Throwback Thursday

In these uncertain times many of us – not all, by any means – have found time for reflection, for casting our minds back, for remembering*. As the title of one Suffolk-based compilation once had it Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits or, as Gil Scott-Heron more prosaically put it;

"The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia.

They want to go back as far as they can.

Even if it's only as far as last week."

Many of my reflections are prompted by whatever comes on in the mobile listening station on my way to work. That I can listen to pretty much any one of the albums in my collection merely by flicking a switch on the steering wheel is still tantamount to witch craft in my opinion, but I’m happy to let the random selection throw up whatever it feels like, safe in the knowledge that if I don’t feel like listening to this particular song for whatever reason, there’ll be another one that I definitely do like in a minute. Or nine or ten minutes if something from that Yes compilation comes up.

Regular readers will know that I’m not averse in any way, shape or form to revisiting past glories – I wallow in nostalgia in the same way that C-list celebrities wallow in the attention of the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame, but this isn’t about what I wore to work this week, or what I was flaunting while I was doing it, it’s about – in the words of Goffin and/or King – Goin’ Back**. This has been quite the week for throwing up my back pages – there was the live recording from Denmark on which my friend and compadre Ross manfully attempted to replicate some rather complex three part harmonies on his own, shortly after which having listened to***, he started posting updates on the social media about his new home in Denmark. Spooky.

Last night it was the turn of Songs from The Blue House, for whom I used to contribute comments very similar to these, regarding what we’d done, where we’d been and who we’d done it to, with or for. Even now I occasionally whack up something from this blog from the (fairly) recent past that some of the participants have no recollection of enjoying. I had a good listen to the first album we did together, and had kind of forgotten how good it sounded then, and consequently how proud I am of it now.

There are a few genuinely stunning songs on there that even back in the day we had quietly dropped from the set once we had moved on to beer festivals and parties in the park. Gathering band members, exploring the highways and byways of Posh North Essex, a pregnant La Mulley expanding in all sorts of interesting directions. The band is gone, the website domain returned to the wild, only the recordings preserved in aspic. I missed those days. I went to bed nostalgic and slightly rueful.

And then when I woke up, I remembered The Wayback Machine.

*I believe that the good folk who work in those drive-through testing centres they have nowadays are reminded periodically of festivals they’ve been to in the past, their day consisting as it does of getting up ridiculously early, shitting in a portaloo and then standing around in a wide open space in the rain, eating terrible food and waiting for something to happen.

**Yes, I did watch Echo in the Canyon last night, why do you ask?

***Grammar police, please check.

Happenings Ten Years Ago.

There was a reunion of sorts at the weekend, wherein grizzled music veterans - alumni and alumna of the  school of hard folk which was Songs from the Blue House - reassembled at Fiddly's country gaff The Hovell to catch up with what we'd all been up to recently. We had a pretty strong line up, including the two Steve's from Too's "Then There Was Sunshine" guitar chorus and TT, who'd travelled from distant climes in order to barbecue things and get gently sun-pinked. Freed from all that having to tune guitars and play chords in the right order malarkey, there was a relaxed vibe amidst the wafting aroma of sizzling sausages and gently toasting halloumi. A couple of us couldn't resist taking the beaters to Fiddly's home-built vibraphone and improvising gently in the hazy summer heat, and besides, there were many fewer wasps inside the shed than out. 

It wasn't always as relaxed as this though, you know. We once had albums to launch, benefit gigs to play, EPs to release, message boards to moderate...if only there were some sort of time capsule we could...oh...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060822045026/http://www.songsfromthebluehouse.com/arch0905.htm
      

"Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every byway..."

I think anyone who gets even part way into this crazy business we call 'show' is necessarily ambitious to some degree. It may be a minor thing – Wouldn’t it be good if I played someone my song and they applauded? say. Then that becomes Maybe I could play a whole set in front of people and they might applaud? and before you know it you’re on tour somewhere in the Midwest and complaining that they haven’t got your guacamole recipe quite right backstage.

I’ve been extraordinarily lucky with my ambitions. Quite early on I found a group of people who were willing to play my songs (rather than, for example, ‘A’ Bomb in Wardour Street, which once you’ve got the chords of E and A mastered is pretty much your common room-led path to glory and adulation) and a while later we won an award with one of them. We went into a recording studio. We had a cassette with our songs on with a printed inlay and we even had an official rejection letter on headed notepaper from WEA. A girl at one gig cried upon hearing us play one song which she said spoke to her. We played the local ABC Cinema, then we played at The Corn Exchange. The local paper actually asked us if they could take our picture. Some time later I got to play abroad, I was on a vinyl single, I signed a publishing deal, I went to the BBC studios in Maida Vale and recorded a session, I was on a CD, and then I was on a CD released by a proper record company, with a barcode and available in HMV and everything. Then I won another award!

Well, I say that I won another award. What happened was that The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley (pictured above) and I were collaborating on a number of things, mainly through the medium of me strumming chord progressions into a cassette recorder and then handing them over to her so that she could play them in the car on her way to work over and over until by a process of virtual osmosis she had absorbed the rhythms, patterns and tones and was then in a position to write some words, a lovely melody and we’d be laughing all the way to the folk club. One of these was a song which ended up being titled Waste of Angels – the original working title, Then There Was Sunshine, as scribbled on the tape inlay, was appropriated by Our Glorious Leader, who used a very similar compositional technique (and about a third of the chords). Both of these eventually appeared on Songs from The Blue House Too and by various ways and means Waste of Angels started appearing in the nominations list for that year’s Hancock Awards on the venerable acoustic music-based forum Talkawhile, eventually coming out top in a straight tie with John Tams’ Man of Constant Sorrow. Helen, you’ll be pleased to hear, had demurred at the thought of voting for a song she had had a hand in co-composing but was nontheless delighted upon the arrival of a shiny trophy, lovingly inscribed with the winner’s name. Singular. Hers.

This is the way of stuff and although it’s nice to receive plaudits and prizes, it’s sometimes good to be reminded that this is not what we strive for. Adventure, heh. Excitement, heh – a songwriter craves not these things - besides, it wouldn’t be too long before Boo Hewerdine was singing backing vocals on one of my songs, we were opening for Robert Plant and appearing on a film soundtrack, so it was easy to become caught up with the ride we were already on without fretting unnecessarily about who got to keep the resulting hardware.

After the success of album number two we moved on to number three, buoyed by the prospect of spending someone else’s money in the studio and with the promise that it would be available on iTunes (tick!) as well as in (at that point) conventional CD form (tick!). Since we weren’t sure if we’d ever get the chance to repeat this opportunity we resolved to record as many songs as possible - things we were playing live, bespoke numbers created especially for the new album and a few older tunes which we weren’t sure if we’d ever get the chance to commit to hard drive in a professional studio again. One of these was called Little No-One.

Little No-One was originally titled Everywhere and Nowhere In Between and had been sporadically performed by my band gods kitchen during what I like to refer to as our Richard and Linda phase, wherein I had persuaded the rest of the group that what we really needed was a female singer to counterpoint my manly tenor and to occasionally step out from the shadows in order to belt out a heart-rending power ballad to pull in the punters perhaps put off by our regular raw, smouldering manly sexuality*. At one living room get-together with guitarist Steve ‘Kilbey’ Mears I started playing a seventh fret guitar figure, he joined in with a counter-harmony and before too long we had a simple recurring pattern to which I was enjoined to write some lyrics. When it came to pulling together material for what was to become Tree (I think) Helen recalled “…that thing you used to play with Paula” and so we resolved to include it on the list of things to do, the only problem being that no-one could quite remember the words. I checked my big book of poetry, various cassettes were unearthed and scanned with no result until eventually we decided that it would just be quicker for La Mulley to write her own – she, after all, would be the one performing it in the studio.

In the midst of all this we were A & R'ing furiously and someone suggested that what we really needed for the appropriate delivery of the new lyrics was someone with perfect, cut-glass, top-note intonation & inflection and since Julie Andrews was in retirement at the time why didn’t we ask someone closer to the group? With one eye on the furthering of our personal dream team-related ambitions we resolved to enquire gently whether one Judith Aileen de a Bédoyère – Dame Judy from Talkawhile to us, Judy Dyble out of Fairport Convention, Giles, Giles & Fripp, Trader Horne and The Incredible String Band to you – might be entreated to sing on it for us. Turns out she was up for the experience, and so Our Glorious Leader was despatched to darkest Oxfordshire to collect her by car in time not only for her to rehearse and record the number, but to guest with us (or us with her, depending on your perspective) during a short set at the late and lamented High Barn’s acoustic night on the evening before we had the studio booked for the Saturday. Hence I found myself under the bright lights of an Essex venue essaying the guitar solo from Fairport Convention’s version of Joni Mitchell’s I Don’t Know Where I Stand with UFO Club and Middle Earth veteran Judy Dyble, who’d sung it on the album**. Tickety, tick, tick, tick!

Anyone who owns our Junior*** effort will doubtless be aware that such a track does not however exist on the album. It is not to be found on the sleeve, is not evident as a hidden track, a bonus, an extra. So what happened? Well, we spent many a long hour debating the relative merits of all of the songs we had backed up with an eye to bringing the number down to a whole which would flow and change organically over the course of the record. Something that we’d never even (or would ever) play live**** made the cut whilst another couple of new songs didn’t. A cover version got added, one tune with a festive-related in-joke had to go and, finally, Little No-One was quietly retired from active service. One reason was that having five different vocalists on the same dozen or so songs might have been confusing, maybe it didn’t fit the overall mood, but for whatever reason it seemed doomed to obscurity and occasional availability on download sites. Maybe if we ever got round to compiling a career-spanning boxed set overview of our oeuvre we’d find a home for it?

The compilation, the anthology, the career retrospective was one thing I’d not ticked off my big list of things to do, nor had I looked likely to. Admittedly the limited edition double CD Shane Kirk’s Forty, with its jewel case, remastered hits, live tracks and rarities and including full colour booklet had been a treat and a pleasure, but had also also been a one-off birthday present and so didn’t really count,  however word had begun to waft on the wind of a bringing together of material by one Judy Dyble... There’d been a false alarm a few years ago when Universal had started in on a similar project only to get cold feet (there had even been a catalogue number assigned) but it seemed as if having taken the project on herself this time it might go through to completion and after a few hints, a number of excited tweets and, finally some Facebook photographs of the completed artwork, the triple disc, forty eight song retrospective emerged, blinking and uncertain, into the world this week. This is where I get off this crazy ride, I thought to myself. There are no more peaks to ascend, no more milestones to pass, no more certificates to frame – to paraphrase the great Boo Hewerdine, there would be my name in the brackets. I scanned the track listing proudly and there it was – half way through CD two. Little No-One (H.Mulley).             

Judy Dyble's Gathering The Threads is out now.

*That didn’t really come off, to be honest, but we did end up performing as an acoustic duo called Cover Girl which she later fired me from. I still get the occasional apologetic email. 

**The performance ended up on YouTube, where one person commented rather unkindly that viewing the clip was akin to watching half a dozen brickies with a geography teacher (IIRC). Once OGL had checked the source and it turned out to be a guy who had videoed himself pissing off his apartment’s balcony and then uploaded it to the internet we kind of brushed over his finely-nuanced critical sequitur. 

***It’s the grade that follows ‘sophomore’.

****The principally Gibbon-composed Vanilla. It turned out to be one local radio DJ’s favourite song on the album.  

“He asked to see my door, but I wouldn't show it to him…”

I am pleased to announce that after a long period of simply going up to people and asking if I can play at their pub, showcase, campfire, party and/or Christening, I now have representation.  Henceforth my musical affairs will be handled by James at Blue House Music, who has offered very reasonable terms under which, basing a projection of next year’s earnings on my turnover for the fiscal year to date, he already owes me thirty five quid.

Obviously we haven’t actually signed anything legally binding as we’re not the sort of people who rely on such things, preferring as we do a manly handshake, an almost imperceptible inclination of the head and a knowing tap of the nose. We had a pretty similar arrangement with High Barn Records around the time of the release of Songs from The Blue House’s album Tree, when we were advised that they would rather not be involved with the sort of people who insisted on ephemera like contracts. Nevertheless they got us on to Amazon, iTunes, the HMV website and into a movie soundtrack and so in the long term I’m not complaining that I haven’t been able to research my royalty rate at Companies House, and the £4.86 I got from the PRS came in pretty handy that time I was on my way to Subway and was out of loose change.

 

I’m no stranger to contractual wrangles, of course. My nascent career with Heavy Big Popsters As Is didn’t necessarily founder on our insistence on haggling with a big-shot American agent over a clause regarding image rights, but it didn’t seem to help seal the deal at all. I guess when your day job had been producing Winkler-centric sitcom Happy Days, dealing with the contractual minutæ raised by a bunch of mulletheads over in Blighty must have seemed like pretty small potatoes by comparison. Our heroic manager, who’d secured the offer in the first place, was informed in fairly short order that we’d better sign up as it stood or forget it, and consign our chances of getting our leather jackets placed in The Smithsonian* to the trash. And he'd had to pay a lawyer to explain what image rights were in the first place.

 

In the end, aside from the legalities which bound us to our manager (and he to us) one contract I did manage to sign during my time in the self-professed purveyors of Loud Love Songs was for the publishing rights for a single song in the territories of French-speaking Benelux and Switzerland, which sounds like a pretty market-specific sort of deal until you realise that these were the only parts of Europe a friend of his who'd agreed to drop off some copies of our single at whatever radio stations he passed during the course of the trip was going to be visiting. I’m not sure we had that much of an impact on the Swiss charts at the time, and I’m certainly not aware of any residual royalties having built up over the intervening years but of course if you’d like me to come to your pub/showcase night/campfire/party/Christening  and play “(I Want to) Move (In With You)” – double parentheses please – then I’d be only too pleased to.

 

Speak to my agent.

 

*The original jacket worn by The Fonz in the TV series is now in a museum.

I Don't Get Around Much Any More

I received a telephone call from Our Glorious Leader on Saturday, welcome not least because any call from him usually presages larks and adventures to some degree, but especially on this occasion because it turned out that he had about a hundred CDs for me to sign as part of the successful Kickstarter-led release of the fifth Songs from The Blue House album, ‘Live’. We had always intended the fifth of our releases to be recorded in front of an audience as this would mean that we could give it a suitably packaged title to follow our sophomore* effort Too, which was in turn followed by Tree and then IV. At one point we discussed presenting the CD in a small fruit container to emphasise that the title was a small play on words, or ‘punnet’. Why my career in marketing hasn’t blazed like a comet across the firmament is a mystery to me, it really is.  

I listened to it in the car this morning, and it really is a thing of wonder. I’m as much a fan of the band as I am a member and although I’m not suggesting this is our Rock of Ages (the last time we made a reference to The Band a kindly reviewer helpfully pointed out that we were ‘deluded’) there are real moments of clarity when the realisation that we didn’t just write these songs, but that we lived them cuts like a knife. Breaking These Rocks is a genuine commentary on (then) current affairs which goes where hard science can’t, Song V is a true story set in root-fifth Cinemascope, counterpart Song III is a three act Linklater screenplay performed in four and a half minutes. Of course there is shade at the heart of the performance in that although we’re not quite at the stage of being "Hilton Valentine’s Animals", over the course of a decade there will inevitably be some comings and goings – of the original line up Jimmy quit for one, and then Jody got married – and that the performance we recorded was actually the launch gig for our previous album gives some clue as to the recent slackening off in our work rate.

 

As fascinating to me as its parent album is the associated outtakes and rarities collection** put together as one of the packages we hoped to entice our online benefactors with. There is our very first demo version of Bike – sounding pretty much the same as the version that kicks off the live album. There’s the version of Fairport Convention’s Rosie which we put together for Ces, that brace of psych-folk Beatles reworkings, Gibbon’s close harmony-led gospel version of When God Created Angels, the instrumental from our Steely Dan period that we never got round to finding lyrics for, the one that, conversely, we had two fully formed sets of words to decide between, the Judas Priest cover.

 

As I say, we didn’t just record this music, we lived it, and there’s a side to me which is gets more melancholy by each day that it looks increasingly like we won’t be living it again any time soon. Mind you, one guy did pick up the House Concert option on Kickstarter. He’s asked if we can do it at his place in the South of France…                      

You can find our music at http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/  

  

*Annoying, isn’t it?

**I’m fully aware that in terms of our commercial profile, pretty much everything we’ve ever released is a rarity.

Songs from The Blue House 'Live' out 26/8/13

 

 

You know what it’s like at parties. Some people pop their heads round the door just to be polite and say hello before moving on to another engagement, some arrive fashionably late, flirt outrageously with the other guests and depart leaving cigarette burns in the carpet that you don’t spot until three weeks later. A few turn up uninvited, stash their booze in the washing machine and then stay up all night talking until the only things left to drink are those brightly-coloured bottles you got in for that fancy-dress themed cocktail party a couple of years ago. Some people you get introduced to for the first time in the queue for the bathroom and hit it off so well that you wonder why you haven’t already been best friends for years. The Blue House party has been going on for a decade now, so it is time to thank everyone who RSVP’d the invite, brought a bottle, made a dessert or just popped in for a time while they waited for a cab. We are Songs from The Blue House, and this is what we do.   

http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/

"Spare a talent for an old ex-leper..."

We (Songs from The Blue House) did a pop show the other day at The High Barn in Great Bardfield, which is where we originally turned up some years ago to do a set at their beer festival, the fee for which we negotiated down to a day's recording at which we did a version of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". This set in motion many trains of endeavour, not least the one which lead to us featuring in The Word Magazine as a bunch of Rock Dads (I've gone on about this at length before many, many times) which in turn meant that our friend James Kindred, who we'd corralled at short notice to do the accompanying photo for us, got sent a press pass to the Latitude Festival in order to do some shots with Peter, Bjorn and John. He put them in deck chairs eating ice creams if I recall correctly, and his submission featured in the next issue. Kind of serendipitious, I reckon.  

Anyhoo, long story short, we were belatedly launching our cunningly-titled album 'IV' at the gig and decided to do a chronologically-based set list starting with the first song we wrote and finishing some hour and a half later with the most recent. Since there's a fully-automated 69-track digital studio right there it seemed a shame not to record the whole thing for posterity, and once the engineering voles had cleared enough space on the hard drive (in the old days we'd just have taped over someone's precious once-in-a-lifetime, life-savings-consuming two inch demo master tape and left them weeping at their inability to cough up the £50 required to preserve it for a month in storage, but then I suppose that's progress for you) that's what we did.

In the great tradition of epoch-defining live albums (I'm thinking All The World's A Stage, On Your Feet or On Your Knees, or perhaps Showaddywaddy's Live in Germany) we'd now like to put the recording of the gig out as a CD or download or somesuch. Which is where you come in.

We have decided to employ the phenomenon of crowdsourcing (as opposed to crowd surfing - that didn't go so well that one time, but then I blame the supper club-style seating plan) to provide some lowly sound engineer with the means by which to both feed his family and to be able to afford the electricity required in order to be able to switch the studio equipment on for long enough to be able to fix that sloppy tuning in the second number and put enough EQ on the audience mics that we don't have to use the second-hand crowd track from The Adicts' Rockers Into Orbit. I hear we're going to leave in that bit about percussionist Mick Harding being able to kill a bear with his man hands.

Here's a link to the Kickstarter page, which details a number of enticing packages that you can invest in, and which also features a short video explaining our predicament vis-a-vis finance in which I end up threatening Our Glorious Leader with a battery powered drill. Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1807726723/songs-from-the-blue-house-live-album             

"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... :-)

The Snow Came Down on This Ol’ Town

 

Another day in the studio, and another chance to sit in a comfy swivel chair and stare at lines on a screen. Back in the old days, you see, folks got together and played a song over and over in a recording studio until at least two of the band got it pretty much right, and then a young person who’d expressed an interest in getting into music would sit poised over a rewind button for the next three days while everyone else watched the tape rewinding over and over again as the guitarist tried to nail ‘the one’ take that would be committed for posterity and the singer fretted that there wouldn’t be enough time left at the end of the sessions to do more than three takes on the harmonies.

Occasionally the Tape Op would be despatched for coffees, sandwiches or to wake up the singer to see what he thought of the latest solo, or to drag him away from the pool table/Spinal Tap video/ pub, depending on the salubriousness of the facilities. Once, I came back from a refreshing lunch to find that the engineer had locked the rest of the band out of the studio while his Mum cooked tea for him (we were working on decidedly different timescales). I think it’s fair to say that this studio was at the lower end of the range facilities-wise. 

George Harrison once notably responded to George Martin’s “Tell me if there’s anything you don’t like” with the legendary riposte “Well, I don’t like that tie”. On this occasion the singer responded to a similar enquiry from our bass player simply, “I don’t like him. Or his collection of porn which he insists we go and watch while we’re trying to do those guitar overdubs”. They were simpler times. The studio was in a converted stable. After the sessions were over we made a bolt for the door. These days, we stare intently at a screen on which our notes are displayed and endlessly analyse whether things are in time, in tune and of the correct amplitude. I’m not entirely sure what that means, which is probably why our engineer turned the displays off at one point and insisted that we simply listen to the track. And we had to go and get our own coffees. 

The luxury of digital editing is that no-one is too concerned about having to rewind the tape to the right point as “…that bit just before the middle eight” is clearly visible onscreen, as are the bits where the horns come in and that section where we put down a vocal just in case we’d need it later. The bits of paper with “gtr – left” written on have been replaced with drop-down menus and digital interfaces which mean that the spectres of the tape becoming see-through, stretched, stuck together or simply dropped have gone with the wind. Imagine though, the first Boston album with even more overdubs… 

As it turns out, the instant rewind is as much of a curse as a blessing, as I listen to the twenty-fourth take on the simple phrase “When I look back!” I am intent on making sure that this, the first line of the song, is as intense, visceral and moving as I remember it from the demo. The Singer is having trouble getting a reservation to ‘that place’, let alone a ticket, and The Engineer is laying his head restfully on the recording console, from which there emanates a slight thudding noise. 

My production technique is starting to look decidedly flaky. The phrase “Concentrate on the N” is received with blank looks from both, and justifiable mild irritation from the man wearing the rather fetching headphone ensemble. We decide to “get back to that one” and to play with Pro Tools instead. As any fule kno, Pro Tools is a system whereby you can pick up bits of digital information (recorded sound in this case) and move them. Back, forward, up, down – whether or not there’s something going on here and we’d like to keep it hidden, we’ll try almost anything once, and no move is forbidden. Naturally we rely on the integrity of our performance, and so there is absolutely, and I want to get this straight, no manipulation of harmonies going on at all. Oh no. At one point I drift off and am woken by a conversation involving E flat (it’s not all glamour in the music biz you know). 

There are manipulations of red lines on the screen, mouse clicks, and a cutting and pasting frenzy to put all but the most active of pre-school playgroups to shame. In the end though, as in the days of tape, the result will be the same. A small boy holds out his work and says “Look. Look what I did today!”

As an adjunct, this is one of the tracks we were working on that day. 

https://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/incredible