G: Hey, what do you think about Malcolm Gladwell?
T: I’ve not read any of his stuff. He sounds like a guy who can make a few gimmicks last a long time. Which is a skill in itself.
G: It is, and I’m always slightly suspicious of people who… like he makes loads of money on the after dinner speech circuit. He charges 80 grand or something.
T: How is there that much money in the world?
G: Imagine being President Clinton. He charges a six-figure amount for those things.
T: It’s pretty incredible. So what about Malcolm Gladwell, anyway?
G: Well, he’s got this book out called Outliers which is all about debunking the myth of genius. His basic thesis is that if you have an aptitude for something to start off with, then what makes you really great is work, and a certain amount of luck. So, having opportunities when you’re developing your talent – parents that can pay for lessons – combined with the completely serendipitous stuff. Such as, I gave this person a CD and for some reason they actually listened to it, or I was on the tube and I bumped into this producer… So there’s that stuff, but there’s also a figure he puts on it, 10,000 hours. If you spend 10,000 hours on something, you’re probably going to become an expert. And actually, being ‘really talented’ is almost neither here nor there. But that’s'not denying that you need to have an aptitude for it in the first place. If you or I spend 10,000 hours working on sprinting, we probably still wouldn’t be Usain Bolt. Or spend 10,000 hours playing tennis and you’re probably not going to be Roger Federer, but you’d be fucking good at it!
T: A friend and I were talking about this a couple of days ago, talking about the Federer-Roddick final. Federer still won. It’s just unbelievable how he still managed to win when he was the worst player in the game. How does that always happen? What is it about him? I don’t believe Andy Roddick has worked any less hard than Federer.
G:I remember reading this Guillemots review by a guy called Nick Southall. It opens with this kind of diatribe against this Q Magazine/Oasis idea of, “we just wrote some fookin’ tunes, man”. Nick Southall was saying that musicians don’t just pluck good songs out of the air. You work on them for ages, and sometimes a good song will happen really quickly but that’s always the result of putting the hours in.
T: Exactly. This is the thing. This is important to state. Obviously we all know that Bob Dylan wrote, like, 70 songs in the year 1967 or whatever it was, and with Michael Jackson they had 80 songs to pick from for Thriller or whatever, and Mozart crammed a shitload in. So you could say, ‘well, these are all geniuses’ and yes, they all happened to be prodigiously young but that’s exactly the point. Discounting Dylan, if you start from a young age and, in the case of Jackson and Mozart, their parents forced them to do it, then what else are you going to do? Of course you’re just going to be churning out music. You’ve been doing it every day since the age of 5. Of course you’re going to end up being immensely talented and better than pretty much everyone else. But, of course, you’re also going to be a total fuck up and die young. That’s the trade off. Dylan’s obviously not quite a wunderkind in the same way, but he was pretty young when he released those first five albums.
G: So… I’ve been reading this guy called Oliver Sacks.
T: Musicophilia?
G: Yeah, him. And he makes what I guess in a way is quite an obvious point – there’s just a lot more music around. Like, it was never commonplace for you to walk into a shop, any type of shop, and hear music piping in the background.
T: Absolutely. And it’s not to be welcomed.
G: I think that ubiquity is coupled with the fact that you can get so much music for free. We’re not even old dudes, but people like you and me can actually remember buying music in shops. Only having 5 CDs, listening to them forwards and backwards. People just a little younger than us have grown up without that experience, knowing that anything you want to hear, you can just type it in and you can hear it for free and I do think that’s had a knock-on effect.
T: So music becomes like tap water.
G: Well, funny you should say that. Chris Anderson, who edits Wired in the States, has just had a new book published called Free which is all about not fighting the idea that anything you can distribute electronically is eventually going to be free because it’s so cheap to store it and distribute it. So he says it’s better to build a business model around giving your thing away for free. So if you’re a musician, give your music away for free but sell merchandise, sell the thing that can’t be electronically transmitted. And, yeah, the allusion he draws is with bottled water. That trying to sell a CD is like trying to sell bottled water. If it’s like Evian or something and you’ve got a really strong brand, you can probably sell some.
T: But most people are just going to get it from the tap.
G: Yeah. It’s kind of a depressing point.
T: Well, it is, but as with anything, I’m quite philosophical about it. I mean, this band started after all this change had begun so it’s not like we’re unaware of the situation. To me the emphasis in Three Trapped Tigers has always been on making it amazing live anyway. The recordings are obviously important as well but the live experience is that ‘real’, capital ‘R’ Real experience that you can’t escape from. And on the subject of the ubiquity and accessibility of music – I also think that a lot of our tracks are quite disorienting in a way that makes the music impose itself on a situation. So if it was played in this cafe right now, you might actually notice it…
