• Make More Lists – this is a start
• Make an acoustic EP by the end of March 2010
• Run another IKTOMS event at the end of March / start of April
• Play a set of my own material once a month
• Go to a gig on the old IKTOMS scene once a month (starting with TABARNAK, The Great Indoors, We Love…, MNYC, Folkadot, BAOBABS etc)
• Give an album its ‘proper listen’ once a month (sitting down with an appropriate beverage and doing nothing but listen and sip)
• Keep reading (I’m on a book a week right now, and loving it)
• Write more – I wrote a few pieces for the Rockfeedback end of year and end of decade articles, and really enjoyed it. Plus, as you well know, the world needs my opinions.
• Drink less. Smoke not.

And some more I’m sure, but I’ll be happy if I make the above happen. It helps that most of them are fun, and it’d be a sad failing indeed if I can;t make myself do things I actually want to do.

So – let me know if I’m failing!

Then, over the same weekend in September 2008, we ran the festival again, this time with the noticeably strong hand of a good team of people behind it. It was ambitious – two floors again – but this time across TWO DAYS. Both days were great, but we felt the pressure of it all, and ended up making a bit of a loss. That year we put on over 100 acts.

All of which brings us to this year, on Sunday 27th September: the latest iteration of the festival. I couldn’t be more excited. We’re sticking with the age old mantra “if it works, definitely change it round, utterly and completely”. We’ve got quite a few changes in store, and two in particular that change the way the whole festival will work. I thought it might be interesting to talk about them – quite a few people have asked me about the festival and how it all works, and I think it demonstrates what made (and makes) IKTOMS so different to everything else that went (and goes) on in the London acoustic scene…

(1) FREE ENTRY – this year we’ve opted for free entry. In honesty, the only reason we ever charged money was (a) so that we could pay the bands, and (b) so that we could do cool things like make t-shirts and CDs, if we made a profit. We’ll miss the IKTOMS CDs and t-shirts, but I think it’s misleading to always charge money. Let’s say we charge 100 people £10 each for the day. Even if we have no costs at all, that means there’s £1000 to split between 50 bands. That’s £20 per band. That’s about £5 per person. And that depends on making 100 people think it’s a good idea to part with £10 for a load of bands they’ve never even probably heard of.

Compare this with a free entry festival. Everybody that shows up is, in a sense, £10 better off than they would have been if we’d charged. We don’t have to pay a door person for the day. And rather than playing to 100 people, the acts could well be playing to 200 music loving members of the audience. Not only are the band playing to a packed out audience, but their chances of selling a CD are doubled, and the atmosphere of the whole event becomes more carnival, more celebratory.

(2) VENUE AND LENGTH – The Cross Kings served us well for two years, but this year we’ve opted for a change in the venue, to the Vortex Jazz Club. It’s for a few reasons, but the main amongst them is that we wanted a venue with a touch of prestige, that idea of getting the great acts we know and love from our little scene into a wider limelight, simply by moving up the venue tree. Also the Vortex has a jazz piano – I can’t wait to see some of the bands playing on that! We’re also sticking to a day this time, to keep the crowd more concentrated, and keep our energies up. It’s hard to get people in London out to a venue twice in two days.

This isn’t to say I’m a staunch advocate of the model in any and all situations. I ran UNPLUGGED as a pay-for-entry night once a week, every week for 2 years, and it was a better event for it: the acts got paid, and the door fee gave a kind of exclusivity to the nights. They were gigs with *quality* acts, it seemed to say.

This time round, though, what we really wanted was a celebration, a coming-together, a creative free-for-all (puns intended). The feedback we’ve had from all our ventures (UNPLUGGED, Wired, the IKTOMS Tour of 2008, the IKTOMS CD and the festivals) has been that it’s great to have a confluence of a good number of the many talented acts that make up our ‘scene’, somewhere both curated and yet ‘open’, that felt as if it had some significance and an actual relationship to the peopl involved.

Some of this is also a backlash to the nights that have sullied the reputations of honest ‘door tax’ nights. Every upstart London musician has played the night where they’re told to bring 20 people all paying £5, and receive 50p per person if they bring more than 25. It’s good to show what you can do for free. If musicians make the choice and can control the ‘free’ ways in which fans can interact with them, then they’re ten steps closer to profiting from rather than being exploited by things like online music piracy. Perhaps we need a musician- or fan- approved status for nights, granting them a ‘fair-trade’ seal of approval (this is something I’ve discussed doing with Siobhan from the Green Note Open Mic a few times – please make a go of it if you can think of a good way to make it happen!).

So it’s a festival with a few weighty decisions at its core. But they all belie one simple thing: we want this festival to be amazing, great fun, and free. Click on through to check out the lineup and location and suchlike, and come and support some great music. You can use the imaginary £10 you save to buy a couple of CDs that might just make you a convert to the next big thing, or a fan of a deserving and talented unknown musician in our midst.