POP EXPERIMENTS

As someone with no musical training but a heck of a lot of ideas, I decided to experiment with AI to see if I could make what's in my head into something that sounded like I imagined. Readers, it's not as easy as you might think.

Now,  I do understand the suspicion around the use of AI in music. But it's here to stay and I decided I wanted to try and understand it in order to have an opinion based on more than fear of the new. And so the experiment began.

While I still lived in London I spent a lot of time in Peckham, and every time I was there I heard the same recorded announcement coming from a loudspeaker outside one of those perpetually closing down discount stores. I found myself chanting it perpetually when I wasn't even in Peckham. And that made me wonder if I could make a dance record out of it - specifically, an indie-dance record from 1993 or thereabouts. So one day I recorded the announcement and then I set about trying to actualise my concept. This was the eventual result - after weeks and weeks of teaching myself how to achieve the sound I wanted.

I ended up being really pleased with it so I stuck it on the streaming services and expected absolutely nothing to happen. But something did. A few weeks later I got an excited call from a friend to say that Closing Down Sale was blasting out from a discount shop - a different one, mind you - on Peckham Rye. And sure enough, when I was down in London later that month, I heard it for myself. It felt a bit, I imagine, what haing a no.1 hit feels like. I was bloody thrilled.

That, of course, set me thinking. And what I was thinking was: I'd love a version that sounds like something Cha Cha DiGregorio would barge in on in Grease. Thus Closing Down Sale '76 was born. 

ANYWAY. It's earned me just shy of four dollars so far and has been Shazam'd 13 times: 11 in the UK, once in Greece (god knows how) and once in Ireland. Fancy that!