I don’t know if it was the changing of the clocks or simply tiredness catching up with me, but in addition to the gift of an extra hour yesterday I went to bed at eleven o’clock last night and woke up at eight o’clock this morning feeling fresher and more awake than I have done for a long time. What cheered me up even more was a quick check of the listening figures for the podcast, slightly down on last week but it is only Monday and I had only allowed twelve hours to pass before checking so the signs are positive. The podcast has also had a long overdue change of logo reflecting the fact that it is now a podcast and not a radio show. The slogan ‘music you don’t hear on the radio, on the radio’ has been tweaked and I have taken away the Trent Sound website address to avoid confusion. I will still use the original slogan in full should the show ever return to radio, but I feel the slight alteration does the podcast justice. I had considered putting the URL on the logo but decided to just stick with the Twitter name for now, as I want to try and attract more traffic to the account. For a show with such high figures to have such a small Twitter following is weird but I still don’t know how to pull in the numbers. My personal account is still under-followed and for some reason I have an increase every weekend which drops off during the week.

While still at Trent Sound I had a tote bag made with the logo on with the intention of getting the name out and about. That was only a prototype and now that the logo is up to date (until something replaces Twitter that is, my dream is for the ‘proper’ MySpace to make a comeback) I am looking into getting some more made, and t-shirts too, to give away at events but also to sell online as a way of bolstering funds to the kitty for making more free online content.

Over the weekend I received a lot, and I mean a lot, of Facebook messages and texts asking if I had read a post on the NUSIC blog written by Mark ‘literally’ Del. The answer of course is yes, I have had very little choice in the matter considering the amount of people pointing me in the direction of it. What I wrote last week within this blog is pretty much what I would have written as a response, but I am not going to get into an online spat with him over this because he has totally missed the point of what I say and why I say it. I have said before that as I have never met Del I am not qualified to make comment about him, personally or professionally (although a lot of people have said negative things about him to me) and have said in the past that I do admire what he does regarding the Nottingham music scene. Our methods might be different, but essentially we are doing the same thing for the same reason – a love of music. One difference is that I don’t go out of my way to be the musician’s friend but he is a blogger and podcaster just as I am. Another difference is that he receives financial backing which means he has to be a bit more careful, if I received kickbacks from a company who own a club chain with a monopoly then I’d toe the line too. He also has the local press on his side which has led to him being given his own television show on Notts TV (which he didn’t get offered on the basis of presenting ability, although to be fair he is no worse a presenter than anyone else on the station). If he thinks that my honest approach is ‘a conscious decision to be a twat’ then he is entitled to his opinion, but is he entitled to make a slur against me without having never spoken to me? Who is the bigger man here?

Thanks to a conversation I had with a friend of mine who plays in a band at the weekend, I found out the root cause of Mark ‘literally’ Del’s blog. This friend sings in a band that fills venues yet gets ignored by the local press to a large extent (the last time their name appeared in the local paper was in an article that I had written) and at Hockley Hustle he found himself in a conversation with Mark ‘literally’ Del and told him that he rated me as the only true music journalist in Nottingham and that the honest approach is the best approach as people shouldn’t just say something for the sake of their own popularity and to be seen as the good guy. This constructive comment obviously pissed off Mark ‘literally’ Del which prompted him to write a blog indirectly calling me not only a twat but a dick too.

I’ll ask again. Who is the bigger man?

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