My mum and dad spend a lot of time in Conwy.

And they like to walk.

One of their favourite places in the world is Abergwyngregyn -- particularly the waterfalls at the back of the valley behind the village.

I packed all of my photog gear into the car and hauled myself down the A55. You take a left off the expressway just past Llanfairfechan, follow a narrow road up through the village, and you come to a [rather expensive] car park.

The signs claim that it the walk to the falls requires you to negotiate a 'gentle slope'. Trust me, it's not so gentle with a rucksack full of camera equipment strapped to your back!

The pictures of the waterfall came out quite badly. My lens / NGrad filter kept getting soaked by the mist. But I like this moody shot of the valley.

In the bad old days finding new music for the radio show revolved around one thing: seeing what dropped through the letterbox during that particular week.

For bands, it could be a very hit and miss affair. Royal Mail may claim a success rate for mail delivery of 99%+, but in my experience, and for whatever reason, jiffy bags with CD shaped things in them [or tape-shaped] are a lot less likely to arrive at their destination.

So, the band who had distilled all of their dreams and hopes into that particular recording had to rely on an unreliable mode of delivery and then the luck of the draw as to what else might turn up in that same delivery.

Some weeks I have had a miserly 3 or 4 demos. Some other weeks I receive over a 100.

So, if your demo turned up in the week I received over a hundred other submissions, it wouldn’t get the same level of attention or scrutiny.

I have always tried to listen to every second of what is sent to me, but sometimes it has been impossible.

myspace has seen a massive change in the way that people submit their music to the likes of me. Over the last 12 months I have noticed a dramatic change of attitude and expectation. Bands, increasingly, expect you to find them. It’s not that I expect musicians to come "crawling" to me [as one person put it], but I do think that it’s a dangerously laissez faire attitude for any band to have. If you want your music to get played on the radio, or to be heard by a record label, the only sensible course of action is to be proactive and send them your music.

A lot of bands get in touch with me and ask me to check out their myspace songs, which is something I spend a large proportion of my week doing. Bands who rely on myspace to such an extent should realise, though, that a good proportion of the time I’m spent staring at the screen waiting for myspace’s notoriously shit servers to cough up the music. Wait too long and I have to go somewhere else.

If you send the demo, directly, you know it’s going to get listened to.

My advice, therefore, is that you send your music directly. It’s not a question of me being lazy, it’s a question of you improving the odds that this business has a tendency to stack against you.

themysterytour@gmail.com

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