From this position on the sidelines of Editors'/Smith and Burrows' lives, there was one primary revelation for me in April 2021. I've been genuinely amazed at how abbreviated and cropped the natural cycle of record promotion has been due to the lock downs. Consider this; the Smith and Burrows album came out in mid February and brought with it the expected media engagements, with some of those having already happened during December and January. Obviously there was the problem of not being able to tour and get the message out in person to audiences on shores not fully visible, but video conferencing allowed certain geographical barriers to be breached.
Within the first week of May, however, Andy Burrows announced that Razorlight have reunited and you would assume that this means all his attention will be directed there. It would be reasonable to suggest, then, that S&B will now be returning to its hibernation state. That means that in addition to the pre-album press stops the entire promotional campaign for Only Smith and Burrows is Good Enough was only about 4 to 5 months. I feel like this is a time in Smith and Burrows' history that we will look back on, assuredly stating they were deprived of much that could/should have been. In spite of that, there's still time for some kind of redemption down the line sometime.
April 2021 was also the month when Tom turned 40. I know he asked Andy Burrows about this during their live chat at the end of December last year, as well as posting a (hopefully) doctored picture of himself as an older man on Insta, so it's clearly something that's on his mind. Whether that's in a positive or negative way is unclear. For whatever it's worth, to have spent nearly half your life so far being able to express yourself creatively and support a family, while enriching the lives of people you'll probably never meet...not bad. Not bad at all. There are worse résumés to possess in this world. Happy Birthday, Mr Smith.
On the 20th of April at around 8.00pm I logged into the Archive's YouTube profile to make sure everything was OK, then I visited the gmail account to ensure that I hadn't been received any unexpected breach of copyright notices that could sink the profile. All was well, no threats, so I logged back out and went to bed. The next morning, I tried to log in again and found that I'd been locked out, and was told that google didn't recognise the device. The same device that approximately 8 hours earlier it had allowed me in on. The set up was exactly the same, nothing was changed. I tried the traditional methods for getting back in and that didn't work either, so I tried to contact google for assistance and found myself on a help page that place me firmly into a loop of being referred back to the solutions that had already failed.
Paranoia in 3...2...1...
Consequently, for the next 3 weeks the Archive on YouTube was completely inaccessible to me; becoming a zombie profile that I'd effectively lost all control over. I couldn't do any of the essentials like responding to copyright strikes, trimming out any shitty comments left by people on the clips but worst of all, I couldn't add any new content. Sure, the videos were all online and the links were working fine, but my inability to practice damage limitation by monitoring incoming grievances made me very, very nervous. I went through the five stages of grief, arriving reluctantly at "Acceptance" that the Archive on YouTube was once again finished.
Then on the 13th of May, and entirely on a whim, I took another shot at it. I was able to log in without any issue. First attempt. No problems at all.
I don't get it, it doesn't make sense, but I'll take the reprieve. We get to carry on carrying on, and I can only hope that this doesn't happen again any time soon. Enjoy the snaps and vids from April 2021.
Editors Instagram - March 2021
For all of Editors' previous Instagram posts, go here.
brought to you with lots and lots of lemming-love :) x
