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Jimi Hendrix has a ‘new album’ out. I hate it and I haven’t even heard it yet.

I’m a lifelong Hendrix fan. Ever since I heard his interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner I was hooked. My initial response upon hearing it was “I didn’t realise that was allowed”. I had a tape of his performance at the Isle of White Festival in 1970 and the entire performance re-engineered what little I understood of music. I put Hendrix on a par with Aphex Twin or Squarepusher for experimentation. There are just some sounds which nobody else has ever made before that just leap out at you and remind you that you’re alive and that life is actually very interesting. The distorted screams and moans he would make with his strat echoed the pubescent confusion I was feeling at the time. And even now they still root out emotions that don’t often see the light of day.

That aside, this ‘new album’ is a collection of studio outtakes, jams and cover versions that has been chucked together by Jimi’s step-sister Janie. Janie was adopted by Jimi’s father Al, who died in 2002. Jimi’s brother Leon was written out of the will by Al shortly before his death. It seems that this kind of in-fighting and wrangling goes hand-in-hand with the legacy of dead rock stars. Especially those, such as Jimi, who died tragically early and unexpectedly, without the foresight to create their own will.

Hendrix only actually completed 3 studio albums in his short career (he died at 28). But each one is crafted into a complete body of work which tells a unique and original story. This ‘new album’, titled ‘Valleys of Neptune’ tells a story, but it’s a story based on lies. It’s a mishmash of stuff that I can’t believe Hendix or anyone else in the Jimi Hendrix Experience would have blessed, if they were alive.

I’m not against these type of collections at all. The lie is in the marketing. The title track suggests it’s from some tape that Eddie Kramer found down the back of the sofa in the reception at Electric Ladyland studios, but which they were just too stoned to release. And just for you it’s been remasted into a deluxe package with horrifying digital clarity. Bullshit. Why not simply call it Scraps of Hendrix’ or ‘The Stuff Hendrix Wouldn’t Dream of Releasing’. I thought the same thing about Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a collection of crap that Jeff Buckley wouldn’t have released if you’d paid him millions but which got chucked out by his estate once he’s brown bread.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some really good deep-dives into aspects of Hendrix that are worth a listen – Blues is exactly that. It was another posthumous release but simply collates many of the very bluesy recordings, jams and live performances he did. It tells a story, an honest story. And if you want to experience his live work, try Live at Monterey and Live at Berkeley. And if you want to hear the Hendrix BBC Sessions, well, listen to that, there’s a bum note on Manic Depression that has to be the most glorious and beautiful bum note I’ve ever heard.

This isn’t the first of these cheesy-titled anathemas, avoid First of the The New Rising Sun (much of which isn’t even in tune) and South Saturn Delta. There’s a reason why these things weren’t released when Hendrix was alive. Elbow call it demo-itis. It’s when you demo a song, send it to your friends, family and A&R people, they love it, then you develop it more. The problem is, nobody likes any other version than the one you sent them in the first place, even if you recorded it in your bedroom on a TASCAM 4-track. Most bands are pretty careful about what they put out. It’s only in death that they begin to lose control. They stop being able to tell their own story.

If you want to get into Hendrix, listen to Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and then Electric Ladyland, in that order. Ovoid anything that has the name of a planet in its title, it is probably shit.

Image credit: designerfake

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I’m really enjoying the various incarnations of Weiden + Kennedy’s Lurpak campaign recently.

As well as a few nice TVCs, billboards and some recipe cards, they have created a nice little social thing called Bake Club.

The idea being that you sign up, invite some friends and schedule a time where you can have a bit of a bake-off. Pictures are then uploaded to Flickr. It’s all very nice and simple.

The only thing I wonder about is why they didn’t make it as a Facebook application. I’m sure it would get considerably more attention and may have grown much faster. They could also have targeted ads based on food-related keywords in their profile. Any suggestions on this?

The best thing about the campaign is that they enlisted the help of some food bloggers to create the food used in the photography. They had one of my favourite bloggers (and fellow Peckham-ite) Helen Graves cook up a giant angry-looking chicken & leek pie. No doubt they were inspired by this beautiful and gargantuan pork pie she did at Christmas.

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Tim recently pointed me in the direction of a Facebook group called Secret London. It currently has 188k members. This isn’t entirely surprising until you realise that it was only created 2 weeks ago. The grou is for “… Londoners to inspire Londoners by sharing the secrets of the city”. There’s a very nice London-for-Londoners feel to it. Of course there’s a load of spam but the group’s creator Tiffany Philippou is working hard to keep it clean. Tiffany is now crowdsourcing the development and design of a new site from a temporary blog.

I’ve been thinking about why it has become so successful so quickly, especially considering the enormous glut of travel-related sites that exist. For me there are four things that make it work.

The proposition

Secrets want to be shared, by virtue of the fact that they are not supposed to be. People love to share secrets. We all love to tell others about a great pub with a huge log fire and the best Toad in the Hole in London, the best ice-cream, the best spot in Greenwich park for a drunken lazy Sunday. And even more, we love to share things that say something about who we are.

The convenience of Facebook

People are spending more and more time simply staying within Facebook. And it’s just too easy to share and join groups. It’s becoming a little world of content, like a vortex.

Inspiration

At first thought you assume that Facebook isn’t the ideal platform for Secret London. It would be difficult to archive the secrets and you have to scroll through a lot of crap to find the good stuff. But perhaps that is its charm. When you scroll through the comments and the responses, there’s is a lot of dross but you do come across stuff that inspires you. Most travel sites assume that you have the first clue what you want to do. You have to initiate your discovery by clicking on a primary navigation item or think of a search terms to enter. It’s a tiny but onerous little chore and you don’t know how the site is going to react, it might disappoint. But with a stream of random secrets, it’s like poring through an vintage shop and finding a little gem that you love, but nobody else cares about.

Simply put, it’s not about discovery, it’s about inspiration.

Shared ownership

Finally, Tiffany is crowdsourcing the design and development of a new site as well as a logo. She is also releasing the content under a Creative Commons license. It feels as close as we can currently get to a shared ownership of something.

I’d be fascinated to see what else you think might have contributed to the success of Secret London.

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One response among designers and UX folk to Apple’s new iPad has been to criticise the effort required of users to command the haptic interface. Microsoft’s Surface had the same response, as did the interface that Tom Cruise used in Mission Impossible.

‘Ergonomically speaking, it’s just too much hard work’ is the usual response. There’s a lot of supposition and conjecture there though, mostly based on the received wisdom that less work is better. It seems obvious that they require more work to control, but I’m not aware of any long-term study into the ergonomic effects of haptic interfaces in everyday use or indeed that they are even hard work to use on a daily basis. I’m certainly one of those people that look at this kind of interface and thinks “It just looks like a lot of hard work”.

In recent years, the coal-face of sedentary computer terminal work has been reduced to mere mouse clicks scattered with a few little rapid tapperings on a keyboard. Our heads don’t move, only our eyes dart from pixel to pixel. Lots of typing and lots of clicking. Maybe even a little bit of dribble. I can imagine one day that our muscles might atrophy completely and leave us existing in a jellied heap still clicking our only STRONG FINGER, eyeballs recessed, still darting.

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People are sharing stuff online more than ever before. The popularity of services such as bit.ly, ShareThis and even Twitter are evidence of this.

You often hear people bandy around an “80/20 rule” (see Pareto principle) where in a social environment, 20% of people will contribute 80% of the content, be it through forum or blog posts, new topics, videos etc. It’s horribly over-simplistic but it’s a tidy rule of thumb. It’s a good way to remember that you will only ever get a small number of folk actually contributing anything to a community. The theory being that if you can get the 20% then the 80% might follow. It’s been around for a long time and you can see patterns of this in anything that exhibits long tail behaviour. It’s supported by Forrester’s highly useful Social Technographics® ladder of behaviors, which is worth grokking if you have the time.

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A reaction of many forward-thinking organisations in times of big change is to create an R&D department, a ‘lab’ or some kind of Skunk Works.

That way, the risk is isolated away where it can’t harm the rest of the organisation.

It makes sense. All the awesome ideas created or discovered by the privileged bright minds can bring them back to the colleagues they’ve left behind like it’s some kind of precious life-preserving root vegetable from a new land.

When you introduce new concepts and new ways of working to people who are quite happy working in the way they have always worked, there’s a culture clash. No matter how awesome the idea is, it will be met with distain simple because it’s foreign and unfamiliar. Simply put, it suffers from the Not Invented Here syndrome.

Plus, the organisation is shielded from failure yet isn’t likely to benefit from that failure, which is the really important bit.

Instead, a culture that somehow fosters awesomeness at any level needs to be slow-baked into the organisation itself not just isolated off.

Of course, many organisations might maintain they are simply too large to instill such change effectively. Look no further than Google’s 20% time to see how to overcome NIH.

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