25 March 2010
'Finding his groove' by BRUCE DENNILL
“Blogging is not for everyone,” says Cape Town-based singer-songwriter Ian Henderson, whose own musings at
www.ianhenderson.com paint a picture of a man with the adventurous spirit of Ernest Hemingway, but without the violent impulses and the ego. “I’ve been drifting around, trying to find an angle.” This searching for a model that works becomes a thread of our conversation.
“Record companies don’t really have a clue anymore,” Henderson ventures. “Anything outside of the Top 20 is just not making any money.” But he concedes that there’s no obvious easy way forward. “Journalists love to write about the ‘new way’,” he says. “Empower yourself; be independent; paint by numbers. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to take a step back and say, ‘What is my groove? Where do I fit?’ Once you know that, the role of a record company, ideally, is supporting artists in doing their thing.”
Henderson also feels that trying to discover where you fit as an artist is a very difficult process in itself. “I’m not sure what space there is in South Africa for more, um, sophisticated material.” He apologises for that statement possibly making him sound like a ponce. “We have certain platforms where certain sounds are expected, so the feedback is skewed. That means the wrong kind of marketing, which means the wrong kind of audience – you get into a negative loop. “The brain is wired in such a way as to be trained to reject failure. It would be better to learn from it.”
Henderson recently spent a couple of months in Argentina. “Back in 2008, I went to New York and Stockholm for a month,” he remembers. “I was struck by how my state of mind changed. There was creativity; excitement; an influx of energy. I liked the unfamiliar. “So this year, I thought I’d like to go to Buenos Aires. I knew nobody there – I’d never been to South America – but that’s why I went. I wanted to push myself.” Henderson found himself enjoying the culture. “You come out of the tube there, and two out of five people are carrying musical instruments. There’s so much going on and so much to learn for a musician,” he says.
“Buenos Aires was time out to reflect on what we can do with the South African situation. Among other things, I confirmed for myself that you need to be motivated by a dedicated pursuit of what you’re doing. “It’s about finding out how to connect with something, not about sales figures. Maybe we need to change the questions before we find the answers,” Henderson says. “It’s like sculpting: keep banging away – eventually a shape will appear.”
Read the original article here: http://www.citizen.co.za/index/article.aspx?pDesc=119754,1,22
