“You can dress me in Prada and uncomfortable shoes…”

Finally, a return to the live arena for Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs as we are engaged to perform at an end of term/retirement party at a local Primary School. The audience is overwhelmingly female - I haven’t played to such a gender specific crowd since that time The Star Club did a graduation party for student nurses, when bass player-come-booking agent Kilbey, upon being informed of the generous fee, replied solemnly “Well, you’ll have to give us time to raise the money…”

We are to perform al fresco, which gives us a sense of health and personal safety during the time of the great unpleasantness, and the familiar setting of the sports field gazebo lends us an enormous sense of wellbeing, as does the reassuring presence behind the sound desk of Blue House James, who has merely had to haul everything out of his shed, set it up, plug it in, and hope it all works as well as it did last time*. He regards a mildewy microphone solemnly. “This hasn’t been cleaned in about a year and a half” he explains “But neither has it been used”.

I am trying out the Nashville Tuning of which I have been reading so much recently, which essentially involves buying a set of twelve-string light gauges, and throwing away all the thicker ones. It gives a few of the songs a lighter, jangly, almost mandolin-y feel, aside from all the ones where I’ve put a capo on the fifth fret to give it a lighter, jangly…well,you get the idea.

Turny Winn, having secateured his banjo fingering hand into uselessness, is on one-handed melodeon, taking time out mid-performance to play a short set of his love songs** to the accompaniment of the Head, who has also delivered a stirring speech thanking the staff for their sterling efforts over the past year and a half, and which delivers the sort of analysis of the performance of certain ministers of state over the same time period which is most akin to the reviews of Spinal Tap’s 1980 Polymer Records comeback album. He also points out that the event (including our stipend) has been independently funded (just in case you, or a passing columnist for The Spectator was unduly concerned).

At break time we retire to a classroom to enjoy a hearty repast, including (somewhat appropriately) Eton Mess Cake, home made coleslaw, chicken satay and a vegetarian option for Mr. Wendell who, as with most of his kind, usually exists on crisps and crudités if and when Green Room catering is provided. He spends the second set slightly bloated as a result. Luckily (for him) he doesn’t sing much. “Don’t let me do that again” he entreats.

As the sun sets magnificently behind the gazebo, the full moon emerges from behind the sports centre, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Radio Nowhere’ soundtracks  the pack-down, Fiddly reflects on the incomers to his village over the course of the pandemic. “All looking to garden” he says. “Topsoil’s gone through the roof”. We consider this scenario, solemnly. “You can tell they’re not locals” he concludes. “Country folk don’t buy dirt”

*It does, it really does.

** https://open.spotify.com/album/0cvHvKgRbopVHstmRsH67D?si=ARd5Df_iR9eLvMqXlqu_0A&dl_branch=1

Donkey Horsey - Another Guest Blog...

...is linked to below, in which I am referred to as a putative 'George', a 'Miami Steve' and an - if you will - 'Fancy'. I prefer the sobriquet 'Sancho'*. Within his blog Mr. Shevlin refers to our seventeen year engagement, the onset of which we were reminiscing about only the other morning. Having been the only person to respond to our notice in The Grapevine seeking someone to fill the recently-vacated John spot in our Beatles specialist band The Star Club, he'd come round to the drummer's house for a run-through of some songs and to see if and how we all got on with each other. As it turned out, he wasn't able to fulfil any gigs immediately as he was being flown to Australia as a result of winning some song writing competiton or another, but it all seemed to go quite well and we agreed that we'd meet up again after he got back. We went for a drink in the local pub afterwards to celebrate and, as these things tend to do, the guitar case (containing the very Takamine referred to in the blog after this one, regarding recording acoustic guitars) he was carrying attracted the attention of the landlord - keen, it would appear, to engage the services of a musician such as he to enliven the quiet weekday evenings. Thursdays, I think he mentioned. "So, what kind of music do you play?" enquired mine host. 

Shev thoughtfully placed his glass back on to the table and, with the practised ease of the professional musician, channelled his inner Sammy Cahn. "What sort of music do you need?"       

http://www.tonyjamesshevlin.com/2014/11/02/what-we-did-this-summer/


*Sancho Panza offers interpolated narrative voice throughout the tale, a literary convention invented by Cervantes. Sancho is the everyman, who remains his ever-faithful companion, realist, and functions as the clever sidekick. (Wikipedia)

Donkey Horsey

Being in an unsigned band means that you actually have a great number of freedoms. Chief among these of course is the freedom not to have to spend interminable hours on tour buses, in recording studio lounges, or in a series of hotel suites being gently probed by Jude Rogers. As it were. One of the concurrent freedoms, however, is that you very rarely run the risk of your loyal fan base turning on you with some sort of backlash should you decide to go, as we like to call it in Songs from The Blue House, off-roading. At gigs this can involve unlikely cover versions (some of which a large proportion of the rest of the band have occasionally actually heard of) being introduced into the set at opportune moments – shortly after a member of the audience has shouted the title at us, say – but it occurs to us that in our extended period of recuperation between arduous recording engagements we have actually built up quite a nice catalogue of what one might refer to as ‘unreleased’ songs. Since the night shortly after the release of our album ‘Tree’ when we decided to preview a selection of carefully unrehearsed and barely-completed songs on an acoustic showcase night we have gently been feeding new material into the set and letting it find its feet, ground itself and quietly get on with the business of incorporating itself into the family. At a recent rehearsal we found ourselves contemplating yet another raft of new songs and since most of our audiences tend to be unaware of our extensive reasonably priced and beautifully packaged back catalogue anyway, we resolved to do a whole gig of the new material, brooking no argument as to whether we should “do some old” or not. As I say, hardly a move likely to strike up a correspondence in some of the worldlier blogs on the Net, but a small strike for self-validation in our artistic progress for us, nonetheless. This notion does, of course, have the precedential seal of approval – no less an august figure than Neil Young tried it on tour when the album we now know as Tonight’s The Night was but merely a gibbous glow in its creator’s eye (you may have heard the hoary old rock anecdote regarding the audience’s restlessness at being presented with an entirely unfamiliar set and their relief when Young announced that he was going to play something they’d all heard before, at which point he repeated his opening number, Tonight’s The Night. Then again he was already at the stage where his support band was The Eagles, and I still think we’re part way off that kind of action just yet) and no less a revered figure than Richard Thompson recently decided that since everyone likes his live stuff anyway he may as well eschew the whole studio process altogether and simply record his album on the road, as it were. And where would we be without Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty, parts of which were literally recorded on the road (you can hear the tour bus moving up through the gears on one song)? Well, faint heart never won fair Grammy, so we thought we’d give it a go ourselves. Oh, and we thought we might get a drummer while we're at it.

originally posted at http://www.skirky.blogspot.com/