Tonight’s the Night

To Sproughton* where Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs** have been engaged for the sort of rustic, hay-bailed experience that every band dreams of at least once in their short, typically gadfly existence - the village beer festival. We are to soundtrack the extensive consumption of ale with our self-styled East Angliacana whilst not upsetting the neighbours. To this end there has been installed the dreaded decibel monitor, wired into the power supply and which upon being actioned cuts off all juice to the equipment. Not that this should unduly affect a nice little acoustic band like us, but electric amplifiers lurk toward the back of the stage, and when it trips, Stephen - our new keyboard player - has to reset all the tones on his Roland***. Once the ‘disco lights’ have been pointed out - a traffic light system mounted in the eaves of the tithe barn - it becomes virtually impossible to focus on anything else when hitting that open E chord at the seventh fret, but it turns out that it’s the vocals which really set them, and us - literally - off. Our de facto stage manager and road crew, collectively referred to as Indian George**** set the mixer levels to tickle***** and look suitably unhappy about it.

We begin in a sprightly yet necessarily subdued fashion and it is not long before (encouragingly) people are demanding that we turn it up. We explain that we are (literally) limited in what we can do about it, given that the whole entertainment license of the place is probably down to not disturbing the local residents, who haven’t bought a nice weekend place in the country just so that they can be disturbed by people in the village hall getting progressively pissed and having a good time on their door step. We don’t actually put it in those terms, but the inference is there. Ironically, given the limited decibel level of the PA, no-one can make out the explanation anyway. At this stage even the organisers are shaking their metaphorical fists at the electric killjoy to which we are all beholden. Then, someone has an idea. I won’t tell you exactly how we did it, but there is a visible brightening of everybody’s mood when we are finally audible above the hubbub at the bar. Given that nobody could really hear the first three numbers we simply go back to the top of the set list and start again.

At the incidence of the fourth song, our bass player moves across to the mic. “We’d like to do some new material for you now…we don’t just play those same three songs all night, you know.” There is a cheer from a wholly engaged front row who seem to have decided that we are the perfect dessert for their weekend’s indulgence. Since this is a two-set evening, we have dug into the collective back catalogue and introduced a few things that we might not usually throw in, and Stephen - who is new to this particular game anyway, remember - has a well-organised set of index cards to cue him on keys, chords and presets. Naturally we throw this off by moving one of the songs from the second set to the first, which discombobulates not only one, but two members of the group, who were not privy to this information beforehand. There is a shuffling of cards to my left, and a snapping of capos to my right.

We are in good company, there are cheers, swaying, the occasional whoop, and a generous smattering of applause after each song, which is gratifying given that most people have a pint glass in at least one of their hands. We are to conclude the first set with a little something from the last century which originally had quite a lot of phased electric guitar, some Pete Thomas-style drumming and lasted a not-unreasonable three and a half minutes. We have brought this right into the new millenium with an extra verse, over which Helen plays a psych-folk wyrd flute solo, and necessarily taken out all the drums. There’s also a slight time signature change betwixt the intro, the second verse and the pre-chorus. This song is called The Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes, and we have unaccountably decided to close our (literally) barnstorming first set with it.****** The song reaches its maelstrom climax, dips into the phased harmonics in the outro, and Indigo on the desk rides the faders expertly to create a feedback loop to finish the song, set, and potentially our booking for the evening. I look up from my guitar’s volume control. There is nothing. Not a sound. This is literally the sound of silence. The audience are neither open-mouthed nor dismissive, merely variously drained, empty of conviction or confused. It is one of the greatest moments of my musical life.

And so to the second half, where we have been invited to play (variously) a ceilidh set, something the audience can dance to, or ‘something we know’. Helen explains that there may be elements of all three within our performance but principally that we shall do what we do, and hopefully everyone else will catch up. At one point a couple announce that they are to be married, she is blonde and the next song on the list - serependitiously - is Tony Winn’s ‘The Girl with The Scrambled Yellow Hair’, a smoocher, which they sway to wrapped in each others’ arms. “We do weddings” I submit over the mic. “And funerals?” a wag replies.

We are, however, subject to curfew, and that curfew is twenty minutes away. Unfortunately we only have ten minutes of material left and so muttered suggestions are passed around the (impressively spacious) stage regarding how we’re going to fill the balance. Our bass player comes up with a suggestion so outre that it immediately becomes a rallying point for the collective. We are to play a Waterboys album track that half of the group have probably never heard, let alone any of the audience. “If we get another encore, we’ll do the one you know…” we concede. A fateful promise, and one that we are held to. At least for Fisherman’s Blues there’s just one set of chords which keep going round, (although our former fiddle played disputes this and always insisted that we never played it right in the past) and I don’t have to keep shouting the changes at the long-suffering Stephen mid-middle eight. At ten past curfew we draw things to a close. There are whoops, there is cheering, there are imprecations to continue. 

Our work here is done.

*’Sprortun’

**As Mr. Wendell sagely points out “We wanted a short, catchy name that would look big on posters”

***Pronounced as in Grange Hill.

****There are two of them, George and Indigo. Collectively they are still not as old as the t-shirt I’m wearing at the gig.

*****You know how the phasers in Star Trek have different levels of- ‘stun’, ‘kill’ etc? It’s the same with PA mixing desks.

******Mind you, we’ve got form. At last week’s open air festival we opened with it.

Result. Catch. Hooked

 

Our singer went to Uni with a girl who afterward went on to edit for one of the big publishing houses, hence today's onstage introduction to her semi-autobiographical song 'Where Are They Now?' which ran "If you enjoyed David Nicholls' One Day here's a song about the person who did the punctuation."

“That’s Seventy in Dog Years.”

Once more to Helstock, this year returning to The Institute in Kelvedon, for the annual celebration of The Fragrant and Charming La Mulley’s birthday, a cheeseboard the size of Belgium and, this year, the realisation that we have been performing in various iterations of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs for a decade. When Neil Young had been performing for ten years he put out a triple album retrospective* to mark the occasion, whereas we’re going to play the Sproughton Beer Festival. Diff’rent strokes…

We are blessed with the tactical substitution of one Steven Turnbull on keyboards coming into the squad and being named in the first team. I have known him principally as a member of Tony Winn’s band - they even made an album together called Love Songs which is well worth your time seeking out - which is how he is named in my phone as ‘Steven Keys’. He has very much brought an E Street vibe to proceedings and so I have similarly diversified into playing a bit more electric guitar** in order to take on some of the spaces where the fiddle used to be. This is our first public performance with the new line-up, which is also to be augmented by nepo-baby (or, in the circumstances, nepo-puppy) Indigo on third guitar, whose name we are allowed to shorten to ‘Indy’, but I am nevertheless reminded not to shout it at them in the style of John Rhys-Davies in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The mood backstage is sanguine, however I discover that my stage shirt of choice (we need a photo for the Maverick Festival programme so we’re dressed nicely) is missing a button. Gibbon, on bass, without even needing to check the label, which says ‘Slim Fit’ remarks dryly “I wonder how that happened..?” I button my jacket around me, breathe deeply in…and hold it for forty minutes.

The post-show atmosphere is remarkably brighter. “I think we got away with that” posits Mr. Wendell. “Not really a ringing endorsement though, is it?” I reply. La Mulley enters the room with a similar take. I repeat my assertation. “Oh no” she responds “I’ve got better than that - someone who’s never seen us said ‘I knew you dabbled in music, I didn’t realise you were that fucking good at it!’”. I concede that this is a much more positive summary, and wonder if we might use that for the festival blurb?

The evening proceeds in an orderly fashion. Indigo parlays a short set of singer-songwriter drafts of their own. The Arctic Mulleys, with it’s annual performance and ever-revolving line up do a principally Marc Almond-themed selection, one youngster who has clearly been listening to the right things does a Jeff Buckley-esque set which minds me of nothing so much as staying up late to watch the Whistle Test in 1974. Sadly though, as seems to be the way with the young folk these days, once his performance is concluded he and all his friends sidle off into the Spring night. As we know, the correct form is to stay for the first two numbers of the next turn and then quietly excuse oneself under cover of darkness, however that doesn’t seem to be the way to do it these days. Admittedly two of our number have also already gone but in fairness one of them had to get to a Black Metal gig in Colchester right after our show. I think it was ‘Black’, it might have been ‘blackened’ or even ‘toasted’. It was definitely something you can also do with cod, anyway.

Those people did, then, miss an absolute masterclass in composition and performance from one of my favourite singer-songwriters ever, one Paul Mosley (“Aye, spelled like the fascist…”) who really deserves to be much more appreciated than he is. He, similarly, is a veteran of many, many Helstocks, one of which was held in Helen’s sister’s back garden as I recall. Those of us with long memories often spend more time reminiscing than preminiscing. So it is with Wor Pauly, who fondly remembers one sold-out show at The Institute in the company of Jamie Lawson, who you may remember as having a massive, massive hit in Ireland with “I Wan’t Expecting That”*** and being signed to Ed Sheeran’s label. He made it so big that someone was moved to comment under one of his YouTube videos that they’d seen him back in the day in front of four people in Kelvedon. “Okay, it was’t Wembley, but this place was full” remarks Paul. “And that comment was made by…” he shades his eyes and looks around the room until he alights upon the person in question. 

“I don’t normally do trigger warnings, but I am about to play the ukulele” he quips. Back to the piano and a series of torch ballads that at one point genuinely brings me to tears. I am as relieved that it’s dark and that no-one can see my expression as I imagine that other person was earlier. All too soon though, it is over. A groaning tableful of cheese is to be discreetly transported back to The Blue House. I do the idiot check to ensure I’ve retrieved all my leads. Where am I going to? So what happens now? Another guitar case in another village hall.

I cannot stress enough how much you need to listen to Paul Mosley. Start here.

 https://paulmosley.bandcamp.com/album/the-ventriloquist

*pronounced in the record shop argot of the time as ‘decayed’.

**Disappointingly, no-one shouts “Judas!” when I put it on.

***It’s not the original video, but in the same way that someone happened upon that if you start playing Dark Side of The Moon at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, it all fits rather neatly together, similarly, someone did this. Get a box of tissues. https://youtu.be/ttXrb2tRNm0?si=HCsPd8ktB9DCao-p

Photo Credit - Emellia Shrimpton. 

“When it all comes down…”

 “Thanks for coming out to see us on Valentine’s Night, we’d like to start with a song for all the lovers - this is ‘The Bends’…” We are back in Radiohead mode, having had a bit of a squad rotation in terms of set lists recently, and the freshen up seems to be working. Pre-show I am chatting to an old compadre who hasn’t seen us for some time. “Are you doing anything new?” he enquires. “Ah” I say “Define ‘new’?” Some of the between song bantz have, after all, been handed down through generations. Sure enough though, before too long it’s time for us to bring things “Right up to date…if you were born in 1964” with some Tom Petty. It’s so new we don’t even have a funny intro about it

There’s a story that Petty, upon finishing the recording of ‘Refugee’ (for it is this essay which occupies us) bumped into the legendary Jim Keltner in the corridor outside and asked him what he thought. “Needs a shaker” replied the later drummer of The Travelling Wilburys, whereupon he was issued with said percussion, ushered into the studio and told to show them what he meant. Once you’ve heard the shaker, it’s very difficult to concentrate on much else that’s going on, from the swelling organ, intricate licks and, well, it *is* Valentine’s Day.

Our version is a bit more power-chordey and a good deal more guitar-soloey than the original, which does give me a good opportunity to wig out on the Em pentatonic and oh yes, we changed the key as well. We were all probably concentrating a little too hard on the shaker. Spoiler alert: We don’t use a shaker. Nevertheless, I am gratified to receive a mid-set acknowledgement from my partner-in-chord The Other Guitarist regarding the non-existent guitar solo I have just extemporised and indeed everything seems to be going very much to plan until The Bass Player produces an uncharacteristically dissonant note to close our version of ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ (the Green Day song, not the Tony Bennet one) as a result, it turns out, of a particularly hefty darts trophy - one of those big, thick oak ones the size of Alan Partridge’s dinner plate - being dislodged from a shelf some feet above his head by the resonant frequencies of the closing power chords and landing on his head. This, as you might expect, has come as no little surprise, as has the blood now making its way across his forehead in a Terry Butcher-esque display of what happens if you hit a rock with a hard place. We adjourn, first aid kit blood pad in hand.

After a suitable break to confirm that he is neither concussed nor still shaking in shock (and a restorative whisky) we decide to return to the endeavour at hand. “Will you be able to play keyboards?” someone enquires solicitously. “Well” [Eric Morecambe look to camera] “I couldn’t before…” he replies. This, if not an epochal turning point in our relationship, has nonetheless endeared us and our spirit greatly to the audience, and so we carry on where we left off in terms of set list, buoyed by further good vibes. Also,they’ve had an early interval to get the beers in, so there’s that. It’s an interesting diversion in terms of performance duration in that rather than two forty-fives, as in a football match, it’s much more the short set/long set support act-styled arrangement, which allows us to build from the back (to continue the sports metaphor) which, by the end, we all agree was a generally more satisfying experience. Maybe something to think about in future..?

In the morning, anxious messages are despatched toward our wounded comrade. “I didn’t sleep too well” he replies on the (literally) Group chat. “I dreamed that I’d won a trophy. Turns out it was all in my head”