My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): Album Of The Year, Rolling Stone

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Sometimes AMAZING events come along that you'd never expected but which completely change your world. Other times AMAZING events come along which you'd never expected and end up having almost no effect whatsoever. This was one of the latter.

The whole thing started with me GOOGLING myself one day. I'd like to be able to claim that doing this is a vital part of being a modern thrusting totally independent artiste/label, living on the very edge of the perpetual cyber-geist, always keeping up to date with hits from the blogosphere and track-backs on blackberry, but to be honest I just like looking to see if anyone's said my album's any good.

Usually I get the same few websites (my page, my myspace, my work address etc) and some blog forums where someone (ME) has been mentioning gigs, but this time around I came across an article in the online version of Village Voice, the super-hip New York paper. It was the annual Pazz & Jop poll, where they ask HUNDREDS of journalists to name their top ten albums of the year, and I was THRILLED to discover that our latest album, "This Is Not A Library" was OFFICIALLY the 625th best album of the year!

I was, not to mince words, COCK-A-HOOP! We've NEVER done well with awards or indeed ANYTHING that requires the approval of Those In Charge. We hardly ever get covered in magazines, never in newspapers and only make it onto Festivals by a) ACCIDENT or b) PESTERING - there's one festival which shall remain NAMELESS (but which happens in Leicester, during the summer months, partly on a Sunday) which we've applied to EVERY year, for instance, being local, very MUCH of the kind of music they book and, you know, EAGER, but which we've never even had a REPLY from. It doesn't bother me though, not at all, and the fact that I go on about it all the time is just a COINCIDENCE.

ANYWAY, this means that even the SLIGHTEST acknowledgement from The Powers That Be is cause for excitement. I tracked down the VOTING INTENTIONS articles and discovered that ALL of our votes came from a LOVELY couple of chaps, Mr M Krugman and Mr J Cohen, who wrote a column called "Well Hung At Dawn" for Rolling Stone online. They'd both paid actual CA$H MONEY for their copies of the album and had, wonderfully, liked it and PIMPED it in their column, so I sent them both and email to say thanks and to ALERT them to precisely HOW chuffed I was: VERY.

There the matter lay until a couple of weeks later, when I got a reply saying "If you liked that wait until you see our next column!" Not long after that the aforesaid column appeared online, a large chunk of which was dedicated to their Album Of The Year: "This Is Not A Library" by MJ Hibbett & The Validators! There it was, clear as day and as official as THE LAW: we had an actual real-live clearly labelled RECORD OF THE YEAR in Rolling Stone!

I was STUNNED! This was inarguable FACT, not something I'd made up or deliberately exaggerated or written in myself or ANY of the usual JOLLY SCAMS, it was an album of the year in Rolling Stone! FOR REAL!

I could hardly believe it... and neither could anybody else. Whenever we put out a press release I'd include this accolade at the very top, but everybody, quite understandably, assumed they were missing the asterisk which pointed to a footnote saying "* Rolling Stone, the parish newsletter of Woodhouse Eaves". MJ Hibbett & The Validators having a record of the year in Rolling Stone? That's ridiculous!

I can't argue with that, it WAS ridiculous, but BRILLIANTLY so. Clearly Messrs Krugman and Cohen had realised that this accolade would mean rather a lot more to me than, say, The Libertines, and BLESS THEM had thought it might do me a bit of good. It was a lovely thought and, a year or so later, I was able to buy them some BEER to say thank you, but it was so unbelievable that, well, nobody believed it.

A few weeks after THAT however, something even MORE ludicrous was about to happen that we couldn't have ignored even if we'd wanted to.

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