Facebook pages

Do you use Facebook? Have you discovered the Dayve Dean and James and the Giant public profiles on Facebook yet?

If you're a Facebook user, you can become a 'fan' of these pages. This means that (depending on your settings) you will see activity and status updates in your Facebook stream, including new photos, videos and songs, information about live shows and events, and also gives you the option to post comments, discuss with other 'fans' and upload your own photos and videos.



I'm working on getting a direct URL for both my solo and the band pages, but until then you can link directly to the pages at:

Dayve Dean - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dayve-Dean/6338332724

James and the Giant - http://www.facebook.com/pages/James-and-the-Giant/73751652347

Song of the week: Ride (demo)

This week's song of the week is a demo of Ride:

This is one of several demo versions of Ride, which ended up being recorded for the Octagon album.

Ride was a slow song to develop. The chord structure of the chorus, along with some vague words, were written a long time before most of the rest of the song. At some point the first verse appeared, using a chord structure used quite often on the songs on Octagon.

It was then several months, if not a year or two, before the other two verses and final structure were put together. I eventually wrote them on a train home from Birmingham after making a determined effort to move the song forward and took inspiration from the journey including conversations overheard on the train.

You can hear that the song did not drastically change from the demo to the final product on the album, other than being slightly slowed down, some basic structural changes and the addition of the piano and melodica.

The album version of Ride is included on the Octagon album, available to buy from www.dayve.co.uk.


Download the podcast from iTunes (search for Dayve Dean) or follow the link at www.dayve.co.uk

Whatfest Battle of the Bands

A few weeks ago James and the Giant took part in a process to be selected to play at Whatfest, Cheshire's music festival, which takes place at Whatcroft near Northwich in July.

The voting for this is now online and the acts with the most votes by 12 July will be selected to play the festival.

The battle of the bands was a bit of a one off for us and we normally don't part in this kind of thing - they're essentially popularity contests as much as anything else and we're unlikely to be able to take on a young band bringing half their school or college along. It was nice to meet some local bands and promoters though, and it will be interesting to see how the voting goes for the online vote.

So, in the spirit of competition - VOTE FOR US AND ENCOURAGE EVERYONE YOU KNOW AND MEET TO DO THE SAME! (Okay, maybe a little over the top. But it would be nice if you could spread the word :-D )

You can find the voting page at http://www.whatfest.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=391.

Unfortunately, casting a vote is not as straightforward as it could be, but should only take a couple of minutes of your time. Here's how to do it:

Firstly, head on over to http://www.whatfest.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=391 where you'll see a list of all the bands and votes.



To cast a vote, you need to log into the forum. You'll first need to register. Do this by pressing the register link on the top right which will bring you to the registration page:



Select 'I agree to the terms' and you'll move to the registration page:



You'll need to choose a username (between 3 and 20 characters), input and confirm your email address, and select and confirm a password (between 6 and 30 characters including both upper and lower case characters). At the bottom of the form is a confirmation code in a box which you'll need to enter, then press Submit.

You will see a confirmation page and an email from tom@whatfest.co.uk will be sent to the email address you gave.



Follow the link given in the email you receive. This will activate your account.

Select 'Login' and enter the username and password you chose, then select 'Login'.



The voting page will now allow you to select an act to vote for. Find the page at http://www.whatfest.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=391.



You'll find James and the Giant at the bottom of the list. Select the circle next to our name to select us, then press 'Submit vote'.



Your vote will then be added to the list. Thanks!

If you have other email addresses, you can repeat the above process for that address, but each username can only vote ONCE.

SPREAD THE WORD!

Cheers :-)

Steve and Dayve with Badly Drawn Boy

We've having fun here at the LLAMA Music Festival, enjoying playing and watching loads of bands. Headliner Badly Drawn Boy played this afternoon. Me and Steve caught up with him after the show.

The post show drink

Here's Steve and Carl celebrating at the end of our show at LLAMA.

Amazing weather to be playing an outdoor gig! I'll be posting more
photos and videos when I can.

We're now chilling out watching Mike Seddin from the Incredible String
Band playing alongside his daughter Georgia Seddon. Excellent!

Blue Ball Inn at LLAMA

Here's James and the Giant ready to play the Blue Ball Inn at the
LLAMA Music Festival.

If you're in the Lynton and Lynmouth area, pop down!

LLAMA!

We're at Lynton and Lynmouth for the LLAMA Music Festival this weekend. We'll be playing the Blue Bell Inn stage tomorrow (Saturday) at 12.30pm, and have been recording a bit of a video diary which we'll be continuing throughout the weekend.

Here's the first part - packing up the van!

Check it out at youtube.com/dayvedean or on the object below:

Song of the week and new videos

I've been a bit useless as far as blogging, podcasting etc go for the past month or so, so apologies for that. You can find more regular updates through Twitter at twitter.com/dayvedean, which is updated much more regularly. The sad irony is the more I've got to blog about, the less time I have to do it... But more on that in a future post.

In the meantime, I've uploaded a new song to the song of the week podcast. It's a live version of Follow, performed acoustically with just voice and guitar, recorded at The M Club in Crewe at the end of May. Find it at dayve.co.uk/downloadoftheweek.shtml or on iTunes. I seem to have got a bit behind with uploading a new song every week (about 8 weeks behind as far as I can see) so I'll be working to address that over the next week or so. Watch this space, as they say...

I've also uploaded some video of James and the Giant playing at the City Voices Festival in Stoke, again from May. You can watch the show at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6C48C5EA0C01A069 or watching it in the embedded player below: