No Rock And Roll Fun

SING SING FOR THEIR SUMMER: Passing the buck to fans is all the rage these days, what with Westlife saying "if you don't buy our single, we'll split up" and Marillion begging their fans to buy three copies of every single. A slightly less cyncial call to arms, though, reaches us from Sing Sing, who just want us to buy their ep, so they can use the money to make an album:

We need to tell you what the situation is with the band and the second album. Basically we have no record label and very little money. We thought that the ‘Madame Sing-Sing’ EP would raise money for an album but, even though we have broken even and gone into a small amount of profit, we have not raised enough money to go back into the studio with Mark van Hoen as we would have liked.  Our only hope is now you guys.

Many of you might not have bought the ‘Madame Sing-Sing’ EP as perhaps you were waiting for the full-length. Well, the deal is this – if you DON’T buy the EP there will be no album. So if you would like to see a second Sing-Sing album and you haven’t bought the EP yet, we would strongly urge you to do so. Of course, not enough of you might buy the EP even for this but if you don’t then at least you will have the last songs ever released by Sing-Sing. To be perfectly honest, the future of the band now really rests with this. Please help us out.

If you would like to hear and even download for free a track off the EP as a taster, you can do so here.

So that’s that. Sorry if this seems a bit desperate but these are desperate times in the music business. The thing is – Sing-Sing is now a cottage industry and in our quest to be truly independent, we have to operate like this and not be dependent record company advances (which are all very well but with that comes the worry that you may always be dropped if you aren’t ‘performing’ as well as they would like). This is the way many bands are operating now – relying on their fans and not record labels.

Of course, buying anything in the shop, not just the EP, will help. We can tell you that we now have vinyl available to buy too. The ‘Panda Eyes’ single that was released on Elefant Records (7” red vinyl – very cool) is back in stock and, for the first time, we have the vinyl version of ‘The Joy of Sing-Sing’ album which was only released in North America. All the other EPS, except for the Manifesto promo, are still available (with b-sides unavailable elsewhere) as are T-shirts.

So that’s that. We would love to make another album and we hope you would love to see one too. All the songs are ready to go so if you feel you can spare a few quid/dollars/euros please do.

Unless you have cloth ears and a granite heart, you'd have to agree that buying a tshirt or a rather nifty ep to help a band make more music has to be a decent investment, yes? Your indie needs you.