. It’s yourself, Daniel and Damien Mulley behind it, yeah?

PC: That’s right, and SQT Training is kind of our training back-end.

DD: Brilliant, brilliant. Best of luck, and I’m very much looking forward to the both of them, and I’m sure there’ll be nifty stuff coming out of there. Thank you very much and we’ll chat to your again at some point in the future!

PC: Thank you.

We had a quick chat about life on the road, the break-up of The Immediate, Inspiration for some of his songs, Piracy and the future of the music industry.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

dd: I’m here with Conor of Villagers
cob: Hello
dd: And previously of The Immediate. How have you been getting on in the last while? How have things been on the road?
cob: Good yeah, I’ve just literally… I was in Amsterdam this morning.
dd: Business or pleasure?
cob: Business, doing a solo support tour of Tracy Chapman around Europe, which was bizarre but enlightening also. Kinda tired, learning a lot, I still feel like we’re at the beginning of things.

dd: What gigs do you have coming up next after tonight?
cob: I have to play at a wedding on Friday, but I’m not playing my songs, I’m just playing.
dd: So you’re going to be a wedding singer?
cob: No, I’m going to be a wedding guitarist, not even a wedding singer. That’s my next gig, then after that… oh yeah, Latitude! We’re going to play this festive in Suffolk in the UK called Latitude which is sort of like a weird of a weird festival in the forest, apparently its kind of hard to find and it looks really interesting. It’s the day after the wedding, I’m one of the best men, I have to leave the wedding at like half seven, then get a ferry over and then drive for 7 hours because we’re on at 2:45 the next day. Hopefully we’ll get there in time.

dd: What kind of reception have Villagers been getting?
cob: Mainly on the FM, *bdum-tsch*. I don’t know, we’ve been getting good reception, yeah. It’s been good, positive.

dd: Rolling back a bit, to your work with The Immediate, I suppose the biggest shock to all of us was the suddenness in which you guys went your own ways. We saw great things are were expecting an awful lot more. Can you chat at minute about that, would you consider working working with the guys again in the future?
cob: Well, I would consider it, if it made sense, but I cant envision a time it would ever make sense. The spark kinda died for us so we ended it before we killed each other. And now it’s all good, we’ve split and I can’t really envision a time where it would make sense for us to get back together.

dd: Not even to get back together and create stuff, but just get back together and play.
cob: To play a show?
dd: Yeah, to play a show.
cob: No, I can’t envision that, no not at all.

dd: Moving to some of your other stuff, the subject matter of some of your songs, and specifically about inspiration that you’ve had for your songs. Where does your inspiration for Becoming a Jackel and Cecelia [& Her Selfhood] [come from]?
cob: Only with hindsight have I realised that the songs I’ve written in the last couple of months, even in the last two years, are all based on the idea of change, something you cant really control, or a physical change, or an emotional change, anything that makes you realise that you’re not as in control as you let yourself think you are. I didn’t set out to write about that, it just turned out that way. The ones that I threw away, the ones I didn’t want anyone to ever hear were the ones didn’t seem to align with this particular genre.

dd: One last question before we wrap up. What do you see the future of the music industry panning out to? In terms of Piracy, New Media, people downloading your stuff? For example, are you pro people downloading your music?
cob: Yeah, I don’t care, it’s cool. Like, I do it. It’s a really natural progression in the music industry, it’s just a tip in the balance of power. It was always going to happen and now they just have to deal with it. There’s just a lot of grumbles about it, because people are loosing money and stuff, it’s always going to happen. Life’s to short to be worried about that kind of stuff, it’s awesome if people hear your music, I don’t care.

dd: Thank you very much and hopefully we’ll chat to you again.
cob: Thanks dude, thanks Flirt.

Interview:

See Update below. I also (with permission) recorded their gig, which is currently being hosted from Skynet, but hopefully it’ll be up on archive.org’s Live Music Archive soon. The gig is available in four formats with files for each individual song (low MP3, high MP3, OGG and FLAC), plus the entire show as a single file (low MP3, high MP3, OGG and FLAC). Copyright of the music remains with the copyright holders.

I’m quite fond of one of their new songs, Jenny Kelly (high MP3, low MP3, OGG, FLAC). This is the first public recording of it, as last Friday was the first time they played it.

Update: I recieved a mail from Jamie on July 2^nd asking to take down their two new songs, Jenny Kelly and I Am Not a Merry Man. This means the full gig recordings have to come down too. Jamie wanted the songs offline as they are very early versions. The will be back up as soon as the band give the OK. I got permission from Mary on the night to record the gig, and Jamie is happy for the rest of the songs to be up, just not the two new tracks.

dd: Were here in Electric Avenue with Mary and Jamie from Fight like Apes. How’s the tour going so far guys?
mk: It’s great, I suppose we haven’t really been doing much of a tour at the moment. We’ve had a pretty strangely easy couple of months. We’ve been writing a lot, we’ve been rehearsing a lot. Getting back to what we started doing, just hating a lot of things and writing about hating a lot of things, writing for ourselves and having fun. There have been a few gigs…
pk: When we started we never really got a break, we got a bit of a break over the last few months, just the odd gig and stuff. So now we’ve finally got new songs and we’re going to start trying them out in the shows now. We’ve got a new lease of life I suppose.
mk: I reckon Waterford marks the start of the summer, officially, because next weekend we’ve got Glastonbury. Every weekend from here on is all Festivals and really fun gigs. If you have a tour coming up you often have one that you pick out and go “Ugh, I could do without that one”. But we’ve pretty much got a solidly exciting three months ahead of us.

dd: Great, so you guys are really starting to get into the swing of things?
mk: yeah, and its an amazing place to start. We haven’t had a Dublin gig for a while, and we’re not going to have one for a while, and so many people have traveled down from Dublin, which is such a massive compliment, young people who’s parents have dropped them off.

dd: You said a minute ago that for the last while you have been in a Haunted Mansion of some kind?
mk: I’m sure it was haunted, someone touched my bum.
pk: Apparently three people were hung in the Green room upstairs. It’s pretty haunted.

dd: Were ye recording there?
mk: We recorded some demos, nothing at all to be released, just for ourselves kind of thing, writing away and seeing what came out. It was really nice, if you’re rehearsing in a studio you’ve got a set time, and you have to be really conscious constantly of the time limit, how much you’re paying and stuff. It’s so nice to be really relaxed and not really give a shit, eat and drink at your leisure.
pk: If somebody doesn’t want to make music, they can just stroll off as opposed to if you’re paying for a room for a certain number of hours, that’s not really cool.

dd: Sticking with music, one of the things I’ve heard about you guys is that you’ve put down the Pixies as an influence, is that mis-attributed?
pk: I don’t know where that came from, we love the Pixies but I suppose…
mk: I can understand where people get it from, but we’ve never…
pk: I think there’s second hand Pixies influences, but nothing we intentionally did, but we do like the Pixies a lot and with Toms bass-lines I can defiantly see the Pixies. But it’s never something we’ve consciously done at at all, but I can defiantly see it in the Music.

dd: Rolling on from that, do you have your eye on anyone for a collaboration?
mk: Shane McGowan.
pk: Shane McGowan. It’s an odd one, but we’ve decided that we want to do a collaboration with Shane McGowan.
mk: We’ve got the song done and dusted
pk: We’ve just got to show it to him
mk: I think it’d be amazing, we need a kind of gruff voice that’s seen to much of life. I think for you, Steve Malkmus has always been…
pk: Yeah, but i think if we did work with someone like that we’d just be too in awe of them to do anything ourselves, and it’d just end up being a Stephen Malkmus song.
mk: I’d love to do something with Il Divo but I think I’d just end up loosing complete faith in myself and the rest of us, “I can never be like them”. I’d love to do a bit more of that, start working with people and stuff. I think it might be too early to be doing any serious collaboration, you don’t want to give the impression that you’re running out of ideas yourself. We’ve got so much that we want to work on ourselves. I think maybe on the third album we’ll defiantly want to…
pk: start collaborating a lot more.

dd: New stuff you’ll be playing tonight, do you have any of that penned down for a future album?
mk: I think, I hope so.
pk: Hopefully, we’re trying not to think about it in terms of the the album, just to write 20 odd songs and see what the best ones are. But at the moment I can’t see them not being on the next album.

dd: Sticking with the songwriting, one thing I’ve noticed about your songs in the past is that at time your lyrics can be explicit, to say the least. Where does that come from? Is that you [Mary] or the band as a whole?
mk: It’s me and Jamie really. When we started writing if I’d ever considered my mother hearing it, or the local priest hearing it, or my old teachers hearing it, I’m sure I wouldn’t have written the likes of Digifucker, I’m sure I wouldn’t have said things like that. But I think that’s the beauty of where we are now, and something that was really important for us. When we’re writing we just need to remind ourselves that we’ve never written for anything but for our own self amusement. I think that’s where it came from. Digifucker is actually a pretty simple song, the lyrics are very simple, there’s nothing that every girl or guy doesn’t think about when they’ve been hurt, but it’s something that no one would every say out loud.
pk: Especially not on a record I suppose. We never thought we were the type of band that would play many gigs, never mind get on the radio. If we were doing that in the confines of our own personal space, it didn’t matter, that allowed us to properly vent, and cater for some sort of radio play.

dd: Flipping back to the collaborative stuff, what are your views on other people on other people remixing your work, taking a bass-line from here, mixing drums from another track. Are ye open to it?
mk: Yeah, we’re defiantly open to it. Recently Jape did a remix of Battlestations for us and that was perfect, he came to us and he said he loved the band, he loved that song and wanted to do a remix. We were like “of course”. That’s a really nice way of doing it.
pk: At the same time we’ve had some terrible remixes.
dd: Sure, but you’re going to get that.
pk: When you open yourself up to being remixed by anybody you’re going to loose the control of what comes out of it. But I think that’s OK, I think that’s kind of nice. I mean, at the end of the day we sample stuff, so what’s the difference between someone sampling our music and we complain about somebody asking for money for a sample, so we’re not going to complain about somebody…
mk: I was out in a club in Dublin last night and I heard the Battlestations remix, which first of all was weird, because my voice is remixed, and I can kind of tell it’s me, but it sounds kind of weird. But then I saw people, friends of mine who I know aren’t that into the band, but are really into dance music. Afterwards they were like “I really like that song that way”. If someone else has a different take on something that we have, why the hell not?

dd: 2manydj’s do a lot of indie remixes In a a very dancy way, would you think of releasing stuff like that yourselves, even as B-Sides?
mk: I think as a B-Side, yeah, if we liked it enough. We wouldn’t release it just because it’s a remix and it might appeal to a certain type of people but if we loved it as a song itself and as a different version of a song I wouldn’t see a reason why not.

dd: Taking it on from remixing, sampling, and not paying for samples, what are your views on piracy in general, and where do you see the industry panning out on that?
pk: With music piracy?

dd: Yeah, not commercial piracy, it’s pretty much accepted that if you’re selling 10,000 copied CDs and the band are getting no cut, it’s not on. But for fan’s downloading themselves, I mean I will honestly admit that I was coming here tonight to listen to you guys and I had [How am I supposed to Kill You If You Have All the Guns] but not [Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion], so I said, “I’ll grab that”, just to listen up and be familiar with the songs. Now obviously it’s not ideal, it would be much better if there was some method in place whereby I can download it, and if I like it I can pay you fair compensation, I can give you a tenner that preferably goes into your pocket. It’s slightly unrealistic to say that all the money should go to a band and not a recording studio or a producer. Where do you see it panning out?
pk: At the moment we’ve got Spotify which seems to be the fairest to me. It’s a streaming streaming website which looks like it’s going to overtake iTunes in a few years. It’s really cool, money goes into the artists pocket and you can stream anything. At the end of the day, we’re not going to be the ones complaining about not getting enough money, we’re not that cynical about the industry. We’ve grown up in this industry, as opposed to growing up as Metallica, turning around and complaining that the world’s changing, saying “Oh god, my ‘07 Jaguar is the old model”. At the end of the day, any money is a bonus.
dd: But this is still your 9-5, so you’ve got to make a living out of this.
pk: Absolutely.
mk: We’ve talked about this so much, especially since we’ve realised that this is the thing we’re hoping to make money from. We have really quite casual chats about it, anyone who says they haven’t downloaded something illegally is lying, I don’t accept this moral high-ground thing that people take, that’s why I think Spotify is such a good idea, because it’s a way of taking something for free without owning it for free, without pissing anyone else off. I think if someone downloads our album and likes it, they might come to a gig, buy a T-Shirt, and that’s where we might earn money from them downloading something illegally. Someone might listen to it and not like it and that’s fine. When we released our album first we put it on-line, streaming for free for a week. I think that was our way of saying we just want people to hear the music, we’re not going to make our fortune off records, we’re probably never going to make a living off record sales alone, that’s why I don’t really mind. If they like it and download it I don’t really care.
pk: Plus I watch Internet TV every day so I’d be a hypocrite.

dd: So, free culture in general, you can see it going further?
pk: Yeah.
mk: I think it has to, I don’t see a way of stopping it.

dd: Do you see a market in the future for the likes of the Universals and the EMIs?
pk: No.
mk: Not the way it’s going, not right now, and especially with the way Spotify is setting a trend.
pk: look at big bands and big record labels at the moment, it’s very temperamental: one album, maybe. Even if they’re doing significantly well they’re going to fall somewhere. Its a waste of time, big labels are going to fall, it’s all about indies at this stage.

dd: OK, so then where do you guys sum up the money to pay a producer and pay for recording studio time?
mk: We were really lucky with the label we’re with, Model Citizen, they’re a totally independent label, we’re the first band on the label. I think the best part is that we have a very personal relationship with them, so we can all see very clearly where it’s going to come from and where it’s going to go. I’m sure from their point of view they’d rather make sure we make a good album, with better potential for making them money back than give us pittance to make a crap album. So I think we have been really lucky. There’s never any… well there probably is a lot of under the table stuff, but nothing that we’d every be worrying about, we’ve a very honest relationship with them.

dd: Brilliant. So, what does the future hold for you guys, beyond your album and gigs in the next few months.
mk: That’s pretty much it. If you had said two years ago, where are you going to be in two years, I certainly wouldn’t have said where we are now. I mean that in a good way, I’m really happy with how things have been going. I think we’ve been so excited this week writing that we just want to…
pk: Get working on another album as soon as possible.
mk: Yeah, and make sure next weeks gigs go well, then next week we’ll worry about the ones after that. If you look at it as a bigger picture you really will just melt down and freak out.

dd: So you’ve no aims and targets and ambitions beyond tonight?
pk: If we play a good gig tonight I’ll be happy.
mk: Yeah, if we can keep doing this and then some day live off it, that’d be nice. We’d love a load of strippers as well.
pk: There are a load of strippers next door.
dd: You personally would like strippers, or the band?
mk: I think I can speak for the band when I say that…
pk: I think we’d all like a few strippers.
mk: Nice ones now, not…
pk: Not skanky ones. I mean, by default they probably will be…
mk: But you can see a bit of potential for a nice person, a good heart.
pk: You could work on them, take them out of that grotty lifestyle.
mk: Save them!
pk: Save them, yeah, be a saver.
mk: Like in pretty woman.
pk: And West Wing.
mk: Oh yeah!
dd: There was a stripper in West Wing?
mk: She’s a high class escort. They deal with all sorts in that, all sorts.

dd: Cool, well, great to chat to you guys. Anything else to say to fans, or potential future fans?
mk: Are you guys in UL? We’re dying to go back to Limerick. We played to the Limerick School off Art and Design in Dolans, it was amazing, that was such a fun gig. We can’t wait to go back, we love Limerick.
dd: You weren’t playing with Crystal Castles, no?
mk: No.
dd: That was another night, it’s all a bit of a blur.

dd: Cool, good luck tonight, and looking forward to chatting to you again.
pk: Thank you very much.
mk: Thank you, you too.

As always, the audio is up in MP3, OGG and FLAC formats. Unfortunately I didn’t have the Zoom H4 on me, so I had to record it on my phone. The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, No-Derivs License.

We got chatting about:

• Why upcoming bands should keep their hits under their hats, don’t throw your best song up on Myspace, use it to woo a record deal
• How live acts change when people know your music, putting your energy into quality
• Their label XL Recordings (same label Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Beck, and a plethora of others signed to)
• How comfortable they were working with producer Paul Epworth, how he became an extra band member
• Piracy, remixes and sampling

Here’s the full text, enjoi!

DD: I’m here with Ed from Friendly Fires, how did the gig go tonight?
Ed: The gig was great, it was more than I expected it to be, the crowd reaction was fantastic, especially for a place I’ve never heard of. [Waterford is] a town that, to the eye, looks very small.

DD: How is the tour going?
Ed: It’s been never-ending for quite a long time now, but it’s been really good, it’s been great. We’ve had maybe one or two shit gigs, but every band has that. It’s really good to see our fans and to see how we have an impact on the general public.

DD: How long have Friendly Fire been around for?
Ed: We’ve been around since we were 14, now we’re in our mid twenties, I was 25 on May 15th.

DD: Cool. You signed to XL recently…
Ed: That’s right, that would have been last August.

DD: Other bands who have signed to XL; The Prodigy, Bassment Jaxx, Radiohead, Beck, Peaches, Dizzee Rascals. You guy seem to have a different sound, you use less sampling and you have more of an indie, prog sound.
Ed: I don’t know about that.

DD: Oh, so how would you describe yourselves, as a band?
Ed: I would describe us as a pop band, and I like describing ourselves as a pop band, because pop doesn’t really mean anything. The way I see pop; good pop is full of catchy hooks and catchy melodies, stuff you can latch onto. That’s our main goal… we’re influenced my lots of music that isn’t pop; post-rock, house, techno, ambient. We listen to lots of music, and we’ll latch onto little elements we really like, but we’ll try and force them into this very concise three minute pop song.
DD: Yeah, one of the influences you guys have previously said ye had was Prince.

DD: Who would you guys like to collaborate or work with, artist or producer?
Ed: It’s been hard enough for us to start working with a producer; we’ve only just started working with a producer, Paul Epworth. We did “Jump in the Pool” with him, which is the last track we recorded on the album. We’re very used to doing things our own way, working on our own. I don’t know, there are artists who I’d love to collaborate with, but realistically… Foals are a band I’ve been meaning to collaborate with, we share a lot similar tastes in music, we got on very well when we hang out. If I could choose who I could collaborate with it’d probably be Big L but he’s dead.

DD: What advice would you give to upcoming bands?
Ed: If you have a really good song, and you think it’s great, be wary of putting it on Myspace, and opening it up to the general public. I feel like when we wrote Paris, we put it up on our Myspace, and everyone had kind of heard it. If you put music on Myspace or stream off certain websites you’ve kind of released it already. I think if you have a really good one, and you think it’s really good and you think it will take off, just hold onto it. If you’re on the way to signing a deal, make sure you release it as a proper single, and make sure you hype it up really well, do something good with it.

DD: One of the things I’ve heard about you guys is that you’ve very selective about who you want to remix your music, or who you allow to remix your music. Why is that, why so choosy?
Ed: I suppose we listen to a lot of dance music, there’s a lot of shit dance music out there, and good dance music too. We get a lot of offers, suggestions from people in the label saying “you should get remixed by such and such”. We know who they are, but it just isn’t the kind of music I would ever dance to in a club. But the kind of people we do like, and do appreciate, we try and get and get in contact with them. It’s a but unexpected because it’s not expected for [indie bands] to like dance music, or give a shit who they’re remixed by.

DD: You guys use samples in your songs, so it’s a bit strange that you’re selective about who samples your music.
Ed: Naa, people can take samples of us and write their own music from it. But if we’re going to be remixed by somebody, we want to be remixed by somebody who we think is good.

DD: Ok, leading on from that, in terms of remixing and mashing up, what are your views as a band on Piracy? I’m sure as teenagers, you guys downloaded your fair share of songs off the net [ED: right], but now that you’re on the other side, now that you’re actually releasing music, what are your views and how do you see the music industry panning out?
Ed: You can’t fight against it, you’ve got to work with it. It’s a pointless task, pissing and moaning about people downloading your music. I mean if I don’t have any money I’ll download an album, simple as that. Most of time I’ll download stuff off iTunes or Beatpop (?) because I don’t want to install some program onto my computer that will fuck it up and give me a load of viruses, that’s one of the only reasons I don’t illegally download music. IT encourages bands to spend more time creating good artwork, becoming a good live band, because you can’t make any money from selling records. So it forces you to focus on other aspects of the music industry.

DD: So what are your views on fans taping your shows? If a fan wants to record you shows and post them online, are you guys for that or against that?
Ed: If they put us on a blog and write about us they’re helping promote us, so it’s fine. I think that’s great and cool. It’s different if somebody records a live show, and then sells it, that would be a little odd.

DD: No, I’m not saying anyone would make money from [the recording], purely non-profit. But if someone wanted to come along to a show, record a song, and stick it on their blog saying “I heard these guys last night…”
Ed: Well it’s just like people taking tracks off the album and putting it on a blog, I think blogs have really helped us, it’s a way of creating hype around bands. You can’t really do anything about it. If people are talking about you and writing about you, it’s a good thing.

DD: Cool, so are you looking forward to the future?
Ed: Yeah, *laughs* if I wasn’t looking forward to the future I’d be pretty depressed.

DD: Do you’ve anything big coming up?
Ed: Yeah, we’re doing to Istanbul in about three days, it should be fun, then after that we’re going over to America, we’re doing festivals, we’re going over to Brazil, doing a tour of Brazil.

DD: Do you’ve any new records coming out?
Ed: Yeah, we have this new single, we’ve been working with Paul Epworth on, it’s all traditional samba loops and samba rythms, it’s a really kind of euphoric. It’s the right song for a 45. We wanted to write something a bit more interesting and inspiring. I think with Jump in the Pool, we were kind of experimenting, and with this we pushed it aswell. It sounds different.

DD: What’s it been like working with Paul?
Ed: Really good. I can’t imagine working with anyone else to be honest. We’re kind of control freaks; it’s hard when you let someone else take control, you never know what they’re going to do. But Paul’s got the same opinion, what he thinks is good and bad, he’s kind of like an extra member of the band, more than a producer?

DD: What kit do you guys use?
Ed: When we record, I have a Universal Audio 6176 Pre-amp that I record into, that goes into my Apogee Audio Ensemble interface, that goes into Logic. It comes out very… I only have two pairs of speakers, when I get more money I’ll buy some more kit.

DD: Do you write for the band or is it a collaborative process?
Ed: I come up with most of the vocals. A lot of the time I’ll come up with the basis of the tune, I come up with the initial idea, and bring it to the table, and everyone and put int the it input, lime most bands, but we tent not to start with a guitar, but then some songs we have started with a guitar, but it’s not based around chords, with some songs we might just have a drum track, and then just write everything around that, or with vocals.

DD: I noticed that live you guys have quite a big display, with trumpets. Have you tried recording a live set? And would you think of releasing them?
Ed: Yeah, we’ve recorded shows we’ve done. Recently we did a show at the HMV Forum, XL funded and brought in a load of cameras and recording equipment. The gig was really successful, it felt so effortless, it was so nice, I felt like I was so in command of the crowd. Tonight was different, we’re in Waterford and who the fuck would know about us?

DD: This is one of the great powers of the internet; people hear about you, they hear your stuff, they get familiar with it, then they see you live.
Ed: It defiantly changes an artist, as you grow older. When we started and were playing small venues, we had to fucking prove ourselves, we had run up in peoples faces, and yell in their faces. But as the show got bigger you focus more on the details, on how well everyone’s playing. It’s not just about the energy, but how well it translates.

DD: Cool, well, thanks very much and good luck with the rest of the tour.
Ed: Yeah, good luck too.

Audio of this interview is available in MP3, OGG and FLAC. The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, No-Derivs License.

Copyright for the recording of “My Baby’s Waiting” remains with MIG Artists.

Update: Since this interview Industry have had two #1 hits in Ireland, My Baby’s Waiting and Burn.

David: I’m here in the Sugar Club with Industry who have just finished their debut single gig, how did it go guys?
Lee: Great
Morgan: Great
Michele: Brilliant
Donal: It was really good. We got a great reaction, that’s all you could ask for.

David: Excellent. there were some really good tunes in there, I particularly liked your second last song,
Michele: Angles can’t die. Yeah, that’s getting great feedback. It’s a bit of a mad story, our manager played us that track last week in the car, we thought “We have to record it” and literally flew to Sweden the very next day to record it. Within a week we were performing it on-stage in our set list.

David: How did you guys get together? What’s the story behind Industry?
Donal: I used to work at Bubble hits, James Hylands company. I came to him with the idea of putting a mixed group together. I knew Lee, we were mates, and he thought he’d come and join us. James had also know Morgan from gigs, that’s how Morgan got involved, and we knew Michelle as well so it just [came together].
Michelle: James has been in the music business for years, so when Donal came to him and said “we want to put a band together” James picked out the people he thought would gel. He contacted us all, and that was it.

David: Were ye in bands before?
Lee: I’ve been in loads of bands, but mostly just local bands.

David: So this is you’re ticket to fame?
Michelle: I don’t think any of us are looking at it as a ticket to fame. We all want to be credible artists: we all sing, Lee plays guitar, Morgan plays piano, we all song-write. We’re not in it for fame, we’ve much more going for us than that.

David: Ye sound much more down to earth than most.
Donal: We take it seriously.
Michelle: Fame has its downsides.
Lee: It’s success in something you love that we strive for, more than fame.
Morgan: Beautiful put Lee, I can see that quoted.
Lee: Sounded good.
*All laugh*
Michelle: I think a pop band has a shelf life, and we’re all very realistic about that. It is a business but this is also something we love doing.
Donal: We’ve all seen bits of the music industry before, like Michele said, we have a realistic view on it.
Lee: The music what?
Donal: The music biz!
Lee: Biz?! You said the music Industry, then you changed it to Biz!
David: You’re downplaying the name of the band.
Donal: We like to subliminally put it in there during interviews.

David: Who would you consider to be influences, who do you look up to as artists?
Michelle: We all have different people, Donal?
Donal: I love Take That, I think their new stuff is really cool. Gary Barlow is an amazing writer, he’d be someone I look up to.
Lee: Some of the old rock bands, I love rock music. Brian McKnight is vocally amazing. Some newer bands like Creed, Alterbridge. It really is varied.
Morgan: I love allot of pop that’s around at the moment, I love Beyoncé and Rihanna, their albums are really good. An older influence would be Elvis Presley, I’ve loved him since I’ve been really young, I think hes amazing as well.
Michell: At the moment Beyoncé, I’ve been following her career since she’s been in Destinies child. I also love Peggy Lee, Sade, and some of the older performers.

David: Cool, so if ye, as a band, could collaborate with somebody, who would it be?
Michele: Ne-Yo.
Lee: For a track, yeah Ne-Yo.
Morgan: That could nearly be done, we’re supporting Neo.
Donal: Yeah, we could work our magic.
Morgan: Our managers are always talking. Hopefully, with a bit more road underneath us…
Lee: Or Timbaland.
Michele: Yeah!

David: You guys are supporting the Pussycat Dolls too. Are you looking forward to it?
Lee: Defiantly.
Michele: Hello?! They’re so hot.
Donal: When we got that news, it was like “oh my god, that’s crazy”. It just takes this to another level.
Morgan: That’s down in Kerry, and there are some other big names on the bill that haven’t conformed yet.

David: Any other gig dates or tours coming up that people can look forward to?
Donal: We’re going to be in Sweden, we’re releasing the track over there as well, so we’ll be doing some promo over there.
Morgan: It’ll be a ten day promo tour over there.
Michele: We’ll be on a radio tour starting tomorrow for the single release, which is out on the 19th of June.
David: Is there any advice you guys would give to upcoming artists, people singing into their hairbrushes at home who want a break?
Lee: Just keep on trying, relentlessly go for it.
Donal: Never give up.
Morgan: Between us we’ve had so many knocks. You’ll be ready to give up 101 times. Unfortunately there’s no such thing as overnight success, people who say that are talking absolute rubbish. If it does happen it’s one in a million, so be realistic about it. If you want to do it you have to be in it for the long haul.
Donal: I know it’s cheesy, but believe in yourself.
Michele: And follow your dream.
Donal: So cheesy.
*All laugh*
Morgan: Persistence is the main thing.
Lee: You know you’re only good at one thing, that’s what you want to do with your life. You have to be relentless.
Michele: What you should do is: All the knocks people give you just make you stronger.
Donal: Turn them around. Nobody else is going to make this happen for you.
Michele: It’s so cheesy, but that’s the gods honest truth.
Donal: This is your fault for asking the cheesy question.
Michele: Be realistic, don’t think you’re Mariah Carey (?) if you’re clearly not. Know your place and work with what you have.
Lee: Don’t work with what you think you have.
Michele: I feel so sorry for the people on the X-Factor and other shows who say “My mum tells me I’m an amazing singer”. That’s just bad… I wont elaborate.
Donal: But those people can still persist.
Michele: Yeah, work with what you’re good at.

David: I was chatting to Donal earlier who said he released a cook book recently. If you weren’t doing this, what would you be at?
Lee: I’d love to be…
Morgan: A cowboy?
Donal: An elephant trainer?
Lee: A fireman.
Michele: God, you’d be a hot fireman.
Lee: Thank you. I’ve always wanted to do that. If I wasn’t in music, that’d be my second choice.
Morgan: I’d like to get into producing, I’d probably be a producer.
Michele: She’s an amazing song writer.

David: Did you write any of the songs for [Industry]?
Morgan: No, none of the songs…
David: Yet?
Lee: It is a big yet, because she’s brilliant.
Michele: I can’t stress this enough, Morgan and Lee are amazing.
David: So where does that leave you and Donal?
Michele imitates a do-wop backing vocalist.
*All laugh*
Michele: We all sing, but I’m not a songwriter, these two are talented, they blow me away.
Donal: We’ve gotten very close to our two producers, Jake and Oscar, they’ve been asking us to give input.
Michele: So, anyway, before I was doing this I was modeling and acting. I would probably be in London, chasing the dream, or in PR.

David: You guys, I can envisage, are about to become big. One thing that comes with that are people who want to listen to your music, people wanting to get it. What’s your take on Piracy?
Donal: That’s a hard one.

David: I imagine as teenagers you downloaded one or two tracks, but now that you’re on the other side what are your views?
Donal: The music industry is changing so much. At the moment the industry is finding itself and the issue with piracy is going to resolve itself. There has to be a happy medium for both artists and people who want to listen to music. It’s going to come with time, the recent case with The Pirate Bay is going to really have an impact on the music business as it is right now. It’s a matter of time I think, but we’d like people to be buying our records.
Lee: That’s what keeps it going, obviously there needs to be money coming in. But there’s two sides to a story, music does allot for people. And a way to get it is to download it.
Donal: It’s so available at the moment. If you ask a kid whether they’re going to pay or not… Well, it’s a temptation, it’s there: would you not take it? But we’re against it, so buy our records.

David: One thing I’m hearing more and more, is that artists are making their money from gigs, tours and merchandise.
Lee: That’s very true.
David: So, best of luck to you guys in touring.
Morgan: Thank you.
Donal: Thanks very much.

David: Any closing words for future fans?
Michele: Just that our music is really happy.
*All laugh*
Donal: Are we going to close with that? Our music is really happy!?
Michele: A Michele random model moment.
Morgan: Michele is adorable.
Michele: I can’t believe I said that, it’s defiantly one for my book. You know the “Overheard in Dublin” book, that should be “Overheard: Michele’s life”.
Lee: We’d love to build a fan-base.
Morgan: Stick with us. We’re not going to stick with one type of music, we want to delve into different aspects of pop because it’s so wide and so varied. We’re going to be constantly changing.
Donal: I think that even the songs we have now have good variety.
Lee: It’s going to be great to see a fan-base building, we’ll be good to our fans.

David: Brilliant. I’m looking forward to it, and good luck guys.
All: Thanks.

Update: The French Basshunter site basshunter.fr have translated this interview into French. Merci beaucoup, mes amis.

DD: Good show tonight, congrats.
BH: I loved it.

DD: How did you get into DJing?
BH: I didn’t DJ.

DD: Producing?
BH: There’s is a big difference between producing and DJing. It was about 8 years ago I think, one of my mates burned me a CD with a couple of programs that included a music program.

DD: Fruity Loops?
BH: That’s right, Fruity Loops. So I was trying it out, because I spend basically my whole life in front of a computer. So then I got hooked, I loved it, I kept on doing it.

DD: Do you still use Fruity Loops?
BH: Yeah actually I do.

DD: You haven’t moved onto Traktor?
BH: I use Logic as well. I’ve been using a PC all my life, but I got myself a Mac Pro, an iMac and a Macbook Pro because I really need to start working with Mac, it’s like he ultimate thing now. But I don’t have so much time to sit at home, it takes time to study and learn a new music program, you’re always afraid that you’re going to loose your sound. So I’m kinda stuck with FLStudio, when I three months off in my schedule then I’ll probably start using Logic full time.

DD: One of your songs, Boten Anna is about an IRC bot.
BH: That’s right.

DD: You’ve been involved with computers for a long time, how did you get into IRC?
BH: When I started playing counter strike, it took a couple of weeks, everyone spoke of this #gather channel on Quakenet. I was like “What is that?”, “Just download this IRC client, mIRC”. So that’s how it all began. I’ve been using ICQ, MSN, everything. I don’t use any of them any more, except for IRC, because I know that’s just my kind of people, that’s where I can be myself, and just chill out.

DD: Brilliant, what games are you playing at the moment, or do you have any time?
BH: Yeah, I do have [time], I mean you have to make time, especially for gaming. I’m always travelling with laptops, if it’s a really bad connection I can play World of Warcraft, because it’s OK if there’s a little latency. At home I play DotA or Warcraft 3, I love Tower Wars and Tower Defence, and line TD, of course DotA and Counter-Strike. Do you play any games?

DD: Some games, I used play Counter Strike back in the day.
BH: Call of Duty?

DD: Call of Duty is very good, Modern Warfare.
BH: I’ve heard that Call of Duty is almost bigger than Counter-Strike, especially in Ireland and England.

DD: It is, but it’s different, personally I was always a fan of the faster games, like Unreal Tournament, UT.
BH: Oh yeah, that’s big! I actually have my own Unreal Tournament (UT) server.

DD: Nice. UT2003/2004 were awesome, particularly because there are so fast. You’re in there playing, you kill three guys [in a row], it’s great.
BH: Unreal Tournament came out before Quake 3, didn’t it?
DD: Yeah.
BH: I mean, Quake 3 is almost inspired by Unreal Tournament. I remember Quake 2, the edge, shooting rocket launchers to the spawn points, if you have a good system…
DD: You’re set. Gaming is very cool, and I know you’re big in the gaming scene.

DD: Boten Anna, when you translated it into “Now you’re gone” you changed the meaning, almost completely
BH: So, half a year, 6-7 months after I started my career with Boten Anna I thought I should write some English lyrics. So I tried to translate it several times into English and still keep the story and the hook, and that’s impossible, it’s so hard. So at the end of the day I was collaborating a little bit with a guy in Holland – not for the Basshunter project, we did productions for a couple of vocalists, just some side projects – and we worked out the [lyrics] together. We didn’t have any inspiration so we were just playing around, drinking beer, and it all was there.
DD: Cool, well it’s a huge hit and you’ve done well from it.

DD: Speaking of the Netherlands, how is your jumpstyle?
BH: My jumpstyle, I’ll see if I can do this, it was a long time ago.
*BH performs a few jumps.
DD laughs.
DD: Very good.
BH: I’ve always wanted to learn how to dance and as you probably saw I have no idea how to dance, I’m just jumping around waving my arms and just freak out. Some day it would be nice to have some choreography. You know about tectonic, there is a French dance called tectonic, and shuffle. I think shuffle is [from] the UK or Ireland.

DD: Yeah, I think shuffle is hardcore UK. Ireland just takes [all types of dance].
BH: I think it started in the subways. Shuffle and tectonic, that’s something I could get into.

DD: Do you have any advice for upcoming producers?
BH: I’m on a boat motherfucker, with my flippy floppies. I jizzed in my pants.
DD laughs.

DD: Lonely island are very good.
BH: Aw man, that song, when we heard that one, we were in that car and see a guy lying on a bench, “I’m on a bench motherfucker”, and “I’m on a bike motherfucker”, it was fun.

BH: Advice? Are you looking for a recipe for success?
DD: I’m looking for what someone, an upcoming producer do. You started out with Fruity Loops in your bedroom, now you’re playing to 2,000 people in University in a different country.
BH: If you compare to 15 years ago, today it’s so easy to produce music, anyone can, actually. There is, for example, the Nexus VST plug-in, pre-made sounds, you don’t have to touch it, it just sounds perfect from the beginning. The only thing you need is to know how to use the program and produce some beats. You need to have an ear as well. To be honest the best thing to do is to try and make something that no one else has done before. Make it as simple as possible and as catchy as possible. If you do that, and do it in a good way of course, everyone will be [able to sing along], even a person who can’t sing “It’s a long way to Tipperary”. That’s one of the easiest songs to sing.

DD: It’s catchy and people remember it.
BH: Picture a bunch of guys partying in the pub, suddenly a sound starts to play. It’s not a song you sing, you just scream it out. Use all the free promotion you can get, why do you want to spend €10,000 on one weeks radio promotion when you can reach out to millions and millions of people with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Seriously, there is the future, and it’s free. So, just become a member on all communities, Asian communities, everything, with the same name, and hand out your music for free. Free downloads, people love that.

DD: Speaking of free downloads, what are your views on the Pirate Bay?
BH: I know the guys personally, they’re Swedish so of course.

DD: And their unfortunate court-case recently.
BH: Yeah, they’ve had a hard time. Actually, I think it was the first of April, a new law stepped in in Sweden and it says, you’re not allowed anything, and you’re not allowed to upload anything. That’s like movies, music or anything copyrighted. They’ve found a way to track, even if you download with torrents. You remember DC++, Limewire or WinMX, it was so easy to track the IP number, but with torrents they couldn’t but now they’ve found a way. So basically what they do is, they don’t even tell you, they just send you a bill, of €2,500, and say “you’ve downloaded this, this, this files, we’ve registered your IP number. If you have any objections, go to court.”. So basically, that’s quite fucked.

DD: So, what do you think the future of music on-line is?
BH: You can never stop the download or upload, never. I mean look at me; without the internet and downloads I would be a fart in the wind. It’s true, if my label read this interview they’re probably going to kick my ass. I think the future is like iTunes, they were the first [to] put out songs for sale very cheap. Some songs, you download 10 versions and it’s just shitty copies. This is like 320Kbps.

DD: Same with Amazon and VBR.
BH: Exactly, everyone follows. So I think that’s the future, you just order things on-line to your laptop and transfer to your iPod. No one uses portable CD players or anything.

DD: Even still, they say that only maybe 15% of iPods’ music is legitimate. A majority is either torrents or you get it from your friends. So, will people continue paying for music, do you think?
BH: I think people will continue paying for music, yeah. I know [what] it’s like being a student, I’ve never had a job in my entire life, I couldn’t get one, I don’t know why, I tried. I know [what] it’s like, you have very little money to spend. Imagine if there is a new album out by your favourite artist and you cant buy the album for 3 months. Is that going to prevent you from listening to the music? No. Of course I think it’s more than right that this person should download it.

DD: I know that as a student I would much rather spend money on a live show, I would much rather buy a ticket to a gig of an artist I like and get the music for free on-line.
BH: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

DD: This way, hopefully, the artist gets more money. Rather than getting screwed by a label.
BH: Basically all artists today, I mean artists in general, their income is from the shows, not the sales. There aren’t many artists today who produce and write their own music, but I do, so I get the whole cookie. As long as you can pay your bills and rent, put food on the table every day, that’s my goal. Everything else is just a bonus. If people like my music and want to listen to my music I don’t care how they get it, as long as they like it and are having fun.

DD: Do you have any new stuff coming up?
BH: You heard the last song, that is going to be the new single, after the summer, it’s called “Every morning”. I’ve been at home now for one and a half months, working on a new album. I’m about 70% done, so the album will be out at the end of the summer.

DD: Good luck, I look forward to hearing it.
BH: I’m working quite hard on it. For “Now you’re gone, the album” they only gave me two and a half weeks in the studio, so there are tons of things I want to change, but there wasn’t any time for it. But this time I said, “if you don’t give me two months in the studio you’re not getting an album”. So what are they going to do, you know?
*BH laughs.

DD: So, how’s the tour going?
BH: Very good. This year I’ve been in America for one and a half months, in Canada, in France, I did the Dance Nation tour which was quite successful, and now I’m here in Ireland. It’s good to be back. This summer will be another major tour in America, around fifty shows, then New Zealand and Australia for one and a half months, then I’m going back to the UK and Ireland for a tour.

DD: So, do you spend any time in Sweden at all?
BH: Last year I visited my home town, my family – you have to spend some time with your family as well – and she has calculated that last year I spent 52 days at home, or in Sweden in general. The stuff I do at home; I just eat pan pizza and play computer games, when I’m not in the studio producing. Basically eating pan pizza and playing computer games I can do wherever, so long as I have a decent connection.

DD: Are you planning on a family, do you have a girlfriend?
BH: I had a girlfriend before, for 5 years, and it went straight to hell when my career started, don’t even ask why.
DD: You were on the road, never home.
BH: Yeah, and she freaked out. I’ve tried to establish a decent relationship for the last three years on tour, sometimes when you really meat someone special, but it’s not going to work.

DD: I imagine it’s hard on tour. Do you plan on settling down at any point?
BH: Oh yeah, I want to be a father before I’m 30. I’m 25 this year so I have at least 5 years. I’m always wearing my scuba gear, so I’m not going to have any mistakes. I picture myself in maybe ten years time with a son or daughter.
DD: The best of luck.
BH: The thing is, and I don’t want to sound like a complete idiot, but if I wanted to find a girlfriend it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s just that you have to find the right one. Before this whole thing started it was quite easy to find the right one, because people didn’t know [me] and only the people that though there was something special about me wanted to… you know what I mean. But today when you mean someone you never know why interested, if she’s interested in Basshunter, my success or me as a person.
DD: It’s hard to find someone who’s interested in you.
BH: Yeah, most of the time it’s quite easy to tell, but I think I’ll get there.

DD: Good luck, Good luck. OK, very good chatting to you, we’ll all be looking forward to your new album.
BH: Is this a newspaper for the whole campus?
DD: Yeah, the whole campus.
BH: We have a couple of Universities in Sweden as well, I’ve been on a few, especially at parties and stuff. I must say, this is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I could defiantly think of going to school here, I mean I’m not going to open another book again, but maybe, who knows…
DD: It’s a nice place.
BH: My mom, she’s the principal of a college in Sweden, and I went to that college. I didn’t do so well in the Math and the History, I didn’t study. I could never get away with it. I have pictures of my mom, speaking with all the teachers in school when they are having lunch and she’s ask Mr. Mahr, the Math teacher, “Hi there, I’m just curious, how is Jonas doing in your class?”, “Well, I haven’t seen him in three weeks”. Busted man! So maybe I’ll just go back to school some day and fix my minus.

DD: Cool, well, thank you very much, we’ll see you again.
BH: No, thank you, my pleasure.

DD: I’m here with Special D, who just played in the University of Limerick, how did it go?
SD: Great man, I really enjoyed it, it was good fun because the crowd were really easy. I just played some records, hands go up and everything was fine, so, allot of fun for me.

DD: Do you’ve any new records coming out?
SD: I’m working at the moment on some stuff, but for the last few years it’s been a bit quiet around me, because I did so many other things.

DD: Can you tell us about any of this stuff you were doing?
SD: I did allot of pop music.

DD: As a producer?
SD: Yeah, I’m a producer, I produce my own stuff. I started really early, then I did some work, music for commercials. My music is in the new Crank: High Voltage movie, you’ll see my name fifteen minutes into the credits.

DD: As a DJ, what do you use to DJ? What software and what kit do you use?
SD: I started, like every DJ with vinyl’s No, first I started with CDs because I didn’t have the money for turn-tables. When I reached a professional level I earned money, I bought turn-tables, and I started to play with vinyl, that was 14-16 years ago. I’ve played vinyl’s since ‘95. Three or four years ago CD’s became bigger again because DJ’s were sending MP3’s to each other with new tracks, and that’s the reason everybody starts using CD’s. Then you have the MP3 market becoming bigger and bigger, you get the tracks earlier and earlier, and every DJ wants to play the hottest stuff. One and a half years ago I bought new Pioneer CD players with USB sticks, 8Gb can play for 10 hours, that was really easy. I’ve been DJing for a long time, and I feel I need to change something. Two months ago I started to play with a laptop, using Ableton. It’s isn’t only a DJ set any more, it’s a bit more like a live set, I can remix and everything. I think it’s a new generation, one can be different to other DJ’s. I’m one of the first guys in this scene doing this. There are allot of guys in the minimal and electro scenes playing live sets, but in my scene it’s not so big. So I think I’m one of the first guys, and I think that’s good.

DD: So, have you been having fun with Ableton?
SD: Definitely. I think sometimes other DJ’s think it looks like a computer game, it seems like it’s not real DJing. But belie me, when you have Ableton, there is so much functionality, it is so much more than only two CD players. In the first sets I did with Ableton I was so confused. It’s not only two tracks, now you play maybe eight tracks at a time, don’t forget the filter here, don’t forget the loop there, so there really is allot of stuff you have to look for. But for the last two months I’ve been getting more into it, the set you heard today, it was OK?

DD: Yeah, there was some original stuff, it wasn’t just all off CD’s. You mixed some stuff live.
SD: Yeah, I just put some a capella’s or only melody parts from some songs, then put another kick on it. That makes DJing more interesting to me now, because there is something new.

DD: Do you have any collaborations coming up with other DJ’s or artists?
SD: First I have to get my own stuff out, because it’s been a long time since I released some Special D stuff. I’ve tried to do some new stuff, but it didn’t work, I was in my studio and I wasn’t happy with the stuff I did. I only want to release records when I think they are really good. I don’t want to release 80% or 90% work, I only want to release 100% work, and that’s not easy. Because there are so many talented guys out there it’s really hard to make good stuff. The level of production is getting higher and higher.

DD: What advice would you give to DJ’s who are starting out?
SD: DJing or producing?
DD: DJing first.
SD: As a DJ, you definitely have to do something really exciting, crazy stuff, otherwise you don’t have a chance to become big. There are so many people DJing, and it’s so easy today with Ableton or Traktor. I came from the old-skool, I learnt how to play with vinyl’s for years, and now I know how to play with Ableton, because I know that if Ableton won’t work I can go back to vinyl’s But everybody can DJ now.

DD: Are you talking about someone like Mark Ronson where you’d mix different genres, you’re doing something really fresh?
SD: Yeah. I know some DJs out there that play hardstyle and dance, they came from hip-hop so they’re really good at scratching. That’s something really cool, but nobody from the techno scene normally can. It’s not easy, when you want to become a big DJ really fast, really urgent, you have to do your own productions, successful productions.

DD: What’s important in being a producer?
SD: The same, be fresh, don’t copy the old stuff. If you are in my scene, you notice that every song sounds really similar, so it’s really boring. If all the stuff is so similar, then it shouldn’t be so complicated to do something different, but you have to have the balls for it. That’s what I’m looking for, that’s the reason I haven’t come out with new stuff, I defiantly want do do something fresh. That’s not easy, hopefully I will release something this year but I can’t promise.

DD: You’re too much of a perfectionist?
SD: Yeah, that’s bad, that’s really bad. Otherwise I would have released maybe 12 albums in the last three years, but my mind kills me. I’m working in my studio, and I think “That’s not good enough”, “I don’t like that, I don’t like the kick, I don’t like the bass, I don’t like the melody”. I’m working hard on it, I do my best. Every time I see crowds like this, and parties like this my heart is pumping, I really feel it’s my profession, what I have to do.

DD: You’re quite big in the Netherlands. How is your Jumpstyle?
SD: Can I dance? No man. I play football and go to the gym, but I don’t dance jumpstyle, I never learnt it. It’s also big over here, with Scooter?
DD: It’s coming up.
SD: It’s coming up, I thought it was big? I’ve already stopped playing jumpstyle, but it’s coming up here? Huh, for my set tomorrow I have to put some more of the Jumpstyle in.

DD: Thanks very much. Have you any closing words?
SD: Yeah, let me say that you have a really nice University. I was in a University in Hamburg too, and it looked like shit, but this, it looks like… I don’t know. We came in a car, and it’s so big, everything is so clean, nice and big. It’s a really nice school man. You can be happy to be a student here.
DD: It’s a very good University, yeah.
SD: Maybe if it takes me some time to release a new record maybe I will come to study here, for some years.

DD: Best of luck, hopefully we’ll see you back here soon.
SD: Yeah, thanks man, hopefully.

We had a chat about reverse engineering legalities and some decent metal.

The audio (MP3, OGG, FLAC) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

Rob Savoye: So basically I started up a non-profit last year called Open Media Now and we bascially fund raise for a bunch of projects that use patent-free codecs like Gnash flash player also streams Theora and Ogg Vorbis and things like that. I just wrote a clone of the Adobe media server, we do a bunch of stuff like that, and we’re doing a lot of work around legal issues fall from that and codecs and stuff.

David Dolphin: Cool, to go into the reverse engineering a bit more, how did you get into reverse engineering, was it purely you had an itch you wanted to scratch or did you build up to it?

RS: Actually I kind of fell into it backwards, I had a tendancy to work at small startups that had insufficient staff for a lot of things and often cut too many corners, and one person debugging another persons hardware or software could be reverse engineering. I think I kind of got into this stuff literally as a survival skill cos I was always like the systems guy, you’d support packages and you’d find bugs in drivers and you’d have to figure out how it really worked you know, and sometimes observation is better than reality and junk like that. And then I wound up working on the GNU debugger, GDB, I had like the world record in GDB back-ends, and pretty much designer two of the three remote debugging protocols and all that, so I spent a lot more time debugging hardware and weird protocols, I mean, the current one I talked about yesterday is almost my two dozenth, I’m not even sure anymore. I just think it’s really fun, so, and it conveniently turns other people need reverse engineering so I’ve done a lot of reverse engineering for people on contract and it’s kind of amusing.

DD: Is that in terms of community work or commercial work?

RS: Commercial work actually, I used to work for NASA, so I used do to reverse engineering for NASA funnily enough, y’know, taking old code and porting it to Linux, and basically spent a couple of years porting everything they had to Linux for them, and in the process had to reverse engineer a lot of weird stuff like you’re porting some network code and there’s no byte swapping in it because it was running on a big-endian machine so porting it to Linux meant like lots of byte-swapping and data structures that, the documentation was 30 years old, and whoever wrote it is like, y’know, tired, or dead from old age and I spent all this time reverse engineering a lot of really obscure network protocols.

DD: Speaking of reverse engineering I remember hearing a story that Alan Cox, who worked on the Linux Kernel had, where he wanted to get information on a certain bit of code and he was told to talk to his manager, to talk to some other manager, to talk to a global manager, down the chain, and he said ‘Nah, that’s going to take me two days.’ and he rang the guy up in Australia and got an answer in five minutes, and was almost fired, because he didn’t observe and do you see that aswell, that you have you follow procedures and does that bog you down?

RS: Well I don’t work for a big company, so I don’t really have that kind of problem I guess, basically you know, I’m self employed doing whatever the hell I can raise money for but at the same time I mean Alan did is to be honest how you’re supposed to solve your problems, I mean sometimes reverse engineering is like, they talk about hacking, well sometimes it’s more social engineering than it’s actually technical, and often that’s the beauty to be honest these days, of the sort of development community and international conversations and email and all that is you can often talk to the right person who can give you something in five minutes so in a sense blowing off too much process is almost usually a good thing.

DD: Cool, so you’ve worked on the Adobe stuff, have Adobe seen what you’ve done? Have they taken into account, have you been contacted?

RS: I’ve actually been to Adobe. When I first started the Gnash project a bunch of years ago they had concerns, at the same time this was before Adobe had really gotten into open source and so we basically went out there with kind of a dual-pronged focus I guess, one they wanted to ask me some questions and figure out if basically I’d been doing illegal reverse engineering which I was, and it was pretty easy to prove more or less, and at the same time they were kind of curious what it would take to be an active participant in the open source world and much of the problems with flash and the legal licensing they inherited when they bought it from Macromedia. I mean, Adobe used to be customers of mine when I was at Cygnus Support and they’re usually a pretty decent company I mean PDF is open, postscript is open, and part of my pitch to them a couple of years ago was like, just be like Adobe, just make all the specifications for free, I don’t even care if they release their flash player for free I wrote Gnash who cares about their code base, but I want specifications out there so I know what target I’m working to. They’ve been slowly getting around there but they wouldn’t reverse RTMP so I bascially had to reverse engineer that.

DD: Right, and is that mostly a profit thing for themselves? Do they sell servers which support RTMP and they don’t want…

RS: They make a huge amount of money on their servers. In a month I release my clone of the Adobe Media Server.

DD: Very good!

RS: I spent the last six months doing it, the whole reason I reverse engineered RTMP was actually to do this server side flash support since I have a flash virtual machine, as well as client side, and the idea is now we’re working on full flash-based video conferencing support and stuff which is very popular in the professional world, but we’ll be able to use patent free codecs because we’ll have both ends of the network connection. Part of my plan, especially with Open Media Now is to increase adoption of patent-free codecs by building more software infrastructure that actually uses them seamlessly so that you don’t really care.

DD: Of course. Yeah, if someone is creating a site such as Youtube, Google video, whatever, are there ways that they can write their code that it can work under Gnash and Adobe Flash Player?

RS: Oh yeah totally, we actually work a huge amount on compatibility. It’s kind of odd because none of us can run the Adobe tools because of licensing problems, so our sort of volunteer community, it’s kind of their wonderful contribution to Gnash is a lot of them can’t work on Gnash because they’ve signed the license agreement yet they can basically run both on their computer and often our bug reporters and people who hang in there for days on end asking them tedious questions, is incredibly useful I mean it’s one of the fun things about free software is developing in an open space where the community can see when you need help and like ‘oh yeah well the border of this line is three pixels on three sides and two pixels on one side’ and like ‘how do you tell the difference?’ and ‘oh, with a magnifying glass, they look different.’ We get a lot of really funny bug reports like that. So we actually work really hard on even bug for bug compatibility, I mean there are tons and tons of bugs in the Adobe Flash Player, I mean we have test cases that Gnash passes that will crash the Adobe Player left and right. They do a lot of really ugly stuff too that we actually have to emulate because we try to do it, uh, our joke is we’re not bascially cloning Adobe technology, we’re re-implementing your technology, better. I tell my engineers all the time, or guys working on our project, just cos it’s free software doesn’t mean we can’t do REALLY good software.

DD: It sounds a lot like IE6 CSS support type of stuff, like there’s some horrible hacks you have to do, in order to get stuff working properly in both.

RS: Yeah, so for instance you take somebody using a Flash 9 based media player, we do the youtube support fine, dailymotion, a bunch of different people, nowadays really the only trick with Gnash is testing with Gnash, and a lot of people don’t but if they test with Gnash we often find we get contacted by people that actually did the flash movie, it’s usually a one line change in their flash application to work correctly in Gnash and then we’ll usually fix the bug anyway.

DD: Are there things that you would say to Flash developers to avoid using, would you say ‘don’t do this it won’t work with ours yet‘?

RS: A lot of the really ugly stuff is below the level that when you’re programming in Flash and ActionScript you have any control over, some of the uglyness is really stupid, like how they do function calls, and how they lay parameters on the stack, a lot of obscure gunk and in flash it’s just really really ugly. I think the main thing I would say for developers is try stuff with Gnash, and if they find out that ti’s got a bug, we love bug reports from people that are actually flash developers. One of our biggest problems is we don’t have access to professional flash developers at all, they hate Gnash, they think we’re going to destroy the world. The HTML wars of the early 90s or whatever and ‘you got to do the compatible thing’, well no actually we implement the bugs in Adobe Flash player even when their stupid, we put warning messages, “don’t do this”

DD: Is it possible to interface Gnash with development tools, IDEs, is it Dreamweaver that’s used for…?

RS: It’s Flex, actually, we actually maintain the Ming project which is a flash compiler, typically the problem with Ming is it’s mostly original developed for websites so you actually do flash programming in more like C, PHP or C++ and stuff, and we would love to actually see a GUI for our compiler and if we had extra money we probably would hire somebody to do it but nobody’s pitched in the money or volunteered to do this for the hell of it and it’d be a great project really for someone into user interfaces, what we’d want to do is design something simple, a lot of the educational machines using Gnash because of licensing and we run on weird processers that Adobe doesn’t and junk and so we really see that there’s a big need for free flash believe it or not, for educational software. Gnash is really really popular in most of the big Linux distributions, in Spain and stuff, they always have client networks, and Adobe player hangs their entire network pretty often and it turns out that Gnash doesn’t.

DD: Moving away from Adobe a little bit, to reverse engineering in general, what are they big differences say between reverse engineering file formats, reverse engineering network protocols, are their major differences or is there collaboration?

RS: I think there’s huge differences, now I haven’t done file system reverse engineering, most of my background is networking stuff, I think the advantage of networking is that because it’s a network streaming type protocol usually, it’s more limited in the way that you could do it. You make it too complicated and your performance goes to hell basically. Most headers for network protocols are actually very short and simple, typically a handful of fields, some of the gunk I worked on at NASA was like 50 fields and a giant structure and pretty huge. But I actually had documentation and that kind of helped a little.even though the documentation was wrong, but you know, when you know what three quarters of it is, the rest will be easy to figure out. Far from that, look at ODF, OOXML and stuff, some of these things, while I know you could reverse engineer them from scratch, I think it would be much more of a bigger problem, much more complicated, I mean Open Office is still working on weird microsoft compatibility bugs and they are pretty good at it. There’s still a lot of weird stuff, I still get documents all the time in Open Office 3 from Word that don’t look quite right.

DD: For example, one that springs to mind that I’ve come up personally against is symbian phones can take an archive of the entire C: drive, however the archive that it’s in is not a documented format and they only extractor for it is on the phones and the problem being that you can’t unzip it on another phone so if you make an archive of your device you lose your device, you have all your backups but you can’t recover your data unless you get the exact same model again. So it would be ideal to take these archives and have some desktop application to just unzip them.

RS: Archive formats are usually pretty simple, I’ve written lots of packaging code over the years for all sorts of stupid operating systems and packaging schemes, and a lot of times just straight archive backup stuff is very simple, more or less a list of files and it’s usually compressed, and once you figure out what it’s compressed with it’s not that hard, I mean a lot of people are using Zip.

DD: Are there things that make it easy to get into reverse engineering? If someone was going for it what would you point them towards?

RS: Getting a good collection of good, loud music. When it gets really hard, sometimes you just have to turn up the volume. I think, funnily enough, you have to do it in a very low-distraction atmosphere, or distracting yourself in appropriate ways, sometimes when I turn up the music really loud it makes me really focus. It’s kind of hard to get into it’s like learning sculpting or something it can be disappointing and every time you make something you go ‘ugh, this is crap’ and reverse engineering is often that way. You get into something and you go, ‘ugh, I’ll never figure this out.’, that’s really common.

DD: Do you find there’s a fear of reverse engineering? It can be used for constructive things like yourself but also on the other side incredibly illicit things such as cracking applications. Is it viewed in a generally negative light?

RS: I think it slightly depends, most people assume that reverse engineering is violating the law, they don’t realise it’s entirely legal even in the US, and the trick is you have to more or less follow a set of rules, so to speak and to be honest some of those are kind of obscure and it’s not simple, like ‘don’t disassemble someone’s executable.’ that’s not good, that’s bascially what people cracking applications do, and to me there’s no sense of style in that anyway so why would you want to do it that way?

DD: You kind of find yourself tarred with the same brush though. Like the hacking community being seen as people to target banks.

RS: Most of the reverse engineering I’ve been doing lately has been in the flash player, so people actually appreciate it because it makes it work better and they know reverse engineering is the only way to get it there. Most of the people I’ve actually done programming consulting work for reverse engineering it’s bascially been the same way they’re just really glad to find someone willing to do this. It’s sounds funny but sometimes they say ‘you actually like this kind of work?’ and I charge a lot of money for it.

DD: What’s next for you? What’s next on the horizon?

RS: Well the big thing now is I’m about to release my Adobe Media Server project which has been almost a years worth of work, much of it is very slow reverse engineering in the beginning, down to basically writing a server, mimicing how their network works, complete with all the weird timing errors and packet fragmentation, basically getting all that stuff to work. That’s pretty fun it already speaks several network protocols, it does HTTP, it does RTPT is which ActionScript encoded objects using post in HTTP, which is basically what YouTube does and everything else, because it’s cheap, and also there’s RTMP which is the protocol that Adobe uses for their server which costs many many thousands of dollars.

DD: Very good, best of luck to you, hopefully we’ll see you again, are you going to be at any conferences in the next while?

RS: Actually I’ve been to so many conferences in the last few months I’m actually hoping not to go to some for a little while. I was just at LinuxConf and before that I was at Open Source world Spain, EduDebian, I’ve been moving around a little too much lately.

DD: Hopefully after some time off we’ll see you again. Thanks very much.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

He covered a variety of physics topics, such as the No-Cloning Theorm, Qubits and Photon Polarization. I also queried him on the real world use of quantum cryptography systems.

The full interview is available under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC-BY-NC 3.0) license.

Transcript to follow…

John explained how the CTF tournament worked. Eight team’s are provided with a server each which they must defend. All severs contain the same custom services. Teams are also give a disk containing an image of their server, allowing them to disassemble the executables which are running on their server.

A larger number of points are awarded for breakthroughs, where a team discover a new vulnerability and exploit it on other servers. Teams must also maintain a service level, to ensure their services are accessible to others. This models the real world, where unavailable services result in lost revenue.

John explained that the Capture the Flag contest kept his commercial skills sharp, as he was learning at the cutting edge. He also explained that DEFCON was an important networking and social ground, with a “group of highly intelligent people”.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Jason is a technology Historian, and archives websites. He discussed legal restrictions on archiving, such as the Lanham Act, and mentioned Wikipedia’s attitude to archiving.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Rockbox is a replacement 3^rd-party firmware for digital audio players which has been ported to a wide range of devices, it offers more codec options than many commercial firmwares and is one of the ways you can get Doom running on your iPod.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA).

Transcript to follow…