Martin Orford August 2009

Death threats!!!

I think Progfan1958 is onto something here. *Thumbs up*

I think MO is a down to earth guy and tells it like it is.  His opinions may lean toward being extreme but I respect where he is coming from.

The creating of music has two sides.  The romantic one where you make hits, sell records, become a star and make a lot of money.  The other side is the cold reality that very few musicians make a decent living at it.  I have a hard time feeling real sorry for people who want to earn a living being a musician buy don't understand the business side of it.  Supply and demand are going to dictate your success more so than the pie in the sky notion that you can write a better song than the next guy.  Sad but true. 

Nice interview there, great work.  However it does make a very sad read indeed.  Martin comes across as very bitter and that is both understandable and very sad.  I'm also extremely disappointed to hear that the parting of the ways with IQ was very acrimonious.  After all their years together I really hoped for better.

Here in Canada many musicians get Government grant to create  music, and recording, marketing expenses are not always 100% out of pocket for the artists. This program has been running many years and has helped quite a few people along through their carreers. Sadly our current Conservative government has been cutting this program considerably. They figure investing in the Military protects our culture more effectively. Meanwhile all the artists starve.... I guess Shana Twain and Avril Lavigne will be the sole survivors when all is said and done in a few years.... hey maybe Martin should do a cover of "Skate R Boi" ?

Thanks Jim for an incredibly interesting, and ultimately sobering, interview. Certainly, the bitterness that Martin feels with the internet and with (sadly) IQ comes pouring through so strongly you can almost touch it coming out of the computer screen.

I have to say that I don't understand how he has come to such a sorry financial state. Sure, IQ were never a huge band, but they have sold fairly steadily over the years, have a loyal fanbase, and I include myself amongst them, and are not a curiousity band by any stretch of the imagination.

Therefore, playing devils advocate as a fan of both IQ and Martin himself, I would be interested in hearing this from (say) Peter Nicholl's perspective. Certainly, he has not rubbished Maretin in recent interviews (quite the opposite), but I mean from the financial perspective. Is he comfortable? Have the internet difficulties Martin talks about hit other band members in the same way? Or, and I will be controversial here, is Martin just extremely poor at managing his financial affairs?

I ask this because I remember the old illegal taping is killing music campaign run by the British Phonographic organisation in the 70s & 80s. We all did it, including myself. I also spent (and still do) far too much money on music/prog. The illegal taping of vinyl LPs did not kill off music then, and I do not believe that illegal downloading/file sharing will now. As ever, the good artists will survive and prosper in the new way of doing business, just as artists did back then.

lazland wrote: Therefore, playing devils advocate as a fan of both IQ and Martin himself, I would be interested in hearing this from (say) Peter Nicholl's perspective. Certainly, he has not rubbished Maretin in recent interviews (quite the opposite), but I mean from the financial perspective. Is he comfortable? Have the internet difficulties Martin talks about hit other band members in the same way? Or, and I will be controversial here, is Martin just extremely poor at managing his financial affairs?

I can't speak on any one's behalf, but I think you will find that in IQ it was Martin's "day job" to run the business side of IQ, and the other band members had "day jobs" in non-musical fields. Therefore, rather than being poor at managing his financial affairs (quite the opposite, Martin has always been a good businessman) Martin was hit by downloading in a different way, it efected his main/sole income. IT also means that no other IQ member was in fact managing IQ financial affairs.

It's often like this in bands, one person has the business weight upon his/her shoulders. The other members tend to be the one's with day jobs and use the band like "lad's weekend away" not really that bothered or interested in the financial arrangements.  And whilst during the good times people will think it's unfair that this one member seems to be scraping the financial cream off the top, you can pretty much guarentee that those same whingers will be heading for the hills/unanswering phone calls/e-mails when the leaner times come.  There are very big risks in this game, and nerves/balls of steel are required, But for Martin the line was drawn. He had done a stirling job for many many years, but outside forces drove him out and he has no financial buffer, this was his sole income.

W x
 

seems to me to be a classic case of taking the good with the bad.. . without the internet...  these bands would probably be playing the local pub on Saturdays night.. getting free beer perhaps.... however with the internet comes illegal downloading.  So what has one lost.. without the internet.. there would be no illegal downloading... without the internet...  musicians like Orford would be hard pressed to make any of kind of living in the first place. Outside of some local fans..  no one would know them. 

musicians are no different from the rest of us...   we work...  and we take the good .. and the bad.  Sometime we get lucky and get a great job that pays us for our hard work .. sometime we get f**ked and are laid off the day before X-mas with a lousy tasting ham as severance pay. 

I'm not so sure, the "golden days" of earnings for bands like IQ or indeed Pendragon were PRIOR to the internet, or at least prior to illegal torrenting. They were definitely NOT playing in some obscure pub on a Saturday night during the 90's! 



"Sometime we get lucky and get a great job that pays us for our hard work .. sometime we get f**ked and are laid off the day before X-mas with a lousy tasting ham as severance pay. "

You have a fair point,  but if you, or I or any other member of PA was laid off on Christmas Eve with no severence pay, I think members of PA wouldn't have the "well sh*t happens" philosophy about it, I think people would expect some upset and bitterness and be respectful of that.   And because this kind of thing happens does it make it fair or right or just?  Of course not, I don't think Martin is claiming to be the only person in the world this has happened to, he was asked about HIS experience, not the experience of others, so you will get a response based on his experience, and based on the facts that he has being in this business.

W x

I hadn't read Jim's interview until now (nice job pal!) and I think Martin has done a great job in explaining it in layman's terms. He's not making it up, illegal downloading is killing the bands we love. We all have a duty to think twice about illegal downloading and certainly as consumers of music it is our duty to buy legal product. I'm no angel but I buy at least one Prog album a month as well as DVDs and special editions. Album sales are a fraction of what they were 10 years ago, the only thing that has changed is the arrival of the Internet and downloading culture. Rush's last studio album got to #3 in the Billboard Album Chart yet struggled to shift 100,000 units! Moving Pictures got to #3 in 1981 and went Multi-Platinum.

Some struggling firms recently have asked their workers to work a certain amount of time for free, the majority have told them in no uncertain terms to get lost. Why should musicians work for free? They have a product and there is demand for it, why would they not want paying?