'There is too much music… Game Over' – the march afternoons

‘there is too much music… Game Over’ 

the march afternoons interview

ged babey talks to mark estall (who, to all intents and purposes, is the march afternoons) about how, after he shortly releases two albums he is giving up on making music.

This is no ordinary interview… the march afternoons are no ordinary band.

This is an interview about how Content is replacing Art. About how dreams don’t come true. About embracing lack of success by finishing the game.  About laughing into the void. It’s one of the best music interviews you will read this year. Or maybe it’s the worst.

It probably won’t help ‘shift units’ – the march afternoons aren’t real (“debut and penultimate” album) released 18 June 2024 – because that’s what every fucking interview is for, promotion of the brand. the march afternoons are not even a band, let alone a brand and t(he)y think the art/music/work should speak for itself.

The march afternoons first SP (short player, Mark insists on calling it, not an EP)  was ‘Name Your Price’ but to obtain a copy of the cassette version there were instructions to Perform a Random Act of Kindness (Talk to a homeless person for a few minutes. / Anything at all, we don’t care what you do, just do something good for another human). I described it as  a ‘meditative song-cycle that has a relaxed sense of sorrow but acceptance that we can’t change the past but can maybe learn from it’.

The second SP … was downbeat and wonderful. Described as ‘Anti-commercial music’ yet eminently accessible.  The band name came from a Sparklehorse song  I discovered and I made comparisons with Eels / Silver Jews.

Mark Estall calls his music ‘Tired Pop’. I suggested ‘English Melancholy’ might sound better.

The third time I wrote about the march afternoons I decided to have fun with it  (with Marks approval.)  Cult band cover 80’s hit Cruel Summer in tired marketing ploy

The piece confused the hell out of some people. It made us laugh a lot and we realised we shared a cynicism about the music business that was as strong as our passion for the art of great music/ brilliant songs. Despite what may seem like abject pessimism, we have enough self awareness to laugh at ourselves.

An interview seemed like a good idea.

Ninety minutes of face-to-face conversation were recorded but ironically the device stubbornly refuses to play it back or let it be downloaded.  So, from memory…

Mark is from Barnard Castle – the northern market town which was the undoing of Dominic Cummings.

“He couldn’t have chosen a worse place to test his eyes. All those curtain-twitching, nosey people… nothing goes unnoticed!”

He doesn’t remember there being much pop music in the family home as a child. His parents owned very few records – I told him I could list the three my parents owned which included a Jim Reeves LP – who he enthused about – one of many conversational tangents….

Mark loathes the music business but loves pop music – from the times when it was uncomplicated and natural and fun – like Bananarama for example.

“Cruel Summer is one of the greatest minor-key pop songs of the 1980’s (and therefore all time.) but do you realise that they barely ever actually harmonised like modern girl groups – they all sang the same thing, at the same time, just like a bunch of mates in their bedrooms, singing into hairbrushes “

He got ‘into music’ as a teenager, first gig: Ride supported by Verve – before they added the The. From there he worked backwards to The Smiths.  He oved bands like Grandaddy and Sparklehorse.. He moved to London to form a band … accidentally ended up running his own recording studio. 

He was in bands over the years but recently re-commenced making his own music as the march afternoons – an imaginary band / studio project, which is just him with a little help from friends and associates.

He talks enthusiastically about music made by others: the Beach Boys, Public Image Ltd and the greatness of Leeds-based Learning-disabled band Ultimate Thunder came up in conversation and has a dedication to the analogue recording process rather than the digital.

A couple of things on the ‘lost tape’ I asked Mark to elaborate on by email – here are his full replies.

(Ged LTW)  Talking partly about promoting the march afternoons in an over-saturated market, but also generally about music in 2024, you said ‘There Is Just TOO MUCH music around…’ can you remember what you said?

(Mark Estall -the March Afternoons)  There is too much music around. And so much of it is dreadful, let’s be honest.

And I think that’s driven by the landscape of what’s expected from independent artists in 2024. On the one hand, you have direct access to marketplaces and audiences in ways that were never possible before. So it looks at first like all the old hurdles have gone – you don’t have to fork out a tonne of money making physical product, you don’t have to organise distribution to get it into shops, you don’t need the NME or Melody Maker or Smash Hits or Kerrang to let the world know you’re here and find yourself an “audience”, you don’t need Steve Lamacq to play you on the radio.

The rock & roll star is one of the two great aspirational figures of the late 20thC, and while becoming an astronaut continues to look like a tough gig, this one is starting to look achievable. So everyone’s having a go.

But on the other hand, it’s no utopia, we haven’t stormed the Citadel. Because instead you are expected to train yourself into being a perfect little microcosm of capitalism, except that you have to do it for no money – somebody else gets paid for your work.

At some point, someone worked out that the rock & roll dream-myth is strong enough to use as leverage to part musicians from their money, and they also worked out they could get more rich from doing that directly than by having record labels in the way of their grabbing hands like they used to be.

So you’ve got a whole generation of musicians who are their own sales & marketing machines, their own ad agencies, copywriters, stylists, videographers, directors, bookers, promoters … You have to do everything for nothing. And it’s all driven by these huge social media corporations who have got us hooked on our screens. You’ve got to be engaged with your audience on social media every day. Content content content. And you’re churning out vast amounts of utterly meaningless banal repetitive nonsense and it’s all so these companies can have limitless new content every day, without having to make anything themselves.

And where is the art in all this? It’s such a small component, it’s almost irrelevant.

When getting record reviews and being added to playlists is just another thing that you pay for … MusoSoup, Submithub, Amazing fucking Radio … it really doesn’t matter what your music sounds like, someone will take your money and write you a good review, or sling you on their endless “good vibes” playlist a hundred or so down the list so you’ll never be actually played in the one week you’re on there for and you’ll write another social media post to say “Wow! Thanks for the great review TunePanda!” Or “honoured to be on this playlist with so many great artists” that you’ve not bothered to listen to either, and it’s utterly meaningless because you paid for it and it only exists to separate you from your money. And the most horrible thing is that it works. This is a vampire state.

I might have lost my point somewhere in there, but this landscape is not a place built for art to thrive in. And it’s definitely no place for me, this game looks like no fun at all to play. It infuriates me just thinking about it.

You’ve said previously that after releasing the two march afternoon LP’s -“That’s It” what do you mean by that?

That’s it means that’s it. Since the first release the aim has been to finish music, like a computer game, get to the end, these records were my final missions.

I hadn’t made any records of my own for a decade already in 2020 so I thought I was already done, but then I found some old hard drives, decided to see what was on there, tidy up and delete everything old and irrelevant. I meant to just bin these scraps of songs, but I made the mistake of listening. Still good bones after all those years! Couldn’t delete them, couldn’t just let them sit there for another decade, so I had to finish them. And then my brain remembered how to do this again and it poured out a bunch more stuff too (the next record after this one is all new, nothing from before – hence why there’s two records to go, not just this one). This whole process has been something of a purge.

What Then? Give up on your living as a studio boss/ engineer / producer as well as the march afternoons?

I dunno. What next is actually a terrifying question to me. I don’t think I can drag the studio through the landscape of what independent music is these days for very much longer, I’m tired and I’m poor. But I never built myself a safety net so I have no idea what’s next. I just know that soon it has to be something else, which means that now is the time to finish these records

Sounds a bit ‘mid-life crisis’

Haha I think my midlife crisis started at 23 and I’ve not managed to shake it off yet.

Nah, but I do have some difficulties I didn’t have when I was younger. Fibromyalgia has been a bitch and is getting worse as time passes. “I’m tired” was the first line and last line of the last record I put out (Hi James, my name is also James! Hail Satan!) and that was all because of this horrible little syndrome. It takes a lot of energy to keep the studio going and I’m near empty. Also my mental health has been ragged lately, ended up walking into A&E in January because I was not in a safe state. Recovery has been slow.

This is stuff you can’t just ignore, and if I need to make a change it’s much better if I choose that and manage it somehow rather than have my body and brain just down tools and refuse to continue one day.

But don’t you need that ‘creative outlet’ of writing, recording songs, making art, as part of recovery? Your songs do sound ‘therapeutic’ in a way – because they are gentle on the ear and have an authorial wisdom….

Well first of all, starting with this next record, the march afternoons are getting much less gentle on the ear! I got most of those kind of songs out of the way on the last two tapes.

As for the writing-as-therapy thing – not even a little bit, for me. I have a very unhealthy creative process, I get obsessive over trivial details and lost in the repetition, but not in glorious daydream kind of way, it’s more like when the South African fella is sinking in the quicksand in Ice Cold In Alex, it feels like I’ll sink and never be able to pull myself out. I lose track of time. Forget to eat. Can’t sleep because the repetition won’t stop in my head even when it’s not coming out of the speakers.

Like the album closer It’s Time to Admit That you Were Wrong, which is essentially me trying to recreate what it’s like in my head when my brain goes wrong – the sound of my own breakdowns, but in some kind of weird song format … so many different sounds and voices, all repeating the same things over and over, all ignoring each other, shouting over each other, all dischord and disharmony, but at the same time working all together in some singular way, like a storm  in which you can just about make out details of what’s blowing in the wind in if you really concentrate hard … like when Dorothy is in the house, and the house is in the cyclone.

I do like the music I make though, when it’s done, when I’m out of the doing and can just listen. It almost always ends up full of stuff that makes me laugh, actually, although I don’t suppose most other people will get the jokes. Like my favourite thing on this record is a couple of lines where I’ve lifted a lyric from Chicken Licken and another from The Waste Land and put them next to each other. I like to imagine T S Eliot and a worried, little, fluffy yellow bird sat next to each other on the bus, I think they’d get along. Silly stuff.

But yeah, the only real therapy in it is finishing what I started, so I won’t have stopped with that horrible sense of a thing left incomplete. But I can’t wait til I don’t have to do any more of this. I’ll find a more relaxing hobby. I really like appliqué …

What do YOU see as the point of ‘pop-song-writing’? – Is it self-expression, self-analysis ? Or like that Eno quote is it what adults do in the same way as children ‘play’?

There’s a different answer for every single person who does it.

Running my little studio, it’s actually a great privilege to get to hear a lot of these stories from the people who come to make records with me. And there are no two stories the same. Some common threads, sure, but for me the interest doesn’t lie in what people have in common, it’s what makes them different. This is how the Art changes and stays interesting. If everybody was doing the same thing for the same reasons they’d all be making art that means the same, feels the same, sounds the same. But they’re not. And that’s what I try to encourage when people come to make their records with me.

Be the most YOU you can be. Let that show, because it’s the only thing that’ll make you stand out from everyone else with a guitar and a few chords. This is why I like to do as little “in the box” as possible when I record. Every preset sound you use, every time you click “quantize” you remove something of the person from the art. And the purest expression of yourself is the most valuable thing you can give to the world, as an artist. We’re all, in the end, unknowable mysteries to each other. But art in all its forms – including the pop song – when it works, is an effort to make the unknowable known, to try and make sense of the incomprehensible, firstly for yourself and then to share that with whoever will listen.

For me, I failed at this ages ago …

No you didn’t! Commercially, maybe, but NOT artistically – your songs are successful: – interesting, catchy, subtle, original, like you say, funny, and enjoyable to, OK a small audience. Lou Reed said about his music “If I can make ONE person feel less alone…” he had succeeded. Same goes for you.

Sure, that’s one metric to measure by, and sometimes I’m ok with thinking about it on that scale. But I have to admit, back when I started doing this, I was aiming for something bigger, you know? When I was an idiot kid, all unsocialised and isolated and weird, I was wrapped up in the idea of writing songs and putting them out into the world to reach other people like me. Timid little hunched up weirdos in the real world, but with a pretty wild and vibrant inner life of imagination. Because I’d been on the other end of that – my record collection was my lifeline. So that was always gonna be my medium, and the aim was to get to the other side of this connection, be one of the voices on the records that all the fucked up kids played in their bedrooms. Turns out it’s not as easy to do as to imagine, and I’m alright with the idea of having tried and failed.

We’re culturally obsessed in with success. Stories of failure so rarely get told. But there’s just as much to learn from them, and failure is way more relatable! And so many “successful” people are psychopaths – we shouldn’t want their stories permeating our culture as aspirational fables! I think the world wouldn’t be as fucked as it is if we stopped putting those people on pedestals and started paying attention to the ordinary people around us. If there was no shame in failing, if we could just shrug our shoulders and laugh about it, and be OK with it, and be *interested* in it, just as much as we are in “success”.

Anyway, for me, now, with these records “success” is about paying respect to the efforts I’ve made, acknowledging it’s run its course, ending it well, and then trying to find something else that seems worthwhile to do that I can actually manage – something smaller.

With dogs maybe. Or cats. I don’t discriminate.

Maybe I should invoice you for this ‘therapy session’ – I hope you feel better getting this off your chest? I’m gonna ‘worry about you’ as you do have even more of a negative/pessimistic/fatalistic outlook than me. Even the fact you can joke about it I know doesn’t mean you’re ‘OK’. I visited a friend after a suicide attempt and they could laugh yet still look me in the eye and say they wanted to die.

Well, the void is the ultimate joke, isn’t it?

Give it a little bit of time and everything will become nothing – everybody who ever lived, everything that was ever made, thought or felt, all art, all commerce, all human endeavour will disappear and not even leave a memory.

It’s hilarious what we get up to on this ball of ours to distract ourselves from the inevitability of this ending. And unless you get into religion and spirituality – which, of course, I think is all bollocks, and dangerous too – I don’t really think you can see it as anything but absurd.

BUT the trick is to acknowledge the void as the ultimate truth, and then stick two fingers up to it and act as if things really DO matter, just from an experiential point of view.

Because we have these oversized brains and can think and feel and experience joy and pain and fun and misery in ridiculous depth and complexity. I’m not saying it’s as easy as just choosing to be happy or sad, but you can aim for the good stuff, give it a shot.

And you can also choose how you treat other people, knowing that they are also creatures who think and feel. And as much as nothing means anything, and everything is meaningless in the end, it still means you’re a prick if you go around acting like you can just fuck people around because you feel like it.

You know, be decent, have a nice time. It’s basically Bill & Ted.

That seemed like a good note to end on…. but later on I get a message from Mark

I’ve been thinking about chicken licken, and you know what? He was wrong.  The sky wasn’t falling in