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A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

The world lost a wonderfully acerbic writer this week – Steven Wells. I knew Steve back in the late 70’s as he was friends with all of us in Gang of Four and was a regular contributor to the Leeds post-punk scene. In later years he wrote for the New Musical Press [fortunately before it became a shallow imitation of itself] and up until his death he had written a weekly column for the UK’s Guardian Newspaper.

Here is the Guardian’s farewell to him – in it are links to some of his best writing.

And here is another eulogy from Clash Music.

He will be missed.

The pop star and the professor … Mike Skinner talks to John Gray. Photograph: Suki Dhanda

Mike Skinner and me have some things in common – we are both well-known musicians; me as bass player for Gang of Four and he performing under his moniker The Streets, although he is arguably more popular. That aside I now find that we are both ardent supporters of the work of the philosopher John Gray, especially his book ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals‘.

In The Streets recent release ‘Everything Is Borrowed,’ Skinner reveals Gray’s influence in his lyrics while Gray’s influence on me comes through in my writings on the conceit of ’social media’, a term that I feel is empty and is peddled furiously only by those that would profit from harnessing social networks for the purpose of creating advertising revenue. Here we are then – two musicians, a philosopher, Charles Darwin and Facebook; such a wonderful mashup. Much food for thought. Here’s the interview:

Few records this year addressed themes such as human consciousness and evolution (as well as reflecting the linguist’s pleasure in a good piece of slang) as smartly as the Streets’ fourth album, Everything is Borrowed. OMM detected in it the influence of the work of the philosopher and occasional Observer contributor John Gray – and a quick call revealed that Mike Skinner is a huge fan of the Straw Dogs author. That bestseller, first published in 2003, argued that humans have still not come to terms with Darwin or accepted that they are like other animals – thereby knocking the humanists’ belief in progress.

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation – covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism – in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.

Mike Skinner: Reading Straw Dogs… I was aware of the idea that consciousness is an illusion, but it really made me think about a lot of things differently.

John Gray: The book is not intended to convert anyone to anything or to impose my world view. It’s intended to stir people’s thinking so that they see their lives in different ways. People have said to me – young people, old people, a couple who were trapped in a religious cult for 40 years – that they liked the book because it helped to weaken the story that they’ve woven of their lives, the story that was ruling them.

MS: What you seem to be saying is that it’s all an illusion, life goes on and shit just happens…

JG: Well, good things happen too.

MS” But what’s a good thing? It’s just something that we perceive to be good…

JG: I’m not saying we should rid ourselves of the need for stories, but when that need becomes tyrannical then we can give up too much of our freedom. One story of the past few years was that wealth was going to grow indefinitely – we were all going to get richer and the ups and downs of history weren’t going to apply to us. Well, stories are not true or false in the way that science is, but some are closer to human reality. And this Prozac-like story of the last 20 years – people believed it!

MS: The financial situation: the impression I have is that we’re not in as much trouble as we were in 1929.

JG: Not yet.

MS: OK… and the reason for that is memes – it’s the knowledge that if you don’t bail the banks out, we’re in really deep shit. So does that represent progress?
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The back cover of the Damaged Goods EP

On June 18 I spent an afternoon with the University of Oregon’s philosophy department class presenting a talk on Gang of Four and our place in the “creative, potentially transformative popular music pantheon.” It was fun. As a band our achievements are well known, mainly in critical circles, but also from the few thousand passionate hard core fans who continue to hang on dearly to their vinyl copies of ‘Entertainment!’ For a band that didn’t sell very many albums we continue to draw new listeners and thought leaders to our music. Hence the invite to speak today.

It was fun taking questions from the students, and very good questions too, about our lyrics, our political stance, how we messaged through our music. We also discussed where music is going and how will musicians be able to make a living. The students appeared to take to heart my idea that musicians are no longer in the music business, they are in the T-shirt business.

As I researched for the talk I came across the Damage Goods EP ripped from vinyl and made available as a download along with a hi-res file of the back cover. 30 years ago, on June 28th and 29th 1978, in Cargo Studios just outside Manchester England, the original Gang of Four line-up recorded the EP. Two days, live recording, minimal overdubs, recorded and mixed. Three songs – Damaged Goods, Armalite Rifle, (Love Like) Anthrax.

It’s amazing to listen to today [the students loved it.] The disarming, sprawling charm of the non-production stands out. Performed basically live this version of Damaged Goods seems now perfect – unhurried, raw, prickly guitar, Jon sounding like he’s just yelling in a room. I’m glad I never trust my memory.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design

Gang of Four – Damaged Goods (EP version 1978)

Damaged Goods 3 song EP Click, right click or control click to download. It’s a 12mb zip file and it includes a hi-res back cover image.

Will Ferrell and Heidi Klum solve the left brain vs right brain dilemma.

“My main task in writing the drawing book was to dig down underneath everything I knew about art and drawing to try to find the most fundamental level of ‘thinking’ that goes on in drawing,” she said. “What was I seeing, how was I ‘seeing’ what I was seeing, and how was I transforming those perceptions into a drawing? It makes my brain hurt even now to remember the effort required by that seemingly simple task.” – Betty Edwards in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 

I have written many songs in my lifetime. Frantic bass lines over frenetic beats mostly, and then, in conjunction with other like-minded musicians together we formed the complete whole entity recognizable as the “song.” My all time favorite song I’ve written with others? ‘Natural’s Not In It’ with Gang of Four, found first on its ground breaking [so I'm told] debut album, Entertainment! and later as the title track to Sofia Coppola’s movie Marie Antoinette. A close second? Evaporation by another of my bands, Shriekback, from its album ‘Care’ which also made the movie soundtrack ranks being as it was in Michael Mann’s ‘prequel’ to Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter.

The act of songwriting or the forming of musical ideas is a nonverbal form of intellect; we musicians cannot ignore the artist within, the one that resides in the right hemisphere of our brains, but being a nonverbal activity it obviously can be hard to describe the process that takes place from the germ of an idea to the seeding and ultimate fruition of a song – the left, logical hemisphere of the brain is of no help here. Unfortunately for some time the idea that the partitioning of our more creative thinking, tapping a mental connection via countless synapses that form the route to the right side of our brains, was dismissed and often scorned. Of course now we know the theory has been well tested and confirmed; simply put the left side of our brain is where our language center resides; it is the logical, linear problem solving and processing half of our brain. The right side, the side I use the most I reckon, is home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts; it is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure. It’s my ‘ideas centre’ where the songs, the ideas and even this post come from. I write less songs these days but I write much more; two thirds of my day at Nemo Design is spent over-heating the right hemisphere of my brain.

Which brings me to creative businesses; where are they headed and who will lead them? You might be surprised to learn that the current common wisdom points to a new generation of business leaders who “get the right brain thing.” In an article in the NY Times titled Let Computers Compute. It’s The Age of The Right Brain there’s this nugget – When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to whip its product development into shape, he told The New York Times about his new approach. “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative,” he said. “I see us as being in the art business,” he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.” [That sounds positively McLuhan - see post below.] The article goes on to point out that today someone with a master of fine arts, M.F.A., trumps someone who holds a good old M.B.A. The point made that rings loud and clear is that if G.M. says it is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

My most successful songwriting was mostly in collaboration with others – the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It was about investing in each others ideas and sharing and adding to the burgeoning art piece or project with complete openness – today we call that radical transparency; nothing hidden, nothing guarded, no walls, no barriers to entry.

So, after considering the worth of being a right-brained musician, a songwriter, a blogger, a creative who finds himself running Nemo Design’s outward-facing digital properties I’ve come to this conclusion – I’m in the right place because Nemo has been set up with tools that provide a success formula for the future [left brain,] and that the right brain is King in our business [right brain!]

At Nemo Design we need to harness the power of the collective whole, understand that at the core of the company we are fundamentally operating as a ‘right-brained unit.’ When we require logic and strategy our left brains won’t let us down but the thinking and all the fun, the pleasure centre, the high concepts and the imagination all reside to the right. We no longer need to verbalize our ideas; we can now show them interactively in motion, in film, in video, in graphics, in projections on buildings, in sculptures, in events, in our actions because actions speak louder than…. 

So what does the future look like for branding, marketing and design companies like Nemo Design and similar companies such as Anomoly, Odopod and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky?

Who innovates, who creates in collaboration with others, who shares in the wealth of knowledge and experience that employees hold in their heads? Does it have to be put in words or business plans – left brain. Or expressed creatively through drawings, film, music, design and song – right brain? If Nemo Design embraces ideas and innovation (right brain) over execution and strategy (left brain) what will it look like in 5 years?