Folk Radio talks to Ciaran Algar about his ‘Corona Collaboration’ project. After starting as a way just to pass the time during lockdown, the project has built a large fan-base, featured twice on National television and is now being turned into a crowdfunded album project.
Shortly after the COVID-10 lockdown began, two-time Radio 2 Folk Award winner Ciaran Algar produced a musical collaboration video and posted it on social media. The next day, after receiving a positive response to the first video, he made another one.
https://www.facebook.com/ciaranalgarmusic/videos/832786350566133/
Forty days on and Ciaran is still going, posting his daily collaboration videos to an enthusiastic and ever-growing audience. Working his contacts list hard, Ciaran has managed to secure involvement from musicians from across the spectrum of folk and roots music (even a member of parliament) and the project has featured twice on national television. A Kickstarter campaign to make an album from the project, designed to provide much needed paid work to musicians who have lost income as a result of the lockdown, took just 48 hours to reach its target and is still rising:
“Greg Russell and I were in the middle of a duo tour when the lockdown happened” Ciaran explains. “All our gigs got cancelled. I had a couple of days to collect my thoughts; I could spend the next three months doing nothing and just have a break from music, or I could try and do something creative that meant I could still play. I had absolutely no idea how to make a collaboration video, but I’d seen Jenn Butterworth do one with Sam Sweeney the week before, so I knew it was definitely possible.”
After putting a message out on Instagram asking if anyone was interested in making a video, Dave Delarre from Mawkin messaged Ciaran to say he was on board and the first ‘#ciaranscoronacollabs’ video was born.
“I had no plans to do more than one video, but after doing the first one, I got a taste for it!” Ciaran laughs. “It was also the response the videos were getting from people; a lady messaged me on Facebook and said ‘These are really keeping me going, it’s giving me something to look forward to when there’s not a lot else to do.'”
It took a few weeks for the album to become a serious prospect in Ciaran’s mind:
“From about day four people were saying ‘I’d love an album of these.’ I dismissed it at first because I was just recording using my phone. While I might have been able to make some money by just putting those mp3’s out on Bandcamp, I needed to be happy with the quality of what I was putting out. By day twenty I was recording using Logic Pro and was much happier with the results…and people were still asking about an album.
“I spent around ten days figuring out how to make the album happen while continuing to put out the daily videos. I didn’t have the money to make the album. I tried getting in touch with labels and various funding sources; the funding applications available weren’t enough to make the album and the labels I contacted weren’t interested, although I think they’re missing out…I think it’s a really cool idea!”
Ciaran launched his Kickstarter campaign on April 18th attempting to raise £4,000 to fund the corona collaborations album. The campaign description laid out Ciaran’s objectives:
As you’ll be aware by now, the Covid-19 outbreak has left a lot of people struggling, with huge losses of income for the foreseeable future…. So that’s why I’m making this Kickstarter. I want to make a 10-12 track album featuring some of my favourite collaborations, and pay every musician involved Musician’s Union rates. This is the bulk of the costs on this project, but I also want to spread some money into the other sectors of our industry, such as an engineer to mix and master the album, a designer to create the artwork, a videographer to help create accompanying videos to each track. It’s not just musicians who are struggling, and I want to support as many people through this project as possible.
Just forty-eight hours after launching the campaign, Ciaran had secured his £4,000 target, and the donations continued to arrive.
“We’re currently just under £5,000 on the Kickstarter” Ciaran explains. “Doing the maths, that could cover getting 15 or 16 musicians involved where I can pay them all Musicians Union rates. It’s looking like twelve or thirteen tracks. It’ll be mixed and mastered by Ian Stephenson, a fantastic musician who did one of the collaborations with me. I’m going to combine some of the tunes we’ve done into a set that runs through with four or five musicians contributing. We still have twenty days to go on the Kickstarter…if we could get to £7,000 then I would be able to get around 50% of the musicians who have contributed so far involved with the album. It would be nice to also have a pot at the end to be able to help some other musicians out.”
In parallel with finalising arrangements for the album, Ciaran is keeping up with his relentless schedule of daily collaboration videos:
“I got to day thirty-one and thought ‘right that’s a month now, that’s time’. There had been some days where I’d spent all day trying to get a recording ready for the following day, and I was getting exhausted. But then I was messaged by a producer on the Channel 5 Jeremy Vine show asking me to play to their theme tune and they wanted to mention the collaborations. Plus, people were still messaging me to say ‘Don’t stop now, we’re really enjoying these!'”
“My plan at the moment is to get to fifty and then see what’s going on with lockdown. If we’re still in lockdown by then, I’ll carry on and do some bigger things involving more musicians and space them out a bit…but I’ll probably have to stop the daily videos at that point; I think I’ve put in a good shift!”
In the meantime, the interest in Ciaran’s project shows no sign of dropping off:
“With posting videos daily, I expected the interest to stop to drop at some point, but it’s been really surprising. Across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the interest in different videos has been completely different; it’s like there are three completely different audiences. Tunes seem to go down well on Twitter. There have been some videos that I’ve thought haven’t been my best, but then they’ve had a bigger response than other videos that I thought were incredible! I’m surprised by what people have reacted to, how nice people have been and the opportunities that have come from the project. It’s reaffirmed my faith in myself as a musician. It’s made me feel good.”
You can get involved and support Ciaran’s campaign to make the Corona Collaboration album here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coronacollabs/ciarans-corona-collaborations-the-album
And you can see all the corona collaboration videos produced by the project so far on Ciaran’s Facebook page.