Unfortunately Lisa’s had a tough week with her baby boy Truman, who got ill as a result of teething symptoms. At just 9 months, he has teeth breaking through that have been causing him a lot of pain –which only means Mommy Lisa is up in the night to care for him. Beyond baby blues, there’s plenty of activity in the Name office in planning for a few press releases to be distributed. The highlight of the week was Thursday’s surprise pizza party – a few tasty pizzas were ordered and the team enjoyed lunch, courtesy of head honcho Sam.

Speaking of said Honcho, Sam has taken to the south of France for a light bit of skiing and snowboarding, we can’t wait to hear all of the stories on his arrival.

Hugo has returned from his sickly daze this week, still slightly groggy but firing on most cylinders. He spent much of the week preparing the PR for Nozstock The Hidden Valley festival’s initial line-up announcement all coming to a head on Thursday, a day in which Sam decided to disappear to the slopes of France. Faced with a variety of tasks from a variety of clients (as well as some of Sam’s, picked up in his absence) he buckled down with our new helper Tom to conquer the mountain. We have to say that he was successful in climbing the Himalayas, but not without his trusty Sherpa Tenzing..I mean Tom. The weekend is looking to be a welcome relief for him and despite not making it to ILMC himself one of his clients, WeGotTickets, will be up to win an Arthur Award ‘The Golden Ticket’ there – we at Name wish them the best of luck!

Check out Lisa’s Evian addiction above lol, have a great weekend all!

With the imminent arrival of a lot of press coverage for respective clients, the team has been working not only on all of our ongoing projects but some top secret new things too… shhhhh! We can’t tell you all the details just yet.

Lisa, although much better, is still recovering from being very sick. She spent the week with an enormous workload including the prospect of putting out four press releases in one day. For our client Merlin, we achieved extensive coverage as the digital rights agency reached a settlement for its thousands of record label members with LimeWire. The story even appeared in The Guardian and was picked up by popular TechCrunch.

In a never ending cycle of sickness Hugo’s body finally fell to the incessant attacks of germs on his immune system and called in sick today. However, as he’s such a trooper and loves Name SO MUCH that he’s been working from home getting things accomplished and ready for next week.

We’ve also had some strange occurrences in the office. On Thursday Hugo and Denise both heard morse code and blamed Sam, which to their defense was ultimately true, as they both heard it at the same time.  The mystery deepened on Friday when one of our clients gave us a brief involving Morse Code management, freaky right?!!

Quote of the week, has to be from our general knowledge guru, Hugo, “I thought she [Lisa] was going to cough up her face”. This was in reference to Lisa coughing so badly that her face turned a scarlet colour and produced sounds of a dyeing buffalo.

We also have a real treat for you this week as we not only have our fortnightly playlist but also a freebie. That’s right, just to make sure you read to the end of our week notes we save our free stuff until last. Good job you. The free download is from the brilliant and fast rising Soundway Records and is called Tirei O Chapeu by Batida, Sam absolutely loves this stuff.

Our playlist is titled ‘Soundtrack To Our Lives’ can you guess who picked which tunes from our childhood?

Until next week Name fans.

On Monday night Denise and Lisa attended the launch party for Social Media Week – the drinks were flowing and there were some really great characters at the party too. Being the social media addicts that they are, they fitted right in and were able to make some top-class connections.

Although Denise awoke  from her slumber on Thursday thinking she was only mid-way through her week, it’s been a great one for Name’s junk food queen. She’s also extremely excited about judging the auditions for the Live and Unsigned competition this weekend, where a variety of artists will be showcasing their talents and hopefully making it to the next round. She does promise however not to be extremely cold hearted like Simon Cowell  and break anyone’s dreams.

Swathed in the grey Friday afternoon Hugo managed to find beauty in some unlikely places. It isn’t an occurrence that happens often for him – and it definitely did not come from the office, which was chaotic cacophony of crashing computers and coughing employees – but somewhere in the ether inspiration seemed to be pouring forth. Cascading down a mountain, collecting in little luminous pools encased in willing minds, works of art have been springing out and in turn creating further inspiration. An encounter with one such work occurred Friday morning, a track recommended to him by his ex-colleague and web designer friend with impeccable taste, Mr. Dave Hall. A track by British trumpeter Neil Yates, Rainy Harbour is clearly influenced by his Transylvanian band-mate Zsolte Bende and unearths sparse, intimate soundscapes interlaced with Balkan rhythms and rich melodic lines.  The second is a review by Dave Edwards found on Drowned in Sound this week on indie act Tindersticks. It’s worth spending a couple of minutes reading it just to enjoy the writing. As Hugo said, this kind of inspiration is not something that occurs often, but when it does it’s worth stopping and smelling the flowers.

Lisa, the Mommy of the office, rushed home on Thursday as Baby Tru caught a fever. We’ve missed our Yankee in the office and we hope Tru is doing a lot better now.

So who’s looking forward to Pancake Day next week Tuesday? We sure are! Doubt that we’ll  be having a tossing contest, but we’ll be sure to let you know  how our pancakes turn out via Flickr.

Work has gotten going for this summer’s Nozstock festival and even though the warmer days are months away, the Name team is busy planning and preparing for this event. Tom has been researching hundreds of blogs and online forums in the dubstep, jungle and drum ‘n bass genres, whilst Denise has been helping with the hip hop side of things. Mom of the office, Lisa has been thinking about ways to promote the festival to a family audience and Sam was brainstorming how to run a Nozstock Battle of the Bands series of events.

Next week is the international Social Media Week, where Lisa and Denise have plans to check out a Monday night launch party.

With the snow falling Wednesday night, it was time to turn up the heat and stay inside – but Hugo ventured out for the Kinetica Art Fair, where he saw mind-blowing examples of digital art and sculpture. The annual event is one of Lisa’s connections, from her days working on the Cybersonica festival of music, sound, art and technology.

Hugo left the office on Thursday night with the idea fixed firmly in his head that he would see the Black Keys. He’d been too disorganised to get tickets in advance, but was sure that he would be able to source something at the door as there were three gigs over the weekend, there will definitely be some cancelations and scouts with tickets to a Thursday night show. First he would meet a friend but would be on the road in no time to see the gig. Well that meeting set him back an hour or so, “oh well” he thought trying to keep positive, “so I miss a most of the Band of Skulls, would have been nice to see them but I really want to see the Black Keys”. After stopping for something to eat he was on his way in the tube, up the Piccadilly line and at this point properly late but still in high spirits, ‘maybe I’ll be able to get a ticket cheaper as the scouts will have a whole lot that they want to get rid of’ he thought.

By the time he got off the tube it had started snowing heavily, not ideal for his flat soled boots. Checking his phone he imagined it would take 15 minutes to walk to the venue and WHAM! He fell over. “I can still make it” he thought and went trudging up the hill on his non-existent grip and feeling very much like a Napolionic horse retreating in the winter of 1812. As he looked to catch a bus he realised he got off at the wrong stop, it would take him a good 30min to walk there and a flick over his twitter revealed that the Black Keys had started their set. So sitting in a fallen pile of demoralisation, covered in snow on the side of a mountain and over two hours late for a gig he had no ticket, Hugo gave up. The moral of this story is ‘If you’re going to #fail, #fail spectacularly’.

Quote of the week, comes from Hugo. Whilst having an episode about his almost deceased PC, Hugo blurted, “It really grinds my gears… I mean your one function in life is work [as a computer] and you can’t do it”.

We finally have a brand new playlist of our latest recommendations for you Name fans and it’s a good’un!

Whilst beginning incredibly stressfully, Hugo’s week has actually come to a rather pleasant close as he sits overlooking the Thames under a crisp blue sky through floor to ceiling windows. He has found himself at the Southbank Centre at the AIF’s Structural and Crowd Safety Conference ducking out from the proceedings to bang out some work and check his emails.

One thing he’s not looking forward to however, is the celebration of New Zealand’s national day ‘Waitangi Day’ this weekend. Let me rephrase that, he is looking forward to the celebration of this day on Saturday with the thousands of other Kiwis who have found themselves in London, but he’s not looking forward to the Sunday. The day commemorates the treaty that was signed between the main Maori chieftains and the British crown thereby bringing a close to the bloody ‘New Zealand Wars’. It now turns out that the British duped the Maoris into signing the treaty by mistranslating it and thereby stealing the Maori land – so in effect we’re celebrating the peculation of property from the primitives… ‘Here here’ as the Brits would say.

This week two people in the office win clutz awards, Lisa walked into the doorway, slamming her arm against the hard metal lock. She did, “Yelp” in pain but her colleagues laughed about the clutz move. However this (Friday) morning, Sam managed to make the toaster fall off the table, which then in a chain reaction, caused the sugar and other items to fall on the floor. It’s a mystery how he managed this, as he was sitting at his desk when the incident occurred. We think he may have magical powers.

He did however want to say how excited he and the team are to be working on Nozstock 2012!! Woop Woop!  A much loved, much fun festival that aims to stay small even though it could grow a lot bigger…  Look out for the first artist announcements next week!

A rather busy week, Denise hasn’t been conscious of the days but rather feels like they’ve amalgamated into one another and now it’s, “Happy Friday” as she likes to call it. With a fun pack packed weekend ahead of her she’s raring to go and can’t wait to see her friends.

Quote of the week has to come from our Mommy of the office, Lisa. During a brief chat about technology, geeks and more Lisa uttered, “Khaki Pants – the uniform of Geeks”. Everyone was in stitches after she mentioned this.

Have a great weekend

For one release, we connected with the artist Trenton Birch, and his band Free Radical, who’s collaborating on a new track for his upcoming album with Maxi Jazz of Faithless fame. Fan girl Lisa was thrilled to have a link to this amazing artist, who’s tracks carried her through the late 90s.

This week has been pretty standard for Denise; however she did go to the Childish Gambino gig on Wednesday night. The night kicked off with a performance by Josh Osho and then Gambino took to the stage much later.  She says, “It was a great chance to bring out her inner rapper and get down.” We can’t even begin to imagine this!

One of the best things that happened, was that we announced our lovely Lisa has now joined full time and of course our Zealander Hugo, who has now been promoted to press officer – YAY for Lisa and Hugo,  as Lisa would say! It was nice to see Lisa and Hugo becoming famous – be it only for only 15 minutes – as we’ve had some great endorsements from some of the most read publications within the music industry, like Record of the Day and Music Week.

We are also inching closer to taking on a really cool little festival this summer – the sort of thing we will be going to anyway if we weren’t working it!  Fingers crossed for us!  To celebrate we might even try and sneak off a little bit early tonight for a nice drink – don’t tell Sam!! Shhh!

This week has been a bit of blur for little ol’ Denise and now she’s wondering how the week went so fast without her registering that it’s now Friday. But hey ho, she’s not complaining! Much of the week was spent dedicated to the new ‘Meet The Team’ Lichtenstein photos and the new Facebook page logo. We have to applaud her efforts as she is in no way a graphic designer but she certainly did a great job!

Hugo has been fighting deportation officers this week, well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. He’s been very stressed trying to decipher the INCREDIBLY complicated maze of information that is the UK Home Office website. After days wasted reading PDFs and following labyrinthine trails of information he is none the wiser and wondering how anybody ever emigrates to the UK – although he did find David Bowie in a ballroom. To cheer himself up he has managed to score tickets to Henry Rollins tonight, and with minimal Rollins experience to date other than some idle Black Flag listening he’s looking forward to it with an open mind.

On the brighter side of things, Sam and Lisa won over a new client over a tasty meal at Koba (a scrumptious Korean restaurant), talking deals over BBQ and Kimchi. It was either the food or talent that won over the new client, and work’s begun immediately. 2012 is brewing some fantastic client projects for Name PR, especially on the music meets technology front, with innovative campaigns soon launching that make use of new technology in ground breaking ways.

Quote of the week, has to come from the Name’s Head Honcho, Sam Shemtob. After attending a Ukulele karaoke night he couldn’t be persuaded to sing, which he says, “Was for the better of mankind that I didn’t”.

Also, remember the PIAS fire last summer? Well we’re finally putting up the coverage in our office so stay tuned for the final product on our new Flickr site.

We’re also back with our playlist, so make sure to check out the treats we have in store for you musically.

Sam dotted around London at a number of different parties – the ever brilliant Audience/Live party on Tuesday, MusicTank drinks and PIAS’s party last night. Even with all that non-stop dancing, he’s in full spirits and ready to get the show on the road.

To be honest Hugo’s just looking forward to his only night off this week from all the soirees. A bit of hot chocolate and a good book whilst the snow falls outside sounds like just the ticket for him as his Christmas party onslaught comes to a close. Although he can’t really complain, as he only has himself to blame for the whiskey permeating his essence of late and if he’s completely honest, all the partying on company wallets is actually pretty fun.

The favoured fiesta of this week though was Name’s Christmas bash which took place in the depths of Hackney at Bistrotheque,  a venue with minimal signage and with a distinct ex-warehouse quality to it. The rugged charms actually enhanced the experience though and we all dined on succulent morsels, imbibed copious Cosmopolitans and were treated to an incredible drag Cabaret show choreographed to perfection. The evening even included watching Dave dance on stage and Hugo wear his Bah Humbug! Santa hat, a gift from his secret Santa – gifts were exchanged, with everyone guessing who got who what.

The highlight for Denise came when she got to do go-karting for the pre-celebrations of the office party shenanigans. Although, she did come last out of the group, the chance to do something completely new was exhilarating. She now understands why boys love fast cars.

Quote of the week has got to be from The Enemy who provided a sensational one about our clients Cooking Vinyl and being signed to a previous label, Lead singer/ guitarist Tom Clarke says,

“My experience of record labels is as follows: the big ones have got big lawyers who want to pull your pants down and fuck you for fun while telling you they’re doing you a favour.  And they are all about one thing – money.

“Cooking Vinyl have got bags of passion, and look where it’s got them; The Prodigy put out some of their finest work on Cooking Vinyl, The Subways tugging at the Radio One A list, that’s a guitar band on the A list in 2011. That is where passion gets you, and right now it’s gotten us into the studio, excited, enthused and passionate about being a band again. Something which our previous label miserably failed to achieve.

“Long live Cooking Vinyl and all the proud people who make it what it is.”

Well if that isn’t a corker I don’t know what is! Stay tuned for our Christmas themed playlist which comes out next week, it’s sure to get you in the Christmas spirit.

The great Scottish singer and song writer Jackie Leven passed away on Monday, 14^th November, at 8 o’clock in the evening. He had suffered from cancer.

“There are spiritual story tellers and there are soulful story tellers. I hope to be a soulful story teller. I see the two kinds as two different directions. Spiritual is ascending. Sky, God and all that. I hope my story telling is going down into the earth, is wetter, has more moisture.”        Jackie Leven

Born on June 18th 1950 in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, Jackie Leven had a richer and more eventful life to draw inspiration from than most other dedicated followers of the bardic tradition. And when Leven sang so sonorously of the depths of pain he knew what he was singing about as much as when he sang of wild adventures in far flung places in Europe, love found and lost in a drab corner of Birmingham, and defiantly different loners like the Irish transsexual hitman who was the inspiration behind the title-track of his 2008 album “Lovers at the Gun Club”.

Childhood taught Jackie Leven what it meant to be an outsider. His father an Irish Cockney, his mother a Geordie, the family were treated as intruders by the close-knit and conservative Glenrothes community, especially as they also came from a Romany background. Typical for Jackie’s rollercoaster life is the time in the early 1960s when he won the national Scottish Round Table School Essay competition (he had written about his dream of becoming a travelling musician) only to become the first boy in Scotland a few weeks later to be expelled from school for the possession of drugs. Married at 16, Jackie worked in a missile factory when, at 17, he became the target of a local gang that prevented him from returning home for weeks. In the end, Jackie grabbed his guitar and began a peripatetic life that lasted well over a decade. He worked as a farm labourer in all corners of Britain, spent time by the wall in Berlin, lived in County Kerry, Ireland, and ended up in Madrid where, under the name John St.Field, he released his first album, “Control” (the title is not without ironic undertone, since Spain was then still under the rule of the dictator Franco).

Back in London, on the cusp between Punk and New Wave, Leven formed Doll By Doll, a band whose ferociously intense Rock sound and existential lyrics were at odds with the much more playful attitudes prevalent at the time. Like all truly innovative bands, Doll By Doll sharply divided opinions. Unforgettable to anyone who ever experienced them live, they were several years too early for their own good. “People used to say that our songs were depressing.” remembers Leven: “What the fuck were they talking about? I cannot hear them as depressing at all. Probably they meant depressing to us the record company because we know we can’t sell it.”

Doll By Doll released four albums – the last of which numbered Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour amongst the guest musicians – before splitting up in 1983. Shortly after, Leven signed a solo record deal with the then laudably diverse Charisma/Virgin Records – it was an act that changed his life in a tragic and not at all anticipated way. Walking down Market Street in Islington late at night after a recording session, he was attacked at random by a complete stranger, strangled and slashed across the throat. He was unable to speak for several months before discovering he had also been robbed of his ability to sing falsetto. Leven turned to heroin for solace. For several years, the drug became the centre of his life. First, he painfully but successfully weaned himself off the drug thanks to a course of traditional Chinese five-element acupuncture as well as psychic healing. Following his recovery, he co-founded the CORE Trust, an organisation still operating today in the central London and dedicated to a holistic approach to dealing with addiction.

The first public signs of Jackie’s re-birth as an artist came in 1994 when he released two new albums, “Songs from the Argyll Cycle, Volume 1″ (a “Scotland only release”, said the sleeve), and the richly textured “The Mystery of Love is Greater than the Mystery of Death”, a cast-in-stone classic that featured in a good number of “best of the year” lists that December and served to define Jackie’s style ever since. Helping him on an album that combined Rock with hints of Blues and Gospel and melodies steeped in Scottish and Irish tradition, were Waterboy Mike Scott as well as the American poet Robert Bly whose “Men’s Movement” philosophy Leven admired at the time. “I didn’t have a conscious aim in the sense of a manifesto,” says Leven. “But I think I wanted to be a severe writer. I like things that are severe. That doesn’t mean I like harsh music or harsh art. But I love it when someone puts you into that intense moment of what they’re doing. I can’t live without that in my own writing. Nothing would ever shake me from that intense, severe thing in the song.”

Those two albums in 1994 marked the start of a exceptionally varied and fecund second artistic life for Jackie. He has released twenty-four albums since, all of which are filled to the brim with his unique sense of melody, dramatic story-telling and lyrical depth. Amongst these, in 2004, was “Jackie Leven Said”, a remarkable recording of the combined forces of Leven and a long-term fan, the Scottish author Ian Rankin, creator of the hard-drinking, hard-thinking Edinburgh cop D.I. John Rebus. Around the same time, the fascinating pairing of Leven and Pere Ubu himself, David Thomas, could be seen performing in various European venues under the heading Ubudoll.

The usual music business habit of releasing a new album every two years or so was no longer enough to contain the thick flow of music generated by Jackie Leven’s intense muse. This was, of course, a reflection of Jackie’s similarly intense thirst for life. Those who knew him best tell of a bear of a man bursting with wit, humour and spirit, always springing a trick or two on unsuspecting friends, and counting amongst his greatest achievements a whiskey called “Leven’s Lament”, especially bottled in his honour by the Scottish distillers of Islay Mist. Long after having eased himself into a more settled life in rural Hamphsire, he still set off once a year with a sleeping bag and a handful of books for a very long walk in the countryside. Jackie’s creative force was unstoppable. In 2009 alone he released no fewer than five albums. Four of these contained two albums each that had previously been available only through “The Haunted Valley”, a sort of secret society that published a quarterly magazine and one album a year for the inner circle of Leven-appreciators. In the same year, 2009, Leven also released his third album under the pseudonym Sir Vincent Lone, an alter ego invented for the sole purpose of creating more room to release records and to give vent to some of his more experimental ideas.

After that, Jackie Leven released two more albums, “Gothic Road” (2010) and “Wayside Shrines and the Code of the Travelling Man” (2011), the latter featuring – as have many of the albums before – Michael Cosgrave. It featured songs written mostly in German and Austrian hotel rooms. Martin Goldschmidt, the Cooking Vinyl Records founder, another long-standing Leven fan who has released all Jackie’s albums since “Argyll Cycle”, rightly regards it as Jackie’s best album after “The Mystery of Love…”. Jackie, with a typical twinkle in the eye, described it as “the world’s first homeopathic record”: “In the true homeopathic way, we have taken a sound – in this case a sound which represents grief – grieving is something we are not so good at in the West, and we have diluted that sound in the songs so much that you can no longer hear it, but the “memory” of the sound is still there. For this reason, the more you listen to this record, the better you will feel about the real sadness in your life.”

For an introduction to his music or if just to reminisce click below:

Jackie Leven – The Mystery of Love (Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death)

Hugo has been working tirelessly on extremely complicated press releases too, that had to be completed this week. Was that achieved? Wait to see some new releases coming out next week.

This week kicked off – for Lisa – with more training on the Name PR database, getting better acquainted with how to explore, assign and generate conference lists for clients. Lisa said, “Once you get your head around it all, it’s a great system that would be the envy of any PR agency!.”

The highlight of the week had to be on Thursday night when Lisa and Sam rocked up to the posh digs of Shoreditch House to attend a networking event with all the top technology companies from the Shoreditch area. The event was part of TechCity happenings, a government initiative that is supporting the development of the technology industry in the East London area, in hopes that it will become a new Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately for Dave he’s had a cold for most of the week, which made him delirious and forced him to take the tube instead of cycling. He recommends that you vote for his friend Megan’s entry in the corgi haiku competition that she entered (it’s #3), because he believes this will make him recover more quickly. He says this is “science”, so you shouldn’t bother questioning it, and you should just go vote Corky now instead.

For the past two weeks Denise has been reading The Help and even though she hadn’t finished the book yet, she made her way to the pictures to watch the film and now she highly recommends on watching the film and reading the book.

Don’t forget its Bonfire night over the weekend, which only means that there’s only seven yes, seven weeks until Christmas and then the year’s over. How are those New Year’s resolutions working out for you?

Until next week Name fans!