List Envy

Indie music blogger Kamala Adams joins Mark to discuss all things modern indie, and to define what “modern” means.

Kamala’s picks

In order of discussion:

Porridge Radio

Despite Mark’s apparent ignorance, this band did crop up in the previous episode, but he had apparently forgotten. Regardless, Porridge Radio are Kamala’s current favourite band.

Wolf Alice

Initially on first blush, Kamala wasn’t a big fan of Wolf Alice, but they’re a varied band, and eventually they won her over.

Blaenavon

Named after a Welsh town but formed in Hampshire, Blaenavon make Kamala’s list after she saw blown away by their live set.

The Vaccines

They are the band that Kamala thinks of when she thinks “indie”. A good, solid band with a great track record, but probably difficult-to-Google right now.

Courting

Kamala picked Liverpool band Courting as her fifth pick. Highly praised by Anthony Fantano, these lads are ones to watch. Unless you’re reading this in the far future and they’re now massive, in which case, you’re welcome?

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion:

The Corteeners

Mark became of the band circa 2015, and especially enjoyed Concrete Love, although their lack of live chops might make them a less-than-stellar pick as an indie band.

Maxiimo Park

This band might deserve a higher place than Mark initially gave them, but he appreciates the stripped-back sound found in their earlier albums, and their ability to play a decent live set.

Gerry Cinnamon

Mark’s third pick is a solo musician with a strong Scots brogue and a real way with words. Possibly more folk than indie, but as a solo musician with a busker’s feel, he’s a good poster boy for the genre.

Nothing But Thieves

This in-yer-face, high energy band rock a little harder than Mark’s tastes usually allow, but he recognises the importance of his station and so wanted to leave some space for a reasonably well-regarded indie outfit.

Courtney Barnett

This laid-back Aussie pop-rock artist is Mark’s final pick, and something of an enigma since – to him at least – it feels like she’s better than the sum of her parts.

Honourable mentions

Arctic Monkeys

Peace

Slaves

Royal Blood

Fizzy Blood

Spoon

Radiohead

More of Kamala Adams

Kamala setup and writes for The Indie Scene, a blog championing new music, with articles by a number of writers.Special Guest: Kamala Adams.

Mark talks vinyl and hunts down new music to enjoy, with music podcaster Elliott Farrar.

Elliott’s picks

In order of discussion:

Weird!, by Yungblud

Elliott picked Yungblud’s second studio album for the way the artist’s message of “you do you” bleeds through.

Girlfriends, by Girlfriends

Pop punk is back, in the form of Travis Mills and Nick Gross’ project, which may have a limited shelf-life, given Mills’ busy career.

Grime MC, by Joe

Actually released right at the end of 2019 – but near-as-dammit to 2020 – Grime MC makes Elliott’s list for its interesting release, but its honesty and authenticity.

Fake it Flowers, by Beabadoobee

This debut album by Filipino-Brit Beabadoobee makes Elliott’s list for its soulful sound, undercut by rougher guitar riffs.

Foolish Loving Spaces, by Blossoms

Elliott’s final pick was a toss-up between a few contenders, but Blossoms’ 2020 album could not be permitted to slip through the net.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion:

RTJ4, by Run the Jewels

Mark didn’t know people still made hip-hop like this, and was instantly up for the dirty beats and the smart lyrics.

Women in Music Pt III, by Haim

Mark likes to be taken by surprise, so the variation of songs in Haim’s latest album made this an easy second pick.

Letter to You, by Bruce Springsteen

Mark wanted the Boss for his list, which took him rather by surprise (Mark that is, Bruce doesn’t know about the podcast). Turns out the man’s still kickin’ it, and we must show respect.

Saint Cloud, by Waxahatchee

It’s a lazy Sunday mid-morning, you’ve got a coffee in hand and you’re sat on the sofa listening to some country-tinged indie rock.

Shore, by Fleet Foxes

Mark’s final pick is a band he’s enjoyed since 2008, although dropped off his radar a few years back. Shore has some tracks that feel like a return to that warm autumnal sound he enjoyed.

Honourable mentions

Working Men’s Club (self-titled)

Dream Nails (self-titled)

More of Elliott Farrar

Elliott is one half of the Scratched Record Podcast, which you can find in all your usual podcast places, and which brings indie music artists out of the shadows and into your ears every Tuesday.Special Guest: Elliott Farrar.Links:Samara Ginsberg on YouTubeWonderwall x Smalltown Boy, a mashup by Deco

Guest

Bryony Williams

Your favourite rockstar with a watergun, once compared to a young Fiona Apple.

@bryonywilliams | Linktree

twitter.com

Mark is joined by super-talented singer-songwriter Bryony Williams. Bryony realised she could sing in her early teens, and spent most of her mid-to-late teens honing her craft. At nineteen she was in the electro-pop duo Field Harmonics, and has been recording solo since 2018.

Bryony’s picks

In order of discussion:

Cleaning

Number one – with not so much a bullet as a scented wet wipe – for Bryony, and for so many, is cleaning. It’s a great way to see a problem and eliminate it with extreme prejudice; perfect for those times when you just don’t want to tackle that spreadsheet.

Spontaneous trips out with pals

You’ve got a job to do, and then your friend calls you up and asks if you want to go on a day trip. Are you honestly going back to work, or are you grabbing your keys and heading out the door? At least if the job doesn’t get done today, you can chalk it off to research.

The mobile

Whether it’s watching videos on YouTube or TikTok, endlessly doomscrolling or looking at people impersonating the Simpsons, our phones are several-hundred-pound procrastination engines.

Bingewatching

Any kind of TV binge can be a great way to tell ourselves we’re feeding our souls. And perhaps we are, but maybe crime documentaries aren’t the thing are brain needs right before we’re supposed to write that tricky email.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion

Over-planning the task

Mark is not necessarily a planner by nature, but make him anxious about a thing, or give him a thing to do that he really doesn’t want to, and watch him plan and research to the nth degree.

Organising and taxonomising

A great example of this is tagging faces and locations in digital photo collections, or fixing the metadata in your music library (if you’re still the kind of person who has one, and doesn’t get all their music from a streaming service). It’s horrifically addictive to a certain brain type.

Putting the kettle on

It could be making a pot of tea, putting on a pot of coffee, or just crunching through a handful of dry roasted peanuts, filling the face is an excellent way to solve a problem – that perhaps doesn’t exist – before you really get down to the task at hand.

Pet-bothering

If you’ve got cats, they probably don’t want your affection right now. They’ll let you know when that sort of thing is appropriate. Dogs are a different story of course, but almost any pet can sense when you’re paying them attention in order to avoid paying attention to the thing you don’t want to be doing.

Honourable mentions

Imagining hypotheticals

Bargaining

Gardening

More of Bryony Williams

You can get a limited edition copy of Bryony’s EP Growing / Fading, and follow her on Instagram or Twitter for more.

Links

Support the podcast

Follow Mark on Twitter

Find more shows from the Outpost

Share List Envy and get rewards

Notion, Mark's second brain

Soulver, the back-of-a-fag-packet calculator

Guest

Ella Gregg

Founder of artist management and development company 321 Artists.

twitter.com

321 artists

Mark kicks off a music mini-season with artist manager Ella Gregg, who’s been supporting emerging music artists since she was a teenager.

Tech has always been an important aspect of Ella’s work, including her early days helping artists get their work played in films or adverts.

Ella’s picks

In order of discussion

Livestreaming

Over the lockdown period, artists have needed to adapt in order to survive, and the ability to livestream gigs has been a lifeline. The fact gigs were no longer bound to a specific geography made them more accessible to audiences that otherwise might not have got the chance to see new artists play. But playing to a camera does bring its own challenges, which Ella can speak to directly.

Multi-participant video calling

We’ve all had it up to here with “Zoom fatigue”, but services like Zoom have been invaluable over the past year, and just as with livestreaming, voice and video over IP have given musicians, producers, and songwriters the opportunity to collaborate with people they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Digital audio workstations

DAWs are an important addition to the modern musician’s toolkit. You can go as simple as Apple’s GarageBand or as complex as ProTools and beyond. Ella picked the DAW as it gives emerging artists the chance to craft a great sound, or at least record a rough demo, without having to pay for studio time.

Music recognition algorithms

If you’re in your 30s, you might remember ringing a number on your feature phone, holding it up to a speaker in a pub or a café for 30 seconds, and then getting a text with the name of the song that was playing. Now, we take services like Shazam for granted, as music ID tech is pretty much built into our voice assistants, but to some of us it still feels like magic. Plus, services like it are incredibly valuable to emerging artists whose music appears on TV or in adverts.

Social ads

Advertising on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can put your work in front of exactly the right people, based on their likes and location. Ella uses social video ads successfully in her business, and has seen other artists do the same.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion

Loop pedal

Mark picked this piece of kit for its ability to help solo musicians create layered sounds, with something as minimal as a guitar, or with a whole set of instruments being played consecutively.

Handheld SD card recorder

The best ones are made by a company called Zoom (not that one), and give musicians the chance to create high-quality recordings wherever they are, either by using the in-built mic, or by plugging in one or up to four mics.

Music distribution services

Mark was introduced to Amuse a couple of years ago, which is a mobile app based distribution platform that makes it super-simple to release tracks to Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and everywhere else, completely for free.

iPad

Combining a handheld recorder and a DAW, the iPad gives musicians access to a portable multitrack recording studio, combined with the ability to release tracks to the Internet directly from the same device.

YouTube

Although the relationship between creator and platform is often contentious, YouTube has provided a megaphone to a raft of artists who now sell out venues.

Honourable mentions

Collaborative workspaces

Social media scheduling

More of Ella Gregg

You can find Ella at 321 Artists, where you can sign up for her mailing list to get exclusive downloads you won’t find elswhere.

Links

Support the podcast

Follow Mark on Twitter

Find more shows from the Outpost

Share List Envy and get rewards

Guest

Owen Stephens

Librarian. “What else is there to say?”

twitter.com

Overdue Ideas | Ideas linking Libraries, Computing, E-learning, and anything else that springs to mind.

Many people are intrigued by the depiction of their profession in popular fiction, and none more so than librarians, like this week’s guest Owen Stephens.

Owen’s picks

In order of discussion:

Bunny Watson

The TV company researcher and librarian played by Katharine Hepburn in the 1957 film Desk Set is top of Owen’s list for her quick wit and style. The film itself is a story that could be told today, and has perhaps only become more prescient.

Lirael

“It’s better to be a librarian than part of the collection”, so goes the advice given to the librarian in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series of novels, who uses her place of work as a means of escape and exploration.

Oswald Bates

Played by Timothy Spall in Stephen Poliakoff’s Shooting the Past – because that’s exactly who you cast – Bates fights tooth and nail against property developers intent on turning the stately home that houses his library into a business school.

Tammy Swanson

Tammy II, as she is less-than-affectionately known in the US sitcom Parks and Recreation, is the Deputy Director of Library Services in Pawnee Indiana, played blindingly by Megan Mullally. Although she has broken Ron’s heart on multiple occasions, driven him to distraction and corn rows, the worst thing about her is that “she works for the library”.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion:

Horace Worblehat

The Unseen University is the school of wizardry in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of novels, games and TV films. Its librarian is an orangutan who once purportedly went by the name of Horace Worblehat, but was turned into an ape via a magical accident in the first Discworld novel, and found that “being an orangutan has certain advantages”.

Mrs Phelps

Mark picked the kind woman at the desk of the public library frequented by Roald Dahl’s Matilda as his second choice, as she was the catalyst that propelled our heroine forwards, allowing her to explore and unlock more knowledge.

Brooks Hatlen

For his third pick, Mark went with the librarian at Shawshank prison, in the Stephen King short story Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption from Different Seasons. His [spoiler alert] death is what sets up the expectation of Red’s post-prison life

Joe Bookman

The “library cop” Lt Bookman, played by Philip Baker Hall is Mark’s sitcom pick. His job is to track down “library delinquets” like our hero Jerry Seinfeld. See him in action.

Honourable mentions

Rupert Giles

Flynn Carsen

Evelyn Carnahan

Wan Shi Tong

Twilight Sparkle

Kaisa

Mary from Party Girl

More of Owen Stephens

You can follow @ostephens on Twitter, or find him working on the Folio open source library project.

Links

Support the podcast

Follow Mark on Twitter

Find more shows from the Outpost

Share List Envy and get rewards

Guest

Aaron Conway

Co-host of The Third Wheel podcast.

Aaron Conway | Developer, Designer, one or the other.

The Third Wheel

twitter.com

Whether they cover an entire life or centre on a pivotal moment, biopics are often Oscar fodder, and are frequently conic. In this episode, Mark and podcaster and web developer Aaron Conway get straight down to business, ranking the best biopics around.

Aaron’s picks

In order of discussion:

The Social Network

Aaron goes straight in with the Fincher/Sorkin collaboration that tells the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg up until his court battle with the Winklevoss twins. It’s a top pick for Aaron as it helped pave the way for an interest and then career in tech.

Rocketman

While most biopics arguably strive for some level of accuracy, this Dexter Fletcher musical biopic of Elton John throws realism to the wind, while stillk eeping true to the man behind the piano and the massive glasses.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Aaron picks Scorsese’s Jordan Belfort for its fast pace and storytelling that both beckons you in but also makes you think “can this really have happened?”

Dangal

This big budget Bollywood film tells the story of former wrestler Mahavir Singh Phogat, played by the director Amir Khan, who pushes his daughters into the world he wished he could have pushed his sons, if he had them.

Marvellous

This might be easy to overlook, but Aaron was taken with this story of the life of Neil Baldwin, which plays with the form by including the subject alongside the actor playing him (in this case, Toby. Jones), as the subject. It’s all very meta. You should watch it.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion:

Shadowlands

This love story between author CS Lewis and poet Joy Gresham hit Mark right in the feels when he saw this at the end of 2019. It’s a quiet story about a quiet man who was given an all-too-brief glimpse of love.

Stan and Ollie

Although Laurel and Hardy mean increasingly little to younger generations, they’re part of a history we can trace back, and one that bridges the gap between the British variety scene and Hollywood’s golden age.

Hillbilly Elegy

This Ron Howard film, based on a young man’s memoir, is emotional at best and heart-wrenching at worst. A compelling story portrayed by Glenn Close, Amy Adams and Gabriel Basso, that has big and bold characters without drawing lines between heroes and villains.

Lion

Apart from linking nicely to Aaron’s first pick by way of Rooney Mara, Lion is a solid pick for Mark for the gripping retelling of Saroo Brierley’s return to India after he was adopted by a Tasmanian couple who found him in India a thousand miles away from home.

Private Parts

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mark enjoyed a particular radio style growing up. In America, that style was epitomised by people like Howard Stern, and although society has largely outgrown that personality type, there are still some performances Mark cherishes, mostly from Paul Giamatti.

Honouarble mentions

Mark and Aaron discussed these after recording had finished, but they still deserve a mention.

The Founder

42

Ray

Walk the Line

More of Aaron Conway

You can follow @aaronconway7 on Twitter and on Instagram, and make sure to check out his podcast, The Third Wheel.

Links

Support the podcast

Follow Mark on Twitter

Find more shows from the Outpost

Share List Envy and get rewards

Guest

Eliza Lita

Europe Editor for The Meridian magazine. Top writer in Books and Reading on Medium.

Eliza Lita – Editor and freelance journalist

twitter.com

Journalist Eliza Lita is a self-confessed bookworm, but her early reading focused more on non-fiction work. As a result, she’s picked up a wide variety of useful knowledge, and kept her curiosity alive. She and Mark share an appreciation for good crime fiction, and Eliza has some tips to help Mark finish the books he keeps starting.

Eliza’s picks

In order of discussion:

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

Eliza’s first pick is life-changing for her, in a less-than-subtle way. This book can help you connect with your reason-for-being, and could even help you live to 100.

The Face: A Time Code

How many times do you really look in the mirror? In this book, author Ruth Ozeki does just that… but for a really long time.

Sleep Well: Everything You Need to Know for a Good Night’s Rest

This book helped Eliza navigate through her sleep procrastination. It has a lot of useful, practical advice for improving your sleep hygiene, including a powerful visualisation technique.

Beyond Mars and Venus: Relationship Skills for Today’s Complex World

This book unpacks the differences between the way men and women think, and a more constructive manner than the “men are from Mars” style books of the previous generation.

Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown

Eliza’s fascination with the British royal family is piqued with this memoir by peeress Anne Glenconner. If you’re ready to take another look at the stereotypes and the lives behind The Crown, this book comes highly recommended by Eliza.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion:

The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness

This self-help book is Mark’s top pick as it had a dramatic effect on the way he approached the part of the brain that keeps us safe, but also keeps us mired in shame and self-doubt.

Self Compassion

This book challenges the hitherto lauded notions of “self-belief”, instead demonstrating that we’re all worthy of love and compassion – even when we make mistakes – because we’re human.

The Infinite Game

This Simon Sinek book helped Mark concentrate less on his small business competitors, and focus more on his ultimate aim.

Three Men in a Boat

Although this might not be everyone’s first thought when it comes to non-fiction, Jerome K Jerome’s travelogue has some hilarious moments that opened Mark’s eyes to a style of humour he’d previously been unaware of.

Alexander Hamilton

The book that inspired the smash hit musical is Mark’s final pick, as the work it inspired changed his life in a less than subtle way.

Honourable mentions

History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

More of Eliza

You can read Eliza’s writings on Medium, and follow @lita_eliza on Twitter. Eliza is also Europe Editor for The Meridian magazine, and you can read some of her contributions there.

Links

Support the podcast

Follow Mark on Twitter

Find more shows from the Outpost

Share List Envy and get rewards

Guest

Sue Burlton

Paediatric ICU nurse passionate about her career and her children.

twitter.com

Mark is joined by nature lover and avid walker Sue Burlton, and together they uncover the joys of a good stretch of the legs. If you’re planning a stroll, this will make excellent accompaniment.

Sue’s picks

In order of discussion:

Wildlife

You might be surprised how much wildlife is available for you to see, even in an urban space, so let the dog off the lead for a bit and take a look through the trees and the hedgerows and see what you can spot.

Green space

Trees are good for us, berries are often plentiful, and flowers are pretty. Look, it needed to be said, and now it has been. Flowers are pretty, dammit. Look at the flowers. (Not in a Walking Dead sense, just look at them all pretty like they are.)

The canals of Birmingham

It’s an oft-recited — and completely wrong — boast that Birmingham has more miles of canals than Venice, and it’s usually spoken by people who’ve missed the point of Venice entirely. But Birmingham’s canal network is a lovely thing to be part of, whether in a bot, on a boat, or near a boat.

Seven Wonders walk

In the mid-2000s, a group of young environmentalists created a circular walking trail that brings walkers in contact with some of the lovely things Sue’s local area has to offer, from the mill pond to the Dingle.

Discovering history

Walking tours and trails give us a chance to discover and reconnect with aspects of our history. You might have to venture further online than a quick Google search as so much is buried in local knowhow passed around orally, but it’s worth it. Plus, a savvy Internet-connected individual such as yourself could be just the person to help preserve it.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion:

Time to yourself

A long walk gives us the chance to get away from the world for a few minutes, and be unproductive (in the traditional sense) through the disconnection from the Internet and the occupation of your hands and eyes.

It doesn’t have to be a means to an end

If you don’t like the thought of exercise, for whatever reason, a walk has good practical value too, as you can stroll to the shops instead of catching the bus or jumping in the car. You can also use walk as play, and take part in a geocache.

Time offline

It’s not often you have a good excuse nowadays to not be available. The benefit of taking a long walk is that, even if you’re reachable in a workplace catastrophe, there’s probably not much you can do about it, and even if you could, you have a ready-made excuse.

Collecting things

Whether you’re collecting pinecones, conkers, or in Mark’s case, sounds, collecting is a good way to give purpose to a walk, or add a few extra achievement points to your exercise.

Spend time with someone

Although there are great benefits to walking alone, you can get even more by walking with someone you love, or at the very least you like. In times of social distancing, it’s a great way to safely meet someone you might normally only see in the pub.

More of Sue Burlton

You can follow Sue on Twitter @sueburly.

Links

Support the podcast

Follow Mark on Twitter

Find more shows from the Outpost

Share List Envy with your friends

James Brindley

Time to Walk on Apple Fitness+

Guest

Valerie Paris

Creator of games, immersive media, and broken dreamthings.

twitter.com

Valerie Paris - itch.io

Developer of horror video games including Butterfly Collector, Valerie Paris joins Mark to discuss point-and-click adventure games you’ll remember, and one or two you’ll never forget, no matter how hard you try.

Valerie is too young to have played many of these games when they originally came out, but has made up for that

Valerie’s picks

In order of discussion:

Grim Fandango

This wildly popular and hilarious swashbuckling RPG from LucasArts is close to so many hearts, and it is to Mark’s eternal chagrin that he has still yet to play it. Go north, pick up thing, put thing in other thing, and hope for a resolution.

Myst

Perhaps one of the most well-known and well-regarded games of the genre and era, the atmospheric Myst is Valerie’s second pick because of its genre-defining quality and because it ran everywhere.

Still Life

A slightly more modern pick, Still Life is set in two different time periods, allowing you to play as two different characters — a police detective and her grandfather — solving related murder mysteries. Valerie describes it as “if David Fincher directed a serial killer murder mystery point-and-click”.

Loom

Perhaps one of the more obscure LucasArts offerings, Valerie’s fourth pick is a beautifully colourful and innovative game that turns the verbing-the-noun trope on its head, allowing you to perform spells and control time by playing musical notes in a particular direction.

Bad Day on the Midway

This game is meant to be a little bit scary and creepy, but there’s a chance its uncanny valley nature has propelled it from creepy to nightmare-inducing. In order to complete the game, you have to play through as a number of different characters, to get the full horrifying perspective. It’s also possible to kill off the main characters, thus making the game impossible to complete, so that’s fun.

Mark’s picks

In order of discussion:

Day of the Tentacle

Mark’s list kicks off with another LucasArts classic, a story told in the past, the present, and the future, in which you play as three characters who have to save the world from the invasion of slimy tentacle creatures, hell bent on taking over the world.

Little Big Adventure

Not to be confused with Little Big Planet, LBA (or Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure) as it was for some reason known in North America, is a pretty chilled-out, cozy adventure in which you play a sort-of dissident whose prophetic dreams of your planet’s discovery make the ruler nervous.

Discworld

This funny, very long and often infuriating point-and-click adventure set in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is perhaps better than it has any right to be, based on the voice talent alone.

Under a Killing Moon

This strange point-and-click first-person interactive movie combined slapstick comedy, gratuitous use of green screen and a Blade Runner aesthetic to create a detective film noir experience like nothing… except perhaps its sequels (one of which is still in development).

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

In this funny sequel within the popular Space Quest series published by Sierra, you play as space-janitor Roger Wilco. It is your job to avoid the Sequel Police who are intent on putting a stop to your existence, which sees you chased throughout space, ending up in a mall where you make burgers and try on women’s clothes.

Honourable mentions

Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel

Barrow Hill: Curse of the Ancient Circle

Shivers

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Gobliiins

Simon the Sorcerer

Starship Titanic

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou

More of Valerie Paris

You can follow @UncannyVallerie on Twitter and on Itch to experience her games, and look out for Apolysis when it arrives.

Go deeper

Haunted PS1 Demo Disc 2020

Petscop

Frog Fractions

Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail

Halt and Catch Fire (TV series)

Syncro-Vox

Guys from Andromeda

LSD: Dream Emulator

Links

Support the podcast

Guest

David Webb

Creative Director at WeAreBeard.

twitter.com

WEAREBEARD - Design, branding & development Worcester

Mark is joined by the Creative Director at Worcester-based design, branding and development agency WeAreBeard, Dave Webb, to share his top tips for working in the kind of field that your mum told you you should have a backup for.

Dave remembers the first day he was praised for drawing something good, instead of being made to feel like he was falling behind academically, which is where his affinity for creative work began.

A creative person’s priorities often don’t fit in with a “professional” culture, which can lead to clashes, of which both Mark and Dave have experience.

Dave’s tips

In order of discussion:

Don’t have a plan B

Make an achievable, flexible plan and work towards it. Consider subsidising it if you can’t make a living at it, and keep a record of your success so you can measure how far along you are.

Be childlike, but not childish

A child’s enthusiasm is an inspirational thing to keep around, as it gives us curiosity and wonder, making us more receptive. A child’s attitude to criticism… not so much.

Be excited by your work

If you’re not excited about your work, you can’t expect anyone else to be. That goes not only for the work that you create from whole cloth, but the ideas presented to you, or even professional briefs. If you enjoy working on a project, that enjoyment shines through, but the inverse is also true.

Failing is learning

Don’t be afraid to make a mistake, because chances are you’ll make lots of them as you’re starting out, but making those mistakes, figuring out what went wrong is what equips you to do better next time.

It’s a numbers game

Looping back to Dave’s original point, your time will come if you stick at what you want to do, and wait out the competition who give up too soon.

Mark’s tips

In order of discussion:

Be supportive

If encountering others’ work, whether you’re being asked to critique or not, focus on the things that matter, rather than what might be elements of technique alone that can be improved.

Be stubborn

Some people ask “why?” instead of “why not?”, so in those moments where someone doesn’t see the worth in what you see, maybe it’s time to dig your heels in and advocate for your thing.

Run your own race

If you’re running a race ,while you need to keep half an eye on your competitors o you know when to push ahead, your primary focus should be on the finish line. With creativity, we need to compare sparingly and in context.

Use what you have to hand

If you can’t afford the latest up-to-date music creation software, or the most-expensive DSLR camera, that doesn’t make you less of a musician or photographer — your work is in you, not your tools. Yes, they can make the creative process easier, but “XKCD isn’t successful because it looks great”.

Take all advice with a pinch of salt

Your goal is to improve on the work you did yesterday, not to improve on someone else’s. This is your art, your work, your creativity, and your choices.

Honourable mentions

Dress for the industry you’ll be working in, not what you think you’re supposed to wear.

Show your work in an email; don’t send a precursor and wait for an invitation.

If you’ve sent a legitimate email, don’t be afraid to follow up (this doesn’t apply unless you know the full name of the person you’re emailing, and you have their permission to email).

More of Dave Webb

Follow Dave on Instagram and @illustratteddave, and check out the wonderful WeAreBeard, of which he is Creative Director.

Go further

Compare the Meerkat

Share this show with friends

Mark’s meme thing

@obscurestvinyl on Instagram

Links

Support the podcast