>>PREVIEW
SCREWTAPE LEWIS
Sunday, May 28
The Lilac Festival
It’s a plight all too many indie bands fall prey to. They pump all their time, energy and money into creating a product they’re proud of, but after it’s all said and done, they have no resources left to get it out there and get it heard. This was a plight that Edmonton’s new wave, cabaret popsters Screwtape Lewis were determined to avoid with their third release. The Opulent Hum was produced by former Northern Pike Jay Semko and features eight catchy, finely crafted pop-rock tunes that throw back to the early ’80s.
With boxes of their new disc crowding their rehearsal space guitarist and front man Randl Lewis Bailer stepped into a new, less familiar role.
"Then you put on a completely different hat and you become ‘the promoter,’ and then you’re contacting press, you’re contacting radio, you’re contacting venues and trying to get them excited about what you’ve just spent the last six months doing," he says.
With a scrappy underdog attitude and some positive press under their collective belt, Screwtape Lewis took aim at the next great media frontier –radio.
A grant from Alberta Foundation for the Arts allowed them to enlist the services of a "radio tracker." DB Productions of Toronto selected "Imperfect" as the song most likely to succeed as a single.
"It wasn’t my choice," Bailer says. "Jay really liked it because he heard the commercial potential in it."
Still, DB insisted on a radio remix with more guitars and drums and less keyboards before "Imperfect" was perfect enough to shop around.
"And then every week they call all the stations they have a relationship with and petition on your behalf." Once a week they report back on their progress.
Campus stations CITR in Vancouver and CKRG in Toronto soon placed Screwtape Lewis in high rotation. Then SONiC FM in Edmonton made SL their Band of the Month. This guaranteed them 100 spins and what is known in radio talk as "medium rotation."
"It did more for us than I expected," Bailer allows. "Things just changed dramatically." But looking ahead it’s still a long, uphill struggle.
"I have comments where people (radio programmers) like the song, but they can’t play it because it isn’t charting on other stations," Bailer concedes. "We’ve made some positive in-roads in Edmonton, but there’s a lot of world out there."
Bailer, an articulate, mild-mannered, Wetaskiwin school teacher by day, is anything but the hardcore, shameless self-promoter I was prepared to interview.
"Some people are naturally born sales people and they thrive in that role, but I don’t. I’m a musician and it’s not easy for me to sell this as a product," he says. "I hope that I’m able to sell this in an honest and kind of humble way as opposed to the hard sell, bravado way that I think most entertainment is sold."
Ironically, at a time when most of their indie peers have all but completely given up on the idea of mainstream acceptance, Screwtape Lewis, by tackling the commercial radio Goliaths, are effectively breaking new ground and firmly positioning themselves in the underdog slot. |
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