"Hello CD listeners..."

This time last year I was unpacking my annual Spotify most-played list and found that my three top artists were Tony James Shevlin, Tony Winn, and Steven Turnbull. Having been co-opted into various line ups in order to perform the music of these esteemed artistes, it was no great surprise to find that my evenings of practice at home prior to joining up with the band(s) had elevated their rotation numbers to a position above those of (say) Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which is the only other thing I can remember trying to find online in 2023.

To my great pleasure I found myself in the same room as two of those same people at an undisclosed location in darkest Essex, gathered with what we calculated to be five sixths of a remarinated Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs in order to strip down the back catalogue down to its bare bones and reassemble it with, say, a three ninety-six, Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor. To this end we have transported Steven off the internet and into the room and invited him to express himself through the media of synthesized piano, organ presets and swell pedals over the sweet, sweet candy malarkey that is our back catalogue.

Far from simply trying to remember the chords at rehearsals, we now are indulging ourselves in reforming the malleable bits and forging on with – if not reinventing the wheel, then certainly asking what colour we think it should be. Everything has a bit more room to breathe, we’re stripping things out rather than loading them in, and the vibe is very much those collaborative conversations you see on the Celtic Connections series, or during episodes of Live at Daryl’s House. It’s quite the fillip to realise that it’ll be a decade next year since we started fooling around with this in Helen’s Snug, and as a result we are determined to celebrate our tinth anniversary in style.

Hope you like our new direction. 

The Price of Whales

“What’s the best thing about Sudbury?” The Singer had enquired solicitously the last time we were here. “Nothing - it’s a shit hole!” came the response from a gentleman on the table at the front, a mere plectrum’s throw from the stage. If not in his cups, then he had certainly had a card put through the door saying they had been delivered to a neighbour. He tried again. “Anyone follow Sudbury Town?” I moved momentarily further toward stage left, lest I become entangled in the tumbleweed drifting across the bar. This time around he is slightly more circumspect. “Is everyone alright?” he enquires, with the air of a concerned parent who has a stash of boiled sweets in the glove compartment for just such an occasion.

At the table in front this time around are a group who, although friendly enough, have clearly enjoyed the hospitality of a proper, old-fashioned, local boozer. There are two pool tables, a generous garden, TVs tuned to two different stations (which are turned off when the talent is performing), warning signs in the toilets warning of dark consequences should anyone be discovered sharing a cubicle, and brisk and efficient bar staff, who ask if we wouldn’t mind shutting the door as it’s letting the heat out. Opposite, 1887’s Victoria Hall*, quiet and dark and due to be renovated - probably for residential use, at which point the new occupiers can start complaining about the noise from the pub they’ve moved in next to.

We start with the gentle flex that is Take it Easy, then the similarly ‘Flats in Dagenham’ intro’ed Cruel to be Kind. Some sort of boisterous exchange of takeaway food is engaging the front table. At my feet lands a half consumed bag of sweet and sour chicken balls. The sauce pools quietly by a bar stool’s feet. Over on the other side of the stage an entire human clatters into The Other Guitarist’s microphone stand, scattering crib notes and pedals and, although apologetic to the point of Heepian obsequiousness the perpetrator is summarily ejected. It always helps to make friends with the door staff. Meanwhile, the intro to Last Night gets the 12” remix treatment.

As we have accepted an engagement for New Years Eve to which end we have decided to revisit the set list of a previous iteration of the line-up, based principally around the soundtrack to the movie Backbeat we have gently started workshopping some numbers to include, and so find ourselves two thirds of the way through a three song rock n’ roll segment before The Drummer notices what’s next on the set list. “But there are sixteens!” he gasps. Post-gig, The Singer and I reflect on how it all went. “I can’t believe we used to do two sets of that stuff at full tilt! Mind you…” he considers “…that was thirty years ago”. Thirty years before that, it was happening in real life.

Nevertheless, we move with the times. The Other Guitarist asks us not to bother cable-tying the PA leads as he’s doing a DJ set at a party the next day. Well, these seven year-olds won’t entertain themselves.

*Named for the Cuban guerrilla leader, Victoria Hall.

“You can’t buy time, but you can sell your soul…”

 Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts. Tell today’s groovy fuckers about The Tube on a Friday teatime, and they probably won’t quite get what you’re on about, but for those of us of a certain age, there was a certain frisson, a delight, in tuning in to see what Jools Holland and Paula Yates were going to throw at you this week. The Jam, say - or The Icicle Works, Carmel, The Tygers of Pan Tang or, for one week only, a callow young fellow in a buckskin fringed jacket with a floppy fringe and one of those ubiquitous Ovation-type guitars that you couldn’t play sitting down because the rounded, bowl-shaped back would slide off your leg.

Since I was listening almost exclusively to Neil Young around this time I was instantly intrigued, not least when Roddy Frame - for it was he - started playing a lovely song about going down the dip or somesuch and then followed it with a super pop song called Oblivious which had one of those amazing one note guitar solos (there’s that Neil Young thing again) which veered off into an amazing jazz/folk arpeggio* before the last chorus. The drummer had Roto-toms, I believe the bass player was dressed as a Gaucho. I was hooked.

Obviously at this point in my nascent musical career I was nowhere near accomplished enough to pull off either of those tunes, but I could just about manhandle my way through The Birth of the True, with it’s The Passenger-like intro, and descending chord chorus which a gleeful Albion Mills** audience stoically endured for much of 1984 and doubtless subsequently spotted a lyrical lift which made its way into Showtime***, part of the epochal This Much Talent oeuvre. 

Flash forward three years (time seemed to move so much slower then) and those nice people at WEA, having inexplicably passed on signing my band The World Service, had ploughed their money instead into keeping Roddy Frame’s career afloat and had not only subbed him enough cash to go to America to make the album Love, they had also shelled out on a promo video which went on a compilation that we - a grateful record retail industry - were supposed to keep on a loop so that the good people of (say) Grimsby might be so entranced by the performances that they might enquire of the artist and purchase one of these new-fangled CD singles everybody was talking about (Walk Out to Winter still being their familiar calling card it was, of course, included on the EP). I loved it. I loved the song, moody black and white visuals, the way the backing singers came in on “…radio!” - it was one of the ones I used to switch the sound over for, and not even Aha got that treatment.

Flash forward again, and The Drummer is enthusing about a suggestion The Keyboard Player has made about something we can add to the Picturehouse set. With our recent regime of weekly rehearsals and a four-gig month under our belts**** we have been hoovering up songs from the last century and although he can’t remember the title or the artist he can hum the distinctive intro- “Bah na baaah (blap!) Bahp baaaahhh” - I know instantly what it is. There is some discussion about how to end a track that fades out on the album (with a saxophone solo) however with recourse to a phone, a bluetooth speaker hook up and an internet library featuring the live version….well, it’s a long way from sitting down to tea on a Friday afternoon in case you miss something and don’t know what they’re chanting on telly in between Balaam and The Angel sets.

And so it is that I find myself in a Kew Gardens-like Pickerel***** in Stowmarket, ready to declaim about a vision of love wearing boxing gloves and peel off the celebratory solo that - fortunately for me - follows the Aeolian scale with which I (and by default anyone who’s heard me play a solo in the last forty three years) am so familiar. All we have to do is count in the intro - a drum fill played by a keyboard player is never going to be a walk in the park for the adept, and so The Keyboard Player counts it in while The Drummer, glasses sliding slipperarily down his nose frowns in concentration but nevertheless comes in adroitly on the five. And we’re off. Girls in their Summer clothes (cf Bruce Springsteen), boys in cargo shorts and football tops, old friends, bookends. Silver splits the blue.

*Cascading shards of tonal delight, if you will.

**Don’t look for it, it’s not there any more.

***Still available on Bandcamp, people.

****Doesn’t sound much, but this time last year we were gigging quarterly.

*****The humidity, not the plantlife.

That difficult second solo EP in full https://thismuchtalent.bandcamp.com/album/belgian-whistles

Aztec Camera on The Tube in 1983 https://youtu.be/liZyggMFWXQ?si=uLp0JF40na8_oJmI

Mick’s Blessings

 Around this time of year my social media history starts filling up with Maverick Festival flashbacks and so, sure as eggs is eggs, the weekend saw me making my annual pilgrimage to Easton, where the pock-marked fields of the Farm Park bear witness to seventeen years of cowboy bootheels traversing the wild plains of a bit of Suffolk which is near the coast.

In tandem this year was Big Jan – all the way from Nelson NZ – out to pick up some Americana vibes and chill with The Medicine Show crew, i.e. me. Scheduled, but not in the programme, this is the pop-up stage in the leafy glade where the talent comes to let off steam, jam, improvise and/or rehearse, where the hired help come to express themselves, or the un-booked to show off in front of as many people as they can persuade away from the Taco truck. Emily Lawler, for example, who spent (by Lachlan Bryan’s estimation) eight parts of her ten minute soundcheck ensuring that the fiddle sounded good, before playing a four song set exclusively on guitar. One of those, mind, so wowed her employer that he insisted that she play it again on three different stages during the course of the weekend.

Shortly after Emily’s necessarily truncated set – she was due on somewhere else, otherwise I’d have kept her there all night – the rains came. It would appear that Festival Supremo Paul Spencer had neglected to renew his annual Faustian pact regarding the weather and so after confirming that the next turn due up was stuck in traffic anyway, we (I) battened down the hatches, put the PA to bed, covered the speakers with their own personalized overnight cases* and pootled away to enjoy a rare night off under cover.

The next morning brought little respite – on the way back from an early pitch inspection I was beckoned urgently toward the artist’s entrance gazebo. Much as I enjoy being issued my lunch and dinner per diems in a timely fashion, it turns out that Anna-on-reception had seen the wall of rain looming behind and outpacing me, and was merely trying to get me out of the way before it hit. Production Manager James and I agreed to keep a weather eye out and review the situation again once the storm broke, which was due to be in the late afternoon, and so once more I had the opportunity to check out some of the turns - The Pleasures, for example, whose rootsy rolling country vibe was not entirely appreciated by one lady, who suggested that the supposedly excessive volume of the performance “Spoils it for the audience”. She then opened a massive brolly right in front of me which completely blocked my view. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?

By tea time, we were sufficiently confident of the outlook to plug in the Medicine Show again (albeit having stood back at a safe distance) and were able to resume the innings by trying it out on the busking session, which had up to that point been an entirely acoustic operation. Turns out you can’t really put a PA away twelve months previously, try to run it in the rain, leave it out overnight and then expect it not to throw a tantrum. Apologies to any and everyone who has a particular aversion to white noise, whether from a listening perspective or – one might argue more importantly – while trying to perform. We unplugged everything, plugged it back in, checked the power supplies, soloed the channels, rerouted the monitor cables, switched off the CD player and discarded at least one of the vocal mics. We were one step away from becoming a Bernard Cribbins lyric. Intriguingly, all of these things worked, not in isolation, but when combined. Site electrician/magician Mick looked darkly at the skies. “We’ve got Dolly Parton’s niece on tomorrow” he muttered as if to himself. “And I still haven’t got that mirror ball up”.

By the time I emerged on Sunday morning, coffee in hand, Mick had already WD40’d his way around the desk and identified the opportunity. “It’s the effects loop” he announced, somewhat proudly. I was simultaneously relieved that we had a solution and wary that even in a field, some turns like to hear a Small Hall ** reverb in their monitors. I was going to have to brace myself for Dolly Parton’s niece’s diva-esque demands…of which there were none. I have rarely - if ever - met a more down-home, charming scion of country music royalty and found them happier in their own skin than self-confessed Child of Hippies Jada Star. “This is more fun than Glastonbury!” she exclaimed. Once she’d introduced me to her son, her Dad, her husband and quoted some Philip Larkin at me I found possibly the only person on site more content with his lot than she was with hers, in the form of Eric Rupert, a bowling shirt-clad man with a massive stogie in one hand and a bull fiddle in the other. It was as if I’d said “Siri, draw me an American bass player”.***   

The previous evening at the bar we had discussed how difficult it must be to get on to Dolly Parton’s Christmas list. There was a suggestion that she never tours after July as it takes her the rest of the year to personally sign each and every one of the exquisitely designed cards she sends to her friends and family and highly-regarded acquaintances. How to get on the nice list, how..? Well, now I’ve been kind to her niece and her bass player. So fingers crossed…     

  

 

*Bin bags. 

**Preset #03

*** Only the other evening I was chatting to a friend who was mystified about how civilians think that everyone in the music business is close and friendly. He was amused to be asked if he knew former Weather Report and Genesis touring drummer Chester Thompson. I just Googled Eric – he does.

“Put down the cheese and get on the stage…”

 And so, again, to Helstock which as regular correspondents will know is the annual celebration of the continued existence of The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley and which has been running almost annually since the towards end of the last century. I get a free pass to perform since it’s also near my birthday and everyone else gets an admission pass if they bring a cheese of interest, echoing an approach first adopted in the late eighties by local band As Is, whom I once saw do a splendid gig at The Old Times in exchange for the wholly reasonable entry fee of a potato.

This year’s submission is along the lines of stripped-down power trio (Mr. Wendell is indisposed due to illness) This Much Talent who - let’s face it - are principally performing a gods kitchen repertoire from the roaring nineties, no longer available on handcrafted cassettes (we were way,way ahead of the hipster curve) but still available to listen to on the Bandcamp courtesy of the Bluehouse Records imprint. In order to fully embrace the retro feel of the occasion I have also dug out the very shirt I used to perform some of these songs in, courtesy of a grateful record industry (Duran Duran as it happens) in 1988. “How do I look?” I mutter to Mulley prior to kick-off. “Like someone I used to know” she whispers.

To climax the five song bijou settette I summon a pre-warned show majordomo (and proprietor of BHR) from behind the mixing desk to perform with us as a surprise eye candy treat for La Mulley who brings things bang up to date by needing both his phone as a prompt and his glasses to read it in order to perform. After a refreshing amuse bouche of a set by Mulley and Winn (“We’re going to play you a traditional folk song - don’t be scared. Oh, and Tony will be performing it on the banjo”) we are back on stage in the guise of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs - a dog or two down, but Dogs nonetheless and are so late on stage due to the buffet-centric distractions that we have to forgo our closing singalong and go out with the big folk epic about the dead sailor, in part derived from Heart’s ‘Barracuda’.

The stage is cleared and Lily Talmers, hot foot from New York and having absolutely smashed the entry fee by bringing fresh bagels, takes centre and utterly charms the room with her acoustic balladeering which hits the sweet spot between Joni Mitchell and - say - Paul Mosely, and if you don’t know how much of a compliment that is, you don’t know you’re born. She is concerned that the room is very quiet. Someone breaks cover to confirm that we are all simply entranced. At what is essentially a private function, the queue for Merch reaches back from the sound desk to the stage.

As per usual, my journey back is soundtracked by the random feed from all the albums I’ve bought and paid for and loaded onto a memory stick*. About seven minutes from home an eight minute version of ‘Thunder Road’ kicks in and I am minded that it was recorded on the night before Mr. The Boss’s twenty ninth birthday. Apparently he was staring down the barrel of his thirties, not sure if he had achieved everything he’d set out to do and worried that this might be it (his delivery of the line “So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore” resonates through the ether even today) but was emotionally rescued, reassured and convinced by the music in the room that night.

You and me both Bruce, you and me both.

*OK Boomer.

“I am breathing in, I am breathing out…”

 Once more to The Institute in/at/for Kelvedon (see blogs passim). I am employed this evening as go-to session guitarist for The Tony Winn Band, as we are promoting his latest (and best) album - Blue Speck, upon which I also make a small contribution. My role this evening, under Eno-esque direction, is to play as little guitar as possible - something which we take to the absolute apogee during some parts of the set, in which I am not on stage at all.

One of the joys of The Institute, aside from its convenient parking, lovely audience, adjacent Co-op and marvellous nearby Indian food is the appointed backstage area, a veritable trove of comfortable seating, occasional theatrical props, a clock to tell the time by, a lit mirror and a fully operational separate kitchen, which has been stocked with tea, coffee, milk and sugar by de facto TM, sound engineer and promoter James Bluehouse, seemingly from a stash of well-plundered hotel, motel and Holiday Inns’ courtesy baskets.

I settle into an armchair and catch up with the rhythm section - on bass, the artist formerly known as Barry Picturehouse, currently engaged in a quest to bring the music of Prince the length and breadth of the UK and on percussion (“Congas and bongas”) Sam ‘Bongoboy’ Thurlow, who tells us of his ukulele-based exploits with his Anarchy in the Ukulele quasi autonomous syndicalist collective. “Occasionally we break them” he confesses. “That must be popular!” I say, cheerfully. His mood darkens perceptibly as he glowers under beetle brows and mutters in a meaningful half-tone. “Not always…”

We are joined by Maverick scion Ella Spencer, who is to be the principal supporting artiste and who is gratefully checking the mirror to see if - having enjoyed a curry earlier - she has spinach in her teeth, on her face or (and I quote) in her piercing. “There’s always a first time”. Bass player Trill and I reminisce fondly about what we refer to numerous times as being “Back in the day”*. Ella seems fascinated at the idea that one might book a venue in London, guarantee to sell thirty tickets, organise a coach and then play to the same people at The Powerhaus as you would have done at (say) The Caribbean Club in Ipswich.

These days of course, one might set up a phone in a cradle, film yourself with a filter and put the resulting demo on YouTube for much less effort, and without having to pay a clean up fee to the bus company. A passing Tony Winn dolefully recalls the attendance figures at his Edinburgh Fringe residency (spoiler - you could have fitted the entire run’s audience in tonight’s venue) however we brightly point out that the subsequent press merely reflects that he had a show at the Edinburgh Festival. 

Before too long it is time to mach show ourselves, and after my brief Little Feat-esque groove to ‘South Australia’ (the presence of a conga player named Sam to my left helps enormously with getting into character) and a career-spanning guitar solo, I am off for a bit of a sit backstage and a cup of tea before resuming duties for a bit of light arpeggiation, the climactic audience singalong and some off the cuff volume control swell work. For the arms-linked audience bow at the end, Trill and I engage in lunges, at my behest. “Christ” he says “You could have warned me. At my age!”

*To be fair, when I drove La Mulley home from rehearsal earlier in the week she actually said “Of course, it was all fields around here when I was growing up” at one point.

A to the M to the E to the Ricana

“Jazz” opined the songwriter and philosopher Otis Lee Crenshaw “ain’t nothing but a blues quartet falling down a flight of stairs”, thus neatly labelling an entire genre of music which encompasses everything from Louis Armstrong’s gravel-coated reading of ‘Wonderful World’ to Pat Metheny’s atonal ‘Zero Tolerance for Silence’, which one critic called “…an incendiary work by an unpredictable master” while another called it, simply, “rubbish” which is, frankly, nitpicking. Thus, to define ‘Americana’, we need to dig into its - appropriately - roots. 

I was having a conversation about authenticity in music at The Maverick Festival at Easton Farm Park, where if nothing else the presence of horses, goats and sheep lends a bucolic air to the self-styled first and finest Americana music festival with a visiting musician who posited that folk should really sing in their natural accent, prompted not by an outbreak of MacCollesque revisionism, but by a performer who had sung a song in a broad Tennessee twang and then explained the genesis of the ballad in an accent which reflected nothing so much as a deep immersion in the history and culture of (say) Beccles. My companion nodded approvingly at the next turn, who provided a thorough exegesis of the Appalachian ballads she had wrought regarding mining disasters and backwoods stills. When we looked her up in the programme it turned out she was from New York.

And so we try to define ‘Americana’, the granddaddies of which are probably The Band, who after all were eighty per cent Canadian and steeped in rock n’ roll and Motown roots. ‘Roots’ being the term many thrusting young women and men adopted in order to avoid being pigeonholed as ‘folk’ (too finger in the ear), ‘country’ (big hats and songs like “When You Leave Me, Walk Out Backwards so I Think You’re Coming In”) or blues (literally endless versions of “Sweet Home Chicago”). Put them all together though, and you have a form which encompasses all the best of everything. To paraphrase Sanjeev Bhaskar’s grandfather character in ‘Goodness Gracious Me’; “Guy Clark - Americana”, “Police Dog Hogan - Americana”, “John Craigie - Americana”. It’s a convenient shorthand for an all-encompassing genre which wends its way from the close folk harmonies of The Black Feathers to the (now) bombastic Zeppelin-esque onslaught of Larkin Poe or the stadium-bound LA-centric Morganway.

If Beyonce opined that you should really put a ring on it, Americana suggests that if you like it you should put a fiddle on it. Or a dobro. Or a banjo. Our old friend Otis might suggest that Americana ain’t nothing but a folk singer in a lumberjack shirt, but the breadth and scope of the genre is the most welcoming of churches. After all, one of the early adopters of the opportunity to simply get up and perform songs from the heart-worn highway in a checked shirt is immortalised on You Tube in an early performance at Maverick.

Local lad. His name was Ed Sheeran.