"...and for those of you watching in black and white..."

Like swans, we musical Narcisseae generally glide serenely across the waters of this business we call show whilst underneath our little legs scurry away in a frenzy, forever reaping and posting, commenting and colluding, and trying to ensure that the machine is adequately fed and watered at all times. So many platforms to fill, so much media to refresh – and all for the fear that if we don’t keep buoyant, our online presence will sink to the bottom of a watery grave, our career floating in the starry firmament in exactly the same way that bricks don’t. Honestly – if I’m not dropping the latest Rare Candy remix on Tidal I’m generally up to here issuing Cease and Desist writs to the paps. It’s never-ending.

I’m swamped.
  
As it happens, there’s not a lot to report at the moment, but I like hanging out with you guys, so in a spirit of “Well, and what have you been up to recently..?” let me take you through my virtual week, since it’s mainly involved the subject of visuals and video and they’re quite fun to look through. At the last Neighbourhood Dogs get-together we were going to collaborate on a song. I came in with a couple of verses and a couple of chords and looked forward to a pleasant evening wrangling over middle eights and taking things to the bridge, but on the first run through La Mulley conjured a melody out of the ether, Mr. Wendell found a few inversions he could play with, Turny wandered up to the dusty end of the banjo, we all threw in some 10CC-esque “Aaaaahhh”s in the turnaround and Producer Andy pronounced himself satisfied with the outcome to the point where he suggested that adding any more chords in would unnecessarily complicate the whole thing. I suspect that this would have pleased the shade of Our Former Glorious Leader, who was forever trying to edit things down - preferably to the point where a song consisted of one verse (possibly repeated twice) and one chord, and that being without a major tonic*.

What with us being freed from the constraints of arguing about diminished fourths for the rest of the evening we decided to lark about with some guerrilla promo-making. Ordinarily when doing something for the interweb one would ensure that the lighting, camera angles, shooting script and sound source were all in tip-top condition and ready to be tweaked in post-production. Even Zoella makes sure not to fall over the scenery, I'm told. What we did was prop my iPad up on the breakfast bar and point it at the sofa. It’s on Facebook, which tends to annoy some people but then again, so are we.

Here it is.  

In the same week that we did that, a far more professional editing job appeared over on the YouTube courtesy of Tony James Shevlin, who I did a session for the BBC with a few weeks ago. Those nice people from Unity in Music turned up with a couple of cameras, thus obviating the need for any of us to casually approach and fill the screen (an action which is a lot easier for me than it used to be these days) when we needed to cut between shots. My main job in this one was to sit quietly to the side and not fuck things up, which I think I achieved with commendable aplomb – my model for this role being Bill Bruford, who once received a writing credit on a King Crimson track for not playing anything, the reasoning being that although he was there in the studio, this was exactly what the song needed. What I will say is that that third harmony was my idea and in the absence of Dirk the Drummer on backing vocals, I was pleased to be able to dep in and perform it.

 

 

Last, but by no means peremptorily, was the astonishing discovery that MySpace is still a thing! Going back to my opening remarks, back in the day that’s all we had. I think Justin Timberlake owns it now, in which case he has the rights to this performance from The Cornbury Festival of ten years ago, wherein the single camera edit is skilfully utilised by our friend Nick Cooper who was already rather conveniently out on the weekend doing something or another with Spiers and Boden. See how crowd cutaways allow him to switch between angles. You’d probably never have known unless you were the sort of person who could instantly distinguish between a banjo and a mandolin** - keep an eye on Russ Barnes to the left of your screen. He's the, er, one in the hat - not the one in the frock.        

  

*The notable exception to this would have been that time he set out to write a song with a central riff containing all twelve notes in the scale. He did it, as well.  

** Unlike the guy on the desk out front doing our sound check.

Moby Dave.

Friends, pray serve my indulgence as I reproduce a heretofore un-blogged excerpt from All These Little Pieces (down in price to £4.99 for the paperback, everybody!) regarding Songs from The Blue House's appearance at The Cornbury Festival in 2006, at the behest of The Word magazine. There's a post script on this occasion.     

 

 

We are unwashed and slightly dazed the next morning when a dishevelled denim-clad fellow staggers toward us as we are drinking tea outside our tent, which is parked to the rear of the backstage area at the festival. “Hello” he introduces himself “I’m John Bonham’s son - Ravin’ Dave’s the name. I was here last night - s’posed to play drums with Plant, he’s known me since I was this high”. He waves an unsteady hand somewhere aroung knee level. “Thing is, I’ve flown in from fackin’ New York last night. I was in Barbados yesterday, got a gig tonight in Glasgow and now I’m in fackin’ Oxfordshire. I don’t know where the fack I am” - this much is clearly true, at least spiritually if not geographically.

“I was s’posed to play drums” he continues “But Robert took one look at me and says “You’re jet lagged - you can’t play, but can our drummer use your kit?””. Robert Plant, it is inferred, has remembered to bring his own mixing desk but seems to have forgotten to bring a drum kit. Lucky that Ravin’ Dave’s roadie was there in time, eh? That’s what we thought. “Where’s my coffee?” Our passing soundman has been persuaded to grab a couple of reviving hot drinks from catering for the tired and emotional alleged offspring of erstwhile rock legend ‘Bonzo’. “Back in the day, yes, I was heavyweight boxing champion of Great Britain you know” he continues apropos of nothing. We are aware that a line of security men are observing from a safe distance and chuckling visibly to each other.

“You know what’s unusual about me?” We can’t think of a safe answer to this and so decline to answer at all. There follows a long and involved monologue about the South African security services and how Ravin’ Dave was unfairly incarcerated under the same laws that put Nelson Mandela away - “...and poor old Steve...” Dave shakes his head sadly “...of course he never made it. Can I buy a fag off yer, I fackin’ hate rollies”. His rather damp and sad-looking cigarette is indeed hanging unloved and unlit in his hand.

There is further discussion around his consumption of drugs and alcohol over the previous twenty four hours, and indeed forty two years. “I’ve got an interview with Kate from The Guardian” he mumbles, and gestures to indicate where his drinks are to be delivered. ‘Kate from The Guardian’ seems to resemble nothing so much as a startled and rather nervous looking gentleman, who spares us a pleading look as we make eye contact. An idea seems to occur to Dave - “You’re beautiful” he announces to one of our party “I bet you’ve got a beautiful body - do you want to go skinny-dipping in the lake?” Rock Mum Helen politely demurs. Dave senses that he has outstayed his welcome. “What the fack did I say that for?” he wonders out loud. No-one can provide a cogent answer and so he gathers what remain of his wits about him and stumbles off. The guys on security are still chuckling contentedly to themselves.

 

So anyway, James did the sound for Deborah Bonham on Saturday last and asked her if she by any chance had a nephew called Dave. Apparently she hasn't. We were pretty sure that was the case, but the confirmation prompted a momentary frisson in both of us anyway. Presumably there's an LA club doorman somewhere still wondering if that guy that night really was the drummer from Coldplay. If you're reading, sir, that was the night my mate Steve tried it on.  

How Mark Ellen made me a Rock Dad.

It’s been a bad month for those of us who like our popular culture expertly deconstructed and served up with picture caption jokes, as monthly compendium of aperçus The Word draws a discreet veil over its operations and ceases publication. The wailing and gnashing of cappuccino cups has been heard far and wide across the net – at one point the website turned into a virtual Kensington Palace – and among the tributes to the monthly’s wit and erudition and consensus that they really couldn’t have done any more in terms of positioning themselves in the new marketplace whilst determinedly fulfilling their manifesto to the last, there emerged smaller, more personal stories of how the magazine literally changed people’s lives. I have one such reflection, which even if the events therein didn’t move my life on to a different course, then certainly caused me to sail a bit closer to the wind than I otherwise would have done. In fact one could argue that the whole interactive Word weekend was a barrel of luffs*. It began with the July 2006 issue – number 41 – which contained a small article and jokey quiz about the rise of the Rock Dad. Tucked away at the end was a brief paragraph. “Are you a Rock Dad in a band?” it enquired, going on to suggest that if there were a collection of Rock Dads who had a demo MP3 and a decent photograph to hand then sending it in to the mailbox pretty sharpish might mean that such a group could find themselves opening The Cornbury Festival a few weeks later. As it happened, we did have a demo – a version of Blue Oyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper that we had recorded at High Barn Studio in darkest Posh North Essex a few weeks earlier in lieu of a fee for performing at their beer festival. The rise of the electronic communication age meant that we didn’t even have to find a jiffy bag and a clean C-90 in order to send it off. 

I still have the email I received from Our Glorious Leader in which the earthly representatives of Development Hell communicated their pleasure with our submission and invited us to apply for wristbands forthwith. By lucky happenstance we had picked a song that David Hepworth used to have as his mobile phone ringtone, and so announcing our version with a banjo riff had apparently tickled the adjudicating panel and bumped us to the top of the queue. There followed a flurry of communications between (among others) a production manager now faced not only with Robert Plant’s backline demands but also some bunch from Suffolk who intended to bring a banjo, a mandolin and a fiddle player, but who remained the soul of affable helpfulness throughout both this period and the festival itself. A request for a publishing-spec photograph meant a hasty call to one James Kindred (@sketchybear) – now CEO of his own agency but back then the only guy we knew with a top-end camera and a Mac to edit on. His off the cuff art direction was of such quality that we ended up using shots from the session for the centerfold of our album Tree, and he got a call shortly afterward from the magazine asking if he was available to go and take some shots of Peter, Bjorn and John at Latitude in exchange for a weekend press pass. His portrait of them appeared in the next issue and he got a weekend out into the deal, so I think we all kicked a goal on that one.

We rounded up Simon Allen from High Barn to provide a friendly ear behind the mixing desk, and corralled James Munson to perform a similar task on monitors. They packed tents and gumboots and joined the parade. With our set to be shoehorned into the section immediately after Robert Plant’s crew’s sanctioning of the stage for his headline set and before the festival’s official start time he carefully line checked us all in the face of rising pressure, including our drummer’s rendition of ‘Moby Dick’ and appropriation of Rocco Deluca and The Burden’s cowbell, and then did such a sterling job on us that he was invited to stay up there for the rest of the day. I believe he may have had a hand in refereeing Hayseed Dixie’s sound – again, a case of good deeds not only being their own reward, but offering a little bonus on the side.

At one point a film crew came backstage to interview us. I answered the “What’s a Rock Dad?” question at length, a combination of nerves and bravado, for what seemed like fifteen minutes. The interviewer turned to vocalist Helen. “And what’s a Rock Mum?” they ventured. “Pretty much that…with stretch marks” she deadpanned. When, shortly afterwards, we were introduced to our host and sponsor - one Mark Ellen - he immediately pounced on the remark, which he’d heard relayed anecdotally by one of the film crew,  and guffawed his appreciation while making us all feel immediately at ease with his story of the crushed lavender sprigs in the VIP restaurant area and a good-naturedly dismissive Rock Stars today shake of the head as he compared and contrasted the catering at great festivals past – he may have mentioned Weeley, or Bickershaw. He complimented us on the photo we’d submitted and that they’d published in the magazine’s follow up story (“Oh, which cover did it reminded me of? The Allmans! That’s it - The Allmans – what’s the album that’s from…? ‘Brothers and Sisters’!”) and good naturedly denied being The Rocking Vicar (“No-one knows…”). To be honest we’d probably have spent the next twenty minutes quite happily chatting with him rather than lurking behind the stage checking our watches. Having carefully made a note on a card so as not to inadvertently introduce us as Songs from the Blue Room (“We get that a lot…”) he made a short and funny announcement about what was coming next and let us loose on a big stage in front of a field capable of holding twenty thousand people.

I’ve mentioned in past blogs how the next day I bumped into him, sans pass, and got him back past security (“This is the editor of Word Magazine, one of the festival’s biggest sponsors…”) on condition that I could meet Peter Buck (He made a point of ensuring that he got my wife’s name right so that when he did the introductions he didn’t confuse her with someone else), and there’s a whole chapter in All These Little Pieces devoted to our weekend out at the festival, but none of this would have been possible without someone at The Word coming up with the idea of the Rock Dad, green lighting the idea of an article and then throwing the idea that they might get an actual band of Rock Dads onstage at the festival itself into the ring to top off the cake (I believe that the next year Ellen himself took to the stage with his band The Love Trousers). For that alone, notwithstanding nine years of entertainment for lively minds, thank you The Word. I shall miss you.        

 *Other puns are available.

There is a video of us performing Reaper and a song called Not That Kind of Girl at Cornbury here - http://www.myspace.com/songsfromthebluehouse

It's MySpace, so mind the cobwebs and try not to disturb the dust too much.  

"We'd like to do a song that's been very kind to us..."

In the world of Songs from The Blue House, we are preparing for another assault on the hearts and minds of the great listening public by winding up into the release of our version of Blue Oyster Cult's seminal classic "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". At a meeting some time ago with our beloved record company this was to be a combination tie-in vinyl seven inch, CD single and download as well as an upload of our performance of the song at the album launch gig last year to YouTube.

As of now this has been downgraded slightly in that it will certainly be available as a download, but we're still waiting to hear if anyone at the studio has had time to look at the live footage yet, let alone edit it all together into a seamless performance-based file for posting on the web. Reading yesterday about how Jimmy Page had to recreate the ambience of Madison Square Gardens at Shepperton for some of the close ups in The Song Remains The Same, I'm also concerned that the shirt I wore for the gig has lost a couple of buttons since then and so any retakes we need to do present the potential for horrible continuity errors. Possessing the twin virtues of impatience and compulsive worry, as I do, you can probably imagine how I'm feeling at the moment. 

We are hoping to use our forthcoming gig at The High Barn in Great Bardfield (home of OBRC) next month as a launch party. I'm sure everything will come through in time - it usually does, and I then manage to enjoy the sensation that there was really nothing to worry about all along. The second album turned up on the morning of the launch gig for instance, which saved us the ignomy of having a big sold-out gig for which there was no actual tangible product to be presented. Same thing with the download, really, as it is unlikely that folks will be sitting rapt in the audience with their laptops, all ready to simultaneously hit the 'buy' button after a dramatic countdown, possibly involving streamers, party poppers and a big back-projection of a stopwatch, and besides, I understand the wireless coverage out there is awful. 

The genesis of the song's arrival in our repertoire is a tale long and convoluted. I distinctly remember Our Glorious Leader James messing about with the riff in the studio for the 'Too' sessions after a bit of tuning up and remarking that it would be a good thing to try and reinvent, and after we'd done a beer festival for what was then merely our favourite venue and not OBRC, the payment for which was a day's studio time, we thought it would be rather a laugh to have a go at it. 

Anyone familiar with the original album version will note that there is a lengthy middle section involving wailing guitars, and since we are principally an acoustic-based folk/country/bluegrass/blues/pop crossover hybrid (there isn't a genre sub-section on iTunes, we've looked) this was clearly going to be somewhat of a challenge to pull off. As in so many of these situations however, we simply rang Fiddly Richard and told him that he'd have to do something with it, and then contacted then friend of the group, now stalwart associate member and songwriter, Tony 'TT' Turrell with a view to filling in the gaps underneath. 

I had an idea that he could do something like the piano intro to Genesis's 'Firth of Fifth' while Fiddly wailed away over the top of it and since he can pretty much play anything at the drop of a hat (his 'Theme from Roobarb and Custard' is a thing of wonder) he acquiesced, came round to The Blue House, showed us a few things which we applauded warmly and then arranged  to meet us at the studio. The combination in the final version of his rolling piano chords underpinning Fiddly's swooping solo, underpinned by Helen's ghostly counterpointed flute and the cymbal swells really is quite an aural experience. Naturally, that's the bit we've dropped from the single/radio edit version for reasons of time and concentration constraints.... 

It's a lovely barn, The High Barn, and so we determined to record as live as possible in the centre of it, with TT at the grand piano on stage being flanked by Fiddly and the fragrant-and-charming Helen Mulley, who was to add spooky flute, and the rest of us, including two (count 'em) banjo players seated in a circle down on the floor of the barn. Tony 'Ellis' Winn came up with a banjo intro which we all loved, and we settled down to enjoy a day's mucking about in the studio. 

People came and went, bass player Gibbon and Helen improvised some backing harmony vocals, Hel introducing the elusive 'blue' note to proceedings, Pete 'Radar' Pawsey enjoyed his usual studio technique, which involved running the track over several times while he blew, hit, strummed, stroked and stared at various things (the look on producer Chris's face as Radar unpacked what looked like a child's zither and proceeded to hammer on it for a bit while trying to get a level is still one which some members of the band treasure as their favourite moment of the day) and Fiddly improvised and practised until he'd got several takes that we thought we could work with. 

Rough mixes taken away and listened to, Chris very kindly agreed that we may as well do the whole thing properly if we were going to do it at all, and so invited us back to finish off some percussion and do some mixing once everyone's ears had recovered slightly and so we, naturally, turned up with a drummer and the news that we thought it could probably do with a proper rhythm track. Now at this point you may have sensed a slight flaw in our plan - you'd think that the sensible point at which to lay down a drum track in these days of computerised mixing desks, click tracks and digital edits would be at the point we recorded the basic backing for the song, wouldn't you? And you'd be right. 

Paul 'Reado' Read however is a man who is unlikely to shirk a challenge and so having listened carefully to the sound of some musicians sitting in a circle in a barn and playing a song some of them barely knew while trying to monitor a piano some twenty feet away committed the tiny yet significant tempo changes, lapses in concentration and fluffed intros to memory and, incredibly, managed to play along with the whole track as if he'd been there in the room in the first place. His only bone of contention being that there should be significant amounts of cowbell present in the final mix. 

For those of you who have seen the YouTube footage of that sketch featuring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken, "More cowbell", I can assure you that it is a barely-fictionalised account of what went on that night. Then, of course, those nice people at The Word magazine ran a competition to find a bunch of 'Rock Dads' and since we pretty much fit the bill, we sent them a version of it, and blow me if we didn't win! An experience to treasure, not least for the little things that went unremarked at the time. 

As an example when, having waited for Robert Plant's crew to finish their lengthy soundcheck before we could load our gear on stage Reado then soundchecked his drums and cymbals by playing part of the mid-section of Led Zeppelin's 'Moby Dick', it was probably an in-joke too far for most of the anxious waiting audience. ). Then, when we were putting together the track listing for our latest album 'Tree', James and I kept coming back to the fact that we had this old thing in the bag somewhere and if we didn't drop it somewhere into the mix it'd very probably be lost for ever. 

Patient and with good grace as ever in the face of our ideas, our friend and engineer Simon Allen went delving through the hard driven archives to dig out our performance, dusted off the files, reformatted the mixes, tweaked, tuned and remastered the thing so it sat kindly next to our more recent efforts and probably wondered what else we'd come up with before he could relax and stop doing fourteen hour days for us. 

And so, with a little fanfare heralding our hopes and dreams of a foray into the pop charts, we are nearly ready to thrust ourselves upon the pluggers, producers and publishers of the industry, all because James decided one day to fool around with a half-rembered riff. It could all have been so different. The other thing we used to muck about with was Robyn Hitchcock's 'Brenda's Iron Sledge'. I wonder how things might have turned out if we'd gone with that one....?

You can listen to, buy or make a gift of the album version here: https://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/dont-fear-the-reaper

p.s. In the great file of "what might have been", I am reminded that Reado stepped up to the plate and offered to get us back on when The Waterboys didn't turn up. One of the great regrets of my life is that we didn't get to do our covers of 'Medecine Bow', 'The Whole of The Moon', 'This Is The Sea' (complete with Sweet Thing' segue)' and 'Fisherman's Blues' and get off before anyone noticed... :-)