I may have break this up into different blogs otherwise people will be reading it FOREVER!! Believe it or not, my journey to where I am now in my music career wasn’t a straight line at all… to be honest, this wasn’t even the route I was planning on going down.
All The Best Decisions Happen By Accident
I think this is a good place to start.
It got to that time in school when you’ve either almost completed Sixth Form or College and you have to start considering what your next step is… further education, like University, perhaps an Apprenticeship, or are you going to find a job?
Well, I already did an extra year of Sixth Form because they just couldn’t get me to leave! So I stayed until Year 13, I think I was 19. I took Photography, Media and English Language as my A Levels.
Music was always something that fired up my soul more than anything else. It was all I thought about, all I was interested in and all I could really write about! For my last Photography Coursework my work was based purely on how to photograph bands. My media exam piece was based on The Rolling Stones. If I could include bands and music in my education… then I would!
My Tutor Mr. Mabert would actually set me extra work to do outside of school; he knew how passionate I was about rock music. I can remember walking down the corridor one morning wearing a retro crop top, paisley flares, red lipstick and Doc Martens and Mr. Mabert said “Jodie, what year is this?” and I said “1975 sir“. He knew I was good at writing, and he would encourage me to write about my favourite musicians etc and would read and give feedback on what I had written.
To be fair, at this point I should probably add that I was doing pretty good at photography and actually won a world wide competition judged by renowned photographer Rankin, with a reconstructive photograph of myself as Mick Jagger from a photo that David Bailey took back in the 60’s.
I was also pretty well known on the Tribute Band scene because I absolutely loved David Bowie & The Rolling Stones so would be out regularly watching tributes to those artists and meeting people through those sort of avenues. I mean I had bright purple hair and wore a feather boa… I wasn’t exactly hard to miss.
This can probably lead on to how I got my name actually – JodieBowie.
At the age of 15 I discovered a man named David Bowie; and I thought he was Gods gift on earth! There was a boy in my year… I can’t remember his name, but I think it was Jacob? and for some reason I thought he looked exactly like David Bowie from Labyrinth (even though he had short black hair! But they did have the same teeth to be fair). Me and my friends would use the code name “Bowie” to talk about him. Of course this ‘Bowie’ never looked at me twice, let alone knew my name! I was a flat chested, goofy, boyish, awkward girl with a hair cut like Brett Anderson from Suede – not exactly what boys of 15 find ‘attractive’ aha. ANYWAY, because of my Bowie obsession a lot of my teachers started calling me JodieBowie and this followed me into Sixth Form.
Mr. Mabert, Mr. Presnell and Ms. Green were all teachers who’d call me Miss. Bowie.
So when it came to starting up my blog, I decided to go with “JodieBowie” and from then on it’s kind of stuck. I decided to use it also as my promoter name because so many people knew me as that. I’m sure I’ll get sued one day for copyright!
SO, I’m at Sixth Form at that annoying cross roads in life where you have to decide which way you’re going to do. At this point they’d already done me a favour letting me stay an extra year, so by this time they were desperate for me to spread my wings. I decided to just go along with what everyone else wanted me to do and what everyone else was doing. I’ll apply for University.
I thought seeing as I love music and writing… the obvious course to follow would be Music Journalism.
In order to get some practice within the industry I needed to actually try doing some journalistic things.
I saw my local centre – New Milton Memorial Centre – was doing a lot of Tribute Nights, so I popped in one afternoon and asked if they’d like someone to write press releases for the local paper to help promote the shows.
This decision literally changed my life.
They said YES, and the next thing I knew I was working with bands, learning about what actually goes on behind the scenes and doing all the writing I was supposed to be doing. A few months later, one afternoon they called me in for a meeting because they wondered if I had any ideas on how to get younger people in; and that’s when I thought “what about local band nights?“. I saw that Mr. Kyps in Bournemouth (at the time) had a few band nights which featured all the best of Bournemouth’s local music scene, so I thought why not just bring that line-up down my way and maybe add some other bands that I knew personally from other areas like Southampton.
I was basically just left to make this idea a reality, and I DID.
This was when “ROCK NIGHTS” were born. They were originally called ‘Heavy Rock Nights’ but we decided to rebrand just in case the ‘heavy’ put people off.
My very first line up took place Friday 13th February 2015. At this point in time I knew of Western Sand as Tyler Hains and Jimmy Bradshaw were actually my guitar tutors from when I was about 14 years old, so I knew they’d make an excellent headline band. I was familiar with The Smokin’ Prophets from their Hollywood Trash days where I saw them support Alan Merrill at the old Talking Heads in Southampton, and they were up for jumping on my show. I heard that Saints of Sin were pretty big around Bournemouth at the time as well and had seen them on many line-ups with both bands, so I got in touch with those guys and that was it… that was my first line-up!
Honestly, compared to what I do now, I had no idea what I was doing. I somehow winged it, into getting the bands involved and probably got lucky through them just knowing me anyway, then it was the case of actually making sure people knew about it! I was still at Sixth Form at this time, so I would go out every Friday during my break and lunch and hand out flyers around my town, stick them everywhere I can. I’d spam all the Facebay groups in my area too in the hope someone would see it and share it. I learnt how to use the ticketing service EventBrite and that made life a whole lot easier.
I can’t remember if the night was particularly financially successful (at this point, I didn’t do any of the ‘money’ part of bookings, nor did I make anything from it), but there was people there and everyone was having a fantastic show and loved all the bands! So with that being said, it was time for round 2!
Originally I kept the same line-up, but Western Sand couldn’t make the second show which meant I had to do some researching a find another band!
This is when I came across a band called ‘Pirates of Panama’ who seemed to be doing not too badly in Bournemouth and when I listened to their music, I liked it. This was another unforeseen moment that would change my life again.
My second line-up consisted of headliners Saints of Sin (and these were the first of many many shows together) and support acts Pirates of Panama and The Smokin’ Prophets. The show took place on Friday 31st July and needed some proper pushing, and the show almost got pulled! But somehow we made it work within the space of 3 days with some proper hard work and it went down an actual storm. The connection I had formed with the bands were unbreakable, people were beginning to recognise me a little bit, I was getting spoken to differently, I was behaving differently, my music taste had changed, I wasn’t listening to 70’s bands, it was all about the 80’s. I was having the time of my life, 19 years old and living the life you dream of when you’re watching Rock of Ages on TV.
This was the moment that I realised I wanted to be doing this forever.
Going to University to study journalism seemed like a lifetime ago, and was no longer an ambition of mine. I wanted to give my entire life, and my whole self to bands and doing and being what they needed me to be and do.
That hasn’t changed since that day.
I began really looking into bands in the area, adding members of bands on Facebook and making that contact. It didn’t take long before I was getting invited to gigs, being put on guestlists (which I still don’t like – I will always pay for a ticket, sometimes even to my own shows!), and bands were introducing themselves to me. I was having a great time going to gigs, mainly Saints of Sin gigs, meeting fans, living my life, discovering new music, figuring out how the industry works and just getting a taste for how many bands are actually out there!
I did a further 2 Rock Nights in 2016 which included 4 bands on the line-up. I worked with Saints of Sin, The Brash Bullets, Lip Service, Pirates of Panama, Daisy Chains, The Smokin’ Prophets, Our Propaganda and Freeway Mad.
Some members of said bands are now members of South of Salem, Crooked Shapes and The Treatment. Both gigs were fantastic line-ups and did fairly well to be honest, especially for the size of the venue I was working with, but the people who ran the Centre weren’t really up for following my dreams of bringing rock ‘n’ roll to a sleepy town of pensioners…
So, that’s where the rock ‘n’ roll dream took a break for a while. I grew tired of not being heard or encouraged and decided that it was better to be at gigs than it was to put on gigs. Everyone around me was convinced that music just wasn’t a ‘thing’ anymore, and no matter how hard I tried to prove them wrong, they just weren’t interested in helping me get to the next level, so I guess I got tired of my flame being blown out and took a step back.
BUT… that would soon change!
And you will hear about what happened next in PART 2!! ❤
I hope this wasn’t too long winded, but there’s so much life to pack into something like a blog! I might as well write a book or a movie haha.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed! Feel free to ask questions… do you thang! 😀
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Seeya soon!
Jodie x ❤ x
JodieBowie 