Talking With The Diaries ep 1. Our 100th gig. The first in our new Talking With The Diaries series

The Diaries chatting about out upcoming 100th gig.
The Diaries are an original acoustic duo based in Camden Town, London.
We play hugely catchy acoustic rockpop with a punk attitude and an 80s vibe.
See more including upcoming gigs and discover our entire story, covering two European tours and our London and Ireland adventures here:
www.thediaries.band
Our debut album, titled HEᒐ, is written, and all of the songs are well on the way to being completed as productions. The second album is also written, and there is plenty in place for multiple other albums. So yes. We are ready and very interested to hear from any potential managers.
You can hear The NOW Hustle EP on Spotify here:
open.spotify.c...
I Like You (Better When You’re Naked)
Six Sense Lover
Make Me Shine
Rock’n’Roll Tree
How You Rock’n’Roll
For so many of our shows we’ve just turned up at bars unannounced and asked to play there and then. This is how we twice toured Europe. Most of the bars we play in are not even regular music bars, or music bars at all. By definition, we are playing to cold audiences who do not know us, often have little exposure to original music, and who have never heard any of our songs. So please consider that when you see the huge reaction and live music reaction from audiences to our songs. On our London pub crawls we have taken this as a huge endorsement of grassroots music and hopefully we are adding to things to do in London and in London pubs. And we have more plans to take this internationally, especially Japan.
We hit hard and fast. Three, four songs, five tops, then we were out on the street and looking for the next hustle. From first approach to leaving, we can be in and out of a bar in less than half an hour. Our record is five shows in one day. When we first moved to London we moved to Shoreditch, and then moved to the music capital of London - Camden Town. Which makes it one of the music capitals of the world. A perfect place from which to begin a London pub tour, and from there developing to international touring to cities all over the world.
We became an item the day we met, in February 2021. Within four days we had decided we were going to write songs together. Within a month we had decided this was going to be our life; write songs and tour the world. Two months after that we moved from Kentish Town to Ireland to rent a countryside house where we could make noise 24/7, write and record songs, and develop our sound and style. Maja is Swedish, Mark is English, and we now live in Camden having returned to London in December 2022. Very close to Camden Market, so right in the centre of things. The perfect place for future music stars. Songwriters who live for songwriting and live performance.
Apart from working to establish ourselves in London, we recently began sowing the seeds to tour Japan with a view to breaking ourselves there. Maja used to live in Tokyo, speaks fluent Japanese and knows the culture, and we regularly play live streams in Japanese on a Japanese platform - Niconico - to build an audience there to make touring viable. We are also posting KZbin videos with Japanese titles, descriptions and tags. If this all follows through and we make an impact in Japan, we believe we will have a foundation from which to launch ourselves anywhere else.
As for thoughts of merchandise, we have quite a few product ideas and will be putting them into production probably before summer of this year - 2024. Our flagship idea is The Diaries themselves. These will be books of our story, going all the way back to when we met with both of us writing in a kind of relay fashion. The whole thing is currently at around 350,000 words and can be read in real time here: thediaries.ban.... In addition to this, there’s also over a million words in prologue between our individual respective diaries - Mark’s Diaries and Maja’s Diaries. We were writing these independently before we met. Both are about our own musical journeys. The first planned book of all this is called The Diaries: Music, Love and Impossibilities, and it comes in at around 100,000 words. We are going to self publish it to sell at gigs. It begins eight days before we met and ends with us leaving on the ferry bound for Ireland to begin our adventures as The Diaries. No representation or publisher yet, so the idea is just to make it ourselves and sell it at gigs and maybe get it into some independent outlets.
So as you can see, we have a story, a brand, a lot of material, and solid, tangible ideas of how to make this work financially and sustainably. A realistic plan to build success in spite of the ‘music industry’ being, to all intents and purposes and certainly regarding new acts, broken almost to the point of non-existent.