Mark Watson

True, and I did put that into a follow-up post. Big-name artists are incredibly passive about it, and could be setting an example.

I shall hold the tongue on the subject of Live Nation.

I'm involved in this a little (from a comedy production side) and it is partly true, but it's also true you can break out of it, if people were to work together a bit.

It's true. If you compare it with the price of a West End show, for example...

That truly makes your head spin.

That is a good attitude (and long live TMBG).

Exactly. So then you can't be surprised if the gig tickets start to be expensive.

(And I know someone like Beyoncé or whoever can afford *not* to charge £200 and in those instances I do think the artists should take responsibility, stand up to their promoters. But most musicians are not in that situation and are at the mercy of streamers.)

I know I say this fairly often: people are right to complain concerts are too expensive, but they got that way because a lot of artists started to make almost no money out of their actual records. We have to look really hard at how we pay for music.

Got through to the second round of interviews for the Ayatollah but they’re making candidates do a written task of matching a pitch deck and honestly they shouldn’t be asking us to do unpaid labour for a job interview

OK, I'll tell the rest of them.

I reckon we could go up to three, four of them a year?

Congratulations!

Happy birthday!

Quite a lot of people have signed up who are international fans! Most of the benefits are non UK-specific.

Aww.

I'll do a blog thing explaining how everything is going to work, but basically: if you DM on Patreon with the requests, I'll sort out Bristol and Cardiff. (Obviously, you have already made the request by sending *this*, but I think it'd be good if had all of them in one place.) x

Thank you very much!!

Sure enough, it is tremendous, like all his work.

And, well...

Thanks for always being so receptive!

Yeah, agreed. The album version is basically 100 percent perfect.

Huge thanks for indulging me/supporting me in this. Asking for support is sort of grim but it's probably worse if you don't.

It's really just one guy, Sufjan Stevens. The album version is better, sort of perfect (from 'Illinois'). (At one point he claimed to be making an album about every American state.)

The people have spoken.

Haha comfortably, yes.

So it's official: Sonic has had more movies than The Godfather.

Mad that the film is about him struggling to get people to understand the condition in the 90s and now, indirectly because of its success, he's got a whole new bunch of people failing to understand it in the 2020s.

I think it might be a risk worth taking. It's quite different from most podcasts. Much more akin to the books, really. And you seem to like those...

We're still waiting for quite a lot of those states, aren't we.